My thoughts of the Orient conjure up images of Chinese men and women eating steaming dumplings with chopsticks, pushing two-wheeled carts through the crowded street, breaking boards in half with their hands then bowing reverently in white karate garb with black belts, carefully cultivating bonsai trees, and flowing rhythmically in the public squares at dawn manipulating their chi.
My thoughts of the Orient conjure up images of kimono-wearing geishas dancing with brightly colored fans that conceal their stoic porcelain doll faces to the pounding of drums for the entertainment of men whose sexually driven gutteral utterances are abrupt and strangely incomprehensible.
My thoughts of the Orient conjure up images of Mr. Miagi, almond-shaped eyes, straight black hair, big bowls of white rice, egg rolls, and General Tso’s Chicken, hibachi chefs, soy sauce, black or green tea in tiny porcelain pots, lucky, friendly dragons, fortune cookies, foot-binding rituals, and Bruce Lee.
But my thoughts of the Orient are, as Said warns, not real, and definitely not Eastern; they are steeped in Western-created Orientalism. For though he admits that it would be inaccurate to see absolutely no reality in the Western idea of the Orient with its “history, tradition of thought, imagery, and vocabulary,” Said advises that “their lives, histories, and customs have a brute reality obviously greater than anything that could be said about them in the West” (PC 74).
So what is the Orient? Where is the Orient? and more importantly, what do they do there? In my “essentialized,” insular Western mind, I didn’t even know that the Near East and the Middle East were considered part of the Orient. That is how “Orientalismized” I have been. What a shame. To come to an understanding that our Western-dominated concepts of the East are merely the work of fantasy and reflection, imitation and not authenticity, is to realize the West’s ultimate power over not only the East, but also its very own inhabitants’ ideas and thoughts. And to think that I was, as Gramsci calls, “consenting” in my own acceptance of these notions is appalling (PC 76). As Said concludes, we can only hope that through his elucidation of the boundary between Occident and Orient, that we can “unlearn” our “inherent dominative mode” of thought and erase the line that separates us from them (PC 93).
.
Source:
http://mariatholder.wordpress.com/2012/10/12/thoughts-on-orientalism-the-orient-to-the-occident/