How far have we come?
IT is hard to face violence head on, with feet firmly planted on the ground. I stood in front of my class today, asked them to question what genres were associated with male writers and which were associated with females, and if they believed these divisions to be valid. I also asked them to discuss the representation of violence, preparing them in part to discuss a story by Pita Amor "La cómplice" and in part for the film that I am having them watch, Perfume de violetas - directed by Maryse Systach, but more importantly because I wanted to process once more this tendency in this country to bury feelings until such time as they explode.
Yesterday I stopped to pick up my girl, the sun was shining, there was a light breeze. We were on our way to see her therapist, and as usual, I was rushing her because I have a dawdler, no doubt about it. Bob, her care-provider, was taking her to see if she could replace the book she bought at the book fair and which had subsequently broken, and she was anxious, and nervous that I would be angry that she had broken it. I worry about that. She was such a happy child.
Last week she was on the phone in the living room, my mother and she have a close relationship, far closer than I ever had with her, at least at that age. My mother and I tend to enter immediately into combat, even when there is nothing to fight about, there is always this feeling of resentment, like I somehow don't appreciate what she does for me, or what she has sacrificed, and for my part, the feeling that I can never do anything to please (or even shock) her. It isn't as bad as it sounds. We laugh together, and she listens to me when I cry. We once shared a room in Buenos Aires in which we were attacked by the bidet. We still laugh about that, even though sometimes, when I am feeling a certain way and I know she is making her best effort to cheer me, I fake my laughter, just so she can feel better. So while I. was on the phone and I was in the kitchen, trying to maneuver my way around so many dishes that seemed to multiply like loaves and fishes there in my small porcelain sink, I listened to her talk about something that seemed to have no consequence at all, "You know that night that mommy and daddy were fighting... I didn't think they would get divorced. I was on my balcony, and my friends were calling to me to come down, but I had to stay inside, and I was afraid that something was going to happen. But I didn't think they would get divorced. They talked about it so many times before. But he was just too rough..."
And the tears welled up in my chest, and I thanked myself for taking her to therapy, even if she seems totally well-adjusted and happy, and even if it is a place where most of the people, it seems, are treated (and perhaps rightly so) as if their education was at about a third-grade level. And I know that I qualify because of my lack of income for state aid, but I refuse to take anything of the sort because I lead a lush life (sorry, Ella Fitzgeral slips in on occasion). No, no, no... that isn't really true (the part about being a lush?) but I can hardly complain about lack of opportunities for me.
But returning to the point of this ponderance. Bob looks at me, while he is searching for her book, and asks, "did you hear the news?" and it is that dead, pregnant pause that makes my stomach drop and I don't have a clue, but I ask, in code, as there are small impressionable minds, "Is it a Columbine-like thing?" He nods gravely. "Oh, Jesus!" I interject, not being a believer in the man, I use his name quite frequently. Meanwhile my child is obsessing over a book, and, it turns out, bought two journals and immediately began writing things down (she is my child, after all) "But only college students, 30 so far," his gravelly voice informs me.
And I try not to feel sick to my stomach, or afraid to return to school, thinking that somehow the teen angst and mysery that is generated in the distopic public school system couldn't possibly extend itself to an institution of higher learning, and I turn on the radio, scan the channels for something, settle on a scratchy press conference in which no information is given but quite a bit of ass-covering on the part of the police, and I think about the night that I. was remembering, with police cars in front of my house. And when we get home and I am cooking a tortilla, frying up copious amounts of garlic in olive oil, and there are the wails of sirens, I run outside to see several fire engines and police cruisers, and I stand there, looking quizzical, because I don't know what to do, and I don't really trust officers that much either, always nervous that what is meant to "serve and protect" can turn around and rip you to shreds if you look the wrong way, or speak the wrong way. But it is nothing, a false alarm.
So today, I stand in front of my students and ask them to think about if representing violence in art propitiates it or diverts it, and in which cases yes or no. And they don't seem very talkative, but I try to loosen them up. And when I sit on the desk, legs dangling over the side and we talk about México, and women's right to vote being a mid-twentieth century phenomenon, they laugh at the facetious jokes I crack (captive audience, does wonders for one's ego, I swear) and we discuss what a "good woman" and a "bad woman" looked like (according to Octavio Paz in 1950). And we then return to the text about a woman who aided in the suicide of three female friends, all suffering from "female tragedy" - one disdained by her lover, another lost her beauty, and the third in love with a married man, opted for virginity, academia, and final, death. It is a mordent critique (I think) on the notion that women only write and think about intimate relationships, while at the same time inverting this intimate space of friendship, as intimate enemies. As women, sometimes we can be our own worst enemies, it is true. And yet I refuse to believe that in toto.
So then later, my partner in crime and I decide not to kill another girl on purpose, but accidentally (and I still stick to my misgivings about showing one more dead girl because of what it means to see that normalized on screen, and at very least I want there to be some sort of critique of this from within) in the script that we are slowly constructing. But I am confronted once more, in class, with Marcela Fernández Violante's short that is essentially a montage of 100 years of Mexican film, pieced together to make absolutely clear the connection between visual reproduction and the normalization of a violent (macho) culture. And I have to turn my head away every time when it comes to the part with men and their hands around women's throats, choking the life from them, and tears jump to the corners of my eyes, but I hide them well, and it is after all me that is making the presentation. I look over at Sara, my friend, and advisor, and she sees the look on my face and knows, or I think she knows, because I can still feel hands around my throat sometimes, and I still want the comfort that comes after.
So I wonder, if I can't seem to eradicate such twisted notions of love entirely from my repertoire what chance does the general viewing public have. And I think about the strange homo-social spaces that men form, and that maybe they should form, as long as there is a critical voice of reason present, because on Saturday night, I went out to a hip-hop show. And while it was a musical genre that I rarely frequent, I was amused nonetheless, and tipsy far too quickly. And my friend and I agreed that it would be a nightmare to run into one of our students, when lo, there was one of the few boys from my class, who surprisingly came over and gave me a hug. As the night wore on, and I danced a little, losing myself just a little, or loosening up, and trying to connect with the voice imploring revolution and social justice, and non-racist coallition building, but, of course, not with those words, I wondered why no one was moving. So later, when some of the band members found their way back to my friend's house to party, and I was if not three, at least two sheets to the wind, the first thing I did when they asked our opinion was to tell the truth. "I'm telling you this because I respect you," says the Ilana that is no longer holding her tongue in politeness. "You need to make people move... This is music, man (think Vermont hippie voice)" (mind you this conversation was not in English, but you get the gist.) "What about the women?" I ask, "you're from Guatemala, güey, what about the women that are disappearing? What about Juárez?" I insist, and they humor me, mostly I think, because I am dancing with my friend around the kitchen, and because we are still laughing. But I want to know what all this talk about justice means in real terms, and at the same time I can't help feeling like an adolescent. But it comes back to me, when my head is spinning, and I am staring up at the ceiling, wanting it all to stop and the very evolved rapper keeps asking me, "But you are ok, right, I mean, you know what you are doing?" and there is a tinge of hopefulness in his voice, but I keep telling him "No, man, I am not ok, I am totally out of my head." And I get away with a mild attempt to rest his hands on the curve of my hip as I lay on my side on the couch, before I announce, "Tengo que ir hacia la luz" and in no way am I being metaphorical, but rather I retreat, unscathed, to the room where the others are, and I take shelter in numbers, and the guy falls asleep on the couch, and I drag myself home.
And I think, well, maybe things are changing. Sure, he was being a little creepy, but you can't blame a guy for trying, and well, he was at least attempting to gain consent. I of course would never have consented, but he couldn't have known that, and did indeed respect my personal space mostly (although his friend did ask to and proceed to spank me on the tuchus, expressing gratitude and personal satisfaction). But then I come home to the mail, this afternoon, with all these conflicted emotions spinning around my humble little head, to open up the national women's studies association quarterly (it seems I have been made an institutional member, and it is one of the perks) only to read that while 1 in 18,000 people in the general population are murdered, 1 in 12 (12!!!!) transgendered or queer people are likely to be murdered. And I am reminded about how small people are and how abject this world is, and I just want to curl up under a rock, and cry, except that I have a paper to write on conflicted identity in certain contemporary Jewish Mexican women authors and a plane to catch in the morning. Ach.
Not far at all.
Yesterday I stopped to pick up my girl, the sun was shining, there was a light breeze. We were on our way to see her therapist, and as usual, I was rushing her because I have a dawdler, no doubt about it. Bob, her care-provider, was taking her to see if she could replace the book she bought at the book fair and which had subsequently broken, and she was anxious, and nervous that I would be angry that she had broken it. I worry about that. She was such a happy child.
Last week she was on the phone in the living room, my mother and she have a close relationship, far closer than I ever had with her, at least at that age. My mother and I tend to enter immediately into combat, even when there is nothing to fight about, there is always this feeling of resentment, like I somehow don't appreciate what she does for me, or what she has sacrificed, and for my part, the feeling that I can never do anything to please (or even shock) her. It isn't as bad as it sounds. We laugh together, and she listens to me when I cry. We once shared a room in Buenos Aires in which we were attacked by the bidet. We still laugh about that, even though sometimes, when I am feeling a certain way and I know she is making her best effort to cheer me, I fake my laughter, just so she can feel better. So while I. was on the phone and I was in the kitchen, trying to maneuver my way around so many dishes that seemed to multiply like loaves and fishes there in my small porcelain sink, I listened to her talk about something that seemed to have no consequence at all, "You know that night that mommy and daddy were fighting... I didn't think they would get divorced. I was on my balcony, and my friends were calling to me to come down, but I had to stay inside, and I was afraid that something was going to happen. But I didn't think they would get divorced. They talked about it so many times before. But he was just too rough..."
And the tears welled up in my chest, and I thanked myself for taking her to therapy, even if she seems totally well-adjusted and happy, and even if it is a place where most of the people, it seems, are treated (and perhaps rightly so) as if their education was at about a third-grade level. And I know that I qualify because of my lack of income for state aid, but I refuse to take anything of the sort because I lead a lush life (sorry, Ella Fitzgeral slips in on occasion). No, no, no... that isn't really true (the part about being a lush?) but I can hardly complain about lack of opportunities for me.
But returning to the point of this ponderance. Bob looks at me, while he is searching for her book, and asks, "did you hear the news?" and it is that dead, pregnant pause that makes my stomach drop and I don't have a clue, but I ask, in code, as there are small impressionable minds, "Is it a Columbine-like thing?" He nods gravely. "Oh, Jesus!" I interject, not being a believer in the man, I use his name quite frequently. Meanwhile my child is obsessing over a book, and, it turns out, bought two journals and immediately began writing things down (she is my child, after all) "But only college students, 30 so far," his gravelly voice informs me.
And I try not to feel sick to my stomach, or afraid to return to school, thinking that somehow the teen angst and mysery that is generated in the distopic public school system couldn't possibly extend itself to an institution of higher learning, and I turn on the radio, scan the channels for something, settle on a scratchy press conference in which no information is given but quite a bit of ass-covering on the part of the police, and I think about the night that I. was remembering, with police cars in front of my house. And when we get home and I am cooking a tortilla, frying up copious amounts of garlic in olive oil, and there are the wails of sirens, I run outside to see several fire engines and police cruisers, and I stand there, looking quizzical, because I don't know what to do, and I don't really trust officers that much either, always nervous that what is meant to "serve and protect" can turn around and rip you to shreds if you look the wrong way, or speak the wrong way. But it is nothing, a false alarm.
So today, I stand in front of my students and ask them to think about if representing violence in art propitiates it or diverts it, and in which cases yes or no. And they don't seem very talkative, but I try to loosen them up. And when I sit on the desk, legs dangling over the side and we talk about México, and women's right to vote being a mid-twentieth century phenomenon, they laugh at the facetious jokes I crack (captive audience, does wonders for one's ego, I swear) and we discuss what a "good woman" and a "bad woman" looked like (according to Octavio Paz in 1950). And we then return to the text about a woman who aided in the suicide of three female friends, all suffering from "female tragedy" - one disdained by her lover, another lost her beauty, and the third in love with a married man, opted for virginity, academia, and final, death. It is a mordent critique (I think) on the notion that women only write and think about intimate relationships, while at the same time inverting this intimate space of friendship, as intimate enemies. As women, sometimes we can be our own worst enemies, it is true. And yet I refuse to believe that in toto.
So then later, my partner in crime and I decide not to kill another girl on purpose, but accidentally (and I still stick to my misgivings about showing one more dead girl because of what it means to see that normalized on screen, and at very least I want there to be some sort of critique of this from within) in the script that we are slowly constructing. But I am confronted once more, in class, with Marcela Fernández Violante's short that is essentially a montage of 100 years of Mexican film, pieced together to make absolutely clear the connection between visual reproduction and the normalization of a violent (macho) culture. And I have to turn my head away every time when it comes to the part with men and their hands around women's throats, choking the life from them, and tears jump to the corners of my eyes, but I hide them well, and it is after all me that is making the presentation. I look over at Sara, my friend, and advisor, and she sees the look on my face and knows, or I think she knows, because I can still feel hands around my throat sometimes, and I still want the comfort that comes after.
So I wonder, if I can't seem to eradicate such twisted notions of love entirely from my repertoire what chance does the general viewing public have. And I think about the strange homo-social spaces that men form, and that maybe they should form, as long as there is a critical voice of reason present, because on Saturday night, I went out to a hip-hop show. And while it was a musical genre that I rarely frequent, I was amused nonetheless, and tipsy far too quickly. And my friend and I agreed that it would be a nightmare to run into one of our students, when lo, there was one of the few boys from my class, who surprisingly came over and gave me a hug. As the night wore on, and I danced a little, losing myself just a little, or loosening up, and trying to connect with the voice imploring revolution and social justice, and non-racist coallition building, but, of course, not with those words, I wondered why no one was moving. So later, when some of the band members found their way back to my friend's house to party, and I was if not three, at least two sheets to the wind, the first thing I did when they asked our opinion was to tell the truth. "I'm telling you this because I respect you," says the Ilana that is no longer holding her tongue in politeness. "You need to make people move... This is music, man (think Vermont hippie voice)" (mind you this conversation was not in English, but you get the gist.) "What about the women?" I ask, "you're from Guatemala, güey, what about the women that are disappearing? What about Juárez?" I insist, and they humor me, mostly I think, because I am dancing with my friend around the kitchen, and because we are still laughing. But I want to know what all this talk about justice means in real terms, and at the same time I can't help feeling like an adolescent. But it comes back to me, when my head is spinning, and I am staring up at the ceiling, wanting it all to stop and the very evolved rapper keeps asking me, "But you are ok, right, I mean, you know what you are doing?" and there is a tinge of hopefulness in his voice, but I keep telling him "No, man, I am not ok, I am totally out of my head." And I get away with a mild attempt to rest his hands on the curve of my hip as I lay on my side on the couch, before I announce, "Tengo que ir hacia la luz" and in no way am I being metaphorical, but rather I retreat, unscathed, to the room where the others are, and I take shelter in numbers, and the guy falls asleep on the couch, and I drag myself home.
And I think, well, maybe things are changing. Sure, he was being a little creepy, but you can't blame a guy for trying, and well, he was at least attempting to gain consent. I of course would never have consented, but he couldn't have known that, and did indeed respect my personal space mostly (although his friend did ask to and proceed to spank me on the tuchus, expressing gratitude and personal satisfaction). But then I come home to the mail, this afternoon, with all these conflicted emotions spinning around my humble little head, to open up the national women's studies association quarterly (it seems I have been made an institutional member, and it is one of the perks) only to read that while 1 in 18,000 people in the general population are murdered, 1 in 12 (12!!!!) transgendered or queer people are likely to be murdered. And I am reminded about how small people are and how abject this world is, and I just want to curl up under a rock, and cry, except that I have a paper to write on conflicted identity in certain contemporary Jewish Mexican women authors and a plane to catch in the morning. Ach.
Not far at all.
posted by ilana at 6:51 p.m.
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