WARNING: If you have not read the book, there are spoilers in this review.
Like many cosmopolitan, post-colonial South Asians, Hari Kunzru writes extraordinarily well. He knows and loves words in the English language, not just the functional language of the British Islands, but the de-territorialized language of twentieth century globalism, kneaded by diaspora intelligentsia, whimsically dipping into the vernaculars and dialects of English-speaking localities, and – in Kunzru’s case – ironically, but also desperately-lovingly, seeking to use English, a language of modern power, as a moral language that mourns, assesses, and stays alive. In White Tears, he writes beautifully and he has a fabulous, intelligent, moving, and unusual concept. As an aside, but this is important, I came to the United States in 1980, a post-colonial Indian, fresh off the boat, not knowing the blues at all.* I’d heard jazz and rock, and, yes, I may have listened to Billie Holiday, but simply as jazz. I did not know the blues. In the early eighties, three young white people from North Carolina introduced me to the blues. A few years later, more white people introduced me to more blues. No African-American has introduced me to the blues, though one here, or one there, may have listened to a song with me. White Tears is about the blues. It is also about incarceration, racism, American government, guilt, and blaxploitation. I read it after J. Saunders Redding’s No Day of Triumph, Ta-Nehisi Coates’ Between the World and Me, and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah, also some Flannery O’Connor, but before Marilynne Robinson. This context is important because it reflects one thread of twenty-first century grappling with “race” in the United States: immigrants, especially non-white immigrants, consciously – intellectually and morally – adopting and owning the race history, and the racial present, of their new country, trying to find to find an American identity between, or beyond, the two easiest choices: “to assimilate into White culture or to appropriate Black culture.” ** The main characters of White Tears are two young white men and a vengeful black ghost. The two white men love music, particularly the blues, particularly the richer white man. The poorer man is adept with technology, the richer is a collector, and neither is good at navigating the moral delusions of human societies. Kunzru sets up a gorgeous plot device which begins with Seth’s hearing a song fragment while randomly recording street and other public sounds in New York City. It leads to a theft of intellectual property, of cultural property. We don’t know it, but the past is vengefully inserting itself into the present. We get a hint of mixed realities but the language of reality keeps us grounded in the present. The rich boy, Carter, gets beaten up and disappears into a coma, but we are not sure if all of that is real or a delusion. The remaining boy (Seth) knows that the attack on Carter has something to do with the theft of the song, but he believes that the threat will be dispelled if he can explain and prove the innocence of the prank. Meanwhile, he has geeky hots for Carter’s rich sister (Leonie), is conned by a journalist masquerading as a friend, and draws Leonie into the retracing of a tragically exploitative trip, during which she is pruriently murdered and he falls into his first full hallucination of white face-black face. From that point, the narrative spirals towards to the climactic integration of evil-innocence-cluelessness-privilege-death and subordination-suffering-incarceration-ghostsofChristmaspast. The problem with White Tears is it is not a tragedy. The bad people are unambiguously bad. Revenge is simple. The innocent are clueless, and cluelessness is not innocence. Kunzru’s story is very powerful, relating a national, indeed global, history of extreme exploitation, of capitalist and racist privilege, of systematic cruelty. This is a story of deep red and black strokes. The flaw in White Tears is that he tells it with deep red and black strokes, but he – diaspora brown, and post-colonial like me – does not have adequate color capacity for it. Coates tells it black and red, unrestrained, and sometimes tenderly, from his heart; he himself grows in the telling. Redding’s 1942 travel memoir is written with a post-War, pre-Civil Rights optimism. His telling is fluent and dispassionate, skillfully weaving literary English and the vernaculars of the southern localities he visited. With scholarly calm, Redding chronicles harsh and casual racism, and the human frailty of Southern Negroes (as they were called in the forties), whether beaten down by poverty and racism or, if well-off, struggling to reconcile racism and economic privilege. Americanah’s narrative goes from the ordinary color consciousness in a non-white, post-colonial, independent state – in this case Nigeria – to consciousness of racism in the United States, with a side journey into racism in England, and back to a twenty-first century globalized consciousness of race and color. Like Kunzru, Adichie writes with all of the skill and confidence of the educated post-colonial cosmopolitan. She claims all of the English language, and writing phenomenally, so to speak, claims all of the colors her novel can bear. She cheerfully presents us with types, and then just as exuberantly adds their ingrown hairs and pretensions. In the end, Coates, Redding, and Adichie write about flawed people loving, exploiting, or being clueless about flawed people. Held against them, albeit serendipitously, Kunzru writes about bad, or consciously false, people exploiting weak people. In White Tears, Hari Kunzru writes a superbly ambitious story. He manipulates structure, language, and plot both intriguingly and smoothly, and his characters are often perceptively drawn, although sometimes with more self-conscious irony than needed. However, in this brave effort to write about race in the United States without (simple) assimilation or (strident) appropriation, Kunzru loses his voice, and as a result no character is full, not as black, not as white, not as female, and not even as male (or other gender). The characters who are closest to being full are the two lonely older (white) men, JumpJim and Chester Bly who move through their ghostly parts in ways that are both lumpy and alive. They are not stock characters dressed up; they have shadows that allow me imagine into them. JumpJim shuffles and obfuscates in palpable ways while Chester Bly travels through the south like a lovingly-rapacious white doppelgänger of J. Saunders Redding. To the degree this review sounds critical, it is not about throwing shade on Kunzru for misappropriation nor is it calling on Kunzru to add a “brown” voice if writing about race in the United States. Rather it is a rumination on the difficulty of trying to write about race in the United States, where every word takes a stand and every word can be hurtful. One path to safety is to write what, at its fullest, is an uncontrolled narrative in a highly controlled way, where the writer is apart and in control always. The rub is that ‘to be in control always’ can only be achieved with a limited range of representations. This means that the writer risks being more on the mechanical end and less on the “live” – internally conscious, escaping, haphazard – end of narrative representation. As a South Asian diaspora voice, Kunzru writes very carefully about race in the United States. He is not afraid to personify the badness of racist capitalism and the will to vengeance of the historically exploited. But, in a curiously ironic way, while he makes the blues the heart of the story, he loses the pathos of the blues which is a human pathos. The whiteface-blackface-whiteface torment in Seth’s story comes the closest to pathos, but Seth loses palpability as his delusions are cleverly articulated. In the end, his delusions and hallucinations come across more as elaborately didactic representations of the delusions and hallucinations of racist capitalism than as human pathos that wends through will to/subordination to power, desire, suffering, love, weakness, and death, though not necessarily in that order. * For more on my slow, always incomplete, learning about race in the United States, see my blog post The Color of People. ** Mallika Roy, Hardly Un-American
0 Comments
Over a decade ago when I was going through a melancholy phase, I began to sit with a Zen meditation group. I get melancholy when I cannot resolve something important to me, when there is no solution that I can generate in an ordered way. When I am melancholy in this way my mind gets stuck on a treadmill of the same questions, the same arguments, the same words, the same dead-end fogginess over and over again. This is a mental state well-suited and challenging to meditation. So to help me focus – the restraint of counted breaths usually frays and falls apart with the pressure of the treadmill -- I conjured a brief mantra of the capacities I wanted to bring forward to keep myself sane: strength, integrity, compassion. These capacities would help me jump off the treadmill both while meditating and in general. So whenever I found myself distracted or morose, I repeated these words, standing (or sitting) straighter, feeling simpler, bowing to the person or persons who were the apparent causes or objects of my distress. As the causes for that distant melancholy faded, in part because of my own and others’ actions and in part because the world turned, I stopped reciting those words as frequently. For a long while I stopped regular meditation.
Then, as an empty nester, I returned to meditating with the same Zen group, not as regularly as those many years ago, but often enough. A few days ago, I saw the Dalai Lama with a group of no more than 200 people. I was in the third row, in the center, and could see him as an ordinary old man – his expressions, the folds of his skin, the slowness of his movements – while he spoke as one of the most influential figures of the late 20th century and the early 21st century. Among other things, he spoke familiarly about the importance of the calm mind and the unhealthy effects of anger and fear. So when I went to meditate on Monday and “strength, integrity, compassion” drifted into my mind I felt good about my calm mind and my rejection of anger and fear. Wanting to update my mantra I thought about the capacity I would want to add, and alighted on the elusive and unlikely (for me) capacity for sweetness. I repeated “strength, integrity, compassion, sweetness” with brave complacency, knowing that sweetness was something I would have to strive for. Then my mind, ever-unmeditative, started thinking about incompleteness, imperfection, and what of myself I was excluding and I found myself building and repeating: strength, weakness, fear, shame, integrity, confusion, inconsistency, scattered-ness, dishonesty, compassion, anger, hatred, sweetness, bitterness. I had to face all of the excluded and found that while I had all apparently under control, all lived in me, not all to the same degree at this time and some (like bitterness) very little at any time, but if I have strength, I have weakness, fear, and shame; if I have integrity, I have confusion, inconsistency, scattered-ness, and dishonesty; if I have compassion, I have anger and hatred; and if I have (a little, sometimes) sweetness, I have (a little, sometimes) bitterness. Somehow this relieved me. There is nothing to hide; I have nothing to hide. And how does this relate to beauty? Well, while I was thinking about what to add to my original mantra, I thought about adding “beauty.” But beauty isn’t a capacity, it is a kind of presence, and once I faced (some of the) excluded, felt relieved with open imperfection, I thought this I can call beauty. In the spring of 2012, I watched The Hunger Games. I was horrified by the story. I hadn’t read the books, though my daughter and nephew and millions of others had. I knew it had a strong female hero and so I expected to like it. But then I found that the core story involves a gladiatorial competition between children, where the winner is the one who survives. The weak, usually the youngest, get picked off first. What mind conceived of this horribly implausible game, I wondered. Never in history, to my knowledge, had any ruler or regime instituted such an entertainment. Yes, children were wantonly killed; yes, people were killed by (adult) gladiators; yes, child soldiers killed and committed atrocities in a “war.” But this pitting of children against children for entertainment made no sense, fit no pattern that I could think of, though it was a compelling story to follow and watch, much like a horror film. It wasn’t implausible in the way a superhero movie with bogus science is implausible, it was implausible because the social premises seemed off.
The only way it made sense was as an allegory. I moved back from the immediate spectacle of bigger children killing smaller children in a lush game world and considered only the most basic scaffolding. The story is set in the country/world of Panem which has twelve districts surrounding the capital. The districts are punished annually for a long-past insurrection by having to give up a child to fight in the Hunger Games. The capital is a beautiful city with wondrous technology, extravagant foods, fascinating clothing. All in all it expresses a climactic moment in human design and artifice. The richer districts are close to the capital and the poorest is far away. Typically, the expectation is that a child from the richer districts, usually one of the older children in the competition, will win (killing or otherwise out-surviving the others). So, with what framing could I find children surviving by killing or out-surviving other children plausible? Looking at the structures of my life, I am close to the centers of power and wealth, not geographically but in class terms. I enjoy some of the ease and luxuries that are increasingly taken for granted, and often further rarified, in those centers. My children have tremendous access to opportunities of various kinds. No, of course, they aren’t like the competitors of The Hunger Games, my mind shies away from the thought, but out there are children, even in the US, who have much less, and further out there are millions of children among the 20 million people who are at risk of starvation, right now in 2017. Our children do not choose these roles. It is as adults that we acquiesce to these structures, with those of us who are closest to the centers of power and privilege acquiescing the most. It’s very difficult not to acquiesce as an individual. The system supports, and is supported by, a web of daily tasks and pleasures. I could pay more taxes. I could give more money to worthy organizations. I could work in public service jobs. I could volunteer. In all these cases, my individual actions can easily be lost or get wrapped into the same-old. It’s not just a case of feeding the twenty million enough that their dead bodies don’t saturate our newsfeeds; and, then, once this crisis is past, we would leave them to a deprivation that is one notch above death. As an allegory, a plausible one it turns out, The Hunger Games helps us see the problem in our own lives, but it doesn’t help us much with a solution. In Collins’ trilogy, Panem’s socio-political structure is maintained with hidden (and not so hidden) violence and trauma, and then is, itself, overturned with extraordinary violence and trauma. We have our own hidden, and not so hidden, violence. But I cannot hope for the extraordinary violence that drove change in Panem. So, in the dull way of ordinary work and long-term trajectories – not just of policies and numbers, but also of relationships and accountability – how do we, in the US, look past one or two elections (2018! 2020!) to a larger, longer-term shift from the inequalities and hidden (and not so hidden) violence of our world? How do we work for this shift across political boundaries? Or can we hope only to hold back the worst extremes? Twenty million people are facing famine now. A few days ago, while doing a walking meditation, I reflected on what I remembered of a recent discussion of a Zen koan – What’s the sound outside? It’s the sound of raindrops?[i] The discussion I heard was about inside and outside, emptiness and sound, sound and sound, listening and listening for. My memory of that discussion, while walking, slid into a trite, but ever-enchanting, thought about the fleck of my life in the universe, and I had a sensation of being matter inside and out, dust and dust, indistinguishable in that moment of space and continuous on the axes of time. Except, right in that thought or right alongside it, this dust contained desire inside and commitments outside, listening inside and raindrops outside. And I was exhilarated by both dust and desire. That memory and rather ecstatic moment took me to the old spiritual question – how do you reconcile the objective inertness of dust with the desire and activity of sentience? Here I use some language from the practice and writings of Zen Buddhism, but similar questions are raised throughout Buddhist and Daoist traditions and have analogs widely in other religious and philosophical traditions.
But this blog post is less a spiritual or philosophical inquiry and more a place to initiate and document the transformation of failure into joy of living in a universal sense and a kick in the pants in the short run. Failure is the dark side of desire. To be is dust, to live is to desire, and to desire is to fail. So, then, where is the joy? In that walking meditation, I felt, which here is the same as I thought, that being-as-dust not only does not exclude living with desire (temporality, corporeality, love of self, love of others, fear, and anger,) but fully permits desire. I can only live now, and living means living with desire. This is true even when living fully is simple and meditative, even when listening within is harmonic with raindrops outside. Desire most commonly means “I want.” While ‘desire’ often has a negative tinge to it and in contemporary discourse seems to be morally superseded by passion, I am using it in the general and value-neutral sense of an inexorable pressing within oneself towards or against something outside onseself. This pressing is by itself living, whatever its value according to this or that criterion, and whatever its success, however success is defined. Which brings me to failure. Success in living – whether being loved, winning something, or sensing the sublime in music, or food, or the greenness of a hill or something else – is easily linked to joy. Some variation of pleasure or satisfaction runs through the body. It is failure which is more difficult to link with joy, especially failure in the form of stasis or self-doubt. It is hard to see or feel joy when one desires something beyond one’s current state but there is no change, when one works in whatever way one can, when one searches here and there, and when one feels trapped, whether because of non-response from a world just carrying on or because of self-doubt that becomes a questioning of one’s desire or a palliative redirection towards apathetic gratitude for what one already has. But, I know from my ecstatic moment and my thinking since, that so long as one does not wallow in the apathetic gratitude – recognizing that what one is grateful for is precisely the foundation and fuel for desire – and so long as the questioning of one’s desire is honest and active, this is living! Actually, it’s living even if there is apathetic gratitude and dishonesty. Constraints and social valuation of what a person desires may change the direction and forms of her desire, but, if she’s living, what’s inside her will press out. This could be the heartbreaking, fatigued pressing-out of survival. Or it could be a well-fed, aggressive pressing out of a will to power. Or it could be any number of other expressions of desire. How do I say it without distracting tautology? That the pressing out is the joy of living. It is not about happiness or pleasure. It’s about being alive, with desire. As a side-note, this is fundamentally an amoral definition of the joy of living. What I desire and do in my joy of living may be shaped and countered by moral (and legal) perspectives that are larger than me, but my joy of living is an existential phenomenon in itself. So where does this take me? To the kick in the pants! Let dust be dust, let failure flourish, and let me get on with the activity of living. [i] Case 46 Kyosei's "Voice of the Raindrops" Main Subject: Kyosei asked a monk, "What is the noise outside?" The monk said, "That is the voice of the raindrops." Kyosei said, "Men's thinking is topsy-turvy. Deluded by their own selves, they pursue things." The monk asked, "What about yourself?" Kyosei said, "I was near it, but I am not deluded." The monk asked, "What do you mean by 'near it but not deluded'?" Kyosei said, "To say it in the sphere of realization may be easy, but to say it in the sphere of transcendence is difficult." Setcho's Verse: The empty hall resounds with the voice of the raindrops. Even a master fails to answer. If you say you have turned the current, You have no true understanding. Understanding? No understanding? Misty with rain, the northern and southern mountains. from The Blue Cliff Record, translated by Sekida (I took this from https://clearmindzen.blogspot.com/2009/06/koan.html) One of the things Hillary Clinton did not do, possibly because she remained a “well-brought-up” woman, was to confront her critics head-on and aggressively, “you’re full of shit.” I just noticed that, in suppressing my own anger, I am doing the same. Some of my anger is directed at Trump, his supporters, the Republican Party, etc. That’s easily expressed in the echo chambers in which I live AND it’s pretty pointless anger. They owe me nothing, they operate on the basis of different values and worldviews from mine. More than anger, I see dialogue, strategy, and political action as relevant to engagement with Trump, his supporters, and Republicans.
The anger that I am suppressing most, that is most difficult for me to utter, is directed at those on the center-to-progressive-left spectrum who comfort themselves that it’s Clinton’s fault and the Democratic Party’s fault. Yes, there are things her campaign could’ve done better and DEFINITELY the Democratic party needs some major overhauling, but once she was elected candidate (by a large number of voters, not by some sneaky number gamed by the DNC), SHE was the alternative to Donald Trump. Those who identify as left-of-center, as Democrats, or as appalled-by-Trump, if you did not support Clinton, you chose Trump. If you held your nose and groaned and moaned about Clinton, you chose Trump because you chose to let innuendo and relatively unimportant Clinton mistakes remain hugely amplified, while ignoring the fact that for the most part she was always left of center, was shifted further left by Bernie Sanders and his campaign, was genuinely open to input on issues of equity, civil rights, the environment, was likely to be open (and with greater authority and responsibility than as Secretary of State) to new ways of engaging with deeply challenging and complex foreign policy issues, and in general pretty intelligent, competent, consistent, and honest on policy/governance issues. Yes, I understand that you disagreed with her spouse’s centrism and its legacies, you disliked her connection to big money, you were suspicious of her hawkish foreign policy positions (not all of her positions were hawkish), you were underwhelmed by her (apparent lack of) charm, you found her white-woman feminism too old-fashioned and classist, many of you were upset that your candidate lost, and once the DNC emails were published you very understandably were angry about the DNC’s favoring Clinton (not nice, but not surprising given her history with the Democratic Party and his history as an independent). But you had a choice. Nurse your grievances (or, like Susan Sarandon, stoke The Real Revolution), OR defeat Trump. Trump did not get more votes than Republican candidates in the past. Clinton got fewer votes than Democratic candidates in the past. I’ve seen posts that simplistically blame Clinton—well, it’s her fault she wasn’t popular enough. My anger is because it isn’t only her fault. Bernie Sanders did his part, Elizabeth Warren did her part, Michael Moore did his part, Barack and Michelle Obama did their part, but if you didn’t support Clinton openly and fully, you helped Trump get elected. I’m closing my participation in this long, critical, often painful, (sometimes, just sometimes, touching or funny) election with a bow to Hillary Clinton, and some thoughts about going forward.
I honor her efforts, her perseverance, her ambition, her many strengths (intelligence and doggedness, to name two), her commitment to women and children, her pragmatism, her consistency AND her willingness to change. I honor her imperfection. This will be an election we and our children will remember for the rest of our lives. We will remember Bernie Sanders opening up the left for Clinton and hopefully leaving behind a movement, the DNC’s decision to back one of their own, her many (many!) plans, her email server and #thosedamnemails, Wikileaks and the Russians, her pantsuits, the Comey effect, “whitelash,” the urban “elites” disconnection with the white working class and rural America, the return of sexual language about and with women, Obamacare premiums going up, the rising power of the Latinx vote, appalling media coverage, the continuing distrust of Hillary Clinton, the shocking losses in Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania. I hope I don’t remember Anthony Weiner. Donald Trump will be in my face for four years, so there’ll be layers of memories about him, escaping the leaden capsule in my mind I’ve tried to relegate them to. So now the election is over. If Clinton had won, there was a real chance of violence. I am both proud (and a little irritated) that Trump supporters can take for granted the kind of gracious concession Clinton offered, and nonviolence on the part of Clinton supporters and the left in general. So now the election is over minorities, especially Muslims, are under threat. Muslims are a small minority and there is, unfortunately, a very broad population of Americans who would be comfortable suspecting and restricting Muslims. Non-white Americans, the poor, the incarcerated, LGBTQ, and women are also likely to face threats to their rights, safety, and wellbeing. The environment is under threat. Trump has already indicated that he is committed to unravelling clean energy policies. Criminal justice and incarceration conditions are likely to get worse. In the stock market today, the private prison industry was a big winner. Healthcare will become less available AND more expensive. Big pharma will be restricted less, and so on. Now, what are we going to do? The midterm elections come up in two years. Meanwhile we need to focus on protecting the rights of minorities (I am particularly worried about the scapegoating of Muslims), LGBTQ, the incarcerated, women, and other groups that are likely to be vulnerable under Trump; on increasing equitable access to education, healthcare, healthy food, and housing; on protecting the environment. Let’s support local and state initiatives And work to turn the legislature in the midterm elections. Tim Kaine said (quoting Faulkner): “They killed us, but they ain’t whupped us yet.” YES! Clinton said: “Our campaign was never about one person or even one election.... Make sure your voices are heard.... There are more seasons to come.” YES! So, thank you Hillary Clinton! And now the work of citizenship in a democracy continues. Hillary Clinton FULL Concession Speech | Election 2016 Hillary Clinton formally and publicly conceded to Donald Trump this morning after an upset defeat in the presidential election. "Last night I congratulated… YOUTUBE.COM Every moment is a dying moment and a new beginning; every day a new year starts. So paying attention to the end of a man-made calendar year invites irony even while it draws benediction. Mulling the non-binary lying of benediction with irony – both benediction and irony have fluid shapes and fuzzy boundaries, for example a metaphorical image of irony as large polka dots imbalancedly in a variegated mess of benediction, or vice versa, seems entirely plausible – in the last days of 2015, I realized that this is a fundamental state of human being, wrought as much into writing – whether penny-dreadful Harlequins or immoderate literary fantasies; the range, shapes, and tones vary – as into my everyday life of elemental love, conscious good, and whiplash cynicism.
New paragraph. Long an admirer of Pollyanna, I love to hear the ways people love and are kind to themselves and others. For many years this was a practice I sought. At first I struggled to keep all of me, the cynicism, fear, shame, and anger, along with the love and kindness to self and others. And then the struggle stopped, not because the love kindness cynicism fear shame anger disappeared, but because the struggle, petulant, distracting, or sucking me into an abyss of perfection, was getting me nowhere. So that was resolved in practice. But not in my writing. Writing under my nom de plume, which is my nom de nom which is my legal name, memorializes me, or, at least, memorializes my name. So I want beautiful, inspiring writing to throw lustre on my name, but what I want to write is often, mostly, flat, ironic. Be careful; I’m not just peer-pressured into wanting to be inspiring (or flat-languaged). At a gut level, with a final constancy, I love the inspirational. But when I even think of writing with singularly inspirational portent, my lips turn down. Can’t do it, can’t do it, don’t want to do it. I like writing flatly, ironically. I want to write, with round eyes and a flat tongue, the ironic underside of benediction. But (third time, third time lucky) surely I can write blips of gratitude here, offer genuine Pollyanna puffs of contentment for love in my life, for being able to write the words I want to write, for being able to drink wines in the evening, and fragrant coffees in the morning, indeed for being able to smile at the strangers who are laughing, swaying, and being silly in front of me. This gratitude curls away from irony. In the spirit of this gratitude, then, … All of you, those who have opened this post, those who have not, and everyone who does not know it exists: As this moment dies, this sun-day ends, this calendar year draws to a close, I wish you comfort with, or at least respite from, your cynicism-fear-shame-anger, I wish you safety, joy, and good health in drinking and eating (so many of you will not have the safety or the good health or even the potable liquid to drink or food to eat, but, still, fiercely, I can wish this, I can deny the irony of this helpless benediction), And I wish you love to give and love around you, even if unspoken, even if love is simply the mundane sloth of mourning doves on the wall. Over the last week or two, I’ve been touched by stories of loss, some from and about people I don’t know directly, some from people I care about but don’t know well, and some from or about people I am deeply attached to. The experience of loss and grief comes from the limiting or end of some dream of action in the world, whether caused by disability, illness, rejection, or death. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the stories of loss and grief are also stories of survival, living, creating, loving, holding others in relationship. These aspects of the stories – sometimes they are the main stories themselves – are about fierce loving, clear-eyed pleasure (whether sensuous, relational, intellectual…), resonating laughter, and so on. Other aspects of the stories, again sometimes themselves the main threads, are about anger, worry, depression, solitude, fear, futility.
These are your stories, these are my stories: sometimes they are more your stories than mine; sometimes they are our stories. Sometimes it is our story because you pull me into the story; sometimes it is our story because it is my story also, perhaps from the past, possibly from the future; and sometimes it is our story because it has to be our story, you can’t separate it from me, and I can’t separate myself from it. So, as I look forward to Thanksgiving which I have learned to enjoy as a time of gathering, though this year we won’t celebrate it as Thanksgiving per se – no turkey decorations, no cranberry sauce, no marshmallows with sweet potatoes – but will be celebrating life and family with my German kin, I’m thinking about how to hold loss and life fully. When loss is not immediate, but could be, at any time. My mind boggles. My heart sort-of avoids the question. Or is it avoiding the question? Perhaps the question side-steps living fully. If I just live, including celebration, loss will have its place in there, perhaps not obviously, perhaps not comfortably, but integrated. What do you do when a city you love is cruelly attacked? Paris is not the only city that has been cruelly attacked this millennium, this decade, this year, this month. Think of Beirut, Baghdad, Lahore, Nairobi, New York…. These are cities whose attackers claimed to be true Muslims, and yet they are a miniscule fraction of the 1.6 billion Muslims in the world, most of whom do not participate in or support these attacks. Apart from these “Islamist” attacks, there are hundreds of places all over the world where people are subject to cruel attacks by non-Muslim people, mostly in the pursuit of money and power. So cruel attacks, whether by “Islamists” or not, are commonplace (how do I write a sentence like that so calmly?!). Why, then, am I stricken by today’s tragedy in Paris and what do I do about it?
For people who live in Paris, this tragedy means that people they know are hurt – some are dead – and places they know are splattered with blood. Their hearts are broken in an immediate way. That cannot be the case for me. I’m in San Diego, and I haven’t been to Paris in years. But I’m stricken all the way in San Diego because I know Paris. It is the most beautiful city I know, which may seem irrelevant in the face of humans being mass-murdered but I cannot think of Paris without seeing its beauty; I cannot imagine anyone there who is not shaped by the beauty of Paris (even if negatively because they feel excluded from it). And the beauty of Paris is not a static, plastic beauty nor an archaic, lifeless beauty. The beauty of Paris comes alive because it is a vibrant world city, in which you hear languages, see art, listen to music from all the populated continents. It’s a city in which I can easily imagine myself, my family, and any of you, including refugees from warfare,“Islamist terrorism,” drought, and extreme poverty. Its beauty comes alive because so much living – walking, eating, painting, arguing, loving, laughing, playing, kissing, self-adorning, thinking, critiquing, mocking – happens in public, in a way that I have enjoyed and I love. Parisians are often offhand, grouchy, and snotty; they can be racist and bigoted; but they can also be charming, enlightening, loving, and very, very kind. The wonderful thing about Paris, and France in general, is that to a very significant degree one can hold them to liberté, egalité, fraternité. That ethos has inspired great heroism, and that ethos made me brave when I walked into uncaring offices or unfriendly cafés. So when Paris is attacked, it feels personal, not gut-wrenchingly immediate as it feels to people in Paris, but personal because I’ve lived some of what Paris is, I’ve absorbed some of its spirit. I’ve laughed with and loved some of its people, I’ve been inspired by its heroines and heroes, I’ve been intellectually challenged by strangers, I’ve argued with its officials, gosh some part of me is in Paris and some part of Paris is in me. And the attacks in Paris don’t make me forget the attacks in other cities, other places. Somehow they bring those other attacks into sharper focus. There was life – living, loving, laughing, arguing, excluding, including, self-aggrandizing, self-adorning, with beauty, grouchiness, bigotry, kindness, grieving – in those places too. So what now? I’m mourning, angry. For the first time in years, perhaps ever, I think, “war, this is an act of war.” Perhaps because of what Paris stood for in World War II? Less fancifully, perhaps because this attack follows a string of possibly linked attacks in different countries on different peoples? But if this is war, who exactly are we (Americans, the French, the “Allies”) fighting and how? If it’s ISIS, it operates like a cult, how do you fight a cult? In the long-run with social-psychological resistance and safeguards. In the short run? Must we acquiesce to the curtailing of civil liberties, the blanket “other-ing” of whole groups of people? Must we narrow and regulate our kindness? If it’s Al Qaeda, who is Al Qaeda today? And how does fighting Al Qaeda feed ISIS? The option that is perhaps most logical is also the hardest to activate – supporting true (not puppet) alternatives that, inspiringly and powerfully, will draw acolytes’ attention away from the lures of Al Qaeda and ISIS. It’s the most difficult option and also long-term, so in the short-term, what? There has to be something. This won’t go away easily, not on its own. A post-script, a reminder to myself: "Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.” Martin Luther King, Jr. (Parenthetically, the picture on my blog page is of graffiti in Paris, as is the picture on my “about” page.) |
AuthorMeenakshi Chakraverti Archives
December 2023
Categories
All
|