Quote for the Day
"Whether your dog is 10 pounds or 110 pounds, it is still a dog. However, a 10-pound cat is a pet, but a 110-pound cat is higher than you on the food chain."
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"Whether your dog is 10 pounds or 110 pounds, it is still a dog. However, a 10-pound cat is a pet, but a 110-pound cat is higher than you on the food chain."
Few people know that I have been working on a nonfiction book for the entire last year. Work slowed down during the last six months, but I am closing in on the completion of the last chapter, after which I will go back through for a second draft, rewriting, reorganizing, and, eventually, indexing it (I am a professional indexer). After which I plan to announce it in full force and self-publish, with my breath held and my fingers crossed and every fiber of my being hopeful that others will enjoy it and find value in it. Meanwhile, here is a tiny, tiny excerpt from the section I am currently writing:
Although Saturn is mostly about self-mastery and self-wisdom, it also involves learning enough about human nature that one has a keen eye and excercises discernment when dealing with others. We might have, in our younger days, consorted knowingly or unknowingly with others who are less ethical or moral. But as time passes, we start to wake up to a greater responsibility that demands that we cut our ties with that past, no matter how painful or how much the outward cost, because we know that otherwise, we are not going to be able to move forward spiritually.It is a difficult and very Saturnian choice to make, and yet, for our survival, we must make it or forever stay within a shell, like a seed that struggles to germinate but cannot break open its outward husk. Eventually it withers and dies, and so will our souls if we do not break free of the restraints that hold us back. Which can be fear of what others will think, fear of leaving a comfortable situation or a good working relationship or a lucrative business relationship. Whatever the fear is, it must be faced and dealt with.
So even in becoming aware of human nature, we still must, in a Saturnian way, also become aware of ourselves and what we are capable of doing in response to the actions of others. Will we sit by and allow our fears to prevent us from doing what we feel is right? Or will we find in ourselves the courage to speak out and to step away? And to then go on to find more compatible souls, people who may challenge us, but in a new and more delightful way, by challenging us to become the best possible expression of ourselves?
It can be a difficult change, to move from being around constant dishonesty, distrust, and denial to being around people whose habitual ways are of honesty and integrity, but it can also be refreshing, like the crispness of a small wind that has just brushed over the snows of Tibet to touch our cheeks. It alerts us and makes us more alive to the moment, and leaves us always wanting that freshness forever after, no longer content to stay in stale pool halls filled with old smoke and older ideas.
The thought for the day is taken from the Bible. Most people think that the quote is "Money is the root of all evil," which of course totally serves those who wish you to feel guilty if you are well off (or wish to be), and would prefer that everyone be poor and afraid--and serving those who aren't.
For those of you who are skeptical and want to look it up for yourselves, the full quote is in 1 Timothy (Timotheus) 6:10. "For the love of money is the root of all evil: which while some coveted after, they have erred from the faith, and pierced themselves through with many sorrows." The next two verses go on to say, "Shun that, o man of God, aim at integrity, godliness, faith, love, stedfastness, modesty." And so on. It doesn't say that being rich is bad; it says that in striving for wealth, for some, those things that are important can fall by the wayside, leading to evil deeds that stem from bad choices.
Such as those done by people in our country for whom these verses were meant. For a discussion of the banking system in the United States--all of it true, some of which may be news to you, all of which is eye-opening stuff, see
http://www.prisonplanet.com/analysis_mark_020503_money.html
Thomas Jefferson is quoted on that site as saying,
"If the American people ever allow private banks to control the issue of their currency, first by inflation, then by deflation, the banks...will deprive the people of all property until their children wake-up homeless on the continent their fathers conquered.... The issuing power should be taken from the banks and restored to the people, to whom it properly belongs."
I just finished reading The Cairo Trilogy, by Naguib Mahfouz, which won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1988. I read all 1,313 pages in one day, starting at 10 AM, taking a break from 6 PM to 10 PM, then returning to complete it by 4 AM--so, 14 hours in toto, making it a fairly fast 93 pages an hour. I've impressed myself; perhaps I've set a new reading landspeed record for myself, though I am humbled by the reading achievements and abilities of others, who can read an astonishing 2.500 words a minute or more.
But vanity or humility aren't the topic of today's essay. The book, and everything it represents, is.
The book, written by an Egyptian man who was born in 1911 and starting writing when he was 17, follows the lives of a Muslim family through three generations in Egypt, from World War I on into the 1940s. The focus throughout is primarily on the first and second generation (the parents and their childen), with some smaller focus on the following generations born in that time span.
Although one might be tempted to compare the work with anything by James Michener in terms of size and scope, there really isn't a parallel. Though Michener also sweeps through generations, he gives a much wider historical perspective and follows the fortunes of more families, though perhaps with much less initimate detail. This book focuses more narrowly on the one family and on the small, everyday details of their lives and interactions, though Egyptian politics do come into it throughout.
I will say up front two things about this book:
This is not to say that everything is wrong about the Arab culture, for there is much to praise and admire. The Arabs carried the torch of learning and education when Europe was maliciously burning "witches" and their "familiars" (usually cats) at the stake, usually so that the Christian church or some man could obtain the so-called witch's property, while others ignorantly stood by or even rooted the perpetrators on. (Of course, they paid for it, because the "witches" had a lot of healing herbal knowlege that was lost, and cats kept the rodent population down, and we all know about the Black Death. Fools.)
And if it hadn't been for the Arabs, the works of Plato and other ancient Greeks would have been irretrievably lost, thanks to our savage, book-burning ancestors. It was the Arabs who admired and preserved works from the Greek culture while Europe went down in flames into the Dark Ages, and it was Arabs who made many mathematical advances. Many magnificent works or art and literature came out of the Arab culture as well, even though Western Europe tends to marginalize or trivialize those works.
Nonetheless, arts and sciences aside, this book starkly portrays an unlovely side to the Arab culture that needs serious scrutiny.
First, a quick summary. Ahmad Abd al-Jawad completely dominates and terrorizes his wife and his five children, inflicting upon them high levels of physical, emotional, verbal, and mental abuse.
Al-sayyid Ahmad (Ahmad Abd al-Jawad) displays all the classic signs of the abusive/addictive personality. He gets angry far out of proportion to an incident, and inflicts punishment far beyond what is warranted or justified. He both plans his anger to initimidate and frighten, and also flies off the handle at the slightest cause, or no cause. His wife and children are terrified of him, and tiptoe around him, afraid to speak, act, or even look out of place, and even then they can't avoid his anger. He speaks abusively to them, calling them names and beating the bottoms of his children's feet until, in his own self-satisfied thoughts, "smoke pours from [them]." His wife is not immune either. After one incident early on in their marriage, in which he hurts her so that she is frightened for her life, his wife never again dares to do anything that would provoke him enough to raise his hands against her. He unexpectedly grants mercy now and then, just enough to keep them guessing--another classic abuser tactic.
His wife, Amina, is a prisoner for all intents and purposes, never allowed to leave the home except on a few very rare occasions when she is heavily guarded by her husband on trips to visit her mother. Armina long ago gave up speaking up to him or trying to express herself or her desires in any way, and has given herself entirely over to being his ultra-submissive slave, physically, mentally, and emotionally.
The children are expected to never have any fun or to play or act as children. They still have some sense of themselves, yet stand in trembling fear of his displeasure even when adults. Despite their best efforts, and although several of the children are quite praiseworthy, none of them receive praise or a kind word, and instead all of them are frequently subjected to his abusive whims.
Yet away from home, al-sayyid Ahmad is a completely different man. The people who know him outside the home would not recognize him at home--at least, so the book says at first. He is jovial, convivial, persuasive, and witty. People love him and admire his restraint and diplomacy. He is also, unlike his stern Quran-spouting self at home, a habitual adulterer who drinks alcohol far beyond the point of inebriation every night, though in his own twisted sense of propriety, he does nothing to dishonor his neighbors, but instead maintains his affairs with musicians and the like.
Later, it is acknowledged in the book that at his daughter Aisha's wedding, al-sayyid Ahmad's cronies, who are well aware of his partying and womanizing, completely recognize that he is also abusive at home, and they admire him and support him in it as a man who is at worst seen as being "perhaps a bit too strict at times."
In fact, this is the thing that was most repellant to me about this book. It is one thing to provide a portrait of abusiveness if one's goal is to show the horrible and long-lasting harm it inflicts as a way to, one hopes, educate people in an attempt to stop the abuse. It is entirely another thing to portray this kind of abusiveness and in the process to make it clear, as Mr. Mahfouz does repeatedly throughout the novel, that not only is the man performing these atrocities admired and even loved by the author, but we, the readers, are expected to admire and love him too.
And the Arab people do. I am not making this up. In the introduction to the edition I read, the writer of the introduction, Sabry Hafez, says of the father, Ahmad Abd al-Jawad,
"As a family saga, it succeeds in enshrining major social stereotypes of relationships, emotions, and role-playing to the extent that its hero, Ahmad Abd al-Jawad, has become the Egyptian patriarch par excellence. Even today, when the Trilogy is serialized on television, both men and women throughout the Arab world view this archetypal and larger-than-life patriarch with melancholic nostalgia and admiration. This is so because the author portrayed him with similar sentiments, for he was based on Mahfouz's own father."
Notice how this abusive man is called a "hero" and how he is said to be admired throughout the Arab world. When I was first reading the book, I thought he was being portrayed as the villain, and I hoped that the family would be able to fight their way free of him or, failing that, that the author would show the irreparable damage that this man was doing to his family as a cautionary tale. To my surprise and growing dismay, it became clear to me that nothing could have been farther from the author's mind. Instead, this abusiveness is, apparently, mistaken by most Arabs for strength instead of being recognized for the unacceptable cowardice and weakness that it really is.
This abberrant love that the Arab world holds for the abusive man is shown in the novel as well. Starting toward the middle of the novel, and increasingly so all the way to the end, there is a shift from the family members being terrified of him to them loving him and feeling great affection for him despite their fear.
This love and affection on the part of the other characters for the father is presented as something that somehow justifies his abusiveness, deceitfulness, and hypocrisy, as though, if his virtual prisoners and the objects of his sadistic rage start exhibiting signs of the Stockholm syndrome, "admitting" to themselves their deep love and affection for their father, then it makes his abusiveness okay--in fact, it makes it so that it is not abusiveness after all. In fact, as his sons discover his hidden life and realize what a fraud he is, instead of recoiling or being angry at his deception and phonyness, they start to admire him and emulate him in his womanizing, adultery, and drinking. We are supposed to likewise revere him, for, after all, if his own abused family loves him, what is there to censure?
Plenty.
It is correct to teach that cultural values are, on the whole, relative, and whether a culture does this or values that is not something that can normally be judged or given any value of right or wrong. If one culture finds red to be an ill-omened color, and another considers it the color of extreme good luck, so be it. No harm is done, and both cultures can be enriched by learning of the other.
But there are some things, things we call human rights, that are generally recognized by most civilized folks on this planet. And by "civilized," I make no reference to technology or lifestyle, but instead to a way of interacting with each other that affirms each other's humanity, and promotes peacefulness and love and a safe atmosphere in which each of us can grow to our full potential. Some of the most "primitive" cultures are the most civilized by that definition.
One short way to summarize one of the basic human rights rules is to say that "your right to swing your fist ends where my body begins." In other words, you are free to do anything you like, as long as you harm no one else. This right and its restriction are recognized world-wide in some form or another.
Yet what is most disturbing about The Cairo Trilogy is that it presents a culture that does not recognize the restriction part of this right, and instead has institutionalized massive abusiveness on the part of men toward the women and children in their lives and in their care. Furthermore, this culture is so arranged that those women and children have very little freedom, including the freedom to protest against or stop the abuse. If one is to believe the picture painted by this book (and there is no reason to doubt it, as the book is hailed as a "magnificent" portrait of Egyptian life), for the women and children in Arab cultures, there is no recourse but to submit or die. They are considered property, and as such have no rights. In the book, the phrase, "she belongs to her husband" is used repeatedly.
As anyone who understands the cycle of abuse will instantly recognize, men who are abused are very likely to grow up and become abusers in turn. There is little hope, then, for the Arab cultures to stop being institutionally abusive unless it becomes possible to perform some kind of massive intervention on the entire culture. Either that, or we need a massive miracle, which I am not totally discounting.
To be fair to both the book and the Arab culture, not all the men are portrayed as being as abusive as al-sayyid Ahmad, nor are all the husband-wife and father-child relationships portrayed as ones of sheer and unremitting terror. Some of the marriages are portrayed as being based in loving affection. And the book shows signs that the culturally condoned massive abusiveness is changing to some small extent as women are allowed more education and freedom. This change is portrayed in part by a slight lessening of the father's abusiveness toward the end, as he grows older and more decrepit.
Yet the fact remains that al-sayyid Ahmad is presented, not only in this book, but in adaptations of this book, as the most admirable of men, and his style of running his household and his life is thought of as something to be emulated, admired, and sighed over as "the good old days," when men, apparently, were "men" and wife and children were chattel. And still, to this day, men believe that they possess their wives and children, and as long as men anywhere believe that they own their women and children, and as long as there are men and women who were abused as children, there will be this kind of abusive interaction played out over and over again in each generation.
Links to the book itself and to books on abusive relationships.
An aside about the writing: Although something is always lost in translation, I would like to think that the unnatural stiffness of the writing and the otherwise poor writing style through bad word choices are merely the result of a competent, perhaps even an excellent, translator who is nonetheless definitely not a gifted writer and not skilled in the writing craft. (For example, he uses the word "yelled" repeatedly when yelling would not have been appropriate--perhaps "exclaimed" was meant, but we can't tell, since we are at the translator's mercy.)