It occurred to me today that I should not take certain things for granted.
The way I should not take for granted that my mother was finally able to share her collection of poems with me yesterday. She had always been hesitant and decidedly insecure about showing them to anyone, let alone her daughter.
I suppose she thought that some part of our relationship as it stands currently, would prepare me for what I was about to read. She did remark later on that she felt we had become more like ‘friends’ to her rather than a mother speaking to her daughter.
The poems were earmarked into sections: ‘Mother’ ‘Wife’, ‘Friend’ and ‘Lover’.
I was unprepared for what I found in the ‘Lover’ section, I can tell you that. Words so full of lust and passion, longing and relief found in bodily union.
But then again, why not? It makes sense! My mother has always been a passionate woman, why should her words not bear testimony to this? And why should she not express this through her body? Through whatever it is we mean when we say, ‘sex’?
She is a woman and so am I. Perhaps the ‘Lover’ poems were only jarring because I did not expect to see a reflection of the waves of lust that I go through, the carnal experience of relationships that I have had and am currently having, the longing that is only sated through inexplicably… satisfying… sex…!
What a selfish assumption to make on my part!
There were poems in the ‘Wife’ collection that felt too close to the bone for me.
Leading up to my parents’ divorce, I remember being a persistently Angry (yes, the capital ‘A’ is deliberate) child/young woman.
At the age of sixteen, I knew that their marriage was doomed. In hindsight, I think this was perhaps unsettling and disorientating for me at the time. It did not help that I had moved from Indonesia to Australia only a few years previously, at thirteen years of age, and was finding it difficult to ‘find my own place’ again.
So, ‘Wife’, left me feeling quite raw.
It is difficult to have to face my own mother’s accounts of how lonely she was with my father. Moreover, there was a clear sense of how she is now able to enjoy ‘being alone without feeling lonely’ in her current marriage. I am glad for her, but this is painful for me to accept, as it is a blessing only made possible by her leaving my father.
But let’s be clear, I do not hold her decision against her.
In fact, it was I who told her, again at the age of sixteen, to not stay together ‘just for your kids’. Why did I say this? Because it was clear that they were not happy together and that this was not doing us (their children) any good either!
After reading her last piece, I told my mother that I was proud of her… and then I started to cry.
I was crying because she had shown how honest one could be: about our feelings, about the ambivalence one feels about the life-changing decisions, about what our body really needs, about how difficult but also how irreplaceable our relationships with our friends, colleagues, partners, ex-partners and finally, our children, can be.
To think that I find it so difficult to leave myself feeling vulnerable, and yet here is my mother doing exactly that, time and time again, poem after poem.
After a few deep breaths, my mother and I shared a hug. Then, she thanked me for being her friend and I thanked her for being my mother.
I hope to never take this for granted.
Sunday, December 20, 2009
Friday, December 18, 2009
On Corporal Pain
Today I want to write about pain, pain as I have felt through my body.
Two days ago I spent the day wracked with back pain. When I am suffering back pain, it is as if someone has inserted six knobs into my back, three on either side of the spine, roughly ten centimeters apart. The pain comes when they twist these knobs and my muscles tighten accordingly into whirlpools of intricately fragile and familiar pain.
At one point, a few years ago, the pain was so chronic that I would find it difficult to walk without being in tears. I missed a lot of my university lectures during this time.
One day, I came back after a week or so of being absent and a newly found friend joked, ‘Where have you been, you slacker?’ Through gritted teeth I told him about that awful visitor of mine, good old Mister Pain.
The peculiar thing about Mister Pain is that at times he is like what one would call in Indonesian, a customer of ‘kupu-kupu malam’ or ‘butterflies of the night’: a common term for sex workers. Perhaps the analogy isn’t quite clear? Hah! I mean that Mr. Pain is there one minute and then, once having sated himself with my agonizing body* , gone the next, without a trace.
During a particularly intense day’s worth of searing pain coursing through my flesh, I decided to miss an in-class test for my Social Work degree. The following day, the pain having spent himself with me and then miraculously gone on his way, I turned up to class fresh and beaming.
A classmate who did not know the nature of my back pain asked me where I had been. Not wanting to go into details, I simply said, ‘I was sick yesterday.’ She looked me up and down and remarked quietly, ‘You don’t look sick.’
I felt like I had just been slapped in the face.
I remembered completing a course on Sociology of Health and Illness, in which we had discussed ‘playing the sick role’. By this we meant needing to ‘act sick’, in order for other members of society to believe one to be so and act accordingly, e.g. an employer seeing an employee turn up to work with a runny nose, a haggard face and complaining of a headache, would acquiesce for the employee to take the day off.
I felt as if by her comments, this woman had demanded that I perform my sickness to her, demonstrate and prove it. ‘Give me a valid reason for you having missed that test’: essentially was what had been communicated to me.
I found this outrageous at the time, especially given the kind of pain I had just gone through and the elation I felt at having been rid of it, at least for the time being. And now I felt as if I needed to wallow in that pain just for someone else’s benefit?
Does this mean that I regarded my pain as a private matter? It is true that I tried to be aware of when I spoke of my pain to others or not. I was aware that it could be tiring to have to listen to a friend speak of their pain so constantly and so regularly, even though the reality was that the pain was there constantly and regularly.
Once, when I sighed yet again and commented briefly about my back pain, a friend said somewhat impatiently, ‘You’re always in pain! Go and have it checked!’ Although she meant well, I think she was also communicating that it was starting to become challenging having to listen to me moan and groan everyday.
I suppose in a sense this shows that shared pain does not necessarily mean lessened pain. Or maybe it is an example of how sharing in someone else’s pain can lead to burn-out quite quickly, so there is a need to replenish oneself somehow when one is caring for someone experiencing chronic pain.
I have to say, this past week when the battle reignited, I felt pretty lucky. Having been in the company of my mother, it was she who tended to me when I woke during the night with my back screaming out and making it impossible to sleep. I woke her with a desperate, ‘Ma…!’ She was immediately alert and her voice dripped with worry.
In the middle of the night, my mother tenderly placed strips of ‘koyo’, a menthol-based solvent commonly used in Indonesia to ease muscle tenderness. She also prepared a hot water bottle that she rolled up and down my back whilst massaging me gently.
What was funny was that whilst my mother was preoccupied with the 23-year-old version of the small body that had grown inside her own, I was busy wondering what kind of pain she was going through seeing her daughter in pain.
This was almost enough of a distraction for me to forget the knobs turning within my flesh.
NOTE: *This is not to say that all sex workers find their work ‘agonizing’ at all times, with all of their customers.
Two days ago I spent the day wracked with back pain. When I am suffering back pain, it is as if someone has inserted six knobs into my back, three on either side of the spine, roughly ten centimeters apart. The pain comes when they twist these knobs and my muscles tighten accordingly into whirlpools of intricately fragile and familiar pain.
At one point, a few years ago, the pain was so chronic that I would find it difficult to walk without being in tears. I missed a lot of my university lectures during this time.
One day, I came back after a week or so of being absent and a newly found friend joked, ‘Where have you been, you slacker?’ Through gritted teeth I told him about that awful visitor of mine, good old Mister Pain.
The peculiar thing about Mister Pain is that at times he is like what one would call in Indonesian, a customer of ‘kupu-kupu malam’ or ‘butterflies of the night’: a common term for sex workers. Perhaps the analogy isn’t quite clear? Hah! I mean that Mr. Pain is there one minute and then, once having sated himself with my agonizing body* , gone the next, without a trace.
During a particularly intense day’s worth of searing pain coursing through my flesh, I decided to miss an in-class test for my Social Work degree. The following day, the pain having spent himself with me and then miraculously gone on his way, I turned up to class fresh and beaming.
A classmate who did not know the nature of my back pain asked me where I had been. Not wanting to go into details, I simply said, ‘I was sick yesterday.’ She looked me up and down and remarked quietly, ‘You don’t look sick.’
I felt like I had just been slapped in the face.
I remembered completing a course on Sociology of Health and Illness, in which we had discussed ‘playing the sick role’. By this we meant needing to ‘act sick’, in order for other members of society to believe one to be so and act accordingly, e.g. an employer seeing an employee turn up to work with a runny nose, a haggard face and complaining of a headache, would acquiesce for the employee to take the day off.
I felt as if by her comments, this woman had demanded that I perform my sickness to her, demonstrate and prove it. ‘Give me a valid reason for you having missed that test’: essentially was what had been communicated to me.
I found this outrageous at the time, especially given the kind of pain I had just gone through and the elation I felt at having been rid of it, at least for the time being. And now I felt as if I needed to wallow in that pain just for someone else’s benefit?
Does this mean that I regarded my pain as a private matter? It is true that I tried to be aware of when I spoke of my pain to others or not. I was aware that it could be tiring to have to listen to a friend speak of their pain so constantly and so regularly, even though the reality was that the pain was there constantly and regularly.
Once, when I sighed yet again and commented briefly about my back pain, a friend said somewhat impatiently, ‘You’re always in pain! Go and have it checked!’ Although she meant well, I think she was also communicating that it was starting to become challenging having to listen to me moan and groan everyday.
I suppose in a sense this shows that shared pain does not necessarily mean lessened pain. Or maybe it is an example of how sharing in someone else’s pain can lead to burn-out quite quickly, so there is a need to replenish oneself somehow when one is caring for someone experiencing chronic pain.
I have to say, this past week when the battle reignited, I felt pretty lucky. Having been in the company of my mother, it was she who tended to me when I woke during the night with my back screaming out and making it impossible to sleep. I woke her with a desperate, ‘Ma…!’ She was immediately alert and her voice dripped with worry.
In the middle of the night, my mother tenderly placed strips of ‘koyo’, a menthol-based solvent commonly used in Indonesia to ease muscle tenderness. She also prepared a hot water bottle that she rolled up and down my back whilst massaging me gently.
What was funny was that whilst my mother was preoccupied with the 23-year-old version of the small body that had grown inside her own, I was busy wondering what kind of pain she was going through seeing her daughter in pain.
This was almost enough of a distraction for me to forget the knobs turning within my flesh.
NOTE: *This is not to say that all sex workers find their work ‘agonizing’ at all times, with all of their customers.
Sunday, December 13, 2009
Inheriting Anger
I am staying in my mother’s house on the side of a mountain in Sulawesi, Indonesia.
The afternoon thunderstorm is coating the green bamboos and the lush rice paddies in its gray peacefulness.
Yet, for a while I have been sitting here staring blankly at the long snakelike valley with anger beating at my breast.
The wave of anger came as I had just read a particular passage from Naomi Klein’s latest book, The Shock Doctrine. In it, Klein argues that America’s free market policies have come to dominate the world through the exploitation of disaster-shocked people and countries.
One of the first countries used as an experiment for the propagation of free-market economic policies by way of a military coup d’etat upon a ‘too-leftist-leaning’ first president was… Indonesia.
The brutal military coup, masterminded by General Suharto (who came to be Indonesia’s second president and ruled for 32 ½ years) combed the countryside for alleged ‘Communists’.
Women associated with Gerwani, a national women’s organization which had until then worked to provide universal childcare and combat illiteracy, were particularly targeted.
In late September 1965, the military fabricated and propagated the story that Gerwani members had brutally mutilated and then murdered army generals in an attempt to overthrow the government. Thousands of women were arbitrarily arrested, jailed, tortured and remain branded as shunned ‘Communists’ to this day.
Some of the women had never heard of ‘Communism’, they were just trying to provide affordable community childcare.
Yet even their children do not believe them, as since 1966, thanks to three decades (and counting) of carefully formulated ‘education’, we were fed the story of how the Gerwani women danced around the army generals naked whilst singing a popular folk song, ‘Genjer-Genjer’ and mutilating their penises.
Klein notes that Suharto ‘had shown that if massive repression was used preemptively, the country would go into a kind of shock and resistance could be wiped out before it even took place. His use of terror was so merciless, so far beyond even the worst expectations, that a people who only weeks earlier had been collectively striving to assert their country’s independence were now sufficiently terrified that they ceded total control to Suharto’. (2007:69)
I then read another statement that only compounded the anguish I feel on behalf of all of us whose nations have been systematically robbed of our natural resources; all of us who have been reduced to being nothing more but cheap, dumb and alienated labour on our own lands (actually most of the lands don’t belong to us anymore, they belong to multinational corporations), all of us whose bodies were considered expendable enough to be experimented upon for the state’s terror-spreading purposes, all of us, all of us, all of us…
The statement goes: ‘The success of that [operation] meant that it would be repeated, again and again.’ (2007:69)
In Chile (September 11,1973), in China (June 3, 1989), in South Africa, Poland, the list goes on…
And I think my renewed outrage comes from being reminded that all of this suffering, all of this, as Klein would put it, ‘shock therapy’, employed at both the macro level of economic policies and political coup d’etats, as well as at the micro level of people's bodies… all of this suffering, all of this ignorance, all of this pain, all of these lies… all of this was for the propagation of free-market policies?
Let us have a moment here.
We need to realize that my mother’s memories of the Solo river in 1965-1966 Java, being clogged with bodies of the anonymously assassinated... only happened in order to open up our country’s economy to foreign control and exploitation.
Let us commemorate the ‘Gerwani’ women who still find their identification cards marked ‘communist affiliated’ to this day… and acknowledge that their on-going suffering was imposed upon them in order to make us, in neo-liberal speak: ‘internationally competitive’.
In order to become ‘internationally competitive’, we have been told that we ‘need’ to get rid of the minimum wage, we ‘need’ to get rid of unionism… otherwise we will scare Foreign Direct Investment away.
Wonderful! All of this brutality came to pass so that we may become slaves to Foreign Direct Investment and systematically be made to fail in protecting our farmers, our primary producers, our industry sector, our women, our political and historical awareness… our people.
How can one not be angry?
The afternoon thunderstorm is coating the green bamboos and the lush rice paddies in its gray peacefulness.
Yet, for a while I have been sitting here staring blankly at the long snakelike valley with anger beating at my breast.
The wave of anger came as I had just read a particular passage from Naomi Klein’s latest book, The Shock Doctrine. In it, Klein argues that America’s free market policies have come to dominate the world through the exploitation of disaster-shocked people and countries.
One of the first countries used as an experiment for the propagation of free-market economic policies by way of a military coup d’etat upon a ‘too-leftist-leaning’ first president was… Indonesia.
The brutal military coup, masterminded by General Suharto (who came to be Indonesia’s second president and ruled for 32 ½ years) combed the countryside for alleged ‘Communists’.
Women associated with Gerwani, a national women’s organization which had until then worked to provide universal childcare and combat illiteracy, were particularly targeted.
In late September 1965, the military fabricated and propagated the story that Gerwani members had brutally mutilated and then murdered army generals in an attempt to overthrow the government. Thousands of women were arbitrarily arrested, jailed, tortured and remain branded as shunned ‘Communists’ to this day.
Some of the women had never heard of ‘Communism’, they were just trying to provide affordable community childcare.
Yet even their children do not believe them, as since 1966, thanks to three decades (and counting) of carefully formulated ‘education’, we were fed the story of how the Gerwani women danced around the army generals naked whilst singing a popular folk song, ‘Genjer-Genjer’ and mutilating their penises.
Klein notes that Suharto ‘had shown that if massive repression was used preemptively, the country would go into a kind of shock and resistance could be wiped out before it even took place. His use of terror was so merciless, so far beyond even the worst expectations, that a people who only weeks earlier had been collectively striving to assert their country’s independence were now sufficiently terrified that they ceded total control to Suharto’. (2007:69)
I then read another statement that only compounded the anguish I feel on behalf of all of us whose nations have been systematically robbed of our natural resources; all of us who have been reduced to being nothing more but cheap, dumb and alienated labour on our own lands (actually most of the lands don’t belong to us anymore, they belong to multinational corporations), all of us whose bodies were considered expendable enough to be experimented upon for the state’s terror-spreading purposes, all of us, all of us, all of us…
The statement goes: ‘The success of that [operation] meant that it would be repeated, again and again.’ (2007:69)
In Chile (September 11,1973), in China (June 3, 1989), in South Africa, Poland, the list goes on…
And I think my renewed outrage comes from being reminded that all of this suffering, all of this, as Klein would put it, ‘shock therapy’, employed at both the macro level of economic policies and political coup d’etats, as well as at the micro level of people's bodies… all of this suffering, all of this ignorance, all of this pain, all of these lies… all of this was for the propagation of free-market policies?
Let us have a moment here.
We need to realize that my mother’s memories of the Solo river in 1965-1966 Java, being clogged with bodies of the anonymously assassinated... only happened in order to open up our country’s economy to foreign control and exploitation.
Let us commemorate the ‘Gerwani’ women who still find their identification cards marked ‘communist affiliated’ to this day… and acknowledge that their on-going suffering was imposed upon them in order to make us, in neo-liberal speak: ‘internationally competitive’.
In order to become ‘internationally competitive’, we have been told that we ‘need’ to get rid of the minimum wage, we ‘need’ to get rid of unionism… otherwise we will scare Foreign Direct Investment away.
Wonderful! All of this brutality came to pass so that we may become slaves to Foreign Direct Investment and systematically be made to fail in protecting our farmers, our primary producers, our industry sector, our women, our political and historical awareness… our people.
How can one not be angry?
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