Units

In this expanded annotation I want to look back at a post I wrote about a scene in The Baader-Meinhof Complex movie. My original post was:

“The way Meinhof’s death was portrayed in the film sticks out as a bit odd. Hers is the only death in the film that had no screen time, at least that I can recall. The corpses of every other person who died were shown, but her death was only described. This choice came off to me and the people I watched this movie with as weirdly dismissive.”

After reading and watching more content pertaining to Meinhof I have come to think differently about how her death was portrayed. I now look back on how the film handled her death and can see how instead of being “dismissive” I might instead look at it as being a good representation of the suddenness and assumed “mysterious” nature of her death. The Baader-Meinhof Complex movie and other films we watched about Meinhof spend some time on this.

In Prof. Wills’ unit we watched the documentary “Paris is Burning,” which focuses on drag queens living in New York City and chronicles the evolution of “ball culture.” I chose to write about my interpretation of the quote “everybody’s in drag– just like in real life.”

The documentary spends a fair bit of time on the expanding list of categories people walked at balls. Among those categories were “passing” ones— for “women” and for “men,” as society at the time viewed them, a “businessmen” one, and many many more. Both looking and acting the part was essential to win the most points. To a lesser extent, this occurs on a broader scale in “real life”— life outside of balls, the drag scene, and even the larger LGBT+ community. In “real life” people dress and act to fit into categories they’ve assigned to themselves or have had assigned to them. We all perform our constructed identities, and in this way we all wear drag.

I wrote the following in response to Camilla Townsend’s introduction in Fifth Sun: A New History of the Aztecs.

History is written by the victors, the invaders, the dominant ethnic and/or cultural group. Voices like that of the “Aztec Princess” are spoken over in the conversations Townsend refers to. The method the Mexica used and that Townsend intends to use of collating multiples perspectives in order to give a fuller picture leads me to share her optimism that the content of those conversations can at least be approximated. This is only if there are enough perspectives to begin with and if those perspectives are varied enough, of course.

Here I can connect back to the danger of the single story. Even if one or a few of those perspectives are intentionally or unintentionally distorted, the presence of so many others will work to counteract that.

Corroboration!

I posted this in response to Okwui Okpokwasili’s “Bronx Gothic” performance.

What I saw

The video opens with a shot of Okwui Okpokwasili from behind. She is outfitted in a simple red dress that shows her back, and is moving rapidly back and forth in place. The shot changes from straight behind her to some distance away— still from the back, but with the set and some of the audience in view as well. White, cloth walls bracket the set, lit by old-fashioned lamps strewn about. Grass pushes up in various places from the floor. Numerous people can be heard talking and seen passing in front of the camera. In the background, a ringing sound plays. She seems disconnected from her own body, almost compelled to keep moving. There’s an apparent lack of control there.

After about 30 minutes Okpokwasili approaches a standing microphone towards the front of the stage, at which point she finally stops moving. She then proceeds to read out an exchange between her innocent younger self and her more mature best friend (physically and sexually, at least) whom she eventually had a falling out with. The notes – and the singing and poetic segments between readings of them – tell a visceral, heart wrenching and gut clenching story.

What I felt

A loop of confusion, recognition, concern, awe, discomfort, and fascination. My awe and fascination with Okpokwasili’s performance came to outweigh my discomfort as it progressed. Most of what I saw was largely unfamiliar to me, especially the first part, but there were certainly thoughts and behaviors she expressed that I recognized. Issues with self-image, navigating interactions with peers, and growing up as a whole are experiences that just about anyone can empathize with. Throughout a large part of the latter half of the performance I kept thinking: middle school.

Shaking, shaking;
visceral.
She moves because she has to
and in the silence twisted memories claw their way out of her throat.
Two girls turned women scream and dream and ask themselves:
“Am I awake?”

An abstract portrait–

with laugh lines framing the sides

of my painted face.

It took me about a half an hour to brainstorm this Haiku. In this slack post expansion, I wanted to go over my thought process as I wrote it.

During the initial stages of my brainstorming, I played with the idea of scars quite a bit, as they’re one of the most obvious marks our experiences can leave on our bodies. After composing a Haiku following that line of thought, however (visible in the upper right hand corner of the above photo), I wasn’t satisfied. My Haiku felt completely disconnected from who I am, and needlessly edgy. I do have scars (most people do), but they aren’t me–they’re not representative of my archive.

I decided I’d write something a bit more positive, and that brought me to laugh lines. Wrinkles! Another common mark our experiences leave on our bodies. As I am a very smiley person, I’m sure that when I’m older I’ll have fairly deep laugh lines around my eyes and mouth; I already have a few now. That – and the painting class I was taking at the time – led me to my Haiku.

“Smith looks for the character of the nation through idiosyncrasies in order to thwart traditional stereotypes and elaborate on her own sense of history.” —Embodying Hybridity: Anna Deavere Smith’s Identity Cross-Overs by Xavier Lemoine, page 241

The role of stereotypes in Anna Deavere Smith’s performance is a topic that a lot of my fellow Humesters wrote about, and for good reason– it’s really fascinating. I picked this quote to focus on because it lines up with my thoughts on how exactly this role plays out: that while Smith portrays people who at a glance could easily be relegated to a single title or name (and even possibly leans into further stereotyping– though it’s hard to say, given that I’m not familiar with most of the people she portrays), she does so in such an empathetic way that the audience is made to be intimately familiar with the undeniable humanity of these people. 

I wrote in my notes on Twilight that “none of the people [she portrayed] feel caricatured,” and that, while watching, I’d “forget about her and just see the [people] she’s portraying.” In explaining how Anna Deveare Smith portrays people who fit certain stereotypes in such a positive way, I have found a quote from Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s TEDTalk “The Danger of a Single Story” particularly helpful. In her talk she claims that “the problem with stereotypes isn’t necessarily that they’re untrue, but that they’re incomplete.” Stereotypes are two-dimensional, and because of this two-dimensional, unfinished quality, they’re also dehumanizing. They also often possess a distorting quality, changing how one views others who appear to fit within those stereotypes. Smith’s portrayals, however, are nuanced and deep and unmistakably human. These nuances and the empathy with which she undertakes her performances complete thwarts the distancing and dehumanizing abilities of stereotypes.

Human dignity revolves around the recognition that all human beings – their minds and their bodies – have intrinsic value. Slavery, which assigns a price tag to that which ought to be priceless and is predicated upon the belief that certain groups of people are inherently lesser, violates this to its core. The “Displaying Sara Baartman” document, Sojourner Truth’s “Ain’t I a woman?,” and the reading on Human Zoos all describe further instances wherein human dignity was trampled upon: the atrocities George Cuvier (amongst many others) committed against Sara Baartman and Khoisan women like her, Frances Gage’s erasure of Sojourner Truth’s identity and voice, and human zoos, which reads to me like something out of a dystopia despite the fact that, apparently, these things still exist today. In all of these examples people are reduced to their labor, or to a spectacle– their beings/bodies used for others’ gain. Dignity itself is irrevocably tied to respect, and there is a blistering lack of that in any of the above. 

When I was reading about human zoos, the second episode of a Star Trek parody-type series called The Orville, titled “Command Performance,” came to mind. In this expansion of my original slack post on human dignity, I’d like to dig into that some more (as I now have room to do so).

Like Star Trek, episodes of The Orville frequently address social and moral issues. In “Command Performance,” two of the main characters find themselves imprisoned in a type of human zoo. The Calivon – the alien race that imprisoned them alongside thousands of other aliens – view all other life that isn’t as technologically advanced as them as inferior and simplistic, and thus have no moral issues with their zoos. The complete lack of consideration they give to the thoughts and feelings of those they’ve decided are inferior to them does not so much come from a place of malice as it does incomprehension. Here I’ll refer back to the sentence that kicked off this post. Those who trample on the dignity of others do so from a position of extreme self-conferred superiority. This sense of superiority renders them incapable of understanding the core principle of human dignity – that all humans (and aliens, in this case) have intrinsic, infinite, and incomparable value – and thus strips them of their own.

“The choice between competing theories is arbitrary, since there is no such thing as objective truth.” (Karl Popper, The Open Society and its Enemies, Vol. II (London, 1963), p. 369f.)

Originally, in a slack post in response to the “Cognitive Relativism” reading from Prof. Robb’s unit, I wrote the following (edited for clarity’s sake, as there were a few grammatical nightmares in there):I think there is such a thing as objective truth, in the sense that there is theoretically a way to go about opening a can of beans the “best” way, but until it is known to us the “truth” will remain multi-pronged. By “multi-pronged” I mean that if we were to ever make a breakthrough or have one presented to us by helpful aliens, the truths we held up prior to that breakthrough would not suddenly become falsehoods.

—

These things would be true up until they are not because the absolute truth/Truth presented overshadows them, but that wouldn’t render them untrue in the past. Before my sister was born, I was an only child, but now I am not. That doesn’t mean that back then I wasn’t an only child. I believe that until these absolute truths are discovered – if they ever are – they can hold no sway over present truths.

There’s a lot here that I didn’t express properly– to the point that it comes off as nonsense. I was deep in the rabbit hole when I wrote this, and having had a bit of time to climb out of it and look back with fresh eyes, I feel that I might now be able to express my thoughts on objective truth more clearly. 

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In this revision process, I’m comfortable holding on to the first of the two paragraphs above, but I’ll scrap everything from the second but the last sentence: “I believe that until these absolute truths are discovered – if they ever are – they can hold no sway over present truths.” This gets pretty close to what I was trying to convey in that second paragraph. Here are my tidied up thoughts:

I believe in absolute truth in the same way I believe that of the infinite number of branching paths before me, there is one that will leave me the happiest. And there is next to no way I’ll stumble across that path. In my original post I was ultimately trying to get at the difference between theoretical versus practical belief. Because though I believe in absolute truth, I also believe in the necessity of practical truths– in accepting that I am beyond unlikely to stumble across that “perfect path” or across absolute truth, so to fixate on them would be to neglect the multitudes of truths that make up the present.