“I’ll bet you can’t break this.”
I looked at the wooden dowel, a bit over a foot in length, maybe a quarter-inch thick, and took it, one small hand at the empty end, one hand at the top, bunching the starred blue nylon field just below the gold-painted spearpoint. Putting my knee in the middle, below the stripes, I pulled and the wood shattered, long grains split, some still holding the stick together at a broken angle. Just a stick, it wasn’t even difficult.
The gasp. “You broke an American Flag!”
It hadn’t meant anything to me. It was just a stick. The boy had handed it to me. He had said I couldn’t break it, and I was pretty sure I could, even though I was small. I was only four or five. Naiveté didn’t stop me from getting a parental beating in consequence. I was my earliest remembered exercise of iconoclasty. It wouldn’t be my last, but it stands in my memory for the lesson that breaking symbols others revere, can result in pain and bruises, carried for weeks.
It was also an introduction to the schism between the symbolic order and sensory reality. For me, the thing I broke was just nylon cloth on a stick. Frankly, it still is. I was beaten for breaking a stick. People die fighting over sticks with bits of cloth or plastic. People are killed in its name. They’re still just bits of cloth. The thing they symbolise, nations, is just as illusory. The people who are wounded, who die, who have their homes destroyed, dreams shattered; those people are real, their flesh bruises, tears; children, parents, gone forever. The symbols are only things in the mind, and not the same in everyone’s mind. The symbols often seem only to be an excuse for hurting others. That’s one thing I learned, age five. It was a good learning, and has only seemed more true with time.
Another thing I learned was that people make boundaries. They define territory and those inside are “us” and those outside are “them”. I don’t mean the “real” territories, land defined by imaginary lines where different flags are flown. I mean the inner territories, that allow someone to be “them”, to be “other”, even living just up the street, or in the same house, the same family. The flags are not always flags. Sometimes they are words, like “Christian”, or “decent”. All the same, they represent territories that someone rules, where someone defines the borders and polices them, deciding who is a “real” American, Christian, Feminist, woman. It doesn’t matter how people consider themselves, what side of actual map-borders a person is born on, whether a person is born with a penis or vagina. That is not enough to make them a “real” Australian, or Muslim, or man. “Real man” is a set of rules someone in charge dictates, with only a vague reference to anatomy. “Un-American” is a concept that means a person doesn’t toe some line in the mind, established by a local despot and policed by the ideological death squads. Nothing to do with where you are born. A lot to do with failure to acknowledge the dominant self-appointed elite.
It took me a little while to get this part of the teaching, but the flag incident was a definite lesson in that learning. It helped gel some of what I’d already seen about being “other”. It was part of finding out what “transgressive” meant, putting a shape on all those ways I was not “proper” to my gender, to my parents’ expectations, to the sort of thoughts and feelings a child was “supposed” to have. It started to let me make pictures that explained something about the way I was treated, excluded. It gave some context about what made me “wrong” and what being punished for being myself was about. It taught me about wariness, and the need to cross borders in the dead of night, away from the checkpoints. Important to know when one is too young to lead a revolt.
I did learn, and like many oppressed minorities, mostly resentment just simmered, though there were times when it came out sideways, moments of rebellion or disobedience, until there was enough strength, or desperation, to finally make a stand. In my case, desperation came first, and strength was an outcome dealing with the consequences of things I did when my situation was “too much to bear”. It may not have been the best means of finding inner strength, but then, we seldom have much choice in how that comes about. The important thing is that we do become strong, and we learn to consider where we want to stand, and develop the courage of our convictions.
More importantly, it let me understand and empathise with all those other “others”, the metaphorical, sometimes actual, dwellers on the the fringes of all that is “appropriate”. It let me start to see that the enemy is almost never the people who don’t live in “our” ideological territory. They are rarely the people who live in “other” lands. Rather, the real enemy for many of us is the tendency to create communities of exclusion, instead of communities of inclusion. The process where “key players” who interpret “special books/teachings” draw lines and say holding the right ideas, doing the right things, makes us “real” women, are really no different to those who dictate that “real Christians” or “real Americans” must think this, abhor that, fight the other. It is all borders, and policing of hearts and minds. The territory is less important than the process. It is all the same, whether the “us” is “Feminists”, “Patriots”, “Ecologists”, “Communists”, “Dominants”, “Gays”. Wherever exclusion and maintenance of “right thought” is the process, there will always be the excluded, the shunned, the others. It is the difference between listening and learning from women’s experience, and dictating what women should present as their experience.
As soon as the flags go up, there will be enemies, enemy deaths, and collateral damage.
You need to log in to urbis or create an urbis account to review this writing.
Sort Reviews by Newest | Oldest | Highest Quality | Lowest Quality | Newest Comments |
Yeah. This is great. Excellent. Needs to be in a women’s studies, minority studies, semiotics text.
Mechanics first: You’ve got extra commas sprinkled needlessly around, and quoteation marks erupting like weeds around words that shouldn’t have any such foliage. They’re all breaking the natural forward progression of thoughts and sentences, and embezzling impact away from the mechanism. With the commas, e.g. ”...others revere, can result in pain and bruises, carried for weeks.” You don’t need either of those commas.
“key players” who interpret “special books/teachings” ... neither of these terms need to be in quotes, and neither does the list of identifiers, Fems, Pats, Coms, Doms, etc. They’re already capitalized, and having all those in there takes the punch away from the places where convention requires it or distinction demands it. Don’t use them for emphasis. Bold, italics, underline, whatever. Quotes are for quotes or defining a distinction.
And watch for the subject/verb agreement issue where your sentences get long and complex. e.g. “People die fighting over sticks with bits of cloth or plastic. People are killed in its name.” All your antecedents are plural. Just tweak.
Also, commas go inside the quotes in the U.S. The Brits do quotation marks differently, but we yanks always put the commas and terminal punctuation INside the quotation marks.
Cliche alert: “homes destroyed, dreams shattered;” Why do dreams have to be shattered always? Can’t they be decimated or mutilated or dissolved? You have better.
Now, as to Content: I’m not sure how I feel about your otherness. Part of me feels it’s inauthentic for you to not lay claim to it, but then perhaps that refusal to do so is you asserting some territory. My jury is still out on that.
“Un-American” is a concept that means a person doesn’t toe some line in the mind, established by a local despot and policed by the ideological death squads.”
Not really. ”Un-American” is a big, big concept that is established not by local despots but at so high a level that it suggests paranoia to even propose it. Yet we know it’s so, but the idealogical deathsquads, they are most certainly local, and they function with our agreement, which is part of the point of your piece. We’re all carrying that message. We are complicit, right? I think this point needs to be drawn out a bit more, because you seem to go back and forth between naming that complicity and disavowing it, as though all this was being visited up on from on high.
I could go on a bit, because the credit stopped accruing long ago, so any more would be free bonus blather, but mostly I’d be chewing for my own pleasure. I love the topic, I love the approach. The symbol stays strong and present in the piece throughout. It needs a lint brush taken to it, is all.
I have been very lonely to hear a voice like this. Welcome. Thank you.
I like how you use the introduction with the flag story…and expand upon it to address the real issues that revolve around symbols. Your story give a different perspective to what others may see in symbols…I look forward to seeing how your story continues to unfold. You have a number of options on ways to go with your ideas/thoughts.
i really like the descriptions and details you’ve put into this. it makes this fun to read, and a lot of writers dont have that ability to make their writing pieces interesting. but you obviously do, thats a major plus. :]
but i agree on the fact that it was just a flag. it has meaning behind it, but when you broke it, it was just an act of innocense [in my opinion] becuase thats what kids do, with no intention of actually hurting or offending anyone.
and you have a very good point on where once you present yourself as being in a certain group [represented by flags and such] you’re going to get some of those who are not involved jealous, thus creating enemies, and so on.
““Un-American” is a concept that means a person doesn’t toe some line in the mind, established by a local despot and policed by the ideological death squads. Nothing to do with where you are born. A lot to do with failure to acknowledge the dominant self-appointed elite.” Very interesting line here. As you are not looking for a debate, I will not give you one. But I wanted to point it out just the same.
“I did learn, and like many oppressed minorities, mostly resentment just simmered, though there were times when it came out sideways, moments of rebellion or disobedience, until there was enough strength, or desperation, to finally make a stand.”
I liked this point here very much. I expresses how things happen, whether it be revolution or just a plain and simple fight between a bully and the one he/she was picking on. Excellent.
“It may not have been the best means of finding inner strength, but then, we seldom have much choice in how that comes about. The important thing is that we do become strong, and we learn to consider where we want to stand, and develop the courage of our convictions.” Another fine point is made here. I have to agree, plainly and simply. I could say more, but, again, I won’t.
“It is all borders, and policing of hearts and minds.” This, to me, is the heart of the message of this entire writing. And it makes that point very well, right up until the end. Right near the end, you lose me. It becomes focused on the ordeals you faced as a female that wasn’t doing what a female “should” do. Up until that point, you did express that you were a female standing outside of what was expected, but it wasn’t the crux of the message. That’s my own complaint.
I know you’re not looking for debates or anything like that, but if you just want to talk about this or the very points in it, email me! This thing as so much in it that’s worth of discussion, open conversation, that it’s taking a helluva lot for me not to break your guidelines.
Thanks for sharing a piece well written, and for this view into your mind’s inner workings. Well done. Very well done indeed.
This is really brilliant. I like how in the opening, you don’t realize that it’s a flag. it’s a great discription, but I didnt automatically think FLAG. I thought ” Hmmm stick with striped and starred nylon… and a point… hmm”
This is written very well, and if you had a n published work, I would purcahse it. “Un-American” is a concept … and policed by the ideological death squads.” this whole sentace really caught me, it’s very well written, and very true. kepp it up.
10..+1
this is very easy to read and I believe that this essay will be a great addition to your “rambles”... you sound quite wise, and i think i would enjoy reading the rest of these “rambles”
I am now challenged in thought after reading what you have written. I think you did an excellent job of conveying the message that you did, and I think it contains the emotional and personal impact that most readers will be able to relate to. Job well done, and keep writing!
Nit Pics
iconoclasty (cute coinage … but sounds like a surgical procedure more legitimate would be “experience of an iconoclastic rebuke”)
really no different to those who > really no different from those who
The last line is too cryptic to be a summary. It needs a link from the previous thoughts. (ending is too abrupt)
Big Pic
My view is that you need to give readers better reasons to read your stuff (wallow thru your ideas). The simplest first step would be to break up your long sentences into shorter ones, which make for easier reading.
I could express the same basic ideas with much less emotional baggage, but that, apparently is part of your identity.
Tony Allessandra has an interesting perspective on human interactions. He uses the metaphor of foreign language. If you want to be understood, you need to speak in a way they will understand. So for the purpose of communication (necessary to get what you want) speak foreign. That doesn’t mean you are foreign. You only used that mode of behavior in order to get your request across. So Tony says get used to the idea that to get cooperation, expand your behavior to meet the other, but keep your identity separate and pure, within. My aphorism of that idea is “Conform to the Norm in behavior, but Be Wild like a Child in your thoughts.”
To tell you the truth, this is all pretty good. The only problems I see are with punctuation.
This threw me and I had to read it several times in order to understand what you are saying.
“I did learn, and like many oppressed minorities, mostly resentment just simmered, though there were times when it came out sideways, moments of rebellion or disobedience, until there was enough strength, or desperation, to finally make a stand.”
Far too many phrases strung together to create a sentence. You lost me after the third one. A sentence carries a thought. This one carries several.
”... but then, we seldom have much choice …”
The comma is inappropriate here.
”... communities of exclusion, instead of communities of inclusion.”
Same here.
Remember this oversimplification – a comma replaces a conjunction (in additon to other uses). If you have a comma and a conjunction, one of them is probably unnecessary. The EXCEPTION is in lists. When listing more than two items, you separate them with a comma and ALSO place one before the “and” (or “or”) that comes before the last item in a list.
Example:
‘It is all the same, whether the “us” is “Feminists”, “Patriots”, “Ecologists”, “Communists”, “Dominants”, “Gays”.’
Would be better as:
‘It is all the same whether the “us” is “Feminists”, “Patriots”, “Ecologists”, “Communists”, “Dominants”, or “Gays”.’
Other than the puncuation, you are doing a pretty good job of making a clear statement.
This beginning is near perfect. It drew me in quickly. Where you loose me is in the second paragraph. I get what you’re saying, and it is an important part of the piece, but it’s a bit cliche and you could skim over it quickly. The boundaries part is much more interesting. EG: The flags are not always flags. Great.
The fact that you seem to be a skilled writer makes this piece a very good and compelling read.
I get what you are doing with the quoting and everything, but I wouldn’t It’s too distracting. I feel like it’s too in your face for such a smoothly written and powerful piece.
Resentment simmering is a great image as well.
I’m very impressed by this. This is the first nine I’ve given out.
Showing 1 - 10 of 11
Next →
Ratings & Rankings
Review item
Add to faves
