7. The Notion of Oriental Silence
Said has formulated the word ‘Oriental Silence’ (Said, 1995, p.9) to stress the fact that the East has never tried to protest against such dominations in the past and doing so, they have allowed the West to proceed. It denotes that they have accepted the intellectual subjugation and academic supremacy of the West or they are waiting for a perfect time to speak out. He has given no justification to such a doubt but mentioned that a scholarly protest in the near future may arise like the ‘Field Day’ movement (ibid, p.353). The East may not have pedagogic excellence compared to that of the West but they have many other hidden talents which will evoke the unawaken peak of conscience. Hence, it can be predicted that they may object to be called as subjects or subalterns but the certainty of such a revolution in future is on doubts.
There is no disagreement that general readers do not survey the actual facts and believe what the authors say in words. For example, when a person speaks of black man’s sexuality and jealousy referring to Othello (1603), hardly any common reader protests. There is hardly any denial that Othello speaks black man’s jealousy on love and sex and it makes readers believe that black people are more sexually provoked and the reason for this silence is supposed to be the stern establishment of orthodoxies regarding the black-skinned individuals rooted by the higher intelligentsia. Several psychoanalytic illustrations and historical documentary proofs forcefully convince the minds of the general readers to adopt such concepts. Another similar example is Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness where the Africans are depicted as slaves who are unable to revolt against the slavery enforcement.
All writings on Eastern culture are presented in a contrast against the Western culture where the West is the superior one in all respects, strongly mentioned by Said. Moreover, the depiction is so attractive, convincing and believable that readers accept the way the writers present them. In this regard, Barry (2009, p.161) says that when general readers read a piece of post-colonial text, they do not critically review the written words the way a Marxist critic does by creating a division between the ‘overt’ and the ‘covert’. Therefore, it becomes obvious for
them to believe without hesitation and such an acceptance is being criticized by Said as ‘silence’.
Such attitudes of the readers encourage Orientalist writers to continue their practices of making a contrast between the Western and the non-Western countries. Furthermore, the impact of the previous World Wars and the triumph of the European and Atlantic powers which evoked ‘power intellectual’, ‘power cultural’, and ‘power moral’ are responsible for establishing ‘the indisputable truth that Occidentals are superior to Orientals’ (Said, 1995, p.2001).
Therefore, there is no denying to the fact that “The superior ‘order’, ‘rationality’, and ‘symmetry’ of Europe, and the inferior ‘disorder’, ‘irrationality’ and ‘primitivism’ of non-Europe were the selfconfirming parameters in which the various Orientalist disciplines circulated.” (Ashcroft and Ahluwalia, 2001, p.51).