Paternalism and prevention

This appalling story comes via the Globe and Mail: medical supplies were withheld from Manitoba reserves while health officials debated the risks of sending alcohol-based hand sanitizer into the fly-in communities.

It's easy to make fun of the public work-up about H1N1, but in some places it really has reached the level of a pandemic; Northern provincial and Southern territorial reserves host the largest outbreaks in the country and some of the fastest transmission rates. The flu is travelling in Nunavut, and here as elsewhere it has been happening predominantly in the fly-in communities (although that description catches Iqaluit too - and there have been a few cases here).

No matter how you spin it, this delay should never have happened.

Alcoholism and other addictions tend to be major problems on reserves, but this is true of lots of other identifiable, easy-to-target communities in Canada. I don't think Health Canada would have hesitated to send these supplies into non-reserve Northern Ontario towns, or Vancouver's East side.

There are major problems with alcohol and drug abuse in urban centers too, but none of the provisions that I have found in the Canadian Pandemic Influenza Plan make any reference to limiting access to sanitizer to people with past or current problems with alcohol. If this is a legitimate concern - theoretically - then shouldn't Health Canada be as worried about non-reserve alcoholics as they are about alcoholics living on reserve? As a potential future white, urban alcoholic, I resent that!

Furthermore, this would not be the first time people living on these reserves were ever exposed to hand sanitizer. It's available in drug stores, and lots of people there probably use it. Anyone who was ever going to abuse it has already had ample opportunity, although I continue to think that most people - even First Nations people! - have the good sense to understand that drinking hand sanitizer is dangerous.

There is an Annex to the Canadian Pandemic Influenza Plan that deals specifically with First Nations reserves. It's here. I've skimmed it, and while it recommends in a couple of provisions that hand sanitizer be used, it does not contemplate complications arising from potential abuse. If concerns over abuse were based on good evidence from Health Canada, this issue would have been worked into the Plan. It's not.

Which signals, to me, that this is no more than paternalistic hand-wringing of the kind that so often plagues public health debates. These debates almost always have a racial/class-based dimension, which is only more explicit here. The same issues, manifested differently, arise in arguments about everything from condom distribution to public funding of methodone clinics.

But let's be cold-hearted about this. Let's permit the assumption that white and urban people understand the subtleties of hand sanitizer in a way that Canadian Aboriginal people don't. Let's take the human factor out and look at the numbers. Sure.

In the time these supplies weren't being sent out to communities, "dozens" (says the article) of Aboriginals got sick enough that they needed to be flown into more urban centres for hospitalization. At one point, the article notes, "two thirds of all flu victims on respirators in the province were aboriginal." So for all those people, the province of Manitoba flew them in for hospital treatment and has supported elaborate medical care for them, when prevention measures would have cost no more than a few dollars per person. Even if, theoretically, a small number of people got sick as a result of ingesting the sanitizer, I doubt this would approximate the financial or human cost of all these flu victims in either frequency or severity.

And this is why the paternalistic approach to public health fails and the harm reduction approach wins. Help people get what they need to protect themselves, and they will.

So. What's the stupid to evil ratio on this? I'll go with 50-50 - half ignorance, half indifference.

At least the G&M had the good sense to disable comments.

A new study on young women and sexual violence, and some thoughts on language

This report, by ChildTrends.org, is incredibly upsetting, but hardly news to those of us who have some familiarity, either personally or professionally, with sexual assault. While conservative statistics about rates of incidence of rape tend to put the figure at around 1 in 6 (North American women, at some time in their lives), I think it's becoming increasingly clear that, to get a real feel for how many women have experienced sexual abuse in their lives, the terms need to be broadened. This new study suggests that 18% of women aged 18 to 24 have had forced sexual intercourse. That's more like 1 in 5, by around the time most of us are finishing college or getting our first "real" job.

Which has got me thinking (again) about the role of language in how we talk about sexual violence, and about our experiences more generally.

There's a reason we say "sexual assault" and not "rape," why we say "survivor" and not "victim" or "accuser," and why we let women tell us when it was rape and when it wasn't, rather than us telling them. This is all Sexual Assault 101.

But in this specific context (meaning a blog generally, and a personal-politics blog more specifically), I think there's something else going on.

A few days ago, my dad and I got into a very heated conversation about the American election. At the end of a long series of frustrating back-and-forths, he informed me that Michelle Obama is going to cost Barack the election, because she's just so *aggressive*. "I heard her speech at the DNC, and I couldn't believe how aggressive it was."

I had kept my cool through the conversation until this point - through accusations that I was relentlessly partisan, that I had a personal vendetta against Palin, that the idea that Palin was anti-woman was laughable, that McCain's POW status prevented all criticisms of his foreign policy approach - and then I flipped my shit. With tears in my eyes and no embarassment, I told him that when you hurl a word like "aggressive" at a woman like Michelle Obama, you're hurling it at all of us. Us. Us. Me. Me as a professional-to-be. That word tears down my future. Mine.

And then I realized I should have been saying this all along.

Sometimes objectivity is necessary and helpful. Sometimes it's the only path to the truth. And sometimes it's not.

This isn't a newspaper, or CNN, and I'm not a politician. When I talk on this blog, or with people in my own life, I have no professional obligations to be neutral. I'm not campaigning, trying to win people over to my side with diplomacy. I have no obligation to be neutral when I have something at stake, or to try to make myself seem rational by going out of my way to grant points to the other side, even when they make me wince.

My attempts at objectivity, at not taking things personally or getting emotional, enabled my dad to treat the misogynistic language of this election as a purely academic issue. I enabled that with him, as I have in many other conversations. That might be a disservice to him, but it's definitely a disservice to me. I, and women in general, are not a theoretical concept. Once I teared up and said my bit, he refused to continue the discussion "if I was going to get all emotional about it." The truth is, I wanted him to see the emotion. I didn't want him to have the luxury of treating sexism as a purely rhetorical problem, when we are living it. I wanted to break him out of those habits of thought and into my world. It's not that he doesn't care, he's just never had it made real in this way by someone he loves.

Which is why I'm rethinking the way I talk about women's issues on this blog and in general. Let me take one more stab at introducing that new Child Trends.


By the time we are 25 years old, 1 in 5 of us will have experienced forced intercourse.


Because it's us that I really want to talk about.

(h/t to Feministing.)

Pretty sure that's illegal

I'm apartment-hunting in Toronto. I just had a landlord tell me over the phone that he wouldn't allow me to come view an apartment because I was living with three girls, and he wanted at least half of the tenants to be guys.

This was the place.

Fuck you, guy. Seriously. Just fuck right off.

Who wants to help me find out who to complain to?

Catch-up reading: Crime and Punishment edition

The New Yorker on families of illegal immigrants in a private-run prison in Texas, featuring a family who tried to claim asylum in Canada.

Unspeakable alleged abuses of power from the Albany police.

Even more reasons to be afraid of McCain.

The writers of The Wire, the smartest show in the history of television, on what's wrong with the War on Drugs.

And respect to Pandagon for being so awesome the last few weeks.

Things I liked more and less about Agra

One minor train problem later, we're in Agra. This city is gaudy, at least all the areas we've seen, and I kind of like its total lack of tact. Congratulations to the touts at Fatehpur Sikri for being, by a wide margin, the most persistent we've seen so far. I seriously thought S. was going to smack this one kid, and was trying to figure out how to say "You are putting yourself in physical danger" in Hindi when the tourist police came and shooed him away. (Yes, there are special tourist police in India. They're the ones dressed like police, but not carrying AK-47-style guns.)

The Hindi is coming along, slowly. I can construct simple sentences and understand some of what I'm hearing if the speaker isn't talking a million miles a minute. They all speak directly to S., right away, barely acknowledging E. and I sometimes. I know it's probably mostly because he's Indian, but I get the sense that his being a he has something to do with it as well. The good thing is that it lets me sit back and listen to them trying to speak so that he can understand them. The bad thing is that it gives me few opportunities to speak it myself. I'm getting used to the pacing, the bubbling, front-of-the-mouth sound streams, catching the beats and the intonation. But it still feels like double dutch, and even though I've got the rhythm of the ropes clicking on the pavement, I'm stuck rocking back and forth and waiting for one opening big enough to jump in. Still, it's coming along.

I got really serious about it a few days ago in response to a straw-that-breaks type incident on our "7k hike" (truth: grim, shadeless death march at a 30-degree incline which we gave up on halfway) in which the three of us ended up surrounded by men who were transparently talking about us. I could understand some basic parts ("Two girls, one boy," "Where do you think they're from?") but couldn't follow it when the tones changed, got quieter and bolder, and into what S. assures us was very, very crude - not that we didn't know what was going on anyway. It drives me insane that people always think that speaking in another language means that no one can tell that they're being discussed; it's not true, you always can. Always always. Anyway, it really burns me that people can openly show us disrespect and we can't do anything about it, so I've gotten serious about learning the language. My goal is to be able to shock and humiliate one person before I leave who says something exceptionally disrespectful to us. (Of course, if no one else talks rudely about us, I won't get the chance - and no one would be happier than me if that were the case - but in the meantime I think I'll try to be prepared.)

Anyway. Agra.

We spent yesterday at Fatehpur Sikri, which was ultimately not that enjoyable. It's not that the buildings weren't great - they were - but between the heat (yeah, uh oh), the touts (as I said, in a class of their own) and the bugs.... good god, the bugs.... I was too distracted and uncomfortable to really absorb the scenery. I speak for myself here, but I think it probably applies to all of us. The entire place was like a solid, dense cloud of these tiny, fruit-fly type bugs. Because we were perspiring and wearing sunscreen (okay, only E. and I), walking through a cloud of them meant getting them stuck to your face, your neck, your arms, and all over your clothes. I have never seen so many insects in one place. The clouds were so dense they were a permanent haze across the complex. I made the mistake of wearing yellow, which apparently they were attracted to, so I ended up absolutely covered. It's taken two washes to get all the bugs out of my shirt.

But, nothing a cold shower didn't fix. Every shower here feels like the Best Shower Ever. People in Canada don't really need to shower, ever. They don't get dirty. Not actually dirty. You don't really know how dirty works until you come somewhere like India. You don't really need to wash your clothes, either. We do.

Had a mediocre dinner last night and a beer that the restaurant had to send a boy on a bike to go buy, and made us keep under our table when we weren't refilling our glasses. You can get beer everywhere here, but no one has a liquor license. I can understand that (cf: my previous post on Indian bureaucracy). It was hilarious, we felt bad. Kingfisher is the only widely available brand here, which - like most of what Indians drink - is sugary as hell. It also comes in 650ml bottles, so I suggest that any blossoming alcoholics steer clear. Came back to the hotel and stayed up late watching old American cartoons dubbed in Hindi - Johnny Bravo, even, and Tom and Jerry.

Got up at 5.30 this morning to be at the gates of the Taj at 6am when it opened. (Okay, 6.15.) May I recommend the Taj Mahal at dawn? It's hard to imagine a time that wouldn't be worth rising to see the building described by Nobel winner Rabindranath Tagore as "a tear on the face of eternity"* shift from muted pink-blue-greys in the predawn twilight through the autumnal colours of sunrise and into the blaring, pearly light of the daytime sun. The play of light, which in Moghul (Islamic) architecture is used to signify the presence of God, who is never directly represented, is one of the most interesting features of the Taj. It seems flat without the sun, all grey. From what we saw, I think it's at its best when the first bits of direct morning light hit it, giving it a third dimension and illuminating the Koranic script around the main arches. It's definitely the most subtle, and makes the brassy major chords of the full sun** feel a bit garish. Of course, that's only until you actually enter the buildling - when you come back out and look again, it's so white and so fine that you can't imagine it in any other lighting. I know I'll forget all of this, and the photos won't help at all.

In the inside of the mausoleum, you can't take photos, and that is a damn shame. You've seen a hundred photos of the Taj and you haven't seen the most beautiful part. Inside is a replica of the tombs of Shah Jahan, who built the thing, and his favourite wife, whose death inspired it. They're surrounded by a wall of carved marble that's cut so thin it's translucent, with incredibly detailed inlays of precious and semiprecious stones in long floral motifs that echo the ones on the front gate. There are also panels in this wall that are carved right through, and through which you can see the tomb-replicas - for such a hard material, the marble here managed to look incredibly soft, even malleable. The walls of the interior, which sit back about 15 feet from the wall around the tombs (which is only 5 feet high or so) are all, again, inlaid marble and Koranic text, rising right up to the full-height dome ceiling at the top of the structure. Beneath the replicas, the real tombs lie in the same positions, in undecorated wood coffins, in a permanently sealed and inaccessible room that, my guide says, smells of incense and roses.

The thing you can't capture, in photos or words, is how much soul is in the building. The expressiveness of the work is completely unlike any other building I've ever been in, and it's hard to explain exactly what that means. The thin alley of water in front of the Taj (in which you can see a reflection of the building, in a lot of famous photos) is actually just the North stream of four, which extend in four directions from a raised platform, and represent the four streams in the Muslim paradise. Apart from the restrained elegance of the detailing, which itself speaks volumes about beauty and loss, the interior layout of the mausoleum follows an old Islamic text about the layout of paradise - the sum of all of these details is that Jahan and his wife's tombs lie at the seat of God, but for one detail: they are slightly off-center, and in an obsessively symmetrical structure, we had all wondered why. I have a guess, on further thought: to lie beside, rather than in place of, the throne of God.

To say the least, I was moved by the interior. A little choked up, actually. There's just so much feeling coming together in such a small space: of love, of faith, of loss, of joy. All I could pull together in my mind at the time were random strands of poetry from god knows where... well, some I know. "where leap the wild, bereft deer" is from one of Phyllis Webb's Water and Light ghazals, for example. But I think the truth of the building reveals itself like that, like those strange flashes of recognition that happen in poetry, where something far too big to ever be articulated is channeled into a narrow phrase, a shorthand for the human, or even the sacred. My experience of the Taj had a lot in common with my experiences of poetry, at its best.

Well, this entry has gotten really out of control now, so I'll cut it off there, except to say that I've also finished Anil's Ghost and strongly suggest that if you haven't read it, you should, and that if you have read it, a second reading is definitely needed. I'm considering a third.

We leave tomorrow for Orccha, in Madhya Pradesh to the South, after which we'll be headed to Kajuraho and Pachmari, then hopefully back to Varanassi, if the trains work. We've had a really hard time working the trains to Varanassi, and the buses are just unsafe there. It's also a theft-heavy city, and E. and S. want to skip it entirely. I'm torn. Getting there really will be a nightmare. We'll see what happens.

Take care, all.

*Thank you, Rough Guide.
** Thank you, P.K. Page.

Dear Indian bureaucracy (language warning)

(The content of this post has been removed because it has been deemed inappropriate for children, Christians, the elderly, and everyone else. Sorry if you read it before I got to it. For real, though, they deserved it.)

Jaipur, yes, but Jodhur, oh yes!

Hey again, all. Sorry for the hiatus - we were in Jaipur yesterday and the day before, and couldn't find internet there for cheaper than about Rs40-50/hr ($1.10-1.40). No deal.

One minor trauma later, we're in Jodhpur, where we'll be roosting for a few days. Before I get to Jaipur and the trauma, which after this blog post will not be spoken of again except as a cautionary tale, let me say that we're both pretty much in love with Jodhpur. Rajasthan, you know how to make a beautiful city.

First, Jaipur. We had the better part of two days in Jaipur, which was generally really nice, although during our time there we decided we'd had enough of bazaars for a few days. That's simple enough. Among the hilights were the Palace of Winds, which is every bit as Final Fantasy-esque as it sounds (so, obviously, I loved it. Nerd noise here). It's this beautiful huge construction right on a main market which is basically just a huge front that was constructed full of windows (over 900) so that women who were in strict purdah could observe festivities on the street without being seen. My hips couldn't get through most of the passageways, so obviously I'm not delicate enough for that kind of thing. There, that's my snark for the day.

The Jantar Mantar at Jaipur was really fascinating; it's this centuries-old field of huge instruments for measuring and predicting astronomy, astrology and... chronology? Time. They had ways of measuring the altitude, latitude and longitude of the sun, the accurate solar time within two seconds, which phase of the zodiac the sun is in, and bunch of other stuff that I tried pretty hard to understand but didn't. I think Emma followed a little more than I did, but there was a lot (especially about astrology) that we just couldn't piece together. Still, very very interesting. 17th century, I think.

Our hotel was really great, with a lovely courtyard, and two peacocks that the owner apparently feeds. Regardless of how you feel about that, damn are those beautiful birds, especially from 6-7 feet away.


Alright, the trauma.

Last night was our first overnight train. The overnight train process, we suspect, is in generaly going to be fine and fairly easy to use. Last night, it was not.

We booked our train tickets for the whole of Rajasthan (roughly the next week) at once in New Delhi, for convenience. We had a very long chat with the man we did the bookings with, who was very nice, and picked out our trains carefully. Last night we were meant to board the 11.57pm train, and had been waiting in the waiting room at the train station since about 8.30, because we were checked out of our hotel and had nowhere else we really wanted to go in the dark. Then, at about 11.45, when getting up to go to our platform, E. noticed that the date on our ticket said February 14 (which is today), not February 13 (which was yesterday).

So. We ran to the tourist office, who calmly assured us that it was correct, that they put the 14 because the train always runs late and therefore usually leaves after midnight, meaning the 14. He told us to get on the train. That made no sense to us, but we went to the platform.

Of course you see where this is going. Other people in our seats when we got on. The next 15 minutes were an insane blur of random locals trying to help us (who/wherever they are, we are so so grateful), pleading our case to multiple ticketing officials, jumping from car to car trying to find someone who will let us on. Reminder: it was midnight, we had our heavy packs with us, and no hotel for the night. Finally, as the train was pulling away, one of the ticket guys gestured vaguely to hop on, so we did, still not knowing if we could stay. He dragged us through a bunch of cars, out of 3AC (our class of ticket) and into sleeper class, which is noisy and comes with no bedding. He pulled two Indian soldiers out of their bunks (awkward) and put us in them. The soldiers were not impressed, although they were exceptionally kind to us. I felt awful, but we were also totally desperate. After some yelling between people in our cabin, we curled up and tried to sleep. It was freezing; we'd been expecting bedding. It's still going down to 2-3C at night, so we were pretty uncomfortable. But we were on the train.

After some rough sleeping and numb appendages, we realized that they don't announce the stops on the night trains, and we didn't know exactly when our train was supposed to get in. We thought it was around 5.30am. So at about 4.45, we got out of our bunks, pulled up our packs, and stood by the door to the car so we could ask someone at each stop where we were. We were wide awake, that artificial exhausted-awake, and finally an Indian man in our section traded berths with me so we could fold one down and E. and I could sit rather than stand. He also told us when we were at Jodhpur. We still aren't sure how they know. But we're pretty sure we could figure it out again if we had to - lots of people get off and on at the larger junctions.

Luckily our hotel had sent a driver to pick us up (we love this hotel), who was on the platform waiting for us when we got off around 6am. There was no room for us when we got to the hotel as check-out time was 10am, so he led us through the streets to another building that's being renovated by the owners of our hotel, and let us into a very luxurious but only half-finished room. It seemed safe. We offered him a tip (the ride was provided free and he carried our bags, plus it was only 6.30am still at this point) but he declined, saying, "Sleep, sleep." So we did.

At 9.30am we got up and made our way back to the building, had a lovely and leisurely breakfast at the rooftop restaurant (these are common in Indian hotels and extremely nice) and got into our room a little later. After the rough sleep and the tense night, we had a beyond wonderful day today, sitting on the roof in the sun, reading and chatting, again with lassis. E. loves lassi more than any human should, which is really hilarious and great.

So today, the day today, ended up being completely great. We got a refund on our tickets for tonight's train, and Jodhpur is just lovely. Many of the buildings are this beautiful robin's-egg blue, with the odd pink and whitewash sandstone ones for contrast. We have a great view of the fort, which I won't be able to spell properly at the moment, but we're hiking up to it tomorrow, so we'll let you know how it goes and maybe post some photos in another day or two.

So all's well. This post has been all story and no thinking, but we've both been thinking a lot (I think), so we'll have another thinking post tomorrow or the next day.

I wanted to thank everyone who's reading and commenting; your comments have been really interesting. I especially want to get into the question Cindy's raised about the human rights framework as an evolved form of colonialism, and the risks of that. Gonna keep that in my mind for the next few days. Really looking forward to seeing who weighs in on it.

You guys are great. Happy Valentine's.

Troubling predeparture conversations

A: "Where are you flying into?"
me: "Delhi."
A: .....
me: "What?"
A: "You know how people say nothing can prepare you for India? When they say that, they mean Delhi."
me: "I thought when they said that, they meant Mumbai...."

Oh well. They probably meant both, and that's just fine.

So I've set myself up this space to post while on the road, partially as a record for myself and partially to avoid assaulting you all unnecessarily with 'update' emails.

I've been doing some thinking about why I'm doing this trip, why I'm doing it now, and what I'm hoping to get out of it. It's been a strange thing to think through; it's hardly unusual anymore for my demographic to go places our parents would have been unlikely to choose, and for long periods of time. It sort of feels in some ways that travelling outside of North America and Western Europe (I have yet to hear a satisfactory term for this group of areas, probably with good reason) has become for our generation what the two-months-in-Europe-after-graduation trip was for previous generations (though, of course, plenty of us still opt for Europe). I wonder what both of these mean. I certainly see myself wanting many of the same things, and probably sinking myself into similar problems.

People have tended to react to my trip in one of two ways. The first, which tends to come from the older generation, is a mix of cautious support and curiosity as to why in the world anyone would choose India as a destination. (Early email a concerned family member: "Italy, France, Belgium, Germany, England, Scotland, Ireland, Greece, Austria. Even Hungary. All these countries have bathrooms in them. And did you know that India was right beside Pakistan? I'm sure you didn't." [NB: I did.]) I haven't really been able to explain it to anyone who's had this reaction, and don't expect I'll be able to. The second reaction, which has usually come from my own generation (and community) has been one of total understanding and excitement.

There is, however, a difficult subset of this group, who follow up their approval with a question to the effect of, "Are you going there as a spiritual journey?"

That question sends me off in a million directions. My gut wants to say no; I'm not expecting some mystical experience to happen; I feel like this question comes from an embarassingly orientalist set of ideas about what India is; I have never had a moment of transcendence triggered by bright colours, a foreign language, or the smell of incense or curry* here, and don't really expect it to work any differently there; I feel that human beings are basically the same everywhere, and I don't expect any one or group of people overseas to answer my questions any more than I expect anyone here to; that it's not appropriate to look at other parts of the world (or anyone else) as answers to the parts of ourselves that remain mysterious.

But I also know that that answer is disingenuous. First, of course I believe that we do define ourselves with and against others, and that on some level, you need to allow yourself to do that in order to accept other people's humanity - at its best, it's an act of sympathy. Second, although it's easy for me to say that I'm not seeking any kind of religious experience, spirituality is an entirely different question.

I consider myself a spiritual agnostic. I'm moved by beauty, by suffering, by justice, by history. I'm moved by chaos and paradox. In this spirit, I can say that the last few years have been a profoundly disorienting and grounding experience for me; I believe strongly that the organizing principle of the world and of life is chaos (mantra #1: "crazy shit happens all the time") and that this needn't dislodge our sense of self and justice (mantra #2: "don't be a dick"). Trying to understand my place in this world, and in history, has become very spiritual.

And this trip has a lot to do, for me, with locating myself within these things. Our generation does not have the option of ignoring the non-Western world, and we have good reason to be angry with our parents (where applicable) for doing so. I think I'm drawn to India, specifically, because it strikes me as a particularly hard place to rationally come to terms with; it doesn't fall easily into the "developing world" paradigm that gets applied so liberally** to anyplace that doesn't have easily visible markers of 'advanced democracy' and ' late capitalism,' and allows us to, for example, talk about areas as bafflingly varied as "Africa" and "South Asia" as if they were homogenous. Without having been there yet, India (and here I do mean the whole of India) encapsulates something for me about both the mechanics of the world and our moment in history, and I think this comes from the contraditions and multiplicity of things it contains. Within four months, and within a single nation, I'm going to see some of the oldest structures on the planet (some of which predate the Roman ruins by hundreds, even thousands of years), and then move on to a few cities which are becoming some of the most important technological and economic hubs in the world. India is a constitutionally secular society which has been dealing with issues of religious and regional plurality (with varied degrees of success) since long before Canada was a twinkle in some British lord's eye. Not to mention the issues of population management, which will become a serious global concern over the next century, not only due to the increasing global population but due to scarcity of resource concerns, displacement due to climate change and...

Well, I could go on, but I'll save all of that for the road. In the meantime, I'll be trying not to think every experience into some abstract comment on the cosmos and its relation to worldly justice, and to see the places I'm going to as openly as I can, and for what they are. This is by no means the end of my reservations, intentions, hopes, or assumptions.


In closing, a word on the title of this blog: last year I read Anne McClintock's brilliant article, "The Angel of Progress: Pitfalls of the Term 'Post-Colonial," which got me thinking in a serious way about the current prevalence of the prefix post-. We're stuck, we're told, in a culture*** that's post-modern, post-capitalist, post-communistic, post-democratic, post-feminist (yuck), post-9/11, post-just-about-every-movement-that-has-tried-to-take-the-world-seriously. Post-colonial, of course. McClintock's insights about the way these terms obscure our ability to talk about so many problems that still exist are great, and I won't repeat them. But I think what all this adds up to is a sense of floating in a void, of being disconnected from what's happening around us and in the places we can't see, and of feeling like no one's contributions are meaningful. I worry that the term that's missing from this list, and is the sum of all those terms, is post-responsibility. One major artistic theme of the twentieth century was our individual dislocation from history, our inability to see any semblance of ourselves in the stories of the past, and how that prevents us from seeing and telling the stories of the present, and worse, of the future. I think this view requites an awful inflexibility in the way we look at history; it may not happen on horseback anymore, but I'm not sure it ever really did.

I want to work through these ideas; I think the post is bullshit. I think we all need to get back into our bodies, back into history. I think I'm going to India on a spiritual quest to confront the question of where and who I am, and where and who we all are.

(Of course, I also enjoy the pun on traditional mail; these are my letters to you, which appropriately enough will come electronically rather than by the actual, traditional post.)

And, of course of course, the 'comments' button is at the bottom of each post for a reason.





* Okay, so I've had some pretty transcendent curries... but I think this has more to do with how badly the traditional Anglo-Saxon diet accomodates vegetarians than some spiritual property inherent to the spice. I'll let you know later whether this was, in fact, curry witchcraft.
** Wording deliberate.
*** Few words make me cringe harder than "culture," but there it is.