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Strangers in a strange land

BEST OF OFF THE SHELF (SO FAR)
2004 Best of Off the Shelf

Just as Texans are told to remember the Alamo, Jews are told to remember the Holocaust. But as David Bezmozgis suggests in Natasha and Other Stories, maybe it’s time for Jews to remember that they’ve also wandered through the desert and trekked across international waters.


(Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

To read Laura Nathan’s interview with David Bezmozgis about Natasha and Other Stories, please click here.

What does it mean to be a Jew? What defines a “good” Jew? Is one’s Judaism something that is performed through active participation in certain rituals and religious services? Or can Jewish identity be proven simply by referring to oneself as a Jew?

In a sense, the debate over Jewish identity is as old as the Torah. One could say debating Jewishness is part of being Jewish. But the increasing cosmopolitanism, refugee flows, and globalization that have characterized the last half-century have left Jewish communities around the globe grappling with these questions in a new context. As David Bezmozgis demonstrates in his debut short-story collection Natasha and Other Stories, the answers, when they are reached, are hardly final — or universal.

For the 320,000 Soviet Jews who fled the U.S.S.R between 1960 and 1989 to escape persecution, the debate over what constitutes Jewish identity is especially pronounced as refugees like Bezmozgis and his family cautiously — and somewhat naively — navigate the newfound ability to practice their religion freely. Only seven years old when his family left Riga, Latvia, for Toronto in 1980, Bezmozgis offers an intoxicating exploration of the poignant arguments about Jewishness among émigré communities, using his own experiences as a guide. Having just emigrated from Riga to Toronto at the age of seven, when the book begins, Mark Berman, the narrator in each of the seven stories, has stolen part of his author’s biography.

In Natasha, Mark tells the story of his family: himself, his mother Bella, and his father Roman, as the Bermans — like those making the transition from closeting their queerness to “coming out” — learn how to live the once persecuted identity publicly, openly, and as part of a community. In the Soviet Union, saying “I am a Jew” affirmed one’s Judaism. But in Toronto, the Bermans’ relationships to Judaism — and the Jewish community — are complicated by the tendency of some North American Jews to expect — even require — more than a moniker to substantiate Jewish identity. The family discovers that they must reconcile conflicting desires in order to remember the past, practice Judaism on their own terms, and assimilate into the North American Jewry.

Bezmozgis depicts North American Jews, meanwhile, as needing to balance the freedoms they’ve taken for granted with those previously denied to their brethren. What they’re all left with is a community that simultaneously demands definition and refuses certain definitions — and the people who embody them.

The metamorphosis

The death of a neighbor’s dog. The labor of establishing a clientele for an émigré’s new massage business. The visit of a Soviet weightlifter. A fight on Holocaust Remembrance Day. Sexual encounters with a cousin. The quest for knowledge about a great Jewish American boxer. A controversy at a Jewish old folk’s home when one man’s death leaves his male partner to fend for himself in a community of opportunists.

In the course of a full novel, these events might seem pedestrian. But without intervening chapters to denote the passage of time and make the process of change seem less acute, Bezmozgis’ seven stories demonstrate that identity is a work-in-progress. Or as L.A. Weekly columnist Brendan Bernhard puts it, “mysterious and seemingly random.” Although Mark participates in and narrates each story, one might not know that these stories bear connection to one another if not for the recurring Berman name. A mere first-grader when the book begins, Mark is in middle school by the fourth story — “An Animal to the Memory” — and is a sexually active 16-year-old just one story later in “Natasha.” Although Bezmozgis leaves us in the dark about Mark’s exact age at the book’s conclusion, he assures us that the narrator has matured considerably, exhibiting a thirst for knowledge and embracing the responsibilities of work, family, history, and Judaism.

Given Mark’s evolution over the course of Bezmozgis’ stories, one can’t help but read Natasha as a coming-of-age narrative — one at times reminiscent of J.D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye, Philip Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint, and Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita.

But Bezmozgis sets his coming-of-age narrative apart by complicating the common experiences of adolescence with the struggles of migration, loss, and Jewish identity. As we come to realize, Mark isn’t the only one to come of age in Natasha. In many ways, immigration is a form of rebirth, an event that puts adults back at square one and forces them to unlearn every cultural custom and norm that they internalized in their homeland over the years.

Children, however, tend to be more malleable, making the changes they undergo seem less drastic. Or perhaps their metamorphosis just seems inevitable, given the usual pitfalls of adolescence. This, of course, could lead one to expect that an émigré child would assimilate more easily than an adult. But as Natasha surmises, it isn’t that simple.

For Bezmozgis, an émigré’s life cannot be divided into two simple categories of pre- and post-Soviet life, religious persecution and religious freedom. Rather, the author shows destruction stalking each individual stage of change as each story ends with a form of death: The death of the neighbor’s dog. The disposing of an unwanted, non-kosher apple cake that denotes a bond between the Soviet Jews and the Canadian Jews. The death of dreams and the defeat of the “strongest man in the world.” The death of millions of Jews and the death of one individual’s understanding of what it means to be a Jew. The death of an identity associated with drugs, sex, and incestuous relationships. The death of a grandparent and the death of a stranger whose only relationship to Mark is a shared enthusiasm for a legendary Jewish boxer. The death of an ostensibly gay elderly man, the death of uncertainty over what it means to be a Jew. Occurring so frequently in Natasha, death and drastic change become predictable rites of passage.

With death ever-present as Mark comes of age, Judaism plays a more defining role in his identity, demonstrating that it is possible to keep vestiges of his past alive in his present. From his parents and their contemporaries — people who fear assimilation after living the majority of their lives in the Soviet Union — Mark learns that he can’t simply discard history. Or rather, he can’t discard the history his parents want for him, the religious freedom that became the cause for sacrificing everything in moving to a new land. Meanwhile, those who seek to erase the Bermans’ history and redefine Judaism for them reinforce the past the family fled. The feelings of inadequacy and invisibility that their critics inspire remind the Bermans that the past — their past — will always be with them.

Are you a good Jew or a bad Jew?

Coming to Canada with nothing but their history and their religion, as documented on their emigration papers, the Bermans initially milk their Jewish identity for all it’s worth. Judaism, after all, seems to be their only currency of any value, their only connection to others who don’t speak their language or understand their cultural idiosyncrasies.

As Mark explains: “This was 1983, and as Russian Jews, recent immigrants, and political refugees, we were still a cause. We had good PR. We could trade on our history … My mother … believed that [my father’s] strongest selling point [as a massage therapist] was his status as a Soviet refugee. The most important appeal, she said, was to guilt and empathy. That would get them in the door.”

Heeding this advice rather than appealing to the poor Soviet émigré community, Roman looks to Canadian Jews to help build his clientele. After all, Canadian Jews are privileged. They know people. And they know what it means to be Jewish.

Unfortunately, they don’t fully grasp what it means to be persecuted for being Jewish.

“The rabbi,” for instance, “was supposed to be particularly sympathetic to the plight of the Russian Jews,” Mark suggests. “To improve his chances [of getting the rabbi to help him establish a clientele], my father brought me along.”

Roman could of course prove his Jewishness simply by pointing to his emigration papers. But because Mark also attends Hebrew school and can speak very rudimentary Hebrew, Roman has living, breathing proof that the Bermans are not just Jews, but good Jews — Jews who make their religion a priority and consequently, are deserving of help.

But the rabbi doesn’t accept the “Jew card.” As Mark says upon leaving the synagogue: “Fifteen minutes after going in, we were back out on the street … and on our way home. For our trouble we had five dollars and the business card of a man who would print my father’s flyers at a cost.”

Given Mark’s tone, the Bermans seem to have naively believed that the sympathy of Canadian Jews would improve their lot and help them fit right in. But a combination of sympathy and guilt cannot lay the groundwork for an equal relationship between two peoples, particularly of such contrasting backgrounds.

In the story “Roman Berman, Massage Therapist,” this becomes increasingly evident through the Bermans’ interaction with the Kornblums, a Jewish couple that invites them to Shabbat dinner. One might assume that the Kornblums are simply making a kind gesture, but their intentions seem slightly selfish, more imbued with sympathy than empathy, as they try to play the part of model Jews.

This is evident when Rhonda Kornblum returns the entire apple cake that the Bermans bring to dinner. Explaining to the Bermans that “although they sometimes took the kids to McDonald’s, they [keep] kosher at home,” Rhonda makes Bella feel inadequate. The reader, meanwhile, can’t help but question this qualification. Why do the Kornblums make exceptions for McDonald’s and for their own kosher-raised children while refusing to make exceptions for Soviet Jews who never had the privilege of keeping kosher? Why don’t the Kornblums just keep the cake and throw it away rather than making their guests feel inferior?

The Kornblums, it seems, are a reminder that established Jews may manipulate newcomers’ pleas for pity to make themselves feel that they are “good Jews.” In other words, marketing one’s Jewishness may gain one access into the Jewish community; it may even earn a dinner invitation or a few minutes of the rabbi’s time. But it can never guarantee genuine, unmotivated inclusion. Perhaps at best, it can ensure a place on the margins, as the disparity between the Jewish émigré experience and the Canadian (read: privileged, un-persecuted) experience undermines the inclusiveness that the community prides itself on.

All for one and one for all: Memories of suffering

Telling the couples “what an honor it was to have them at his house,” Dr. Kornblum reveals that he and his wife have been trying to help Soviet Jews “for years” and “If it wasn’t too personal, he wanted to know how bad it really was.” After hearing their stories, Kornblum takes out a family photo album and makes a point of identifying each person killed by the Nazis.

We see this concerted effort to remember the Holocaust not just at the Kornblums’ but also when Mark fights with another student on Holocaust Remembrance Day in “An Animal to the Memory.” Ironically, Mark’s parents have sent him to a Jewish school to “learn what it means to be a Jew.” But when the rabbi — the son of a Holocaust survivor — tells Mark that even the Nazis wouldn’t do what he did, he implies that Mark hasn’t fulfilled his parents’ objective. Making Mark repeatedly yell, “I’m a Jew,” the rabbi replies nonchalantly, “Now maybe you understand what it is to be a Jew.”

But does he? Do we? Perhaps more than any other story in Natasha, this one concludes with more questions than answers. That is, we know there’s some connection between being a Jew and remembering the Holocaust. But the inability to pinpoint this connection is something with which Bezmozgis takes issue.

You can’t help but wonder why the Holocaust is treated as the end-all-be-all of Jewish identity throughout a book that is predominately about the Bermans, who never discuss their connection to the Holocaust. Pointedly, whenever Bezmozgis puts Soviet Jews in the same room with non-Soviet Jews, the Holocaust — rather than the countless Jews who died under Stalin or subsequent Soviet regimes — becomes the rallying point for Jewish identity. Those whose connection to persecuted Judaism derives from some other epoch tend to be treated as outsiders.

In fact, Natasha questions whether North American Jews are capable of articulating a shared history based on anything other than the Holocaust and its assault on their collective identity. The reader — at least this reader — can’t help but wonder: As North American Jews belabor this epoch more than the rest, do they disregard their own individuality and the potential of the Jewish community to forge a collective identity that is more true to the diverse experiences and memories of its members? And by focusing their energy on remembering a specific past, might they end up forgetting, overlooking, or trivializing something occurring in the near-present?

The problem, as we learn through the Bermans, is that the Holocaust isn’t the only thing Jews must remember in order to retain a sense of who they were and who they are becoming. Looking backward to a specific epoch — one that some members of a given community might not identify with — does not necessarily hold the answers for defining shared identity. For as Mark learns in “Minyan,” only empathy — genuinely and unselfishly connecting with and relating to other people for an extended period of time — can begin to ensure membership in the Jewish community. Easier said than done.

Death becomes them

Mark comes to realize this through the death of Itzik, a man who has been living in a Jewish old folk’s home. When Itzik’s death leaves Herschel — the man believed to have been his lover — alone in their apartment, hordes of people vie to move in and displace the bereft partner. Suddenly, Zalman (the man who runs the building and organizes weekly religious services) finds people he never met before, people who have never attended religious services, appealing to him for help. They go out of their way to convince him that they are “good Jews,” better than Herschel. In fact, whereas Zalman typically struggles to find ten Jewish men to form a minyan at religious services, more than 20 men attend services the Saturday following Itzik’s funeral. “Everyone [making] an effort at making an effort …” Mark recalls. “Voices battled for distinction.”

Here history is simultaneously relevant and irrelevant in defining Judaism. That is, the opportunists believe they’re Jews because their ancestors were. But they want Zalman to disregard who they personally have been in the past — Jews who have never bothered to attend religious services — and embrace them for who they promise to be in their moment of desperation.

One might expect Zalman, who was never a fan of Herschel, Itzik, or their queer bond, to accept the “good Jew” card, to privilege imagined history over active, selfless participation in the Jewish community. But Zalman’s explanation as to why he will allow Herschel to stay is telling about the myth of the “good Jew” and the futility of bartering Judaism:

Here the only question is Jew or not. And now I am asked by people who never stepped into a synagogue to do them a favor. They all have friends, relatives who need an apartment. Each and every one a good Jew. Promises left and right about how they will come to the synagogue. I’ve heard these promises before. And they say, “With so many good Jews who need apartments, why should Herschel be allowed to stay?” This is not my concern. My concern is ten Jewish men. If you want 10 Jewish saints, good luck … They should know I don’t put a Jew who comes to synagogue in the street. Homosexuals, murderers, liars, and thieves — I take them all. Without them we would never have a minyan.

Ironically, in casting himself as non-judgmental, Zalman, by equating gays with criminals and other immoral types, implies that some forms of morality — and sexual preferences — are inferior to others, even within the Jewish community.

At best, then, Bezmozgis leaves us with an open-ended final answer in the final pages of Natasha. That is, attempting to articulate a more coherent, more universal definition of Jewish identity — or any identity category, for that matter — only raises more questions. Sure, we can conclude that being a “good Jew” is less productive for the community than simply being a Jew on one’s own terms and showing up to ensure that the community lives on. But inevitably it’s impossible to call oneself a Jew and avoid being scrutinized by others who consider themselves more Jewish as they fall back on their own understanding of what it means to be a Jew.

Maybe the question we should be asking, then, isn’t what it means to be a Jew. Perhaps it’s time instead to ask why we as individuals and sub-communities define our shared identity in particular ways. For instance, why does being a Jew mean you have to remember the Holocaust above all other instances of anti-Semitism and all other manifestations of community and tradition? And how does the way that we identify ourselves in comparison to others impact the constitution of the Jewish community by creating divides within?

Maybe it’s time to acknowledge that, on some level, we’re all strangers living in a strange land — even if our passports suggest otherwise.

To read Laura Nathan’s interview with David Bezmozgis about Natasha, click here.

STORY INDEX

BOOKS >
Order through Powells.com, and a portion of the sale goes to InTheFray to defray publishing costs

Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger
URL: http://www.powells.com/cgi-bin/partner?partner_id=28164&cgi=product&isbn=0316769177

Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
URL: http://www.powells.com/cgi-bin/partner?partner_id=28164&cgi=product&isbn=0679723161

Natasha and Other Stories by David Bezmozgis
URL: http://www.powells.com/cgi-bin/partner?partner_id=28164&cgi=product&isbn=0374281416

Portnoy’s Complaint by Philip Roth
URL: http://www.powells.com/cgi-bin/partner?partner_id=28164&cgi=product&isbn=0679756450

HISTORY >

Operation Exodus
URL: http://www.jewishgates.com/file.asp?File_ID

World Jewry: Ethiopian Jewry and Soviet Jewry
URL: http://www.rac.org/issues/issuewj.html

REVIEWS >

“One man shock-and-awe” by Chris Nutall-Smith
URL: http://www.quillandquire.com/authors/profile.cfm?article_id=5795

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Interviews

Writing home

2004 Best of Off the Shelf

A conversation with David Bezmozgis concerning Natasha and Other Stories.


Recently, InTheFray Editor Laura Nathan interviewed David Bezmozgis about his debut collection of short stories, Natasha and Other Stories. Their conversation — and Bezmozgis’ thoughts on “home,” what it means to be a Jew, and writing — follows:

The interviewer: Laura Nathan, InTheFray Editor
The interviewee: David Bezmozgis, author, Natasha and Other Stories

Though the stories in Natasha are fictional, the similarities between the Bermans’ life and your own suggest that writing this must have been a very personal experience — one that you seem to be somewhat critical of. Tell me a little bit about what inspired you to write Natasha.

I wrote Natasha because I had wanted for a very long time to write about my community. As far as I knew there had been nothing written about the Soviet Jewish immigration in English – though there had been books in Russian and, I believe, Hebrew. As a reader of American Jewish fiction, I had seen previous generations of Jewish immigrants treated and, inspired by that, wished to do the same for my own community.

As for being “somewhat critical,” I am “somewhat critical” about everything. But the distinction, perhaps unintended on your part, between “somewhat critical” and “critical” is an important one. In the totality of the immigrant experience there are things to both criticize and admire. As with any experience — if observed honestly.

Natasha repeatedly comes back to the centrality of the Holocaust in defining what it means to be a Jew. Why do you think this is the case, and what are the dangers (if any) of this tendency? Also, as an emigrant, is this a phenomenon that you’ve found to be unique to North America?

The Holocaust is an undeniable part of Jewish identity. To think otherwise is naïve and to suggest that it could or should be otherwise is offensive. However, the Holocaust is hardly the only thing that defines Jewish experience. There is, obviously, much more. We are talking here of a people who have a history of several millenia and who have in many ways influenced Western thought and culture.

Now as for why the Holocaust and the Second World War feature in Natasha I think you need to understand the Russian (Latvian) Jewish experience. Latvian Jews (and Western Russian Jews) suffered, like most Eastern European Jews, from the Nazis. Those who did not evacuate or join the Red Army were exterminated. And those who evacuated lived in the eastern depths of Russia, sent their sons and husbands to the front, and — at the war’s conclusion — returned home to find that home no longer existed. This happened only 60 years ago. These people are still alive. The experience is central to who they are. How could is be otherwise? The experience (if only of the Great Patriotic War) was made central to the education of their children. To this day, speaking to my grandfather or his friends, talk of the war is common. It has marked them permanently.

As for dangers of this tendency to invoke the war and the Holocaust — I think any gratuitous invocation is dangerous. But I think just as dangerous is any reactionary tendency to begrudge these people the right to speak about their past.

Twenty-four years after emigrating from the Soviet Union, do you find that you have fully assimilated into the North American Jewish community, or do you still feel like an outsider at times?

Your word “fully” presupposes a lot. As much as possible, the local Jewish communities invited the Russian Jews to assimilate. I think “full” assimilation is not possible. I don’t think most Russians wanted to assimilate “fully” because that would entail abandoning their Russian past — a past which incorporates culture, language, history. So, as far as I know, most Russian immigrants of my parents’ generation keep as their intimate friends other Russian immigrants. But they have, to various degrees embraced the North American lifestyle. They now eat more salads and use less butter.

As for my “embrace” of Judaism and Jewishness, I have no doubt that by living in North America my identity as a Jew is much stronger and more informed. But as for “full assimilation” I don’t think I have the temperament to assimilate fully into anything. I would argue that this is common to most writers and artists. Some amount of objectivity is probably genetically programmed.

Fighting, violence, and aggression play an important role in Natasha. Tell me a little bit about what inspired your interest in this sort of sadism and why it plays such an import role in your stories.

Sadism?

As a Russian-turn-Canadian who has now resettled in California, do you find that there are differences between Jewish communities in Canada and those in the United States? If so, what are those differences?

Well, I no longer live in California, though I did live there for five years. I now live in Toronto where I find no discernible difference between American and Canadian Jews. I am told that the Canadian version is slightly more conservative in religion and politics. This may be true. But on the whole, communities of middle class Jews are the same. And communities of lower class Jews are probably also the same. The distinction that interests me is one of class, not nationality.

The émigré experience — that sense of loss of home and the quest for a new identity — in Natasha is, of course, centered around the Jewish Soviet émigré experience, but many of Mark’s experiences seem to extend beyond the struggles with religious identity. How, if at all, might your stories be read by other (non-Soviet/non-Jewish) émigrés, by other people who are struggling to discover a sense of belonging in a place that, at times, feels nothing like home?

With only two exceptions — “An Animal to the Memory” and “Minyan” — I think all of the stories are secular. Meaning, in order to understand them you require no background in Judaism as a religion. I live a secular life. My concerns, almost exclusively, are secular concerns. I think the stories reflect this. Though set in the Russian community, the stories are mostly about basic struggles – get work, learn a language, find and survive love. I think these are things common to all immigrants and, really, most people. These are not stories of existential conflict; they deal instead with a pursuit of concrete things. Generally, I am not interested in existential conflict (although I just finished reading a book called Rituals by Cees Nooteboom which was exceptional.)

Throughout Natasha you allude to the question of what it means to a Jew. With all of your experience as an émigré and a writer, what do you think it means to be a Jew? How do you define Jewish identity? And do you think that definition can ever be generalized or applied to the Jewish community as a whole? Why or why not?

… Some of the stories certainly deal with is the question of what it means to be a Jew. As for what a Jew is, I always think of the answer Rabbi Hillel gave in response to a similar question. The question was posed by gentile and I believe he asked if Rabbi Hillel could teach him the whole Torah while standing on one foot. (Already a good story, and even Jewish in its comic irony.) Hillel said: That which is hateful to you, do not do to your neighbor. That is the whole Torah; the rest is commentary. Go learn.”

To my understanding, then, to be a Jew involves not hurting others and learning perpetually.

Throughout Natasha you allude to the way in which people barter Judaism, the way in which they say things like “I’m a Jew,” or “I’m a good Jew,” to get ahead or to get what they need. When you allude to this tendency, you seem to do so with both an emphasis on the necessity of doing so for the new immigrant and with a critical eye toward opportunists. Would you mind elaborating a little on how you think this sort of behavior implicates the formation of a community, Jewish or otherwise, and what it says about the question of what it means to be a Jew?

People barter all the time. Life is a series of power transactions. This is not limited to Jews. If people were patient with one another and understood one another it would be different. (See above for Rabbi Hillel.) But this will never happen. The only compensation for the pain is if one can look at all of this with some level of objectivity and accept that the misunderstandings are often what make life interesting. That these misunderstandings are indeed the conflict which writers term “conflict.”

What are you working on now? Do you think that you’ll continue to write about the émigré experience, or do you see yourself moving onto other matters?

I am working on a novel. Though I am reticent to say to much, the subject matter is related to Natasha. I think I will continue to write about my particular émigré experience. Or, at least, this particular community. I will probably write about other things as well — though perhaps more in film than prose.

STORY INDEX

CONTRIBUTOR >

The interviewer
Laura Nathan, InTheFray Editor

BOOKS >
Order through Powells.com, and a portion of the sale goes to InTheFray to defray publishing costs

Natasha and Other Stories by David Bezmozgis
URL: http://www.powells.com/cgi-bin/biblio?inkey=62-0374281416-0
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Commentary

Shanghai spectacle

Being a female gym rat in China isn’t as easy as it looks. Part two of a three-part series.


I clench my gloved palms around the cold serrated steel bar, at either end of which sit several rubberized 5, 10, and 20 kilogram plates. My knees bent, I attempt to deadlift the weight by pulling the bar over my knees and straightening my back. As I prepare for lift-off, I try to ignore the gawking observers to my left. I suppose lifting over 80 kilograms (176 pounds), for a girl weighing less than two-thirds of that, is generally considered no small feat in China or elsewhere. But the fact that I am in Shanghai makes weightlifting a uniquely challenging experience.

When I joined the First (phonetically translated into Fei Si Te) Fitness Center near my apartment in Shanghai’s Yangpu District, I was not quite prepared for the adjustment process I would have to undergo: an abrupt introduction to the cultural gaps between Chinese and Western concepts of exercise and personal space.

My initiation into the Fei Si Te community brought me the dubious privilege of celebrity status, me being 1) a small-framed Chinese-American female, and 2) an avid weightlifter with an admittedly odd penchant for lifting dumbbells and barbells that are about as big as I am. Thus, not only was I upsetting conventional notions of femininity, but I was also doing so in a booming post-Communist metropolis whose youth culture is hovering precariously somewhere between Maoist puritanism and Britney Spears. So I guess I shouldn’t feel surprised that I attracted stares of fascination mixed with horror and fear as I squatted close to twice my body weight. Not that my weightlifting didn’t draw surprise from male bystanders back in the United States, but at Fei Si Te , the blatant shock plainly smeared on the faces of exercisers was a Shanghai specialty, and months would pass until they began gradually to accept me as simply a grotesque fixture at the gym.

Alone in the crowd

To complicate matters, Fei Si Te, like many new enterprises in Shanghai, is hopelessly over-invested and over-staffed. Though it is nice having an entire gym all to oneself in the afternoon, it is slightly unnerving to be the only other animate object in the cavernous space besides three trainers and the custodian, all uniformed in pert warm-up suits.

On busier days, the five of us are joined by several 30-something ladies who maniacally monopolize every sit-up bench. As I push around the freeweights, the custodian meticulously wipes clean all the cheaply manufactured equipment with pleather trimmings that manage to peel despite hardly being used, and the trainers idle in the 10-foot radius around the air-conditioner, or do a few random chin-ups. They often have nothing to do but watch the exercisers. Though they sometimes offer me advice on good form, which I appreciate, they are more eager to engage the American in conversation about powerlifting techniques, protein powders, bodybuilding contests, and other aspects of fitness culture in the United States of which Chinese are just beginning to catch on and be mass marketed to.

On occasion, a trainer or a bold male bystander has been known to reaffirm his masculinity by jumping in between sets and attempting to throw my barbell around with strenuously displayed ease. I try to warn people against jumping under heavy weights if they have no previous lifting experience, but for some reason, seeing me lift has prompted some to “test” their strength by attempting to imitate my movement immediately after I finish with a weight or a machine. (I do admit it’s gratifying to see a grown man grab and instantly drop in bewilderment the barbell I just lifted, but I’d hate to be responsible for someone’s injury.)

During some memorable lifting sessions, I have been approached every ten minutes with some sort of question about how I picked up such an odd hobby or a comment about my being lihai (powerful) or how I should keep my elbows closer to my side when doing tricep pushdowns. “Are you planning on entering a bodybuilding competition?” asked one trainer. “You must be familiar with that guy,” said another, gesturing to the pair of posters (front and back) of Mr. Olympia flexing his steroidal physique in briefs.  

The body as temple, or high mass?

If I were only more culturally resilient, I might do as my fellow Chinese gym-goers do and chat happily with the trainers from the warm-up to cool-down. For Westerners, though, a workout is either a functional task (sometimes a chore) or a chance to isolate oneself from the hectic stimuli of work and household and focus on simple physical cultivation. In China, the idea of “working out” is still novel enough that the exercise is not so much practical as it is exhilarating, not an escape hatch from the pressures of Shanghai city life but a chance to participate further in modern consumer culture. Though Shanghai’s blitzkrieg of economic development has enabled the city to import the trappings of a cosmopolitan metropolis, recreational activities that seem mundane in developed nations, like “going to the gym,” still hold a spectacular quality for many of its wealthier residents.

In contrast to other parts of China, years of capitalist transition have acclimated Shanghai to the presence of lao wai (foreigners), Western pop music, and European brand names. Yet more personal aspects of the Western lifestyle — from dimly lit cafes to sweat-pumping aerobics classes — still dazzle even Shanghai’s rising elite, representing sophistication accessible only to the moneyed class.

Some cultural intangibles, however, just can’t be bought. Privacy, for instance. China is not only a mass society, but a society of spectators as well, which might explain why at my gym, people seem much more adept at watching others exercise than doing it themselves.

During a one-day promotional event, visitors were allowed a free trial of the equipment, and the usually empty gym was for an hour or so overrun with young men and women in trousers and dress shoes, positioning themselves backwards on the leg curl machine, yanking various limbs and cables back and forth, and nearly running the wheels off of an exercise bike in a frenzy of freshly discovered aerobic energy — all to the tune of techno and mandopop blasting in the background.

A group of gaunt Chinese men in their twenties made no attempt at subtlety when watching me do a few sets of deadlifts from about 10 feet away.

“Do you have to watch me like that?” I said in my best Chinese approximation of my surly New Yorker tone.

“We just think you’re lihai,” said one.

I tried to explain that it was uncomfortable to be observed this way, particularly when I was trying to focus my energy on dragging an obscenely heavy weight up from the floor. I realized that in China, Western amenities are designed for display, and the idea of private activity, within a seemingly “public” space such as a weight room, remains a foreign concept.

The men ambled off soon after I began glaring at them. I complained about the incident to another American gym patron who was also lifting weights. “Different concept of personal space here,” I remarked.

“Yeah,” he said disdainfully. “None.”

But this culture clash perhaps has a deeper significance than personal annoyance. My watchers considered a stare a complement, my subjection to their scrutiny a testament to my “lihai.” Nonetheless, as an American city girl who doesn’t always appreciate being put on the spot, my flattery is dwarfed by unease. Shanghai’s great irony is that its size and bustle afford both the anonymity of a global metropolis and the claustrophobia of vintage urban China. The surveillance I encounter as a fitness novelty reveals that here, what seems like a personal quest for muscular achievement can quickly turn into a spectator sport.

Click here to read Part One of the series.

STORY INDEX

TOPICS >

THE CHINESE FITNESS TREND >

”Global Fitness Chain to Build First Gyms in Beijing, Shanghai”, published by People’s Daily on March 22, 2002.
URL: http://china.org.cn/english/investment/29295.htm

”China’s Wellness Revolution” by Mark Godfrey, published by China Today. June 22, 2004.
URL: http://china.org.cn/english/2004/Jun/98896.htm

GENDER POLITICS AND POWERLIFTING >

”The Bodybuilding Grotesque: The Female Bodybuilder, Gender Transgression, and Designations of Deviance” by muscle-bound scholar Krista Scott-Dixon of Stumptuous.com.
URL: http://www.stumptuous.com/grotesque.html

“

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Commentary

“I don’t care that it is not signed by a senator”

Part of Fahrenheit 9/11 moves beyond conspiracy theories and simple Bush-bashing to give African Americans a lesson in race consciousness.

BEST OF ITF COLUMNS (SO FAR)


Hours after seeing Fahrenheit 9/11, I did what hundreds of thousands of other viewers probably did. I picked up the telephone to urge others to see the movie.

My first call went to my sister, a self-described “Yellow Dog Democrat,” teacher, and activist. I didn’t have to tell her to see the film; I know she’d go as soon as the movie came to her town. But I urged her to take my niece and nephews.

There was something in the film they need to see.

It isn’t filmmaker Michael Moore’s theories about the connections between the Bush family and the Saudi royal family. It isn’t the scenes in the second half, when Marine Corps recruiters try to lure young, under-employed African American males into enlisting.

I want my niece and nephews to see a scene at the beginning of the movie, before the credits, when Moore shows the U.S. Senate certifying the election of President George W. Bush.

One by one, African American members of Congress and their allies stood before the senators to oppose the certification of Bush’s election. They presented written petitions noting how Bush’s victory lay on the disenfranchisement of African American voters. When Vice President Al Gore, who was serving as president of the Senate, asked if any senator supported his or her petitions, each member of the House of Representatives gave the same answer.

“No.”

Why should the young people in my family see such a defeat? My sister thought the scene would teach the importance of electing black officials.

Maybe, but I am hoping for a larger lesson; I want my niece and nephews and their peers see what race consciousness really is.

True race consciousness means recognizing your responsibility to stand up for those who have less than you: less education, less access, even less understanding of the machinations that keep the elite in place.

True race consciousness means recognizing your responsibility to stand up to oppression, even though your resistance might be futile.

True race consciousness demands speaking truth to power.

Sadly, I think younger blacks don’t often see this kind of moral leadership.

Older black leaders, like Jesse Jackson, have failed them by not practicing what they preach in an age when one’s indiscretions can appear on a website — and the national news — in an instant.

Then there’s Bill Cosby, who castigates the younger generation, as well as the underclass, with vile and stereotypical language.

Their peers, the new class of young celebrities, concentrate on “bling-bling.” I’ll admit the term is probably outdated. But the lyrics to hip-hop I hear still gleefully celebrate sex, flash, and cash. So young people look up to folks touting P. Diddy race consciousness: folks who think they advance the race by showing others how to live fast, glittering lives.

Where were they when the Republicans stole black votes to put their boy in the White House? Sampling beats?

Who where they talking to? Each other?

Rep. Maxine Waters, D-California, and the others confronted the white, predominately male senators who sat comfortably on their behinds and approved an election that they knew was illegitimate. These were people who hid their cowardice and cynicism behind rules of order.

It would have only taken one senator to sign a petition that could have stopped the process that made Bush the president of the United States.

Not one came forward.

And the representatives knew that before they came to deliver their petitions. But they came anyway.

They welded the power they had even though they knew the final outcome.

And that’s what I want my niece and nephews to see, so that when their turn comes to speak out —and it will — they will not hesitate.

They will remember those who went before them, and stand strong.

STORY INDEX

FILMS >

Fahrenheit 9/11
URL: http://www.fahrenheit911.com

ORGANIZATIONS >

The Congressional Black Caucus Foundation
URL: http://www.cbcfinc.org

“

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Commentary

This is my country

I can’t help but feel at home in Mexico. But that does not mean it is my country.


I flicked my driver’s license casually.

“Citizenship?” asked the border patrol agent.

“American,” I said.

My best friend Cecilia and I were coming back from a fun weekend in Mexico and had just driven up to the U.S. entry gate at the Tijuana/San Diego border. I asked the uniformed man for the best route to northern San Diego, where I lived. He teased me about having to ask for directions. We both laughed.

Cecilia was not so at ease. She paused and was jittery when she answered the agent’s questions, leading him to briefly inspect our trunk before telling me the best way home. I quickly left Mexico without another thought. But next to me, my friend Cecilia started to cry.

“What’s wrong?” I asked.

“I can’t believe it was that easy,” she said.

This was one of Cecilia’s first trips back to Mexico, her homeland. She had spent more than 15 years living as an illegal alien in the United States before finally becoming a legal resident. The first time she had crossed the Mexican border wasn’t so easy. She had climbed into a tire, floated, and then waded across the cold waters of the Rio Grande into Texas. She’d walked overnight before landing in a safe house. Another time she’d hidden for hours inside the tiny secret compartment of a couple’s truck, holding her breath while a border patrol dog sniffed the outside, its damp nose searching for illegal cargo.

Five years ago Cecilia married a U.S. citizen and became a legal resident. Now she can travel to Mexico freely. But she knows she will cry when she crosses the border. She can’t help but think of the hundreds of thousands of people who did as she once did — risk their lives to live in this country.

“I didn’t really think about that just now,” I said. I then hugged her, an embrace for all the immigrants in this country, including my parents.

As a first-generation Mexican American, born and raised in Dallas, Texas, I basically grew up Mexican. My parents are often more traditional than families in Mexico — trapped in time, they are unaware that the country has moved beyond the 1950s and 1960s. While kids my age danced to Michael Jackson, I fell in love with romantic boleros from Mexican idols like Javier Solis. I became an expert on black-and-white film stars like Pedro Infante and Cantinflas.

Some parts of my culture I rejected. I was not allowed to go to sleepovers. I couldn’t talk to boys. English was banned at home, and I ate tacos for lunch while classmates ate sandwiches. Most of all I hated the work. I had to help my parents clean offices at night, falling asleep in the van while they worked until morning. On the weekends, while my friends got to see movies or visit the park, my parents and I sold food out of our home, collected cans, cleaned houses, mass produced paper flowers, packaged gift tissue, sold toys at swap meets, painted apartments, and mowed lawns or buffed floors.

“I don’t belong here,” I’d thought. Only when I visited Mexico did I get the childhood I yearned for. I could hang out on the streets without my parents beckoning me inside. I was free to flirt with boys and walk around the plaza arm-and-arm with my cousins.

Something magical happened to my parents in Mexico. They laughed louder, told funny stories, hugged relatives, enjoyed leisurely meals, and even danced.

“Why don’t we stay here?” I wondered. When we came back stateside, I missed Mexico, with its big mountains and wide beaches, its loud cities and colorful fruit stands. But it always came to an end, and we dutifully headed home to work and to school. At the border, my mother and I would cross by car. My father would always disappear and take another route.

“He has something to buy, “ my mother would say. “He’ll meet us on the other side.”

We prayed while we waited for him to cross. I would absorb my mother’s nervousness. We always felt relieved, and happy when my father walked up to us in Laredo, Texas — safe on the other side.

Today, my mother is a U.S. citizen and my father is a U.S. resident. They make few trips to Mexico now, ensconced by a lively Dallas lifestyle where they tend three small businesses. Mexico lives in my heart, but as I matured I began to embrace being American more.

Some of my relatives are very poor in Mexico, with little hope of getting ahead. Some of them are middle-class and believe keeping up appearances is the most important thing there is. I like it here where I can work hard to get ahead, and where it’s okay to be me — 31 and unmarried, living on my own, working on a career, experiencing other cultures, traveling alone, going without makeup, speaking up when I want to, being unfashionable, hosting martini parties. My family in Mexico would forgive me for my small indiscretions too, I’m sure, though I do get a lot of lectures when I talk to relatives there.

No, I am lucky to live here. As a reporter in San Diego, I often cover stories about undocumented immigrants. I read mail from readers who accuse me of not telling the story of how illegal aliens are crippling California, not to mention the country. I am often told to go back to my country too. I laugh off the most offensive comments because I can.

I am American.

I look at the immigrants here — who stand on the corner looking for work, who live in makeshift shacks in canyons because they lack affordable housing, who pile into cars to go buy groceries, who work 12-hour days for little pay, somehow managing to save thousands to pay back the coyote who brought them — and I’m not afraid of them. They are here illegally, I know. But they are here. There are an estimated 8 to 11 million illegal immigrants in the United States. They are part of our society, and I am honored to tell their stories. Somebody has to. I approach them respectfully and I am glad when they talk to me.

Recently, U.S. border patrol agents began arresting immigrants in San Diego at bus stops, on corners and in grocery stores. I wonder if they will snatch me up if I somehow forget my I.D. — after all, I look so ethnic. It angers me that my civil rights as a U.S. citizen could be so easily violated. But then I return to my comfortable stateside apartment and do not think about immigration issues. I have that luxury.

Back in the car, my friend Cecilia cried. And when I hugged her, I began to cry too. I remembered the struggles my mother and father had gone through for me, the countless times they had risked their lives to cross the border, the dozens of jobs they held, the new language they studied, the hamburgers they learned to cook, the way they encouraged me to go to college, the soft words of love my father murmured when I told him I was moving away. They are proud of me, but I can only aspire to be as courageous.

My parents became American for me, just as millions of immigrants have done for decades and will continue to do so for their families. When Cecilia cried I could almost hear them panting, out of breath in the nearby deserts, walking through the night to reach a safe house somewhere in this country.

And I prayed for them.

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Commentary

I liked tea

For an immigrant, everything tastes, sounds, and feels a little different from “home” — a place that seems farther away for the nomad with each passing day.


Author Radhika Sharma performs a ceremony on her sister-in-law’s groom during a wedding in Jodhpur, Rajasthan, India, in April 2004.

I often find myself mired in thought comparing and contrasting my new life in the United States to my life in India. Recollections and epiphanies come to me during mundane dinners, at supermarket checkout counters — even during spiritual discourses.

Each month I struggle to do justice to my position as a reluctant and informal ambassador, hoping fervently that as I vocalize my observations about both cultures I also reawaken and clarify my rather murky sense of self and identity.

Almost every week I struggle to explain fuzzy existential and far removed issues to folks back home: Why do Americans complain about housework despite having so many timesaving appliances? Why does the immigrant Indian community celebrate Diwali (The festival of lights) on weekends? Why this? Why that?

And almost each day, while I drink tea by myself, I remind myself to enjoy the richness and aroma of the tea and try to avoid listening to the voice playing in my mind: “You liked tea because it signified something. Does it still?”

That voice in my head repeats provocatively. Teatime was my time with my mother and brother; time spent relaxing, time spent bonding, time stolen from the onslaught of life’s perpetual errands.

In my early months as an immigrant, my lunches and teas would get the better of me — leaving me depressed, sometimes tearful, missing home. That doesn’t happen anymore. I am happy that a symptom has faded away, but has the disease, this looped drama, playing in my mind?

Disease is the state of being ill at ease. But on a cynical day, I feel that the word is synonymous with the state of being an immigrant. As my sense of powerlessness grows, I often marvel at the illusion I used to have that I could decide the degree of my assimilation and separation. Now that seems nearly impossible.

My first few months went by in a blur. “Learn this.” “Get here.” “Get there.”

Perhaps a part of it has now been accomplished. I know the difference between a Macy’s and a Nordstrom. I have trained my tongue to pronounce “schedule” the way the American ear likes to hear it. I laugh delightedly on jokes by American stand-up comedians. I have started reveling in the inescapable “Do-it-yourself” philosophy of my adopted country.

Yet I often wonder that in this process of learning, how much did I unlearn and how much more do I have to go? Each time this fear strikes, I try, in vain perhaps, to control the process of my adaptation — to never forget where I came from, to become only so much of an insider that I understand the issues of this new land while still remaining the outsider who can offer a fresh perspective.

The other day someone said to me: “So, you’ve been here for awhile. You should be well adjusted by now.”

I guess I am. With each passing year and each subtle adjustment I make, I become interesting fodder “back home” for extended family and acquaintances to analyze. An aunt hugs delightedly and tells me that she is so happy that I am still the same. An acquaintance spots a few of my “American” mannerisms within 10 minutes of association. They are both right. And wrong. For the truth is always somewhere in between.

For me, and perhaps for many others like me, the intangible fallouts of immigration started kicking in only after I seemed to have successfully wrestled with the tangible fallouts of immigration. After the mad rush to make sense of the system had subsided. After you have learned to drive on the freeway, navigate the healthcare system, and much more, you realize that your phone calls to extended family start feeling increasingly threadbare.

You rely on old memories and idiosyncrasies to craft conversations. And as soon as you set the telephone receiver down, you ruminate on this greater vision immigration has unexpectedly ushered. Longing alternates with pragmatism and then, perhaps, at parties with others who chose to live in the United States, you ponder the pros and cons.  Depending on your mood, you let one place win over the other.

Like characters in a novel which take on a life of their own, eluding the grasp of their creator, so too is the effect of this new geography. When blissful ignorance yields to unsettling realities, the mind grasps for acceptance of the new reality.

I rationalize. “Let us be grateful,” a voice inside me whispers. After all, this is a great century to be a nomad, a wanderer or an immigrant, as my older friends reassure me. Email, voice mail, snail mail, Web cam.

True, short of touch, I am there, wherever I want to be, deluding me into thinking that I know what is going on in that place I once called home. And should my longing get unbearable, the airport is barely an hour away!

Twenty-four hours on a Transpacific flight is all that that separates me from a once-lived world and a new world that gives me the seductive opportunity and the infrastructure to do cutting edge professional work. But one weekend as I got back from my first writers’ conference, I thought, “How lovely if this would happen in India!”

But it doesn’t. Not right now. And that is among the many reasons why I continue to stay.

This cutting-edge work wreaks havoc on my heartstrings, while giving me nebulous fears and joys. A little bit of geography and a boundless chasm of the mind keep the different pies of my circle apart. And only I know how exquisitely different each pie in my circle is. I know how my days are a crazy mish-mash of feelings. Sometimes I feel completely at home and wonder why we need to stick labels onto feelings like belongingness, while at other times, when I am forced to deal with prejudice, discrimination, and explain life choices like being a writer who writes in English, I wonder, “Why am I here?”

Each day I learn that nostalgia is like an uninvited guest who never really bids goodbye, and every couple of days when you open some closet in your heart, you will find it hiding there, waiting to pounce on you. And then it hits me that these feelings will not go away, and that I have no words with which to dress them.

Our adjustment to geography is unfortunately not as well defined as the geography itself. No matter how much we might try to keep in touch, to prop up our understanding of cities and scenarios miles away through the written word and the spoken word, there simply can be no substitute for our physical experiences. There’s no substitute for the here and now.

Radhika Sharma (left) visits San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge with her husband’s aunt, Sangeeta Sharma (far right), and Sangeeta’s daughters Nikita and Kareena in the summer of 2002. (photo by Nikhil Sharma)

With each month that I stay an immigrant I know more people in my new land. With each year that I stay away my nucleus in India shrinks to a highly dense mass. I see myself in my English friend who longs for London (“home”) the moment she sets foot in the San Francisco airport, yet feels strangely unsettled in London and wishes she could go (“home”) to San Francisco.

I see myself in my Indian friend who must buy Indian handicrafts when her craving for colors gets insatiable. I see myself in my Polish friend who prays for an alternative to seemingly interminable flight journeys. I see myself in my younger friend who has just discovered the joys of hopping on a fast-moving train from San Francisco to San Jose. Our names might be different. Our faces unique. Yet our secrets are the same. Despite the pitfalls, the world is our playground. All of us homeless and all of us home.

A few days ago I caught myself getting irritated at a jaywalker while I drove my car in my California suburb and remembered my unconditional acceptance of traffic chaos in my hometown of Jodhpur, India. I christened it “selective acceptance.” For immigrants thrive and struggle with this sense of a bifurcated identity that lets them create different switches in their minds. Switches that are turned off and on depending on their viability to the present moment.

Still, there are many other nameless mental switches longing to be named. Perhaps I could have devoured books on language and come up with some feeble attempts at categorizing them. But my purpose is not to see a few self-coined words as a part of the lexicon. My hope is to see a time when we will have a large working vocabulary on immigration coined by our collective experiences. For that is when its nebulous halo will get slightly better coordinates.

If we are to deepen our discussion, if we must ensure that the richness which our “diversity” has injected into the system, is not submerged into some dense mass of homogeneity, then we must take care to articulate and encapsulate all the insights our immigrant status has bestowed upon us. The mere act of such acknowledgement will reassure those newly uprooted and alone while opening the eyes of the non-immigrant to a world they shall then perceive with far greater empathy.

We must articulate the loss of a once familiar language, the joy of occasionally hearing a word once commonplace and reveling in all its contours and nuances, the reluctance of being put in a ambassadorial position (“So what exactly does this symbol signify …?”).

Physical distance places a slow, corrosive dilution on our relationships. The gain and loss of friends. Missed weddings. The resigned acceptance of an Internet-discovered home remedy as woeful substitute to a grandmother’s, which, physical proximity allowed, would be passed down through the generations.

Otherwise, those who have vicariously shared these experiences shall attempt, as they do now, to dissect and condense our imagery to fit the conformed dimensions. Reducing to caricature our struggles with a new language, new neighbors, and new workplaces; always focusing on the tangible, the easily perceptible; and tidily neglecting the harder and more elusive aspects of our journeys.

Language is fluid, and at times an imperfect tool. But let us not make it a highly imperfect one due to laziness. And while we find words to convey the gamut of emotions that well up inside us when we hop from one flight to another, all the while hoping to capture the creases on those faces standing across the terminal for posterity, we must understand that we measure our losses by their absences. We must accept that our quantification of our losses has stemmed out of a consciousness of their absences.

Nevertheless, those absences have been gifts, enriching our perceptions. The piercing pain of those losses and the richness of our gains is what we must more adeptly articulate.

When we choose to name something, we acknowledge its presence. We cannot describe or deal with what we do not know or will not admit. Loss and abundance have innumerable shades.

But it is time we added a few more shades to our palette. One word at a time. And even though there may be times when our hearts ache, we must chose to remember that this is a great time to be a nomad.

STORY INDEX

PEOPLE >

Profile of a young immigrant author
URL: http://www.masslive.com/living/republican/index.ssf?/base/living-0/1082452771112062.xml

A link to various immigrant authors (with bibliographies of their work)
URL: http://www.emory.edu/ENGLISH/Bahri/Contents.html#Authors

Commentary >

NPR’s audio piece on the immigrant experience
URL: http://www.npr.org/features/feature.php?wfId=3075005

Radhika Sharma’s perspectives on immigration in India Currents
URL: http://www.indiacurrents.com/news/view_article.html?article_id=7cc0e622759345fb7373b739077e5726
http://www.indiacurrents.com/news/view_article.html?article_id=d8f17cfd5b64be9c5fc5e969ee9bff19

A potpourri of the various facets of American immigration
URL: http://immigration.about.com/
http://www.kn.pacbell.com/wired/fil/pages/listmigratiodo.html

KQED FM San Francisco weeklong dedication to new Americans
URL: http://www.kqed.org/programs/program-archive.jsp?progID=RD62&ResultStart=121&ResultCount=10&type=radio

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News

Seduced by the Stars and Stripes?

For a few months, it seemed policy differences between the United States and Canada had thawed and a new relationship was blossoming. But June's election expressed a lack of confidence in Prime Minister Paul Martin’s Liberal Party, leaving President George Bush’s plans for a continental missile defense shield hanging in the balance.


(Illustration by David Benque)

Sharing the world’s longest undefended border, Canada and the United States have benefited from a long history of peaceful and friendly relations, including more than 80 treaty-level defense agreements, more than 250 memoranda of understanding between the two defense departments, and approximately 145 bilateral forums in which defense matters are discussed. Yet, in recent history, during the George W. Bush/Jean Chrétien years, this relationship endured difficulties: from the recently resolved trade dispute over softwood lumber tariffs; to the banning of Canadian beef exports after a single case of mad cow disease; to the gaffe that resulted in the firing of Chrétien’s aide, Françoise Ducros, who called Bush a “moron.”

The cooling between Ottawa and Washington reached an icy low when Canada declared its steadfast opposition to the war in Iraq, and refused to partake in the war effort. Paul Cellucci, the U.S. ambassador to Canada, made it very clear how “disappointed” Bush was with Canada’s decision.

However, after Chrétien retired in December 2003, and Canada’s new Prime Minister Paul Martin took the helm, relations had begun to thaw. A priority was placed on improving bilateral relations, including expediting discussions on Canada’s participation in the missile defense system (MDS). In a nation with a long and proud history of being pacifist and non-antagonistic, this seemed to mark a divisive shift in policy, which could have drastically altered Canada’s peaceful standing in the world.

Then, six months after taking office, Martin was forced to fight for reelection and win his own mandate to govern with the confidence of the Canadian people. The election took place amongst widespread public anger and disillusion over corrupt practices in the Liberal Party after Auditor General Sheila Fraser found that the Liberal government had funneled $100 million of taxpayer money into the coffers of Liberal-friendly advertising agencies in the forms of fees and commissions.

At the June 28 elections, Martin’s party won, but only narrowly, gaining 135 out of 308 seats in parliament. Being 20 seats short of a majority means that the party will have to compromise their agenda and collaborate on policy with the other stakeholders in parliament: the Conservatives on the right, the New Democratic Party (NDP) on the left, and the pro-sovereignty, yet largely left, Bloc Québécois Party. Teetering in the balance is whether America will gain financial and logistical cooperation in its vision of a continental missile defense system, or have the door shut in its face.

The benefits of public apathy

As early as November 15, 2003, the day after Martin’s coronation ceremony in Toronto, he stressed Canada’s eagerness to participate in discussions on the Bush administration’s missile defense system, saying: “We’re talking about the defense of North America. Canada has to be at the table.”

Martin’s priority of improving bilateral relations moved up the echelons of parliament, with the establishment of a permanent cabinet committee and a House of Commons committee on Canada-United States relations. Member of Parliament Scott Brison, who defected from the Progressive Conservative Party to the Liberals, was appointed to this portfolio. When Brison ran unsuccessfully for the Progressive Conservative Party leadership in spring 2003, he advocated a far-reaching partnership with the United States for the creation of a “seamless border.”

In the past, Canada’s position on the missile defense system has wavered from outward opposition to meek caution. Although bilateral talks proceeded between Canada’s former Defense Minister John McCallum, who served in Chrétien’s cabinet, and U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld in 2003, they were highly secretive and substantial results were not revealed. One reason for the silence may have been the widespread disinterest among average Canadians.

In February, when I asked random people in Toronto’s diverse neighborhoods about their thoughts on Canada’s role in the missile defense system, most told me that they hadn’t heard anything about it, or that the topic didn’t interest them. Yet no one wanted to be quoted as an “uninformed” person.

A 28-year-old student at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education at the University of Toronto, who plans to teach high school in the fall, asked to remain anonymous and admitted that he doesn’t follow politics very closely. Queried about his country’s change in stance, he said: “I don’t know anything about the missile defense system. I don’t recall seeing a single newscast on this almost sci-fi thing that you’re describing.” When I asked him if he thought Canada should collaborate with the United States, he flatly replied: “I guess it would depend on how serious the threat would be. I don’t know.”

A residential youth worker who was attending a Valentine’s Day party, Michelle Hadida, 25, agreed that the subject hasn’t caught the attention of most Canadians. “Not many people know what’s going on,” she said. “You don’t hear about [the missile defense system] in the news. Usually people will flick on the 6 o’clock or 11 o’clock news for a quick update of what’s going on in the world, and because they’re not being exposed to this on the news, the chances of them looking it up on their own time is very slim.”

Under cover of public apathy, the issue had gained momentum in Ottawa. Canada’s most recent Defense Minister, David Pratt opposed the Chrétien government’s refusal to join the U.S.-led war in Iraq. However, he just lost his seat in parliament with his district of Nepean-Carlton, just outside of Ottawa, falling to Conservative Pierre Poilievre on Election Day.

Pratt was seen as more hawkish than his predecessor, John McCallum. In commenting on Pratt’s appointment to Defense and what could be expected, John Ibbitson of The Globe and Mail called him “a firm believer in the need for Canada to sign on to the continental missile defense system” and  “as Americanophillic as a Liberal can get.” With Pratt’s ouster, Canadians are now left in suspense, waiting to see whether Martin’s new appointment to the defense portfolio will follow Pratt’s lead and cozy up to the Americans or put more distance between the two neighbors.

Margaret Rao shows her solidarity with the New Democratic Party’s opposition to the missile defense shield by holding up one of the Party’s advertisements. Rao, who lives in Toronto, thinks most Canadians wouldn’t go along with plans for Canada to participate in this feat if the issue were more publicized.

Doubting Thomases

Back in February, activists like Margaret Rao, 51, a theologian, and mother of three young adult daughters, were worried about the public’s lack of knowledge. Seated at her home in Toronto’s little Italy neighborhood, Rao clutched an ad by the NDP outlining her party’s opposition to the missile defense system. “Paul Martin knew whom he was choosing [in appointing Pratt to the defense portfolio]. It’s already skewed towards making friends with the States,” she said. “We need to have a national debate on this. I think most Canadians wouldn’t go along with this — especially if we got the facts out.”

The facts Rao thought Canadians would take exception to include the highly questionable effectiveness of the system, in which a sensor in space discovers an object headed for the United States, ground-based infrared sensors and radar systems track it, and the United States launches a missile to intercept it. If the system worked, it would give the United States the power to protect itself from incoming intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICMBs), whether launched without intent, or from what the Bush administration has commonly referred to as “rogue states,” such as Iran and North Korea, which is predicted to develop the capacity to launch a missile towards the United States by 2005.

If it worked — there’s the rub. Such things also worry Alex Carter, 27, a post-graduate journalism student at Ryerson University in Toronto. In between classes, Carter took a moment to express his doubt. “I haven’t heard anything about it possibly working,” he said. “It just seems like a waste of money, so until they can prove that it works and prove that there’s a threat, then I think we’d be doing it only to appease the Americans.”  

Although the United States has a long history of researching the viability of ballistic missile defense systems dating back to the 1940s, no definitive results have been yielded. President Richard Nixon briefly deployed a system in the mid-1970s that was then abandoned due to technical difficulties. President Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) of the 1980s revived the concept of ballistic missile defense. Essentially, SDI was based on exotic, futuristic space technologies and ambitiously geared towards countering the entire nuclear arsenal of the Soviet Union. Due to technological problems, high cost-estimates, and the end of the Cold War, the initiative was never implemented.

With the demise of the Soviet Union, some see missile defense as unjustifiable. Such is the opinion of 24 year-old artist Krystal Ann Kraus, who has been banned from entering the United States due to rallies she’s attended in opposition to U.S. free trade agreements with the Americas. Unwinding with a Smirnoff Ice at an Irish pub in the upscale Yonge and Eglinton area of Toronto, she felt that a clear threat to justify pursuit of such an endeavor did not exist.

“It’s silly to think that we should spend our resources and energy in tax dollars in fighting some weird, almost ‘cartoonish’ type of character, like power rangers taking over space,” she said. “Altron’s not the enemy. Most poor nations can’t even dream about occupying that realm. It’s an area of the rich, and the rich are going to control it because they’re the ones with the funds to get up there.”

The Council for a Livable World, a U.S.-based organization advocating arms control, points to an analysis prepared by the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation in which two official reports five years apart reached a remarkably similar conclusion, affirming that missile defense deployment is “a rush to failure.”

The Center for Arms Control compared a 1998 study issued by a panel headed by former Air Force Chief of Staff Larry Welch and a report released by the General Accounting Office (GAO) in June 2003. Both reports suggest that political pressures are driving the missile defense program, leading to premature deployment of an inadequately tested system. The GAO report explains: “Because of time pressures, the Missile Defense Agency (MDA), must include components that have not been demonstrated as mature and ready for system integration into a particular element …Testing to date has provided only limited data for determining whether the system will work as intended in 2004.”

Fear makes friends

In the mid-1990s, President Bill Clinton agreed in principle to the need for a missile defense system, in terms of policy, he sought to remain consistent with the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) Treaty between the United States and the Soviet Union. Intended to set limits on defensive missile systems, the ABM Treaty is credited for what has been approximately 30 years of nuclear stability around the world. However, under pressure from members of Congress, the National Missile Defense Act was passed in 1999, allowing for the deployment of a missile defense system as soon as technologically possible.

Then in the wake of the September 11, 2001 attacks, amid a climate of fear, Bush scrapped the ABM Treaty on December 13, 2001, and gave an impassioned speech. Of the historic treaty, he said: “It hinders our government’s ability to develop ways to protect our people from future terrorist or rogue state missile attacks. I cannot and will not allow the United States to remain in a treaty that prevents us from developing effective defenses.”

Thus in 2002, the United States began work on adding components to allow for layered and overlapping missile defense coverage. On December 17, 2002, Bush announced the United States would deploy an initial operational ballistic missile defense (BMD) system for the defense of North America by the fall of 2004. Costs, already totaling $91 billion on the missile defense system over the past two decades — with exorbitant spending by successive Republican- and Democrat-led administrations — will continue to rise as progress is made.

While an understanding exists which exempts Canada from bearing any costs of the system as long as it allows its airspace to be used, this principle has recently been called into question. On Sunday, February 22, 2004, in a Question Period segment on CTV News, former Defense Minister Pratt refused to rule out the possibility that Canada would make a cash contribution.

York University Law student Stephen Tolfo, 24, feels that it’s in Canada’s best long-term interest to be complicit, regardless of any associated costs. A long-standing supporter of bilateral defense arrangements, he’s adamant that people need to remember there is a real threat. “Bush knows what he’s talking about, and as Canadians, we can’t afford to sit out and expect the Americans to take care of us when something goes wrong,” he said. “We need to be pro-active. The key is that it’s a defense system, not an offense system.”

An additional pressure is the fear that Canada’s role in the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD), which was established in 1958 to monitor and defend North American airspace, would be diminished if it doesn’t sign on. Already, progress on the discussions has resulted in an agreement in principle that MDS operations would be placed under the auspices of NORAD, providing that Canada endorses the controversial system.

Protecting Canada or gaining points with the United States?

On February 5, 2004, the C. Warren Goldring Annual Lecture on Canada-United States relations at the Royal Ontario Museum in the heart of downtown Toronto drew a distinguished crowd of guests, including representatives from numerous conglomerates and Canada’s largest banks that line the city’s financial center on Bay Street. In a lecture theater filled to capacity, Leon Panetta, Clinton’s former chief of staff, delivered a speech, “The Challenge in Washington: Governing by Leadership or Crisis.”

Panetta, like many others, is concerned with the effectiveness of the system. Asked how legitimate the threat posed by so-called rogue states is and what, if any, role Canada should play in the initiative, Panetta cautioned: “Ultimately, I think we do have to be concerned about what can happen with terrorism and the weapons that can be used. But I do believe right now, that to embark on a missile defense system with all the costs associated with it, and with the questionable technology that’s involved with it, would not be in our interest.”

“Let’s be careful,” he warned,  “particularly at a time of a $500 billion annual deficit, in throwing more money at systems that ultimately can be proven as unable to protect our security.”

Despite such warnings from experienced statesmen, there is strong support for the pursuit of a missile defense system from influential corporations on both sides of the border who stand to make money from it. Pressure on the Canadian side comes from Canadian aerospace companies and business lobby groups such as the Canadian Council of Chief Executives, which has set up a CEO Action Group to push for closer business and military ties with the United States. Derek Burney, chief of staff to former Progressive Conservative Prime Minister Brian Mulroney and current president of CAE Inc., is seen as a key stakeholder. His company is already supplying U.S. aerospace and defense giant Boeing with software systems for the missile defense system.  

While corporations are behind it, the government’s possible public expenditure on the system has Canadian citizens expressing concern. Advocating a social justice agenda, Barry Weisleder, of the activist oriented NDP Socialist Caucus, feels “it’s an incredibly lavish waste of funds.” Demonstrating outside the Israeli Consulate on Bloor Street West in opposition of the controversial wall that Israel is erecting in the occupied West Bank, he lamented: “There’s no evidence that such a system is even capable of bringing down a barrage of incoming missiles; but even if it were, it’s an attempt by the U.S. to seize control — not only of planet earth, but also of outer space. What an incredible waste of money at a time when hospitals and schools are crumbling and social programs are depleted and people are dying in the cold outdoors for lack of housing. It’s just an abomination.”

Professor Ron Stagg, chair of Ryerson University’s history department, is concerned that “the issue hasn’t been debated to the extent that it should in a democratic society like Canada.” This viewpoint was echoed in a May 2003 segment of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s radio Commentary broadcast. Steven Staples, a military analyst with the Ottawa-based Polaris Institute, an organization that promotes principles of social justice in grassroots organizations, pointed out one of Martin’s shortcomings on the missile defense program: “He doesn’t talk much about missile threats to Canada. Instead, he seems to talk about improving relations with the Americans.”

This point has been a crucial one for a substantial amount of Canadians who see the threat to the North American continent as largely elusive. Richard Gwyn, an acclaimed Canadian political affairs writer, argues, “The missile defense program itself, is the dumbest military idea since the French nobles at Agincourt put on such heavy armor they couldn’t move in their saddles. It will provide an unworkable defense — even rigged tests most often fail against a non-existent threat. What ‘rogue state’ is going to commit suicide by lobbing one missile, even if it actually had it, at Washington?”

Paul Hamel, of Science for Peace, a Canada-based organization concerned about issues of peace, justice, and the environment, is concerned that Canada’s decision will hinge on appeasing the Americans, and become a make-up gesture for the government’s refusal to support the war in Iraq. “I think that the definitive goal of blindly signing on to such a useless and unjustified endeavor is simply to patch up relations with our neighbors south of the border who, quite frankly, still hold a grudge against us,” he said.

Similarly, Linda McQuaig, a Toronto-based author and political commentator, also sees the politics of appeasement at play here. She writes, “If Ottawa does join the missile project, it will undoubtedly insist that the decision had absolutely nothing to do with appeasing Washington, that we — entirely on our own — came up with the idea of abandoning Canada’s longstanding commitment to international arms control.”

Canadians becoming more … American?

McQuaig presents a compelling argument. After all, Canada is a founding member of the Missile Technology Control Regime that was established in 1987 as a means to counter the threat of weapons of mass destruction proliferation by controlling the transfer of missile equipment, material, and related technologies. Canada was also instrumental in the development of the 2002 Hague Code of Conduct against ballistic missile proliferation, the first multilateral agreement that established principles regarding ballistic missiles.

Scott Peterson, 42, a former stockbroker and current journalism student at Ryerson University, feels that Canada’s role in the missile defense system is highly problematic. “I think it breaks a lot of treaties we have. I think it’s isolationist and protectionist in a global society and I think it’s just wrong,” he said.

Moreover, concern exists over how support for the missile defense system will threaten and reverse hard fought gains in the struggle to ensure that nations comply with non-proliferation policies. Llyod Axworthy, a former Canadian Foreign Affairs Minister and current director and CEO of the Liu Institute for Global Issues at the University of British Colombia, and Michael Byers, a professor of law and director of Canadian Studies at Duke University, write, “There’s good reason to think that support for BMD [Ballistic Missile Defense] would curtail Canada’s foreign policy options. In fact, it would entail an abrupt change in our policy on the non-proliferation of missiles and weapons of mass destruction, moving from a model of multilateral regulation and cooperation to a confrontational approach based on the threat of force.”  

Furthermore, a majority of Canadians feel that Canada, popularly labeled “a decaffeinated version of the United States” by Canadian political commentator Charlotte Gray, should struggle to level out the playing field with the United States to better assert itself as an independent nation with distinct values.

In an article featured in Maclean’s magazine on February 9, 2004, titled “Hope you Lose, eh,” an exclusive poll found that a mere 15 percent of Canadians support Bush’s re-election in November 2004. Jonathon Gatehouse wrote, “Despite a spate of polls showing a broad desire for improved relations with the United States after the often rocky Chrétien years, there is a sense that this administration isn’t one we want to do business with.”

Barry W. Cook of Toronto personified this concern in the opinion/editorial section of The Globe and Mail on November 19, 2003. Just as Martin was set to take the reins of government, he expressed apprehension over the extent to which U.S. influence permeates Canada. He wrote, “Canada is about to retire a Prime Minister and gain a CEO [referring to Martin’s business background] … Here’s hoping the head office of Canada (Limited) is not Washington, nor its chairman in Crawford, Texas.”

Such an editorial points to a popular cultural divide that many Canadians feel. The question remains whether they will demand that distinct policies be adopted in order to affirm Canada’s traditional commitment to the principles of multilateralism, disarmament, peace, and the rule of law. Yet perhaps Jonathon Gatehouse of Maclean’s put it perfectly when he wrote, “In Canada, there is still no surer kiss of death for a politician than caving into American pressure.”

With the policy-making authority of the Liberals being drastically curtailed in light of the recent election, Martin is now in the unique position of looking left or right as he vies for unabashed cooperation from the other parties in Parliament in order to stay in power and pass legislation.

While Jack Layton, leader of the NDP, affirmed that he would continue his vigorous campaign against Canada’s participation in the missile defense system, along with Gilles Duceppe, leader of the Bloc Québécois Party, whose platform also opposed such collaboration, Martin may have to look towards the Conservative Party, Canada’s version of what in effect is the “Republicans-lite” for support. Its leader, Stephen Harper, is the only politician who campaigned vociferously in support of Canada’s participation in Bush’s pet project.

After a hotly contested race, Martin and Harper may end up forming an uncanny alliance on the issue of missile defense. The two dignified politicians who spent much of their time on the campaign trail trading insults and jabs may end up standing shoulder to shoulder with one another, gazing south with stars and stripes in their eyes.

STORY INDEX

ORGANIZATIONS>

Department of National Defense and Canadian Forces
URL: http://www.forces.gc.ca

United States Department of Defense
URL: http://dod.mil

Canada Institute at the Woodrow Wilson International Centre for Scholars
URL: http://wwics.si.edu/index.cfm?fuseaction=topics.home&topic_id=1420

Council for a Livable World
URL: http://www.clw.org

Liu Institute for Global Issues
URL: http://www.ligi.ubc.ca

Science for Peace
URL: http://scienceforpeace.sa.utoronto.ca

Brookings Institute
URL: http://www.brookings.edu

“

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Photo Essays

Life after torture

BEST OF IMAGE (SO FAR)
2004 Best of Image (runner-up)

Hoping to kill off the ghosts of Abu Ghraib, President Bush wants to tear down the now infamous Iraqi prison. But getting rid of Abu Ghraib won't ameliorate the trauma — at least not for the tortured, who struggle with their pasts on into the present.


Click here to enter the visual essay.

Investing the time to learn about the horrors of torture is in no way pleasant. In recent times, the world has endured terrorist attacks in the United States, merciless bloodshed in the Middle East, and continued instability across the globe. Why now pay attention to yet another crisis, that of torture survivors languishing in refugee camps in Africa, when we have real problems at home? In an era when our duty of compassion has been tested over and over again, why should we be willing to look at truly horrific photos, an offense to the senses, documenting the worst horrors of human existence?

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Commentary

Insert Jell-O reference here

A recent speech by Bill Cosby suggests that, despite the dangers, there’s always room for candor.


On May 17, during an appearance at Howard University in Washington, D.C., Bill Cosby made some colorful remarks about race and responsibility. For a few days last month — alright, let’s get the Jell-O reference out of the way — he was in deep pudding with the P.C. police.

During a celebration for the 50th anniversary of the U.S. Supreme Court’s Brown vs. Board of Education decision, in our nation’s capital of equivocation and obfuscation, and in the presence of the presidents of Howard University and the NAACP, “Combustible” Huxtable had the bad taste to make frank, critical comments about the state of black society in America.

Thankfully, he has yet to back down.

Howard University hasn’t released a full transcript of the speech, but according to numerous media reports, here are some of the greatest hits:

Ladies and gentlemen, the lower economic people are not holding up their end in this deal.

These people are not parenting. They are buying things for kids — $500 sneakers for what? And won’t spend $200 on ‘Hooked on Phonics’ …

They’re standing on the corner and they can’t speak English. I can’t even talk the way these people talk: ‘Why you ain’t, Where you is’ … And I blamed the kid until I heard the mother talk. And then I heard the father talk.  Everybody knows it’s important to speak English except these knuckleheads . . .

You can’t be a doctor with that kind of crap coming out of your mouth!

As you might expect, there were mixed reactions about the propriety of his remarks. Is Bill Cosby giving ammunition to arch-conservatives who want to believe that blacks lack a sense of personal responsibility? Is a celebration of an historic milestone of equality the right occasion for airing such pointed criticisms?

Cosby was accused of being a classist and betraying his race. But ultimately, many people, black and white, applauded his frankness. He may not have been accurate or precise (generalizations never are), but in the antiseptic haze of national politics, where every word is calculated to offend the fewest people, it was refreshing to hear some uncensored honesty. For too long, the American obsession with political correctness — especially on issues of race — has crippled the national dialogue.

Americans are so thirsty for candor, we’ll take it any way we can get it.

“Nothing Cosby said hasn’t been uttered by other black people,” Renee Graham wrote in the Boston Globe, “but usually only among ourselves at dinner parties, on back porches, and in barbershops.”

“Had a white person made comments similar to those expressed by Cosby,” Graham wrote, “without fail he or she would be strong-armed into an apology.” She’s right. More accurately, if he or she were a politician, the P.C. police would be in full battle mode before you could say, “Confederate flag.” Remember Howard Dean?

On November 2, 2003, the Des Moines Register published an interview with Dean in which he said he wanted to be “the candidate for guys with Confederate flags on their pickup trucks.” Like Cosby’s remarks, Dean’s comment was broad and open to misunderstanding. It offended some people. But the sentiment behind it was sound.

“We can’t beat George Bush unless we appeal to a broad cross-section of Democrats,” Dean continued. Hardly a contestable suggestion. Even so, Dean’s fellow democratic candidates feigned indignation. John Kerry and Al Sharpton demanded an apology. For all of three days, Dean stood his ground.

“I started this discussion in a clumsy way,” Dean said on November 6. “I regret the pain that I may have caused either to African American or Southern white voters.”

These are grown men. Howard Dean meant what he said. But instead of applauding Dean for being forthright, Kerry offered this disingenuous plea: “Rather than politics as usual, Howard Dean should have taken responsibility for his rhetoric and simply said, ‘I was wrong.’”

Kerry was right in one sense: Howard Dean should have taken responsibility for what he said — and stuck to it.

Unfortunately, you have to meet some lofty criteria to get away with being blunt in Washington, D.C. Who but Bill Cosby could be so candid about such an explosive subject? Besides being one of the most beloved entertainers of all time, he is a doctor (he got his Ph.D. in Education from the University of Massachusetts in 1977). Before he became a comedian and a gajillionaire, he was one of those “lower economic people.” He’s black. And most notably, he isn’t a politician.

Three weeks after the fact, we’re still talking about Bill Cosby’s thoughts on race. And he’s not even an elected official. He’s an entertainer.

We’re still talking about Cosby’s comments, not because the ideas weren’t around before, but because somebody we respect had the temerity to address it in public, rather than behind the doors of a cozy dinner party or local barbershop.

Agree with Bill Cosby or don’t. Dissect his statements and parse the exceptions from the rules. But don’t ask him to apologize for the pain he may have caused. Presumably, he thought about what he was going to say. And whether or not anybody thought it was appropriate, the national dialogue is better off for him having said it.

If only Bush and Kerry would follow his lead.

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Interviews

Dear violent person

A conversation with Benjamin Weissman about violence, writing violence, and his most recent collection, Headless.


The interviewer: Justin Clark, InTheFray Literary Editor
The interviewee: Benjamin Weissman, Author, Headless

Headless has been compared to the writings of Henry Miller and Philip Roth, both authors whose works shocked their readers. The scatalogical and sexual themes in your fiction seem to aim for something other than shock value, however. It’s almost as if there’s a desire to show the innocence of serial killers and rapists, to fuse together the homicidal and the infantile.  Is your work about breaking taboos, or showing the comedy of transgression, or something else?

I’m not interested in shocking people. And I don’t think people are shockable … We’re trained to consume anything, and it’s all art.  But I think the art-viewing and the reading public are different.  Sometimes the public is freaked out right away; I’m trained genetically to write about stuff like this, it’s in my blood from childhood.  I have an autobiographical inclination to go there: [My] mother … was really morbid, and I was predisposed to this kind of material.  I don’t want to go the obvious routes.  I’m also thinking about murderers who will kill somebody and then eat their food, and I also think that’s so remarkable.  I’m always trying to go less predictable routes, and I do think that killers do have human sides, but I’m not trying to make them friendly or palatable.  It’s almost like trying different textures — if I’m going at you with something hard and sharp, I want to break in some soft things to break up the monotony.  The same thing happens in films I like.

In “Marnie,” a much more traditional story concerning the death of a friend, you seem less concerned with displaying a less perverse vision.  Other than the ski slope setting, [which is present in many of the stories in Headless], what ties ”Marnie” to the [other stories in the book], and how do you know when all of the violence and bodily fluids have gotten to be too much?

I think the bodily fluids thing is spontaneous, and it’s just about what fits or belongs or what seems fun to go into and explore.  I kind of don’t think too much about the reader, ever.  I’m just trying to make a story that works.  Maybe the reader is a couple of trusted friends.  Marnie is a story that afflicted me — it reads like it really happened, and it did really happen, and it was the kind of thing I put down to honor a friend who died.  I just sort of worked on it endlessly, and [the final text of “Marnie”] was a lot longer than the published story …  I was talking to a lot of people, and it was really slowing down my whole life. And I was reading the things they carry, and I was thinking this was my kind of Vietnam, the first time I’d experienced someone dying in front of me.  I wasn’t trying to write a story to make people cry, although I know that’s the effect it has on people, even though it works me up because I have vivid memories of what happened. At one point I thought I was just going to write a personal essay about it.  I was asked why I was struggling — the first time I saw [Marnie] naked was when the paramedics were cutting her clothes off — the friend said, “That’s your first sentence, and if you don’t use it I will.” You can be a perfectionist to the point where you don’t write and don’t publish anything, and I wrote something that was close to it. I think I was excited by putting that story next to others that were completely over the top.  I wanted to make it a less predictable collection.  Each story was going to push you in a different direction.  Me as a reader, I kind of want that from a writer.  It’s a horrible thing for readers to put down books.  It seems to happen so much, people who can’t get through a lot of really good books.  I originally had the story later on, but Dennis [Cooper] was smart enough to throw it in the middle … section [with the] family stories.  But that in itself was very different.

You seem particularly interested in the banality of evil.  How does your vision of evil compare with that being promoted in American popular culture and by American politicians?

I feel America is my homeland; my grandparents are from Austria.  When I’ve gone there and done exhibitions, [I notice that in] the work I’ve seen with other artists, there’s a graphic weird mixing of sexual violent things, and I’ve always been floored by that work and [the feeling that] I was among my brothers and sisters.  When you talked to someone with a high-pitched voice, doctors will ask, “Why did this voice stay with them?” And [the doctors will] ask if this is some kind of trauma that was locked in at a particular age.  Maybe there was a time when I was a kid and listening to stories from my peculiar mom and that became a story mode I was going to replicate later on.  Violent stories, stories of fear and paranoia.  She would cut articles out and send them to me.  Lots of strange things about killers, and the family would totally ignore it … Trying to comprehend … where inappropriate humor comes from … was a constant at the dinner table, talking about Nazis — it’s a coping device.  I think for me the stuff was so far removed that Hitler was as bland as a glass of water or as gigantic and horrible as he is.  We had relatives that were killed on both sides of the family [in the Holocaust].

I think I’m pretty motivated by writing about terrible experiences.  A good happy life — I can’t write about them, I have no use for them except to have one.  I feast on for my writing the way the world is tearing itself apart and people are just ripping each other to shreds.  I’m amazed at the weird position people are in, where your life is placid and safe and just outside or several thousand miles away, or an hour from now it’s absolutely violent and atrocious.

There are some differences in the prose style between Headless and Dear Dead Person, your previous collection. Your sentences seem to be more syntactically complicated — lush even — with more adjectives and clauses.  What inspired you to use a more literary voice with this collection?

I think it’s the evolution for me or just growing up; I think [during your] evolution … as a writer, you’re pushing yourself to deal with sentences differently.  I haven’t looked at Dear Dead Person in so long, but I imagine the sentences were short and blunt.  I took a lot of pleasure out of it.  I’m glad that you said that.  In a way I feel a lot of the stuff I’ve been doing is pretty intuitive, of one’s language getting more sophisticated as one grows up.  I didn’t think in this book I wanted this language.  I just think it happens with maturity.  I’m not sure what I picked up from Robert Walser, but I couldn’t get rid of it.  There’s a child-like thing that happens in a lot of his work, and in Thomas Bernhard[‘s] work, and Lydia Davis’ work that I can’t get rid of. Those writers mean so much to me, and they are my ideals.”

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Reviews

Violence is golden

Reading about violence isn’t everyone’s idea of leisure, but navigating the sadism of Benjamin Weissman’s world — and our own — certainly breaks up the monotony of daily life.


(Registered members of the site are invited to read Justin Clark’s exclusive interview with Benjamin Weissman. If you are not yet a registered member, please register now. If you are a registered member and would like to read the interview, please click here).

It helps the satirist’s cause if he has at least some warm feelings for the culture he intends to skewer. Twenty years have passed since the short stories of Benjamin Weissman first appeared in such literary journals and art magazines as The Santa Monica Review and The Village Voice Literary Supplement.  In that time he has published two story collections, Dear Dead Person (High Risk Books, 1994) and Headless (Akashic Books, 2004), both featuring the same grotesque gallery of serial killers, pederasts, porn stars, neo-Nazis, and average dysfunctional Americans.  Both also consist of interior monologues, usually under ten pages and often as short as two, and read like a pastiche of the abject voices of William Burroughs, Kathy Acker, and Dennis Cooper — writers who subject the reader to a prose as tortured, hypersexual, and banal as their characters’ twisted lives.  

Take, for instance, “Flesh is for Hacking” (1986), Weissman’s deadpan description of a pedophile copulating with the severed head of a young murder victim:

I twirl the head around like a slow pinwheel.  When was the last time he brushed those teeth?  I know it’s been at least two days.  Teeth feel good.  I like it when it hurts.  Yes, yes, just like that.  Uh huh.  Oh you little fuckhead, you dead little shit.  My God, you can’t do this to me.  And when I’ve suffered as much pain as I can stand I pull out and squirt on your eyelids.  Killing, cutting up boys has made me a better person.  It took me so long to notice.  For instance, now I give without expecting something in return.

The results, it goes without saying, are sometimes unfriendly to the reader.  Five years after the story’s publication, many people reacted squeamishly toward Bret Easton Ellis’ American Psycho, a serial killer novel that likewise aimed at illustrating how inured our society has become to suffering.  It is easy to see why readers were even less sympathetic to Weissman’s first serial killer stories, which take readers so far into the perpetrator’s mind that evil becomes uncomfortably banal, and not, as with Ellis, monstrously ironic.

Writing violence

Weissman has matured with regard to the style and content of his prose. Writing sentences that seem to be more syntactically complicated, lush even, with more adjectives and clauses, Weissman seems to have found a literary voice, while also achieving what his work was looking for: Sublimity in abnormality, an immersion in violence that leads beyond “dark humor” into the violent egotism of a book like Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf.  

Consider, for instance, “Morality Play (Six Hours in Length)” from Headless, “an old-fashioned fable of the unendurable man known only as (raises his arm) … who wakes up one morning sick to his stomach.”  Not unlike the protagonist of Albert Camus’ The Stranger, “this unendurable man” goes on to commit casual violence:

He shoots his daughter and son, strangles his wife, and heaves their newborn infant against the wall; clutter, he screams, every person takes up so much room … the world is passive, he says as smoke rises all around him, I am the active one, the spring rain of contempt, a swift morose icon, my gift is misguided love, I’m the only person who’s truly supposed to be here.

The prose’s lyricism gives the story’s violence an entirely different meaning. If “Flesh is for Hacking” is, as its critics accuse, only a hair’s breadth from being pornography, and if “Dear Dead Person” is a darkly humorous psychological cartoon, “Morality Play” longs to be like a grandly violent Renaissance painting — “The Rape of Cassandra” set in the modern living room.

At a few moments in Headless, Weissman becomes unexpectedly clever.  In subject matter, “Of Two Minds” is familiar territory: The tale of a boy who exacts his revenge on his mother’s bullying friend. But here Weissman plays a game with the point-of-view, alternating at every sentence between the first and third person, until the difference between inhabiting a violent mind and watching it is negligible:

One voice is distant, observational, policelike, as if it were narrating all physical and cognitive action. The other was intimate subjective, which is another way of saying, I’m all about double-talk. First he sees himself behaving in the present moment. Then I found myself blathering on about something I’d just done … He leaps at the horsy madame and begins to strangle her. With intent to choke, the galloping equine was advanced upon by yours truly.

Even at the collection’s smartest moments, the violence grows tedious, because Weissman seems so intent on exploring it at the cost of other themes.

There are strange lacunae in Weissman’s style, however.  

In “Marnie” Weissman adopts a more conventional voice to relate the story of a friend’s accidental death on a ski slope — a woman for whom the narrator had secretly pined. Here Weissman seems less concerned with displaying a less perverse vision. After so much blood and guts, Weissman’s readers may be shocked by the narrator’s vulnerability when he describes the paramedics who tear into his friend’s clothes in order to save her life. “They needed to get to her heart. Didn’t we all?”

With Weissman teetering on regarding the human heart as something more than a horror movie prop here, one can’t help but wonder what it is that ties ”Marnie” to the other stories in Headless. Written to honor a friend who died in a skiing accident that Weissman witnessed, “Marnie” is what Weissman terms “my kind of Vietnam,” a terrain for the author to struggle with the excruciating experience of witnessing death for the first time. If “Marnie” seems out of place in a book full of masculine sadism, it is only a testament to Weissman’s quest to push readers “in a different direction,” to challenge their sensibilities, and keep them reading.

Stomaching Weissman’s violence in a post-9/11 world

In light of the allusions to war and terrorism predominating the media today, those looking to do a little leisure reading might prefer something a little lighter and fluffier than Headless. Many readers may even contemplate putting Weissman’s book down before making it to the final page. But while the simultaneously ironic and banal tenor of Headless, like most of Weissman’s work, can be difficult to stomach, this discomfort is reason enough to continue reading — both the pages of Headless and the cultural and political milieu of Weissman’s seemingly fictional world and the stranger-than-fiction reality of post-9/11 America.

That is, like Michael Moore’s film Bowling for Columbine,  Headless provides a fascinating domestic parallel to the destruction America has become entangled in overseas since 9/11. While the body count in Iraq and Afghanistan increases daily, the media avoids presenting the more graphic evidence of the conflict. An outcry ensued after the recent beheading of 26-year-old businessman Nick Berg in Iraq was posted on Salon.com, yet nightly news stories of murder-suicides and serial killers continue to titillate audiences without evoking the same indignation. Domestic violence in America is necessarily upstaged by news involving troops overseas, and yet graphic depiction of battles and their aftermath is censored.  

Though it does not depict violence America realistically, Weissman’s work provides an interesting snapshot of the frightened, aggressive, and sometimes callous mental atmosphere that has developed since 9/11 and redefined the domestic landscape. That is reason enough to seek refuge in Headless rather than our usual comfort zones, where violence, for many of us, seems rather distant — at least until it strikes a little too close to home.

STORY INDEX

MARKETPLACE >

American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis
URL: http://www.powells.com/cgi-bin/partner?partner_id=28164&cgi=product&isbn=0679735771

Dear Dead Person: Short Fiction by Benjamin Weissman
URL: http://www.powells.com/cgi-bin/partner?partner_id=28164&cgi=product&isbn=1852423307

Headless by Benjamin Weissman
URL: http://www.powells.com/cgi-bin/partner?partner_id=28164&cgi=product&isbn=1888451491

Mein Kampf by Adolf Hitler
URL: http://www.powells.com/cgi-bin/partner?partner_id=28164&cgi=product&isbn=0395925037

The Stranger by Albert Camus
URL: http://www.powells.com/cgi-bin/partner?partner_id=28164&cgi=product&isbn=0679720200

Commentary >

“Jumps of Imagination” by Juliet Waters
URL: http://www.montrealmirror.com/ARCHIVES/2004/021904/books.html

Interviews >

Interview with Benjamin Weissman by Raul Deznermio
URL: http://www.akashicbooks.com/benwintv.htm

Justin Clark’s interview with Benjamin Weissman
URL: content/view/479/39

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Dear Reader, In The Fray is a nonprofit staffed by volunteers. If you liked this piece, could you please donate $10? If you want to help, you can also:
 
Commentary

Society of cards

With our wallets looking more like a deck of cards with each passing day, it's time to ask just how flimsy a society built on cards can be.


(photo by Laura Elizabeth Pohl)

Digging through my wallet today I have discovered — I never really thought about it before — that I have many kinds of cards; too many, I think. Some are credit cards and thus a constant reminder of the monthly burden I’ve placed on myself.

Many are flimsy business cards, some you might even call calling cards, and there are a few gift cards to various computer stores and book stores. I have membership cards to the few societies I am a member of and insurance cards that are there, I suppose, to give me some sense of security regarding my health or the health of my car. I have several security cards instead of keys: one for the building I work in, and another for the suite that houses the cubicle within the building I work in, and most recently I have acquired a parking pass (yet one more card) that allows me access each morning to the parking garage a block from the building that houses the suite which houses the cubicle I work in, and for which I pay the sum of $100 per month for this very privilege.

My driver’s license is a card, as is my Social Security card. I even have a debit card that parades itself as a MasterCard, but in reality gives me no credit whatsoever, no matter how well I treat it. I have discount cards and privilege cards. I have rewards cards that allow me to collect points for purchases, food punch cards that allow me to collect punches for purchases, and ink-stamp cards that allow me to collect ink-stamps for purchases  — all of which I summarily forget to produce from my wallet whenever I find myself standing in front of a checkout clerk. I even have something called a “universal access card,” but I have no idea what it could possibly access — the universe, perhaps?

We are a society of cards and they’re filling our pockets and our wallets and our purses and our landfills and the very desk I write these words upon. We need cards to access this, or cards to purchase that, or cards to even prove we are who we say we are — apparently no one’s word is good any longer. We have playing cards of all sorts, and packs of cards with pictures of sportsmen and heroes, of villains and heroines, all with a stick of hard, pink bubblegum.

We have catalogs of cards to find our way through the mazes of shelves and stacks in the public libraries. We have index cards for jotting down notes lest we forget our speeches or our thoughts or our recipes or how to make the perfect dry martini.

We send out a card to thank someone for a birthday gift that, no doubt, was itself a card for us to purchase ourselves the gift that someone hadn’t the insight or the time or the inkling of understanding to purchase for us.

How simple it is to walk into the video store and ask, “Please may I purchase a gift card?”

“Why certainly … how much would you like to spend?”

And then you wonder … what is this friend worth? $20, $50, $14.72? You don’t even know, so you say, “How about 20 bucks,” and then you get, “They only come in denominations of $5, $10, $25 and $50.”

So you wonder and you ponder and you consider and you contemplate and in the end you buy the $25 card because that sounds fair enough, and then you’re asked if you’d like to buy a discount card which would save you 10 percent on any purchase made today and so you ask the lady behind the counter, “Would I save 10 percent on the purchase of the gift card?”

“No,” she says, shaking her head, probably thinking to herself that you’re cheap. “Discount cards are no good towards the purchase of the gift cards.”

And, you think to yourself as you look around and spot the various sale items, posters, T-shirts, mugs, and other bits of movie paraphernalia that litter the store, they probably aren’t good for much else, either.

So out of embarrassment you buy the discount card anyway because you don’t think you’re cheap and you certainly don’t want her to think you’re cheap; the card costs you $25, but don’t worry, she tells you, you can make all that back in no time at all and save money, too … and of course you know full well, as you shake your head and smile to yourself (and as you attempt to stuff yet one more card into your bulging wallet), that you don’t watch movies let alone purchase them and you’ll probably never be back until the next friend’s birthday and it doesn’t matter anyway because the discount card that now occupies your wallet behind the sub-club card and your all American Big Bank Visa card is no good towards the purchase of the gift cards.

STORY INDEX

ARTICLES >

“America’s deepening credit card hole” by Jim Hightower
URL: http://www.alternet.org/story.html?StoryID=7979

“Calling all shoppers: On grocery store loyalty cards” by Deborah Pierce
URL: http://www.alternet.org/story.html?StoryID=13684

“Charge now, think later” by Elizabeth Zipper
URL: http://www.alternet.org/story.html?StoryID=12275

“Credit card companies close Muslim accounts” by Hillary Russ
URL: http://www.alternet.org/story.html?StoryID=15659

“Letting consumerism get under your skin” by Jim Hightower
URL: http://www.alternet.org/story.html?StoryID=18729

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Dear Reader, In The Fray is a nonprofit staffed by volunteers. If you liked this piece, could you please donate $10? If you want to help, you can also: