Norway
>Tintin in Norway
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Morten Harper on Tintin, comics, and racism @ Eurozine.
Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( None so far )We have all seen the blonde-fringed Tintin wriggle his way out of one sticky situation after another. But early 2010 saw the Belgian national hero’s past catch up with him; a past most of us had forgotten he had. Congolese Bienvenu Mbutu Mondondo believes the comic book Tintin in the Congo is racist and should be banned, and has taken legal action against the series’ copyright-holder Moulinsart and its publisher Casterman.
It was during his second adventure, published in 1931, that Tintin travelled to the Congo, a Belgian colony at the time. There he was mixed up in a gangster showdown when some of Al Capone’s partners tried to take over the country’s diamond production. The early Tintin books are crudely drawn and feature a coarse style of humour, such as when Tintin escapes an angry rhino by blowing it up with dynamite. Even more notorious is the sequence where he visits a school to teach geography. “Dear friends,” he says to the Congolese children, “today I’m going to tell you about our country: Belgium.” This is the colonial master talking. In another sequence, he repairs a broken-down train for the helpless locals. In the new colour version of Tintin in the Congo, published in 1946, the geography lesson has been replaced by mathematics and the Congolese speak more comprehensible French, but the tone is still condescending. The population is presented as naive and lazy; a land of childlike beings.
A not altogether unnatural immediate reaction to Tintin’s paternalistic manner is that he ought to take a trip over here [Norway] and sort out our rail system – we can chuckle about that kind of thing. However, Tintin’s trouble in his home country is no laughing matter. “J’accuse,” proclaims [the plaintiff] Bienvenu Mbutu Mondondo indignantly, and denounces the album as “offensive and demeaning to all Congolese”.
>Everything was either immediate or very far away
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Julia Grønnevet recounts the beauty and drudgery of factory fishing @ n+1.
Going fishing is called, in dialect, “fær på sjøen.” It was something boys in Norway did when society couldn’t hold them anymore. I took it for granted I should be allowed to do it too. After a summer fishing cod on F/T Havbryn right out of high school I got my uncle to put in a word for me with the company he worked for off the coast of Alaska. I spoke with them once on the phone and flew to Seattle a few days after the new year in 2001.
Read Full Post | Make a Comment ( None so far )I reported for duty at the American Seafoods headquarters in a downtown skyscraper. At that time I hadn’t yet spent any time on my own in a large American city. Things were so exotic to me that almost ten years later I still remember innocuous details and mistakes I made speaking to people. Who knows what they made of me, a dark-haired girl about five feet tall, shipping out for the “A” season alongside gigantic Samoan men, bearded Americans, and a huge assortment of South Americans. On the F/T Ocean Rover we were around one hundred crew, a dozen officers, and half a dozen support staff, mostly galley workers. They called it “steaming” as we sailed from Seattle past Canada to Alaska and then out along the Aleutian chain. I had already met Jay at “crew-up,” the big information session where they tried to scare away anyone having second thoughts. He sat down across from me and I looked into the clearest green eyes I had ever seen. I remember just the eyes, nothing else about him. Dwelling on it, I have thought about what my aunt, an anaesthesiology nurse, told me once about deeply sedated people—when you look into their pupils they’re so dilated you feel as if you are looking them straight in the brains.
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