The Trouble with Genocide*

In a city that doesn't want for them, I think the NYPL Live series is one of New York's great resources (Paul Holdengraber* notwithstanding; although undoubtedly I unfairly discredit his contribution on account of my allergy to his attitude. About which I am nevertheless willing to modify my impressions, see below). Sadly, I find myself too often unable to attend events, usually because of my travel schedule. That said, I hadn't realized how much I'd missed until I heard that tonight's Robert Silvers Lecture with Nicholas Kristof was the final NYPL Live event of the season. The talk was preceded by a screening of excerpts from the recent event with Norman Mailer-- evidently his last public appearance. I really hadn't paid a lot of attention to him after 'The White Negro' which I read when I was reading everything about race and can't actually recall the essay but guess I didn't think it that important. Mailer didn't really figure for me; not my period, not my paradigm. But he was keen and unsparing in this final video which will send me back to the text. If I were a writer, that's the kind of legacy I'd want.

Anyway that was a preamble, delirious and bracing: Felix the Cat to the main event.

Nicholas Kristof's presentation was surprisingly unpolished and correspondingly effective. I hope that doesn't sound cynical, a quality I do not attribute to his performance. In large part, it was his coverage that introduced and engaged me and so many many others to and with the situation in Darfur. His courage in pursuing the story and the personal commitment were both evident and evidently sincere tonight.

But so too was a hopeless humanism. Clearly, Mr. Kristof is moved and motivated by the pathos of the individual. I think I remember now that
he bought a sex slave in SE Asia at one point in order to free her from bondage? There's no question that the stories he told (and the pictures he showed) are outrageous, and no question that the conditions obtaining in Darfur are unacceptable, that pressure from the international community is necessary and right.

I have to give credit to Mr. Holdengraber* for demonstrating an unaccustomed restraint in his role this evening, as well as for carefully synthesizing what he said were over 100 comments submitted in writing during the talk (written submissions are a wise programming decision, I think) into a few relevant questions. Apparently a number of people wanted NK to justify his argument that the crisis in Darfur merited priority attention from the international community (and individuals in the audience) over against say malaria, or the Congo where the deadliest war in recorded history supposedly ended in 2003.

The gist of Kristof's response was that genocide-- defined as a state policy of extermination of a race, ethnicity or other characteristic believed to be heritable or otherwise essential-- is the greatest challenge to our humanity and therefore automatically belongs at the top of the agenda of those who would pursue peace and justice for the peoples of the world.

A post-Enlightenment subject would find it difficult to reject this argument out of hand. Indeed, I confess that there were points during his presentation when I reached for my handkerchief. (I'm cutting back on kleenex). But I also find it incredibly uncomfortable. Leaving aside everything else, it reflects a quaintly modernist and decidedly 'western' conception of how power is organized and effected much less of the role of the state in its engagement and exercise. There's the whole ISA thing which I think is very important, and beyond that something I'm just beginning to glimpse from my recent exposure to part of the middle east, about which I don't feel sufficiently well versed, instructed, or experienced to comment beyond saying that I begin to realize, to my horror, that the Enlightenment project (within which I have understood my entire life) was likely always more idiosyncratic than I was aware, and even more minor tomorrow than today.

*with apologies to Walter Michaels.

Smile

I wouldn't have paid so much attention to this if I hadn't received an evaluation the week before in which my actual performance was acknowledged as benefiting the organization and but I was threatened with imminent termination on account of anonymous and unspecified complaints of my 'condescending' and 'contemptuous' attitude toward various employees. I'm not ready to lay out a brief here. But in my follow up interview my supervisor, a semi-closeted gay white man who is preparing for retirement within the year, actually volunteered that he 'suspected that gender was at issue' in the reaction I have incurred--and which he credited in his assessment (left in writing on my chair as he left the office for the weekend). Mind, my (women) colleagues with whom I shared the evaluation have called it 'insane'.

I was a feminist before I got out of braces. No flabby Friedan for me, nor Robin Morgan; I toted and quoted Shulamith Firestone throughout my early teens. I was deeply impressed by her unsentimental take on motherhood: 'giving birth is like shitting a pumpkin'. I've never been pregnant. I don't have a family. Could this be a reason? Just now I returned to look up the reference. The pages are yellow and the binding cracks as I open The Womens' Press paperback (with the iron logo). I'm too old even to wince any more at the marginalia; I'm almost ready for compassion--even admiration-- for me, nearly 30 years ago.

What did I know at 14, to underline: 'The smile is the child/woman equivalent of the shuffle; it indicates acquiescence of the victim to her own oppression'? or to find a boyfriend whom I could persuade to read the book, whose own comments (for example, in response to a passage in a section entitled 'The Racial Family: Oedipus/Electra, the Eternal Triangle, the Brothel-behind-the scenes', reading 'What the white woman doesn't know is that the black woman, not under the thumb of one man, can now be squashed by all. There is no alternative for either of them than the choice between being public or private property [my original underscore!], but because each still believes that the other is getting away with something, both can be fooled into mischanneling their frustration on to each other, rather than on to the real enemy, "The Man"' --) would read, in still pink ink: 'NOT GOOD'?

(To be fair: this same boyfriend was even then amassing an arrest record and FBI file that will ever put me to shame).

I'd thought this was all part of the detritus of my adolescence. That first world feminism belonged in classrooms, as a useful set of historical references that might help tomorrow's Goldman analysts better appreciate their opportunities, and maybe think twice about the life-work issues they, their colleagues, hires or (more theoretically) supervisors might face as women (who are still weirdly defined primarily by virtue of their reproductive function).

'Feminism is the inevitable female response to the development of a technology capable of freeing women from the tyranny of their sexual-reproductive roles--both the fundamental biological condition itself, and the sexual class system build upon, and reinforcing, this biological condition'.

Thus sprach Shulamith in The Dialectic of Sex, back in 1970. I picked it up nearly 15 years later, and after an initial conversion, left it on the shelf for a long time. There's a lot to leave behind (specifically, its repudiation of class in favor of gender as the fundamental basis of social order and struggle) but there's a lot more with which I find a renewed sympathy and inspiration as I brush the crumbs of dried binding glue from my lap.

Mother Earth

I attended an update on the millennium development goals at the UN today and learned that 80 per cent of sub Saharan Africa's small farmers are women. They walk an average of 4 miles a day to get their water, and they produce 90 per cent of the continent's food (elsewhere I've seen reports at 75- 80 per cent. Regardless: a preponderance). But for a variety of reasons, including the fact that (and this may be garbled; at the very least an overgeneralization; but I couldn't stay long enough to clarify during the q&a) they are not considered farmers socially (qua gender, as I understood it), they have the least access to technical and other information to help them improve their methods and lives. Only 17 per cent of the arable land in the region is under cultivation. Almost half of the population of the region lives on less than $1 per day.

(None of this is really surprising, of course. But I am reminded of how much is really at stake in an internationalist feminism: something I've always believed in and at times fought for--but if you live in a wealthy nation and don't commonly find yourself in the academic or activist situations that would tend to remind you--well, it does tend to become an abstraction. Even modest activities such as today's are salutary under such circumstances).

These statistics were offered as part of a presentation on progress toward millennium development goal #1: 'Eradicate extreme poverty and hunger'. The chart that accompanies this update in The Millennium Development Goals Report shows that since 1999, progress (even if slight) has been made toward this goal in every region except for Western Asia, where poverty rates have more than doubled since 1990. The narrative report doesn't comment on this. I can think of a few possible reasons. Check this out, too.