Unknown Unknowns, Unknown Knowns, and the Repetitions of History

The Orientalist:  Solving the Mystery of a Strange and Dangerous Life

There are known knowns; there are things that we know that we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns, the ones we don't know we don't know.

--Donald Rumsfeld, 2002

In 1921, when Rudolph Valentino was captivating audiences as ‘The Sheik,’ a fifteen-year-old Azeri Jew named Lev Nussimbaum converted to Islam and assumed the name of Essad Bey.  He and his father had escaped turmoil in Azerbaijan and had knocked around the Caucasus, Turkmenistan, and Persia before landing in Constantinople, where the teenager changed his identity.  From there, they joined the masses of refugees and exiles caroming throughout Central and Western Europe . . . and Lev Nussimbaum/Essad Bey began his remarkable literary career.  Before his death in 1942, holed up in Fascist Italy, Lev had written dozens of articles and sixteen books, including Ali and Nino, a romance still considered a keystone of Azeri literature (published under a new pseudonym, Kurban Said).  This enigmatic, peripatetic author is the subject of Pulitzer Prize-winning Tom Reiss’s fascinating book, The Orientalist.

That’s my first ‘unknown unknown.’  Before my daughter brought this book to my attention a couple of weeks ago, I’d never heard of Lev Nussimbaum or his substantial literary output, which includes biographies of Lenin and Reza Pahlevi, studies of the Russian secret police and of Theodore Dreiser, articles published in Die Literarische Welt and Vanity Fair.  According to Donald Rumsfeld’s gnomic epistemology, this ‘unknown unknown’ changed for me to a ‘known unknown.’  I still haven’t read any of Lev’s works (thus the ‘unknown’ remains), but now I ‘know’ a good deal about his intriguing life – insofar as his deliberate, situational, and fabulous fabrications allow.  (And insofar as one accepts Reiss’s research:  there seems to be a vigorous counter-narrative in the pages of the Azerbaijan International that seeks to problematize and de-Azerbaijanicize Lev Nussimbaum’s life and authorship, particularly of Ali and Nino, and to delegitimize Reiss’s book.)

 Strategic Positionality:  Azerbaijan and its neighbors

 My second ‘unknown unknown’ was the history of Azerbaijan and of the Caucasus in general.  I could locate the country and the mountain range on a map, and that was about it.  I had no idea Azerbaijan was the turn-of-the-century oil capital of the world and a stunningly progressive Islamic state for the brief time of its independence, a place where Islam, Christianity, Judaism, Zoroastrianism, and other religions co-existed in oil-profit-fueled harmony, a polity where women could vote, an East-West crossroads where European-styled opera houses, medieval palaces, and crusader enclaves existed side-by-side.  Lev Nussimbaum’s childhood home was a microcosm of the Azeri capital of Baku, a wealthy enclave in which the Alfred Nobel family and Joseph Stalin could share Caspian caviar, along with dreams and fears of revolution, in the company of the Nussimbaums’ eunuchs and German nannies. Nor did I have any idea of the ethnic and cultural diversity of the Caucasus . . . or its importance to the ambitions of larger European powers.

 Baku, Azerbaijan:  the Opera and Ballet Theater (1911) and a view of the Old City

The third ‘unknown unknown’ was the milieu of the Weimar Republic (Lev and his father landed in Germany, where the young man attended the Russian School in Berlin and used falsified credentials to pursue Oriental studies at the Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universitat).   Before I read The Orientalist, I’d thought of Weimar as the interval between World War I and Hitler.  Period.  The book discloses the seething Bolshevik vs. proto-Fascist struggles, the weird situation of White Russian émigrés, the vectors of Teutonic mythmaking, the vibrant literary culture enabled by cheap printing and ostensible freedom of the press, the precursors of Nazi ascendency, the precarious position of German and Russian Jews.

The Neue Synagogue in Berlin, 1859-1855, severely damaged during World War II

And the fourth ‘unknown unknown’ – a protean Orientalism that predates, but in U.S. academia was largely eclipsed by, Edward Said’s formulations.  Jewish Orientalism: Benjamin Disraeli’s novels, Moorish-style synagogues, and certain  Zionist principles based on a capacious idea of Semitism and a romantic concept of desert people’s affinities.  Pan-Turanianism: the ‘Young Turks’ concept of a modernized Ottoman empire focused on Russia and Central Asia, a sort of tolerant Orientalized lebensraum.  Lev Nussimbaum’s self-fashioning:  the adoption of a fantasy identity as a Moslem prince, an identity rooted in an idealized Baku (and Caucasus, and Middle East, and Central Asia) where political, ethnic, and religious strife does not exist.

The ‘unknown unknown’ is Donald Rumsfeld’s third term (after the self-evident ‘known-known’ and the should-gather-more-information ‘known unknown’).  Slajov Zizek added a useful fourth term, the ‘unknown known.’   This category encompasses things we know, or kind of know, but have decided not to acknowledge (or, perhaps, have repressed).  It seems that Lev Nussimbaum’s life was an exercise in operating within the ‘unknown known.’  He knew, for example, that his father Abraham was a Jew from the Pale of Settlement (as was his mother); since for most of his life he lived with his father, who made no efforts to hide his identity (and who ultimately was murdered in Treblinka). Lev’s adherence to his fabricated Muslim heritage is a remarkable instance of ‘unknowing’ the known, as is his stubborn belief that he could flourish in Fascist environments, as is his conviction that monarchy or revived Khanates were viable alternatives to the revolutionary terrors he experienced.

 Reading this remarkable book, I felt as if I were falling into an uncanny (or Lacanian Real) rabbit hole of repeating history driven by the ‘unknown known.’  Lev’s early life was shaped by failed or failing states and empires threatened by extraordinary instances of terrorism and the political fragility it feeds on and causes – threat and collapse that motivated his construction of an imaginary Orient, with himself as the Scheherazade who kept these Arabian Night-dreams afloat with his words. These years seem like scary funhouse mirrors of contemporary geopolitics, ‘unknown knowns’ that could perhaps help us negotiate today’s crises with the help of a few more acknowledged ‘knowns.’

Let’s go back to the year 1921.  Eastern Europe in chaos (German Freikorps fighting Polish forces in Upper Silesia, for instance).  Russian troops stamping out dissent in its remnants of Empire (then Bolshevik rather than Czarist or neo-Czarist).  The Jaffa riots in newly mandated Palestine.  Political assassinations.  Thousands of dead in political and religious massacres.  Resuscitation of ‘The Protocols of the Elders of Zion’ and White (Teutonic/Aryan) supremacy ideologies.  Oil.  Rampant terrorism.  Gigantic refugee populations.  Shia vs. Sunni warfare, plus persecution of minority groups, including the Yazidi (yes, they also make an appearance in The Orientalist). 

Let’s fast forward to the year 2014.  It’s as if history repeats itself not as tragedy to farce but as tragedy to tragedy, in part because current history ‘unknows’ its potentially known past.

To me, the greatest value of The Orientalist is the way it pries open ‘unknown knowns’ as well as how it reveals ‘unknown unknowns’ that deserve to be known.  I can’t remember a book that made me think more about issues ranging from authorial to biographical (and the art of biography) to historical to geopolitical, past and present.  It may not be to everyone’s taste, as the issues I’ve tried to comment upon here do intrude on the primary story – discovering the ‘known’ about Lev Nussimbaum, who functions as an Orientalist Zelig more than as an investigative focus.  That said, it’s a book I can’t recommend highly enough.

The Orientalist:  Solving the Mystery of a Strange and Dangerous Life.  By Tom Reiss.  New York:  Random House, 2005.  Hardcover, paperback, electronic format.

[Side note:  the Azerbaijan capital of Baku was known for its polycultural architecture in Lev Nussimbaum’s day, and it is now known for its futuristic building projects, projects that represent its imaginary future just as Lev’s depictions of the city represented its imaginary past.  Here are a few examples that try to out-Dubai Dubai but also have roots in Baku’s multi-ethnic and multi-aesthetic history.]

The Flame Towers   The Hotel Full Moon   The Concert Hall

Radically Other

Savage Harvest:  A Tale of Cannibals, Colonialism, and Michael Rockefeller’s Tragic Quest for Primitive Art

Don’t be deterred by the cheesy title (and the tiresome academicolonic subtitle).  Savage Harvest is a thoughtful, well-written, and compelling book.  Although its ostensible subject is the mystery surrounding Michael Rockefeller’s death in New Guinea, its core interrogates current theoretical models and assumptions about colonial, neo-colonial, and post-colonial encounters with the (non-Western) other.

The son of the immensely wealthy and politically influential Nelson Rockefeller, Michael Rockefeller was just 23 years old when he disappeared in what’s now the Indonesian province of Papua.  He was on a well-financed trip to collect Asmat art for the new museum his father had founded.  He disappeared in late 1961, and despite his family’s efforts, he or his remains were never located.  The official resolution was ‘death by drowning.’

But there were always rumors, rumors involving traditional Asmat practices of headhunting and cannibalism.  The explorer and travel writer Carl Hoffman set out to track down these rumors and the truths, if there were any, behind them.  The result is Savage Harvest . . . and the convincing conclusion that Michael Rockefeller was indeed killed and eaten by the very people he was attempting to ‘know’ well enough to acquire what he considered to be artistically significant objects.

The unraveling-the-mystery narrative is sufficient to make the book interesting, and Hoffman’s strong, direct prose drives the reader as relentlessly as the best crime fiction does.  But that’s only the first level of Savage Harvest.  The second is Hoffman’s retracing of Rockefeller’s journey.

One would expect that such retracing follows the pattern of many such ‘in the steps of’ narratives.  It does – in the sense that, fifty years later, Hoffman travels to the same places as Rockefeller did, even interacting with relatives of those who had most probably murdered the young art collector.  One might also expect that Savage Harvest ultimately would ‘be about’ Hoffman’s own journey: his attraction to the exotic, the dangerous, the authentic. 

It’s not (at least not much).  The important retracing is about cultural, political, and academic assumptions.   This is Savage Harvest’s third level of interest.

If the book is indeed about the author, as well as about what happened to Michael Rockefeller, it focuses on Hoffman’s being stunned by the radical otherness of the Asmat (remember, we’re discussing ‘encounters’ of just a couple of years ago as well as those decades earlier).  Even after a half-century or more of ‘civilizing’ – by Dutch missionaries and colonial officials, by Indonesian governance, by globalization in general – the Asmat present themselves to Hoffman as almost unknowable and almost completely alien.  Their core culture was/is built on revenge, revenge to help restore balance in a profoundly precarious world where enemies exist forever, throughout generations, and spirits of the dead pose constant danger to the living.  Headhunting and cannibalism are ways to restore balance, at least temporarily.  So is making ‘art.’

I put ‘art’ in quotation marks here because the beautiful sculptures the Asmat create to commemorate, activate, and appease spirits of the dead – the sculptures for which Michael Rockefeller traded fishing nets, tobacco, and ax heads – were/are central to Asmat culture in ways the young collector did not begin to understand.  The operative principle of this pre-technological society (until not very long ago, the Asmat did not have anything except stone tools and were one of the few extant hunter-gatherer societies) was/is retribution . . . the Asmat did/do not have a concept of time outside of diurnal cycles . . .  deaths were/are what’s needed to restore balance . . . eating the dead restored/restores balance in each eater, at least for the moment.  In anticipation of a retributive action, Asmat sculptors would carve bisj poles, up to twenty-feet high creations hewn from a single mangrove root that would represent, even embody the dead – and their need for compensatory action.  These bisj poles would be erected in an Asmat village until the compensatory action (killing and eating and anointing the poles with new blood) happened; then the poles would be abandoned in the jungle to rot and transfer their vitality to the earth. 

These were what Michael Rockefeller wanted to buy with trinkets.  And to do so only a few years after a Dutch colonial government agent had led a ‘punitive expedition’ against an ‘unruly’ Asmat settlement, shooting a number of villagers, an expedition that at the time Rockefeller arrived, remained unavenged. Rockefeller did succeed in purchasing these bisj poles, which now adorn the Michael Rockefeller wing of New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, but he apparently paid for them with his life.

It is to Hoffman’s credit, I think, that he neither skewers Michael Rockefeller for ethnological naivety nor engages in cheap amateur analyses of rich Daddy issues (or twin issues, as Michael had a twin sister who, the book suggests, has avoided confronting the most evidence-backed explanations for her brother’s death).  Part of the way Hoffman avoids such targeting is by exploring the colonial contexts of the Asmat encounters with modernity (explorations that also help explain why Michael Rockefeller’s death was pretty much covered up by authorities in the South Pacific and in the First World).  Another part is how Hoffman presents his own experiences with the Asmat.

Despite the Asmat’s one-generational veneer of ‘civilization’ (they’ve converted, nominally, to Christianity and have entered, provisionally, into a market economy), to Hoffman they retain their radical otherness.  They remain focused on retribution as a means to restore cosmic balance.  Spirits remain threatening and demanding.  Time remains irrelevant beyond sunrises and sunsets.  Sexuality (male and female) remains polymorphous.  Privacy and individuality remain pretty much unknown concepts.  In other words, to Hoffman (and one is invited to presume, to almost all non-Asmat), these people remain awesomely and dangerously alien.

Of course, I have no way of knowing whether this is ‘true.’  But such a depiction of a remote, still quite isolated people is unusual.  Savage Harvest‘s use of historical and cultural information to ground and assess the writer’s own experiences allows the book to go against prevailing contemporary assumptions of universality (that we’re all brothers and sisters under the skin, that we share a common humanity, yadda yadda) and cultural relativity (that all customs are equally valid and worthwhile).  Carl Hoffman’s book, instead, obliquely offers a different perspective.  There are, still in this world, domains of radical otherness.  Radical, as in at the root.  Essential.  Non-negotiable, even by Rockefeller-scale money or prestige-school education or top-level institutional (or publishing) support. 

Let me put it another way.  Colonial (neo-, post- included) writing usually falls in two camps, which can be organized roughly by the concept of jeopardy.  One:  the writer/explorer/collector/interpreter ventures into the unknown and is in jeopardy of losing his life (see Henry Morton Stanley’s books) or his sanity (see Conrad) because of the power of the Other.  In brief, he (usually but not always a ‘he’) could be killed, and the commercial/scientific/missionary/cultural knowledge he is trying to amass is at risk.  Two:  the Other (the primitive, the savage, the indigenous) is in jeopardy because of the power of the colonial official/westerner/missionary/scientist – in jeopardy of becoming extinct or irrevocably contaminated (the vanishing American Indian, the last of the Maasai, the erosion of authentic artistic production into tourist art, etc,). 

The first concept usually requires a danger-courting hero-narrator and inscrutably malevolent indigenes, often planted in a physical environment insalubrious for Westerners.  The second requires a needy pilgrim-narrator and Rousseauvian indigenes who experience life fully, unmediated by the burdens of civilization, yet who are vulnerable to complete cultural collapse when exposed to modernity.  Carl Hoffman’s Savage Harvest confronts and juggles these conflicted legacies of ‘native’/explorer/’exotic’ collector jeopardy in ways I’ve never quite before encountered.

In sum, I recommend this book highly . . . to those interested in non-Western art and its acquisition, in colonial history and theoretics, in travel writing, in South Pacific culture, or just in unraveling long-standing mysteries.  Savage Harvest is exciting to read, and it’s even more exciting to think about. 

Savage Harvest:  A Tale of Cannibals, Colonialism, and Michael Rockefeller’s Tragic Quest for Primitive Art.  By Carl Hoffman.  New York: William Morrow/Harper Collins, 2014.  Hardcover, paperback, and electronic format.

Deb's Book Blog: Introduction

Deb's Book Blog

The debblog is back!  But in a different incarnation, as for the moment I'm really tired of politics. The purpose of this blog is simple:  to share impressions of books, books that I've liked, books that I've recently discovered, even books that have driven me crazy.  Most of you who might look at this blog are, or have been, fellow travelers in academia . . . and are incorrigible readers.  Your tastes may be different than mine (I gravitate toward non-fiction, for example), but I think we all share a love of books and the new experiences/ideas they can give.

If I can figure out how to do it, I'd love for this site to be a space for friends to share reading recommendations and our critiques of what we've read recently (whoops:  too much alliteration). 

The illustration (which I posted today as a Throwback Thursday thing) is the first library I remember . . . in Marinette, Wisconsin, where I was born and lived (other than a three-year residence across the river in Menominee, Michigan) until I was eight years old.  How could one not love books when one could walk to such a lovely library (and have a friendly librarian who adhered to the all-the-books-you-can-carry rule)? 

Later tonight, I'll try to write my first Weekend Reading suggestion.  For now, I just want to see if this new site works.