Seek joy in the saddest places
Tom Feeley over at ICH does such a great job collating pertinent political articles from around the world. His email alerts also often feature pithy and relevant quotes. Here’s one from the great Indian writer and activist Arundhati Roy, author of The God of Small Things and recipient of the Sydney Peace Prize in 2003 (click here for speech transcript).
I would only add to Ms Roy’s great words that though each of us is insignificant in the vast enormity of our universe, our agency isn’t. What we do for social justice always counts, and with our privilege comes great responsibility.
“To love. To be loved. To never forget your own insignificance. To never get used to the unspeakable violence and the vulgar disparity of life around you. To seek joy in the saddest places. To pursue beauty to its lair. To never simplify what is complicated or complicate what is simple. To respect strength, never power. Above all, to watch. To try and understand. To never look away. And never, never, to forget. “
– Arundhati Roy
To respect strength, never power.
Excellent thought!
that’s a great quote
Today my psychology professor was making a comment about the difference between strength and power. He used a (somewhat sexist) domestic example: when a woman uses her intuition and emotive fluency to “outmaneuver” a man, in a manner of speaking, sometimes the man will turn to violence. When he doesn’t know how to combat (or how not to combat,) a weak man will go into a muscle-driven temper tantrum, at which point he has already been defeated, is already a loser.
I think there is a vague analogue here to US foreign policy in the Middle East. The US and its close allies have determined, mostly through trial and error, that there is no way to turn the region into New America with treaties and goodies and high-paying call centers. Now violence has become the method of choice for coercion, and all of the rhetoric of benevolence is just the same as wifebeater trying to cry “You made me do it! It’s for your own good!”
Good way of putting it, and I suppose just as much damage can be wrought with emotional violence or manipulation, which is not solely the purview of the female to be sure, but can be her weapon of choice with tendentially greater emotional fluency. The analogy whereby the Occident is gendered masculine to the Mid East’s (or Orient’s) feminine is historically resonant and reflective of gender power relations in a number of ways. The language of war is often couched in sexual-violent terms, for instance (eg “submission of targets”), and is manifest even in dominant economic discourses (eg “penetration of markets”). Language and metaphor are quite revealing of elite values!