Watching, listening, and reading with a little girl: Dr. Seuss

Showing posts with label Dr. Seuss. Show all posts

Tuesday, July 1, 2014

Would you eat it in the favela? (Part 3)

The last of three posts on Green Eggs and Ham: Click here for the first and second.

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It turns out that Marília had her own Sam-I-Am, her friend Adriano. Adriano is a classic “good kid,” but even when Marília was deepest in the gang, he always insisted on their friendship. “He wasn't pedantic,” she told me. “He never told me what to do, or that I was being bad, but he was always there, living a different kind of life from me and my friends.” They chatted in the alleys of the favela, he listened to the funk lyrics she composed, and from time to time he would invite her to join the dance group he organized. And one day, months after her boyfriend had murdered her sister's boyfriend, when Marília felt like the funk gang had gotten boring, when she was tired and run down, Marília heard Adriano's voice. She accepted his invitation to dance in his group, and together they invented a choreography that told the story of her life.

Adriano (the "Sam-I-am" of this article) with Helena and me in
Triunfo, in the interior of Pernambuco.

In Dr. Seuss's story, it took a train crashing into a boat and everyone nearly drowning before the un-named nay-sayer decided to say “yes” to green eggs and ham. The series of tragedies that befell Marília were more violent, but something similar happened in the favela of Arruda: exhausted and beat up, she decided to try something else. In the end, though, the result is the same: “Thank you, thank you, Sam-I-am” was mirrored by the depth of gratitude I saw on Marília's face as she and Adriano described their choreography. “Thank you,” she told him, that secular manifestation of grace.

The recent craze among parents for Pamela Druckerman's Bringing Up Bébé, a book about the superiority of French parenting, brings to light a fantasy adults have about their children: that kids need not force adults out of their perfect, ordered, and pleasant lives, that children need not disrupt. For Druckerman, French parenting means that babies always sleep through the night, kids eat all their food, and mothers can continue to talk about fashion and art with their friends as they sit in cafés.

But whether it's Sam-I-Am, street kids, Adriano, or my daughter, we have to remember that children disrupt. That's what they do. They threaten our comfortable order, our received ideas, our schedules, our sense of propriety and modesty. This threat is painful, difficult… and in the end, liberating. I spent most of my life declaring that I never wanted kids, but when my daughter Helena came along, I found out that I did, in spite of all of my protests, like green eggs and ham. That conversion didn't come with a lightning bolt out of heaven, but with laughter and crying and playing, sleepless nights and the constant learning of a baby. Working in the midst of gang wars, child soldiers, and gangsters, I've had lots of opportunities to walk the road to Damascus, but nothing has changed me like Helena has. I think most parents would say something similar.

One can make a pretty good argument that iconoclasm in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam is a way of saying, “Religion is not about a person's relations with things, rituals, or symbols. The only route to God is by loving and being just to other people.” Iconoclasm delivers this message in the visual realm, but I wonder if we can't say something similar in the field of hearing: might the disturbing silence of God be a way to force us to listen to the other? Instead of listening for the voice of God, does that silence force us to listen directly to widows and orphans and foreigners, those three great figures of Levitical law?

Sam-I-Am and Adriano remind us, I think, that our listening isn't enough. The silence of God also means that street kids, undocumented immigrants, and others who stand in for the orphans and sojourners of lore have to talk. God isn't going to do it for them. They needle and irritate and offer and persist… until finally we hear the call of justice in strange words like “Would you like them in a box? Would you like them with a fox?”

I wonder if Sam-I-Am doesn't also help us to re-read the Bible. Saul walking the road to Damascus may have a parallel in Green Eggs and Ham, when the train falls into the boat: the voice of God is only the final moment in a long story. As Saul persecuted Christians, can we imagine victim after victim looking into his eyes with a persistent, questioning “Why?” Or seeing a child pull at his cloak to say, “Please don't hurt my mother!” Without them, would Saul have been able to hear God's voice? Saul and God get the leading roles in the drama of Acts, but in his desire to tell a clear and compelling narrative, Luke may have missed the real protagonists of the story.

Dr. Seuss and the favelas of Brazil make for a strange juxtaposition, but for me, conversion and grace will never look the same again.

Monday, June 30, 2014

Would you eat them in a Favela? (Part 2)

Last week, I began a long reflection on Green Eggs and Ham. If you missed the first part, you can find it here. The conclusion is here.

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There is an important reason for this difference between the conversions in the Book of Acts and the one in Green Eggs and Ham: power dynamics. The un-named nay-sayer in Green Eggs and Ham has all the characteristics of an adult: he is taller, he reads the newspaper, he is easily irritated by Sam-I-Am, he is set in his ways. Sam-I-Am is clearly a child: smaller, playful, unafraid of rejection. Unlike the Hebrew God, Sam-I-Am cannot convert his opponent with pyrotechnics and miracles. His only resource is his playful persistence.

It might be useful to think through the problem spatially. When prophets hear the voice of Yahweh in the Tanakh, they always have to look up. Paul's conversion follows the same model:

And as he journeyed, it came to pass that he drew nigh unto Damascus: and suddenly there shone round about him a light out of heaven: and he fell upon the earth… [Acts 9:3, my emphasis]

Yahweh calls on prophets to support the suffering, the poor, and those who suffer from injustice (those “below”), but this call comes from “above”. That's the voice we're used to hearing and obeying, after all: parents, judges, leaders… they all come from above.

Let me turn back to Marília for a moment. In the favela, she stands at the top of the hierarchy: she reigns over the gang as she wishes. In the stateless zone of the favela, no police officer or politician can tell her what to do. Unless some God decides to intervene, there is no figure who can call her to conscience from above. And from below? Why should she listen? Her world is working as it should. Unfortunately, few powerful people – whether in a small pond like the favela of Arruda, or at the peak of state power – feel the weight of an ethics that calls us to hear the pained cry of the other. The powerful and evil may be the ones most in need of conversion, but it's unlikely they are going to do it themselves.

Enter Sam-I-Am. In the face of the constant “no”, the unwillingness of the un-named interlocutor even to countenance the possibility of green eggs and ham, Sam-I-Am keeps trying. He refuses to hear the “no” that his powerful interlocutor always calls back to him. He persists.

Half a dozen years ago, I worked in a Colombian shantytown controlled by paramilitary gangs, teaching children how to make movies; the kids were excited to use this new technology to show a bit of their community. As we filmed in this very dangerous place in the mountains above Bogotá, a gang member would often come up, point at where the kids were filming, and say “You can't do that.”

“Oh, no, that's not what we're filming,” the kids would say. “We’re shooting there.” They pointed their fingers to something off to the side of what worried the gangsters, indicating that they were interested in something else. With this simple motion, they felt like they could continue to film as they liked. The gang authorities, completely unprepared for anyone to disobey their orders, accepted the kids' explanation with a bemused grunt. Then, we moved on to the next spot and had to do it again. There's a wonderful obverse here to the parental lament that “you aren't listening to what I'm saying”: kids persist, even in the face of words that try to stop them.

It's interesting, I think, that Sam-I-Am has the name Samuel, based on the Hebrew verb that means “to hear,” when he, like the kids in the Colombian shantytown, is most characterized by the remarkable ability not to hear. Sam-I-Am reminds me of the street kids I've worked with for almost two decades, their cleverness, humor, and their capacity to annoy an adult until they get what they want. Without the power or theological fireworks available to God, they have to use the tools they have on hand to get what they want.

Friday, June 27, 2014

Would you eat it under an umbrella? Would you like it in the favela?

Up until now, most of my posts in this blog have been about movies... but Helena loves books even more, so I'm going to start writing about children's literature as well. Here, the first part of an extended "think piece" I've been working on about Dr. Seuss and social change. As anyone might guess, Helena loves Green Eggs and Ham, and it turns out to be a pretty useful book to think about violence in the favela.

Marília was twelve or thirteen when she joined the funk gang. She danced well, she sang even better, and she loved the camaraderie of the group, the sense that someone always had her back, even in the most violent alleys of the favela where she lived. Her ability to compose songs and her fearlessness quickly made her one of the gang's leaders, and she used her new authority to challenge gangs from around the city to more and more violent brawls. Beautiful, tall, and with a newly dyed shock of blond hair, she became one of the most feared people in Recife, Brazil.

Gangsta Funk is a kind of ritualized violence, based on repeated challenges using music, almost an esthetic duel of insults and affronts, as if the Jets and the Sharks from West Side Story had come to life, dancing and singing and fighting to a funk beat. The most respected members of the brigades are creative composers, who invent lyrics to laud their friends and denigrate their enemies. Marília knew how to rhyme taunts into unforgettable challenges, but she also found she was gifted as a field marshall, organizing battles so well that her gang, once the laughing stock of the city, never lost.

Marília concentrated her power in the funk gang by taking as her boyfriend the boss of the gang that controlled drug trafficking in the favela. The two gangs had always cooperated in defending the community, so it was a political as well as romantic match. When her sister started to date the leader of the gang on the other side of the canal, it looked almost like one of those arranged marriages to cement Hapsburg and Bourbon alliances in early modern Europe. Everyone thought that the two banks of the Canal de Arruda would come to dominate both trafficking and funk in the city.

Two years ago, a gang from third favela tried to take over both sides of the canal, and suddenly the alliance became fragile. A raiding party from Marília's neighborhood killed a couple of boys on the other side. The funk insults began to rain down. Finally, in a pitched battle, Marília's boyfriend murdered her sister's boyfriend.

Were Hollywood to make a movie of Marília's life, that murder would open the climatic act of the film: either the chaos and anarchy of revenge (if Tarantino were directing) or the passage into redemption (Clint Eastwood as director, maybe). Whether we look at Paul on the road to Damascus, the call of the Hebrew prophets, or the evangelical trope of being born again, in the West we like our conversion to come like lightning from heaven, or at least with the drums and gunshots of a movie soundtrack.

As Marília talks about who she has become, though, the story sounds less like the voice that came to St. Augustine in Milan, and more like a book we don't generally think of theologically: Green Eggs and Ham.

Green Eggs and Ham gives intellectuals an excuse to let their hair down. Jesse Jackson famously read the verses in the cadence of Martin Luther King on Saturday Night Live, and everyone from computer scientists to mathematicians to Mormon theologians[1] has used the book to theorize playfully about their favorite subjects. Here, though, I'd like to suggest that when we read Marília's story together with Dr. Seuss, we learn something about how people really change.

Almost every American who has had a child or been a child since 1960 knows the basic plot of the book: thirty-five years passed between my childhood and when I began to read it to my daughter, and I still remembered most of the rhymes by heart. As the book opens, a tall, nameless character with a hang-dog look tries to sit quietly and read his newspaper, but Sam-I-Am won't leave him alone. First, the rascally Sam-I-Am rides by on a dog, then on a tiger, and then sets the story in action by forcing a plate of food under his nose and asking, “Do you like green eggs and ham?” After a first refusal, Sam-I-Am offers the green eggs and ham a total of eleven times in more and more ridiculous and dangerous places before his interlocutor, exhausted, finally accepts.

And here, the conversion: the food he had rejected again and again becomes the food he loves the most, and a beatific smile descends on his face. My 22 month old daughter is so thrilled by that smile that she starts reciting the book's last words – “Thank you, thank you, Sam-I-Am” – well before the final page.

Here, conversion is nothing like the blinding light that shines down on St. Paul in Caravaggio's painting, nor like the 3000 people transformed by Peter's preaching in the Book of Acts. The conversion in Green Eggs and Ham isn't about charisma or drama or power; it happens only through the perverse persistence of Sam-I-Am, who finally exhausts every “no” that the other character can offer.