Uncategorized – Page 5 – Paola Trimarco

Dealing with Hate

The hate bandwagon seems to be a long one these days, zigzagging through towns and country sides, extending their reach to help people climb aboard. For those of us who watch it go by and cover our ears against its noise, it’s something unreal – a trick of the mind – from a different time and place. It makes me think of historical times when people were less educated and fought with bayonets and canons. Or, more worryingly, recent historical times that still haunt the memories of older generations. I wonder if we haven’t learned any lessons at all. Perhaps in this surreal sense the hate-filled bandwagon rolls through another part of the world where deep-seated religious divides have fuelled irreversible resentment and our countries have changed places or merged into one. While some individuals might privately harbour hate towards others from different groups, this bandwagon doesn’t seem to belong in our modern democracies. Yet it does.

Of course, I’m angry at this hatred and its exponential growth and visibility. I struggle for words to express this that aren’t full of aggression and don’t make me sound as if I have hopped onto a bandwagon myself. Now that I’ve grumbled and shared news stories on Twitter and Facebook, I wish to raise the argument above the specifics of post-referendum Britain, the presidential election in the US, the rise of the National Front in France, and so on.

I’m reminded of a couple of quotes attributed to Buddha. The first – “Holding on to anger is like drinking poison and expecting the other person to die.” This makes me want to do something useful or productive with my anger. I know, realistically this anger is not going to go away until the talk of hate and the hate crimes themselves go away. Thus, I continue to write and become more politically active, supporting human rights campaigns, news sources and political leaders whom I believe can help to bring about a more tolerant, inclusive society.

The other quote from Buddha is one which I must apologised for even quoting. It’s a hackneyed line, having appeared on posters, bookmarks and Facebook pages for years. Buddha said, “Hatred does not cease by hatred, but only by love.” I’m not a big enough human being to feel love for the hatemongers, but I can focus my energy away from my own anger and hatred to love and compassion for those who are victims of hate – whether verbal attacks or actual crimes – or subtle references which elude public condemnation, but work passively to alter mindsets.

It’s hard to imagine now, but I’d like to believe that in time the hate bandwagon will lose most of its followers and its cargo – or lose its momentum with one wheel after another falling off to a point where it can no longer parade down our roads. Idealistic? Perhaps, but worth aiming for.

Girl Flies

Occasionally, the death of a stranger can haunt us.

It was 1996, a time when most of my mornings were spent with my housemate Adonica in Seoul, South Korea. We would eat breakfast in front of the TV and watch CNN – the American edition for the US GIs. One news story that had us captivated was about Jessica Dubroff, an American child pilot. The seven-year old personified cute in her aviator’s leather jacket and her pink baseball cap, which, slightly too large, made her ears stick out between strands of stringy hair. The reporter explained how Jessica – aiming for The Guinness Book of World Records as the youngest pilot – had been flying across the United States in a Cessna Cardinal 177.

Her adult flight instructor was, legally speaking, ‘the pilot.’ But little Jessica sat in the pilot seat at the controls at all times. Her father sat in the back seat, supposedly cheering on his little girl. But I had also imagined him talking sports with the pilot during the long stretches of uneventful sky. The father had planned stops along the way, where television cameras, reporters and well-wishers were there to greet his daughter – the star attraction.

At the start of her journey, the girl was bubbly and excited about the trip and precocious in her knowledge of how planes worked. A few days into her voyage, Jessica appeared again on television, her face morphed into a droopy, pale mask, a forced smile. Between clenched teeth, she chirped, ‘It’s been a long day. I can’t wait to sleep. I had two hours of sleep last night.’

A couple of days later, we awoke to the news that Jessica had died. The Cessna with the seven-year-old pilot, her instructor and father crashed soon after take-off. There were no survivors.

It seemed that the cargo of gifts from Jessica’s fans, along with severe weather conditions, may have caused the plane to be out of balance, leading to confusion in the cockpit. The exact cause wouldn’t be known until an investigation was completed. Adonica and I talked about being shocked and not surprised at the same time. The shock was in being presented with a lightweight, good-news story that went terribly wrong – not the usual ending for such human-interest news. But not surprised as the risks were obvious and the girl we last saw was tired. Therein lies the sense of guilt. We were being entertained by a situation that we knew was endangering the life of a child.

Eyewitness accounts described how the plane flew some 300 yards, tilted and jerked and fell nose first into the ground. One witness had remarked, ‘Went into the ground like a dart.’ I envisioned Jessica in her pink baseball cap, panicking and screaming, tears rolling down a reddened face – the instructor trying to calm her and stop the plane going out of control. My imagination was shamelessly adding to the entertainment value.

A few weeks after the accident, The Guinness Book of World Records decided to stop the ‘youngest pilot’ category for fear of encouraging unsafe flights. A month after Jessica’s accident, investigators concluded that the ‘pilot’ was to blame for the crash because it was his/her decision to take off in bad weather. As the legal pilot was the instructor, some have seen it as his fault; as Jessica was the actual pilot in charge of the aircraft, others see her as culpible. The investigators also believed that ‘fatigue’ and ‘media attention’ may have contributed to an ‘improper decision’ to fly in such conditions. In other words, Jessica was simply too young to fly.

Years later, I still think about Jessica – the novelty of the story, the shock, the guilt and the sadness for this little girl I didn’t even know. Yet, memory can play tricks. I’ve wondered if it happened as I remember it. I scanned the archives and first found stories about Jessica’s flight at the start of it all – about a little girl with a big dream. In the CNN files the story was simply entitled ‘Girl Flies.’ I stopped myself there from searching any further.

Identity in the age of Brexit

‘Where are you from?’ That is a question I get asked too often in the UK. If it’s from a complete stranger, I might say, ‘Mars.’ If it is someone who has already shown hostility towards me either because of my accent or because I’m wearing a pro-EU t-shirt, I say. ‘I’m from a country where it is considered impolite to ask people where they’re from.’

The problem with admitting where I’m from is that people assume I identify myself with my country of birth and what they think people from that country are like. This triggers a slew of assumptions about how I was raised, my political views, my faith, my class – all based on stereotypes – and most of them negative and miles off the mark. Making such assumptions are about turning individuals into members of a group and even with the most flattering of outcomes, individuality gets lost.

So, where am I from? I was born and raised in Chicago. But what identity do I ascribe to myself? Identity is a rather fluid concept and we all have multiple identities depending on what we’re doing and what context we’re talking about. Ethnically, I’m Italian-American. Legally, I’m American-British. Though if I were to pursue the paper trail, I can get an Italian passport and become legally Italian-American-British. I’ve spent most of my adult life in Britain and gaining my UK citizenship was a conscious act, as opposed to the Italian-American accident of my birth. I identify myself as more British than American as a result. This is not necessarily a good thing. Since Brexit, the Stupid American stereotype has been kicked aside by the Stupid Briton stereotype.

Seriously, since the EU Referendum, there’s been a lot of talk about identity and whether British people see themselves as European. As a British person, I personally do. But I’ll never forget when I first arrived in Britain in 1984. My fellow students, the British-born ones, referred to the rest of Europe, i.e. not Britain, as either ‘the continent’ or as ‘Europe’. I found this baffling. At school I was taught that the UK is part of the European Continent. At first I just thought that this was a linguistic tick, an abbreviated way of saying ‘continental Europe’ – the countries that were not on our little island. But it seems deeper than that as the debates around the referendum have illustrated. It appears that many British people see themselves as not European. Some say this is due to the geography of the British Isles being separate from the mainland of continental Europe. Do people in Greece and Malta refer to the rest of Europe as ‘Europe’ and question whether or not they are European? British separation from the rest of Europe is not just geographical, but deeply entrenched in imperial history and twentieth century politics.

The EU Referendum has also brought up the issue of immigration. I complicate matters more by identifying to myself as an ‘immigrant.’ I wish I had a five-pound note for every time someone has displayed shock at this. Perhaps Americans (which is how I’m perceived) are not allowed to be immigrants because they are from a country known for its accepting of immigrants and people outside the US seem to struggle to understand that anyone would want to emigrate away from it. Millions of Americans live permanently overseas. Many artists, writers, musicians prefer the lifestyles abroad, especially in Europe. Other Americans living abroad include teachers, scholars, aid workers and business people who fall in love with a foreign place and/or a foreign person. I have many reasons for emigrating from the US, including all of the above mentioned. To these I add escape from my dysfunctional family and national, humane healthcare.

There is the other, more unsavoury, possibility that people who have problems accepting that Americans can be immigrants in the UK reserve the ‘immigrant’ label for the ‘other’ – the non-white person or the person for whom English is not a first language. While not everyone who voted to leave the EU is a racist, it is clear to anyone living in Britain these days that the Brexit result has empowered the racists and xenophobes in this country.

I cannot change where I’m from, nor can I do much to change people’s negative stereotypes. Before the EU Referendum, I was more likely to identify myself as a writer, amateur golfer, woman, activist, half of a husband-wife team and a linguist before I would identify myself as Italian-American-British. Now, in the muddle of ethnicity and identity brought on by Brexit, I’m shirking further away still from any sense of ethnic identity.

The Girl on the Train

In brief – a good thriller, but not a very good novel. It had all the page-turning qualities of a competent thriller, even though I suspected I knew whodunit about two thirds of the way in. Paula Hawkins’ novel is well written, a crisp prose with believable characters. But it is only just a thriller and as such at times I felt as if I were reading a detailed treatment of a screenplay. While that’s all fine for the thriller genre, this book doesn’t extend beyond that. In contrast, the Stieg Larsson books made for good thrillers and good novels. They explored social ills in Sweden, such as violence against women, while giving its readers thriller plotlines. So too with Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl, which combined thriller with social satire. Once again, I’m left wondering what all the fuss is about.

The Colour of Milk

A deceptively simple book, The Colour of Milk is a story about a poor farm girl in the mid-19th century. Mary is sent away to earn money for her family working as a carer to the vicar’s invalid wife. There Mary learns to read and write. In the meantime her sister, still working on the farm, becomes pregnant by the vicar’s son, who escapes responsibility – and gets away with it. After the vicar’s wife dies, Mary experiences abuse. The treatment of women and the poor serves as the backdrop to this tale about empowerment. While the story might not be the most original, it is a worthwhile read just for the voice and lively expression of the first person narrator.

Essay: Matthew

Everything is an illusion. We live in the world of illusions. – Matthew

During my childhood, my mother was a devotee of self-proclaimed psychics and mystics like Uri Geller. She was part of the New Age movement in the seventies that saw signs in coincidences and spoke to spirits over Ouija boards. In this environment, it’s no surprise that I actually believed that I was psychic. A typical child, I was intuitive and good at guessing and saw things that adults missed because they were too busy looking. Whenever I had a psychic moment I would share it with my mother and she would beam with pride.

When I was twelve, my mother befriended Carla, a spiritual medium who lived in our neighbourhood in Chicago. On summer afternoons when I was off from school, my mother would suggest visiting Carla, in part because she had air-conditioning and we didn’t. I would have lemonade, my mother and Carla iced tea. We would talk about the latest films, pop music and the way clothes’ styles were changing. All of a sudden our chatter was interrupted – Carla’s voice would drop two octaves as her spirit guide, John, spoke through her. He used biblical language and advised us in ways that sounded to me suspiciously like the horoscope pages. ‘Worry not about the future for it is full of mystery. It is best to wait for things to come.’ That was one of John’s pearls of wisdom. My mother would nod profusely and thank John for talking to us. John would leave and Carla would go limp like a ragdoll and get back her energy with another iced tea and chocolate donut.

While I was out with friends, my mother would visit Carla on her own. I always learned about these meetings afterwards and, even though I had my doubts about John, I felt excluded. I was at that age where I needed to belong to one group or another.

By the end of that summer, I countered Carla’s John with Matthew – a name chosen to fit my mother’s Christian-spirituality phase. I would get an idea from one of her books or from a self-help coach on daytime television and attribute it to my spirit guide Matthew. Once he said, “The peoples of the world will have peace when they find inner peace.” And another time it was “All things are beautiful in themselves,” purloined from Kahlil Gibran. But I couldn’t bring myself to put on a fake baritone voice. I didn’t need to. Anytime I quoted Matthew, I became my mother’s best friend – mission accomplished.

Unlike my early childhood with psychic moments, I never believed that I was or could ever become a spiritual medium. By this time, Uri Geller had been debunked on national television when he couldn’t divine where objects were hidden or bend any spoons. And in sitcoms and films, the psychic charlatan became a stock character set up for mockery.

Within a year, I had grown up to appreciate my own friends more and the need to belong less. Feeling guilty for taking advantage of my mother’s gullibility, I gently phased Matthew out. I would tell her that I simply hadn’t heard from him as if he were an old friend who didn’t keep in touch.

Years later when I was in my thirties, visiting my mother, she asked if I was still psychic, like I was as a child. I explained that I was still intuitive and good at guessing, but that I didn’t see those things as psychic anymore – and there were plenty of times when my feelings and hunches proved terribly inaccurate.

I could tell that my response disappointed her.

“Have you heard from Matthew?”

“No,” was all I said.

Until the end of her life, my mother still consulted psychics and mystics – and believed her daughter once channelled a spirit named Matthew.

Sun-Mi Hwang’s Hen

The Hen Who Dreamed She Could Fly is a delightful little book by Korean writer Sun-Mi Hwang. It tells the story of a hen who’s fed up with laying eggs on demand and wants to raise a chick of her own. But when she manages to escape the coop, she can no longer lay eggs. She happens upon an egg without its mother and lays on that until it hatches only to discover that it’s a duckling. This metaphorical tale raises issues about surrogacy, motherhood, tolerance and independence. Perhaps a chick-lit version (no pun intended) of Animal Farm, it packs a punch with its directness and use of animals who are all too human. With illustrations by Japanese artist Nomoco, this little gem is best read in its paper version.

Reading Elena Ferrante

I’ve finally read my first Ferrante book. There’s been a buzz around her work over the past few years since she’s been translated into English by Ann Goldstein. I thought I’d start small by reading her near-novella, Troubling Love. To call it a mystery story wouldn’t do it justice. It’s more of a psychological tale set in Napolitano Italy. What makes this a worthwhile read is the tension and pacing set by the first person narration. Delia is middle-aged and her mother has just died under strange circumstances. In unravelling this mystery, Delia has to face unsavoury characters from her past and come to terms with her own childhood lies. The writing is as bold as the protagonist, who deals with her period erupting and staining a pair of panties, a clumsy sexual encounter and revelations of a fetishlike nature. The linguist in me also liked the attention given to the use of dialect by the narrator, who observes how speaking dialect is something of her childhood and is the language used in anger. Speaking of language, that thump you heard was Grandma Trimarco turning over in her grave when I confessed to having to read this in English.

Marching for Europe

Saturday I attended my first protest march in over twenty years. In a few words, it was in support of staying in the single market and remaining an inclusive society. In Cambridge some 400 people made up the trail of marchers. That might not seem like a lot, but it’s early days yet. This was one of those ‘gathering of the troops’ march and rally. Now that parliament has reconvened, I suspect future marches will be more focused on one issue or another concerning how we leave the EU – if that really happens. Speculations abound.

I came away from this activity thinking about a few things. First, there was the cross-party spirit of the event. The speakers at the rally included not only the Green Party and the Liberal Democrats, no surprises there, but also politicians from Labour and the Conservatives. The idea of leaving Europe effects so many people in so many ways. Working across parties is an aspect of being in the grown-up world, away from the club-house mentally of the zealot, of the closed-minded.

The march also gave me more face-to-face encounters with people who support Brexit. One man barked at us, ‘It’s over – go home!’ Is it over? Our government doesn’t seem to think so. Since the Brexit camp left us with no plan and a campaign based on twisted facts and some downright lies, how the UK actually leaves the EU is still up for grabs. Another person, an elderly woman, pointed her fingers at a few of us and said, ‘I’m from the North and we’re poor up there!’ This is just another example of the protest voting that happened on 23^rd June. Yes, the divide in wealth between the North and South of England is something to be unhappy about – but why is that the fault of the European Union? What about our own governments over the last three decades? Before I had a chance to question this woman, she, like the uppity man, was gone. That to me sums up much of the Brexit campaign – single utterances or catch phrases without discussion, without debate.

These hecklers were few. As we walked with our banners, signs and EU flags through the windy streets of central Cambridge, we were greeted mostly by applause and thumbs-up gestures. When we stopped to wait for street lights or for some of our number to catch up, we were the subject of mobile phone photographs – dozens of them. There is something immensely comforting about feeling that your views are generally shared. Of course, it’s more complicated than that.

After a few casual discussions with my fellow marchers, I returned to Ely with a sense of dismay as well. There seemed to be strong agreement that the Liberal Democrats were the only party in total support of remaining in the EU and their speaker at the rally, Julian Huppert, was the best received and most inspiring. Yet – and here comes the disappointing part – some of my fellow marchers raised the point that the Lib Dems have the right message, but cannot speak to ‘ordinary people.’ One person said to me ‘They need to tone it down – keep it simple.’ I would argue that the simplicity of the referendum debate is what made it more about emotions and less adherent to facts and gave us the disasterous outcome we are now living under. It might take a generation, but perhaps we should flip this argument and raise the education and understanding of ‘ordinary people.’

33

We sat on a bench outside The Cutter taking in the view of the River Great Ouse that flows through Ely. David had a light lager – a chilled rose for me, which David doesn’t understand. Between the weeping willows we could see the old train bridge, its beams forming a series of Xs. The occasional commuter or freight train whizzed or chugged along. As one freight train started to come through, perhaps I suspected that it was going to be a long one – I started counting the containers as they went passed a certain point. Maersk, Hanjin, another Maersk, several unnamed – or too far to see with middle-aged eyes – Italia and a few more Hanjin and Maersk before it was all over. Thirty-three containers transported the stuffs of the world through our little town that evening.