(based on a Japanese folk tale)

Critics show their limitations and ignorance when they read this pithy and witty film as a critique of Soviet realities. This film criticises civilisation, globalism, racism, and imperialism, of which so many nations are guilty.

Table of contents:

for kids from 0 – infinity

. For Children about U.S.S.R.

.Wonder-pysanka

.The Little Steam Engine from Daisyland – Thomas the Little Tank Engine’s Soviet antipod. Translated into English by me.

.The Moth Translated into English by me.

.The Island (subtitles not needed)

.Crane Feathers – based on a Japanese folk tale (subtitles not needed)

.The Wolf and the Calf. English subtitles

.Moomintrolls (Soviet, 1978)

Puppet animation (the three parts form a feature film):

1. Moomintrolls and all the others (based on Comet in Moominvalley)
2. Moomintroll and the Comet
3. The Road Home

Drawing animation:

1. All because of the Hat: Spring (1980)
2. Summer in Moominvalley (1981)
4. Autumn comes to Moominvalley (1983)

.Cats’ Promenade (subtitles not needed)

.There Once was a Dog – based on a Ukrainian folk tale with English subtitles

.The Tree and the Cat. English subtitles

.A Crow always in Love,1988.

.Winnie the Pooh (Soviet-Russian), part 2

.Ballerina on a Boat (subtitles not needed)

.Heron and Crane by Yuri Norstein 1977. English subtitles.

.Ball of Wool by Nikolai Serebriakov, 1968. English subtitles.

.About Sidorov Vova, 1985. English subtitles.

.Fox and Hare by Yuri Norstein

.Hedgehog in the Fog (based on a Russianfolk tale) By Y. Norstein. English subtitles.

.The House that Jack Built

for kids who can handle serious stuff

.The Dream of a Ridiculous Man based on the story by F. Dostoevsky

.Poor Liza – based on a novella by Nikolay Karamzin (subtitles not needed)

.Glass Harmonica by Andrei Khrjanosvky, music score by Alfred Shnittke, 1968. English subtitles.

.My Green Crocodile by Vadim Kurchevsky, 1966. English subtitles.

.Firing Range by Petrov. Englishsubtitles.

.The Little Steam Engine from Daisyland. English subtitles

Song of a Storm Petrel

This animation film is the unschooling hymn! Maxim Gorki’s cry for freedom in his Song of a Storm Petrel gets beaten, confined, and finally murdered within the stone walls of school. The role of the teacher in this instance is to slam any attempt of the soul to flee the prison-like building. Each time the girl reciting the Song conjures the passions of the storm and the contradictions of darkness and light, joy and tears, the voice of the pedantic teacher brings the birds/spirits back to reality, they slam against the classroom cement and fall back on the ground beaten. The chaos that attempts to liberate the passions of the youth in the end collapse. The final scene is revealing, for, in the debris of shattered dreams and smashed paraphernalia meant to keep the pupils as prisoners of school, appear the characters of the real Alexandre Pushkin and Maxim Gorki – Russia’s classical poets and writers. Their voices let us know that these were the pupils that the punitive teacher destroyed: her final scream is the machine gun that leaves us no hope, as she murders the poets. What could have been the Song of the Storm Petrel falls to the ground, smudged with ink and dirt.

page 2 Continued.... (for an in-depth examination of education see my book “Wild Children – Domesticated Dreams: Civilization and the Birth of Education” (Fernwood 2013).

In fact, I argue that the methods, in pedagogical and psychological interventions, themselves are curriculum in their own right, inculcating a specific habitus through which individuals may continually reproduce their institutions. It is this interdependence of institution and education that makes the essence of education tricky and elusive.

Today, people hardly spend time with their families and the family unit in the Western world has reached critical limits of extinction^xv. While people spend their most efficient time locked up at work away from their families, their children are rounded up for forced – usually referred to as obligatory – education in schools. The love and the life that used to be transmitted in the intimacy of family relations between the young and the old are now replaced by professionals and schedules, i.e. by what kills growth, conscience, intelligence and creativity instilling in these children the instinct of death. In North America, full time nurseries accept children as early as 1 month of age.

Although, education is compulsory ‘only’ until high-school, university is viewed as a prize to be sought after. This “uncompulsory” yet highly desired stage in the educational programme is responsible for sorting out the “information” in the already prepared “consumer” of information and reinforces the hierarchy and the methods instilled in pre-university schooling.

The founders of these institutions, according to John Taylor Gatto, a distinguished public school teacher and researcher in education^xvi, are the military in Europe and the industrial capitalists in the U.S.

“The real makers of modern schooling were leaders of the new American industrial class, men like:
Andrew Carnegie, the steel baron…
John D. Rockefeller, the duke of oil…
Henry Ford, master of the assembly line which compounded steel and oil into a vehicular dynasty…
and J.P. Morgan, the king of capitalist finance…”^xvii

In Dumbing Us Down, Gatto pinpoints the goal of schooling.

“Schools were designed by Horace Mann and by Sears and Harper of the University of Chicago and by Thorndyke of Columbia Teachers College and by some other men to be instruments of the scientific management of a mass population. Schools are intended to produce, through the application of formulas, formulaic human beings whose behavior can be predicted and controlled…”

A more revealing detail of the nature of contemporary schooling is its historical importation from Europe.

“The structure of American schooling, 20^th century style, began in 1806 when Napoleon’s amateur soldiers beat the professional soldiers of Prussia at the battle of Jena… Almost immediately afterwards a German philosopher named Fichte delivered his famous “Address to the German Nation” which became one of the most influential documents in modern history. In effect he told the Prussian people that the party was over, that the nation would have to shape up through a new Utopian institution of forced schooling in which everyone would learn to take orders.

So the world got compulsion schooling at the end of a state bayonet for the first time in human history; modern forced schooling started in Prussia in 1819 with a clear vision of what centralized schools could deliver:

• Obedient soldiers to the army;

• Obedient workers to the mines;

• Well subordinated civil servants to government;

• Well subordinated clerks to industry;

• Citizens who thought alike about major issues.”^xviii

 

Needless to say, the institution of army is the institution of death per se. More important, it is the institution of imposed death, of murder. The deadly nature of the structure itself of education is not surprising in light of the above analysis of the physiological nature of learning discussed by Nikitina and Arshavski. In fact, it is its logical link in history. The methods developed in this case respond to the need to eliminate not only the adversary outside, but also the one inside, i.e. intelligence and will, in order to create obedience, subordination, and what Gatto calls outright “dumbness”.

“Old-fashioned dumbness used to be simple ignorance; now it is transformed from ignorance into permanent mathematical categories of relative stupidity like “gifted and talented,” “mainstream,” “special ed.” Categories in which learning is rationed for the good of a system of order…

If you believe nothing can be done for the dumb except kindness, because it’s biology the bell-curve model); if you believe capitalist oppressors have ruined the dumb because they are bad people the neo-Marxist model); if you believe dumbness reflects depraved moral fiber the Calvinist model); or that it’s nature’s way of disqualifying boobies from the reproduction sweepstakes the Darwinian model); or nature’s way of providing someone to clean your toilet the pragmatic elitist model); or that it’s evidence of bad karma the Buddhist model); if you believe any of the various explanations given for the position of the dumb in the social order we have, then you will be forced to concur that a vast bureaucracy is indeed necessary to address the dumb.

…Mass dumbness first had to be imagined; it isn’t real.

Once the dumb are wished into existence, they serve valuable functions: as a danger to themselves and others they have to be watched, classified, disciplined, trained, medicated, sterilized, ghettoized, cajoled, coerced, jailed. To idealists they represent a challenge, reprobates to be made socially useful… An ignorant horde to be schooled one way or another”^xix

One of the principle practices in education is therefore the cultivation of dumbness as a norm, the paradox being that dumbness as a negative affliction to be cured and avoided in its semantic rendition in practice becomes obligatory and positive – an end to be desired and which is rewarded with diplomas, certificates, and prizes.

However, if dumbness is the norm in the masses, then intelligence fulfilled becomes a rare occurrence in the realm of genius. Needless to say, the “geniuses” usually arise in conditions that do not stifle the natural passion to learn and allow dominanta to complete its cycle. If we look at the biographies of those persons deemed “genius” in Occidental civilisation, many have been home-schooled. In the case of Blaise Pascal, we can even apply the new term “unschooled”.

More important though, “genius” implies someone at the “service” of the current ideological system. Those who pick out the genius are those for whom the genius is most useful. Thinkers that fall outside the “norm” – no matter how genius – are not on Nobel Prize lists. Those promoting “democracy” are.

There is another category of those who have neither risen to the rare status of genius and for the obvious reasons rarely anyone does) nor have succumbed to the dumbing and killing methods of schooling. These are the schizophrenics, the manic depressors, and other such lot that “society” attempts to cure and recycle.

My own extensive experience in the various educational systems ranging from nursery to the doctoral level on different continents has confirmed the above.

Thus, despite the fact that “Dumbing Us Down” has been an intense practice in our pre-university education, professors in masters and doctoral level seminars inadvertently and frequently remind students of their place and hierarchy not only within the system but within the classroom itself. During obligatory seminars even on the doctoral level, professors repeatedly treated students as lazy, evasive I’ll make you read, you won’t escape work, and other such statements) or as stupid and ignorant: you don’t know, is it hard for you to understand, do you get it at all, you don’t know how to write, you can’t even locate your own “problematique” in your own head let alone express it on paper, and so forth).

Ironically, the argument that “in reality students arrive at this level and still don’t know…” serves only to confirm Gatto’s “dumbing down” premise; for, if they still haven’t learnt, what was the meaning of the decades of institutionalisation in kindergarten, schools, and universities if they still don’t know? And more important, what is the point of repeating “you don’t know” for decades if, obviously, it doesn’t help them to “know” and perhaps only reinforces the “fact” that they “don’t know”. Perhaps, Gatto can help explain.

In “The 7-lesson schoolteacher”^xx, Gatto confesses to teaching the following:

• Confusion: because everything is out of context or is in abstract and imagined context.

• Class position.

• Indifference: “when the bell rings… they students) stop whatever it is that we’ve been working on and proceed quickly to the next work station… Indeed, the lesson of the bells is that no work is worth finishing, so why care too deeply about anything? Years of bells will condition… to a world that can no longer offer important work to do. Bells are the secret logic of schooltime… Bells destroy the past and future, converting every interval into a sameness, as an abstract map makes every living mountain and river the same even though they are not. Bells inoculate each undertaking with indiferrence.”

• Emotional dependancy: he teaches children to surender their will to the chain of command, using “stars and red checks, smiles and frowns, prizes, honors and disgraces.”

• Intellectual dependency. The most important lesson. Children must wait for the expert authority to make all the important decisions, to tell them what to study. There is no place for curiosity, only conformity.

• Provisional self-esteem: Because it is so difficult to make self-confident spirits conform, children must be taught that their self-respect depends on expert opinion. They must be constantly tested, evaluated, judged, graded, and reported on by certified officials. Self-evaluation is irrelevant – “people must be told what they are worth.”

• You can’t hide. Children are always watched. No privacy. People can’t be trusted.

 

If Gatto talks about children in schools, the undergraduate or postgraduate university methods are based on the same principles and we can recognise them in grading, “mentoring”, “supervising”, awards, denial of funding, to list a few examples.

Gatto summarises the consequences of the seven lessons in the following way:

• The private Self is almost non-existent; children develop a superficial personality borrowed from TV shows.

• Desperate dependence.

• Unease with intimacy or candor; dislike for parents; no real close friends; lust replaces love.

• Indifference to the adult world; very little curiosity about anything; boredom.

• A poor sense of the future; consciousness limited to the present.

• Cruelty to each other.

• Striking materialism.

• The expectation to fail; the idea that success has to be stolen.

 

These conclusions have a remarkable resonance with Arshavski’s warnings in the above outlined principles of love and respect for dominantas. The instincts of love and life are being murdered in institutions of teaching. This also resonates with Douglas’ observation that when raised in a cultural system, individuals will re-enact their institutional roles even when these lead to their own destruction. Like the aliens of Hollywood films, these institutions acquire a life of their own, independent of and concurrently living off their victim’s habitus and praxis – while the victims themselves willfully submit to rearing the Institution rather than their own and their children’s Dominanta.

The Verdict

Next to the right to life itself, the most fundamental of all human rights is the right to control our own minds and thoughts… Whoever takes that right away from us, by trying to ‘educate’ us, attacks the very center of our being and does us a most profound and lasting injury. He tells us, in effect, that we cannot be trusted even to think…

Education… Seems to me perhaps the most authoritarian and dangerous of all the social inventions of mankind. It is the deepest foundation of the modern and worldwide slave state… My concern is not to improve ‘education’ but to do away with it, to end the ugly and antihuman business of people-shaping and to allow and help people to shape themselves.”

John Holt from Instead of Education

 

A precursor of Gatto, John Holt observed that we learn best from “doing – self-directed, purposeful, meaningful life and work.” He describes school education as “learning cut off from active life and done under pressure of bribe, threat, greed and fear.”

There seems to be a parallel between Holt’s description of education and of war, colonialism and globalism at the basis of which too lies the drive for bribery, threat, greed, and fear. I define globalism as the colonisation of many cultural logics by a dominant one. Needless to say, the cradle of today’s globalism is Europe. After all, it is from there that colonisers of the American Wild West and other territories emerged, efficiently sweeping over and destroying aboriginal cultures and logics.

As I discussed in this paper, the logic of the Institution re-enacts itself through the habitus and praxis of individuals regardless of their place in the hierarchy of individual or of ethnic or national groups and regardless of their own personal interests. Daily, we witness the confirmation of conformation to the logic of the Institution when parents succumb to forced “education” and the educated then accept the murder of their dominanta.

This conformation is also at the basis of habitus in the teacher’s praxis or the teacher’s economy of effort. The teacher exercises this economy in grading where s/he automatically looks for the institution in the work of the student, marking as “right” when s/he finds it and “wrong” when s/he does not. And this is exactly what s/he has been hired to do.

In reality, right and wrong can only be moral judgments religious or natural) – in terms of correctness, there are infinite possibilities. Even 2+2= 4 is not obvious, for it depends on what goes into the definition of the twos and the four. If I choose to consider the uncountable and the invisible soul in counting 2 visible pregnant women and their 2 visible husbands, I may end up with 6 or 7 or…. Finally, it all depends on what, how, and, most important, why are we counting.

Hence, when a teacher judges a student’s work as right or wrong, grading it according to a scale of rightness, it is not “correctness” that is being looked for, but rather an expression of values, which are not absolute, but battled for and battling. That is why, grades tell more about the one who grades than about the one being graded.

In the final score, the content of what is being said means little – it is the method that creates the result. In this way, a teacher’s talking – referred to as lecturing – is not what really affects a person.

It is the fact of the teacher’s talking that confirms the hierarchy and forces the student to conform that has the ultimate result. It is the fact of the constant bells and interruptions that kill the dominanta. It is the fact of being coerced into wanting good grades and believing that they in themselves determine the quality of the life that the person is going to live and the quality of the person that the teaching is to produce. It is the outright threat and danger capable of crushing one’s future, one’s personality and dominanta – threats that descend from those who create the “curriculum” of what we are “obliged” to learn in our obligatory schooling and seminars. What type of habitus can such methods instill?

To return to the opening quote from John Holt: Adults don’t love their children and school is the institutional confirmation of that fact. What love can we talk about in the context of self-destruction? This crucial and fragile aspect of human life we call Love and its distortion to Death we find at all levels of educational hierarchy. The institution does not love its children – it needs only to confirm its own logic. Institution needs obedience and it uses all the means and methods available: grades, policing, threatening, buying, all these are only the tools of bullying that educators – wittingly or not, from nursery to doctoral level programmes – use on behalf of the interests of the hierarchy we call Civilisation.

Bibliography

 

Arshavski, I.A.; Vash Rebionok u Istokov Zdorovja. API TS ITP Moscow 1992.

Arshavski in Nikitina, L.A.; Roditeljam XXI go Veka. Izdatel’stvo Znanije, Moscow 1998.

Bourdieu, Pierre. The Logic of Practice. Stanford University Press. Stanford, CA 1990.

Douglas, Mary. How Institutions Think. Routledge and Kegan Paul Ltd. London, 1987.

Freud, Sigmund transl. From German by James Strachey. Civilization and its Discontents. Norton, London & New York, 1961.

Gatto, John Taylor; Dumbing Us Down. New Society Publishers, Philadelphia, Gabriola Island BC 1992.

Gatto, John Taylor; The Underground History of American Education. The Odysseus Group, NY, 1000 92 000-2001.

Internet references:

 

Family Statistics on http://www.childstats.gov/

Gilman, R. Interview with John Holt. Incontext – summer 1984 at: http://www.context.org/ICLIB/IC06/Holt.htm

 

 

iSkills include habitus as well as the values and knowledge about the world and one’s place and role in it. I shall disuss the role of habitus further in the paper.

 

iiI use the term global to denote any colonizing practices that have taken place before in history or are taking place now.

 

iiiIn an interview with Robert Gilman, summer 1984.

 

ivFreud, S. Civilization and its Discontent.

 

vArshavski.

 

viNikitina, L.A. To the Parents of the XXIst century.

 

viiCooperative Association for Workers and Peasants.

 

viiiBourdieu, The Logic of Practice.

 

ixIbid.

 

xIbid.

 

xiIn Nikitina, L.A.; To the Parents of the 21^st Century.

 

xiiI discuss specific examples that illustrate this point more thoroughly in my essay on Objects, Love, and Objectifications

 

xiiiDouglas, Mary; How Institutions Think.

 

xivIbid.

 

xvFamily Statistics for 2001.

 

xviEach year from 1989 to 1991 he was named New York City Teacher of the Year. In 1991 the New York Senate named him State Teacher of the Year.

 

xviiGatto, J.T.; The Underground History of American Education.

 

xviiiGatto from: The Public School Nightmare: Why fix a system designed to destroy Individual Thought.

 

xixGatto. Dumbing Us Down.

 

xxIbid.

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

Click HERE (Routledge 2015) for an in-depth analysis of Narratives of Civilization and Wilderness.

 

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 that caused the slip. This year, particularly, the winter has been too generous in terms of cold and snow)

In her memoir, Jeannette Walls presents a fascinating ethnographic account of a family that chose to live differently than what the “civilised”, capitalist American norms dictated. 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 Europe. In this book, we see the Walls family striving to live outside the city, which the parents called 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 capitalist (often referred to as humanist) purpose. These norms or regulations and the system of privatisation dictate that some people are allowed to use and own the bodies, effort, time, and space of other humans, animals, and 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 if, 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 permission 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 judgmental, 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 and its concocted “scientific” evidence called “Darwinism” that, supposedly, justifies the complete annihilation of any thing that might threaten the possibility to hoard more resources and power for the future of the powerful and the wealthy. 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 changes in perspectives over time 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  the experience that the author depicts, and most of all the society that reads and reacts to that material in specific ways.

In this radio discussion, we mostly discussed the issues of child welfare, a concept that is politically chiseled 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 paraphernalia of childhood, such as toys, text-books, tuition, etc. – all of which serve capitalist interests. Anthropological research on childhood shows how in the wealthy “north” the phase of childhood has been extending well into one’s 30s, but in the countries on whose labour the north has built its wealth, it is still what it has been for David Copperfield and although we hear the “sensitive” “humanitarians” emphatically express “horror” for and “disapproval” 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, or….

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 an 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 in the case of parents who do not work is, still, less neglectful than in the situation where both parents work on minimum wage and small children in impoverished neighbourhoods of the capitalist America walk home from daycare or school and play in the ghetto hungry and alone because their parents are cleaning up for someone else or caring for other people’s children and well being.

For me, to see how the Walls family stuck together in the desert, appeared to be a healthier alternative than the splintered childhoods in daycare, schools, after-school extensions or, even worse, the destitution 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” that would allow the person to successfully integrate 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?

A good illustration here is the “scandal” with the pastor Jeremiah Wright during the American presendtial elections in 2008. Everybody knows that black people did not arrive on a Baltic cruise-ship on a vacation in North America. African people had their own cultures and communities, prior to the Europeans inscribing them in the category of “human resources”, from which they were kidnapped, half of them killed, and the survivors shipped off in shackles and blood in horrendous conditions across the sea to build the privileges of the white people in America who have, by that time, dealt swiftly with the dispossession of the Native peoples of their rights to the American land. Shackles, death, and pain are the heritage of the American Black people. Yet, when they express anger and dismay, they are being called racist!

Everybody knows that symbolic, cultural and material capital influences health, happiness, and longevity and that these aspects of wealth are accumulated through generations and transmitted accordingly. Everybody knows that the black people who did not arrive on cruise-ships on a vacation – they were captured as slaves and raped in all the meanings of the word – were brought to North America by force to serve the wealthy. They were stripped not only ofcapital, but, until recently they weren’t even considered as part of the human race. And “science” “proved” that “knowledge”.

Still, when black people express their indignation over the injustice that they are now told to enter a race that had begun centuries before they were invited to participate and 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- they now get 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. And so, these same impoverished and angry black and brown people are being called racist and are not allowed to point to historical facts that are common knowledge and which expose that the white people who have amassed during slavery, colonialism, etc. still enjoy the benefits inherited from their ancestors who collected their wealth through the abuse of blacks, aborigines, and wild life – that was the point of imperialism – and through the abuse of white people as well with feudalism and capitalism. What does such denial of reality tell us about the state of mental health of those who find it sane to accuse Jeremiah Wright of racism?

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, could have been for every single American to abandon their material and symbolic capital, redistribute it equally among everybody and then start afresh.

This is the concept underlying the reparations debate. Yet, when Barack Obama was asked on the CNN democratic debate what his plans were with regard to this problem of reparations, he relieved the rich people’s concern that they might be asked to give back what they owe (how could they even afford it? they must have asked): let’s give money to schools! Apparently, the black people need to be better educated and domesticated in this system of abuse.

The 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 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 only drag them deeper into poverty with no access to natural resources and with even less time and energy left to pursue their artistic and intellectual aspirations. 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 make the mining company owners wealthy; they sacrifice their health and dreams, get exploited and at the same time are expected to pay for the right to live in poverty while being condemned for that poverty. With time, we see the parents develop symptoms of depression: apathy, alcoholism, and ultimately despair, and when they do get an inheritance, it is too late. Health, energy, and dreams with time burn up in smoke. Depression is a healthy reaction to the insanity of the work ethic: it is depressing that people are denied access to the world so as to be forced to work for the interests of the employer. Depression is a form of rebellion and is healthy even in its pain.

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; because the pleasure that the sexual assault provides is not the sexual contact but the fact that the rapist could force his will onto someone who did not will the act. This breaking of the will is, of course, the main point of schooling and civilisation.

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” want 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, that person feels and comes to know great sadness, pain or even despair in face of the endless violence towards the earth with its peoples and creatures, a violence in which we are all implicated and trapped since civilisation has taken possession of the globe. We find ourselves in the age of the globalisation of violence.

Professionals, such as doctors, psychotherapists or psychiatrists, diagnose negative reactions to civilised society as depression. Thus, a normal reaction of despair – say for the abused Chinese or Indian child-labourers whose products fill up European and American stores, or the bombed Iraqis, whose oil we participate in regulating and extracting, the dispossessed Indians in North America, for example – points to the mental health of the person whose whole being rebels against the injustice and the pain of the world. Despair is empathy that drives the person to cease her participation in these domesticated relations. Yet, depression has become a stigma that is being “cured” with drugs (both, legal and illegal). Medicalisation of this form of passive resistance strips people of their right to feel sad, to question their role in all this suffering, and to refuse it.

The Wall family did just that: they lived passionately and cherished life, even in despair.

• Selfishness:

Doctors, school teachers, activists for women’s rights in North America hammer constantly about the importance of thinking about one’s self, the virtues of wanting more for oneself, going after the dreams for oneself. This appears as a paradox when these same doctors, teachers, and women’s rights activists urge women to give up their time and energy to employers. If they get families, they are then urged to abandon their children in the hands of strangers in daycare and to neglect their children’s need for breastfeeding, protection by parents, and family togetherness. The symptoms of neglect, instead of being soothed by satisfying the children’s and family’s needs, are “cured” with plastics, medications, exploitation of nannies, house-helpers, etc. All of this is seen as good selfishness.

While the Walls family had a rough childhood, filled with pain, solitude, and shattered dreams, their strength and passion, togetherness and love fill the pages of their lives and give their children the dignity and the skills to succeed even in the culture that raped the land, killed most animal and plant species, destroyed the natives. They walked strong and passionate amidst the grey masses intolerant of difference, unforgiving of weakness, and judgmental of poverty, because they were feeling, they were dreaming of freedom, they were alive. 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 having accomplished that mission. As for the pain, well, that seems to be the prerogative of a society that chose domestication we cherish now as civilisation, which so easily inflicts it on others, yet despises those who accept the suffering and call it happiness. But then again, what is sanity?

Layla AbdelRahim

© 1995, 2002, 2004, 2005

This work is a compilation of sketches I have written in the last two decades. First, there is the poetry I wrote at the beginning of the 1990s when my relationship to the colonial language was pushing away my native tongue. At the time, I was overcome by the urgency of the experience of slipping away into the forceful other, yet drastically attempting to hold on to the illusory threads of being and self. Then there are the observations on adult/children interactions that I submitted as a 20-minute presentation for my doctoral seminar on Textual Approaches to Research on Pedagogy taught by Claudia Mitchell in the fall semester of 2002 at the Department of Education, McGill University. Claudia inspired us to search deep within our souls for what coloured our observations of the world outside us. My search led to Kaleidoscope.

Table of contents:

Part I. Logical Exclusions

Frontiers 1: The First Challenge

The Painful Trilogy 1: La Nonna

Frontiers 2: Birth

The Painful Trilogy 2: Ernesto

Frontiers 3: Mother

The Painful Trilogy 3: Mezabella

Epilogue: Frontiers, The Last Challenge

Part II. Logical Inclusions

Respect.

Kleptomania.

A Spot for Artists under the Sun.

Kind Morning.

Dangerous crossings.

Difference.

Subtle Solutions.

A Parable for all Ages.

Genealogy.

The Question of Money.

The Principle of Exchange.

Prayer.

Strangers and Friends.

A Grandmother should do her Job.

Torn away Promises.

To Russia in Love.

Feminism.

The Fly.

Correspondence with Canis Lupus.

More Correspondence from Russia.

Part III. Logical Conclusions

Anthropology on Breastfeeding

The Verdict of Medical Science

Liouba’s Verdict

Part I. Logical Exclusions

Frontiers:

1.1. The first challenge

First there was Logos. Then there was the World.

We tried to fit the World into the Word.

And we described it, attempting to relate its truth

and mystery in our terms. We made it.

Sometimes it fits, sometimes we need to trim and to elaborate this world we love and hate and cherish and betray…

Stockholm, 1996

Reality is Logos. I search for my place in this world and discover that, in fact, I am in search of language. My quest leads me to my limits, sometimes beyond. Beyond this frontier extends Freedom.

Freedom and social beings are at odds with each other. Life itself is conceived within borders, circumscribed within the womb. The first challenge is the struggle of birth. At this moment we tear ourselves from the body and will of Mother and ascertain our desire for independent life against her pain: the pain that attempts to retain and at once expels. We burst out in blood and pain to face life. And, throughout its course, we struggle with the desire for the tight, warm and protective imprisonment. Yet we dream of the freedom beyond. In this world, this struggle is our first challenge.

The Painful Trilogy

2.1. La Nonna

Every week day, grandma escorts Stephen home from school. Stephen is a sturdy and energetic five year-old. His features compose a determined expression, yet there is something soft and deep in his large hazel eyes. La Nonna is small, roughly 1.5 m tall and about 65 years old. Her tired face exhales sadness. My two and half year-old daughter, Liouba, and I see them almost every week on the playground behind the school where we spend Thursday mornings. And every week we witness the same scene touched only by slight variations.

As soon as Stephen spots the slides and the swings, he dashes towards the playground. He climbs, jumps, and runs about. “Would you like a biscuit?” He shares some with Liouba and they begin to chase one another. During the first five minutes, La Nonna seems resigned, but not passive emitting charged vibrations. Little by little she turns taut with anxiety and begins to hurry him home. But Stephen is here to play and does not intend to leave. After another 10 minutes, her tense vibrations sound danger. Her voice rings rancour: “Stephen, let’s go home”. Stephen turns to Liouba more attentively now and does not seem to hear or see La Nonna. He climbs up the slides; jumps down; rolls on the ground. La Nonna’s voice quavers, “Stephen, we’ve got to go”. Stephen is now deeply involved in rolling with Liouba on the grass. It seems that he sees and hears only her. La Nonna is tense, her voice bitter, “Stephen, I will abandon you. I am going. You will stay here alone. Stephen, I am gone, Stephen. Look La Nonna is gone”. She hides behind some shrubs on the side of the playground. He looks around, and momentarily, anxiety crosses his brows. Then, a smile lightens up his eyes. He turns back to Liouba. Liouba is still rolling on the grass. He joins her.

La Nonna inevitably reappears. She is bound to reappear. He takes her reappearance for granted. She is now desperate and furious. She screams, “Stephen, let’s go right this minute”. He still ignores her. “Stephen, you ugly monster, let’s go right now”. He now runs circles around her – faster and faster, gaining speed, like a meteorite. He looks deeply concentrated within himself and detached from the world around. La Nonna screams more and more and begins to tremble. She attempts to capture him with her words, arms, legs, body, her whole being. He continues to run around her, not looking at her, but with the obvious intention of being within her reach. They spin. At one moment, she grabs him by his hair. Breathing heavily she pulls it several times so that his whole body swings from side to side. Had she claws, she would have scalped him skinless. She is strong and violent this tiny sad Nonna.

An enraged bull, he sways uncontrollably with his whole body and being, back and forth, with all his strength knocking his head into her pelvis, stomach, and chest. Had he a pair of horns, he would have swung and spun her off into the universe. He is mighty and resolved this young little Stephen.

A fighter and a beast on a battlefield, they swing from side to side. Suddenly, they halt. Their arms and shoulders droop. Finally, they look at each other. Their eyes meet. Tears run down her withered face; La Nonna weeps. Her voice crackles. She pleads, “Stephen, please. I beg you. Grandpa… What if he needs to go to the toilet? We must hurry home. Please, what if something happens? Grandpa, Stephen”. He looks at her with his wide soft eyes and tears stream down his cheeks, off his chin. They embrace. They cling to each other, both small, hurt, weeping. Arms around her waist; arms over his head and shoulders; she stoops and limps; he leans on her. They slowly walk away.

The Painful Trilogy

2.2 Ernesto

From Stockholm field notes, 1996.

Oh, Mother! She is the most beautiful woman ever. She has always been so heavenly, so untouchable, so perfect, so remote. We lived in a small town on the sunny island. The lush grass breathed cool dampness caressed by her shadow. Ever since I was a baby – I don’t think I could even walk or talk then – I remember her sitting, serene, her hair black waves of thick velvet falling down her cheeks into the crest of her breasts scattering across her naked back; her eyes of darkness cast down; she would paint and polish her nails, the nails on her honey hands and on her milk cream legs. She always used red nail polish. She was always painting her nails.

She would sit for hours, motionless, not from this world, beyond our reality, our misery, our truth. She would sit on the verandah on a plastic woven garden chair, against the changing sky, into the darkness and beyond my cries, my screams, my tears, my wants; beyond me.

When I learnt how to move about, I would crawl up to her and try to snatch her attention by catching her feet with my mouth. Her feet were all I could reach. She would hit me then, real hard, without even throwing a glance. But she touched me. At last, she touched me. She noticed me. This touch of pain shot like thunder through my skin, flesh, and into my consciousness. This touch of pain overwhelmed my desire for love. This touch of pain ran down my throat in salty streams of tears and into my heart. The tears brought warmth. They brought deliverance. Swallowing my sobs, I twisted on the floor not from pain, but in a fit of abysmal gratitude, of love. And all the while, she continued to trim, polish, paint, check, fix her nails; always with red nail-polish.

She had never been happy with my father, I believe. My father was a cop. He was tough. His job was violence. He continued his job at home. Whenever he hit her, it broke my heart. An image would overwhelm me which never let go of me: I saw her as a porcelain figure in red and black satin shattering to pieces. The pieces cut through me and made me bleed until blood there was no more. No one should have ever touched her. At those moments, I would pray fervently. I begged God to let me take her place; that I be beaten and tortured. Not her. She should have been saved. They could beat me to death, while I kissed her feet, her feet with red nails. But they did not know of my prayer. And God has his own logic. My pain never alleviated hers.

Now, I am 30 years old. I am seeing this woman with red nails and black velvet hair. I recently discovered that she wears a wig to our meetings. But it looks so beautiful against her satin skin. She hurts me; she hits me. She knows my secret and she never looks at me. I lie there at her feet. I kiss her red nails, one by one. I feel warm. I love.

The Painful Trilogy

2.3. Mezabella

Dedicated to Yohann.

Disclaimer: Any similarity in this story to real people is coincidental. If at anytime, anybody gets the uncanny feeling of self-recognition in any of the characters in the story, let them know (both the body and the self) that this recognition stems from inner self, awareness or conscience. If this happens, perhaps they could even survive the operation statistics. We may all hope.

Statistics: 103846566538392827655356758589430 93883755665433122243453646ryfhfnhuekdfkfj

hfjghfghnblb/m’a’qpt]1509u89yiuyrqguyqt7q

7t4ugjkbfkjvbjagfiat87q4yuqgrfahfbaljgvaf

yutqytuieqiueihjkghkhbuieyp3467675601501- 1[uro1hkjthiuygo8737gugyufgu73t7tufguqfgf

laaku……..(et al ad infinitum)……….

I opened my mouth to say that my friend’s bathroom was, in fact, a shrine. Mezabella bugged out her heavy, bald, pale, reptilian eyes. That was the sign to the others to seize me. Methodically, Orl grabbed my arms and Candritta tied them swiftly behind my back with stainless chains that shocked my thin skin with their feel of the medical, that is the precise and calculated, cold; while Mezabella proceeded to stuff my open mouth with tasteless statistics. The figures immediately set off to work, which was to penetrate me. Thus, instead of saying that Asja’s bathroom was immaculate; that the incense, the Japanese prints, the plants and the Indian scarf over the lamp emitted calm and abundant quiet, I had to take care of this situation. The statistics were already beginning to push down my throat, so I had to concentrate on my guttural muscles to keep them tight.

Mezabella slammed the table with her fist and more figures scattered from her hands that shoved themselves into my ears and nose biting and fighting, wiggling and buzzing. Now, I had to figure out how to survive and how to hope.

Candritta was in ecstasy. At the age of 50, she has retained the ferocity of youth and was jumping around me in circles screaming: Aha, that will teach you how to speak nonsense. Don’t you know that words are little arrows? Ah? And you wanted us to catch them? Ah? To do what with them? Tell me, do WHAT with them? Aha, can’t speak. Give her some more statistics, Mezabella. Good girl. Yes, more, more, more… Aaaaaah, you wanted to poison us with the words of how Asja gave birth in her bathroom? Alone! With no help from the doctor! What about a midwife? Well, a midwife would have done – but no, madam wants to do it all by herself, in her bathroom, ALONE! Is that so? Madam is better than us all. And as if once is not enough, madam wants to make a statement, she does it twice. Ah? Well, this will teach you a lesson. You thought you could get away with telling us that crap? You wanted to infect us? No, darling, no no nooooooo.

Mezabella too went into a trance. She squinted her eyes and rhythmically banged more and more figures out of her pale fist. She seemed phantom-like, although, as I had discovered earlier today, she was only 25 years old. Suddenly, still squinting, she was nose to nose with me and whispered in a hoarse, crackling voice: so who’s paranoiac now? Eh? who’s really, really scared? Ah?

Fight your fear – I heard a faint voice from the depth of my being. Fear is what will sell you out. Fight fear. As I listened to the voice, I felt that Orl was confused about this ceremony, and couldn’t decide what to make of it. After all, Candritta was right, all those arrows that I sent them could leave their mark – perhaps indelible. In fact, it seems that some of them have already done so, though he couldn’t locate them or figure out which ones. But, what if??? I caught his doubt and it gave me the moment and the strength to snap out of the chains and out of the circle.

I came to my senses in a pine forest. Through the green of the trees I could see the blue sky. The crystal air was filled with warmth and light, as if the sun lurked nearby, even though I did not see it. I was still coughing and saw traces of my belched out statistics. Like worms, they were vigorously fidgeting and digging their way into the soft moss. I wondered what will become of the earth now, but I felt weak and preoccupied. I refused to be muted and mutated by them, so I mustered the last possible squeezes of my abdominal muscles to make sure that I was free. Hurrah! I rejoiced and began to look for a way into life and out of the forest. Perhaps there was something that I had failed to grasp. Otherwise, why would it happen when I least expected it? But, suddenly, I realized, as I softly crumbled onto a now perilous surface buzzing with malignant digits, that the two miniscule buggers, precisely the digit “6? and the small letter “r”, have dug labyrinths throughout my flesh. They had gnawed through my insides until they filled me with void.

Epilogue to Logical Exclusions

Frontiers

The last challenge

We vested Logos in Reality. I search for my place in this world and I discover that, in fact, I search for peace. In this quest, I venture to the brim. Beyond this frontier extends Freedom.

The challenge is to find the frontier and to wander beyond, without the circle. Throughout our lives we tread the ground of death. We fear it and tremble at its immanence. Yet we know with our stomachs, hearts, heads, or whatever else that we believe shelters our souls, that in death lingers our only true freedom. Probably, that is why we also resist life and invent the flaky warmth of comfort for which some bleed until their earthly end and in which others linger to atrophy and suffocate. We fear and heed and need you, death.

Our most important challenge is the challenge of being, of becoming, of going, of realising that, in fact, we are always going away. We contradict our truth. We contradict our myth and we incessantly repeat that we are here to stay. For freedom and immortality are at odds. Our challenge is to come to Terms and, at the same time, to go on eternal wanderings throughout language, the world and most important between the realms of Logos and Reality.

The last frontier extends there, where I sway in the current of language, where language loses meaning, where I walk into a new reality of shattered images, of fleeting symbols, of unappointed reference. Frontiers encompass me into a new formula of Iiiiiii, where I shatters into the darkness which is complete and into the blueness of the eyes that conceived I in a breath of passion when they inhaled madness and looked at this I and breathed passion into her soul. They conceived I at a point where time and space dispersed and where differences, wars and the whole existence came to a halt. At that point, there was simply his black eyes upon her blue, her smallness against his muscles, his black skin against her white. They were each other’s arms. I erupted between their Words.

Suddenly, words become void. They frighten me. I repeat them over and over and over again and they lose their meaning. I repeat them incessantly in a panic. Frantically, I cling to them, but they become ridiculous and flee away. They scatter. I forget them and they lose their form of sound. One day I shall venture to that beyond. There, the passivity of the word “born” shall disappear. There, my own, new language awaits me. But, will it be only my own? Will it be void? I do not dare reach that freedom. Uncertainty returns. The challenge is to love.

Part II. Logical Inclusions

Correct question:

Have you noticed that all children like to sing, bang, drum, inspect the flute, play the piano, pluck the guitar? So, what made Mozart different?

Correct answer:

He was taken seriously.

Respect for Choice

Anna said to her 5 year old son: I don’t like plastic toys. I don’t want you to play with them.

Siddhartha: Why not?

Anna: Because the earth does not like them.

Siddhartha: O.K. I respect that. (Pause). But I like them. So, I will not give them to the earth, then. I will play with them myself. O.K.?

Anna: O.K. play with them yourself, but not in my house. Alright?

Siddhartha: Alright.

Kleptomania

Dylan (4 years old): Santa is a thief.

Erin: Why?

Dylan: Well, where does he get all those things from, then? Can you tell me?

A Spot for Artists under the Sun

Maria (3 1/2): There must be a lot of pencils in Pennsylvania.

Kind Morning

In Russia, people wish each other a “kind morning” like in the English speaking world people wish one other a “good morning”.

Liouba at 2 years & 4 months: The wind moves the leaves and the clouds and Kind Morning happens.

Dangerous Crossings

Liouba and her girl-friend Sasha are 2 years and 4 months old. They like to play together in Kennedy Park in Montreal. But, Sasha has the habit of running away from her mother. The two girls seem to think that this is a funny game and they scatter away from us all over the playground, laughing at our clumsy pursuit dragging Sasha’s enormous infant-brother Iliusha and the volumous bags stuffed with emergency food, emergency change of clothes, emergency toys, and all.

I don’t want this to become a habit and try to find a way to explain to Liouba why she should not do this. Sasha seems to know the rules for pedestrian children, which is one rule: never cross the road alone. Even though she runs away, she always stops at the edge of the park before the road.

For the first time in her life, Liouba took the initiative and broke the rule. She ran across the road. Petrified, I threw everything and dashed after her. I grabbed her arm and yelled that she should NEVER EVER do this again. I told her that I was tired of this running away game and that I would not run after her again. She immediately ran back to the road.

I ran up to her and asked her, “do you think this is a game?”

“Yes, this is a game,” she laughed.

I: No, Liouba. This is not a game. This is dangerous. Why is this dangerous?

Liouba: Because there might be cars…

I: And Sasha is wrong when she runs away. What should you do if Sasha runs away?

Liouba repeats what I had asked her her to do: “We should catch Sasha, and we should tell her that this is not a game and that this is not funny. And if Iliusha runs away,” she improvised further, “he too should be caught and told that this is not allowed”.

“And is Liouba going to run away again?” I asked.

“No, not any more”.

“Good. Agreed. And if you run away again, we won’t be able to go for walks”.

Several days later, Liouba saw Sasha, Iliusha and their father, Artem, approaching the playground and ran to meet them. The girls hugged and kissed, exchanged their tricycle and doll-pram and disappeared around the corner and across the road. I noticed that Liouba checked both sides of the road before dashing across and that she used pedestrian crossings each time she kicked her experiment; while Sasha stayed mesmerized at the edge of the pedestrian walk.

“Liouba, what are we going to do now? Do you remember our agreement?” I asked her.

“Yes.”

“So, you broke our agreement?”

“Yes.”

“So, what are we going to do, since you broke the agreement?”

She calmly said, “Liouba broke the agreement. Let’s go home.”

Artem and Iliusha have joined us by now and Liouba explained to them, “Liouba broke the agreement. We’re going home.” We picked up our stuff, said good-bye and left. On the way home Liouba said thoughtfully, “when there are cars, Liouba cannot cross the road. But when there are no cars, Liouba can cross the road”.

Suddenly, I realised that, in fact, the agreement didn’t make sense and therefore she took it for a peculiar whim on my part that was nonsensical. For, all along, I have been giving her contradictory information regarding this subject. First, each time we crossed the road, I told her what we should be doing for safety. And she learnt it well, she checked both sides before dashing across, and she dashed across only on zebra crossings. Isn’t the reason why we learn safety rules so that we can apply them in practice? So, here she was applying them. But I never explained why I was allowed to cross the road and she wasn’t. We big people make it appear to children that sometimes (most often, in fact) they are not allowed to do things simply because they are little and that there is something wrong with their littleness. “Because you’re little… When you grow up… You may not now… You may one day…” we often say. Moreover, it was not Liouba’s job to chase after Sasha.

At this point we were about to cross another road. We checked both sides. There was nothing. Just as we stepped off the pavement, a car appeared. I took Liouba’s hand and squatted, “look, Liouba. Do you see? There was no car before. But all of a sudden, it appeared. Cars are big, while a child is small. It is possible that a car suddenly appears and that the driver does not see the child. With this big car, the driver can hit the child, and it is very very painful and even dangerous. Mama is big, so the driver can see her better. That is why it is important for our child to cross the road only with mama or papa, because the driver will see mama or papa from far and then will notice that there is also the child. And even then, mama and papa have to be very careful”.

There were no more such incidents.

Difference

2 years and 5 months: Daddy’s teats are useless.

– And mama’s?

– Mama’s are useful.

Subtle Solutions

A few days later: We should glue the door juuuuust a tiny bit, so that the door doesn’t creak.

A Parable for all Ages

At 3 years & 3 months, after having watched the Russian cartoon The Cat’s House, Liouba told this story:

“The cat was greedy. Because the cat was greedy, the kitten decided to give her a balloon…”

Like most adults, I interrupt her with “our” logical correction: “…despite, despite the fact that she was greedy, he gave her a balloon…”

Liouba insists with a hardened tone: “…because she was greedy, he decided to give her a balloon. She understood that she should share and became kind.

The cat Nana (our cat) was greedy. Because the cat was greedy, the kitten decided to give her a balloon. She understood that she should share and became kind”.

Genealogy

Liouba’s version of the world at 3 years and 3 months:

When mama was little, she hid in Liouba’s tummy. Then she grew and grew, became bigger and bigger; when she became real big, she decided to come out. She came out and said “Mua-mua”.

The princess1 was little. She grew and grew and grew big and died and became little. I saved her, because she didn’t die completely and she climbed into my tummy. She grew and grew and grew and came out of the tummy and stayed little.

While papa came from the forest.

Nana (our cat) appeared in Tver2. She was very little, and from her kittens were born. They grew and grew and they developed claws.

Aunt Maya appeared from the sofa.

The Question of Money

3 years and 3 months.

Mama: I am off on errands.

Liouba: Don’t take any money with you. Leave it at home.

Mama: Why?

Liouba: You guys, don’t spend any money this week, because what if I will be hungry? I need money for food.

Mama: O.K. We’ll also leave some for the farm.

Liouba: Excellent. Let’s leave some for the farm, in order to ride the pony.

The Principle of Exchange:

Liouba is 3 years, Siddhartha 4 and 9 months.

Liouba snatches away the car he holds in his hands.

Siddhartha: Liouba, but I don’t have anything with me. I don’t have anything to share with you.

Liouba: I am not sure if I understand you correctly.

Siddhartha: Liouba, I came to your place not from my home and I didn’t take anything with me. Give me something and I will share it with you.

Liouba, grandly: Nah.

Prayer

Liouba is 3 years and 4 months. We never spoke of prayer or the divine because we feel it to be deeply personal issues that are unresolvable socially or politically. Just like my parents did with me, I decided to leave it up to Liouba to figure out her position vis-à-vis the spiritual aspect of cosmos and her personal relationship with it.

One night in July 2002, as I heard the soft breathing and caught that sweet smell of a cuddled, nursed baby, I began to tip-toe out of the room, when I heard her voice in the dark: “mama, I pray to God every night so that everybody and every child in this world be as loved as I am”.

Strangers and Friends.

Liouba is 3 years and half. I explained to her that she should not follow strangers and leave my or papa’s sight. Liouba said that she understood and agreed with this. “I will never go away with strangers”.

In the woods of Parc Angrignon, she was playing next to a 7 year old boy and his 11 year old sister. Soon, she joined them in their ball game and after 5 minutes the ball rolled into the bushes behind the trees and off the foot-path. The three children instantly vanished. I rushed there, raising my voice: “Liouba, you promised not to disappear with strangers”.

Liouba appears: “Yes, mama. I will never go anywhere with strangers.”

I: But you just did.

Liouba: But these are not strangers. We’ve been playing together. They are so friendly.

A Grandmother should do her Job.

Sasha almost 3 ½ screams in an authoritative voice into the receiver while her friend Liouba also almost 3 ½ speaks to her (Liouba’s) grandmother: Babushka, why don’t you trim Liouba’s little nails? She almost scratched off my mole.

Torn away Promises

In September 2002, Liouba turned 3 years and 5 months old. One morning we witnessed the following scene at a playground near our home. There were two groups of kindergarten children. The children played mostly without mixing, except for one boy who looked about 4 from the younger group who was hugging with an older girl about 6 from the older group. After half an hour, the kindergarten guards began to line the children in two separate lines at two opposite ends of the playground. Organising the lines, seemed to me, to have taken as long as the groups have played outdoors, but perhaps this was deceptive. In any case, throughout the lining procedure, the boy was weeping bitterly as he was snatched away from his sister. He was sobbing quietly, like an old man who knew what pain was and who once again has been struck deep. He mumbled repeatedly through large tears: “Nathalie, Nathalie, Nathalie…”

Nathalie was at the other end of the park and kept looking back shouting to him, “I love you Jason. We’ll meet at home. I can’t, Jason. I love you Jason…”

“Nathalie, Nathalie, Nathalie…”

The guards never once hugged or comforted the boy. One of them saw that Liouba and I were mesmerised with the incredible pain we were witnessing and where we were helpless to do anything. She turned and said, “O, he’ll get used to it. It’s his sister. It’s alright”.

The tragedy is of course that she was probably right and he will get used to being abandoned, to having his pain belittled and ignored. This was an effective lesson in the development of apathy.

Liouba turned to me quietly: “Mama, why do they not let them stay together? …Is this what school is for? To separate a child from family? Mama, promise, promise me that you’ll never ever put me in school”.

I promised.

Jason with his peer prisoners, holding on to ropes like shackles, surrounded by guards, marched away: “Nathalie, Nathalie, Nathalie…”

 

To Russia in Love.

When I began my doctoral programme at the beginning of September 2002, Liouba was still nursing and until then we would spend 2/3 of the day together. Now all of a sudden, I was busy with registration, bureaucratic errands, choosing then attending classes, etc. One week after I began my studies, she announced that she resented the fact that I had to leave her so often and for so long.

“But what can we do?” I asked her. “It’s my chance to study now so I can work on my dreams to write my research book”.

“Well, I prefer to abandon you instead, because then it won’t be as hard on me,” she replied. “We’ll never find Miklukho3. So, I decided to go to Russia to get another Miklukho kitten”.

“And how will you go?” I inquired.

“With papa,” she gestures in dismay. Obviously – silly of me to ask, since now it is papa who spends 3/4 of the time with Liouba. A few days later, she reminded papa that they should be going to Russia. She packed her bag: the knitted kitten, the stuffed puppy, a shirt, the princess, some maple syrup, and was ready to leave. From that moment on, all her games revolved around the trip to Russia. Finally, it hit Sasha4: “but this is a brilliant idea! You can do your work. You wanted to take those extra courses – take them and we’ll be back at the end of the trimester by New Year’s eve”.

“And how are you going to do without teetia pat’5” I asked her.

“I’ll forget it”. And they bought the tickets.

Not believing myself or any of this, I drove them to the airport. There, Liouba had a symbolic teetia pat’ and explained to me, “mama, please make sure that you understand. I’ll be gone for a very long time. Don’t cry. O.K.? You promise you won’t cry that much? Just finish your work as soon as you can,” and with important airs she boarded the plane with her dad.

During the trip, she was happy and determined and didn’t sleep all the way to Prague, taking a nap for only three hours from Prague to Moscow. In Moscow, over-excited grandparents, two sets of great-grandparents, and a baby uncle awaited Liouba. So, for several days she was in joy. On the second night in Moscow, she remembered teetia pat’ and burst out in loud tears. “A mistake has happened. We shouldn’t be here. We have to pack and go back to mama in Montreal right now…”

Sasha didn’t know what to say. Words are often superfluous and do more damage than healing. So, feeling her pain he sat down with her on the Moscow kitchen floor at 2 am and they wept together. Liouba realised that she was not alone, that her father felt her pain, and soon began to soothe him. They agreed that when they found another Miklukho kitten, they would return home. She knew that she could rely on her father’s support in her project and from that moment on, she was resolved and responsible. Each telephone call, she asks me: “So, what’s up mama? You’re not missing me too much? You’re not crying a lot? Are you done with your work?”

As time went by, she fell in love with Russia and developed new plans. “Papa, next time you talk to mama on the phone, tell her that I am planning to go to the Azov sea with babushka Natasha in the summer. Explain to her that I shall be absent for a really long time. Make sure that she understands this well”. The next time I called, Sasha transmitted to me Liouba’s new plan. I heard her voice in the background, “wait papa, let me talk to her myself. Allo, mama? So, how are you doing? Are you done with your work? Not yet? Aha. I am going to the Azov sea in the summer with babushka Natasha. It is going to be a VERY long time. Do you understand that? It’s a matter of seasons”.

“What do you mean it’s a matter of seasons?”

She explained, “Well, now is what season? Winter. Then it will be spring. And only then it will be summer. Well, in the summer, we are going to the Azov sea”. Babushka Natasha was happy and said that Liouba was welcome to stay as long as she wanted.

Finally, the Miklukho kitten was found. During another telephone conversation, she said to me: “So, mama, how are things with you? Are you done with your work? Not yet? Well, you better wrap it up soon. I am going to ship you the kitten. And you can come all together with Nana to Russia”.

“But I can’t come to Russia, yet”.

“Why not?”

“I don’t have the money.”

Liouba: “What do you need money for?”

– “For the ticket.”

– “Which ticket?”

– “The airplane ticket. They won’t let me board the plane without a ticket.”

Liouba, surprised, “you don’t need to take the plane. You have a car”.

“But I can’t drive the car to Russia, there’s the ocean”.

Liouba bursts out laughing: “mama, you’re so funny. Papa and I checked the atlas and the ocean, it is sooooooooo tiny. You can drive. Promise me that you’ll do your best. You promise?”

Feminism

At 3 years and 8 months:

– Papa, are the bandits out on the street by now?

– No, it’s still early for bandits. However, look – someone is walking there. Could it be the bandits?

– No, these are women.

– And women cannot be bandits?

– No, bandits are men – women are people.

– So, men are not people?

– No, men are bandits.

The Fly

Sasha’s report from Moscow: Today, Liouba gushed and gurgled with energy from 9 am till 1:20 am. In the morning she invented a game and called it the Fly. The first and the only rule of this game was the absence of any rules, at least that was her explanation.

At first, we hid under the bed and counted the springs, and this was called the Fly. Then, she hid in the kitchen cabinet, while I crawled under the table and commanded to the sitting nearby Kuzia (the dog): “fly!” and “dream!”, and this, too was the Fly. After that, we read Everything about the Moomintrolls; Liouba, sporadically, hid in the alcove between the sofa and the bookshelf and pretended to be Hemul. Before every new paragraph I mewed and moved my imaginary tail and after each exclamation mark I hissed and scratched the carpet, and this was the fly. Finally, she locked me out on the balcony, climbed on the table and began to dial ‘010?, ‘001?, ‘011?, and ‘100?, while I looked through the binoculars, to see whether Kot Baiun6 and the Kitten-who-slept-through-everything were coming, and naturally, this was called the fly. Now she is asleep, I sit and write this to you and this is the fly.

Correspondence with Canis Lupus.

Since she turned 3 years old, Liouba periodically corresponded with a wolf. She would either draw or scribble something by herself or dictate it to Sasha. Here are two of the dictated letters.

Montreal, Summer 2002.

Dear Wolf,

This is Doll who is writing to you. Lately, a little hare has appeared and the doll began to fight with the wolf with pencils, because she thought that this would please the wolf. But the little hare rescued the wolf. The wolf said “thank you” and then the little hare hid at the wolf’s place, while the doll knocked. But the little hare did not open the door.

Moscow, Autumn 2002.

(In Russian some phrases rhymed).

Greetings, dear Wolf.

Now, we live in Russia, please, do not eat us. You have a button; you have a pencil – now, you are not ours. Do not come to us; play at home. You have a mouse; you better eat her. You have a watch. You will go inside the watch; there you will explode and swim away into the Azov sea. You have a book. You will go inside the book; there you will vanish and cool down. You have a telephone. You will go inside the telephone; there you will stray, but we shall find you – only later. You have a computer. Now I’ll finish writing this letter and will send you there. But don’t come to us.

Liouba the Kitten.

More Correspondence from Russia:

Moscow, November 2002.

Greetings, dear Doll!

We will come to you. Wait for us. Eat the mouse. If that won’t suffice, another mouse will come – eat her. You Doll, read the ABC book. Everything is written there: about life and about mice. Beware of the cat Nana. Go out on the street, but if you meet the cat Nana, run back. At home, stay in the corners.

Liouba

Moscow, November 2002.

Greetings, cat Nana!

We will soon come back to you. Get yourself vaccinated, but do not resemble the cat Leopold. Cat Leopold is a round cartoon, while you, Nana – a square cartoon.

You will not be a ship, because a ship is of paper, while you have fur, and you are afraid of water. I want to send you headphones. Here, I am writing and sending you “headphones”. Also, I am writing and sending you the letter “A”, and, I might as well, the letter “O”.

Till soon,

Liouba

Letter to father Christmas

Father Christmas, hello.

Listen, kittens live in my stomach. They will soon be born. In grandpa’s too. Grandpa locks himself in the bathroom and miaws. Papa doesn’t have kittens. He doesn’t miaw but writes letters (a b c…). My pajamas’ growing along with me. The little dress too. The tights are all grown. You, father Christmas, give me street shoes that know how to grow. Also, bring me a wooden kitten and a flute that plays faster and faster. We are going to dress up the Christmas tree now. You come through snow, ice and the locked doors. I will give you half a kingdom. Firecrackers are roaming the streets – don’t go near them. Also, there are a lot of shops out there. Don’t go in them otherwise you’ll forget everything. Come straight to us.

Liouba

Christmas 2003 (3 years and 9 months)

Part III. Logical Conclusions

Anthropology on Breastfeeding

Katherine Dettwyler, PhD, Associate Professor of Anthropology and Nutrition at Texas A&M University, and author of “Breastfeeding: Bio-cultural Perspectives” conducted extensive research on human and non-human child-rearing and breastfeeding practices.

The very word infant in zoological terms refers to the time between birth and the eruption of the first permanent molars. The research looking at weaning time in primates and dental eruption shows that breastfeeding ends when infancy ends, when the first permanent molars are erupting. In humans, that happens between 5.5 and 6.5 years.

In addition, she based her comparison on other physiological aspects, such as the age of sexual maturity; the age of the eruption of permanent molars; the time when children quadrupled their birth weight; and the length of gestation, concluding that in every other primate, nursing continues for years, not just months.

Her research showed that humans’ natural age of weaning is a minimum of two and a half years and a maximum of seven years.

Dettwyler’s conclusion:

1. Most children in America are weaned from the breast too early.

2. In societies where children are allowed to nurse ‘as long as they want,’ they usually self-wean, with no arguments or emotional trauma, between three and four years of age.

3. “Another important consideration for the older child is that they are able to maintain their emotional attachment to a person rather than being forced to switch to an inanimate object such as a teddy bear or blanket. I think this sets the stage for a life of people-orientation, rather than materialism, and I think that is a good thing.”

The Verdict of Medical Science

Doctor Jan smiled and cooed. “Hhhmmm, so you’re three years old. Hmmmmm. And you don’t speak any English or French yet… Hmmmmmm. O.K. your mummy will translate for you. Hmmmmm. Let’s see now, what do you know… Do you know colours? So, what colour is this?”

– Mama why is he asking me that?

– I don’t know, maybe he wants to know what colour this is.

– He doesn’t know what colour it is? This is blue.

The doctor is delighted: “Good. And do you know what colour is this?” he shows a yellow patch on the board.

– He doesn’t know that either? This is yellow.

The doctor is beaming: “Very good. And what colour is my shirt? Aha?” he pesters.

Liouba shakes her head and sighs out: brown.

The doctor is beyond himself: “This is very impressive, indeed. She doesn’t go to kindergarten and she already knows brown.” He too shakes his head, but in wonder: “Now let’s see what you can do. Can you stand on one foot?”

“I don’t want to stand on one foot,” she is dismayed and moves even closer to me.

“But does she understand what you’re saying to her? Can she do that? Can she stand on one foot?” the doctor seems worried.

Liouba: “I don’t want to stand on one foot. I’m comfortable on two”.

Medical diagnosis: Due to unnaturally extended breast-feeding, the child is over-dependent on her mother and is not friendly.

Liouba’s Diagnosis

I don’t want to ever see him again. That doctor is dumb.