My friend lay back on her bed with her headphones in and Mac out. With a huge sparkle of a smile, she clicked into Skype and said hi to her family. It was a beautiful moment and I sat quietly in the corner feeling strangely privileged… It has been said many times that airport terminals see people greet each other with arms that are wider and warmer than usual. Distance, absence, makes us see clearer what, who is important to us. This was not just the usual call home. My friend is a Californian and this was Thanksgiving. The distance…the absence…was being felt that much more. As they talked Americanisms and familial shorthand meant any attempt to follow the conversation would be doomed to failure. I wouldn’t have wanted to try. The beauty wasn’t in what was being said.
I sat, curled into my friend’s chair, reading the book I always pick up when I find myself in her room, occasionally looking up to smile at her when something humorous and decipherable was said. Philip Gourevitch’s, “We wish to inform you that tomorrow we will be killed with our families: Stories from Rwanda”. It is as cheery as it sounds. The juxtaposition of the palpable, glowing love to my right and the bloody hate in my hands was stark…but we’re used to it by now surely?
Earlier that evening we had been enjoying Thanksgiving dinner with a group of friends from University. Before eating we went round the table and shared things we were thankful for. Friends. Family. Life. These were emotional moments. Glimpses of grace. But the stories from Rwanda show the machete side of life…not that we have to go so far from home to find it. A side that isn’t going to go away no matter how much academia studies or activists seek revolution. I believe strongly that a difference can be made. That redemption is indeed possible. But the poor will always be with us…
A fascinating little debate has been raging over the last week amongst our class about the place of emotion in academic discourse. There is that fear of statistics. Of making people numbers. Of losing touch with the reality of what we are studying. But there is also the realization that emotion can cloud argument. It can seep in and distract. An interesting and important question is posed. As I walked home this evening I returned to some well worn ground…How do we live in this world? How do we function when surrounded by such injustice? The question can be read in two ways…how should we seek to function, what should we cling to, how is it done AND/OR how is it that we do function, since it seems that for the most part we do. When I worked at Christian Solidarity Worldwide this was a conversation I had a few times with other interns. How can you spend all day, every day working for a human rights charity like CSW, reading and writing and analyzing and disseminating stories of brutality, pain and horror…and then go home and…well…function? I had a conversation with my friend Travis one night about how people who are interested in areas of humanitarian assistance spend their whole lives searching for horror…searching for the people with the most crushing stories…chasing after pain.
I have been interested by the reaction to the movie, Borat. I need to immediately qualify my comments by saying that I haven’t seen it. My understanding is that some of the ‘best’ humour is derived from Baron Cohen giving xenophobic Americans enough rope to hang themselves with. But is the existence of people with such horrific views funny? Should we laugh at such people? Or should we weep? Feel ill? My immediate reaction to this question when it was first put to me was to think of the Screwtape Letters. It may be a dreadfully out of place comparison. But it was my first thought. The existence of xenophobia in the world should be mourned. But my tentative suggestion is that those who ascribe to such views should also be scorned, mocked…laughed at? (I just changed that sentence. It originally suggested that xenophobia itself should be mocked and laughed at…I changed it, making the people the focus of the suggested scorn. I think I perhaps had it right the first time…) Laughter perhaps has the power sometimes ascribed to it…Lewis held that the thing that hurts a proud Satan most is laughter in his direction. Comedians talk of the powerless-ness of ‘power’ in the face of laughter.
Some excerpts were printed in The Independent from blogs written by people in the Middle East when Israel and Hezbollah were attacking each other and smashing Lebanon in the process. I was moved and humbled by these, the thoughts of ordinary people trapped in a war. One blogger talked of how, ‘They’ve scraped the honey off the moon’. The words have stayed with me…fitting in their own off-beat way. I guess days like today give me hope…hope is maybe the wrong word…days like today help. There is room at the table. For beauty. For laughter. For love…and I want to believe for redemption…
In the words of Banksy..."Sometimes I feel so sick at the state of the world I can't even finish my second apple pie"...
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