"Out of Fire Grew Narrative."

This article on CNN.com, "Growing Hate Groups Blame Obama, Economy" (not to mention the rejuvenated media  platforms of Newt Gingrich and Rush Limbaugh) capstoned my long, rude awakening from my post-inaugural glow.  Turns out, white supremacists--whose ire, as the article mentions, has been fueled by Latino immigration over the last decade--have found a great "visual aid" in Obama's presidency.  Membership in racist hate groups has shot up as dormant racists, feeling threatened, come out of the closet to declare their sick rage.   So much for pundits' premature assertions of a post-racial, post-racist society. 

The photo that ran with the CNN article was taken here in Nebraska last year, and it gave me a sickening thud in my stomach.

I guess, as much as this shocks and disgusts me, it does help me understand the surprisingly racist perspectives of a small minority of my students at UNL.  If they were exposed, even today, to this kind of nightmare scenario in their childhoods--and/or to the chronic stream of racist rhetoric that surely accompanies it--then it's no wonder they struggle with the viability of Latino lit or the fact that some people think affirmative action is a good thing.  Sad. 

The persistence of violence in the world, of prejudice and hatred, has always mystified, pained, and angered me, pero my only contribution against it has been involvement in anti-racist, anti-sexist education (and raising a passionately pacifist child--who sent, by the way, this link, in case you are interested in signing Avaaz's petition to establish a Commission of Inquiry, as some U.S. Senators have proposed, into citizen wiretapping, torture, detention, and the use of secret prisons in the Bush Administration's "War on Terror."  Go here if you'd like to read and/or sign it.) 

I always wish I had more power to change things.  Sure, we can be the change we want to see in the world, and that certainly helps, but sometimes I wish for more.

"Out of fire grew narrative," writes Alice Sebold in her excellent memoir Lucky, which we're reading in Autobiographical Writing this week.  In chapter 3, she gives us background about her life before she was raped as a first-year college student.  The burned houses of her childhood suburban neighborhood function as objective correlatives for her post-rape state of mind.  She describes walking, as a young child, through a house that had burned one night.  Because she wanted to save the family, she constructed an imagined story in which they got away.  She used her words and her imagination to invent a different ending:  one she could bear, one that met with her ethical approval, her sense of rightness.  "Out of fire grew narrative," and out of the devastation of her own rape grew the story she tells in Lucky, which counters dominant cultural narratives about rape, victims, justice, and recovery, all in a lucid, often surprisingly funny style.

"If you're a writer," says Sandra Cisneros, "then the most important political work you can do is to write."

James and I saw Waltz with Bashir at The Ross this weekend, and if it's at a theater near you, all I can say is, See it.  It's brilliant.  It's an autobiographical, animated film about the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982 and the massacre of Palestinians, with Israeli knowledge, by Christian Phalangists.

But it's also just as much about the workings of memory, trauma, conscience, and invention, which it probes and problematizes in a conflicted, complex, honest, self-aware way.   The writer/director was an Israeli soldier who was there at the invasion of Beirut as a young man, and he doesn't, at the beginning of the film, understand why he can't remember particular events.  He interviews men who were there with him or men who served at the same time to rebuild and jog his memory.   

There's plenty of material for gender criticism in the film, but I'll leave that analysis for to others to perform.  (Classic binaries, Woman as Freud's oceanic, etc.)  For now, I just want to tell you that it's exquisite, brilliant, gorgeous, and powerful--and I don't usually lavish the adjectives on stuff that extravagantly--and that the ending works like a knockout punch.  (I hear the New York Times review spoils the ending, so don't read it before you go.)  There are also moments of profound visual beauty.  It's a hauntingly lovely, terribly disturbing film.  Out of fire grew narrative.