Layla, guest speaker on the programme: In the Motherhood, hosted by Trixie Dumont
CKUT, 6pm Wednesday, 19th March, 2008

Discussion of The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls mp3

(correction: Of course, I meant “winter” and not “summer” when I was talking on the show about the family who melted snow to get water and warmth in Quebec. It must have been my own impatience to get to the sunny time of the year. This year, particularly, the winter has been too generous in terms of cold and snow)

This memoir presents a fascinating ethnographic account of a family that chose to live different than what the “civilised”, capitalist American norms dictated. And difference usually provokes a heated condemnation from the “mainstream” - and in this case even from the “alternative” - spectrum.

The Walls family’s example is yet another illustration of how the contemporary capitalist world has brought the privatisation of space to perfection - a process that was begun in feudal times. In this book, we see the Walls family striving to live outside the city, which they see as oppressive, yet refuses to take possession of land or to farm.  However, the dictates of contemporary American society leave no possibility for survival in this world without serving the capitlist (often referred to as humanist) purpose. These norms or regulations or the system of privatisation dictates that some people are allowed to use and own the bodies, effort, time, and space of other humans or animals or plants. Those who have been designated as resources are forced to pay the owners/landlords to live or eat or drink in this world.

The Walls family attempted to flee the City and its rules of capitalist exploitation, even when often they were forced to work in mines and pay ‘rent” to the individuals who owned the mining business and whom these exploited workers, impoverished by the unjust appraisal of their time and effort, made rich. In other words, huge percentages of their paychecks were extorted for the possibility to live in horrendous living conditions in shacks, sometimes without utilities, such as the toilet or bathroom.

Jeannette Walls comes forth with great courage to unveil her past and invite the judgemental, merciless, and civilised voyeurs into her life. She accomplished the task without denigrating the people, who, as long as - and in the best way - they could, protected her from the humiliations of a rapist and murderous culture, we call civilisation, which has concocted a “scientific” proof called “Darwinism” in order to justify the complete anhilation of any thing that might threaten the possibility to hoard more resources and power for the future of the rich. The “civilised” “scientists” call it competition, or the survival of the fittest, and by grounding it in nature, justify it as natural and inevitable. The Walls family refused to participate.

While in an autobiographical narrative we still face the problems of distortion, memory, and the evolution of values that make any biographical account problematic material for drawing anthropological conclusions, there remain even more problems with “professional” ethnography. Therefore, memoirs continue to have a strong appeal in the study of both the author, the “reality” and experience that the author depicts, and most of all the society that reads and reacts in specific ways to the material.

In this radio discussion, we mostly talked about the issues of child welfare, a concept that is politically chiselled to serve political and economic needs and which is therefore highly problematic, sensitive and a relative cultural concept. For example, child labour is forbidden in the civilised world. We find this norm surfacing at a time when it has become more profitable to squeeze two working parents to pay for the childhood paraphernalia, such as toys, text-books, tuition, etc. - all of which serve capitalist interests. Statistics indicate that in the wealthy “north” childhood has been extending well into one’s 30s, but in the countries on whose labour the north has built its wealth, childhood is still what it has been for David Copperfield and although we hear the “sensitive” “humanitarians” emphatically express “horror” for and “disaproval” of poverty and abuse, their stores are still filled with customers hunting for “deals” on products made by the abused people of all ages in China or Mexico.

The Walls family opted to avoid the “civilised” system of relations and division of resources. Statistics Canada offers many insights to support the position that, in fact, the poor workers are in a worse situation in terms of health, length of life, and general well-being than someone who is “poor” but refuses to give her time and effort to the “employer”. (link: http://www.phac-aspc.gc.ca/dca-dea/publications/healthy_dev_partb_1_e.html ). In other words, poverty, or the lack of access to resources, time, and space of parents who do not work is less neglectful than in a situation where both parents work and small children in impoverished neighbourhoods of the capitalist america walk home from daycare or school and play in the ghetto alone because their parents are cleaning up for someone else or caring for other people’s children or welfare.

For me, to see how the Walls family stuck together in the desert, appeared to be a healthier alternative than the splintered childhoods in daycares, schools, after-school extensions or, even worse, the destitute of drug and prostitution driven neighbourhoods of the City.

The radio discussion of The Glass Castle

Time was short, and some important points remain untouched. Here, I elaborate some of them:

• Mental health and normalcy versus mental disability and illness:

The definition of mental health is the ability of the mind to process information about “reality” and to successfully live in that reality.

But what if the understanding and the view of “reality” that one group of people imposes on others does not correspond to the “real” reality out there nor is representative of the possibilities for other realities?

I want to touch upon the recent “scandal” with the pastor J. Wright in the U.S. Everybody knows that black people did not arrive on a Baltic cruise-ship on vacation to North America. African people had their own cultures and civilisations prior to the Europeans inscribing them into the category of “human resources”, killing half of them, shipping others in shackles and blood in horrendous conditions across the Sea to build the priviledges of the white people in America who have by that time dealt swiftly with dispossessing the Natives of their rights to use the American land. Shackles, death, and pain are the heritage of the American Black people. Yet, when they express anger, they are now being called racist!

Everybody knows that symbolic, cultural and material capital influence health, happiness, and longevity and that these are accumulated through generations and transmitted accordingly. Everybody knows that the black people who didn’t arrive on cruise-ships on vacation – they were captured as slaves and raped in all the possible meanings of the word - were brought to North America by force to serve the wealthy. They had not only no capital, but, until recently in history they weren’t even considered as part of the human race. And “science” ”proved” that “knowledge”.

Yet, when black people express dismay and voice anger over the injustice that they are now allowed to enter a race that had begun centuries ago, which they had already lost (they did not come here on Baltic cruise-ships) and where they are still expected to work for the benefit of the wealthier others are now scorned and blamed for their inability to access the resources from which they have been and still are being denied by those who have legitimated greed – these same impoverished and angry black and brown people are being called racist and are not allowed to call racist the white people who still enjoy the benefits inherited from their ancestors who have abused the blacks and aborigines. This is what Jeremiah Wright has been accused of.

If we use the rhetoric of mental disability here, then the question is: Who is mentally ill? The one who “fails” to adapt to and to accept injustice or the one who imposes a falsehood as truth and announces the truth as illegal?

A semblance of a fair scenario, if such is possible in a capitalist setting, might have been for every single American to abandon their material and symbolic capital, redistribute it equally and then start afresh.

This question of resources and their distribution is pertinent to the choices the Walls family made in their attempt to live outside of civilisation and to honour self sufficiency, dignity and independence not only in their children, but in all life. The parents remained faithful to these ideals even when, after the children have grown up and left the “nest”, they chose to live on the streets, rummaging the garbage, refusing to accept their children’s willingness to share their consumerist and glamorous life-styles.

In the book, we see the parents in their youth filled with dreams and ideals of art, nature, and freedom. They try to get by on various jobs, but the jobs never solve their financial problems and get them only deeper in poverty (with no access to natural resources) and with even less time and energy to pursue their artistic and intellectual dreams. At one point they had to pay the mining company that was exploiting the father for living in deplorable housing. I wonder why nobody sees this as madness: workers amake the mining company owners wealthy, they sacrifice their health and dreams, are exploited and at the same time are expected to pay for the right to live in poverty while being condemned for poverty. With time, we see in the parents symptoms of depression: apathy, alcoholism, and ultimately despair, and when they do get an inheritance, it is too late. Health, energy, and dreams burn up in smoke.

This point led the discussion to the realm of rape:
While most definitions of rape specify that in order for an assault to be considered as rape, the force of someone’s will over another person has to have been applied in a sexual context. I would like to challenge this definition because I believe that by stopping at the sexual boundary, this definition legitimates the massive rape of people’s will, self-assertion, dreams and thus protects the major culprit.

In the book, Jeannette notices that dependence on Erma changes her parents from vivacious dreamers to succumbed failures. Both, her father and mother act like classic victims of rape: they give up their will and do what Erma, the father’s mother, and “society” wants of them. They draw within themselves. This hiding within oneself is reminiscent of the behaviour that is attributed to autism, claimed to be a self- centred behaviour and is typical in victims of rape or violent attacks. In fact, they also describe depression, which is a natural reaction to the experience of aggression and violated will. When a person reacts with empathy, i.e. feels great sadness, pain or even despair in face of the endless aggression towards the earth and other peoples and creatures in which we feel forced to participate because we civilisation has taken possession of the globe. Professionals, such as doctors, psychotherapits or psychiatrists, diagnose it as depression, which is the same as empathy, say for the abused Chinese or Indian child-workers whose products fill up our Dollaramas, or the bombed Irakis, whose oil we participate in regulating and extracting. And depression has become a stigma that is being ”cured” with drugs (both, legal and illegal). Where is the people’s right to feel sad, to question one’s role, and to refuse?

It is easier to succumb to the bully and do as told, like the millions in Nazi or any other war - against people or nature - are willing to do. We should bow low before those who dare embrace difficulties so as to heed their truth and cherish life.

• Selfishness:

Doctors, school teachers, activists for women’s rights in North America hammer constantly about the importance of thinking about one self, the virtues of wanting more for oneself, going after the dreams for oneself. Doctors, teachers, and women’s rights activists urge women to abandon their children in the hands of strangers in daycare and neglecting the need of children for breastfeeding and togetherness in the family – all of this neglect and abuse with plastics, medications, exploitation of personnel are preferrable by these “professionals” that urge parents to cater for the childhood industry (which is abuse and abusive) and is seen as good selfishness.

While the Walls family had a rough childhood, filled with pain, solitude and shattered dreams, yet their strength and passion, togetherness and love fill the pages of their lives and give their children the dignity and the skills to make it even in the culture that raped the land, killed most animal and plant species, destroyed the natives and is intolerant and unforgiving of difference, weakness and poverty. If the aim of education is to forge strong, compassionate citizens of the world, capable of successfully finding their place in it, then we can judge the Walls family as successfull in this mission. As for pain, well, that seems to be the prerogative, even in this society, that so easily inflicts it on others, yet despises and judges people when they accept the pain and call it pleasure. But then again, what is sanity?

Layla AbdelRahim

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