Some Thoughts Reading and Writing on a Cool Sunday Morning

Cool Sunday mornings seem to lead one to contemplation.  There is crispness in the air that relieves a significant amount of brain fog and creates a desire to find something creative and inspiring to fill the day.  It may be finding just the right piece of poetry, an essay that touches the soul, or looking up to see where the sunlight hits the edges of the leaves as they are wind tossed.

I never know what these days will bring.  I want to do more than I feel capable of at the moment.  My spirit wants to climb a mountain, paddle down a river, or ride a horse across a field.  My body wants to crawl back in bed under warm blankets with a hot water bottle and a furry cat.  My travels these days seem to be limited to where books can take me.  Right now I am living in India during the time of the Buddha.  Last week I was in Albania, Syria, and Turkey at the time of the genocide of the Albanian people. For most of July I was in Boston and its surrounding areas solving crimes with Rizzoli and Isles.  This coming week I am planning on going to the mythical land of Westeros.  I will be coming late to that party.  I haven’t read Game of Thrones yet for the same reason I never did heroin.  I am afraid I would like it too much.

This next week I am physically traveling to New Orleans for a conference.  Unfortunately that means that most of my time will be spend in a hotel conference center.  I hope to arrive early enough to be able to take a walk along the river and maybe to the French Quarter.  The New Orleans I want to see doesn’t really exist, though.  I want to walk through graveyards and visit a voodoo queen.  I want to dress in red and attend a mulatto ball and walk the streets with the characters from Isabel Allende’s Island Beneath the Sea or see one of Ann Rice’s vampires in the shadow of a cathedral. 

Reading has been both a blessing and a curse in regards to travel.  I went to England in 2005 and realized the London I wanted to visit was long gone, the blood of Anne Boleyn and Henry IIIV buried beneath the double decker buses and Mark and Spencer’s.  In 2007 I was able to see enough of Tibet to get the feel of what it must have been like to live there before the Chinese occupation, but Lhasa was merely a ghost of its former self.  Alexandra David-Neel would be heartbroken to see the Potala palace surrounded by Chinese military and tourists shopping for Western goods in gated shops, as was I, and is the Dalai Lama.  I am so grateful to those writers who chronicled their experiences during those times so I am able to be there whenever I pick up a book.

What does that mean about these times I live in now?  Will anyone ever want to read about the experiences of a woman living in the late 20^th and early 21^st century?  Will they find my experiences so compelling that they would want to time travel here and be a part of this world?  I don’t know.  I can’t imagine why unless they are interested in a political environment that is so divisive that I only wish I could travel into the future to see how this all ends up.  Or do I?  It is frightening.  Or would that glimpse into the future give me the hope I need?  Would a poor woman, black or white, from the world of the American south in 1840 wonder at my complaints and tell me to get a grip and appreciate that I am able to make choices that they never had? 

I guess that is what reading does.  It gives another perspective.  It may be fiction, fictionalized history, or one person’s view and interpretation of an era.  There is no real knowing.  It is just the reality of the individuals and the expression through the lens of their point of view. 

On this Sunday morning, that is what I contemplate.  My reality changes from one moment to the next.  My history will only be known by me and may be interpreted by others, but no one will truly know my story.  When I do tell it, I will only tell what I want known, what I feel is of value, and I may leave out bits and pieces in order to make myself look better or tell it all in order to explain all of who I am.  But then who would really be interested?  It doesn’t have to be everyone, just enough people who want to know what it was like to be someone like me in this time, at this place.  But it will only be my story.  No assumptions should be made that my story is the same as any other woman during this time in history.  It’s just mine and even my viewpoint changes from time to time, making my story different on one Sunday morning than it would be on another.

Revisionist History

I have been doing a lot of thinking about revisionist history lately. My reaction to Dick Cheney’s rewriting of the Iraq War after leaving office left me realizing that there is very little narrative history that can be taken as fact. We all have our own versions of history based on where we stand.
I once had a person tell me that when it comes to relationships there are three sides to every story – each person’s and the truth. But what is the truth? Can it ever be told given that any narrator will only tell his/her version of the facts? I am sure that my ex-husband and I each have our own version of what occurred in our marriage and the events that led to our divorce. At times I have become enraged by his version of the story and have had a strong desire for the world to see my version as the truth. However, truth be told, neither of us have the full story. You would have to live simultaneously in each of our heads to be able to have an inkling of what happened and I would not wish that experience on anyone. I have learned to honor his version as his story and remember that I don’t know the entire story from his perspective. I can now see him as a player in the story of my life from the age of fifteen to thirty, the father of my son and the grandfather of my beloved grandchildren. I can let him live with his version and I am aware that my side of the story is colored by lack of maturity at that time and over twenty five years of personal growth and recovery.
When my father died, one of his remaining brothers was looking at the shadow box of Korean War medals. They had both served multiple tours in Korea and there seems to be a blurring of their stories. My uncle commented that my father had told a story that was actually his experience. My sister quietly said, “But that was Dad’s reality.” It was. Dad’s reality was told from the viewpoint of an abused child, a traumatized war veteran, and someone who wanted to be loved and respected. His reality often collided with mine and it caused pain for both of us. As in my experience with my ex-husband I have strived to let it be. My father is gone from this life and I know longer have to struggle to have him understand my reality. With that struggle gone, I find that my work in the trauma field has helped me know a little better how his reality was formed.
I do still become very angry, though, when persons and governments in power try to revise history to suit their own agenda. I grew up in Northern Wisconsin and remember there was very little in the history books about the native people of the area, many of whom were my ancestors. The history books were written by white men about the accomplishments of white men and the genocide and racial cleansing of the indigenous people of this country was never mentioned. As an adult, I learned that my grandfather had been taken from his home and sent to a Franciscan school to have the “Indian beaten out of him” by a Catholic education. In order to learn more about my ancestors, my family would go to Madeleine Island, off the shore of Bayfield, Wisconsin, and visit the island museum and the cemetery. We did not learn until much later that the Madeleine for whom the island was named was our great great great grandmother, the daughter of the Ojibwa chief who married a fur trader with the last name Cadotte. I have lost any memory of her birth name.
In 2007, I visited Nepal and Tibet and had a firsthand look at how the Chinese government has revised history to justify what they refer to as the “liberation of the Tibetan people.” Books and television programs in Tibet share a history that is outside of the Tibetan people’s reality. The Chinese government insists that the Tibetan people were under the dictatorship of the Dalai Lama and that Tibet had always been a part of China, therefore justifying the occupation of the Tibet Autonomous Region and the suppression of Tibetan culture, including art and religion. The Chinese even went so far as to “disappear” the child who was chosen as the reincarnation of the Panchen Lama and replace him with the child of a Chinese government official. Rumors still abound as to the whereabouts of the Tibetan Panchen Lama.
Tibetan people are told that if they practice Buddhism they cannot work government jobs – “The Buddha can pay your rent.” Also, our Tibetan drivers were told they had four hours to drive between Shigatse and Lhasa. If they arrived too early they would be accused of speeding and if they arrived any later they would not be allowed past the Lhasa checkpoint. This was being done to discourage Tibetan-led tourism.
Before we had entered Tibet there had been a hold up in obtaining our Chinese VISA. The Chinese government had information that a British journalist had reported that the Chinese made it difficult for Westerners to enter Tibet from Nepal. In answer to this, the Chinese closed down the border to westerners and were refusing to issue visas until they received an apology from the journalist. It took a number of travel companies within Kathmandu to convince the Chinese embassy to begin issuing the visas. We were not told any of this until it was all said and done.
Even once we entered Tibet we witness Tibetans being treated horribly by checkpoint officials, refusing to allow them through once roads had opened after a series of landslides in the Himalayas. I witness a group of about fifty Tibetans, including our drivers, become enraged as cars with Chinese passengers were allowed past the checkpoints while we were all told to park at the side of the road.
Revisionist history is a tool used by governments to destroy culture and maintain control over people. Dick Cheney has tried to convince us that “enhanced interrogation techniques” were necessary and did not constitute torture even though what Cheney refers to as “enhanced interrogation techniques” fits the federal government’s definition of “torture.” I believe that he believes what he says. Historical revisionists eventually begin to believe their own propaganda because to admit otherwise would destroy their vision of their role in history. This makes it critically important for citizens to engage in understanding current events as they happen so that when the players begin to re-write history we are able to recognize the discrepancies and hold them responsible for their actions before we become “liberated” from the truth.