So many roiling emotions and thoughts lately about identity and the direction we need to take in the world today. The thoughts are rough and fleeting, like a cloud of bees, clarity alighting here and there, then flitting away into obfuscation, so that writing comes heavily and plodding. Several days ago I read the poem post by Madame Butterfly at Nehanda Dreams about the world’s tribes declaring pride and love in who they are, and then later her comment on my “Thunder” post, questioning the idea of race. It was a question that every non-white in the world, when subjected to the white world or other homogenous group, daily thinks about, in constant comparison to some amorphous image of perfection hovering over the psychic world.
Yesterday, as if on cue, I just happened to come across Barbara Kingsolver’s selection of essays “Small Wonder: Essays”, a last copy hidden in the corner of the bottom shelf of the tiny nature section of the Kinokuniya bookstore in downtown Tokyo. I thought the book was mainly about nature, since that is Kingsolver’s domain, but upon starting it, it became clear that this was her response to the New York tragedy, and, over time, an effort to comprehend what is happening in the world today. In the opening lines, her wounds are very fresh from the New York attack and still raw with grief and anger. I have to remind myself that her book appeared before much of what the United States is doing now took place, and that through the examples of her earlier work, I must remember that her mind is open to the minds of people in other places.
Then, today, I was watching yet another Discovery Channel documentary of one of our world’s smaller tribes, this time the Tauduram hunter gatherers of Palawan, the Philippines. In the last scene the narrator Phil Borges compares a shaman’s inability to heal a tribe member’s liver disease he had never encountered before, with the surrounding destruction of the forest. Borges wonders about the spiritual effect on these people, who until recently lived in intimate relationship with the mountain forests, of having suddenly to switch to a slash and burn economy and destroy the very forests that constituted the spirits of their ancestors.
It got me thinking about why it is that so many Native Americans lost the desire to live after the Indian Wars, and so many of them gave up after Wounded Knee, with alcoholism and domestic violence reaching epidemic proportions. I understood the sense of despair, but I couldn’t personally compare it to anything that I could empathize with. Until I thought of the New York tragedy and how Americans, and people all over the world, reacted to it. How the sense of the world coming to an end engulfed us all and wrought shock and despair. That must be how it felt, and still feels, to the Native Americans, their world toppled by an abrupt (if seen from their 10,000 or more years of history) and violent attack.
In addition the values that the Europeans brought with them, the very de-personification of the Land, of killing the spirits and gods as if the Land could be anything without them, must have shattered the foundations of what constituted their understanding of the world. What the Europeans brought forced them to adopt a world view in direct opposition to all that was true and right, in comparison almost as if a Christian were coerced into accepting the Antichrist as their god.
Madame Butterfly’s exclamation of “amandhla!” perhaps provides a glimmer of hope, a tiny first step for people around the world reclaiming their heritage and standing up to put the Christian god back in its place, as one among many in the pantheon. With her question of how we might understand race, I claim that we are now delving into something new. The old adages and proclamations need to be redefined, and a new understanding of what the human race is and how it needs to name itself demands discussion. People are mixing among themselves all around the world… the distances are foreshortened. It no longer means everything to claim you are American or I am German or she is Japanese or he is Nigerian. The borders are blurred.
So we are something new. The inability to clearly enunciate what this is illustrates just how new the changes are. Many people deny it and those who do recognize that all aspects of our relationship to ourselves, to each other, and to the planet are evolving, often react with anger and violence, out of fear.
But we are changing. And we must adapt. We must clear our minds of cobwebs and address the mounting problems that are overtaking the world. And we must learn to redefine what we are, once and for all ridding ourselves of the ignorance and intolerance that have plagued our history since we first formed societies. This is the new and fearsome frontier, blessed with peace and prosperity if we can truly learn from our mistakes.
Otherwise…
Laughing Knees 
3 replies on “The New Tide”
“This must be the feeliing that refugees and immigrants carry silently within themselves and which cannot be fathomed by those who have lived in one place a long time. Dislocation is a visceral thing. from cassndra’s post on Preserving Placeâ€
i recognize in the most profound way, the sense of grief and mourning i carry across the ocean to where i lay my head. the people i see, or chose not to see. the hands i let guide me, and those i push away. its this unacknowledged grief in my opinion that causes our bodies to break apart and illness has become rampant.
where i’m from, land tenure is a pertinent issue to most. infact, revolts were staged against the british because of it. until i read your post, i did think the whole deal of who owns what land was because of control. i’m not sure it is so anymore. just like the native americans, people who were indigenous to the land recognised the inter-relationship they as the custodians of the land had with the plants, the animals, and the people they shared the space with. in my opinion, once that inter-relationship is no longer held in the highest of esteem, then the desire to heal and make whole is discared.
and, you are right, this is an important time in the world. the tide is shifting and the parameters of how we view ourselves in relation to others demands we come up with tolerance, peace and love.
the old ways are of no importance.
this is a cool book to read:
The Healing Wisdom of Africa: Finding Life Purpose Through Nature, Ritual, and Community by Malidoma Patrice Some
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Sometimes it is so clear how the demographics of the internet and communications work. While I appreciate and very much admire and like a lot of the people who come to visit my site, and the discussions that ensue are always exciting and educational, I am nevertheless continually disappointed that more people outside the western world, people who are not white, who speak languages other than English, who see thiings from a point of view unrelated to Europe or America, very rarely, if ever, stop by to take a look around, let alone join in the discussions.
This is to be expected, especially because I myself am writing here in English and much of what I write about centers around the English-speaking, Eurocentric world. I speak and write Japanese and German, too, but haven’t yet figured out how to incorporate all three languages without spending an inordinate amount of time working on the blog. Of those people who stop by my site who are not from the west, such as my Japanese students, invariably they are intimidated by the language and even by a way of discussing issues completely alien to their way of speaking with one another.
Another probelm with including these people in the discussions, is the technology itself. Most people in the world just don’t have the means to buy the equipment needed or even know how to use it. Just this gap alone already excludes a huge portion of the world’s population. Why, for instance, don’t I have readers from India or Singapore or the Philippines, places where use of English is widespread?
Just as interesting as what is being said, is what is not being said. When I write about the beauty of a place or simple human interaction or a concrete experience, readers respond. If I write about the spiritual or contextual issues of being non-white or being caught between cultures or being a male, the responses are almost non-existent. I think this is not because there aren’t people who are interested in these subjects, but that my readership in general cannot relate to the topics. I think this is an example of who is using the internet and blogging and who isn’t.
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Interesting. I used to get a few visitors from Singapore and Indonesia and the Phillipines, but I knew them from elsewhere on the net… not through blogging. They are very connected, however; but perhaps reading English language blogs isn’t something which has or will ever catch on among everyone who has great facility with the language.
As for the reply to various topics, I find it hard to respond to much of your writing ‘about place’ beyond an aesthetic appreciation of your eloquence because I’ve always lived in a kind of self-imposed exile, and never learned attachment to any location. After nine years here, for example, I know my way around and love very deeply what I see, but it isn’t, in any stretch of the imagination, home. I can’t picture what such a place would look like.
You, of course, offer a different experience from, say, others who write with great nostalgia about the places and the meanings of which they have internalised since childhood, so I grasp your words where I lose theirs. But I mostly don’t feel able to say anything of value in reply beyond, “Wow, that was beautifully written.”
Of course, I don’t know jack about being non-white, either. But I think response to particular blog posts is also a matter of reader mood, and whether someone has already responded.
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