Stop-Loss

Picture lovingly borrowed from imdb.com

Not much today. I saw the film Stop-Loss last night. It will be on everyone's lips when it comes out in March/April, or should. Stop-loss is when the government sends back shoulders who finished their committment with them and should be, in essence, free to go back to civilian lives. I guess it's also called the 'back-door draft.' People who serve their country can be forced to go back, and then jailed if they refuse. It also dealt with soldiers trying to reintegrate after the trauma they've suffered through.

I could go on, but I'm still processing it.

The Director/Writer, Kimberly Peirce was there. She also wrote Boys Don't Cry. I liked her a lot, she was very gracious (gave me her seat in the theater, I was initially up front and being that close in a war movie, my stomach was churning) and stayed to talk to the audience afterward. She is also just gorgeous, and so smart and articulate. My friend and I hung on every word, especially as she talked a lot about the act of writing and making the choice between writing something as nonfiction (she comes from a military family) or fiction.

Joseph Gordon-Levitt, who seems to act in a film about every family tragedy I've lived through (Mysterious Skin was so incredibly hard, so moving, and he did such an amazing job) was stunning in the film as a soldier who just can't live outside of war but is dishonorably discharged. Reminded me way too much of my brother. He was also on hand to answer questions from the audience.

It tired me out so much, I'm still pretty dazed. A lot is going through my mind right now. I figured, with a film on such subject matter I'd be jarred, and I'm already on edge. But, sometimes it's worth it. Sometimes, when I jar myself so much, a little bit of truth, a little memory, a little understanding ekes out.

I'm so not spell-checking this.

Language (It’s Power and Trappings)

Of the many things I do in my life, I adjunct at a local college. There, I teach a seminar class to adults dealing with the English language. The main reason people take this course (a total of eighteen hours) is to prepare for the GREs (General Record Exam) and get help in writing their essays for graduate school. Of course, I like to try and slip in knowledge other than just prep for future academia.

Language is powerful. Language is how we, trapped within ourselves, can convey our thoughts, our emotions . . . our humanity. Whether verbal or otherwise, there is a language that we use to express ourselves. Those who don’t have that power are lost. One of the main ways conquerors have taken over lands is to strip away the language of those who already live there. A perfect example is given in Brian Friel’s ‘Translations.’ You strip away the original names of the land and you strip away history and man’s connectivity to their surroundings. You strip away language and force people to learn a new one and you strip away a past and a means of expressing themselves. People promote unity with the taking away of one language to learn another, but instead they are taking away identity. This also happened when ‘Others’ came to the Americas and, in the name of ‘progress’ took away the natives homes, their land, their language and customs. You destroy a people not through death, but through making their words meaningless.

There is nothing more frustrating then the inability to be heard. That makes one feel so insignificant.

In my class I can’t touch on this too much, I’m not supposed to be political. It’s a seminar and there are certain things that need to be taught – the relationships of words to one another, root words, how to form a sentence and write effectively as in – shorter sentences. I find it funny that I teach that when I read over my own writings. However, English is a great amalgam of many languages. There are no set grammar rules; there is always an exception. As I am in New York City, and most of my students have English as a second language to begin with, they find it quite annoying that you don’t always pluralize the same way.

Then we come across a word like “Blackguard.”

See, racism is still such an inherent part of the language. It is just built into the very way we speak, which is dangerous. Student’s take the word apart and think it’s some kind of guard, but not sure what kind. I love their innocence. “In the Academic English language,” I explain, “Black still means bad. Thus, while a guard protects a blackguard is a traitor, a betrayer.” They then think of other words with black as a prefix and are amazed that yes, I’m right. Black=bad.

And Indian=false. Indian summer. Indian giver. Etc. It is such a subtle racism that people don’t tend to realize they are thinking that way. But it’s inherent in the words we study and use. It makes it easier to discriminate against others later in life because it’s already built into our thinking.

We, as a nation, as a people, need to be held accountable for our language. We need to be so careful about what we teach, about how we express ourselves. I really think we need a new lexicon as we dream, we think, in the language we use – whether it is words, colors, or notes it forms who we are.

This becomes apparent as I talk about war and peace. I have worked with children as well, usually in art-based afterschool programs or some community building exercises. And it’s amazing.

“What is war?” I may ask the class, and they give me the visual identifiers. They can talk of guns and tanks and the crying mothers they see on television at night. War is fought not to save the women at home, but to make the women of ‘the other’ cry as they hold their dead children.

“What is peace?” I ask. There is silence. The Sunday school student will generally say a dove. But there are no visual identifiers for peace. Peace is an abstract, not concrete. It can’t be understood, not yet. That is because we lack the language for peace.

Look at the words used, and you can tell what is important in a culture. What do we as a people use as our similes? War terms. Not agricultural, not artistic, not peaceful, but warlike. Because that is what we understand, that is what we are as people. We fight.

Examples: “He’s as big as a tank”
“She typed with machine-gun rapidity”
“He’s gone postal”
“Here comes the cavalry”

I used to have so many more, but you get the point. Our language is one of aggression; it is what we as a nation pride ourselves on, “survival of the fittest” and all that jazz.

We need to take a good hard look at the words we use and the images they conjure in our minds, and those of our children. Peace is what people say they want, but does anyone really understand it when all we have are symbols, and not concrete visual identifiers as we do with War? And how can we stop that, how can we make peace real to ourselves, to our children, to our language? There needs to be other words as stepping stones to peace, I just don’t know what they are.

What mental images do you have when you hear that word? Is it just the logo from Woodstock, the olive branch? Are people involved in the vision that springs to mind as they are in war?

What other words do we have that can bring up an image that children can understand? I think of compromise and see two people talking. Surely that’s a start. What about greetings, two people shaking hands. Before peace there needs to be a greeting and understanding. And negotiation. Negotiation seems a good one. Maybe we shouldn’t teach peace, but teach understanding and negotiation instead, something people can understand.

Did I stray from my point? War and Peace are words we use often in our language, but only one has an identifiable meaning. That doesn’t make the other useless, it just makes it harder to comprehend. And if we prefer the ideal to the reality then we need to form the language to bridge the gap to make peace real.

Just like we need to deal with the fact that our language is riddled with words that subjugate others. That we teach our children that black is bad and Indian false. Language is the most important thing we have at this point, we need to take a critical look at the way it’s taught and used. We need to become aware. We need to care. We need to take steps to help others gain their voice, and to make sure ours is as pointed as we’d like it to be.

The Modern Perception of Motherhood

I almost started writing about this yesterday, ready to call it “The Cult of the Mother.” The mother is still highly revered in this culture, not that it shouldn’t be. As much as we are (and I live in the U.S.) a patriarchal society motherhood is the ultimate virtue and the mother is the one who sets the morals of society. War is fought by men, and it’s the females who cry out for their sons. Look at the one who camped out at the White House – the moral barometer is the mother.

I don’t know if this starts in religion. There is certainly the image of the Virgin Mary, pure and chaste, the only vessel pure enough to birth the Son of God. But it’s reinforced in the media. We have Mrs. Cleaver, the perfect mother who always catches her sons’ foibles and gently prods them to the right path. Mrs. Brady had her ‘smiling frown’ when her children misbehaved. In media, women were either mother’s or children (think Lucy in I Love Lucy) but filled with this innocence and moral wisdom. Not to mention the constant newscast footage of women crying for their slain children.

There is a reason why it seems to be a recent phenomenon that men can gain custody of their children. It has taken some time to realize there can be such a thing as a ‘bad mother’ despite Joan Crawford’s public image of motherhood. I always identified with her daughter, and called my mother “mommy dearest” for a bit.

But it is still in the public consciousness that mothers cannot be bad, and this has led me to, maybe not get mad at some people, but perhaps lose connections that could have been beneficial to bringing me out of my shell.

See, in college, everyone talks about their family. It’s how they identify themselves. I’m still struggling for my identity, and since I couldn’t find it in my family I have to find it in myself. But that’s a different story.

In terms of mothers, I hated when people would congregate and start talking about their families. I heard tales of mother’s doing the ‘mother-daughter’ teas and being on the PTA. Of mother’s who knew just what to cook when their daughter’s boyfriend broke up with them. Of mother’s who with the band-aids would bring a grape lollipop, or a story. All these wonderful things.

“I can tell my mother anything,” they’d say. “She always knows just what to do.”

And if someone didn’t have a mother, it was a pity party for them. “You poor thing, you are missing so much.”

So what becomes of me? The one who physically has a mother but emotionally doesn’t? The one whose mother is the main antagonist?

I learned that the truth is alienating. The group would turn to me, wide-eyes, ready to hear about the glories of my mother. At first there was honesty, “My mother is evil,” I’d state, unable to put into words her actions. “All she causes is pain.”

“Oh, she just does it because she loves you,” someone would say.

“No,” I’d whisper. “No, she does it because she likes it.”

But so many couldn’t understand. They’d think I’m weird. “Maybe she had a bad childhood” was a common response. Like that explains it. I have had a horrid childhood, but refuse to blame my actions on it. Refuse to continue the cycle, refuse to hurt another living being.

Usually there’d be one person who came up to me afterwards to admit, in private, that their parents beat them too. Of course, they never admitted it in the group. I don’t like ‘secret alliances.’ I’m sick of living in shadows and keeping everything hidden, even in college when I was an angry dark woman.

This makes things hard. People don’t want to hear that the purity of motherhood can be compromised. But see, by obfuscating the truth to preserve some sense of security we are actually undermining ourselves.

I think this issue of not being willing to recognize that not all mothers are the pinnacle of perfection has led to an erosion in our society and has actually harmed, rather than helped, the woman’s movement. It’s only now that post-partum depression is getting the attention it deserved because for so long if the mother was having problems she’d be the failure, not a society that refuses to admit the truth. Living in silence is never the answer. Being afraid to talk for fear of alienation is never the answer.

This is also, I think, a reason why so many children that are abused are afraid to talk. It’s easier to say that your father hurts you. Hell, it’s almost expected. The man is tough, the disciplinarian, and nowadays in the news more for sexual abuse. But not the mother. If the mother hurt you, “you must have really deserved it.”

It’s a sad dichotomy to which I have no answer. I just know that when I tried to voice things about my mother at an earlier age I was shot down by those who just couldn’t imagine a bad mom, or that there wasn’t a reason behind it. Now whenever people talk to me about their children and/or ask for advice my main statement is, “don’t deny their reality.” If your child says something is wrong, listen. If your child doesn’t like the way something feels, listen to them. Don’t tell them the way they feel are wrong. They’ll stop asking, start doubting themselves, and once that happens who knows how far it will spiral.