My best conversations are when my partners have no other choice, nowhere to hide.
This sounds frightening; baring your soul always is. Which is why we choose to be in large parties rather rather than quiet with each other, why we choose alcohol and smoke rather than a bright dinner table, why we'd rather flirt with love than commit to it.
Or maybe I'm defending my own introverted agenda.
In groups, people always hide behind others' expectations, whether consciously or otherwise. Having cultivated all the personality of hospital tile, I don't matter - but their brothers and sisters do. But when we're alone, oh, when we're alone... I hear dreams, nightmares, and all the life that happens somewhere in between. I'm not particularly graceful at handling these – I tend to absorb the tears and the smiles with relatively equal indifference (though I'm starting to cover possibly undiagnosed Asperger's with what I feel are quite overdone displays of sympathy or joy). But I always feel the weight of it, the shimmering value of the moment.
Not for the story itself – it is quite often biased, reconstructed, and refined by the broken, trapped, bare animal that was redefined by it – but the mere potential of honesty, of reliving it with a stranger, is precious enough. That moment, if it free of the burden of a hidden agenda, holds enough power to change a life.
Unfortunately, this culture is one of story-telling. The reports are fantastic; the testimonies, moving - all bearing witness to God's glory and foresight through some event that probably felt like suffocating under the weight of a sodden blanket at the time.
As long as it meets the 'right' criteria, these are shared overseas, in churches, at Bible studies – all to show an acceptable level of weakness, one that will result in material resources or greater prestige. Rarely will a woman admit to rape, an official profess doubt in the system, or a missionary accept a lack of faith unless the calculated benefit is worth the shame. But it's not just the matter of stigma; it goes deeper. In my experience, while men are willing to share their heroics, and people are generally open to speaking about what they have experienced as children, women rarely boast these stories to the oohs and aahs of a crowd. This may be due to their resilience – I disagree. Women have seen and personally experienced much worse, and peace means something different for them. It means not thinking about what they have seen, what they have felt. It means turning a blind eye to casual misogyny (like the devaluation of women's experiences through war) because things could be so much worse. Besides, who wants to hear of a woman who walked over 600km across the country with 20 children during the war? It's not as if she did anything special. Unless we can get this story to white people – they seem to like this sort of thing. And the stories become a form of leverage again. Not a means to respecting women and creating a safe space for them to admit their pain and prevent their daughters from facing it in the future, but a means to gaining international attention and aid. I know because I have seen that aid workers can say the right words on the job and laugh about them on break – because everyone knows she shouldn't have been there, doing that, dressed in those.
Anyway, these aren't conversations you bring up at bars for fear of being buzzkill. Or in churches lest your purity or piety be called into question. And because of all these secrets, trauma and its consequent manipulation for security, significance, and acceptance are being ignored. Except that people want to get away at any cost.
I've had a mostly whispered, naughty conversation about a nearby country that is safe for women, thriving economically, where the people are polite, there is no rubbish in the streets, and citizens are both cared for and required to care for their communities – a land flowing with milk and harmony. It's okay to like that, I murmur. But you can bring it here too. Live there, if you want, but you can be a bridge to better community and economy here. Use your place to help this one.
You're right, she whispers back thoughtfully. Pray for me.
That had to be a secret. Because I asked why she speaks another language on the phone and she laughingly confided that her family lives on the other side. If it's something she talks about at work, it's not easily or freely, though everyone can hear it in her accent.
They don't like people of my tribe in Kinshasa; they say conflict is due to us. They don't like us because we don't marry outside our tribe, but your culture in India is the same! I have questions! We can exchange - not publicly, but...
Another secret, another face, with the same desperation to prove they belong here while being proud of somewhere else.
I don't want to have more than three or four children. My husband wants maybe five, six... After the third or fourth, I'll deal with it quietly if I have to. What else can I do?
Tell the truth, I murmur, though I know that wanting only a few children is a cultural crime and it seems easier to keep quiet about a few more things. Guilt, like children, is not borne equally among couples – the women will be blamed anyway, but better it be for infertility than murder. Or worse, bucking social norms. So sometimes the whispers are so quiet that I can barely understand them – about post-partum depression or infidelity or sorcery. These are the shameful things that the church can't celebrate with ululation, that don't bear speaking about, that you should keep within your mind for fear that the monsters without are even worse.
I currently have a high school student from my church who thinks he's ingratiated himself to me by telling me he hates his culture and language and loves slurring English. Not only is that a horrible pitch to use on a nationalistic immigrant with a fondness for good grammar, he's already in my bad books for fretting about the state of my cross-signing soul.
Can I come to your house now? When? You can see that it's late, so can I have money to go home? My foot is hurting. No, don't tell the Pastor; I just want to talk to you.
These are the whispers meant for foreigners' ears only – confiding in pain, suffering, friendship, visits, chats – for small allowances. These are likely considered subtle and utterly unique by one party, but are obviously scripted to any humanitarian aid worker. This script has been painstakingly hissed by generations who were abused by Western powers and slowly saw their fortunes changing – not by pretending strength, but by pleading for crutches. But the dialogue is, I hope, slowly being erased and rewritten by locals like Pastor, his leadership groups, our church community, my coworkers, my teammates – none of us willing to join this game of Chinese Whispers, but trying to listen hard and speak gently in the face of the often unintelligible news that reaches us.
Instead of boasting acceptable weakness and hiding real shame and fear, I hope we are trying to change the meaning of strength. Where it now means money, colour, and position, it should mean the potential for sacrificial love. Thus, a grandmother becomes a warrior; a mother, a shield; a daughter, a peacekeeper.
I'm not sure our quiet words will have any effect – they seem to echo again and again, with different eyes, different smiles, the same frustrations, the same defeated acceptance...
But then, a seed is always a secret too.
“If I may be permitted an editorial aside... we must be cautious about passing moral judgement... Surely we have learned by now that such judgements are of necessity culture-specific. Also, [that] society was under a good deal of pressure, demographic and otherwise, and was subject to factors from which we ourselves are happily more free. Our job is not to censure but to understand... [N]o empire imposed by force or otherwise has ever been without this feature: control of the indigenous by members of their own group.”
- Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid's Tale
Or maybe I'm defending my own introverted agenda.
In groups, people always hide behind others' expectations, whether consciously or otherwise. Having cultivated all the personality of hospital tile, I don't matter - but their brothers and sisters do. But when we're alone, oh, when we're alone... I hear dreams, nightmares, and all the life that happens somewhere in between. I'm not particularly graceful at handling these – I tend to absorb the tears and the smiles with relatively equal indifference (though I'm starting to cover possibly undiagnosed Asperger's with what I feel are quite overdone displays of sympathy or joy). But I always feel the weight of it, the shimmering value of the moment.
Not for the story itself – it is quite often biased, reconstructed, and refined by the broken, trapped, bare animal that was redefined by it – but the mere potential of honesty, of reliving it with a stranger, is precious enough. That moment, if it free of the burden of a hidden agenda, holds enough power to change a life.
Unfortunately, this culture is one of story-telling. The reports are fantastic; the testimonies, moving - all bearing witness to God's glory and foresight through some event that probably felt like suffocating under the weight of a sodden blanket at the time.
As long as it meets the 'right' criteria, these are shared overseas, in churches, at Bible studies – all to show an acceptable level of weakness, one that will result in material resources or greater prestige. Rarely will a woman admit to rape, an official profess doubt in the system, or a missionary accept a lack of faith unless the calculated benefit is worth the shame. But it's not just the matter of stigma; it goes deeper. In my experience, while men are willing to share their heroics, and people are generally open to speaking about what they have experienced as children, women rarely boast these stories to the oohs and aahs of a crowd. This may be due to their resilience – I disagree. Women have seen and personally experienced much worse, and peace means something different for them. It means not thinking about what they have seen, what they have felt. It means turning a blind eye to casual misogyny (like the devaluation of women's experiences through war) because things could be so much worse. Besides, who wants to hear of a woman who walked over 600km across the country with 20 children during the war? It's not as if she did anything special. Unless we can get this story to white people – they seem to like this sort of thing. And the stories become a form of leverage again. Not a means to respecting women and creating a safe space for them to admit their pain and prevent their daughters from facing it in the future, but a means to gaining international attention and aid. I know because I have seen that aid workers can say the right words on the job and laugh about them on break – because everyone knows she shouldn't have been there, doing that, dressed in those.
Anyway, these aren't conversations you bring up at bars for fear of being buzzkill. Or in churches lest your purity or piety be called into question. And because of all these secrets, trauma and its consequent manipulation for security, significance, and acceptance are being ignored. Except that people want to get away at any cost.
I've had a mostly whispered, naughty conversation about a nearby country that is safe for women, thriving economically, where the people are polite, there is no rubbish in the streets, and citizens are both cared for and required to care for their communities – a land flowing with milk and harmony. It's okay to like that, I murmur. But you can bring it here too. Live there, if you want, but you can be a bridge to better community and economy here. Use your place to help this one.
You're right, she whispers back thoughtfully. Pray for me.
That had to be a secret. Because I asked why she speaks another language on the phone and she laughingly confided that her family lives on the other side. If it's something she talks about at work, it's not easily or freely, though everyone can hear it in her accent.
They don't like people of my tribe in Kinshasa; they say conflict is due to us. They don't like us because we don't marry outside our tribe, but your culture in India is the same! I have questions! We can exchange - not publicly, but...
Another secret, another face, with the same desperation to prove they belong here while being proud of somewhere else.
I don't want to have more than three or four children. My husband wants maybe five, six... After the third or fourth, I'll deal with it quietly if I have to. What else can I do?
Tell the truth, I murmur, though I know that wanting only a few children is a cultural crime and it seems easier to keep quiet about a few more things. Guilt, like children, is not borne equally among couples – the women will be blamed anyway, but better it be for infertility than murder. Or worse, bucking social norms. So sometimes the whispers are so quiet that I can barely understand them – about post-partum depression or infidelity or sorcery. These are the shameful things that the church can't celebrate with ululation, that don't bear speaking about, that you should keep within your mind for fear that the monsters without are even worse.
I currently have a high school student from my church who thinks he's ingratiated himself to me by telling me he hates his culture and language and loves slurring English. Not only is that a horrible pitch to use on a nationalistic immigrant with a fondness for good grammar, he's already in my bad books for fretting about the state of my cross-signing soul.
Can I come to your house now? When? You can see that it's late, so can I have money to go home? My foot is hurting. No, don't tell the Pastor; I just want to talk to you.
These are the whispers meant for foreigners' ears only – confiding in pain, suffering, friendship, visits, chats – for small allowances. These are likely considered subtle and utterly unique by one party, but are obviously scripted to any humanitarian aid worker. This script has been painstakingly hissed by generations who were abused by Western powers and slowly saw their fortunes changing – not by pretending strength, but by pleading for crutches. But the dialogue is, I hope, slowly being erased and rewritten by locals like Pastor, his leadership groups, our church community, my coworkers, my teammates – none of us willing to join this game of Chinese Whispers, but trying to listen hard and speak gently in the face of the often unintelligible news that reaches us.
Instead of boasting acceptable weakness and hiding real shame and fear, I hope we are trying to change the meaning of strength. Where it now means money, colour, and position, it should mean the potential for sacrificial love. Thus, a grandmother becomes a warrior; a mother, a shield; a daughter, a peacekeeper.
I'm not sure our quiet words will have any effect – they seem to echo again and again, with different eyes, different smiles, the same frustrations, the same defeated acceptance...
But then, a seed is always a secret too.
“If I may be permitted an editorial aside... we must be cautious about passing moral judgement... Surely we have learned by now that such judgements are of necessity culture-specific. Also, [that] society was under a good deal of pressure, demographic and otherwise, and was subject to factors from which we ourselves are happily more free. Our job is not to censure but to understand... [N]o empire imposed by force or otherwise has ever been without this feature: control of the indigenous by members of their own group.”
- Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid's Tale
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At the risk of sounding desperate - PLEASE WRITE TO ME!