Light in the Dark...and Lines in the Sand

This past week, I've been looking at Gloria Anzaldua's book Light in the Dark which explores the role of imagination and empathy in creating social transformation. She focuses on that part of us which exists between worlds, between the world of dominant culture and our own imaginations, and between the world of the ordinary and the spiritual.

This book speaks of the chaos which sometimes shakes up our worldview when we start to look at the world from a holistic perspective. And she explores the struggles and confusions this brings to our lives.  As we search continually for the parts missing in dominant perspectives of the world, this sometimes means that our worldview constantly changes and evolves.  Exploring new knowledge or alternate perspectives can place us on a continuum between hope and despair.  But Gloria Anzaldua speaks of the traditional healer or shaman, who knew that in order to offer healing to his/her community, s/he needed to go through a process of being dismembered or torn apart.  When s/he is able to pull the pieces together again to create a new reality, s/he has something to offer.

This book also focuses a great deal on empathy, and the ability to see the perspectives of 'the other' in order to work towards change.  How interesting that my second book this week gave a lived example of how to this.

Lines in the Sand is by A.A. Gill, who writes with a great deal of sensitivity about the experiences of refugees, explaining that although he has tried not to be the good samaritan, once you stop and see the human face of 'the refugee', then it is impossible to ever turn away.  The book is a collection of articles which explore what it means to be displaced with such kindness and compassion that I found it hard to stop reading.

One of the articles which resonated most deeply though was the experience of going out to eat in a shelter for people who have no homes.  A.A. Gill speaks of the different cities we inhabit, depending on the lives we are able to live, and the opportunities open to us.  He introduced us to his own life, and the lives of those who have lost homes, families or opportunities, and the struggles many members of his (and any) city have from day to day.  There is the woman from West Africa who is in London without family or people.  She lost her job and her home.  Tears trickle down her face as she eats.

There is the Baptist Minister who no longer has a congregation.  He thanks God for chicken and rice.  Gill says:

"Now I don't know a damn about the mysterious ways of God, but I suppose it's no coincidence that at the heart of all religion there is food.  The sharing of food.  The act of feeding someone is the most basic transubstantiation.  To make them whole, and well, to feed their future, and the hope for the better tomorrow... "

He ends his article by explaining that we don't actually exist in different cities, that we still eat alongside people who are homeless, who are cleaners, who are abused, trafficked or kicked out.  We just choose to dis-remember.  He shares that 'others', including the volunteers who try to make a difference need our help.  Not a lot.  Just a little.  We all have something to offer.

Writing with care

I woke up this morning to a song by Sade, with the lyrics "It hurts like brand new shoes..."

The song is called pearls:

There is a woman in Somalia
Scraping for pearls on the roadside
There's a force stronger than nature
Keeps her will alive
That's how she's dying
She's dying to survive
Don't know what she's made of
I would like to be that brave
She cries to the heaven above
There is a stone in my heart
She lives a life she didn't choose
And it hurts like brand-new shoes

Hurts like brand-new shoes

The song stayed with me until I started reading.  I started with  some of Susan Griffin's work.  Our Secret looks at the ways in which our lives interconnect with the world around us, a world we both inherit and create via our own contributions.  Susan Griffin is an Eco-feminist, but one of her passages focused on art, poverty, and the terrible fear of having a baby whose health is fading.  Griffin explained how poverty seems to expose the rawness and vulnerability of what it means to be a person in this world.  She also explained that art may sometimes be used to challenge the social norms of the time.  Explaining that poor people were (are) sometimes seen to be both less valuable, and less threatened by the loss of a child, Griffin explained that this artwork shows something different:  the fear of a mother for her baby, and the anxiety of the baby's father and sibling, who linger in the background.

Some of Griffin's work focuses on war, and while I was reading, I thought about Rollo May's work on care, and the story he shared of images returning from the Vietnam war.  These images no longer showed the heroics of soldiers.  Instead, May explained that they were images of care.  In a very beautiful paragraph, May explains a scene he had observed on the television of a camera man at a scene where a child comes out of a tunnel which has been gassed by marines.

May explains that the child emerges in a state which is beyond crying.  Instead, he is bewildered by a world which could contain such horrors.  And the 'black' marine, aware of the mistreatment and oppression which exists in his own homeland, possibly sees his own oppression and pain in the face of the child:

"While the announcer of the program rattled on about how the gas is harmful for only ten minutes and then leaves no deleterious effects, the cameraman kept his camera focused on the face of the marine...I think he sees there another human being with a common base of humanity on which they pause for a moment in the swamps of Vietnam.  His look is care.  And the cameraman happens to see him - happens almost always now to see them so - and keeps his camera trained on his face; a subconscious reaching-out only for human interest, rendering to us an unconscious expression of the guilt of us all.  And...keeps his camera pointed at the face of the large 'black' man starting down at the crying child, nameless in the whole sad quicksand of modern war..."  (May, 1969, p 289).

May explains that this image is a simple illustration of care, a state in which something does matter.
He lets us know that care is 'the dogged insistence on human dignity, though it be violated on every side..."

Last week, English journalist, Giles Coren, wrote with a great deal of tenderness and sensitivity about the need to break the cycle of violence or harsh treatment of children in a very moving article which related to a seven year old who was lost in a forest.  The article comes from the London Times, which is usually protected by a pay wall, but can be found here.

He explains how "Mr Tanooka told a Japanese television channel, "I said to Yamato, "Dad made you go through such a hard time.  I am sorry." And then my son said, "You are a good dad.  I forgive you"."

He then shares that "That is how it goes when fathers punish their children.  The violence happens in the heat of the moment and then the burden of forgiveness is placed, almost immediately, upon the child.  The power to make everything okay in the family again is placed in his tiny hands."

And that "The chain has to be broken.  it cannot go on.  The violence and punishment that begin in the home go on to ...cause all of the misery in the world.  And if this chain is to be broken it has to be broken by us.  Me.  You..."

These writers are teaching me about aesthetics or soul, about putting care into action so that it can resonate with others, breaking down the hierarchies which harm other people, and giving us images which embed themselves into the minds of others, offering an awakening or a deeper sense of consciousness.  This, I think, is what it means to work with warmth or soul.  It's what I would like to do too.