TH #13 Comfort in the Fight

Towards Home #13

Comfort in the Fight

February, 2004

There’s danger in complacency and comfort in the fight.
- Jonatha Brooke, “Steady Pull”

Lately I have been watching a lot of “Oprah.” Despite six years in Thailand, I still have not picked up the Buddhist meditation habit, which I imagine would be a good way to start each day. A dose of Oprah’s self-help disposition as I water the plants and pack up my laptop seems to do the trick (Dr. Phil and celebrity guests like Celine Dion aside). Her message of “take care of yourself first” feels good and helps me be realistic as I create my daily to-do lists, but I get frustrated with the apolitical way the show tends to deal with issues.

When I flip the channel to the morning news, BBC is full of politics and doom: earthquakes in Iran and Morocco, SARS and then bird flu in Asia, ongoing trouble in the Middle East, chaos in Haiti. I worry about such things, and combined with the daily engagement with similar political issues in Burma, “taking care of myself” becomes fraught with complex decisions. Ultimately, those decisions come down to summoning the energy to re-engage in my work. The personal and political growth that comes from working on human rights and Burma has become a habit of sorts, or an addiction. The fight to grow and learn, to effectively work with people creating a better society in Burma brings more comfort than any feel-good Oprah message.

Still, taking a break occasionally does me some good and provides some balance. Visa-runs offer me an occasional break from life in Thailand, or at least a change of pace. Thai immigration laws do not allow me to stay in the country for more than a couple of months at a time – only one month, in fact, unless I apply for a visa at a Thai embassy. I am writing part of this newsletter from a guesthouse in Dhaka, Bangladesh where I have come to apply for a 3-month Thai visa. While here, I am conducting a short workshop on Transitional Justice and seeing a Bangladeshi friend, Aaref, whom I knew when we both lived in Texas 10+ years ago.

Bangladesh does not bring the expected balance; in fact, it throws off my equilibrium. I do not have the language to chat up store clerks and taxi drivers like I can in Thailand. However, I am able to get a limited sense of life here from Aaref and his English-speaking friends as well as my Burmese friends and colleagues. Their worlds seem to have very little in common with each other and very little to do with the majority of Bangladeshis that I see, except perhaps that they all battle the same Dhaka traffic. Four scenes from Dhaka highlight the contrasts:

Scene # 1

Off the balcony of my guest house, the serene view of Banani Lake belies the surrounding poverty. Beyond the security wall that protects the guest house, on the bank of the lake, a slum community has built makeshift shelters. Rickshaws, which I assume is how many of the men make their living, pepper the compound. Bamboo poles strap together the walls and roofs of corrugated metal creating the ramshackle shelters. Large stones weigh down the roofs to keep them from blowing off. Women in colorful saris and head scarves squat in the dirt over pots, cooking on open fires outside the shacks.

Scene #2

I close the window on that view and leave the guest house with my friend Aaref to have a home-cooked meal at his friend’s middle class flat. The maid unlocks the security gate as we come and go. From there, we go to meet Aaref’s family friend, an old British-educated man who has retired with a hefty salary from the British-American Tobacco Company. We first go for a stroll in a crowded local park, landscaped with beautiful flower beds and health tips in English, such as “Walking 20 minutes per day reduces heart disease!” A young Bangladeshi man follows us the entire time. We rule out that he is with the intelligence service (his lack of discretion excludes that possibility, unless he was very poorly trained), and conclude that he probably comes from a village and has rarely seen a white-skinned foreigner. We are people from two entirely different worlds clashing with fear and suspicion in a public space in the middle of Dhaka. From the park, the three of us go to drink Gin & Tonics at the bar of the 5-star hotel that Aaref, an architect, has designed.

Scene #3

Later in the week, I interview an underground journalist from Burma, a man who brings information about human rights violations and military activity out of Burma to Bangladesh under the guise of a merchant. Our discussion centers on a 1967 massacre in the regional capital of Sitwe, where starving residents demanded access to rice that was being prepared for export and government profit. The military opened fire on the protestors then buried the bodies of the dead in a mass grave. This journalist does not pay attention to the slum communities around Banani Lake, and he does not take note of the striking contrast between the five-star hotel in close proximity to such poverty. For him and his colleagues, Bangladesh is background, a comparatively safe place from which to focus their work on Burma.

Scene #4

Coming in from my visits each day, I watch coverage of the Democratic primaries in the U.S. on CNN and BBC. All the leading candidates, but especially John Kerry (and of course the long-shot Kucinich) talk about values that resonate with me – international cooperation, social tolerance, economic and social justice. The next story on CNN shows gay couples in Massachusetts celebrating a law upholding their right to love whom they want to love and to have their relationships sanctioned by the State. Cut to a bitter President Bush threatening a hateful constitutional amendment to override the Massachusetts law. (A month later, back in Chiang Mai, the stakes are raised with gay weddings in San Francisco and a direct call from Bush for the amendment.)

I cannot stretch my imagination far enough to understand our president’s world. If he were not real, and if he were not so powerful, I would think he was a caricature of an ignorant, hateful, self-interested, deluded – and so, dangerous – politician. How do we make sense of worlds lived so differently? How do we break down barriers under the current political situation where, like coming across the Bangladeshi villager in the park writ large, encounters between two worlds, two realities, are entered into with suspicion and fear rather than curiosity and tolerance? While I was in Bangladesh, I was reading Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being. His character, Tereza, provides some insight into how I try to address these barriers created by seemingly unanswerable questions:

And even if various parts of her body began to grow and shrink and Tereza no longer looked like herself, would she still be herself, would she still be Tereza?

Of course. Even if Tereza were completely unlike Tereza, her soul inside her would be the same and look on in amazement at what was happening to her body.

Then what was the relationship between Tereza and her body? Had her body the right to call itself Tereza? And if not, then what did the name refer to? Merely something incorporeal, intangible?

(These are questions that had been going through Tereza’s head since she was a child. Indeed, the only truly serious questions are ones that even a child can formulate. Only the most naïve questions are truly serious. They are the questions with no answers. A question with no answer is a barrier that cannot be breached. In other words, it is questions with no answers that set the limits of human possibilities, describe the boundaries of human existence.)

I like the idea that we develop “core questions” in childhood, which I think could also be described alternatively as “personality.” We come to view these core questions as common sense and do not recognize the limits they set on how we understand our surroundings, restricting the range of questions we ask about the world. Our personalities develop through a combination of nature (genetics) and nurture (our surroundings). How much different would my personality be if my parents had raised me in Kenya rather than Indiana? Would my life have taken an entirely different direction if I had been adopted and raised in an Eskimo family? Would my core questions be the same?

Anthropology 101 teaches how the Inuit language has a dozen or more words for snow. Franz Fanon railed in The Wretched of the Earth against the mentality that limited the consciousness of colonized people about potential forms of revolution and liberation, limited their imagination. Those limits also inhibit our ability to understand other people, to imagine life from their perspective. Because our core questions are so fundamental to us, they seem inherent rather than chosen. We are not aware of how they have developed over time, as if they have just always been, so they seem “normal.” All nature, no nurture. Thus, people with other core questions, issues, and world views seem odd, different, and simply wrong. An Inuit-speaker learning English must wonder at the lack of precision in the word “snow.” Apolitical, first-time readers of Fanon in Kenya might have shivered to think about a society free of a white overlord and feared their neighbors who began preaching African self-sufficiency.

Even if I had the language to speak with my neighbors by Banani Lake, what would I ask them about? Stereotypes color my assumptions about their lives and daily concerns, and I want to ask them questions about the complex politics of poverty. The questions going through my head since I was a child have been about right and wrong. Although at nine- and ten-years-old, the questions were naïve and childish, they have developed nuance and sophistication through experience and education. My core childhood questions also deal with a curiosity about the world outside my own, questions that I remember Mom encouraging. One of the two dozen photos from my past lives on my bedroom wall depicts me at ten-years-old, with Mom lying next to me on the dining room floor in front of a set of encyclopedias. We have pulled one off the shelf and are learning more about some place or issue that was new to me.

These two sets of core questions – right & wrong and curiosity about the world outside my own – create an ongoing tension that keeps me engaged. It is exciting to live inside the tension created by these two sets of questions. An open-minded approach liberalizes my view of core question #1 – right & wrong: People from Burma may view right and wrong differently than I do and have very different ideas about how to remedy a wrong. This right & wrong approach gives me an activist/social justice approach to core question #2 – engaging others: I am not interested in Burma merely for my own entertainment and curiosity, but as a means of making life better for others in one way or another. A training I conducted in Dhaka set me smack dab in the heart of that tension, a simultaneously uncomfortable and stimulating place to be.

In the training, I heard some horrendous stories of human rights abuses carried out by the Burmese military against civilians – soldiers bashing babies against trees in front of their parents, systematic rape, torture, and political imprisonment. I guess that many people react to those images by turning away, shielding their psyches, but these kinds of stories actually draw me to work with people from Burma. They allow me to learn about situations so distant from my own experiences, and they also offer me an opportunity to work for justice. At the training, we discussed the legal definitions of genocide and crimes against humanity, and we looked at possible venues for justice. I explained the challenges of international justice mechanisms like the International Criminal Court. The ICC cannot be a venue for people from Burma to gain justice because its jurisdiction extends only to the countries that have signed its statute, and the Burmese military rulers (like the U.S. government) have not. Even if a democratic government does sign on in the future, the ICC’s jurisdiction is not retroactive.

In contrast to this defeating news, I shared anecdotes from my research on Argentina and the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo there who challenged the military junta over twenty years ago. The Mothers were poorly educated, working-class housewives who were thrown into the drama of Argentinean politics because their children were targeted by the military. They grew to become key actors in the push for democracy and human rights, but two amnesty laws passed in the mid-1980s have frustrated their efforts for full justice. In 2003, a new president emerged from relative obscurity and promoted a number of judicial and military reforms. As a result, surprising new prospects for gaining justice for the 30,000 disappeared there have developed, as the amnesty laws are likely to be revoked in 2004 and military leaders may face trial. The Mothers have become a politically sophisticated force in Argentinean politics, and their persistence may see some dramatic results.

Speaking from my own experience (and I am no victim on the scale that these people are, but I have suffered my little dramas at times) I seemed a victim when there was no other way to perceive the situation but that I was wronged and there was nothing I could do about it, and no one knew or cared that I had been wronged. Empowerment for me comes with exposure, with the realization that others have suffered as well, and here is what they have done about it. The saints and heroes and leaders of my world are those, like the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, who have such creative minds that they initiate those what-to-do-about-it’s of their own accord.

The trip to Bangladesh was not always full of such heaviness. I also visited with people in their homes, drank some potent local rice wine, and enjoyed the company of people living committed lives. The people from Burma, both in Bangladesh and Thailand, remind me that there is danger in the complacency of suffering quietly, uncreatively, and great comfort, companionship, and joy in the fight.

Oprah would probably love this!