Blog Posts

Pondering Camelot

10/2/2015

What does Camelot mean to you? A musical with haunting lyrics? The administration of President John F. Kennedy? Monte Python's vicious rabbit?

The chances are that your attitude toward kingship affects how you perceive the Arthurian legends. Are kings romantic figures to you? Does the idea of benevolent power attract you? Do you see the past as romantic?

What do the Arthurian legends mean to a feminist? Can we rewrite the tales to make the women stronger or more positive? Traditionally, Guinevere was a passive character who was rescued by others. And Arthur's sisters (sometimes aunts) Morgan and Morgause have usually been portrayed as villains. Women were threats to the male code of chivalry (an invention of an age long after the presumed King Arthur lived). Does recreating the women as main characters change the message? Or is writing about kings, queens, and warriors a hopelessly Eurocentric, classist mode of writing? Perhaps, but some of us are drawn to it nevertheless. If we include characters who are not royalty or knights, we can perhaps broaden the tale.

I have lived in Camelot, and not just King Arthur's. For me, the women's liberation movement was my own Camelot, my own company of equals. Yes, my friends from that era mostly remain, but many of our institutions have vanished. It was when I saw that happening that I began to read about and dream about Camelot. Not exclusively, of course. I keep up with contemporary feminism. But I remember the days when it was new and we felt we could do anything. And so I have written my own Arthurian novel, to be mentioned later in this article.

I don't think you have to be nostalgic for unlikely pasts to enjoy the Arthurian legends. You could use them to dissect the past and dissent from it. Or to create a model of a past that you know is fantasy as a way of examining the present or providing ideas about the future.

Arthurian literature has a long history. The earliest mention of Arthur is in the Annales Cambriae (a compilation of Welsh sources) entry for 537 C.E., which mentions “the strife of Camlann, in which Arthur and Medraut fell.” Despite the mention of the 5th century date in the text, the earliest version of the Annales has been dated as produced in the 10th century or later.

Geoffrey of Monmoth, who lived in the 12th century, was perhaps the earliest writer who created a story about a possibly mythical King Arthur. But Geoffrey's Historia Regum Britanniae (History of the Kings of England) and Vita Merlini (Life of Merlin) outline the story with some of the characters later ages have learned. Medraut (Mordred) becomes the villain who slew Arthur. Characters from Geoffrey's tale include Merlin, the hero Gawain(e) (generally Arthur's nephew), and Morgan, a sorceress. And Arthur was given a wife, her name some version of Guinevere (at first Gwenhwyfar).

The English legends were so popular that Chretien de Troyes moved into the territory and inserted a French character, Lancelot, who became extremely popular and appears in most subsequent versions of the legend. Chretien also created the character Perceval.

The Cistercian monastic order made the tale more religious by inventing the character Galahad, the perfect knight, and the concept of the Holy Grail.

Sir Thomas Malory, a 15th century knight, wrote while he was in prison what became the most famous version, Le Morte d'Artur (The Death of Arthur), with all the familiar characters. He portrayed Arthur as cursed because he was seduced by one of his sisters, whom he did not know was his sister. Women become prominent as villains, as does Mordred, who becomes the son of the incestuous pairing.

In the nineteenth century, Alfred, Lord Tennyson created his poetic version, The Idylls of the King. The Arthurian Age became even more popular and the Pre-Raphaelites used its themes in painting. Weary of their enthusiasm, Elizabeth Barrett Browning wrote in Aurora Leigh:

I do distrust the poet who discerns
No character or glory in his times,
And trundles back his soul five hundred years,
Past moat and drawbridge, into a castle-court,
To sing-oh, not of lizard or of toad
Alive I' the ditch there, — 'twere excusable,
But of some black chief, half-knight, half sheep-lifter,
Some beauteous dame, half chattel and half queen.

The poet’s pithy criticism is well taken, especially if we think she is calling Guinevere “half chattel and half queen,” but many of us have continued to write and read fiction and poetry loosely based on earlier myths.

Concern about the fate of his country in the mid-20th century led the English writer T.H. White to write The Once and Future King (written in segments that were later put together). This became the most popular rendition of Arthurian tales in that century. Arthur grows from a little boy who learns how to become a good king by being transformed by Merlin into different animals. But actual kingship breaks his heart and leads to war, which Merlin had warned against. This book was the inspiration for the musical “Camelot,” which was only loosely based on it. (In White's book, Lancelot is ugly and ashamed of his looks, not much like Robert Goulet.)

Many other contemporary writers have devised their own versions of the story. By far the most famous is Marion Zimmer Bradley's The Mists of Avalon, which makes Arthur's sister Morgaine the heroine. In most tellings she is Morgan Le Fay, a villain who seeks to destroy Arthur. But Bradley made her a devout pagan and used her books to reclaim paganism as perhaps better than Christianity.

Numerous other writers have tried, like Bradley, to place the tales in an early period, around 500 C.E., rather than in the late medieval period that Malory and White chose. Castles and knights-- Norman concepts--are anachronisms in Arthurian literature.

Rosemary Sutcliff wrote Sword at Sunset, a book set in the early period that feels authentic, though it has too many battles for my taste. Its Arthur and Guinevere are real and sad.

Other writers have centered on women, usually Guinevere. One of my favorites is Gyan, in Kim Headlee's Dawnflight, who is a Pict and a fighter in her own right.

I also particularly like Gillian Bradshaw's tales. Hawk of May is from the point of view of Gwalchai, an early name for Gawaine, who is seeking to escape from the evil magical world of his mother. Kingdom of Summer is from the point of view of his servant. In Winter's Shadow is a believable book from Guinevere's point of view.

One ambitious version, which sadly is out of print, is Fay Sampson's five volume series, Daughter of Tintagel, which tells the story from five different points of view, including Morgan's (before Bradley) and a blacksmith's. The first volume is Wise Woman's Telling. Warning: The series is very hard to find.

I also am fond of Sharan Newman's three-volume tale based on Guinevere, which is as gentle and warm as any Arthurian book can be.

There are other books from Morgan's point of view, and some from Mordred's. One unusual and charming book is The Idylls of the Queen, Phyllis Ann Karr's book in which Guinevere is accused of murder and Cai the seneschal, Arthur's foster brother who is usually portrayed as so sarcastic as to be unlovable, tries to find out who really committed the murder and to save Guinevere.

These are only the versions that I particularly like. There are many others, of course, including numerous male-centered ones.

And here is mine: Lancelot: Her Story

As you might have guessed, in my own version, Lancelot is a woman. Lancelot: Her Story, the first of two volumes, will soon be published. My story poses the questions:

How does the concept of Lancelot as a woman in disguise change the Arthurian dynamic? Will Camelot be a dream come true for her, or a nightmare? Or both? What will Guinevere mean to her? What will war mean to her? How will Lancelot and Guinevere manage to survive in a patriarchal world? I hope you will want to read my books and find out. The first volume follows Lancelot from the time she is a 10-year-old girl named Anna.

You can subscribe to my RSS feed to get an email when Lancelot: Her Story goes on sale, both in print and as an e-book. There will be various book launch events, both virtual (on this blog as well as other blogs and websites) and actual (in the DC area and in Florida).

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Growing Into Nature

8/24/2015

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Nature grows into you, if you let it. If you grow into nature. Of course people are a part of nature, perhaps too large a part. We are terrans, of this earth.

But I long to be part of the mountains. Let my wrinkles be ridges, my hair the grasses.

Glacier-carved mountains are still more magical than volcanically created ones, though many have been born of fire, then shaped by ice and water.

I am watching green water edge into the blue, and wondering how the light decides to make the difference. Perhaps the blue reflects the sky and the green reflects the trees, but it is not always so.

I sit on the edge of Lake MacDonald in Glacier National Park. MacDonald is a prosaic name for what the tribes called the sacred dancing water. Salish-Kootenai, Flathead, and Blackfeet used to live at least part of the year in what is now the park. As some wise white writers have begun to realize, it is strange that we assume a park is perfectly natural without the people who first lived here.

I've read about the restoration of wolves to Yellowstone National Park, and had the privilege of seeing some of them. I have seen wolves running across a sagebrush plain. I have seen wolves waiting until grizzlies have eaten their fill of a wolf-killed elk, then moving into claim their share of it after the grizzlies leave. Yes, those are magical sights.

Many people worked hard to make the restoration possible, and to study the wolves, often in temperatures far below zero. They rejoice that the natural ecosystem has been restored. But the native people have not. They live outside the park, in reservations and towns.

Surely anyone who sees this land must love it, especially since most of us see it in relative comfort, walking only when we choose to for pleasure. Even as such a one, I claim a love for nature. I want to learn the names of all the wildflowers in each park I visit and to see as many birds and mammals as possible.

I am overjoyed to dedicate a day to looking for a mountain goat. In the summer, when I visit the parks, their coats look shabby because layers of winter hair are shedding. But the kids' coats are sleek because they have not yet undergone winter.

How beautifully each animal has evolved to fit its ecological niche. The wonder of an animal that can climb stone walls that seem almost sheer. The wonder of an animal that can build dams.

The wonder of birds flying. I am watching barn swallows cross high over the lake on their quest for insects, then return to the roof where they nest.

True, I want only a modified wildness, a safe wildness, though that is an oxymoron and nothing can be entirely safe. I know that Eden is a dream, paradise is a wish. But this is the paradise I wish for. Yes, there are car jams and insect bites. Yes, sometimes rain falls when I wish it wouldn't. Worse, the heat is increasing. This summer has been incredibly hot for Glacier National Park. Its glaciers are melting. This summer, instead of the 60 and 70 degree weather I remember, the sun beats down in the high 80s. How much destruction we are wreaking on this beautiful place. But we can still enjoy the beauty and try to preserve it.

Firs and cedars line the lake. I can see some stands of burned trees from earlier fires. A few days ago, the sky was filled with smoke from fires in eastern Washington State. Firefighters are quelling a fire in Glacier, near St. Mary's Lake.

The green part of the water has turned almost black at shadows creep over the mountains. The swallows are chirping.

Most of the mountains here are too steep for me to climb, but I can watch them and cherish them. Yet walking a trail is special love, a sacred journey in which feet worship the paths, while I delight at pink elephants' head and blue gentian.

Now I look to the glacial cirques – oh, other visitors just pointed out a beaver swimming past and a flock of cedar waxwings hawking for insects. I am grateful that nature can be shared.

The lake is darker now. The water reflects the cliffs. Or did the cliffs always live in the lake, the water showing them only at special times?

In the splash of a beaver's tail, in the flutter of bird wings, there is the world.

How I admire and envy the young woman rangers, who have grown up in a world where it seemed natural to them to find a career in which they can spend their days showing visitors bear-clawed trees and explaining the lives of bighorn sheep. But I too am privileged. While I enjoy a walk in the woods, I remember how many women in the world will never have this pleasure. Indeed, in some countries, women must risk rape and capture when they go to bring water for their families.

I am in the forest, and I am unbelievably lucky.

If I go too long without seeing mountains, I feel like a lynx without snowshoe hares. Lynxes cannot get enough nourishment on a diet of squirrels and voles. They will pad through the spruce trees, and find hares or perhaps die.

I have never seen a lynx, but I am glad that they live in the northern forests. I do not have to see them to appreciate them.

What are the creatures to each other, those that do not see each other as enemies or food? What does a mountain goat think of a bighorn sheep? Does it see the sheep as a clumsy competitor that cannot climb as high? Does it dislike the sheep's smell? Does it think that the rams' horns are garish?

And does the sheep see the goat as pathetic because its horns are small? Does it believe the leaping goats on the highest crags are showing off? Does it envy them?

And what do the sharp-hooved animals think of the marmots? Do they see marmots as clowns? Do they heed the marmots' whistles of danger?

Let me think of marmots and mountain goats. Let me pause from thinking of the Islamic State and of stubborn members of Congress. Let me live in the mountains for at least a few weeks of the year.

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Read Kamila Shamsie!

6/30/2015

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Pakistani author Kamila Shamsie is one of the finest writers alive today. I've read her work before, but I've just read two of her more recent novels, and want to tell others about them.

Shamsie was born and raised in Pakistan, and now lives in London. Her novels are mostly set in Pakistan. They have a wide range of well-drawn characters.

Pakistan is a pivotal country. Created in 1947 to be an Islamic nation by leaders who rejected Gandhi's vision of a united, diverse India, it was born in a bloody war between former neighbors. The country sits in crucial area – next to Afghanistan – and is the way station for many of its refugees. Pakistan has lived with military dictatorships and unstable elected regimes, fluctuating between the two since it was created. Many women are educated, but women have far fewer legal right than men. And Pakistan developed nuclear weapons because India did. No one can afford to be ignorant about Pakistan.

Years ago I discovered Shamsie's Broken Verses (Bloomsbury, 2005). It is still one of my favorite contemporary novels. Few writers can convincingly portray a poet who really sounds like a poet. In a novel of love and Pakistani progressive politics, Shamsie accomplishes that feat. Her characters face murder, exile, and abandonment. The book asks the question: What is betrayal? Perhaps all of her novels ask that question.

Recently I read Burnt Shadows (Picador, 2009) and A God in Every Stone (Atavist Books, 2014). Both novels are excellent. I'll try to give an idea of them without spoilers.

Burnt Shadows begins with the atomic bomb dropping on Nagasaki. (Why don't more Americans write about Hiroshima and Nagasaki? But the term “war crimes” is seldom used by victors. One of her characters says that when Eisenhower was president, he deplored the bombing. Few of us remember that.) One of the main characters is Hiroto, a Japanese woman whose body was marked forever by the blast. Her German fiance, Konrad, a man escaping the war in Europe who found himself in another country at war, is killed in Nagasaki. Disintegrated. Nothing left of him.

For a while, Hiroto works as a translator for the Americans occupying Japan. But when she hears them justify the atomic bomb attacks as “saving American lives” she can't bear to work with them any longer.

Konrad had a sister in India. Tired of being stigmatized as bomb survivor in her birth country, Hiroto goes to India and hopes to find a home. Konrad's sister, Elizabeth, is married to a British official, James. Sajjad, a Pakistani Muslim who had been Konrad's friend, works for James, who dangles the possibility of letting Sajjad into his law practice. Shamsie's description of colonial English life seems on target: balanced, but acute.

India was on the verge of partition, when Pakistan split off. Divisions between Hindus and Muslims sharpened and much blood was shed. Even Muslims who had no intention of leaving Delhi found themselves unwelcome there.

Shamsie tells how the characters rebuild their lives after partition. And then she tells of the descendants of the English and Pakistani families, and how they try to make sense of the world. Hiroto's outsider perspective is crucial.

The U.S. role in Afghanistan plays a large part in the story. Shamsie leaves the reader with a devastating picture of Americans.

A God in Every Stone provides an equally devastating picture of the English. The story begins on the eve of World War I. Major characters are a young Englishwoman who wants to be an archaeologist, a Turkish archaeologist, an Indian Muslim who fights with the English forces in Europe, and his younger brother. All are moving characters with lives full of pain. The book looks back to the ancient history of what is now Pakistan, especially Peshawar, and at what Peshawar has become: a refuge for Afghans fleeing their country and a point from which they launch attacks into it. She rejects stereotypes of Pashtuns, both Pakistanis and Afghans.

One character asks another, “And what do I need to know?” The other replies, “How to remove your blindfold and see your place in the world.” Shamsie demands that we all remove our blindfolds.

Shamsie is honest, but not brutal. She cares about all her characters. Reading her books has expanded my horizons, and I think they would expand anyone's. If I could nominate anyone for the Nobel Prize in Literature, I would nominate her.

I wrote most of this before Shamsie's provocative article that said publishers should focus on women writers in 2018 appeared in the Guardian (“Let's Have a Year of Publishing Only Women: A Provocation” 5 June 2015). I am delighted that she has issued this challenge to confront biases against women writers.

Addendum: For anyone wanting a readable nonfiction account of women's situation in Pakistan, I recommend Rafia Zakaria's The Upstairs Wife: An Intimate History of Pakistan (Beacon Press, 2015). Zakaria looks at political developments, particularly in Karachi, including discrimination against Muslims who came from India. She also tells the moving story of her aunt, whose heart was broken when her husband took a second wife. It was uncommon for men to marry more than one woman in Pakistan's early days, but it became common as Islamization took more and more rights away from women.

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Can We Unmake War?

4/9/2015

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What is the basis of war and how can we unmake it? That is the most important question facing humankind.

            In Unmaking War Remaking Men, long-time feminist writer Kathleen Barry tackles that question. I'm deeply impressed by the book. (Phoenix Rising Press of Santa Rosa, 2011.)
            Empathy is the basis of our shared human condition, Barry writes. If we see an accident in which someone is killed or about to be killed, we normally react with empathy. Some of us rush to try to save the person, and most others feel for the person and hope she will survive. If she doesn't, we grieve, at least briefly.
            War is about snuffing out the capacity for empathy, both in those who do the killing and in their compatriots at home who become inured to hearing about it.
            Almost all societies teach men that they are expendable, Barry says. From childhood, they are taught that they must be willing to let themselves die as well as kill in war. That is why boys are exposed to violence and hazing at an early age. That is why they are taught to suppress their feelings. They must be ready to have their capacity to think and feel for themselves extinguished, as much as possible, by the army or militia of their nation or group.
            Barry points out that The 1949 Geneva Convention on on war violates the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The Declaration says that “everyone has that right to life, liberty and security of person.” But the Geneva Convention says that only those “persons taking no part in the hostilities . . . shall in all circumstances be treated humanely.” It is by no means true that nations adhere to that provision and treat persons taking no part in hostilities humanely. But even under the Geneva Convention, persons who take part in the hostilities are seen as having no human rights. Combatants are expendable, Barry notes. Men are taught to accept being expendable.
            Men are taught that they must be expendable to protect women and children. But the brutalization soldiers and other combatants undergo both in training and in combat leads them to have hatred and contempt for the people who do not undergo the same brutalization. Combatants and future combatants have their identities stripped away as much as possible. They are taught to identify primarily with their own unit and to see civilians as feminized. Combatants are taught that they must accept being sacrificed.
            They go through training killing targets that resemble human beings. When they make their first actual kill, other combatants pat them on the back and welcome them to the club to negate their natural feelings of guilt and shame.
            Kathleen Barry has spent a great deal of time talking with veterans and reading their accounts of what war feels like. She respects the men who learn to empathize with the people they have made war against – an experience they often have after they come home, Barry says.
            She tells about studies saying that only 20 percent of the U.S. soldiers in World War II actually fired their guns. After the military learned that, it worked hard to raise that ratio, and has raised it greatly through increased training in dehumanizing the people whom the soldiers are killing. The training also dehumanizes the soldiers by making their reactions automatic. The military developed sanitized language like “clearing” a house or an area, which means destroying it. Barry quotes soldiers who participated in night raids on homes in Afghanistan and Iraq as saying that they seldom found evidence that the homeowners actually had been attacking U.S. troops, but nonetheless the soldiers looted and destroyed the homes and often took away the men and boys and locked them up. Even when the soldiers found no evidence, they assumed that the homeowners were lying. The soldiers came to believe that all Iraqis or even all Arabs were liars.

            Barry focuses especially on the U.S. invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. Her initial reaction to the horror of the September 11, 2001 attacks was, in addition to grief, a hope that Americans would then understand what it was like to be bombed and would empathize with all people in other countries who undergo bombing. I had hoped the same, as I wrote in “A World Where Justice Brings Peace” (September 11, 2001: Feminist Responses, edited by Susan Hawthorne and Bronwyn Winter, Spinifex Press, 2002) . Sadly, we were mistaken. President George W. Bush and other leaders instead immediately reacted with talk of revenge and retaliation against a nation that did not actually carry out the attack. And the American people accepted that response.
            Perhaps after that it was easy, only a step to attacking a nation on the unproved claim that it possessed weapons of mass destruction. Barry describes Bush and Cheney as psychopathic leaders, and surely lying one's way into mass killing seems at least like sociopathic behavior. She points out the horror that at a 2004 Gridiron dinner Bush poked fun at his big lie about weapons of mass destruction, enacting a skit in which he looked under a piece of furniture in the Oval Office and said, “Those weapons of mass destruction must be here somewhere.” Then he looked to the corner of the room and said, “No weapons here.” Top reporters and editors howled with laughter.
            That occasion is the only one in which Barry notes the media's part in the war. I understand that was not the focus of her book, but we should hold the media accountable for its role in accepting the nation's wars with scant and weak criticism.
            Barry of course also sees Osama bin Laden as a psychopath. She deplores the fact that psychopathic leaders of one nation or group can lead to the rise of psychopathic leaders in opposing nations or groups. She is not a complete pacifist. She questions responding to attacks by waging war on whole nations rather than trying to target the individuals responsible.
            She also questions definitions of terrorism that define as terrorist only subnational groups rather than nations. She says the U.S.-led killing of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis is terrorism. She deplores our reluctance to hold our leaders accountable for war crimes, for massive killing of civilians.
            She also discusses the history of Israel and calls Ariel Sharon and Ehud Olmert war criminals for attacks that killed thousands of people in Lebanon. The response to Hizbollah kidnapping two Israeli soldiers in 2006 should not have been to kill thousands of people, she says. She charges Israeli leaders with manipulating the fear of Israelis traumatized by the Holocaust.
            When she visited Ireland, a man who learned of her Irish background showed how deeply angry he was at the British for centuries of suppression and starvation the Irish had faced. He said the British are the cruelest people in the world, and certainly Britain has a great deal to answer for because of its policies of colonization. She realized how each people who has suffered feels that its own suffering is the worst and its own oppressor is the worst.
            Barry writes about her own suffering as a rape victim to say how deep trauma is, and how isolating. She contends that it is mistaken to say the terrible suffering of any group – Jews in the Holocaust, Blacks subjected to slavery, Native Americans and Australian Aborigines exterminated – is the worst ever. They are all the worst, she says. We need to empathize with all suffering, not focus on our own to the point that we minimize the sufferings of others and might even perpetuate more suffering.
            Barry says that core masculinity, masculinity in the sense of being taught not to feel, not to empathize, to try to become inured to the possibility of dying and killing, is causing devastation. She praises men, such as anti-war veterans, who try to work to change those patterns.
            She also says that women also must stop accepting the idea that the men in their lives have to be sacrificed in war. She tells of Palestinian mothers of suicide bombers whom other Palestinians order to hide their grief over their sons' death because their sons are martyrs. That is similar to the story that all governments tell the families of dead soldiers: That they should be proud that their sons died.
            Some veterans do not want to be thanked for what they have done, Barry says. Some find it terrible to be thanked for what they have had to do.
            She finds it amazing, as I do, that Bush and Cheney and other leaders failed to see that invading and occupying countries would lead their peoples to fight back. Who could not understand that people who lost much of their electricity, clean water, and basic supplies for years on end, as Iraqis did, would be angry? Who could not understand that men whose homes were invaded would be humiliated and would join groups that fight against the country that did that to them? Who could fail to understand that the invasion of Iraq would displace millions of people and lead to more and more killing? Kathleen Barry understands that. I foresaw it. Why couldn't our elected officials?
            Barry points out that women are in many ways victims of war. One in 10 Iraq women is a widow, most of them war widows, most of them living in poverty. Women in countries affected by war face rape by men in the invading army as well as men of their own nationality when the legal system breaks down. Large numbers of women in the U.S. military have been raped by their fellow soldiers who resent them for being there, thus taking away the significance of the sacrifice that is supposed to make a man a real man. And there is impunity for those rapes, merely a slap on the wrist in almost all cases.
            Barry looked at Costa Rica, a country that has renounced war and has no military, to see whether the situation of women is better there. She learned that 50 percent of women have experienced violence from their families or loved ones. So she acknowledges that preparation to be expendable in war is not the only way of learning core masculinity, or learning to violently subordinate women. But she says that Costa Rica is trying, and cites a 1996 Costa Rican law saying that anyone who uses psychological or physical violence against a relative can be ejected from the home and barred from raising children. She says that at the time of her writing, there had been 7,000 actions involving domestic violence.
            Barry says that soldiers should be trained to be more like firefighters. They should be trained to respond to a situation in the way that saves the most people and minimizes damage, not just to shoot anything that moves.

            When, since World War II, has any war made a country a better place?

            Barry said she initially had hopes for President Obama, and she does see him as better than the second President Bush. However, she was greatly disappointed that President Obama expanded the number of soldiers in Afghanistan. And I was greatly disappointed when he supported an attack on Libya. Can anyone honestly say that Libya is a better place since Qaddafi was overthrown? Why must we assume that dictators will be followed by democracy? It seems that seldom happens.
            I agree with almost all of what Barry says. She strongly supports removing all American troops from Iraq and Afghanistan as soon as possible. Polls say that is what most Iraqis have wanted for many years. Almost no one wants to live under occupation by another country.
            I do want Americans to stop killing, as much as possible. But I question her belief that people in Afghanistan will be better off when American soldiers leave. I wonder when she says there are only a few hundred or a few thousand Taliban and they can't do much. I opposed the war in Afghanistan. I certainly don't think our country attacked Afghanistan to help the women. But I seriously doubt that women will be better off when U.S. troops leave. They would have been better off, certainly, if we had never interfered by supporting warlords and Islamists after the Russians occupied the country. We never should have been involved. All I can think to do is to support groups like Women for Afghan Women that, at great personal risk, provide shelters and lobby for legal changes. They face overwhelming opposition, and I think that even more women will die in the future. I don't believe things will be better for women in Afghanistan for a very long time.
            Of course Barry's book was written before the Islamic State emerged. I could understand any government trying to stop that group, even though all the governments opposing it are themselves responsible for a great deal of suffering. I fear that George W. Bush's Iraq war so destabilized and devastated the area and angered so many people that the damage can never be undone.
            Barry points out how horrifying the concept of preventative war is. She notes that the Geneva Conventions accept the idea of preemptive war if a nation is in immediate danger of attack, and she also accepts that. But preventative war, war simply to ensure that a nation that poses no immediate threat never will have the capacity to attack another, is a different matter entirely. That was Bush's justification in Iraq, and has been the justification for many other wars. The concept is dangerous and wrong, as Barry says.
            She believes that the ultimate solution to war is the end of nation states and the creation of a truly multinational force to be used only in situations such as genocide. I admire her optimism. I wish that were possible, but I doubt it. I can't imagine any of the governments that have veto power in the United Nations supporting it. Putin's attacks on the Ukraine have only made it clearer that the nations with arms will never give them up. The U.S. and Russia will not significantly reduce their nuclear stockpiles. We can, should, and must work against war, but it is late in the game to end it. I hope that I am too pessimistic. I hope that she is right and the work of groups like Iraq Veterans Against the War, Veterans Against War, Women in Black, and Code Pink is leading the way to a new world.

            Kathleen Barry has spent much time and energy studying history and learning from people who have actually experienced war. I am grateful for her doing that painful work. I encourage people who read her book to also read Peggy Faw Gish's accounts of being a peace worker in Iraq: a Journey of Hope and Peace and Walking Through Fire: Iraqis' Struggle for Justice and Reconciliation, which I also reviewed in my blog (“The Heartbreak of Iraq and the Story of One Peace Worker,” 2/16/2015.)

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The Heartbreak of Iraq and the Story of One Peace Worker

2/16/2015

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Iraq breaks my heart. It should break all Americans' hearts. Even most of us who grieve have done little about it, but a few brave peace workers have. There are more and more books by soldiers who fought in the war, but few by peace workers who went to the war unarmed.      I demonstrated against the war, before and after it was started. I wrote in my feminist publication, off our backs, that the war was wrong.

     But I have just read the account of someone who did far more: American peace activist Peggy Faw Gish. She went to Iraq. She witnessed the war and it's aftermath. She, and her co-workers, demonstrated from inside Iraq, calling on the United States not to attack. They lived through the bombing. They saw Baghdad on fire. They comforted Iraqis who had lost everything. They could have been killed by U.S. bombs or by angry Iraqis.

     Gish is still going to Iraq. She now works primarily with people in the Kurdish area. She was there last summer when the Islamic State forces attacked towns not far away. Her courage and love are exemplary.

I can't say how much I admire the devotion of peace workers who put themselves in the line of fire. Like journalists, they are noncombatants, and a number of them have been killed, like Kayla Mueller. More will be. They care so much about the Iraqis, Syrians, and other people who are under attack that they risk their lives to try to help these people and tell their stories.

     Of course the deaths of westerners are no more important than the deaths of Iraqis, Syrians, and other people under attack. For far too long Americans, and perhaps other westerners, have treated the lives of non-westerners as less valuable than those of westerners (read whites). That must change.

     But there is something special about those who go further than the rest of us, who do more than write and demonstrate in places where it is now relatively safe to do so. Some other aid workers Gish knew were kidnapped by Iraqis. She was herself kidnapped. Another female aid worker she knew, the head of CARE in Iraq, was killed, and so was a member of Gish's peace group. But Gish persevered and kept going back to Iraq.

     Gish's first book, Iraq: A Journey of Hope and Peace (Herald Press, Scottsdale, Pa., 2004), tells how she and other members of Christian Peacemaker Teams (CPT) went to Iraq before, during, and after the second Iraq war. She and her husband, who died a few years ago, had first gone to work with CPT in Palestine, trying to witness, mediate, and intervene to bring peace. In 2002, she decided to join another CPT team going to Iraq.

     The teams, as she describes them, are far from missionaries. Many of the members are Quakers or belong to other peace-oriented religions, such as Church of the Brethren, which is Gish's church. The teams are nondenominational. They do not preach. They do not want to convert anyone to anything other than peace. Wherever they go, they try to make connections with the local churches, mosques, and synagogues.

     Unsurprisingly, Iraqi Muslims were skeptical of the Christian peace workers at first, but then learned that the teams had no agenda other than helping. The teams did not live in luxury, in areas like the Green Zone where U.S. officials lived. Gish and the others tried to live among the people. Sometimes they couldn't live as close as they wanted because their presence endangered the local people.

     The teams endured many hardships, and they knew they were breaking U.S. law by going to Iraq when they first did.

     They did not see themselves as "human shields," because that term has been associated with people who are forced to be in a line of fire or who are placed in danger by others. The CPT members put themselves in danger by choice. Gish wanted to create a community of U.S. grandparents across Iraq to witness for peace and possibly deter war.

     The teams had to work with the Iraqi government to some extent. They knew that Saddam Hussein was a dictator who had done terrible things, but they did not believe that gave the United States the right to wage war on Iraq. The Iraqi government appointed "minders" for them and told them what areas they could and couldn't visit. Sometimes officials vetoed their planned demonstrations as too dangerous. The Iraqi government did not want the peace workers to get killed, and forced Gish and others to leave in April 2003 because they took a risk by going into a neighborhood that had been recently bombed even though the minder had told them not to. However, the peace workers came back a few months later to witness the war's destruction.

     They tried to get to know many Iraqis, and spent time in hospitals and orphanages. They were shocked at the hardships the U.S. embargo had caused because it kept out many medicines and medical equipment.

     They saw corpses, terrified people, and bombed-out buildings people. They accompanied wounded Iraqis to hospitals. They faced more suspicion after the U.S. started bombing. They had a rule against giving money to individual Iraqis, which was sometimes difficult in the midst of so much suffering, but it seemed wise. They could have given only a little in the midst of great need. And they wanted to be sisters and brothers to the people, not benefactors.

     They let their hearts break. Their religious beliefs sustained them. If only all those who profess religious beliefs could follow them as these people do, or at least recognize that peace-making is the work most in line with the ideas many religions espouse. (I am not a believer in any religion, but I do believe in people trying to help each other.)

     Gish's group operated by discussion; at first, by consensus, and later through chosen leaders and committees. Gish tells of her own feelings, and sometimes criticizes herself for getting annoyed at other members of the group. Please. Everyone is human. This group sounds as close to saintliness as any I've ever heard of.

The Occupation

     Walking Through Fire: Iraqis' Struggle for Justice and Reconciliation (Cascade Books, Portland, Ore., 2013), Gish's second book, tells of her time in Iraq during the U.S. occupation. Often, she and her fellow peace workers tried to intervene to persuade U.S. military officials not to search Iraqi homes in the middle of the night. The peace teams learned firsthand that in those searches U.S. troops often looted and vandalized property. The peace workers appealed to commanding officers to get stolen property returned. The CPT tried to trace loved ones for Iraqis who were terrified when their relatives were taken away; the tracing wasn't always successful.

The peace workers saw the U.S. soldiers as individual human beings, and tried to interact with them sensitively. Gish says the soldiers were victims, caught up in a violent institution, doing horrific things they didn't want to do, sometimes out of fear and frustration.

     Gish also saw Iraqis turn on one another. A young woman whose father had been killed for selling liquor and whose church had been bombed, told Gish, "Saddam was a killer. Now there are many Saddams." Some prominent Muslim leaders condemned such attacks, but they could not control the violence.

Like other observers, Gish reports that violence against women increased greatly after the fall of Saddam Hussein. War lets loose all the dogs of violence. The teams worked with Iraqi women's organizations as well as other local groups.

     One Iraqi told the peace workers that what he most wanted was for them to teach Iraqis how to settle disputes nonviolently. But that was far more than a small team of peace workers could accomplish. (Indeed, they would have difficulty accomplishing that in the United States.) They did train some Iraqis in techniques of nonviolent protest; the Iraqis formed Muslim Peace Teams. The CPT taught them how to document human rights violations, interact with the media, and deal with trauma.

"Our hearts aren't big enough to carry all the pain we each have experienced," one Iraqi peace worker said at a training. People told of seeing family members killed, and of deaths in the Iraq-Iran war throughout most of the 1980s. Iraqis' suffering has a long history.

One person said that he walked into a training session angry, but left wanting to work for reconciliation instead of revenge.

Gish cites numerous examples of Iraqis working together and trying to help one another across denominational lines. But that certainly is not the larger reality in Iraq. She came to believe that Iraqis would have had an easier time resolving their differences without a long-term U.S. presence.

Many Palestinians went to live in Iraq after the creation of Israel. After the fall of Saddam Hussein, many faced brutal treatment in Iraq. After incidents in which Palestinians were slaughtered, Gish and others tried to help some of them go to Jordan. (One Palestinian man said Iraqis had murdered 10 of his friends; he left with his family so his relatives wouldn't be next.) The CPT went with them across the Iraqi border. The border guards told the Palestinians that they could never come back. Then the Jordanians wouldn't let them in, and they were trapped in a no man's land between the countries. The CPT helped them get into Jordan, but only after more agonized waiting in a wasteland.

     Gish voices indignation about the U.S. attacks that had devastating effects on cities like Fallujah. Destroying large parts of cities to stop a small number of people involved in acts of terror is not justified and will not stop terrorism, she wrote.

     Gish and her co-workers hoped for the best. The best hasn't happened, to put it mildly.

     As Iraqis became angry about the American occupation, many blamed all foreigners and assumed they were all connected with the occupation.

     Twice Iraqis kidnapped members of CPT. The first time, four men were kidnapped; one was killed, and the rest were released after a few months. The CPT had difficulty persuading the U.S. military not to use violence to try to free them.

     The second time, Gish herself and a male CPT worker were kidnapped. They were held in a house and given food, but were guarded by men with guns and told they would be killed if they tried to leave. After a few days, Gish was released, perhaps because she was a woman, or perhaps because she had just shown one of her captors a photo of her husband standing in front of Israeli tanks to protect Palestinian property. The captor was astonished.

     A few days later, her co-worker was released. Though Gish was traumatized, she refused to leave for the U.S. until she learned that the group's driver and translator had been cleared from suspicion of planning the kidnapping.

     She returned to Iraq a few months later.

     Gish wound up working in the Kurdish part of Iraq, which had been attacked by Turks, Iranians, and Iraqis. Even so, it was less devastated than the parts of Iraq that the U.S. had attacked directly. The CPT urged the U.S. not to back the Turks' attacks on the Kurds, but for years the U.S. did.

I had known that the Turks attacked the Kurds because Kurds in Turkey were rebelling to demand autonomy, but I hadn't realized that Saddam Hussein's killing of the Kurds amounted to genocide. (He used poison gas, apparently provided by the U.S., on them.)

The Kurds were initially more receptive to the Americans than were other people in Iraq, but they too becamse frustrated because the U.S. took a long time to stop the Turks from bombing them.

These books show the Iraqis on a human level, which we in the U.S. don't often see. Peggy Gish truly tries to approach everyone lovingly, and that is a way of being that few of us manage.

Gish briefly tells of the human cost of her work in Iraq. Both her husband and one of her sons died in the U.S. while she was working with the CPT. Somehow she dealt with the pain. Her faith in God sustained her through everything.

The Future? Who Knows

     It certainly appears that some of those in the U.S. government who started the war in Iraq had cynical motives, but even assuming that some did not, I blame them for replacing a bad system with a broken society, and failing to see that very few goals are worth the human suffering caused in war.

     I believe that the decision to attack Iraq has had far-reaching consequences, beyond the deaths of 100,000 Iraqis and thousands of western soldiers. It contributed to the suffering of many Muslims and members of other religions in war zones, the spiral of violence, the spread of radical Islamists, the war in Syria, and now the emergence of the Islamic State. I am not sure that the damage done by that fatal decision can ever be undone. But the existence of caring people like Gish and the emergence of Iraqi peace workers give me a little hope.

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A Friend of China

1/11/2015

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    China. A mélange of huge glass office towers, golden Buddhas, ancient palaces, motorbikes, VWs, and people, many people, going about their business. Unlike during the Cultural Revolution, most people can go about their daily lives without constant pressure and fear.
    For many years, I have thought of myself as a friend of China. What does it mean to be a friend of China? At the beginning of the Communist regime, China called a few westerners friends of China. Those included a Canadian doctor who had saved many Chinese lives and western journalists who had written articles favorable to the Communists.
    I don't know what the current definition is of a friend of China, but I count myself as one. That does not mean that I endorse everything the People's Republic does, or that it has done. It does mean that I try to understand many aspects of Chinese history, politics, and life, and I don't automatically assume the worst. I try to have an open mind about China.
    I have wanted to see China for as long as I can remember. My first introduction was when, at age 13, I read Pearl Buck. No, The Good Earth wasn't the first thing I read about China; it was the second. The first was Imperial Woman, a novel about Cixi, the empress who presided over China for much of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th. As far as I know, it was the first book to humanize Cixi instead of seeing her as an evil woman who dominated her husband, son, and nephew when they were on the throne. Dominate she did, but her rule may have been better for China than many historians, both in China and the West, have said. (A recent biography, Dowager Empress Cixi by June Chang, asserts that Cixi was more pragmatic and interested in modernization than earlier accounts have acknowledged.) Women rulers have long been demonized in China. But I was intrigued by the idea that a woman had ruled such a vast country.
     Buck's books also gave me a sense of comparative religion. I was raised Roman Catholic, and was struck by her message that people in China had been astonished when western missionaries told them that there was only one god and only one legitimate religion. The Chinese were used to tolerating many religions and fusing Buddhism and Daoism. (Confucianism is a philosophy, not a religion.)
     I was not only interested in Buck's books but also in the transformation that had taken place in China in my lifetime. In college and graduate school, I took courses on the history and politics of China. I thought of becoming a China watcher, but the language was too much for me. I enjoyed classes in spoken Chinese, but learning the characters was overwhelming. I became involved in the U.S. feminist movement, and I realized that that had precedence in my life. Focusing on China would have taken all my energy.
     But I was glad to have learned as much as I did. When others in the U.S. Left sometimes glorified the Cultural Revolution, I knew better. You could say that I followed Mao Zedong's dictum of "seeking truth from facts." I have always tried not to endorse anything unless I studied it. (That also applied to the Vietnam War, which I didn't decided to oppose until I took classes on Southeast Asia and learned that under the 1954 Paris Accords signed by nations of the West and the East, there was supposed to be an election in both parts of Vietnam; the election was never held because the French and the Americans knew that Ho Chi Minh would have won.)
     The U.S. Left did learn from China. Consciousness-raising was a brilliant idea, and I am sorry that it faded away and hasn't reappeared in the women's movement. But criticism-self-criticism was a less pleasant heritage. I remember excruciatingly long meetings in which I and others were verbally bludgeoned for minor mistakes, imagined attitudes, and simple disagreement. Of course, those experiences were mild compared with criticism-self-criticism in China, which could destroy the life of the person being criticized. When I read accounts of the Cultural Revolution, I remember the comparatively minor experiences I had. I can imagine what public criticism would be like in a far harsher environment where the government or a party controlled one's whole life.
     But China still had its lure. From studying, it became clear to me that China had no interest in ever invading the United States. China was concerned about preserving its own territory. (Its definition of its territory was a matter of debate. Tibet and Taiwan come to mind.) Therefore I believed it was in the U.S. interest to have relations with China. I fantasized being involved in developing those connections and was a bit jealous when Henry Kissinger beat me to it. (I never thought I'd read a book by Kissinger, but his book On China is an amazing study of those negotiations, full of direct quotes from conversations with Mao and Zhou Enlai. Kissinger really understood Chinese politics, and I hope that our present leaders understand China as well as he did.)
     Visiting China is expensive. For many years, I wanted to go, but was consumed by my job (which didn't involve China), the women's movement, and my personal life. At first I plotted ways to get to China, such as founding a series of newsletters, one of which would be on China, so I could pay for the trip. Eventually, I gave up that idea. The thought that I might never see China saddened me.
     But when my beloved partner, Mandy Doolittle, died and left me money, I could plan to go to China. When I retired, I had the time. I went there as part of a three-week tour in October 2014.
     Actually seeing China amazed me. The first thing that struck me was the traffic as my cab driver negotiated the six rings around Beijing. Six circles around the city! And I thought the Beltway around Washington, D.C. was difficult! I was stunned that the cab's seat belt didn't work, and learned quickly that many people in China don't use seat belts.
     I also discovered how hard it was to communicate. I had taken a crash course in Mandarin before I left. I hoped that I would be able to negotiate a few simple transactions, but that was even more difficult than I had imagined. At least I understand a few words like "mei you" (don't have, as in don't have seat belts), and could greet people and thank them. I tried ordering in a hotel restaurant the first night and learned that was much more difficult than I expected. I found out later that the word I had learned for "waiter" was obsolete. I was also unable to communicate that I wanted some of the food packed up so that I could take it to my room.
    I had arrived before my tour group so I could adjust to the time. My first full day in China I adventured alone, going to parks recommended by my tour guide. Even though I had taken several language lessons on getting a cab and giving directions, the only way the driver could understand me was through directions from the hotel's concierge and, on the return trip, a card from the hotel showing its name and address in characters.
    Walking on streets where almost everyone was Chinese delighted me. It was a great thrill to see parks north of the Forbidden City alone. A gilded Buddha sat in a pavilion overlooking the Forbidden City. People climbed to offer incense sticks to the Buddha. I was to see far more Buddhas than pictures of Mao in China.
    In that park I saw my first Chinese birds — black-billed magpies, just like the ones in the American West, and azure-winged magpies, whose cry was more delicate. The Tang dynasty poet Wang Wei wrote, "Birds take flight, return to evening mist." But there are not many birds in China, a reminder of Mao's policy to kill all the birds because they ate grain. They also ate insects, so killing birds did not improve harvests. As a person who grew up in the country, he should have known that.
     I saw a few more birds on China's rivers. I kept finding a black-and-white bird known as a magpie-robin that is neither magpie nor robin. On the Li, I saw huge crows with white bands around their necks, appropriately named collared crows. Thank goodness I brought a book on China's birds, though it was heavy and there was a strict weight limit on luggage.
     China was overwhelming. That should go without saying because the nation is so vast and varied, but still there is even more "there" there than I imagined. Thank goodness my tour group organized everything excellently, and our Chinese guide was so charming and helpful that I almost fell in love with her.
     What amazed me most politically was that I didn't see any pictures of Mao, except on every denomination of the currency, and the portrait in Tienanmen Square. I also didn't see any pictures of the current leaders, so I suppose the cult of the personality is over. In Shanghai, I saw one statue of Chen Yi, who had been major of that city. He had been overthrown in the Cultural Revolution, so I was pleased to see that he had been rehabilitated. Some people had their photos taken next to the statue. One western tourist I spoke with thought it was a statue of Mao, and I suspect many other westerners make that mistake (the name was in Chinese, but the dates were in western numbers and were wrong for Mao).
     But even though the cult of the personality may be over, repression of dissent is not. The New York Times reports that President Xi Jinping is cracking down on professors, journalists, and anyone who questions the leading role of the Communist Party. Although the atmosphere is nothing like that in the '60s, of course the Party is in control.
     My biggest surprises:
The prosperity: I had read about it, but I was still amazed to see how many people have cars and how many fancy stores there are.
The beauty of Shanghai: It has many attractive neighborhoods, nice local parks, and more interesting modern architecture than I have seen in any one city in the U.S. It felt like New York. Shanghai's lights at night are beautiful, as you can see in the photo above.
The openness of our tour guides: I had thought that their every word would still be monitored, but they talked pretty freely about China, and I learned a great deal. Yes, I noticed a few gaps in the information, such as not mentioning when we went to see the terracotta warriors in X'ian that the Emperor Chin Shi Huangdi had killed scholars and burned books. I suppose that would have invited comparisons with the Cultural Revolution.
     I learned so many miscellaneous interesting things about China. My tour guide has a son, and she thinks she's going to need to save money her whole life to pay for the things that a middle-class, urban prospective wife probably will demand: a computer, sets of gold and jade jewelry, a condo, and a credit card. And a large sum of money for the bride's parents. Our guide said that though people told her she was lucky to have a son, she wasn't so sure, because a woman's parents might wind up better off than a man's parents because the man's parents have to give them so much. And though traditionally sons and their wives supported only the son's parents, now children of both sexes are legally required to support their old parents if the parents need it.
     I learned that the government controls heat and air conditioning. Our hotel rooms in Beijing were hot in October, but no business or home north of the Yangtze River can have air conditioning that late in the year. (I'm sure there are a few exceptions for high officials and the wealthy.) Another interesting detail is that, by government dictate, buildings with seven or fewer floors don't have elevators. I suppose both of those measures were instituted to save energy.

     My greatest joy in China: Climbing the Great Wall. I felt that I was truly in China, on a pilgrimage into Chinese history. That delight was heightened by the throngs of mostly Chinese people who were also excitedly climbing it. It's easy to get up on the Great Wall, but harder to climb from one station to another once you are on it. The steps are steep and the railings intermittent.
     My other greatest joys were traveling on China's Yangtze and Li rivers. The Three Gorges of the Yangtze are gorges still, despite the building of the controversial dam. Going along the river past hills partially covered by mist thrilled me. And the Li River in Guilin is even more beautiful, with limestone formations called karsts that are the strangely shaped mountains one sees in Chinese scroll paintings. The Li (below) is truly a world treasure like the Grand Canyon.

    My meetings with Chinese people were mixed. Mostly scripted visits to homes arranged by the tour company, but the homes were various. We met an artist who lived in a hutong (an old Mongolian-style courtyard-based neighborhood) in Beijing, whose home had been confiscated in the Cultural Revolution, but who now has part of it back.
     In Shanghai, we visited a home in a pleasant, middle-class neighborhood where the homeowner and neighbors prepared a feast for us. And a se    nior center where women come for classes. A glee club of old women sang for us. Several people told us that retired women like to take classes, but the men prefer to watch television or play mahjongg.
    In Fengdu, a city along the Yangtze, we met a man who had been among the 1.5 million people moved to make way for the dam. I was surprised to learn that people were given a choice whether to farm higher ground or to become city residents (city residents have more rights and privileges than rural residents). This farmer had a large house and seemed to do well on his small plot of land. (Farmers are allowed only one-sixth of an acre per person.)
    In X'ian, we visited a farmer's home where we were served a meal of noodles and dumplings. We also visited a class of fifth graders who greeted us warmly and sang for us, and we sang back to them.
    I was delighted that groups of school children I saw in parks burst out with "hellos" when they saw me. They smiled broadly when I said "hello" and more so when I said "Ni hao." Many schools teach English, and this was a chance for the children to practice. Also, their enthusiasm convinced me that they weren't being taught that all foreigners were "foreign devils."
     We met few people except our guides and drivers and the people whose homes we visited. But we did hear the story of a man who had been struggled against as a class enemy in the Cultural Revolution. I had read books about the Cultural Revolution, but actually seeing someone who had gone through it moved me to tears. After that, whenever I saw people my age or older, I wondered what their experiences in the Cultural Revolution had been. Schools at every level were closed for 10 years, so China has a lost generation.
    Not all of the people were wildly friendly. Most were just doing their jobs, serving meals, selling things, and so on. But I think of an old woman sitting on a doorstep in Shanghai who smiled broadly at me and flashed a victory sign. I wasn't certain what she meant, but I assume it was because seeing tourists in her city indicated that times were better than they had been in the not-so-distant past.
     We visited open air markets in several cities. Our guide said that the Chinese eat everything on the land except cars and everything in the air except airplanes. That appeared to be true. We weren't served any extremely unusual dishes in restaurants, but we did see unusual sea creatures in the markets. Near one market, I saw small children playing at a roller skating rink.
     We visited temples that had been closed during the Cultural Revolution. The monks had returned to some of them, but others were just tourist attractions.
     There was far more to learn than I can recite here. While we were traveling, I read a Kindle book, Gao Wenqian's Zhou Enlai: The Last Perfect Revolutionary.
    Zhou Enlai was a hero to many people. Gao wrote Zhou's official biography, then used the material for this decidedly unofficial one. Though Zhou always supported Mao, he tried to moderate Mao's more extreme schemes and saved some party leaders whom Mao had unseated. But Mao evidently resented Zhou, and at the end of Zhou's life refused to give him appropriate cancer treatments. That shocked me. Yes, I know that Mao was responsible for many deaths, but letting such a major figure die, apparently so Mao could outlive him, struck me as particularly horrendous. Mao had wanted to die second so he could keep in place his policies of permanent revolution. He did die months after Zhou, but a couple of years later Deng Xiaoping was able to institutionalize economic modernization, a policy Mao abhorred.
     What can one say of a country where so much has happened? Its people are fed, clothed, and housed, and the quality of all the necessities of life has been improving. Women can earn money and many have positions of responsibility, though not the top jobs. Those things alone are great accomplishments. I heard a Chinese woman say that Chinese people know they don't have what we westerners have, but they compare their lives with what they had before, not with what we have.
     What didn't I see? College students. Artists. Intellectuals, except for the man who had survived the Cultural Revolution. They probably would have different tales to tell. Nor did I see any of China's 55 minorities, except for one show about the Tujia people, China's largest minority, who have been removed from their beautiful homeland along the Yangtze. I wish I had met minorities, but I had deliberately chosen a tour focusing on Han (the overwhelming majority of Chinese are Han) areas. Three weeks is a short time for glimpsing the culture of one of the world's major ethnic groups and its incredible history. The main evidence of minority groups was dances and costumes in museums. Rather like U.S. museums about Native Americans.
     I also didn't see any signs of political activity. It can't be true that no one remembers Mao fondly and wants to go back to a more militant system. None of the western tour companies seem to offer visits to Yanan, where the Red Army was headquartered during the war with Japan and the Kuomintang, but there must be Chinese tourists who go there.
    Can such a huge part of China's history be buried? Won't it resurface? Much as I enjoyed seeing shows about the Tang Dynasty, I would also have been interested in seeing one of the revolutionary operas, such as the White-Haired Girl, that I suppose are now considered unwelcome reminders of Mao's ultra-militant wife, Jiang Qing, if only for purposes of comparison.
     I saw only five beggars in China. All had severe disabilities. China has only begun to consider working on discrimination against people with disabilities. Deng Xiaoping's son was crippled when he was thrown off a roof by the Red Guards during the Cultural Revolution, and he began work for persons with disabilities.
     I didn't see lesbians or gay men, as far as I know. Before taking the journey, I went to a presentation in Washington by a Chinese lesbian, a Chinese gay man, and a white American gay man who had headed the LGBT institute in Beijing. I was surprised that there was any such institute. I heard that the United Nations and, amazingly, the World Bank, have been trying to foster LGBT visibility in China and other countries.
    At that talk, I learned that discrimination against lesbians and gays has been illegal in China since the late '90s, and that the Chinese psychiatric association declared in 2001 that LGBT are not sick. But heterosexual marriage is still virtually imperative because of the Chinese historical emphasis on having children. The speakers said that most discrimination against lesbians and gays comes from their families. That often includes beating and even psychiatric "treatment" to change their sexuality. But the lesbian speaker actually publishes a magazine! And we saw two lesbian and gay underground films from China.
     All nongovernmental groups are supposed to register, and there are many obstacles in the way of registration. It is very difficult and dangerous to protest.
     I saw many old people on the streets in China. The retirement age is generally 60 (sometimes 65) for men and 50 (sometimes 55) for women. (Clearly that doesn't apply to high officials.) Younger women work, while grandmothers take care of children. Many young children on the streets were with their grandmothers.
    Pensions are small, and are only for urban workers. China's equivalent of Medicare is only for registered urban residents. But old people get free passes to parks, many of which have entrance fees. So many old men sit in the parks playing mahjongg. It's good to see ordinary people in parks where only emperors and courtiers used to walk.
     And, oh, those parks! The Summer Palace, rebuilt by Cixi, is far more beautiful than European palaces, at least to me. There are lakes, willows, pavilions, rockeries, gates, courtyards, and an arched walkway where she walked every day. Everything is open to the air and surfaces are painted in the most exquisite taste. The one ridiculous touch is the marble boat she had built; of course, it cannot float. Her rebuilding of the Summer Palace, destroyed by Europeans and Americans in retaliation for the Taiping rebellion, drew criticism from many Chinese who believe that if the money had been spent on the navy, China would have been able to defeat Japan when Japan attacked it. That may be true, but it is hard today to think that preserving this beauty was a mistake. And it's certainly a major tourist attraction that brings money to the nation.
     China is an excellent place for tourists, certainly for those who go on an organized tour as I did. We ate at government-owned restaurants, which may have the highest standards of cleanliness, according to our tour guide. We shopped at government-owned stores, which guaranteed the quality of their silk and jade, which other stores do not. We saw productions aimed at tourists, with English subtitles and scenes from famous operas, rather than the whole thing, which someone decided would be too long for tourists. I enjoy Chinese food, arts and crafts, and music, and didn't mind getting versions aimed at tourists.
     So am I a friend of China? Yes. I don't think the U.S. should automatically side with Japan over disputed islands that are closer to China than to Japan. We must remember the devastation Japan wrought on China in the '30s and '40s, massacring many thousands of Chinese and carrying out medical experiments just as heinous as those conducted in Nazi Germany. And we should understand how important it is to the people of China, Korea, and many other countries that Japan is backing off from acknowledging its war crimes.
     I think we should all learn about and respect China and the Chinese people. We should at least try to understand the perspective of its government in international affairs.
     What part of China am I befriending? The answer is easy for me as an American who doesn't plan to live and work in China, or to report on it like Times reporters who have been unable to get their visas renewed because their investigative reporting pushed too far. As an American, I can say that I want to be a friend to much of China. To care about the people, though I have met few of them. To resist stereotypes and to learn what I can.

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Beautiful Writing?

12/11/2014

1 Comment

     How can I write a beautiful sentence? That's the challenge, especially because adverbs and adjectives are considered lazy writing. How can a sentence plunge into the heart of life and change the world?

     Perhaps a sentence should leap, not plunge. Should it cut through a fog of confusion or shatter the reader's complacency? But I don't want my sentences to cut or shatter. I don't want to lull readers into boredom, but I'm not sure I want to jolt them either.

     Can good writing be gentle? Perhaps it doesn't have to be if it isn't cruel. I don't like the adage that writers aren't supposed to have a heart, aren't supposed to care who they hurt with their revelations. Why be a mommy dearest kind of writer? Why expose your friends' and family's worst moments to the world's curiosity?

     Does the reader need to know how your friend Janet betrayed you ten years ago? Can you disguise the betrayal well enough that no one will know whose betrayal it is? Does every betrayal give you the right to betray the betrayer?

     What is a beautiful sentence, anyway? Do clouds sing? Do mountains scream? Do streets break your heart? Do people you might have loved float away like balloons? Does purple comfort you?

     How can writing be beautiful? Meanings can be beautiful. If we care about meaning, the most beautiful words are "I love you." Most people would rather hear them than hear the finest metaphors or alliteration.

     If a writer manages one beautiful sentence, or even a few, it will be jarring in the midst of plain prose. So she must cut it out. But how is it possible to write page upon page of beautiful writing that flows together? True, some writers can do that, but most of us cannot.

     Occasionally the dawn will appear over a foaming sea or purple mountains, but even that is difficult to describe in new words. Occasionally a new image will fling itself at us like an eager puppy, but generally the writer is all too safe from such assaults.

     It feels so much safer to express oneself in dialogue. If the character fails to speak in original language, that is the character's fault, not the writer's. It's so comfortable to write, "Get away from me, you creep," "Impertinence was his middle name," or "You'd better take my advice or you'll be sorry." Isn't that ever so much more appealing than a description? It is to me. And people seldom say beautiful writing to each other, so no worries.

     If dialogue comes easier to me, should I be a playwright? But I am learning a little about playwriting, and it is not as simple it seems. It is dialogue, but every word, every character, every scene has to count, unlike fiction, where you can get away with some words that aren't about the main point. In a play, every character has to have a specific aim in every interaction, or so a teacher told me. I suppose characters in novels also have some aim in every interaction, whether to gossip, chide, or conceal their objective, but the action does not have to be so tightly wound. Mrs. Brown can complain about young people, but that does not have to mean that Mrs. Brown is secretly poisoning them. There is time for characters to appear and disappear, as they do in one's life. Beauty can be created without beautiful words when the curmudgeon does a gratuitous good deed.

     Oh, beautiful writing. I have no use for it because I can't do it. But I still hope to learn.

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The Endless Chain of Reading/Writing

11/17/2014

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     Writing and reading are fused for me: reading/writing, writing/reading. When I read a book I am writing and when I write a book I am reading. I sometimes say I have written a book when I mean that I have read it. It is embarrassing to tell a friend that I have just written Pride and Prejudice and then need to explain what I meant.

     The reader collaborates with the author. But the reader also argues with the author. The reader is absorbed in hearing the author's story. But if there are vivid characters, "Dear Reader" also has her ideas about them. If there aren't vivid characters, why read the book?

     The reader is Elizabeth Bennet, Jane Eyre, Ishmael, Daniel Deronda, Oliver Twist. God help the poor reader, she may identify with Ahab, Bertha Rochester, or Nance. Let us hope that she does not see herself in Mr. Collins. Of course she may be many characters at once. This could be a sign that she is a writer.

     Whose story moves you most? Which character do you most fear you resemble? When I read Pride and Prejudice, I fear that I may be Mary, the pedantic sister, but I feel fairly certain that I am not Mr. Collins.

     Characters may take over our lives. We are not mad, just obsessed. We wander down the street wondering if we are Dallowayesque. We ponder about other people's lives and worry that we may be like Catherine Morland in Northanger Abbey, imagining dire deeds where there are none. Reading Crime and Punishment may make us start feeling guilty for something terrible and blabbing to cover it up. Reading Beloved may haunt us. The ghosts of literature make us aware of the ghosts around us in our lives.

     And if we are writers, we may want to create new lives for the characters we have loved in books. We wonder how creative that exercise really is. Is Jean Rhys's The Wide Sargasso Sea with a new prequel for Bertha Rochester so different from fan versions of Star Trek? If those efforts are utterly different, which are we pursuing when we are inspired to borrow characters from earlier books?

     I am compelled to rewrite various stories, various legends. I tell myself that there is nothing wrong with borrowing characters. Shakespeare's plots were not original. But then again, my writing is not like Shakespeare's, I modestly admit.

     It is unnerving that other readers won't read my stories they way I want them to be read. But the thought of "my" characters, even those stolen from other books, escaping me and living in other minds, in the endless chain of reading/writing, is appealing.

     Which characters move you? Which characters establish a dwelling place in your mind? Whose stories have you rewritten? Is rewriting trivial compared to literary criticism, or is rewriting a form of literary criticism?

     Do novels rewrite our lives? Do we change to make ourselves more like the characters we admire or less like those we dislike? I believe we do. When I first read Sense and Sensibility, I thought I was more profound if I acted with sensibility like Marianne, but now I find more kinship with Elinor's sense. When I was younger, I believed that thinking like Ivan Karamazov was nobler than being like Mrs. Ramsey in The Lighthouse, but I am no longer so certain.

    If we live in a wide range of novels, we are at least somewhat remade. The Invisible Man becomes visible to us, and perhaps the "invisible" women and men around us also become more visible. Books that we would not venture to rewrite, like Elie Wiesel's Night, nevertheless rewrite us. The more worlds we have lived in, at least vicariously, the more we know. Or should know, but that is another matter.

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The Endless Chain of Reading/Writing

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