Archive for Violence
See No Evil (part 1)
A few weeks ago I went to the movies to see “Blindness.” I´d been planning that for a long time, and was super excited: first, because I had heard many good things about the book and second, because I was in Brazil when they shot the movie (most of the movie, if not all, was shot in Brazil).
My feelings as I left the theatre are a bit harder to describe. Part of me thought it was a good story taken too far. It wasn´t just that some scenes were extremely unpleasant, but that they seemed unnecessarily so. In my judgement, therefore, the lack of verisimilitude was a big check minus for ”Blindness.” Thus I finally reached a verdict: too unplesant to be true. Period. Which shows how little I know.
A couple of days later, I went to the movies again, this time to watch “Triage: Dr. Orbinski´s Humanitarian Dilemma.” As I entered the theatre, the film had already began, and the feeling of “I know this place, I know this person” gave me a tingly sensation of contentment as I searched in the darkness for a seat.
When I first moved to Toronto in 2002, Massey College, a scholarly community at the University of Toronto, was my first home (and it still is my permanent address in Canada). I lived there for more than two years, during which time Dr. James Orbiski and his wife Rolie Srivastava were also living there.
They were both very active in the community, and always very willing to talk to the less famous members of the College such as myself. But I, in my immense timidity, had never in these almost seven years had the courage to do more than exchange nods and smiles whenever I passed them.
I knew he was famous. I knew he was busy. I knew he had been in Rwanda during the genocide in 1994. I even suspected that he had won a Nobel prize, thought I wasn´t really sure about that, because in my mind it was simply too unlikely that I´d be sharing the same address as a Nobel prize winner.
More than six years later, here I am in a cinema complex watching a documentary about my former neighbour Dr. James Orbinski. The familiar face and the familiar scenery gave me a sense of proximity that I had never experience in a movie theatre.
As the movie progressed the sense of “deja-vu” got more and more intense, but in a bizarre way: all of a sudden, I felt like I was watching “Blindness” all over again. Again, the punch in the stomach as I think of the awful things human beings are capable of when they know that “no one is looking.” Again, the sense of awe at the almost involuntary heroism of people who see themselves providing care to others in the most inhumane circumstances — not knowing whether they themselves would come out of the situation alive. I was trembling.
In a way, I was overwhelmed by the some of the same intense feelings that “Blindness” had provoked in me. But this time I couldn´t put them in a box, seal it and label it: “caused by a work of fiction taken too far.” Rwanda was no fiction. It happened. And I know someone who was there and survived to tell the tale.
I was in shock for days at end.
Sprinkles of a big splash
The news of the plane crash in Brazil really shook me yesterday. I couldn’t think about anything else all day long, and spent way too much time reading whatever news there was about it online.
It all seemed so near. I had spent a good part of the day before, nay, the week, month, year, thinking of the logistics of going back home in August. I always have to change planes in São Paulo whenever I go home, some times change airports. But this time I actually have a couple of errands to run there, and couldn’t decide whether to stop over for a couple of days, or just carry on with my move. Since I’ll be moving from Canada to Brasilia, maybe it be best to go straight to Brasilia first to drop all the luggage and think about errands in São Paulo after. So I’ve been thinking a lot about this lately, more and more as the moving date approaches.
But this week there was something that made the whole logistics of passing through São Paulo in August even more interesting: one of my colleagues in Toronto would like me to accompany her in a trip to Porto Alegre. So two days ago we were debating whether we should combine it with my trip to São Paulo in August, or make a separate trip in October. We were discussing this two days ago. I’m don’t know what her plans are like now, but I’m sure what happened less than 24 hours after has put a completely different spin on things.
When I went home last Christmas, the effects of the plane crash in the Amazon last September were still very conspicuous (see my post of January 5). It had been the biggest aircrash in Brazilian history up to that point. My aunt works in the airport in Brasília, and she knew people who had died, and people who almost did, but decided to take another plane at the last minute. She had pictures of some of those people. If it hadn’t sunk in yet, seeing the faces and hearing the stories of two of dozens of the passengers that had died really made me go, “wow”. Ramifications were everywhere I looked.
These were ripple effects of an accident that had happened months before, in the middle of the rainforest. The one this week was right in the middle of the largest city in South America, less than a year after the other one. Ripple effect intensity goes up exponentially. Shivers go down my spine.
It’s not the proximity of the thing that is so overwhelming. Sure, I do think “this could have been me”. I’ve flown into that airport many times before, and will likely have to do it again. But there’s also something about the sheer magnitude of an accident like this, about the number of people and activities that it affects directly or indirectly, that is just, I don’t know, unfathomable.
I think of the families of each of those 200 people, what they must be thinking now, how their lives have changed all of a sudden. I think of the people who were in the building that was hit, and at the gas station. I think of the cars at the rush hour that missed being hit by an airplane by a hairline. I think of what must have gone in the head not only of the passengers, but of the pilot, and the flight attendants. I think of the people that work in or around that airport, or in any airport or aircraft. And the people that work for or with them. And those who live with or next to them, or know them somehow or other. Something like this affects a lot of people, and it affects them a lot.
So big, so close. Unfathomable, innefable. It makes anything I say or can say about it so shallow in comparison. It’s like complaining of being soaked by the littlest sneeze of a sprinkle of a big splash. So I’ll just stop here, with a moment of respectful silence.
If it can happen there, it can happen anywhere
Warning: this post is rated R for reference to sexual body parts and mild violence content (gotta call a spade “a spade”). Completely based on true facts.
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After a post on being childish, here’s a serious one.
Lately I’ve been thinking about a lot about violence against women, which was something I knew about, but never really knew about. Until now. I always knew it was something that could happen to any woman, but for some reason (presumption? arrogance?), in some subconscious level I tended to think I was immune to it. Not anymore.
The text below is copied and pasted from an email I sent to a friend of mine when I was in Athens last June 7th.
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Ok. A very pleasant and then a very unpleasant thing just happened to me, after I wrote to you a couple of hours ago.
The pleasant thing was that I climbed Lykavittos Hill, the highest point in Athens, to have to most amazing view of the city, the Acropolis, the sea, the islands. Unbelivably pretty! The path leading up there reminded me a bit of the paths in Mont Royal, but not as not as well taken care of, or wide, or busy.
I took the back way up. On the top, where there is a little chapel, a lookout point, where there were a handful of tourists, an old man sleeping on the steps to a little belltower, two policemen. Going around the chapel, then a little further downhill, there was a fancy restaurant and a tram. After taking a couple of pictures, I retraced my steps from the restaurant entrance back to the top where the policemen were now talking to the previously-sleeping man.
On the way down, I decided to take the main path, which was more structured, shorter, wider, with a bit more tourist traffic. And here’s where the unpleasant thing happened.
A passer-by overtook me and tried to start chatting with me. Between Greek, English and Italian I gathered that his name was Eric. After three minutes of trying to get me to sit down and smoke a cigarrette, to which I kept replying (as I walked as fast as I could) that I couldn’t stop because there was someone waiting for me and I was late, he simply unzipped his pants and pulled out his penis as he said something about making bambini, standing there in the middle of the pathway, in broad daylight, 4pm, at the main access to a major tourist attraction in Athens. Definitely not very attractive to this humble tourist writing to you.
I just kept on going with quadruple speed (from my centre of gravity, belly button and whole being), at which point he ran after me saying “sorry sorry” and grabbed my bum. At this point, I turned around (it was actually the first time I stopped and/or turned around), raised my fist, looked very fierce and said something like “don’t you dare!”
To my great surprise, he froze and turned pale. As I suddenly realized that I couldn’t remember how to break any of his bones, and shouting for help would probably be useless, I turned on my heels and ran. Within 15 seconds I passed by another passer-by (by this point, I’m not trusting passers-by that are male, unaccompanied and look in their thirties). In another 10 seconds I got to the bottom of the hill, back to civilization.
And now, less than half an hour later, I am here writing to you. My legs now have just stopped shaking, and my heart is almost back to regular speed. But now I’m thinking: I definitely have to calibrate this “adventuresome” attitude of mine: this was definitely not fun… I only wish that there were policemen at the bottom of the hill too…
You be careful,
Ester
*****
Caring about Caring
When I was 16 a Native Brazilian was burned to death in Brasilia, my hometown and capital of Brazil.
The victim, Galdino Jesus dos Santos, was in town for the celebrations of the 19th of April, the Day of the Native. Having arrived at the hostel after doors were closed, he was sleeping in a bus shelter in one of the busiest avenues in the city.
The perpetrators were 5 teenagers, upper middle class, well-educated. On being asked why they killed the Native, one of them replied: “We didn´t know he was Native, we thought he was just a beggar.” As if that made it ok.
I remember thinking at the time “what a horrible idea!” But my feeling wasn´t really indignation – I was too stoic at the time to get indignant about anything. It was more like intellectual disdain for the murderers (“what a stupid idea”), mixed with a resigned “such things happen”, and with a prayer for the soul of the victim, and for the murderers to get a bit more sense into their heads.
And that was all. No point worrying about what´s passed. Disdain, resignation, tranquility, that was what I felt. A Stoic thing really.
“Such things happen.” Oh, God, where, when, how do things like this just “happen”? My lack of sensitivity at the time now shocks me almost as much as that of the assassins. When you grow up seeing your hometown in the evening news only for political corruption and upper-middle-class teenage crime, you may become a bit anesthesised.
These were people my age, same town, same social class. The “Indian Busstop” was on my way to school. It got decorated, full of posthumous honours. I used to go by there twice a day. And twice a day shake my head in disapproval, Harvey Siegel style, as if the problem had only been an intellectual mistake, something wrong with their education.
Of course there was something wrong with their education. But, my goodness, the guys were rich, went to the best schools, they had everything they wanted. Which goes to show: 1) that quality of education is not determined solely by which school one attends and 2) that even at school education shouldn’t be solely “intellectual”.
The goal of education inside and outside the classroom should be to make humans more fully human. It’s not a matter of simply learning how to think. We should learn how to think with our hearts and feel with our minds.
But the tendency in academia generally, starting with schools, is to detach thinking from acting, theory from practice, causes from consequences, the subjective side of the object, and the objective side of the subject. Problems are formulated and solved “considering ideal the conditions” and “ignoring any friction”.
My stoic reaction is a consequence of this, as is the murderous attitude of the young men. One ends up thinking of people as if they were objects in the equation. One forgets that they are also subjects: subject agents and agent subjects, who create and are created by the “objective reality” of everyday.
Last week I started reading “Pedagogy of Indignation”, a collection of Paulo Freire’s last writings. The last thing he wrote about was the story of this Native Brazilian, and of our youngsters:
“What a strange thing, to kill Natives, to kill people, just for fun. I’m here thinking, sunk in an abyss of profound perplexity, amazed at the unbearable perversity of these young people, de-humanising themselves, in a place where they grew down instead of growing up.” (Pedagogy of Indignation, p. 66)
Paulo Freire died some ten days after the Native was killed. I’m not sure he understood that Galdino was killed but not because he was a Native: the boys had thought he was “just a beggar”. It was a cruel act of violence, of elitism, but it wasn’t racism.
At same time, of course Galdino was killed for being a Native: for being in an unknown urban jungle, for not having a chauffeur, for being put up at a hostel with no stars, that had no 24-hour receptionist waiting for the dear guest, or a thoughtful chaperone worried about the welfare of visitor from far away. And this is the 5-star treatment that he got as the envoy sent to the capital to receive the honours of the Day of the Native.
It wasn’t only the boys then that committed violence against Galdino. It was Brazilian society as a whole. Of course it was racism, as well as elitism, on the part of an entire society. This does not all of a sudden makes the five young men less guilty: it only makes the rest of us more, all of us innocent people who do not see that we play a part in this injustice.
A friend of mine is always saying that the opposite of love isn’t hatred, but indifference. And as Brazilian musician Renato Russo would say, “where does this indifference, tempered with iron and fire, come from?” Galdino’s story seems come from Renato Russo’s songs, a mixture of Metrópole with Faroeste Caboclo, Índios and Baader-Meinhof Blues. “Violence is so fascinating, and our lives are so ordinary…”
One of the most important trends in Paulo Freire’s legacy is a commitment to shaking off the indifference that seizes the “ordinary citizen”. An attempt to make people less passive, less patient, so that they can also be impatient agents. And this starts at school, and much before school starts.
But, as Renato Russo would say in “Índios”, how I wish I could, at least once, explain what nobody can understand…
