Realization

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

Page 12 of 63 · 20 per page

• From From Shame to Sin: The Christian Transformation of Sexual Morality in Late Antiquity (2013)

  e ancient reader of Achilles Tatius would have noticed a conspicuous absence in the apology for pederasty. Nowhere do we fi nd the soaring, spiritualized defense of an elevated form of mentorship that harnessed the power of erotic attraction for virtuous ends. In part the absence of any such defense is explained by the setting of the debate within an erotic novel, whose generic conventions accept and insist on the frankly sexual nature of human companionship. But in a deeper sense Leucippe and Clitophon is a cipher for attitudes toward pederasty in the Roman Empire. It is telling  F R O M S H A M E TO S I N that Foucault sees pederasty in the novel as “episodic and marginal.” Central to Foucault’s pre sen ta tion of Roman sexual culture is the claim that in the high empire, “refl ection on the love of boys lost some of its intensity, its seriousness, its vitality.” Th e decline of pederasty, or at least its diminished place in the moral economy of sex, is treated as the counterpart of the conjugalization of plea sure. Foucault fi nds in the high empire a “philosophical disinvestment” from the institution of pederasty. Th e claim rests entirely on a comparison with “the lofty formulations of the classical period,” notably Plato’s. If comparison with classical Greece seems inevitable in any discussion of pederasty, such a benchmark is nevertheless bound to lead to a stilted mea sure of Roman sexual culture. Seen in broader perspective, the story of Roman- era pederasty is not its decline but its liveliness. Foucault’s judgments are simply misguided. Th e place of pederasty in Leucippe and Clitophon, which is important enough to frame the fi rst quarter of the novel, helps us to situate contemporary attitudes to pederasty in terms of high imperial culture, rather than in comparison to classical Greece. A heightened and almost impolitic insistence on the physical essence of love, an awareness that the beloved’s consent could not be squared with social honor, and narratives of eros that sought to understand the place of mankind’s sexual instincts within the cosmos: these, rather than disapproval or disinvestment, make up the story of pederasty in the Roman Empire. Th

• From Combating Cult Mind Control: The Guide to Protection, Rescue and Recovery from Destructive Cults (1988)

  Immediately after the coup, Kim Jong Pil founded the KCIA and supervised the building of a political base for the new regime. A February 1963 unevaluated CIA report stated that Kim Jong Pil had “organized” the Unification Church while he was KCIA director and has been using the Unification Church as a “political tool.”17 Journalist Frederick Clarkson, who has written widely about the politics of the Moon organization, adds these insights: Though the Fraser Report noted that “organized” is not to be confused with “founded,” since the Unification Church was “founded” in 1954, the Fraser Report goes on to state that “…there was a great deal of independent corroboration for the suggestion in this and later intelligence reports that Kim Jong Pil and the Moon organization had a mutually supportive relationship, as well as for the statement that Kim used the Unification Church for political purposes.”18 It is remarkable that in the 1970s, and thereafter, so many people were deeply involved with the Moon organization, blindly believing the stories they were told by leaders, knowing almost nothing about its real history. Certainly, if I had learned that the Moon organization, as Congressional investigators called it, was connected with the KCIA, or that in 1967 Moon had forged an organizational link with Yoshi Kodama, a leader of the Yakuza, the Japanese organized crime network,19 I would have never become involved. 20 While the story of the Unification Church’s theology is too involved to detail here, the most important feature of it is the Church’s position that Sun Myung Moon was the new Messiah and that his mission was to establish a new “kingdom” on Earth (he actually died in 2012). Yet, many ex-members, like me, have observed that Moon’s vision of that kingdom was distinctly Korean. During my two-and-a-half-year period in the church, I understood that the highest positions of membership (closest to Moon) were available only to Koreans, with the Japanese coming in second. American members, myself included, were on the third rung of the ladder. Members of the Unification Church believe, as I did, that their donations of time, money, and effort are “saving the world.” What they do not realize is that they are the victims of mind control.21

• From From Shame to Sin: The Christian Transformation of Sexual Morality in Late Antiquity (2013)

  Paul’s compromise between libertinism and continence was to reverberate throughout the rest of Christian history. It was a settlement forged in the compressed atmosphere of apocalyptic time. Paul offered a wisdom “not of this age or of the rulers of this age, who are doomed to pass away.” Like any treaty, it would eventually show the marks of age, strained by the passage of time and subtle realignments in the balance of power. But it laid down the key terms that acted as the starting point for all future negotiations. At the same time, the urgency of the moment left much unsaid. There was much that simply did not need saying. The protocols of feminine respectability—virginity followed by fidelity—were so universal and obvious that their express declaration would have been otiose. Paul’s focus was squarely on the quarrels that had arisen in the church. His letter was an intervention. But it was an intervention that would progressively attain canonical status within the diffuse network of tiny communities who viewed Paul as an authoritative messenger. Almost immediately Christians were scrambling to interpret what Paul meant, both in what he said and what he left unsaid. The prophets of virginity would latch on to the apostle’s own celibacy, and the glaring absence of any enthusiasm for marriage, as sure signs that Paul had not allotted any grace to acts of the flesh. But the authors of the pastoral epistles would come nearer to the spirit of Paul, when they envisioned, in the unfolded expanse of continuous time, the moral viability of orderly Christian households. Paul may well not have endorsed the abrasive patriarchy of the pastoral letters, but their explicit affirmation, against those who would forbid marriage, that “everything created by God is good,” is not alien to his thought. This strain of Paul’s sexual ideology was destined to prevail. But what could not be credibly doubted, by any Christian claiming descent from the Pauline tradition, was the irredeemable depravity of fornication and the need to secede from the moral economy of the Roman sexual order.20 THE NATURAL USE: EARLY CHRISTIANITY AND SAME-SEX LOVE

• From Combating Cult Mind Control: The Guide to Protection, Rescue and Recovery from Destructive Cults (1988)

  Finally, in 1988 she convinced her husband to move the family to California. They were both 30 years old. Gina enrolled her kids in public school and began taking courses at the local community college “My husband initially could not function. He played video games for about 15 hours daily—truly just another way to dissociate,” she said. “He began following Sai Baba (another problematic Indian guru). I didn’t follow anyone. I was too busy working (in retail), taking college classes and raising three children.” The pair eventually divorced. Gina would go on to earn three degrees and currently works as a certified nurse-midwife at a major medical center. “I still didn’t realize it was a cult until 2003, 15 years later. I was 45,” she said. A coworker told her about the work of Margaret Singer. “I had the ah-ha moment—‘Oh shit! I was raised in a cult! My whole family is in a cult! That’s why our lives are so screwed up!’ Only then did I begin searching online for cult information, reading everything I could to self-counsel. I found a therapist who knows about cult recovery.” As a medical professional, she has devoted herself to exposing the ways in which TM can adversely affect a person’s health. She maintains close relationships with other former members and with families who have been adversely affected by TM. She blogs at tmfree.blogspot.com and ginacatena.com and speaks and writes on a volunteer basis to raise awareness of the risks of involvement with TM. Lee Marsh and Jehovah’s Witnesses119 Lee Marsh is a former Jehovah’s Witness, a retired Canadian counselor and is the president of Advocates for Awareness of Watchtower Abuses (aawa.co), a nonprofit group that helps educate the public about the group’s violations of basic human rights, especially toward women and children. When Lee was eight years old, her mother abandoned the family, and Lee was forced to live with her father. Shortly after that, her father began sexually molesting her. The crime was reported to the police when she was 11, and her mother, whom Lee had not seen in three years, was awarded custody. Her mom was then living with relatives and studying with Jehovah’s Witnesses. When Lee was 12, her mom’s common-law husband sexually molested Lee and her teenage aunt. When this was reported to an elder at the Jehovah’s Witness Kingdom Hall, the elder advised the family to keep it secret. When it happened again, the elders decided that it should not be reported to the police. Lee’s aunt was sent to live with other family members, while Lee was placed in a foster home for the next three years.

• From From Shame to Sin: The Christian Transformation of Sexual Morality in Late Antiquity (2013)

  Th e Christian authors, by contrast, re create from the pieces of clas- sical romance stories in which the characters determine their own destiny. In the early period, the characters they imagine are little more than symbols of moral liberty, standing apart from the dark forces of the world in their ab- solute purity, within a narrative arc that ends in death rather than rebirth. In the period of the church’s triumph, the bright division between the pro- tagonist and the saeculum becomes blurred, and the individual’s freedom consists precisely in the action of turning away from the world and separat- ing herself from it. So a literature in which honorable girls were preserved inviolate by the dispensations of fate or providence becomes a literature in  FROM SHAME TO SIN which girls choose to stain themselves and then choose to become righ- teous, of their own volition, by accepting the grace of divine pardon. Stories have a claim, just as much as formal philosophical literature, to a privileged place in the history of sexuality. Th e narrative literature of the late classical world proved capable, like no other medium, of representing the pattern and experience of sexual morality, mea sured against the shape of life. Th e collective body of texts, and the literary syntax shared between them, seems to speak to us directly—especially in the hands of the authors who understood the mechanics and conventionality of their stories most profoundly. In the late classical world, the shared syntax of narrative changed. Th e structural transformation that enabled the creation of characters like Pelagia and Mary traces the deeper reordering of the form and logic of sex- ual morality. A romance like Leucippe and Clitophon was possible because— even if the author is smirking or sneering— ultimately the romance be- longed to a world where individual sexual morality was locked within and subordinate to systems of valuation that were external, objective, and social. Th e self, with its uncanny eroticism, was constituted by its place in the har- monious synthesis of nature and society that the ancient city had achieved. A romance like the Life of Mary of Egypt was possible because sexual moral- ity was now a troublesome inheritance of the fl esh, in a universe whose true scale of values lay in the hope of the spirit to transcend its embodiment.

• From Combating Cult Mind Control: The Guide to Protection, Rescue and Recovery from Destructive Cults (1988)

  In my own case, until my counselors taught me what the Chinese Communists of the 1950s were doing, I did not truly understand the process of “brainwashing.” Until my counselors were able to show me how other destructive cults, like the Krishnas,177 were structured in the same authoritarian manner as the Unification Church, I had believed that the Moonies were different from any other group. I was also able to show Phil that, as strange as they sounded, some of the Moonies’ beliefs did seem to make sense, if you believed in Moon and therefore the whole doctrine. I made sure to include the Moonies’ view on accidental deaths, so he could see that there were alternative belief systems that offered other explanations. It was also important for him to see that there are other groups which are led by people claiming to be spiritually superior. When I eventually told him that there were over 3000 cult groups, and that if one of them was in fact led by the one legitimate great leader (which I seriously doubted), then the odds that he would have found the right one on the first pick were 3000 to one. Not very good odds. I also showed him that I had been a dedicated cult member, and that I chose to leave the group for the “right” reasons. I wanted to challenge his indoctrination that people who leave do so because they are weak or undisciplined, or want to indulge in materialism. I wanted him to know that I left the Unification Church out of strength and integrity. I came to see objectively what I had been doing. I had devoted myself to a fantasy created in the Moonie indoctrination workshops. I thought I was following the Messiah—the person who would be able to end war, poverty, disease and corruption, and establish a Kingdom of Heaven on Earth. I didn’t mind sacrificing myself for these noble causes. I thought that as a member, I was teaching people the ultimate standard of love and truth, and living an exemplary life. Instead, I realized that I had learned to compromise my integrity in the name of God. I realized that the higher I rose in the organization, and the closer I got to Moon, the more obsessed I became. Power had become almost an addiction, and I began making choices based on what would protect and enhance my power, not on what was morally right.

• From Combating Cult Mind Control: The Guide to Protection, Rescue and Recovery from Destructive Cults (1988)

  I realize that this entire field is fraught with controversy, and I invite readers to consider that some people object to the word “cult” and some deny the reality of mind control. They are entitled to their opinions. But whatever we may call these things, they are real and often play decisive and, too often, destructive roles in people’s lives. I have lived it and I see it all the time. Throughout this book, we will delve more deeply into these issues and determine what is or is not a cult. But for our immediate purposes: I define any group that uses unethical mind control to pursue its ends—whether religious, political, or commercial—as a destructive cult. The popular view of cults is that they prey on the disaffected and the vulnerable—losers, loners, outcasts, and people who simply don’t fit in. But the truth is very different. In fact, most cult recruits are normal people with ordinary backgrounds—and many are highly intelligent. The world of Nineteen Eighty-Four was a far cry from the typically middle class American world of my childhood. I grew up in a conservative Jewish family in Flushing, Queens, New York, the youngest of three children and the only son. I vividly remember helping my father in his hardware store in Ozone Park. My mother, a junior high school art teacher, raised me in a warm, loving, unconditionally supportive way. Compared to many families, mine was boringly normal. My parents didn’t smoke, drink, gamble or have affairs. We lived in a humble attached row house near Union Turnpike, across the street from St. John’s University, for my entire childhood. My folks remained married for over sixty-five years. I look back on my childhood and remember myself as an introvert, not a joiner. While I always had a few close friends, I preferred reading books to going to parties. The only groups I really belonged to were my synagogue’s basketball team and a sixth grade chorus. I was an extra-honors student and was able to skip eighth grade. I graduated high school when I turned seventeen and turned my father down when he asked me if I wanted to take over his hardware business. I decided to pursue a liberal arts education at Queens College, which is where I first encountered the cult recruiters who conned me out of my dreams—and out of my Jewish faith—and turned me into a disciple of Sun Myung Moon, one of the most notorious cult leaders of our time. Collectively, we were known as “the Moonies.” We were as proud to call ourselves Moonies as the cult leader was that his followers had adopted the societal nickname.

• From Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood (2016)

  Once Mandela was elected we could finally live freely. Exiles started to return. I met my first one when I was around seventeen. He told me his story, and I was like, “Wait, what? You mean we could have left? That was an option?” Imagine being thrown out of an airplane. You hit the ground and break all your bones, you go to the hospital and you heal and you move on and finally put the whole thing behind you—and then one day somebody tells you about parachutes. That’s how I felt. I couldn’t understand why we’d stayed. I went straight home and asked my mom. “Why? Why didn’t we just leave? Why didn’t we go to Switzerland?” “Because I am not Swiss,” she said, as stubborn as ever. “This is my country. Why should I leave?” [image file=image_rsrc2TD.jpg] South Africa is a mix of the old and the new, the ancient and the modern, and South African Christianity is a perfect example of this. We adopted the religion of our colonizers, but most people held on to the old ancestral ways, too, just in case. In South Africa, faith in the Holy Trinity exists quite comfortably alongside belief in witchcraft, in casting spells and putting curses on one’s enemies. I come from a country where people are more likely to visit sangomas—shamans, traditional healers, pejoratively known as witch doctors—than they are to visit doctors of Western medicine. I come from a country where people have been arrested and tried for witchcraft—in a court of law. I’m not talking about the 1700s. I’m talking about five years ago. I remember a man being on trial for striking another person with lightning. That happens a lot in the homelands. There are no tall buildings, few tall trees, nothing between you and the sky, so people get hit by lightning all the time. And when someone gets killed by lightning, everyone knows it’s because somebody used Mother Nature to take out a hit. So if you had a beef with the guy who got killed, someone will accuse you of murder and the police will come knocking. “Mr. Noah, you’ve been accused of murder. You used witchcraft to kill David Kibuuka by causing him to be struck by lightning.” “What is the evidence?” “The evidence is that David Kibuuka got struck by lightning and it wasn’t even raining.” And you go to trial. The court is presided over by a judge. There is a docket. There is a prosecutor. Your defense attorney has to prove lack of motive, go through the crime-scene forensics, present a staunch defense. And your attorney’s argument can’t be “Witchcraft isn’t real.” No, no, no. You’ll lose.

• From Tropic of Capricorn (1934)

  And then came the little louse, as I was saying, a real louse which had gotten buried in my winter underwear. I got him out and I put him tenderly on the tip of a black key. Then I began to do a little gigue around him with my right hand; the noise had probably deafened him. He was hypnotized, it seemed, by my nimble pyrotechnic. This trancelike immobility finally got on my nerves. I decided to introduce a chromatic scale, coming down on him full force with my third finger. I caught him fair and square, but with such force that he was glued to my fingertip. That put the St. Vitus Dance in me. From then on the scherzo commenced. It was a potpourri of forgotten melodies spiced with aloes and the juice of porcupines, played sometimes in three keys at once and pivoting always like a waltzing mouse around the immaculate conception. Later, when I went to hear Prokofiev, I understood what was happening to him; I understood Whitehead and Russell and Jeans and Eddington and Rudolf Eucken and Frobenius and Link Gillespie; I understood why, if there had never been a binominal theorem, man would have invented it; I understood why electricity and compressed air, to say nothing of Sprudel baths and fango packs. I understood very clearly, I must say, that man has a dead louse in his blood, and that when you’re handed a symphony or a fresco or a high explosive you’re really getting an ipecac reaction which was not included in the predestined bill of fare. I understood too why I had failed to become the musician I was. All the compositions I had created in my head, all these private and artistic auditions which were permitted me, thanks to St. Hildegarde or St. Bridget, or John of the Cross, or God knows whom, were written for an age to come, an age with less instruments and stronger antennae, stronger eardrums too. A different kind of suffering has to be experienced before such music can be appreciated. Beethoven staked out the new territory—one is aware of its presence when he erupts, when he breaks down in the very core of his stillness. It is a realm of new vibrations—to us only a misty nebula, for we have yet to pass beyond our own conception of suffering. We have yet to ingest this nebulous world, its travail, its orientation. I was permitted to hear an incredible music lying prone and indifferent to the sorrow about me. I heard the gestation of the new world, the sound of torrential rivers taking their course, the sound of stars grinding and chafing, of fountains clotted with blazing gems. All music is still governed by the old astronomy, is the product of the hothouse, a panacea for Weltschmerz.

• From Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood (2016)

  The great thing about language is that you can just as easily use it to do the opposite: convince people that they are the same. Racism teaches us that we are different because of the color of our skin. But because racism is stupid, it’s easily tricked. If you’re racist and you meet someone who doesn’t look like you, the fact that he can’t speak like you reinforces your racist preconceptions: He’s different, less intelligent. A brilliant scientist can come over the border from Mexico to live in America, but if he speaks in broken English, people say, “Eh, I don’t trust this guy.” “But he’s a scientist.” “In Mexican science, maybe. I don’t trust him.” However, if the person who doesn’t look like you speaks like you, your brain short-circuits because your racism program has none of those instructions in the code. “Wait, wait,” your mind says, “the racism code says if he doesn’t look like me he isn’t like me, but the language code says if he speaks like me he…is like me? Something is off here. I can’t figure this out.” [image file=image_rsrc2TH.jpg] [image file=image_rsrc2TJ.jpg] CHAMELEONOne afternoon I was playing with my cousins. I was a doctor and they were my patients. I was operating on my cousin Bulelwa’s ear with a set of matches when I accidentally perforated her eardrum. All hell broke loose. My grandmother came running in from the kitchen. “Kwenzeka ntoni?!” “What’s happening?!” There was blood coming out of my cousin’s head. We were all crying. My grandmother patched up Bulelwa’s ear and made sure to stop the bleeding. But we kept crying. Because clearly we’d done something we were not supposed to do, and we knew we were going to be punished. My grandmother finished up with Bulelwa’s ear and whipped out a belt and she beat the shit out of Bulelwa. Then she beat the shit out of Mlungisi, too. She didn’t touch me. Later that night my mother came home from work. She found my cousin with a bandage over her ear and my gran crying at the kitchen table. “What’s going on?” my mom said. “Oh, Nombuyiselo,” she said. “Trevor is so naughty. He’s the naughtiest child I’ve ever come across in my life.” “Then you should hit him.” “I can’t hit him.” “Why not?” “Because I don’t know how to hit a white child,” she said. “A black child, I understand. A black child, you hit them and they stay black. Trevor, when you hit him he turns blue and green and yellow and red. I’ve never seen those colors before. I’m scared I’m going to break him. I don’t want to kill a white person. I’m so afraid. I’m not going to touch him.” And she never did.

• From Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood (2016)

  For my mother’s part, the fact that this man didn’t particularly want a family with her, was prevented by law from having a family with her, was part of the attraction. She wanted a child, not a man stepping in to run her life. For my father’s part, I know that for a long time he kept saying no. Eventually he said yes. Why he said yes is a question I will never have the answer to. Nine months after that yes, on February 20, 1984, my mother checked into Hillbrow Hospital for a scheduled C-section delivery. Estranged from her family, pregnant by a man she could not be seen with in public, she was alone. The doctors took her up to the delivery room, cut open her belly, and reached in and pulled out a half-white, half-black child who violated any number of laws, statutes, and regulations—I was born a crime. — When the doctors pulled me out there was an awkward moment where they said, “Huh. That’s a very light-skinned baby.” A quick scan of the delivery room revealed no man standing around to take credit. “Who is the father?” they asked. “His father is from Swaziland,” my mother said, referring to the tiny, landlocked kingdom in the west of South Africa. They probably knew she was lying, but they accepted it because they needed an explanation. Under apartheid, the government labeled everything on your birth certificate: race, tribe, nationality. Everything had to be categorized. My mother lied and said I was born in KaNgwane, the semi-sovereign homeland for Swazi people living in South Africa. So my birth certificate doesn’t say that I’m Xhosa, which technically I am. And it doesn’t say that I’m Swiss, which the government wouldn’t allow. It just says that I’m from another country. My father isn’t on my birth certificate. Officially, he’s never been my father. And my mother, true to her word, was prepared for him not to be involved. She’d rented a new flat for herself in Joubert Park, the neighborhood adjacent to Hillbrow, and that’s where she took me when she left the hospital. The next week she went to visit him, with no baby. To her surprise, he asked where I was. “You said that you didn’t want to be involved,” she said. And he hadn’t, but once I existed he realized he couldn’t have a son living around the corner and not be a part of my life. So the three of us formed a kind of family, as much as our peculiar situation would allow. I lived with my mom. We’d sneak around and visit my dad when we could.

• From Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood (2016)

  I looked at the screen and I realized: Teddy was dark. I am light; I have olive skin. But the camera can’t expose for light and dark at the same time. So when you put me on a black-and-white screen next to a black person, the camera doesn’t know what to do. If the camera has to pick, it picks me as white. My color gets blown out. In this video, there was a black person and a white person. But still: It was me. The picture wasn’t great, and my facial features were a bit blurry, but if you looked closely: It was me. I was Teddy’s best friend. I was Teddy’s only friend. I was the single most likely accomplice. You had to at least suspect that it was me. They didn’t. They grilled me for a good ten minutes, but only because they were so sure that I had to know who this white kid was. “Trevor, you’re Teddy’s best friend. Tell us the truth. Who is this kid?” “I don’t know.” “You don’t recognize him at all?” “No.” “Teddy never mentioned him to you?” “Never.” At a certain point Mrs. Vorster just started running through a list of all the white kids she thought it could be. “Is it David?” “No.” “Rian?” “No.” “Frederik?” “No.” I kept waiting for it to be a trick, for them to turn and say, “It’s you!” They didn’t. At a certain point, I felt so invisible I almost wanted to take credit. I wanted to jump up and point at the TV and say, “Are you people blind?! That’s me! Can you not see that that’s me?!” But of course I didn’t. And they couldn’t. These people had been so fucked by their own construct of race that they could not see that the white person they were looking for was sitting right in front of them. Eventually they sent me back to class. I spent the rest of the day and the next couple of weeks waiting for the other shoe to drop, waiting for my mom to get the call. “We’ve got him! We figured it out!” But the call never came. [image file=image_rsrc2UF.jpg] South Africa has eleven official languages. After democracy came, people said, “Okay, how do we create order without having different groups feel like they’ve been left out of power again?” English is the international language and the language of money and of the media, so we had to keep that. Most people were forced to learn at least some Afrikaans, so it’s useful to keep that, too. Plus we didn’t want the white minority to feel ostracized in the new South Africa, or else they’d take all their money and leave.

• From Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood (2016)

  I often meet people in the West who insist that the Holocaust was the worst atrocity in human history, without question. Yes, it was horrific. But I often wonder, with African atrocities like in the Congo, how horrific were they? The thing Africans don’t have that Jewish people do have is documentation. The Nazis kept meticulous records, took pictures, made films. And that’s really what it comes down to. Holocaust victims count because Hitler counted them. Six million people killed. We can all look at that number and rightly be horrified. But when you read through the history of atrocities against Africans, there are no numbers, only guesses. It’s harder to be horrified by a guess. When Portugal and Belgium were plundering Angola and the Congo, they weren’t counting the black people they slaughtered. How many black people died harvesting rubber in the Congo? In the gold and diamond mines of the Transvaal? So in Europe and America, yes, Hitler is the Greatest Madman in History. In Africa he’s just another strongman from the history books. In all my time hanging out with Hitler, I never once asked myself, “Why is his name Hitler?” His name was Hitler because his mom named him Hitler. — Once Bongani and I added the dancers to our DJ sets, we blew up. We called our group the Black and White Boys. The dancers were called the Springbok Boys. We started getting booked everywhere. Successful black families were moving to the suburbs, but their kids still wanted to have block parties and stay connected to the culture of the townships, so they’d book us to play their parties. Word of mouth traveled. Pretty soon we were getting booked more and more in the suburbs, meeting white people, playing for white people. One kid we knew from the township, his mother was involved in creating cultural programs for schools. In America they’d be called “diversity programs.” They were springing up all over South Africa because we were supposed to be learning about and embracing one another in this post-apartheid era. This kid’s mom asked us if we wanted to play at a cultural day at some school in Linksfield, the wealthy suburb south of Sandringham where my pal Teddy had lived. There was going to be all sorts of different dancing and music, and everyone was going to come together and hang out and be cultural. She offered to pay, so we said sure. She sent us the information with the time and place and the name of the school: the King David School. A Jewish school.

• From Stone Butch Blues (1993)

  Next I set out to learn about my aunt who died in New York City around 1929. She became an organizer for the International Ladies’ Garment Workers after her husband died. My father was always so proud that she merited an obituary in the New York Times. 1 remembered seeing it in the family scrapbook. I spent two weeks searching obituaries at the library, with no luck. I came close to giving up, but decided to try 1930. “There’s a half-hour limit today because we’re busy,” the woman behind the research counter said as she handed me the spool. I threaded the film and quickly fell into my routine of scanning headlines. I almost passed this one without registering its meaning: “Male Butler Discovered After Death To Be Woman.” My breathing slowed. I popped a quarter in the machine and printed out the article. I read each word carefully. The obituary reported the death of a servant Stone Butch Blues 263 in 1930. Her body was found in a rooming house. Her name was never mentioned. Nothing more: no diary, no clues. All I had were these few words on a page to know her by. I closed my eyes. I would never have the details of her life and yet I could feel its texture with my fingertips. Now I knew there was another woman in the world who had made the same complicated decision Rocco and I made. Time separated me from this anonymous servant. Space separated me from Rocco. The headline chilled me—het life reduced to eight flat words. I wondered if my life would be recorded in eight words or less. I stared at a spot high up on the wall, feeling empty and small. “Sit,” the librarian’s voice broke my thoughts, “your time is up.” The last task ’d set for myself was finding the Stonewall bar. I remembered the impact when we heard about the battle with the cops in 1969. I wanted to ask a passerby to take my picture in front of it. I thought someday, after I’d died, someone might find the photo and understand me a little better. “Do you know where the Stonewall bar is?” I 264 Leslie keinberg asked two gay men who were leaning up against a lamppost in Sheridan Square. “That used to be the bat.” One of the men pointed to a bagel shop. I sat down wearily on a park bench. A homeless man picked through the garbage can nearby. I’d seen him before. His bright African print fabric skirt brushed the sidewalk. Gauzy material wrapped his upper body, slung across one shoulder like an East Indian sari. He glided with grace and dignity. For a moment he looked up to argue with someone only he could see. The guttural words he spoke were strangely beautiful. No one else on this planet understood his language. His hands fluttered near his face as he talked, like dark birds winging on warm currents of air.

• From Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood (2016)

  My mother had exposed me to a different world than the one she grew up in. She bought me the books she never got to read. She took me to the schools that she never got to go to. I immersed myself in those worlds and I came back looking at the world a different way. I saw that not all families are violent. I saw the futility of violence, the cycle that just repeats itself, the damage that’s inflicted on people that they in turn inflict on others. I saw, more than anything, that relationships are not sustained by violence but by love. Love is a creative act. When you love someone you create a new world for them. My mother did that for me, and with the progress I made and the things I learned, I came back and created a new world and a new understanding for her. After that, she never raised her hand to her children again. Unfortunately, by the time she stopped, Abel had started. In all the times I received beatings from my mom, I was never scared of her. I didn’t like it, certainly. When she said, “I hit you out of love,” I didn’t necessarily agree with her thinking. But I understood that it was discipline and it was being done for a purpose. The first time Abel hit me I felt something I had never felt before. I felt terror. I was in grade six, my last year at Maryvale. We’d moved to Highlands North, and I’d gotten in trouble at school for forging my mom’s signature on some document; there was some activity I didn’t want to participate in, so I’d signed the release in her name to get out of it. The school called my mom, and she asked me about it when I got home that afternoon. I was certain she was going to punish me, but this turned out to be one of those times when she didn’t care. She said I should have just asked her; she would have signed the form anyway. Then Abel, who’d been sitting in the kitchen with us, watching the whole thing, said, “Hey, can I talk to you for a second?” Then he took me into this tiny room, a walk-in pantry off the kitchen, and he closed the door behind us. He was standing between me and the door, but I didn’t think anything of it. It didn’t occur to me to be scared. Abel had never tried to discipline me before. He’d never even given me a lecture. It was always “Mbuyi, your son did this,” and then my mother would handle it. And this was the middle of the afternoon. He was completely sober, which made what happened next all the more terrifying. “Why did you forge your mother’s signature?” he said.

• From Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood (2016)

  When democracy came, everyone had to be paid a minimum wage. The cost of labor went up, and suddenly millions of people were out of work. The unemployment rate for young black men post-apartheid shot up, sometimes as high as 50 percent. What happens to a lot of guys is they finish high school and they can’t afford university, and even little retail jobs can be hard to come by when you’re from the hood and you look and talk a certain way. So, for many young men in South Africa’s townships, freedom looks like this: Every morning they wake up, maybe their parents go to work or maybe not. Then they go outside and chill on the corner the whole day, talking shit. They’re free, they’ve been taught how to fish, but no one will give them a fishing rod. — One of the first things I learned in the hood is that there is a very fine line between civilian and criminal. We like to believe we live in a world of good guys and bad guys, and in the suburbs it’s easy to believe that, because getting to know a career criminal in the suburbs is a difficult thing. But then you go to the hood and you see there are so many shades in between. In the hood, gangsters were your friends and neighbors. You knew them. You talked to them on the corner, saw them at parties. They were a part of your world. You knew them from before they became gangsters. It wasn’t, “Hey, that’s a crack dealer.” It was, “Oh, little Jimmy’s selling crack now.” The weird thing about these gangsters was that they were all, at a glance, identical. They drove the same red sports car. They dated the same beautiful eighteen-year-old girls. It was strange. It was like they didn’t have personalities; they shared a personality. One could be the other, and the other could be the one. They’d each studied how to be that gangster. In the hood, even if you’re not a hardcore criminal, crime is in your life in some way or another. There are degrees of it. It’s everyone from the mom buying some food that fell off the back of a truck to feed her family, all the way up to the gangs selling military-grade weapons and hardware. The hood made me realize that crime succeeds because crime does the one thing the government doesn’t do: crime cares. Crime is grassroots. Crime looks for the young kids who need support and a lifting hand. Crime offers internship programs and summer jobs and opportunities for advancement. Crime gets involved in the community. Crime doesn’t discriminate.

• From The Laws of Human Nature (2018)

  sided, emphatic traits in yourself. Assume that the opposite trait lies buried deep within, and from there try to see more signs of this trait in your behavior. Look at your own emotional outbursts and moments of extreme touchiness. Somebody or something has struck a chord. Your sensitivity to a remark or imputation indicates a Shadow quality that is stirring, in the form of a deep insecurity. Bring it into the light. Look deeply at your tendencies to project emotions and bad qualities onto people you know, or even entire groups. For instance, say you really loathe narcissistic types or pushy people. What is happening is that you are probably brushing up against your own narcissistic tendencies and secret desire to be more assertive, in the form of a vehement denial or hatred. We are particularly sensitive to traits and weaknesses in others that we are repressing in ourselves. Look at moments in your youth (late teens, early twenties) in which you acted in a rather insensitive or even cruel manner. When you were younger, you had less control of the Shadow and it came out more naturally, not with the repressed force of later years. Later in his career, the writer Robert Bly (born 1926) began to feel depressed. His writing had become sterile. He started to think more and more about the Shadow side of his character. He was determined to find signs of it and consciously scrutinize it. Bly was the bohemian type of artist, very much active in the counterculture of the 1960s. His artistic roots went back to the Romantic artists of the early nineteenth century, men and women who extolled spontaneity and naturalness. In much of Bly’s own writing, he railed at advertising men and businesspeople—as he saw it, they were so calculating, planning everything to the extreme, afraid of the chaos of life, and quite manipulative. And yet, as he looked inward, Bly could catch glimpses of such calculating, manipulative qualities in himself. He too secretly feared moments of chaos in life, liked to plan things out and control events. He could be quite malicious with people he perceived to be so different, but in fact there was a part of the stockbroker and advertising man within him. Perhaps it was the deeper part of himself. Others told him that they saw him as rather classical in his taste and in his writing (constructing things well), something that bothered him, since he thought the opposite. But as he became increasingly honest with himself, he realized they were right. (People can often see our Shadow better than we can, and it would be wise to elicit their frank opinions on the subject.) Step by step he unearthed the dark qualities within—rigid, overly moralistic, et cetera—and in doing so he felt reconnected with the other half of his psyche. He could be honest with himself and channel the Shadow creatively. His depression lifted, as well as the writer’s block.

• From Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood (2016)

  Westerners are shocked and confused by that, but really it’s a case of the West reaping what it has sown. The colonial powers carved up Africa, put the black man to work, and did not properly educate him. White people don’t talk to black people. So why would black people know what’s going on in the white man’s world? Because of that, many black people in South Africa don’t really know who Hitler was. My own grandfather thought “a hitler” was a kind of army tank that was helping the Germans win the war. Because that’s what he took from what he heard on the news. For many black South Africans, the story of the war was that there was someone called Hitler and he was the reason the Allies were losing the war. This Hitler was so powerful that at some point black people had to go help white people fight against him—and if the white man has to stoop to ask the black man for help fighting someone, that someone must be the toughest guy of all time. So if you want your dog to be tough, you name your dog Hitler. If you want your kid to be tough, you name your kid Hitler. There’s a good chance you’ve got an uncle named Hitler. It’s just a thing. At Sandringham, we were taught more about World War II than the typical black kids in the townships were, but only in a basic way. We weren’t taught to think critically about Hitler and anti-Semitism and the Holocaust. We weren’t taught, for instance, that the architects of apartheid were big fans of Hitler, that the racist policies they put in place were inspired, in part, by the racist policies of the Third Reich. We weren’t taught how to think about how Hitler related to the world we lived in. We weren’t being taught to think, period. All we were taught was that in 1939 Hitler invaded Poland and in 1941 he invaded the Soviet Union and in 1943 he did something else. They’re just facts. Memorize them, write them down for the test, and forget them. There is also this to consider: The name Hitler does not offend a black South African because Hitler is not the worst thing a black South African can imagine. Every country thinks their history is the most important, and that’s especially true in the West. But if black South Africans could go back in time and kill one person, Cecil Rhodes would come up before Hitler. If people in the Congo could go back in time and kill one person, Belgium’s King Leopold would come way before Hitler. If Native Americans could go back in time and kill one person, it would probably be Christopher Columbus or Andrew Jackson.

• From Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood (2016)

  You don’t want to be in that class.” “But aren’t the classes the same? English is English. Math is math.” “Yeah, but that class is...those kids are gonna hold you back. You want to be in the smart class.” “But surely there must be some smart kids in the B class.” “No, there aren’t.” “But all my friends are there.” “You don’t want to be friends with those kids.” “Yes, I do.” We went back and forth. Finally she gave me a stern warning. “You do realize the effect this will have on your future? You do understand what you’re giving up? This will impact the opportunities you’ll have open to you for the rest of your life.” “I’ll take that chance.” I moved to the B classes with the black kids. I decided I’d rather be held back with people I liked than move ahead with people I didn’t know. Being at H. A. Jack made me realize I was black. Before that recess I’d never had to choose, but when I was forced to choose, I chose black. The world saw me as colored, but I didn’t spend my life looking at myself. I spent my life looking at other people. I saw myself as the people around me, and the people around me were black. My cousins are black, my mom is black, my gran is black. I grew up black. Because I had a white father, because I’d been in white Sunday school, I got along with the white kids, but I didn’t belong with the white kids. I wasn’t a part of their tribe. But the black kids embraced me. “Come along,” they said. “You’re rolling with us.” With the black kids, I wasn’t constantly trying to be. With the black kids, I just was. Before apartheid, any black South African who received a formal education was likely taught by European missionaries, foreign enthusiasts eager to Christianize and Westernize the natives. In the mission schools, black people learned English, European literature, medicine, the law. It’s no coincidence that nearly every major black leader of the anti-apartheid movement, from Nelson Mandela to Steve Biko, was educated by the missionaries—a knowledgeable man is a free man, or at least a man who longs for freedom. The only way to make apartheid work, therefore, was to cripple the black mind. Under apartheid, the government built what became known as Bantu schools. Bantu schools taught no science, no history, no civics. They taught metrics and agriculture: how to count potatoes, how to pave roads, chop wood, till the soil. “It does not serve the Bantu to learn history and science because he is primitive,” the government said. “This will only mislead him, showing him pastures in which he is not allowed to graze.” To their credit, they were simply being honest.

• From Stone Butch Blues (1993)

  Kim stared at me. Her face was still and sad. “I’m never going to see you again, am I?” she asked. I came over to her bed and kissed her forehead. “T’ll come back to you when it’s safe. You'll see me again, I promise. I love you, Kim. Go to sleep now.” She sighed and pulled the covers up to her chin. I continued to read until her breathing became heavy and rhythmic. What does it matter where people go? Anywhere, anywhere. I don’t know. Stone Butch Blues 183 IT WAS A MORNING IN APRIL that everything seemed to change at once. The birds chirped loudly outside my window at dawn. I rolled around lazily in bed. The sheets felt cool, the air smelled sweet. I reached for a cigarette, but the thought revolted me. I decided to take a long shower instead. As I brushed my teeth, I glanced in the mirror and had to look a second time. Beard stubble roughed my cheeks. My face looked slimmer and more angular. I stripped off my T-shirt and BVDs. My body was lean and hard. My hips had melted away. I could actually see muscles in my thighs and arms I never knew I had. Were the hormones stimulating muscles or just revealing them? This was almost the body I’d expected before puberty confounded me. Almost. I remembered the girls in high school who moaned because their breasts were small. I envied them for being flat-chested. That was within my reach now. I had saved sixteen hundred dollars over the winter toward breast reduction surgery. I took a hot, soapy shower, enjoying the feel of my hands on my skin. It had been so long since I’d been at home in my body. Soon that was going to change. As I combed my hair in front of the mirror, it occurred to me that I might be able to go to a barbershop. Our perfect DAs—one-inch all over— were maintained in the kitchens of hairdresser friends. I'd bought an old Trtumph motorcycle during the winter from a guy at work. I took it out of the garage, put a fresh quart of oil in it, and drove it across town to a barbershop in a neighborhood I’d never have to come back to if it turned out badly. The barber smiled at me. “Pll be with you in just a minute, sit.” I tried to hide my excitement as I leafed through a copy of Popular Mechanics. Vd never dared enter men’s turf like this before. The barber snapped a huge red cloth in the air. “Sir?” he beckoned for me to sit in the chair. He covered me with the red material and pulled it snug around my neck. “A trim?” I looked at myself in the mirror. “Well, maybe something different. Maybe it’s time for a change.” The barber smiled. “That’s up to you.” “T don’t know. Something neat.”