Coda
coda Dis-Orientations Eastern Nonstandard Time Untimely matter in the time of Shakespeare challenges the fantasy of the self-identical moment or period, of the sovereign moment-state divided from its temporal neighbors. It materializes instead a temporality that is not one. Yet in all the instances I have examined in this book, untimely matter remains potentially in thrall to what we might call Eastern Standard Time: the presumption that the orient, where the sun rises, is the location of the past. The physical traces in the western present of orientalized pasts—engraved Mosaic tablets, the bodily techniques of Asian stage despots, a Hebrew gravestone, a Catholic odor of sanctity associated with perfumes of Arabia, a recycled Jewish Cabbala, a handkerchief’s Egyptian embroidery—temporally divide matter from itself, transforming it into an oriental-occidental palimpsest. But that temporal self-division becomes legible precisely because of the Eastern Standard Time that characterizes, in each case, the past as oriental and the oriental as past. The primal scene of material culture’s temporal self-division, as we saw in chapter 1, takes place on Mount Sinai. Yet in its very primacy, that scene insists again on the geographical self-identity, relative to the west, of the orient as origin. Thus it is perhaps appropriate to conclude this book by returning to the vicinity of that scene, Egypt, to think about the ways in which untimely matter can also dis-orient the supposedly unitary origin of Eastern Standard Time and trouble the persistent equation of the orient and past. One such dis-orientation is performed by Amitav Ghosh’s extraordinary 190 coda exercise in postcolonial ethnography, In an Antique Land (1992).1 This ‘‘history in the guise of a traveler’s tale,’’ as the book is subtitled, arose from the anthropological fieldwork Ghosh undertook as a Ph.D. student during the 1980s in Egypt—an ‘‘antique land’’ not just because of its association with ancient civilization but also because of its contemporary rural inhabitants’ supposed exclusion from modernity. As he recounts his interactions with Egyptian villagers, Ghosh simultaneously tells the story of another pair of travelers to Egypt in the twelfth century: a Tunisian Jew, Abraham Ben Yiju, and his Indian slave and business associate, Bomma. Ghosh painstakingly pieces together their peregrinations from a paper trail of letters that had until the late nineteenth century been housed in a synagogue in Fustat, now part of Cairo. Ben Yiju—a devout Jew, son of a rabbi, and brother to merchants in Sicily—migrated from Tunisia to Cairo, and later to Aden and Mangalore in India’s Malabar Coast, where he lived for twenty years, fathered two children , and met Bomma. Even as Ben Yiju identified as a Jew, he spoke and wrote in Arabic, was well versed in Sufi traditions of mysticism, and married a Hindu. In an Antique Land thus dramatizes a world of movements across cultural and religious boundaries that we have come to regard as insuperable. Looking for contemporary traces of the transcultural affinities and border crossings that he finds in the paper trail of Ben Yiju and Bomma, Ghosh visits the Egyptian shrine of Sidi Abu Hasira, a medieval Muslim saint who was also a Jewish rabbi. He is detained at the site by authorities who cannot understand why an Indian should be interested in the shrine. As Ghosh is interviewed by a suspicious official, he has a gloomy revelation: ‘‘But then it struck me, suddenly, that there was nothing I could point to within his world that might give credence to my story—the remains of those small, indistinguishable, intertwined histories, Indian and Egyptian, Muslim and Jewish, Hindu and Muslim, had been partitioned long ago.’’2 Ghosh’s metaphor of partition evokes his native India and the East Pakistan he lived in as a child, as well as the violent cartographical divisions of British colonialism and superpower imperialism. His use of the partition metaphor is not just spatial, however. It is also temporal. Speaking of ‘‘the borders that were to divide Palestine’’ in the 1940s, Ghosh notes that they had ‘‘already been drawn, through time rather than territory, to allocate a choice of Histories.’’3 This temporal partition, between supposedly antique cultures of the orient and supposedly developed western ones, is the enabling fantasy of the supersessionary temporality that Ghosh calls History with a capital H. As alternatives to History, Ghosh seeks to retrieve histories with a [3.140.242.165] Project MUSE (2024-04...
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