I read E. M. Forster’s Passage to India last week for my book discussion group and found myself revisiting a very painful moment in my life. Around 20 years ago an Ethiopian student living with us (I’ll call him Timothy) was arrested for date rape. Passage to India has given me fresh insights into what may have occurred with Timothy. Nor is that all. Now that I think about it, all throughout the affair I viewed the arrest through the lens of Forster’s book, which I first read in high school.
Because we regularly take in students whose finances are low, we accepted Timothy and another Ethiopian student as refugees from then-Marxist Ethiopia. Both had had to escape to other countries because the regime was rounding up young people to keep their parents in check. Timothy spent five years in a Soviet republic essentially emptying bedpans in a hospital, so when the U.S. had immigration openings for political refugees from Africa, he jumped at the chance. The two students attended St. Mary’s with the help of Pell grants. The other student majored in physics, went on to get a PhD, and now works for the U.S. patents office. Timothy never graduated.
One winter evening I received a phone call from campus security asking me to get Timothy from the college library and bring him to them as they didn’t want to arrest him publicly. I did so and watched the county sheriff’s office take him away in handcuffs. He trusted me when I asked to come with me, making me feel like Judas.
I have tried to imagine many times what happened between him and the woman student, but the picture is never clear. This is not the case in the book where Adela, entering the Malabar Caves, believes she has been inappropriately approached by the young doctor Aziz. We know Aziz to be entirely innocent, and the only question about Adela is whether or not she was hallucinating (the most likely explanation). An international incident erupts pitting the British against the Indians, and things look bad for Aziz until Adela recants on the witness stand and he is cleared.
There was no omniscient author in our case. As far as I can make out, the sexuality started out as consensual. There may have been fascination on the woman’s part with the Ethiopian student’s racial otherness, and I can almost guarantee that alcohol was involved. Somewhere along the line, I suspect, she said “no” and that “no” was not heard or respected. The question is whether the communication breakdown was also cultural.
As Forster’s book makes abundantly clear, miscommunication between cultures can be severe. In fact, that is the book’s central drama. In our case, as I learned from the Ethiopian Embassy, incidents like this are not uncommon. An American woman invites an Ethiopian man to her apartment, which she may interpret one way (a chance to talk), he another (an invitation to have sex).
I learned a lot about our criminal justice system from the incident. We had to pay a bail bondsman to get Timothy out of prison (poet Lucille Clifton put up some of the money) and we hired a lawyer. The case ended in a plea bargain—the woman student dropped the charges on the condition that Timothy pay her therapy bills, which he did. He later dropped out of college, we lost touch, and last I heard he had a job installing cable.
The book allows me to find myself in the story as well. There is an English teacher, Fielding, who is sure Aziz is innocent and who breaks with the English community in order to come to his defense. I wasn’t as sure that Timothy was innocent, but I did work on his behalf. And as between Fielding and Aziz, a coolness arose between Timothy and me.
Fielding can’t understand the coolness, but it is almost inevitable as the forces of culture push the two apart. Fielding finds Adela courageous for having recanted her testimony since she has to buck the English community to do so. He even persuades Aziz not to press for damages. This means that Aziz remains a poor doctor when he could have become rich, and eventually he sees this as another instance of the English taking advantage of India. Fielding stands up for him when no other Englishman will—for that he remains grateful—but he becomes suspicious. There is a reconciliation at the end of the book, but the author tells us that the two men will never see each other again.
East is East and West is West and never the twain shall met, writes Rudyard Kipling, a man who understood the gap between England and India as well as anyone. I had occasion to witness a comparable gap between Africa and the Americas.
But that doesn’t mean that we should give up trying to bridge it. We have no other choice.
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