On "the Jews"

I'm on holidays at the moment so here's just a few lines on things I've been thinking about recently.

I just finished reading a book called "Outliers" by Malcolm Gladwell, which I at first thought was about the absolute opposite of what my core beliefs about success are: that everyone has the same innate capacity. And, yes, at first glance it appears to be saying that you can expect to be in low-skill service jobs if you're Latino, you can expect to be good at maths if you're Asian, and you'll probably be a doctor or a lawyer if you're Jewish. And if you're of African descent you'll probably want to kill and physically hurt others for minor slights. Generalizations? Stereotypes? Actually, it deals more on examining the roots of why people turn out to be the way they are based on specific things that happened to the ancestors of their culture, and that for the most part continue to imprint on their futures. An interesting note was made of New York's Jewish community.

In the last week I made my mum visit the Museum of Jewish Heritage in New York with me. Now, she's a very humble woman with a primary school education who can barely pick out the location of countries on a map of the world (e.g. not long ago she was surprised to find out that Spain is in Europe and not in South America like she assumed for a long time). You get my point: she's a humble woman with not a lot of knowledge of what is not essential to her survival. At the Jewish museum while we were looking at concentration camp uniforms and learning about the disgusting things that happened to so many people during WW2, mum asked me, "why did all this happen to the Jews?" I thought it was an excellent question! There's probably no single answer why that did, and there's definitely nothing in this universe to justify it.

What I find even more fascinating, though, is how a great majority of the Jewish community post-WW2 became so prosperous. They were always an oppressed and abused people. They were workers and they had to learn skills. Since thousands of years they've been working (even under slavery conditions) - they had to learn! So the theory goes that around the time of WW2 when dislike of the Jews was quite overt and common, even in the new lands they settled in they were discriminated against for many reasons. So to escape this oppressive environment, Jews after some time used the skills hey had learnt previously, textile and garment industry, for example, and started up their own operations. They hired other Jews. They taught their children the importance of work to better yourself and aiming to equalize opportunity (I maintain that this is the true value of education). The story goes that the children of garment workers went on to become lawyers and doctors and business people at the insistence of their parents - but after they became lawyers (for example) their gentile counterparts still discriminated against them. They ended up working the legal cases nobody wanted, working the medical fields nobody else considered worthy at the time (things like psychiatry and neuroscience, for example). And then, something happened: the Jews had created niches of industry for themselves - which as fate or history would have it, soon became the most sought out niches in industry.

Why did the holocaust happen? I guess there's no valid or all-exhaustive answer to that. But you know what, I believe the best thing the Jewish people ever did was 1) acknowledge their position as others viewed them, and 2) used it not as an excuse to become victims of oppression but to motivate forward action. They were people who once they left the concentration camps, they left the concentration camps. They didn't sit down and feel sorry for themselves for their dreadful pasts and suffering. They began to build instead their prosperous futures. Can't we all learn from that? Once the suffering is done with, let's stop suffering and start building a future we desire.

On what we teach about sex

A few incidents in the last few years of work have made me wonder about the different ways and the different things that parents educate their children about sex. There’s the biological stuff, which is what parents for some reason think is most confronting, but that every single generation in every single country and in fact every sexually-reproducing species since the beginning of animal existence has figured out quite easily. A parent could get away with not ever mentioning to their offspring how babies are made, where they come out of, and the logistics of what sexual intercourse entails, and they’d pick it up anyway. I mean, in most cultures before our grandparents generation such things weren’t discussed by parents with their children – and yet people still had sex and had children, etc. It’s even less of a concern in modern days where there’s television and other media, there’s schools purposely teaching this stuff, and there’s other people (e.g. peers, relatives, health professionals, etc.) who will readily discuss the biology of sex with anyone. So it’s not what we teach children about the physiology of sex that concerns me, but that other stuff we tend to forget about sometimes, the psychosocial aspects of sex in a person’s life.

To go back again to the “olden” days now. Religion used to be a big part in a greater proportion of people’s lives ‘back in the olden days’. That’s a fact, that less people these days than, say, 100 years ago had a religious affiliation, whether that be because they elected to or were expected to by state mandates. In most religions, sex has/had a spiritual connotation and there were rules and consequences described around it. If you had sex before a marriage was confirmed, with someone outside of that marriage agreement, etc. you had “sinned” and would incur a punishment for it. Now, the punishment would be either or both imposed upon you by the church (e.g. been disassociated from the congregation) or by God (e.g. you were lead to believe that God would punish you by disapproval or loss of a post-life privilege, dependant on what the religious creed was). For the non-religious (and of course still applied to the religious) in ‘the olden days’, there was this thing about reputation and social norms.  Of course, social norms and expectations (as does religion) still exist, but modern Western culture places less of an emphasis on it, and more on being your own individual. So our parents and grandparents generation placed greater emphasis on whether others thought or knew that you had been engaging in something as disreputable as having sex with someone you weren’t married to. Sex was a shameful thing. Even for those that were married, it was not a proper thing to discuss or make jokes about or depict in media or entertainment, etc. So, back in the day a parent who educated a child about the psychosocial aspects of sex (the physiology been much too embarrassing to discuss outside of biology classes or by scientists), all you had to do is tell the child not to have sex because they’d either go to hell and die or that the whole town would call them a slut and their life would be miserable.

What are we teaching our children now about sex? Everyone knows about the physiology of sex, even very young children, and parents and their children will share very explicit details about sex. What’s wrong with that? Nothing – except that sex to human beings isn’t just about the biology of it. There’s nothing wrong with having all this knowledge about sex at all! But I’m beginning to believe that we’ve taken too much comfort in only sharing the easy stuff about sex, the stuff every child will eventually figure out even if their parent never tells them about, and have left our children with the hard stuff to figure out on their own.

In my job I’ve met many teenagers having absolutely never considered some of the other consequences of sex, let alone how to deal with them. We teach our children about sex, what it entails, that there’s the possibility of pregnancy and infections, to use condoms to prevent infections, and to use contraception to avoid pregnancy. But where children are missing out on instruction is about romantic relationships, who to have sex with, why or why not to have sex, how is sex related to love, should sex bear any relationship to love at all? These are all questions that increasingly younger people are having to charge through on their own. And I’d like to share with you some examples of questions that I have witnessed some very anxious teenagers try to deal with on their own too:

• How do I tell my parents I’m pregnant? Do they need to know?
• How do I tell my ex-boyfriend that I’m pregnant? Should I tell him?
• Should I tell my parents or my ex-partner/s that I have and STD? How can I tell them?
• Why did I get an STD when I was with a person I loved?
• Should I quit school because the other students won’t stop bullying me about being pregnant in high school?
• Is it ok to be sad about having a miscarriage even though no one else knew I was pregnant?
• What do I do now that I’m pregnant and my parents don’t want me to be and I still haven’t formed a concept on how I feel about abortion?
• How do I tell my girlfriend without hurting her feelings that I think she has a problem ‘down below’ because those warts don’t look normal?
• How can I get an STD when I use a condom all the time except with my regular girlfriend and she isn’t with anyone other than me?
• Is sex always meant to be painful or is it just because I don’t actually want it when it happens?
• Is it normal not to have had sex yet at my age? Does that mean I am lacking something or am sick?

Can a parent or anything in life prepare you to answer those questions? I don’t know. But it certainly would break your heart to have first considered questions like these when they apply directly to you and the situation you find yourself in. I say, good on us for talking to our children openly about sex and the need for safe sex practices and why they’re important, but it’s now time to do the real hard work: prepare our children to think of the consequences if they do find themselves in situations where the safe sex has simply failed. Encourage the young person to think of their own opinions about abortion, about social discrimination against teen parents, about sexually transmitted infections, about the link between love, sex, and relationships, about the effect on career development and parenthood, etc. We don’t need to mandate our kids to the effect of “don’t have sex or you’ll die”, but we could encourage them to ask themselves “could I deal with any of the consequences of sex? If not, then do I need to delay sex for now?” And do this not because the child will go to hell or society will ostracize him, but because he is an independent being worthy of not suffering the negative consequences of sex.

On racism in Australia

Dr. Charlie Teo, an Australian-born neurosurgeon of Asian descent, recently gave a speech on being Australian. He addressed the common denial of certain politicians, and in fact of a large segment of Australia’s population, that there is in fact a lot of racism in Australia. He pointed out that you cannot believably state that there is no racism in Australian unless you are of Indian or Arab appearance. I would add to that list Asian or African or Indigenous appearance at the very least too. That is because people of these backgrounds, with phenotypically prominent features in their face, skin colour, clothing, etc. are the ones that are often the recipients of the racism that occurs in Australia. But Australians in general aren’t racist, are they? Australians in general think they can make “non-racist” racist remarks by prefacing a racist statement by the words “I’m not being racist, but…” then following that up with an overgeneralisation or stereotype about a cultural group of people. It is such a common phrase in Australian parlance, really, but the preface doesn’t exonerate the content of the message.

The population of El Salvador is said to be over 99% ‘mestizo’, that is to say there are less than 1% “indigenous” Salvadorians or Mayan and/or pipils. Who in El Salvador does this matter to? No one! Because almost completely the people of El Salvador consider themselves Salvadorians rather than part Mayan with part Spanish ancestry – yet all of us, in varying proportions, are exactly that. You see it in the skin colour and physical features of the people. In terms of identity and culture, however, they call themselves Salvadorians only. Isn’t that a better method?... And yet maybe it isn’t about one method being better or another being worse, but perhaps it’s a cultural thing to think this way.

I remember when I was in Peru for the first time with some Australian-born girls and they were surprised by the way people describe each other in Latin American countries: skin colour, stature, hair colour, eye colours, nose length, personality, and other physical features – mostly in that exact same order! We were often trying to find people within a local hospital we were undertaking a medical school elective in. The oncologist was the white, tall guy, a bit chubby, with black hair, brown eyes, big nose, and was such a lovely man. The gynaecologist was the dark, short guy, who was overweight, had black hair and eyes, and was an arrogant prick. Found these guys in no time with those descriptions! Maybe our culture hasn’t been too marred by “political-correctness” and that’s why we can communicate so freely, but what else is the point of communicating if not to get a clear message across? I don’t know.

A few months ago I attended an indigenous culture awareness course, of which I’ve written about before. Before us non-Australian-indigenous folk was a man of Australian Aboriginal descent teaching us things about the differences between certain aspects of indigenous and non-indigenous culture. One of the rules of the course was that there were no “stupid” or “offensive” questions; all discussion and questions were allowed. As tends to happen in these kind of conversations, people soon start talking about “them” and “us”. The speaker at the front kept speaking about “us”, so a student of the course asked him a question: does he consider himself Australian at all? The question was based on the fact that we all, the speaker included, were living in Australia and sharing the experience of what living in Australia is. The speaker answered, “I consider myself an Aboriginal man”. Well, yes, but did he identify as both Australian and as an Australian-Aboriginal? The speaker laughed mockingly and said, “There is no Australian culture! What is Australian culture? Eating sausages and drinking beer?” There was an all-round “Ooh!” heard from around the room… I guess no-one likes to be stereotyped.

Is racism rife in Australia? Probably. Is this surprising? No; why should it be? Because suddenly it’s no longer acceptable to acknowledge flaws of the past (or present). What this reminds me of is of certain oppressive governments that seek to rewrite the history books that retell of their defeats or of their gross inhumane mistreatment of masses of people. If those histories or those actions are so reprehensible, then the wisest thing may not be to deny its existence, but to admit it and accept it as a challenge, to set it as the target away from which we must aim our future. If we are lucky enough not be part of a minority group, then what we can do is to personally not discriminate minority groups. But if we are part of a minority group, we must recognise also that this does not entitle us to be racist in return to “the oppressor”. We may not be able to change Australia, a whole country, but if we each make a commitment to change… 

On courageous conversations

Last week I attended an education session on Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander cultural awareness. The intent was to help health professionals engage better with this subset of the Australian population, and as such “close the gap” between the health of non-indigenous and indigenous peoples (who fair terribly worse in morbidity and mortality). The session was run by a man who identified himself as an aboriginal man and he explained various aspects of what is culture from a psychosocial and semantic perspective. It was interesting and he spoke of a thing called “courageous conversations” – you know, all those touchy subjects on elements of our society which if we comment on we’ll be called racist or bigoted or misogynist or otherwise prejudiced. Racism and the history of Australia (or the U.S.A or South Africa or so many other nations) is one of those touchy subjects. So we all listened to the discussion he presented and he played Professor Michael McDaniel’sreconciliation speech and made passing reference to Kevin Rudd’s “Sorry”speech. The things spoken by these two men are along the same vein, but stated quite differently.

On the 13th of February, 2008, Kevin Rudd, the then Prime Minister of Australia gave a speech to acknowledge the past evils that had been afflicted systematically on the indigenous peoples of this nation. The other purpose of the speech was to apologize to aboriginal peoples of past, present, and future who had been (or will be) disadvantaged or hurt as a consequence of the shameful government policies that existed to purposely suppress aboriginal peoples. The speech was symbolic and groundbreaking, intent on paving the way to improving things in future and learning from past mistakes. This very loud gesture was meant to benefit not only the Australian indigenous people who for decades had had their history and rights suppressed, but also of benefit non-indigenous peoples by empowering them with knowledge and freeing them from the guilt of knowing that their ancestors had done something wrong but they now had the chance to right their wrongs. It was by all accounts a very admirable gesture by the leader of a nation.

Professor Michael McDaniel, an aboriginal man who is also Dean of Indigenous education at the University of Western Sydney, also gave a speech related to the reconciliation process that was occurring in Australia. He told one story of a non-indigenous solicitor who met some elders of an indigenous community and tried to tell them that he was aware of the unfairness and mistreatment indigenous peoples had suffered and he had a plan to propose some “reconciliation”, in this case something akin to acknowledging the land rights of the indigenous first occupants of that land. The aboriginal elders when he had finished his courteous and respectful talk, retold him the history of the Aboriginal people. They told him how his ancestors had raped, stolen, killed, desecrated, abused, and hurt their people in previous generations and how the current generation of their people is still suffering because of his people. The young solicitor was taken aback, surprised, and feeling blamed! What do you say to that? You say sorry. And when you say sorry the better man forgives, right? Right. That’s what we do in our culture, but not everyone’s culture is apparently the same in this respect.

Now, I have varying notions of what a sense of responsibility is, but for a while you have to consider yourself in the young solicitor’s shoes also. Prof. McDaniel explains that to the elders they were simply telling their story in their way, that they needed to do this, to vent, if you will. And at that second when the elders meet this young successful non-indigenous man, “For that moment you are Captain Cook. You are Arthur Phillip. You are the Mission Manager. You are the representative of everyone who did those things”. But you may wonder, why should he be designated the “representative of everyone who did these things”? The logic goes that it is because it is as an acknowledgement that the system and society we currently live in was built to ensure the success, exactly as he has, of a non-indigenous person like him and not of an indigenous person like the elders. So is he at fault because he is successful? Prof. McDaniel doesn’t state it quite like this, but he states that the systems that exist are at fault, they’re the “bad” ones. And yet in the middle of all this is a young man trying to do the right thing given what he has. Prof. McDaniel states he just has to “cop it, because it’s part of the healing process”. I know, I was outraged at his logic too. But you know what? Apparently it's hard for us to understand, he says, because (and I am paraphrasing here) ‘as a young non-Indigenous person, we’ve never had a sense of belonging to a society. We’ve never had “a collective sense of responsibility”’.

Honestly, I liked Kevin Rudd’s speech better. I liked it better for two reasons. As a Christian I always remember that scripture in Ezekiel 18:20 that says, “The one who sins is the one who will die. The child will not share the guilt of the parent, nor will the parent share the guilt of the child. The righteousness of the righteous will be credited to them, and the wickedness of the wicked will be charged against them”. Acknowledging our ancestors sins is one thing, we can even apologize for them and regret it on their behalf, but as for being “punished” or held accountable for it, I believe is a bit rich. My second reason can be summarised in this quote by Antoine de Saint-Exupery: “To be a man is to be responsible. It is to feel shame at the sight of what seems to be unmerited misery. It is to take pride in a victory won by one's comrades. It is to feel, when setting one's stone, that one is contributing to the building of the world”. Guilt is a useless thing unless it motivates forward action. It is honourable to take responsibility for righting wrongs even if they weren’t committed by us. It is not honourable to use punishment unless your aim is for retraining. If your camel is already walking to where you want it to go, it is only cruel to continue to beat it.

On god, nature, and spirituality

Recently I was doing a bit of reading about Australian indigenous identity, and one of the things I found very interesting is this culture's view of spirituality. In fact, the interesting thing is that a lot of indigenous cultures from vastly different places seem to have a similar belief system: sharing a deep spiritual connection to the land.

Now, I live in Australia, a westernized and largely Christian (if not by majority agnostic or atheist) country. To say that a culture has a deep connection to the land conjures up images of politics, of land ownership laws, and of a broad concept we’ll called ‘justice’. No, no, what I’m trying to discuss here is not those socio-political issues, but rather one of spirituality and culture. I admit that this new understanding is only new to me as a result of my natural curiosity and some research I had to do as part of coursework for a developmental psychology class. I would, however, like to share what I have come to comprehend from this – which may in fact be completely off track - but is probably closer to the true track to understanding these concepts.

I, like a lot of Judaeo-Christian adherents, couldn't understand before much about how a connection to the land equalled a spiritual connection. And in the Andes region, for the Incas for example, connection to the mountains meant a spiritual connection. The conclusion I’ve reached as to the reason it's hard for the traditional Jewish/Christian person to understand a connection to a land and equate it to a connection to God is because our tradition teaches us that God is in heaven, or “out there”.

So a common belief in Western culture is that God, who is creator of man and earth and everything, is in heaven, above us, in the sky somewhere. When we worship we direct our spiritual attention to this ether out there where God is. Now, the aboriginal man, for example, believes that all life comes from the earth, the soil and the ground on which we're all dependent on. And science will tell you that this is true: life on this planet requires air, water, sunlight, and nutrient and sustenance from the ground. Eukaryotic life, of which mammals and other animals like us are, depend on plants for nutrients. Plants emanate from the earth. Therefore it’s not a huge leap to assume that what keeps us alive is in the earth, or IS the earth. This is not a new observation, thousands of years ago, before pastoral times, and before mass colonization, the indigenous peoples of the land saw this basic relationship. He would see the plants and trees grow out of the soil, which fed the animals, which fed us, which kept us alive.

Keeping this in mind, consider now the human concept of god or creation. Until very recently, most traditional cultures had a basic belief that life, the universe, human beings and every other thing above, on, and below the earth, including the substance that is earth, was created by one if not many other external being/s or forces. For brevity, let’s call these beings or forces God. Extrapolate the line of thinking previously established, that if all life essentially originates from the earth, and God is creator of everything, then earth must be this being we decided to call God. It is now also easier to understand why so many native cultures speak of a 'Mother Earth' or Pachamama.

Now, the most common Judeo/Christian/Islamic traditions are monotheist and believe in a god that created the universe and everything in it, and who we in turn worship or have a spiritual connection or relationship with. To worship a creator is mostly a sign of gratitude and sustaining interconnectedness between ourselves and others (including wildlife, the earth, space, etc. as our specific faith dictates). To worship god or gods, a creator or co-creators, is a very ancient concept common to most cultures. Now consider the aboriginal man to whom God is or is in the earth. For an aboriginal man to worship God is to worship the land, to cherish and honour it, to direct his prayers and rituals to it. Christians, Jews, Islamists, etc. do the same: we pay respect to the place we think God inhabits, the heavens. We direct our prayers to this place. As an example of just this concept we have the very old traditional Christian cathedrals with high arched ceilings, ceilings decorated with images of heavenly creatures and the sun, the skies, etc. Going to the temples and cathedrals to offer our prayers and sacrifices we'd contemplate the heavens, conjure them up in mind and spirit to give our worship to God. The indigenous man does the same thing, except he believes God is in the earth. So making physical/skin contact with the soil is very important. The earth is what connects one man to God, and that which connects him to other men and all other creatures in this planet.

When Judaeo-Christians meet in their churches and synagogues and temples, etc, they also seek not only to connect and share with their god but also those whom they consider their spiritual brothers and sisters, co-worshippers in a common belief, people and creatures with whom they believe they share a common origin. It is the same also with the indigenous man, worshipping with those who are related to him via God, Mother Nature, earth. To worship together means often to worship in a specific place on earth, not just with specific people or within a specific but man-made structure such as a temple.

The indigenous man also shares a deep connection with other creatures, animals that also walk or otherwise inhabit the earth, not only with his fellow humans. That's why when the indigenous man speaks of the wolf or the kangaroo he calls him his brother, sharing a common origin and connection with the land. That's why killing animals for nutrition, especially to the aboriginal man who is not of a pastoral nature but hunts only what he will consume and absolutely needs that day, is a sacrifice and a spiritually-filled occasion, as it would be if a person of a Western culture would eat his siblings or friends. In times of crises, humans from non-traditionally cannibalistic cultures have had to do exactly this for survival, and they will tell you of their suffering in making these decisions and going through with them. You could say the indigenous man does this a little less freely, consuming his brother animals because he has acknowledged the sacrifice and has certain rituals by which these activities take place and they are often so ingrained that they are incorporated into the cultural practice itself rather than as a distinct spiritual ceremony.

Western culture’s spiritual worship rituals and our belief as to the location of God, in heaven or some other intangible place, is exactly what (I believe) makes it difficult for so many of us to understand the spiritual connection many indigenous peoples, not just native Australians, have with the land. But understanding this also helps to understand why place and movement, physical relocation, to aboriginal peoples is so important. Imagine it being like kicking someone out of a temple or cathedral, out to the cold and unknown, and asking them to continue about their lives, including their worship, without the places and things they believe to be sacred and secure.

On being a foreigner

I once walked into an exam room and the first question I was asked was how I ended up with an Australian accent and a last name like mine. Common question; I don’t mind it all, it’s a great conversation starter. But when I was asked if I ever wanted to go home, I didn’t know what to answer. My home across the river? Yes… but that wasn’t the question.

Milan Kundera wrote a book called ‘Ignorance’ about a girl born in the Czech Republic who moves to France and lives there for about 20 years. Here’s a quote about her experiences as an émigré:

“Oh, the French, you know – they have no need for experience. With them, judgments precede experience. When we got there, they didn’t need any information from us. They were already thoroughly informed that Stalinism is an evil and emigration is a tragedy. They weren’t interested in what we thought, they were interested in us as living proof of what they thought. So they were generous to us and proud of it. When Communism collapsed all of a sudden, they looked hard at me, an investigator’s look. And after that, something soured. I didn’t behave the way they expected…. They had done a lot for me. They saw me as the embodiment of an émigré’s suffering. Then the time came for me to confirm that suffering by my joyous return to the homeland. And that confirmation didn’t happen. They felt duped. And so did I, because up till then I’d thought they loved me not for my suffering but for myself.”

‘Ignorance’ talks about nostalgia. At different times in my life, in particularly the last few years, I have been asked whether I have ever considered returning home. Home? I am home! Home is where my mum is. I guess I’m a foreigner and nothing can change that, not even time. Does it bother me, the expectation that I should long for a place I actually feel no connection to? Yes, the expectation bothers me. My discord comes from not being about to understand why I should not consider this — Australia — my home? Because others were born here and I wasn’t? Home is where I raise up my tent, the place I long for when I’m away. The place I long for is the one that inhabits the people I love, my family. That home is not in Central America; what is there is a memory, not my present or the future I choose. But people have this expectation that is separate to my desires, and this expectation renders me a traitor – a traitor for betraying an ideal that is not my own!

Sometimes people ask me if I remember much about El Salvador since when I left I was around 9 years old. I remember, of course; children remember by the time they’re nine. I remember the things that are of value to me, the good or bad things that shaped me. Some memories are still like photographs and seem distant; some more vivid and play over and over. But yes, I remember. It wasn’t all bad. War was almost always background for us (my family). Family, Antoine de Saint-Exupery’s books, school, and Mexican soap operas on TV were in the foreground (for me, at least). It wasn’t all rosy, either, as some people choose to believe, landscapes which they imagine are irreproducible. And although the war was real, it was something you get around by living your everyday life. People do that, we weren’t the only ones. We weren’t specially apt or adaptable; we were common people living in a place where a lot of common people also lived. Sometimes when there’s a big crack in the ground, people learn to walk around it and pretty soon it’s accepted as part of the landscape which isn’t questioned and you can’t suffer over it. Romanticism is for the memories of the past, you can’t suffer from it in the moment.

Yes, I remember El Salvador, certain places and certain people. Why do people doubt that I would remember? Because they (both “romantics” from my country and people born here who insist my home is elsewhere) don’t understand how I could remember El Salvador and yet not long for it again. Memory is not the same as nostalgia. Patriotism doesn’t and shouldn’t rule memory.

Maybe it’s time I write my own version of my story:
I was born in El Salvador, lived there until I was nine. There was a civil war; I was a kid, I didn’t know the reasons for it and I didn’t have a view either way. My uncle was killed by a land mine and my best friend was killed by a bomb; our family was one of the least affected by the war. We immigrated to Australia with all my family. All of it: mum, grandmother, brothers, sister, cousins and aunts. I didn’t know my father very well, I still don’t. If he is still alive, it is highly probable he is still living in El Salvador. My whole family and my whole life, most of my friends, and my ambitions live in Australia. I am Salvadorian; I live in Australia. I am at home.

On Freedom (Part 2)

One day I was watching Oprah and it featured a story about Amanda Knox, a young girl who was imprisoned in Italy for allegedly killing her flatmate. She has been convicted for 25 years at her last trial. Before she allegedly killed her friend, she was in Italy for what can basically be called “cultural studies”. She studied and the rest of the time was free to be a tourist like any other North American in Italy, living a life with few intrusions and hassles. She had a good family back in the U.S. to support her, too.

Now this girl is imprisoned and she has no responsibilities whatsoever —no-one expects anything from her. She has “things” to fill in her days, weeks, months, etc. On Saturday mornings she calls her family and the family have come to make a ritual of it. The family gathers at the parents’ home, with her close friends also attending, and they have a general chat, as if she were right there. During the other 6 days, 23 hours, and 50 minutes of the week, the girl can do anything she wants. A general goal is to get herself freed, so she can devote part of her time working on her defence, reading law books, praying, and doing all the things that are permitted in Italian prisons. The rest of the time she can do whatever she likes (especially given that the general goal of freedom is also voluntary, i.e. she could choose not to appeal her sentence, as some people do). There are certain things, a lot of things, permitted in Italian (as in Australian) prisons; she could choose to read about Italian culture, the language, history, other studies, other books. She could pass the time doing things that aren’t all that different to what she was doing “on the outside”, living her generally carefree life. Now she can even afford to be more carefree: she doesn’t necessarily have to cook for herself, worry about where the money for food or shelter will come from, etc. She is a supported citizen (perhaps even better supported than some of our pensioners and elderly)—and nothing in return is expected of her. If she misbehaves, how will she be punished? She is already in prison. One day she may decide that her plight for freedom is redundant, that she has no hope, and she may give up trying. What then? Well, then off to read or study or whatever other “entertainment” activity she’s allowed.

Now, I don’t mean to romanticize prison life, I know most other co-prisoners aren’t going to be “nice”, that prison staff aren’t always pleasant to deal with (to say the least), that there are certain things mandated of all prisoners (work details, etc.), that small unchanging spaces can be nauseating, and that there can be extremely harsh punishments for acting out of line. What I mean to say is that prison life doesn’t carry with it things of social life which can be just as imprisoning, for example, the obligation to provide for your own meals and shelter, family responsibilities, fear of judgement, fear of job loss, poverty, family conflict, etc. I mean the social aspects of being human. (Similarly, I don’t aim to make any sort of comment about the Amanda Knox case or the treatment in Italian or Australian prisons. I am using that as an example, only.)

Me, if nothing were expected of me, I’d read. I’d read all day; I’d be happy to. I’d get up to eat, shower if I felt like it, then read, read, and read. Which leads me to ask myself two things: 1) Who is freer? and 2) would life in prison be that much more different or unpleasant than life as it is now? Interesting. A third question could be whether my life is actually lacking if prison life seems to be not that different to how it is now—and why.

Dr. Ted Kaczynski (aka “The Unabomber”) once said in an interview “what worries me is that I might in a sense adapt to this environment and come to be comfortable here and not resent it anymore. And I am afraid that as the years go by that I may forget, I may begin to lose my memories of the mountains and the woods—and that's what really worries me, that I might lose those memories, and lose that sense of contact with wild nature in general. But I am not afraid they are going to break my spirit”. Prison, imprisonment, the isolation, the confined spaces, aren’t what is horrible and punitive about prison, it is what it does to the human spirit, to a human spirit that has truly had better before. And the worst thing is that sometimes we don't even need the physical confinement to be imprisoned.

Another Story about Freedom

Do you know what loneliness is? It’s not a lack of friends; it’s a lack of purpose. The drugs won’t kill you. The drugs are just an escape from this emptiness that nothing can fill. Putting a man in a cage is not the punishment. Taking away his job, his people, his love of life, that’s the torture. “Why, God, must I go on living?” they say in their moments of distress.

A man can have it all: life, health, faith, company; but without love or purpose he is nothing. It’s easy to see from the outside and see a beggar dragging himself around in his rags with a bottle by his side, a syringe, some magical powder. It’s easy to hate him for his weakness. But behind that, there is a man. A man like you or me. A man who is not lacking a house or a bed or clothes. That man lacks a purpose. Where do they sell that? Where? It’s not at the bottom of any bottle, or in the embrace of one or another stranger’s body. We might search for it at the bottom of the ocean with the same luck of finding it as finding water in the Sahara. Where? Where is it?

Yet that same man would change his clothes, his city, even his life for a purpose. An embrace from someone that sees you, that loves you regardless of whatever you may be, that wants to know more—your name, at least. Sometimes we don’t ask because we think that that way we are giving others their “freedom”. Freedom from what? Nobody is freer than that beggar on the street without a purpose; and there is no-one more miserable than he. Who wants the freedom to be miserably alone? That freedom sounds mysteriously like rejection/neglect, disinterest, like the disgusting silence that follows a bomb explosion. Where is that beggar? That beggar isn’t in your way; he’s not invading your public space. That beggar is free—and there is no worse punishment than that.
—26/11/2008

On Travelling

There’s a scene in the movie “Motorcycle Diaries” where the characters of Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara and his friend are travelling through the Atacama desert in Chile on their way to Peru. They meet a couple of peasants in the middle of the desert and they sit down to share stories and a hot drink over a camp fire. The peasants tell them of how they’ve been forced to leave their homeland because of political unrest and bad working conditions. Then it’s Ernesto and his friend’s turn to share their story. Ernesto tells them how they are travelling “just to travel”. A silence takes over the camp. Ernesto and his friend sit there almost in shame, and the peasants in complete disbelief that people can and do this. Finally the female peasant breaks the silence and in acceptance tells them, “Bless you... Blessed be your travels”.

The reason this scene was so significant to me was that when I was younger I never understood why people enjoyed "travelling" just for travelling. Like the peasants in the movie, I was raised in a very different place, where people only travelled when they had to, usually for work or escaping a physically dangerous situation, so unless your job was an explorer, then it didn't make sense to travel.

I couldn’t understand why people would choose to travel unless they had to. Later I came to almost despise it because a lot of the people I knew then described themselves as “travellers” when they meant to say “tourists”, or when they would try to make me believe that because they had travelled they were somehow more “cultured”, more “experienced”, better than average. Travelling to me in these cases always seemed a luxury, something someone did by choice and not for survival. It seemed redundant and I found it offensive that these travellers acted as if their journeys had been some part of a humanitarian mission. Seeing a pretty place or partying with other tourists or eating local food did not seem particularly special to me.

And then came another time of my life I found it very hard to stay in one place—the anxiety was unbearable—so I started “travelling” too. It took me ages to realise that running away doesn't make your problems disappear, because your problems have a tendency to follow you around.

As I grew up I eventually came to have more tolerance of this travelling business and I came to see some places myself which made me feel blessed because nature can be so breathtakingly beautiful. Yet still, travelling to me is still only escapism. But everything that isn't survival-related is escapism—and there’s nothing wrong with that.

Travel

One day she left to travel. I’ve always believed that those who like to travel are running away from something. For a while it seemed as if everyone was travelling. Maybe everyone was running.
One day I travelled and a lot of things happened, others changed, and the rest remained the same.
She left, but she said it wasn’t because of me. I believed her because, well, why wouldn’t I? One day she called me and asked whether I missed her. I wish I hadn’t said anything, but I said I did. (Sometimes it’s less complicated to say nothing at all.) She said she hoped I wouldn’t forget her, nor the things we had lived. After that, we said nothing at all.
When I realised that there is nothing behind travelling other than self-indulgence, I wanted to humiliate her, myself too, and to just tell everyone “the truth”. We wanted to deny it, but how could we?
She ran away from the truth and left. Me, I keep thinking that those who like to travel are running away from something.

One day I left to travel. It was early on since we’d met, but I missed her as if she had been a part of me for centuries and lives before that. She called me to wish me well. I told her that I missed her and that I loved her deeply. She didn’t know what to tell me so she told me that she had missed me too, and wished me well (again). I don’t know what happened to us since then.
One day, without saying a thing, she travelled to the same place where I had been without her. She never told me about that trip and I can only ask myself, “could it be that she forgot about me in the same place I had gone to forget about her?” The secrets that the mountains must hold.

One day, walking alone through life (or the park), I thought I heard something that sounded like my name. I wanted to cry but I kept quite. Sometimes I can get so lost in the silence that I even forget the name God himself has given me.
Lost in the silence one day, I thought I heard my name. It wasn’t anything. My consciousness was shouting at me to wake up. The vice of nostalgia was crying to tell me to let myself go. The stars tried then to tell me something, but who sees celestial things during daylight? (The faithful ones who never wander?) I got myself lost because I listened to those three things that were screaming things that I heard as my name but in reality were probably saying something closer to “No!”.

One day she tried to embarrass me for speaking of God. Who was I? Who am I? God knows who I am, the rest doesn’t matter.

—2005 (I initially wrote this story in Spanish, but I’ve recently started to think about it again because I’m on holidays – and not travelling.)