June 2008
KNOWLEDGE IS POWER
In the closing scene of The Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, Harrison Ford, reprising his role as Indiana Jones, responds to his son’s question about the meaning of the legend of the city of gold by explaining that the word gold translates as treasure. But the treasure wasn’t gold — it was knowledge. Knowledge is treasure, declares Indiana Jones, his gaze fixed towards the gold-tinged past, but also towards the future represented by his son. The film takes us back to the America of the 1950s and the McCarthy era, and in this respect the evil Irina Spalko (Cate Blanchett) is a worthy opponent. Having imbibed the slogan Knowledge Is Power with her communist milk, Irina remains loyal to that idea to the bitter end, paying for it with her head. The antagonism between Indiana Jones and Irina Spalko is actually false, because the same passion for knowledge draws both into the dangerous adventure of the film. But Irina is a woman, a communist, and, unlike Indiana, has no family, all of which makes the outcome of their battle clear from the outset.
I drank the slogan Knowledge Is Power with my socialist Yugoslav milk. Hand in hand with Greek mythology, as a child I swallowed the myths about communist leaders who crammed for hours on end, who from humble beginnings as poor village children became PhD scholars, polyglots, and “Great Men.” The story about Maxim Gorky, the orphan boy who read books by the light of the moon, was forever burned into my consciousness. Communist leaders posed for their portraits with glasses on their noses, the backdrop a symbolic row of books. The glasses were an incontestable sign of erudition. Tito also underwent a similar mythological transformation: from a poor village urchin, then a locksmith’s apprentice, he, in his turn, became a man with glasses on his nose.
Such images of glasses-wearing, book-loving communist leaders had a propaganda function and highly visible results. In Yugoslavia the spread of literacy among the people began with Partisan courses during the Second World War (bolstered by the legends of wizened old peasant women who learned to read and write). The popularization of education began in earnest, studying became accessible to all, and a network of “workers’ universities” and “evening schools” for adults was created. (Education in the workplace! was one of the more popular Yugoslav-era slogans). With the arrival of television sets to Yugoslav homes, and the production of educational programs for both adults and children, the education of the socialist masses went on apace. At the time, newspapers also had an educational character.
Abraham Lincoln, the self-educated American president, is one of the founding fathers of the educational-enlightenment myth in American culture. The propaganda-like and Enlightenment-inspired mythologizing of literacy and education and the right of citizens to education took hold in America long before they did in the short-lived Communist epoch. America created college culture and, along with it, campus films and television series, literature and fashion, rituals and customs, all of which are inseparable from this culture. In America the slogan Knowledge Is Power never lost its credibility and strength, Barack Obama being its new torchbearer.
In Yugoslavia the slogan Knowledge Is Power vanished before Yugoslavia itself did. “Workers’ universities,” evening schools, and educational programming on radio and television simply disappeared. Newspapers yellowed with scandal and pornography, and television became lowest-common-denominator entertainment. Writers became comedians and salespeople. Nationalism became an alibi for self-pronounced “avengers” hell-bent on knocking “Yugoslav” giants, literary and otherwise, from their pedestals — and I mean literally. In Croatia, the monuments to Nikola Tesla (because he was a Serb) and those of the sculptor Vojin Bakić (also a Serb) came crashing down, as did the monuments to Ivo Andrić (a Nobel Laureate in literature) in his homeland of Bosnia. In a moment of furious ethnic and ideological cleansing many books were tossed out of libraries, some ending up on bonfires.
On an October visit to New York in the run up to the 2008 US presidential election, I was invited to the Union Settlement Association in East Harlem, a visit organized by the Unterberg Poetry Center. Union Settlement is an American version of a “worker’s university.” I was the guest of an adult education program, which for many years has helped immigrants master both written and spoken English as efficiently as possible.
There were about two hundred people in the auditorium, and the program coordinator translated my English into Spanish. My audience consisted of Mexicans, Puerto Ricans, and other immigrants whose first language was Spanish, men and women working tough physical jobs to put food on the family table. It wasn’t important to them where I was from; for them I had a symbolic value: I was a writer, and a female writer at that. I represented all the values my audience believed went hand-in-hand with a writer’s calling: erudition, courage, moral values, honesty, and a commitment to justice. For them I spoke a language that “recognizes no borders,” a language understood by all classes and all races. In short, I was a woman with glasses on my nose, and that night signed many books and shook many hands. I received a bouquet of flowers and, as a memento, a plush teddy bear. My throat tightened. Accepting the role they had bestowed upon me, I really did feel like a writer, though a bit like Rosa Luxemburg too.
Later, walking the New York streets armed with a bouquet of flowers and a teddy bear, I wondered why I had been so moved, and where all the soppy sentimentality had come from. Then I wondered how my countrymen, those semi-literate do-nothings, those Yugo-shitters and smart-asses, who get off on making jokes at the expense of others’ talent, knowledge, and work ethic, would have fared among those earnest Mexicans and Puerto Ricans, who still believed that literature can save the world. I wondered how those who used to taunt Ivo Andrić with “Hey, four-eyes, done your scribbling for the day?” would have fared, let alone those who still today get off on regurgitating the anecdote, thinking it oh-so-funny. Actually, it’s for the best that I couldn’t explain to the Mexicans where I was from, I thought to myself. I mean, what could I have said? That I come from a place where arrogance is a kind of unwritten etiquette, and ignorance a treasured human value? That I come from a place that cultivates disdain for every intellectual effort, a place where they understood the slogan Knowledge is Power literally, and, this being the case, the Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadžić set his cannons on the Sarajevo Library? That I come from a place where local politicians, criminals, liars, thieves, thugs, and murderers are models of courage, morals, honesty, and progress?
I gave the teddy bear to my six-year-old niece. When she’s a little older, I’ll tell her the story of how the teddy bear found its way to her, the story of impoverished immigrants who arrived in America with the belief that knowledge is the only real treasure. I’ll do everything I can to instill in her that same belief. She might say, “Thank you, Indiana Jones,” or “Thank you, Irina Spalko,” but that really doesn’t matter.
November 2008
THE HAIRDRESSER WITH THE POODLE
A homeland is a fact in a person’s private life just as a person’s place of birth and date of birth are facts. The encounter with the homeland begins at pre-school. One of the first things a child learns is the famous sentiment: My country is. . Here, at a tender age, begins the homeland briefing that lasts from the cradle to the grave. This briefing continues at school, through classes in the history, language, and literature of the land. The poets tell us that the homeland is the land of our grandfathers, our home and hearth, our native soil, amber waves of grain and eyes the color of the sea, the prairies, mountains and valleys, seas and plains, and other such things. Today, particularly from a broadly neo-liberal vantage point, all these thousands of patriotic verses — particularly the ones which urge expropriating the native hills, rivers and plains, hearth and home, sky and sun (my sky, my sun, my prairies and my mountains) can be read as a list of real estate holdings which were acquired under suspicious circumstances. Poets, of course, as proof of their right to this imaginary property, unfurl their direct ancestral line, claiming that the homeland is their mother, which, from a gender perspective, is discriminatory, but easy to understand. Homelands are generally mothers for their sons. Poetically inclined daughters seldom refer to their homeland as mother.