The Very Best of Kate Elliott (49 page)

That brought me up short. I had hardened myself to it, and I had just assumed that my daughter would grow up learning to harden herself to it. But she couldn’t, or maybe she didn’t want to. Maybe she thought she shouldn’t have to.

It made me think about how when I write I have to struggle against the idea, sunk down deep inside me, that when I write about women they have to be afraid or they have to be in pain.

Too often when the stories of women in fear and pain are told, we are seeing them in pain, we are being pushed into the perspective not of the woman who is suffering pain but into the perspective of the person inflicting the pain.

We are constantly being asked to identify with inflicting pain on others.

Of course we are. You don’t just take over the other person’s life and body; you also take their voice, their dreams, their perspective. You take their right to speak and leave them with only the power to suffer, a suffering that can be lifted from them by death or by rescue but always by an agency outside themselves. You take their eyes and turn them into your eyes, your gaze, your way of looking at the world. When such stories are told in this way, they reinforce the perspective of the person who is watching the voiceless have no voice.

But while it is important to say “let’s stop telling those stories then because they exploit women and furthermore perpetuate the view of women as victims whose only role is to suffer fear and pain,” I would go on to suggest that it is not quite that simple. It isn’t binary; it’s not either/or. All stories of women’s fear and pain are not the same because it does make a difference from what perspective we see.

In her memoir
Mighty Be Our Powers
(written with Carol Mithers), Nobel Peace Prize winner Leymah Gbowee of Liberia talks about discovering the need to find spaces in which women could share their stories. Some of the stories she heard were stories that came out of the civil wars that wracked Liberia, the Ivory Coast, and Sierra Leone; others were stories that had to do with untold experiences within families, the kind of thing no one wants to talk about no matter where it happens. She writes:

Each speaker wept with relief when she finished; each spoke the same words: “This is the first time I have ever told this story . . .”

Does it sound like a small thing that the women I met were able to talk openly? It was not small; it was groundbreaking. . . . Everyone was alone with her pain.

Everyone was alone with her pain.

That line stabs me in the heart. I do not want me, or you, or anyone to be alone with the pain.

Yes, I get angry and creeped out when I see and read stories about women in fear and pain, seen from the outside, looking down on them, inflicting pain on them through the gaze of the story.

I get especially angry when I’m told that these are the only or the most realistic stories, that they trump any other way of looking at the lives of women. Because they don’t. This perspective looks in only one direction; that makes it an incomplete, biased, subjective, and even warped perspective.

You see, I worry that it is another form of silencing when women’s stories of fear and pain are not given voice when the voice is theirs or when an incident of violence or fear is told from the perspective of the person who undergoes that experience, who must live with it, be changed by it, internalize it, fight against the injury it has done to her, build or continue her life, live defined by herself and not by her injury.

I worry that it is another form of silencing when all such stories are seen as the same without considering from whose perspective they’re being told. It is not a small thing to speak up. It is not a small thing to hear stories and voices that have long been silenced.

There are indeed too many stories that fixate on women’s fear and pain, and more than that, in my opinion, too often it is the wrong stories that get the attention, the wrong stories that are held up as the right ones, the only ones, the most authentic ones. The truth is usually difficult and complex and often so painful that it is easier to look away. All too often, silence is the ally of the powerful.

So, yes, I will rage against the exploitative portrayals of sexualized violence, of women in fear and pain. But I will also remember the women who never told their story because there was no one to listen.

A
ND
P
HAROAH'S
H
EART
H
ARDENED

I HAVE NEVER TOLD this story to anyone except my father. I may have told my spouse at the time it happened, but I don’t recall. My children were there, they were the reason it happened, but I doubt they remember.

In the mid ’90s my spouse was attending graduate school at The Pennsylvania State University, in State College, Pennsylvania. He and I and our three then-small children lived in graduate student housing, on campus, in an old World War II era duplex of 625 square feet. It got a bit close at times, to say the least, and in addition I worked at home writing, so I made every effort to get the kids out to do something, anything, when I had the chance and when the activity was age appropriate for small children.

A traveling photo exhibit came to the student union. I noted the photographer’s name first because early in his career he had worked at the local newspaper in the area where I grew up. Brian Lanker had since expanded his journalistic photography; this exhibit contained a series of portraits of African-American women, specifically women who had contributed to the nation as artists, writers, activists, community organizers, business women, singers, what have you, that were collected into the book
I Dream a World: Portraits of Black Women Who Changed America
(Stewart, Tabori & Chang).

That looked promising!

One afternoon I walked the children over. I suspect that my daughter was seven and the twins were five.

The photos were all I could have hoped for, beautifully shot, large and imposing, opening a tiny window onto these magnificent women of strength and purpose. Many of the women were, at the time the photographs were taken, elders; maybe most were. They were a testament to the power and importance of age as a weight that anchors and balances a society when storm winds batter it, yet you could also see in their faces the hard work they had done when they were younger.

Some I had heard of; some were names I’d seen although I knew little enough of them; some I had never heard of. The children were as patient as children can be at that age and I knew better than to drag out our little expedition beyond their ability to enjoy the outing and the novelty. We didn’t linger over any of the portraits until we came to Rosa Parks.

Like so many, I have a soft spot for Rosa Parks.

I thought it worthwhile to give my children an early lesson in citizenship.

I had to choose my words to work for the level at which they could understand, overly simplified and yet truthful. I said something like this (reconstructed from faulty memory):

“This is Rosa Parks. She is a great American hero. When she was younger, there was a law in some parts of the country that people who have black skin, as you can see she does, had to sit in the backs of public buses. People who had white skin, as you can see we do, could sit in the front. Isn’t that a strange law? Just because people’s skins are different colors? Of course, it was wrong to have a law like that. And she knew that, so she with the help of some other people decided to protest the law. She got on the bus one day after work and refused to sit in the back of the bus, and then she was arrested, but then many more people began to say that that law was wrong, and then the government got rid of that law. So she is a hero. She is hero for the people who could now sit wherever they wanted on the bus. But she is also a hero for all America, because a law like that hurts all Americans because a bad law like that hurts the spirit and heart of America.”

They listened attentively, perhaps drawn by the fact that I got a bit of a tear in my voice, but by this time it was clear we had reached the limit of our visit to the exhibit, so I steered them toward the exit door.

As I herded them forward, a woman, also exiting, had paused at the door and turned back to look at me. She was an African-American woman about my age, maybe a bit older.

She caught my gaze, and she said, “I want to thank you for what you said to your children.”

My first reaction was surprise, succeeded almost immediately by embarrassment. I said something in reply; I have no recollection what. She went on her way; we went on ours, and my embarrassment subsided to be replaced by a sudden and very sweeping sense of shame.

Not at myself. I try to live a decent life (as do most people, I truly believe).

It is difficult for me to express how deep the chasm is, this exposure of the pervasive racism that afflicts the USA.

My father taught American history. He taught his children that “if you grow up in a racist society, you are a racist” by which he meant not that you burn crosses on lawns but that you have absorbed unexamined assumptions about the way things are and that it is therefore incumbent upon you (I am using the generic “you” here, as he was) to honestly reflect and examine where you stand and what is going on around you as often as you can.

The presence of racism is not news to me, therefore. But I am white, and while I have intersectionally dealt with forms of prejudice directed at me personally or family members or friends or as part of the body politic, for someone like me it can still take a moment like this one to really expose that particular chasm, however briefly, in its full and terrible darkness.

She
thanked
me
.

I have no idea what prejudice that woman had faced in her life, what moments of anger, hatred, denial, insult, grief, rudeness, and perhaps outright physical danger she might have experienced because she was black. That made her—the one afflicted by racism—take notice of a solitary woman and her three children,
and thank me
for such a small act. I felt shame, among so many other reasons, that what I said to my children was even worthy of comment. Because in a better world it shouldn’t be. It should be ordinary. It should be unremarkable.

Never think this story is about me, because even though I naturally tell it from my perspective, it is a story about the way in which racism and prejudice harm our country in the most deep-seated ways imaginable.

Think instead that it might be the story of Pharaoh hardening his heart each time Moses asks him to “let my people go.” He hardens his heart (or God hardens it for him, but that’s another layer to a story that has many layers of meaning) in order to bring himself to say “NO.”

To harden our heart means to turn away from our connection to others, to deny compassion, to refuse to change. Psychologist Erich Fromm says that “every evil act tends to harden man’s heart, to deaden it. Every good act tends to soften it, to make it more alive.”

Every time Pharaoh hardens his heart, he makes it easier to harden his heart again, the next time. Surely this is true for all of us. Every time we turn away from our connection to others, we imprison ourselves a little more. In the end we can so accustom ourselves to this condition that we cease to notice it is going on.

The question of the systemic racism threaded through American history, as well as the question of the extermination of so many of the original indigenous inhabitants of this continent as the destiny and dream of a mighty empire (for that is what we are, speaking in the context of history) was being established, cannot be dealt with in a brief piece of writing like this one. So I won’t try.

This is what I will say:

Prejudice is a form of hardening the heart. Prejudice, as we unfortunately know, comes in many forms. Just as human beings show a propensity to be tolerant and inclusive, so also, often at the same time, and sometimes in the same person, they show a propensity to be intolerant and exclusive. Human beings are such forces for good, and yet such forces for bad, and sometimes in the same person. The contradiction makes one dizzy. I am not immune.

Prejudice harms and hardens each of us as individuals. It also harms and hardens that thing which those of us who are Americans like to call “America,” which is a dream and an ideal and, in some ways and at some times, a reality.

For those of you who are not Americans (USAians, to be precise), if you are still reading (and frankly, were I not American, I am sure I would get sick and tired of all the maundering Americans do about the Dream of America), I do not apologize but simply explain that this is specifically written from the perspective of an American speaking of America.

The USA has always had a contentious love affair with immigration, which may be inevitable in a country founded on the three-legged stool of genocide, slavery, and liberty.

In the nineteenth century Jewish immigrants were considered, as a group, ineducable; in the twentieth century, some universities (more than I care to think about) maintained quotas for how many persons of Jewish background they would admit, because so many (i.e.“too many”) qualified. Similarly, plantation workers brought in from different countries and regions of Asia in the nineteenth century to settle in Hawaii were considered not smart enough to succeed in Western-style schools. Of course this makes me laugh now—in a sardonic way, I suppose, the joke being on those self-righteous missionaries—given that perhaps three-quarters of the students in my sons’ high school honors classes were, of course, girls who were Americans of Japanese ancestry.