grief

Infidel

Infidel (literally, 'one without faith') is what Ayaan Hirsi Ali has professed herself as and has plastered in large all-cap letters on her recent autobiography. A brave woman as association with such a name puts her in direct threat of Islamic radicals.

I have just finished reading her fabulous autobiography where Ayaan details her life as she moved throughout Eastern Africa and the Middle East specifically Somalia, Saudi Arabia, Ethiopia and Kenya. She places emphasis on how Islam shaped and changed her life, then to a greater extent how it affects it's followers and finally, Islam as a worldview that influences the world. Her story is all horrific, fascinating and thought-provoking. I winced through it as I read about her experience with female genital mutilation and the treatment of women in most Islamic countries. How can you leisurely read about a girl of 14 begging her husband who is holding a knife to her scar (the result of circumcision) not to cut her open so he can penetrate her? He so kindly got her cut open at a hospital instead of doing it himself. Such experiences fill her life's story. It is horrifying.

Ayaan also describes the political and social environments of the many countries she lived in. The reign of Siad Barre, the battle and ultimate destruction of Mogadishu (think Black Hawk Down). The rise of the Brotherhood of Islam and their influence in the world. Finally, she relays how she escaped an arranged marriage and fled to Holland. There she stayed independently where she worked factory jobs, learned Dutch and worked herself through school, gaining a masters degree in political science. Her observations and description of western culture from architecture to sex to philosophies is direct and eye-opening. We hardly comprehend our own culture until the other appears. Ayaan made her way into Dutch parliament and fought for women's rights, various immigrant policies, etc. all the while publically rising up as a fierce critic of Islam.

Together with Theo van Gogh, (a filmmaker in Amsterdam) Ayaan made a short film called Submission (you can watch it on youtube). The movie simply and artfully communicated the oppression of women in Islam. In November, 2004 Theo van Gogh was chased down on the streets of Amsterdam, shot, had his throat slit and was stabbed numerous times by an Islamic radical. With the last stab his killer attached a note onto Theo's chest addressed to Ayaan threatening that she would be next. She has since gone into hiding and is residing now in the U.S.
I arrived in Amsterdam 6 months later and I remember walking with some friends in Dam Square and being told of the huge demonstration that had happened there for Theo van Gogh in reaction to this terrible incident months before. This was undoubtedly a big deal.

Today Ayaan is known as one of Europe's most controversial political figures, speaking directly against the detriments of Islam. My natural overly tolerant Canadian tendencies winced at reading her harsh accusations and criticisms of Islam in her book. She has not been one to withhold her controversial opinion and in turn has rose in popularity as one of the most loved and hated feminist voices of today. I admire her strength and courage.

I love autobiographies generally. I love hearing people's stories, learning their lives, sharing and relating to their thoughts and experiences. What I love about Ayaan is her honesty and directness. I felt as though I have had the honour of being taken into her confidence and share a deeply personal journey. She wrote so candidly, not withholding details that one might easily hide as embarrassing if not unimportant to the story. But Ayaan has simply lived and told her story. She is a product of and now a fighter against religious abuse.
I recommend this book as one that has deeply touched and taught me. One can learn much from it's personal journey, history and perhaps challenging (or other) point of view from a fellow fighter for social justice.

In Ayaan's sharp criticisms towards Islam fundamentalism I couldn't help but find parallels with fundamentalist Christianity. Yes, evil is done in almost any name. I felt an uneasiness thinking back on the Christian education I so often received growing up with a (too often solely) strict emphasis to 'save the lost!' (as thought that were my job in the first place. Didn't Jesus come to do just that?) and all the detriments attached to an over simplistic, non-relational, partially understood 'mandate of love.'
Ravi Zacharias declares that one cannot judge a religion based on it's abuses but rather on what it professes. Now we're getting onto a whole other topic. :) I believe religions are flawed and often harmful. They are human made. And though it may be harder for me to separate a religion from it's abuses I am most interested in what religions profess. Ayaan makes it clear that it is a critical question to ask, for in reality it affects us all.

jo

Jo: Oh, Beth, truly, I don't know if I could ever be good like Marmee. I rather crave violence. If only I could be like Father and go to war and stand up to the lions of injustice.

Beth: I'm sure Marmee does in her own way.

Jo: Yes.. But I want to do something different. I don't know what it is yet, but I'm on the watch for it.

Beth: You'll find it Jo.

--------

Jo: Well, of course Aunt March prefers Amy over me. Why shouldn’t she? I’m ugly and awkward and I always say the wrong things. I fly around throwing away perfectly good marriage proposals. I love our home, but I’m just so fitful and I can’t stand being here! I’m sorry, I’m sorry Marmee. There’s just something really wrong with me. I want to change, but I – I can’t. And I just know I’ll never fit in anywhere.

Marmee: Oh, Jo. Jo, you have so many extraordinary gifts; how can you expect to lead an ordinary life? You’re ready to go out and – and find a good use for your talent. Tho’ I don’t know what I shall do without my Jo. Go, and embrace your liberty. And see what wonderful things come of it.

not to mention everyone speaks english!

What is funny most about being home is calling this 'home.'
I am one of the few people in Calgary who can say, 'born and raised.' Weird (i feel quite estranged from all that statement entails). Weird seeing Calgary now as i do; quite corporate, fast paced, money-driven, extremely materialistic - the sad state of many western cities, but not all (or as much). i'm quite sick of blackberry's, labels, big trucks, hummers, etc. I miss Winnipeg. Hippies all of them. :) (not all of them, but diversity is more easily seen). I miss Lakeside - our quiet hideaway in the mountains. Freshly made granola at 'buns by the lake.' I miss Otterburne.
Nonetheless, this is where i have lived most of my life save the last 6 years or so. So i come back (from Korea) not knowing what to expect or what i would feel. It's familiar yet unfamiliar. I know how to get places... I had a church here once, and a fairly large community of friends.
Over the past few weeks i have been amazed as i've gone about my days in this familiar yet unfamiliar place. I go to Kensington and order a shwarma from Sam! The same man who's served me Sam's special for years. Still smiling brightly, still calling me, 'my friend!' I couldn't stop smiling. How strange. I move away for years... experience various places, people and communities.. and things still exist here as they did!
I'm amazed at how i run into people on the streets that i know! All the time! That i will recognize someone from high school at a coffee shop, or an elderly person will come talk to me because they know my dad. Calgary is not that small. I guess it is.
Today i went to the Doctor. I didn't think he would remember me. He did. Asked all about my life, how i was doing, if i was married. Advised me that i shouldn't get married to a man under 40 and talked more to me about personal things than what i went there for. It was nice. He knew my mom, well.
These experiences are strange to me. I am not used to familiar. I am not used to being known. I think it's a good thing.

because i also feel large

Father, I bring thee not myself,—
That were the little load;
I bring thee the imperial heart
I had not strength to hold.

The heart I cherished in my own
Till mine too heavy grew,
Yet strangest, heavier since it went,
Is it too large for you?

-Emily Dickinson

Leaving the garden by Miriam Meinders

We all want to be good. We are heavily invested in our identity as good, well-meaning people. This accounts for the appeal of the development narrative as it is usually told: go to exotic places, meet interesting people, and help them. We don't want to know about unfair trade practices or resource exploitation, but we do want to know about how we could fund an orphanage, dig a well for a village or get more African girls in school. It is easier to congratulate ourselves for helping others than to think about how our comfortable position depends on their uncomfortable lives. It is easier psychologically, but it's also easier intellectually. Neither mainstream media nor the various NGOs and development organizations have much reason to complicate the story of the good North (sometimes called the First World) reaching out to help the poor benighted South (sometimes called the Third World).

In Desire for Development: Whiteness, Gender and the Helping Imperative, Barbara Heron, a former development worker, concludes that the "desire for development" is at heart a "profound desire for self." Working in the South can be a path to self-actualization, to a more fully realized life. You can have a meaningful experience, and do good at the same time. If you are troubled that your meaningful experience comes via the suffering of others, you can tell yourself, "Well, at least I'm helping. Or trying to help."

I am being both facetious and non-facetious here. Helping is one of the things humans can and should do for one another. Our species is interdependent, after all. But there are unseen power dynamics at work. Paulette Goudge, a scholar whom Heron quotes, foregrounds the idea of domination rather than the idea of helping:
The more I have reflected on my experiences, the more I have realized the crucial role of notions of white superiority in maintaining the whole structure of global inequality. The aid industry is deeply implicated in these structures.

Rather than acknowledging our participation in structures of domination, however, we would prefer to maintain our innocence. Our innocence is the key to maintaining the moral high ground, and the moral high ground is very dear to the hearts of Northerners (especially if we are white and middle class). It is territory we consider ours by right. It is crucial to our self-concept.

You have to live far removed from the exigencies of survival to believe in the possibilities of your own innocence. That is, the further removed you are from the labour that made your clothes or grew your food, and the less you know about the pipelines bringing the natural gas to your house, the more easily you can convince yourself that life can be pure.

With knowledge comes responsibility, but that responsibility is more than can be borne sometimes, which I take to be the meaning of the story of the expulsion from the Garden of Eden. Once you eat of the Tree of Knowledge, you have indeed been cast out from Paradise. To cling to the notion of your own innocence is a way of trying to get back into the garden. But what if we look around and accept this world as our home - this reality here and now, mixed and troublesome as it is? Would that help us accept our knowledge and our responsibility?

In Ursula Le Guin's short story, "The Shobie's Story," a spaceship crew does a ritual to prepare for a dangerous voyage with experimental technology. One character explains the purpose of the ritual: "'We all use each other,' Oreth said. The ritual says: we have no right to do so; therefore we accept the responsibility for the suffering we cause.'" I suppose this could turn into a source of easy comfort - we could say, "Ah, well, we all use each other, therefore I might as well get what I can out of other people" - but it seems profound to me. There is no living without using and being used, there is no remote safe place from which to maintain one's innocence. If I give up on a fixation with the idea of purity, I am better able to conceive of the possibility of action, I am more willing to embark on a course of trial and error, I have less fear about pushing up against the world with my foolishness and having it push back and show me the error of my ways.

My sense of self can rely less on a static concept of goodness and more on my interdependence with others who need me, and help me, as much as I help them.

random ranting and church shopping OR 'from without'

At this moment i wonder why Christians are often such snobs (how contrary to the religion's foundational values, don't you think?). Why physical appearances are some's sole concern. Why we reject tradition for 'relevance' that weakens in a month's time and excludes more humans than includes in it's 'relevence' (highly ineffective). We all sit around looking beautiful, scanning the room for other beautiful people to use. All the while thinking highly of ourselves and this pious lot of the most humble and spiritual.

I ask why equality is not only unpracticed but completely unconsidered. Why human relationships are encompassed in games and mask-wearing. Why we have forgotten the worth of a critical mind for the sake of mindless pleasure (and self-justification).

... and there's the dichotomies within myself where i look for something ancient yet something new (an 'ancient future'). A rebel trying to find meaning in the traditions i rebel against. Playing the games i detest and judging those who join me. Wanting stability and longing for escape. Needing order in the chaos and chaos in the order. And all the while hoping that there is something bigger than my questions, frustrations, dichotomies and this 'unendurable sense of desire and loss.' Something 'from without.'

such a common bird

I am a lone wolf
A beauty and a beast
Both hunter and hunted
Soft tongue and sharp teeth
I'm toned from my travels yet raw from this road
As I drink from storm puddles
And the stories I'm told
Help me figure this out
Help me figure you in
You're a shadow to me
That I echo when I sing
Help me figure this out
Help me figure you into this simple little melody
I have seen angels
They were sleeping in gutters
They were standing in bank lines
They were jumping from towers
They were calling like seagulls
But nobody heard
Such a beautiful message
From such a common bird
We want freedom for ourselves
But we can't give it to each other
We want peace between nations
Yet we battle with our lovers
We're blinded by billboards
And trying to get ahead
Choking on ambition
And the words left unsaid
All the words left unsaid form a simple little melody
I am a lone wolf
A beauty and a beast
Both hunter and hunted
Soft tongue and sharp teeth
I'm toned from my travels yet raw from this road
As I drink from storm puddles
And the stories I'm told
Help me figure this out
Help me figure you in
You're a shadow to me
That I echo when I sing
Help me figure this out
Help me figure you in

my father's wisdom

"I'm so glad you haven't figured out what you're going to do the rest of your life, yet. It would be so disappointing for us who are a little further in our history, still scratching our butts wondering whats next?" - Papa

my heart and i

ENOUGH ! we're tired, my heart and I.
We sit beside the headstone thus,
And wish that name were carved for us.
The moss reprints more tenderly
The hard types of the mason's knife,
As heaven's sweet life renews earth's life
With which we're tired, my heart and I.

You see we're tired, my heart and I.
We dealt with books, we trusted men,
And in our own blood drenched the pen,
As if such colours could not fly.
We walked too straight for fortune's end,
We loved too true to keep a friend;
At last we're tired, my heart and I.

How tired we feel, my heart and I!
We seem of no use in the world;
Our fancies hang grey and uncurled
About men's eyes indifferently;
Our voice which thrilled you so, will let
You sleep; our tears are only wet:
What do we here, my heart and I?

Yet who complains? My heart and I?
In this abundant earth no doubt
Is little room for things worn out:
Disdain them, break them, throw them by
And if before the days grew rough
We once were loved, used, -- well enough,
I think, we've fared, my heart and I.

-Elizabeth Barrett Browning