Kafka’nın Kızıl Peter’i ve Yeryüzündeki Ezilmiş Topluluklar

“A Report to an Academy” Franz Kafka tarafından yazılmış bir kısa öyküdür. 1917 senesinde yayımlanmıştır. Hikayede, insan gibi davranmayı öğrenen Kızıl Peter (Red Peter) adlı maymun, dönüşümünü nasıl etkilediğinin hikayesini bir akademiye sunuyor.

Bilimsel bir konferans öncesinde konuşan anlatıcı, önceki yaşamını bir maymun olarak anlatıyor. Hikayesi, bir av gezisinde vurulup yakalandığı bir Batı Afrika ormanında başlıyor. Red Peter Avrupa yolculuğu için kendini bir gemide kafese sıkışmış, ilk kez istediği gibi hareket etme özgürlüğünden mahrum bulur. Bu durumdan kurtulmaya ihtiyaç duyan Red Peter mürettebatın alışkanlıklarını inceler ve şaşırtıcı bir kolaylıkla taklit eder; Yalnızca alkol almayı öğrenirken belirli zorluklarla karşılaştığını bildirir. Öykü boyunca anlatıcı, insan davranışını herhangi bir insan olma arzusundan değil, sadece kendisine kafesinden bir kaçış yolu sağlamak için öğrendiğini yineler. Maymun, Avrupa’ya vardığında “Hayvanat Bahçesi veya Müzik Salonu” arasında bir seçim yapmak zorunda kaldığını fark eder ve kendini yetenekli bir icracı olacak kadar insan olmaya adar. Bunu birçok öğretmenin yardımıyla da başarır.

Aşağıda kısa öykünün kısa bir çözümlemesiyle “How does Red Peter subvert the request of the academy? What are the techniques used by Kafka to enlarge the story to include almost all the suppressed and marginal groups on earth?” sorusu cevaplandırılmıştır.

In A Report to an Academy, Kafka uses an ape, which can speak like a human being, in order to criticize what modern men call “civilization”. Th text forces a careful reader to question whether education or civilization contributes anything of value to his/her animal nature. The dominant figure of speech used is irony. Red Peter’s choice of words, style of narration, the way he depicts the incidents and his own emotions, which ocur during the training process, demonstrate his alienation and entrapment. Red Peter talks very fluently and controlled. He uses language flawless but one issue with this is that language makes an hierarchy, determines one’s place. It is hard for the marginals to communicate or to express themselves in that language therefore Peter prefers to talk with irony, or not to talk at all about some issues.

Literary texts give us a different kind of knowledge concerning ideology. 19.-20. Century novels or short stories don’t mention imperialism openly but when we read texts with their relation to other texts, lapses become visible. A Report to an Academy can be defined as an anticolonialist text in its essence because while close reading it we can see the exploitation of something newly conquered whether it is a new territory or a community or groups of animals. As Edward Said says, the spoken and the unspoken coexist. When the writer is telling us a story about a simple family, or someone forced to migrate, at the same time he is telling us a story about imperialism, colonies and slavery, and exploitation. Said says that novels show us norms, values and almost tell us what is acceptable and not. They covertly teach us a kind of ideology, they interpellate the reader. And here Kafka, uses irony, we feel that the ape isn’t expressing his sincere feelings, and the ape’s story is actually the story of all exploited nations, natives in those lands. Think about Jane Austen’s Mansfieldpark for example, and how Fanny acts as a commodity to be able to survive in mansfield park. Fanny needs to be assimilated in order to be a part of that estate which is a representation of the British Empire. Without going deeper in those matters, here in Kafka, the reader is given a story of an ape who is brought to Europe from the Gold Coast and has to confirm to western civilization in order to survive, in order to not to be caged in a zoo. Red Peter uses the phrase “This achievement would have been impossible if I had desired to cling to my origins, to the memory of my youth. In fact the first rule I set for myself was the renunciation of any and all forms of obstinacy; I, a free ape, willingly accepted this yoke.” The word “origins” is important because it takes the monkey from being only a monkey to all of us. Because we also are originally animals. Also in any society like Kafka’s, we are originally not similar to the majority or to the rulers. Minorities are monkies in the eyes of the ruling classes. It makes us something to be transformed, something they want to mold into their own desired shape. But he stubbornly uses this word “i voluntarily rejected my origins” becase he understands that either this or to the zoo which is actually another form of death. Red Peter has been away from his ape life for so long that he doesn’t remember it as we human beings have been away from our neanderthal origin. In another part Peter tells about his scars, “Shots were fired, I was the only one hit, I took two bullets”, this scar incident is very touching because every sort of colonialist expedition leaves a scar on the native populations. It’s the scar of being rejected as an honorable creature, human or not. Ruling ideologies have always been treating various people grpupd as animals and exploiting as much as possible. So the scars are the monkey’s actual scars but also psychological scars. This is how Kafka enlarges the story to include almost all the suppressed and marginal groups on earth. The plot has a pattern behind the visible veil of words it consists of. A so called lower creature is captured by Hagenbeck company from a far away land, shot and etherized, put behind the bars, caged in a ship, brought back to Europe and assimilated for the “greater good” or “progress” as Peter and the Academy says. This pattern repeats itself over and over again for years and centuries. Names change, characters change, countries change but the plot is always the same.

Speaking of progress, the most ironic part is when Peter says “What progress! How the rays of knowledge penetrated my waking brain from all sides! I will not deny it: it made me happy.” Progress and rays of knowledge are key terms. Rays of knowledge is a reference to Enlightment era. How are colonies expected to progress? What makes them progressed? An overall conformity, imitading the “godlike” civilized people, to adapt christianity, capitalist and democratic systems. The ironic speech points that the cultural level of a European is almost nothing. At the end of his story Red Peter says there is no value judgements on his side, and he doesn’t expect anything from the Academy, he is only parting knowledge. Although he says it was only a report , we can understand that, through irony, there are many fundamental criticism to the western civilization,in terms what is done to the individual, to the colonies, to animals and everything. For instance Red Peter says “my first teacher nearly went ape himself, as the saying goes. He was soon forced to give up teaching and had to be taken to an institution”, the teacher goes mad in the process of teaching him how to be human. As an anti colonialist text that reaches to whole humanity, this scene represents the way the victimizer also becomes animal through colonialization. The victim and the victimizer change places.

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References: Karadağ, B. M. (2020), Kafka’nın Kızıl Peter’i ve Yeryüzündeki Ezilmiş Topluluklar. Türk Dilbilim. (access date: …). https://turkdilbilim.wordpress.com