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The Rot of a Puny Mind

Might I first express my appreciation for the flattering remarks directed at the Overseas Student Officer by your correspondent A. Rimbaud in Salient (Aug 29). I am informed that the letter was directed at me and the 'Asian Students' apparently as a means of providing some kind of response by way of correspondence in the Salient. No doubt, Rimbaud sees himself as performing an usefull role in this regard, in provoking 'Asian Students' out of their present state of 'apathy'.

Among other thing Rimbaud's xenophobia extends to believeing that some 200 to 300 odd Asian students, by their very presence, inhibit 5000 odd other from achieving 'a truly stimulating creative, aroused, bubbling campus', and 'clearly act as an anchor to all attempts of the University to make progress in any direction.'I am not quite sure of the logic (if any) inherent in Rimbaund's assertions, but I have been assured that such a capacity for logical thinking does in fact exist the dirt-clogged sewers of Rimbaud's feeble mind.

To spout mane jokes now and again is, I imagine, quite all right, but to make such pucrile jokes constantly about any one subject, is to suggest no 'liberation' but rather, a form of subconscious enslavement seeking vainly to prove itself as freedom on a conscious level.

Rimbaud's sentiments reveal quite clearly certain facets of the syndrome of ethnocentrism. Thus, for eg he typifies an universal aspect of the syndrome in his tendency to blame a particular group (outgroup) for the troubles and deprivations of in group members, Again, one finds evidence of a very naive 'phenomenal absolutism' the tendency here being to assume that the world is exactly as one sees it, and that all other persons (groups or cultures) really perceive it in the same way but behave the way they do of a perverse wickedness or incompetence.

These sorts of assumptions and the tendency to syllogise inevitably leading to placing students from different cultures and environments into inclusive categories such as 'foreign' or 'overseas' or 'Asians' are quite commonplace. As a result, very little effort is ever made to understand, and consequently much of the expectations behind all orientations and induction is the belief that there can be no communication until these groups conform, become 'I ike us'.

The symptoms of such prejudice (as Rimbaund expresses) at this University are hard to discern. One inevitably finds oneself looking not for scars in one's own body, but for an attitude determining the behaviour of one's fellow students. At best, there is, after the suspicion, an unprovable certainty that there are numbers of people at the University who do assume white superiority and its corollary. Over against this and acting as a kind of foil to it, is another certainlty — the presence of those who do not share these views. All this leads to a mood which is mainly despair, but one can only think of the few and clings to the hope.

Jean-Paul Sartre in 'The Reprieve'expresses quite aptly, the kind of feelings that may be evoked; "It isn't good for a man to live on other man's territory, it is very hard to hear; he is grudged the bread he eats. And their suspicion — that supremely......suspicion of us! When I get back to .....this is the vision I shall have of (NZ?): a long dank staricase, a bell, a door half-opened — 'What do you want?' — and then shut again.....What I find hardest to bear is to be a charge on others. Especially when they make you feel it so cruelly."

Finally, I suspect, one will find underneath the facade of concern for the 'amount of apathy on campus', in glorious; living colour; the full-some phantasmagoria of base rot that permeates the very core of Rimbaud's puny mind.