sincerely misguided
© Melina Magdalena (2010)
for grandparents
Yesterday was another important day in the life of our family. We held a thanksgiving service at home in the afternoon, and our son had a dedication in the morning, at my partner’s church. We get some pleasant compliments when we throw parties – and in doing so, we are building a community of friends and family here in Adelaide that feels strong and positive. It is great to offer hospitality and share our events with people we love and respect.
It occurs to me that we ask a lot, of the people around us, by being who we are and by living the way that we live. In making our expectations explicit through our actions and commitments, we merely reflect back the similarly unspoken majority mainstream, which is rarely brought into focus or questioned as to the correctness, validity or tastefulness of its presence. By choosing to live quietly and openly as a same-sex, mixed-faith couple with a child, there are an awful lot of aspects to our identities which cause anxiety and disquiet in people who position themselves squarely in the mainstream, and for whom coming into contact with us is far removed from what they perceive as normality.
However, we are not only interested in engaging the so-called mainstream. Naturally, most of our friends and family members do not identify as mainstream. But in preparing for our thanksgiving afternoon tea, we were acutely aware that in choosing to invite our neighbours to the celebration we hoped to build on the tenuous threads of connection that we have tentatively been establishing whilst living here, as well as sharing with them, our joy in the new life in our family. We live in an area that is rich in cultural and socioeconomic diversity. Building on the threads of common connection and shared humanity is the only way to find any hope of cohesion.
In the ceremony which we conducted to bless our baby and welcome him into the family, we omitted, for example, a Kiddush or blessing over wine which is a traditional and indeed central part of nearly every Jewish ritual. We could have used grape juice, but chose instead to incorporate a blessing over water, something with which our Muslim neighbours could also identify. We’ve all been experiencing a similar relief at the breaking of a long drought in our state.
Food is always an issue with us, as my partner is vegetarian and I am coeliac. This time we chose to have a vegetarian afternoon tea, not only because it is easy for us, and out of deference to the many vegetarians in our circle. We also chose not to have meat out of deference to our Muslim neighbours, for whom food that may not be halal, is problematic.
It irks me that they did not come and that indeed they did not even respond to our invitation. It’s ok – we’re a long way from giving up on this! But I’ve been thinking about it today, and realised that my own Jewish tradition, like Islam, has long demanded that its adherents separate and keep themselves apart from the general community, instead gathering in tightly insular, self-sustaining groups. In the light of certain interesting questions that were asked of us yesterday, and issues that have been raised because of yesterday, I have been tracing back what happened to make me the way I am, and to break me out of the mould of needing to keep myself apart.
I could not do the work that I do, which is teaching English to newcomers to Australia, without being open to the complexities of cultural and religious diversity. I am continually confronted in the classroom, by manifestations of diversity and incipient conflicts that arise from this. Ethics and conflict resolution are not directly part of our curricula, but maybe they need to be.
I was surprised week or two ago, whilst planning an end-of-term event with one of my classes, when a student challenged the easy statement I made, that if we were to have a BBQ of course the meat would need to be halal. “I’m not Muslim,” she said, “I’m Christian. So why do I have to have halal meat?” Good point, particularly since she comes from a war-torn region where religious conflict tore apart her family and community with the direct result that she is orphaned in Australia as guardian of two younger siblings, and worries incessantly for the safety of the other four who remain, inexplicably, marooned in their home country.
I didn’t have an adequate answer for her, but it’s something I would dearly love to take up in the classroom, after our holidays.
A Jewish friend commented last night that it must have hurt, to have my son dedicated in a church. She also asked, as though it were given, whether he had had a bris (ritual circumcision). My sister referred in passing, the other day, to the fact that our son won’t be raised as a Jew. I was struck by my strong internal reaction to all of these comments. I found these questions harder to deal with, than the question of a young boy in church yesterday, who asked me whether I was my son’s Dad.
Clearly, I am not completely reconciled to our situation, but I take comfort from the fact that our family is in a process of continuous transformation and conscious evolution. We are not set rigidly within a mould that would impose upon us certain conditions that we might not be able to live up to. With such freedom comes a great deal of responsibility. I feel that it I am responsible not only to my family and myself, but to exploring and explaining our situation to others, in the hope that they might also find understanding and acceptance of us. It’s not something I can take for granted, and it’s not something I feel comfortable in imposing upon those who would impose their ways upon us.
There have certainly been times in my life when I have felt threatened by Christianity, and when I could not have felt comfortable with having any kind of formal or semi-formal associations with a church, or church-members. Happily, I now dwell in a certainty that we share far more than I was once able to acknowledge. This does not feel threatening, most of the time. I still insist on certain latitudes of choice and distance, and as I said in the previous paragraph, my situation is in process of continual transformation. I am getting comfortable with who I am, and how I came to be.
I can state with flippancy that it would take far more than my son’s severed foreskin to convince others that he is Jewish, or to usher in the messianic age. But the issue of ritual circumcision is difficult and mystical, not very different from issues that confound me when I think about some of the difficult and mystical things that Christians do and believe. Indeed, the peculiar things central to all religions that seem strange to outsiders.
I cannot be flippant about my son’s religious identity. I did not birth him. Therefore the Jewish tradition that a child follows its mother’s Jewish identity cannot apply in our situation. Does this mean therefore that he is Christian, like his birth-mother? Christians do not have the same tradition – whether they are of the view that a baby can be baptised, or whether a person must choose to be baptised into a Christian church. Nevertheless, this is truly a dilemma for both of his mothers. We create ourselves as a family that is both Jewish and Christian.
We intend not to impose a singular identity on our children. Some might say such ambiguity in itself is cruel, but it is our conscious intention to not demand that our children choose one over the other. If we as parents can live (un)comfortably with our multiple identities, than so can they, we hope.
My understanding of life is directly related to the fact that I am a third generation person consciously committed to interfaith and intercultural understanding. My mother’s mother appears to have made a deliberate choice to intermarry and to raise her children in a new country and a liberal faith tradition that embraces diversity. Her husband of choice came from a family that brazenly defied the national xenophobic law and culture which destroyed most of her family. Her 6 children, as I am fond of reporting, adhere with their respective spouses to 6 different religious traditions!
My father’s father married a woman who had been raised within a small, insular German-speaking community. He and his wife (my paternal grandmother) raised their four children to recognise and respect diversity, something which each of them has passed onto their children, in a myriad of manifestations.
My mother and father have, in their lives, directly engaged in interfaith and intercultural activities that have spun a vast web of connections that sparks off every continent of this planet. This has been part of their personal and professional lives, and is a source of great pride and inspiration to me. They are quiet achievers, but their achievements have a depth of integrity which I draw on, in my own personal and professional life. It’s not for nothing, that we migrated to Australia; that they adopted children into our family as well as birthing them; or that we earnestly and sincerely bounced from one religion to another.
To turn back to my partner and me – at least we cannot be accused of lazily adhering to empty tradition for its own sake. Our situation demands that we grapple on a daily basis with what is at the hearts of our belief systems and values. Some might well accuse us of being misguided, but no one can accuse us of insincerity.
Sunday, September 26, 2010
Saturday, August 14, 2010
a protest vote?
a protest vote?
© Melina Magdalena (2010)
It was because of Facebook that I became aware of Wendy Francis and her obnoctious, hurtful, defamatory and vilifying comments. If I do a quick scan of my Facebook Friends, a good percentage of them are lesbian friends whom I’ve never met in person. I don’t have many face-to-face connections in Adelaide where I live, and my online lesbian parenting community has become a big part of my life.
However, during this election campaign I have been aware of Bob Day, and his obnoctious, excluding electioneering propaganda, because it came right into my letterbox, despite the “No Junk mail, thanks”, painted thoughtfully on said letterbox a week after we moved into Kilburn. The Family First Party proudly captions its candidates’ photographs with statistics on how many years each one has been happily married and, if possible, how many lovely children they have.
First of all, I watched the link posted to Facebook, of Wendy Francis and Fiona Patten, of the Australian Sex Party, when they appeared on
Sunrise, August 2 2010. I was first of all appalled by Wendy Francis’ complete lack of respect for the courtesies and formalities of a debate, and her gleeful verbal attack of everything that Fiona Patten said. I felt Wendy Francis came across as a defensive bully, who couldn’t allow Fiona Patten a chance to speak.
A few days later a different Facebook Friend posted a link to the comments that Wendy Francis published on Twitter, against gays having children. I was incensed and offended. For the next week, my updates on Facebook were mostly about this issue. The whole thing about Gay Marriage does not really move me one way or the other, but to accuse me of being a Child Abuser because I am a parent in a same-sex relationship really hurts and frightens me – especially because I’m quite open about my identity.
What is interesting is to see the reaction of my Facebook Friends to my furious status updates. Usually, there is a range of responses to my pithy and often ridiculously banal status updates. However, an uneasy silence seemed to reign this week, from many corners. So – is this the silent majority to which conspiracists enjoy attributing election results? Everyone was busy? Refugee issues are more important? We’re fed up with “liking” bits and pieces of election coverage? I don’t know.
Piqued, I chose to post a link to Clemetine Ford’s article published on ABC’s The Drum Unleashed, Family First Worth Fighting For. I picked out Ford’s argument about the demographic which happens to really be responsible for perpetrating most abuse against children in Australia, and commented: yup the stats on child abuse - whether physical or emotional or otherwise - speak loud and clear against straight white men parenting children. Of course, neither Ford nor I meant that therefore no one in that particular demographic ought to be allowed to parent children. Naturally, neither Ford nor I was implying that the majority of straight white men in Australia are Child Abusers.
In hindsight I don’t think I need to apologise to my Straight White Male friends or their spouses. Certainly, Wendy Francis can only tick two of those three boxes, so it would possibly have made more sense for me to be attacking Straight White Married Female Religious Fanatics. But even in our family-unfriendly society no one is claiming that Straight White Women should not be having babies!
On a side note, I really do need to take stock and mind my attitude, because as the mother of two sons I don’t want them believing they need to fit the stereotype’s mould and thereby earn my wrath and scorn. I don’t want them to be exposed to the kind of anti-male sentiments that women – both straight and bent – tend to indulge in, which of course, is the corollary of the kind of misogynist male talk that pervades our society (posted, incidentally, by another Facebook Friend). And no, while I am big enough to admit to this tendency of mine, I am not accusing all of my male friends of indulging in this. And seriously, I don’t want my boys thinking there is no way we can relate with mutual respect and affection.
What interests me is that a few of my Facebook Friends took great umbrage at my comment. I realise it is politically correct to swaddle Straight White Men in the heady embrace of adoration and abject gratitude for taking seriously, their roles as fathers and partners, and while my gag reflex is thereby triggered, it is mostly sour grapes for the lack of similar encouragement that women tend to receive for stepping outside their perceived roles and treading unfamiliar paths, with similarly varying degrees of success. Will these fathers and partners stop performing their roles if they aren’t given sufficient reason to keep them up? I don’t think so!
But this was not supposed to be another heterophobic verbal onslaught. I am fascinated by how people rose up in indignant affront when I was seen to be attacking the group who least require our support. These are the people who through no fault or effort of their own, have power and status granted to them simply because of their skin colour, gender, and sexual orientation.
Wendy Francis made very personal attacks on me, my partner and our child. She accused my partner and me of being Child Abusers. And this was supposed to be an intelligent and considered piece about why some of my Facebook Friends thought it was more important to stand up for the rights of straight white men, than to show empathy to families who have been attacked and publicly vilified across Australian media.
© Melina Magdalena (2010)
It was because of Facebook that I became aware of Wendy Francis and her obnoctious, hurtful, defamatory and vilifying comments. If I do a quick scan of my Facebook Friends, a good percentage of them are lesbian friends whom I’ve never met in person. I don’t have many face-to-face connections in Adelaide where I live, and my online lesbian parenting community has become a big part of my life.
However, during this election campaign I have been aware of Bob Day, and his obnoctious, excluding electioneering propaganda, because it came right into my letterbox, despite the “No Junk mail, thanks”, painted thoughtfully on said letterbox a week after we moved into Kilburn. The Family First Party proudly captions its candidates’ photographs with statistics on how many years each one has been happily married and, if possible, how many lovely children they have.
First of all, I watched the link posted to Facebook, of Wendy Francis and Fiona Patten, of the Australian Sex Party, when they appeared on
Sunrise, August 2 2010. I was first of all appalled by Wendy Francis’ complete lack of respect for the courtesies and formalities of a debate, and her gleeful verbal attack of everything that Fiona Patten said. I felt Wendy Francis came across as a defensive bully, who couldn’t allow Fiona Patten a chance to speak.
A few days later a different Facebook Friend posted a link to the comments that Wendy Francis published on Twitter, against gays having children. I was incensed and offended. For the next week, my updates on Facebook were mostly about this issue. The whole thing about Gay Marriage does not really move me one way or the other, but to accuse me of being a Child Abuser because I am a parent in a same-sex relationship really hurts and frightens me – especially because I’m quite open about my identity.
What is interesting is to see the reaction of my Facebook Friends to my furious status updates. Usually, there is a range of responses to my pithy and often ridiculously banal status updates. However, an uneasy silence seemed to reign this week, from many corners. So – is this the silent majority to which conspiracists enjoy attributing election results? Everyone was busy? Refugee issues are more important? We’re fed up with “liking” bits and pieces of election coverage? I don’t know.
Piqued, I chose to post a link to Clemetine Ford’s article published on ABC’s The Drum Unleashed, Family First Worth Fighting For. I picked out Ford’s argument about the demographic which happens to really be responsible for perpetrating most abuse against children in Australia, and commented: yup the stats on child abuse - whether physical or emotional or otherwise - speak loud and clear against straight white men parenting children. Of course, neither Ford nor I meant that therefore no one in that particular demographic ought to be allowed to parent children. Naturally, neither Ford nor I was implying that the majority of straight white men in Australia are Child Abusers.
In hindsight I don’t think I need to apologise to my Straight White Male friends or their spouses. Certainly, Wendy Francis can only tick two of those three boxes, so it would possibly have made more sense for me to be attacking Straight White Married Female Religious Fanatics. But even in our family-unfriendly society no one is claiming that Straight White Women should not be having babies!
On a side note, I really do need to take stock and mind my attitude, because as the mother of two sons I don’t want them believing they need to fit the stereotype’s mould and thereby earn my wrath and scorn. I don’t want them to be exposed to the kind of anti-male sentiments that women – both straight and bent – tend to indulge in, which of course, is the corollary of the kind of misogynist male talk that pervades our society (posted, incidentally, by another Facebook Friend). And no, while I am big enough to admit to this tendency of mine, I am not accusing all of my male friends of indulging in this. And seriously, I don’t want my boys thinking there is no way we can relate with mutual respect and affection.
What interests me is that a few of my Facebook Friends took great umbrage at my comment. I realise it is politically correct to swaddle Straight White Men in the heady embrace of adoration and abject gratitude for taking seriously, their roles as fathers and partners, and while my gag reflex is thereby triggered, it is mostly sour grapes for the lack of similar encouragement that women tend to receive for stepping outside their perceived roles and treading unfamiliar paths, with similarly varying degrees of success. Will these fathers and partners stop performing their roles if they aren’t given sufficient reason to keep them up? I don’t think so!
But this was not supposed to be another heterophobic verbal onslaught. I am fascinated by how people rose up in indignant affront when I was seen to be attacking the group who least require our support. These are the people who through no fault or effort of their own, have power and status granted to them simply because of their skin colour, gender, and sexual orientation.
Wendy Francis made very personal attacks on me, my partner and our child. She accused my partner and me of being Child Abusers. And this was supposed to be an intelligent and considered piece about why some of my Facebook Friends thought it was more important to stand up for the rights of straight white men, than to show empathy to families who have been attacked and publicly vilified across Australian media.
Sunday, July 11, 2010
Gardening Outside the Fence
Gardening Outside the Fence
© Melina Magdalena (2010)
I call it gardening outside the fence. It’s so easy and productive, that I think this style of growing vegetables and herbs could become as popular as Lolo Houbein’s “One Magic Square”. At present there are radishes, Japanese turnips, silverbeet, red chard, beetroots, snow peas and coriander in this garden strip. There are also two volunteer sunflowers, reminders of our first crop outside the fence, last spring and summer.
This morning I harvested some radishes and beets, sowed some carrot seed and planted out a few tiny parsley seedlings. While working I chatted with a few passers-by. One man just smiled and grunted a greeting. He’s the one who warned me not to bother planting the sunflowers, as the “kids around here” would just destroy them. A couple of months later though, he was also very happy to take home a seed-filled sunflower head for his cocky. Another man stopped and admired the crops. This was the first time I had spoken to him. He told me he has cabbages and carrots in his garden at home. Some kids ran past, busy with a project they have going on the back fence of the vacant lot over the road. They waved.
Last week I was hanging out the washing, and heard my bamboo poles being removed yet again, from the snow peas that have been straggling across the footpath instead of climbing them as they should. “Who is that outside my fence, stealing my sticks?” I roared in an imitation of the troll in Billy Goat’s Gruff. The chattering paused, and moved a little bit up the path. When I finished what I was doing, I took the baby out to see whether there were any sticks left. I chatted with the two little boys, aged 9 and 10, who live around the corner and were engaged in a vigorous sword fight with my bamboo poles. I explained to them what they were for, and told them to come back every week to check for peas. I said they can eat the peas if they find them on the plants.
Most of the houses in our suburb of Kilburn were built by public housing. They all seem to have their fence lines 30-50 cm away from the footpath. We are lucky enough to live on a corner, with the long side fence facing north. I noticed last winter that this strip of dirt was full of healthy weeds and I thought – why not dig up the weeds and replace them with something I want to grow? I set to work with my fork and spade and had soon filled the compost bin with weeds, and had a garden bed full of rich soil, which I have since manured and mulched at least twice, to keep it in good shape.
The sunflowers as I mentioned, were our first crop. They grew with strength and beauty in that sun, against the colourbond fence, and attracted a lot of positive attention. We are new to this area, and I’m keen to try and strike connections with other members of our community, which is diverse and changing. As well as the very poor, multi-generational unemployed white public housing residents, there are Aboriginal families and also families of new immigrants and refugees. I sometimes wonder whether they would take up gardening in their new homes, if they could access the tools and the seeds.
We already have a vege garden in the backyard. We have a couple of fruit trees as well. We are slowly working to establish a native garden in the front yard. I love gardening, and try to do a couple of hours in the garden every week, rain or as it mostly is in Adelaide, shine. So why garden outside the fence?
I grew up around Maylands and Payneham. Most of our neighbours were post-war southern European immigrants. Everyone had olive trees, fig trees, grape vines and vegetable gardens. This was part of my culture, way back before the subdivisions started. Every year, my brothers and sister and I were sent out to gather flowers and leaves to decorate our Easter nests. We built the nests out of grass clippings – my Dad always mowed the lawn on Easter Saturday. It was our time-honoured rule that anything hanging over or outside of the fence was fair game, and we could pick it with impunity. We could not, however, pick anything that was inside someone’s fence.
It occurred to me that I can adopt a different philosophy with the produce that I grow. I can share it, instead of keeping it just for us and ours. I’ve had my eye on a couple of traffic islands around the corner, wondering whether we could establish a community orchard on them, harvesting rainwater from the stormwater drains next-door to keep the fruit trees healthy.
Food growing on plants is not something that kids around here see every day. I’d like to show the kids around here how easy it is to grow good food. I rely on my fork for nearly all of the digging work that I do, and I would happily lend that fork to someone else, if she wanted to start a garden outside her fence. Or, I could help that person purchase a fork and spread the work around.
And so I’ve made a start. Last week a pair of Housing Trust maisonettes just like ours was knocked down opposite us. Apparently it could take a couple of years before building work commences on them. In the meantime, I think I’ll plant sunflowers over there, too. One of our neighbours pointed out that because this vacant lot is on a corner, people are sure to use it as a shortcut. That was useful information. I’ve decided to plant a double row of sunflowers marching diagonally from open corner to open corner. I imagine us Kilburnites might enjoy walking through an avenue of sunflowers when spring comes…
© Melina Magdalena (2010)
I call it gardening outside the fence. It’s so easy and productive, that I think this style of growing vegetables and herbs could become as popular as Lolo Houbein’s “One Magic Square”. At present there are radishes, Japanese turnips, silverbeet, red chard, beetroots, snow peas and coriander in this garden strip. There are also two volunteer sunflowers, reminders of our first crop outside the fence, last spring and summer.
This morning I harvested some radishes and beets, sowed some carrot seed and planted out a few tiny parsley seedlings. While working I chatted with a few passers-by. One man just smiled and grunted a greeting. He’s the one who warned me not to bother planting the sunflowers, as the “kids around here” would just destroy them. A couple of months later though, he was also very happy to take home a seed-filled sunflower head for his cocky. Another man stopped and admired the crops. This was the first time I had spoken to him. He told me he has cabbages and carrots in his garden at home. Some kids ran past, busy with a project they have going on the back fence of the vacant lot over the road. They waved.
Last week I was hanging out the washing, and heard my bamboo poles being removed yet again, from the snow peas that have been straggling across the footpath instead of climbing them as they should. “Who is that outside my fence, stealing my sticks?” I roared in an imitation of the troll in Billy Goat’s Gruff. The chattering paused, and moved a little bit up the path. When I finished what I was doing, I took the baby out to see whether there were any sticks left. I chatted with the two little boys, aged 9 and 10, who live around the corner and were engaged in a vigorous sword fight with my bamboo poles. I explained to them what they were for, and told them to come back every week to check for peas. I said they can eat the peas if they find them on the plants.
Most of the houses in our suburb of Kilburn were built by public housing. They all seem to have their fence lines 30-50 cm away from the footpath. We are lucky enough to live on a corner, with the long side fence facing north. I noticed last winter that this strip of dirt was full of healthy weeds and I thought – why not dig up the weeds and replace them with something I want to grow? I set to work with my fork and spade and had soon filled the compost bin with weeds, and had a garden bed full of rich soil, which I have since manured and mulched at least twice, to keep it in good shape.
The sunflowers as I mentioned, were our first crop. They grew with strength and beauty in that sun, against the colourbond fence, and attracted a lot of positive attention. We are new to this area, and I’m keen to try and strike connections with other members of our community, which is diverse and changing. As well as the very poor, multi-generational unemployed white public housing residents, there are Aboriginal families and also families of new immigrants and refugees. I sometimes wonder whether they would take up gardening in their new homes, if they could access the tools and the seeds.
We already have a vege garden in the backyard. We have a couple of fruit trees as well. We are slowly working to establish a native garden in the front yard. I love gardening, and try to do a couple of hours in the garden every week, rain or as it mostly is in Adelaide, shine. So why garden outside the fence?
I grew up around Maylands and Payneham. Most of our neighbours were post-war southern European immigrants. Everyone had olive trees, fig trees, grape vines and vegetable gardens. This was part of my culture, way back before the subdivisions started. Every year, my brothers and sister and I were sent out to gather flowers and leaves to decorate our Easter nests. We built the nests out of grass clippings – my Dad always mowed the lawn on Easter Saturday. It was our time-honoured rule that anything hanging over or outside of the fence was fair game, and we could pick it with impunity. We could not, however, pick anything that was inside someone’s fence.
It occurred to me that I can adopt a different philosophy with the produce that I grow. I can share it, instead of keeping it just for us and ours. I’ve had my eye on a couple of traffic islands around the corner, wondering whether we could establish a community orchard on them, harvesting rainwater from the stormwater drains next-door to keep the fruit trees healthy.
Food growing on plants is not something that kids around here see every day. I’d like to show the kids around here how easy it is to grow good food. I rely on my fork for nearly all of the digging work that I do, and I would happily lend that fork to someone else, if she wanted to start a garden outside her fence. Or, I could help that person purchase a fork and spread the work around.
And so I’ve made a start. Last week a pair of Housing Trust maisonettes just like ours was knocked down opposite us. Apparently it could take a couple of years before building work commences on them. In the meantime, I think I’ll plant sunflowers over there, too. One of our neighbours pointed out that because this vacant lot is on a corner, people are sure to use it as a shortcut. That was useful information. I’ve decided to plant a double row of sunflowers marching diagonally from open corner to open corner. I imagine us Kilburnites might enjoy walking through an avenue of sunflowers when spring comes…
Thursday, March 25, 2010
Chicken Livers
Chicken Livers
© Melina Magdalena (2010)
“ I’m off to cook chicken livers for my children now,” I announced to my colleagues as I left the office.
“What?” asked one of them.
“Chicken livers – we all love them. When we were really poor we found out they’re one of the cheapest sources of iron-rich foods.”
As soon as I was ready to cook, I measured out 2 cups of basmati rice, washed it once and left it to soak in some cold water for 15 minutes.
My son accepted my dinner invitation with one proviso. He was going for a run later, with an old school friend, so he couldn’t stay all evening. (He must be doing OK again, if he was willing to see me.) I had told him I would cook fish, so it wasn’t just the lure of the chicken livers.
I bought 500g free range chicken livers last time I was at the Central Market. Well, haha – when they were attached to the chickens they were not free range. I froze them and then thawed them in the fridge overnight, but they were still half-frozen this afternoon when I was ready to cook. That made it easy to slice and dice them into small pieces.
My daughter had her first prac in a piggery today, and she was not going to go to karate if she smelled too bad. But she really wanted to go to karate, so I agreed to drop her off after she had a shower. (She usually catches the bus.) She made sure I would leave her some pilaf for when she got home.
I heated a little olive oil in a heavy-based saucepan and saut̩ed the livers whilst I chopped up a lot of garlic very fine, and added it to the livers. Our parsley dried up in the late summer sun, so I had to make do with some celery chopped fine. Parsley is better Рit looks good to have the dark green flecks, and it adds flavour. The celery went in next.
After I learned to make this dish, I used to cook it a few times each year – always in sufficient quantities that we could eat the leftovers for breakfast, and lunch next day. It’s a simple recipe, and so nutritious and delicious. I do recall once, during the most strenuous growing times, there were no leftovers – everything was eaten and the bowls were licked clean.
I strained the rice and added it to the garlic, celery and livers, and stirred frequently with a wooden spoon. We were out of currants, so I throw in a couple of handsful of sultanas, and about 2 teaspoons of cracked black pepper. Then 6 cups of water (no need for stock because the livers make it flavourful), stir it through one last time, turn up the heat, put the lid on, and let it cook.
Despite the extra drive to Kilkenny and back to get my daughter to karate, I managed to prepare the cucumber and yoghurt by the time my son arrived, and I was chopping some vegetables for a side dish. His face lit up.
“What are we having? That smells good! Ah, vegetables!” (It was just carrot, cauliflower and broccoli in a pot with some water – nothing special. (He’s not eating terribly well at his Dad’s, I note.)
He sat down to read bits of the newspapers that were lying around on the table. There was an article about the primary school he and his sister used to go to. There was a lot of sport in the Messenger this week. There was an image of virile masculinity on the front cover – representatives of all the SANFL football clubs with their faces and shoulders painted. My son called them a rude name. He didn’t sign up for football this season, on the grounds of unfitness. I’m thankful once again, that he has friends to go running with.
Here’s how I prepared the cucumber and yoghurt salad: grate a large cucumber, drain off the juice and drink it – it’s delicious. Sprinkle on a pinch of salt, a scant teaspoon of dried mint and twice that amount of dill tips. Scoop in a lot of plain yoghurt, and dribble a dash of lemon juice or white vinegar over the top. Mix well, and stash in the fridge to serve with the pilaf.
My son and I dished up enormous quantities and sat down together at the table to eat and chat about life, university and whatever he felt like telling me about. I managed not to annoy him too much with details from my working life.
“What’s the kid going to be?” he asked at one point, “a girl or a boy?”
“We don’t know yet,” I said. Then – “Everyone says it’s a boy.”
He looked at me sharply – “Who’s everyone?”
“Oh you know,” I mumbled, regretting bringing up hocus pocus, because now he’s living with his Dad such matters are clearly off limits, “People who think they have a feeling about such things. They all think it’s a boy.”
“But the doctor?”
“No, we didn’t get it looked into. It’s going to be a surprise.”
At that point I realised I’d forgotten to toast the pine nuts – whoops! So I got up and did that, then added some to the pilaf on our plates and the rest to the pilaf still in the pot.
After tea, he used the computer in the dining room to do some study. I used my laptop in the lounge room to check my emails. It was very companionable. He left for his run before his sister came home. By that time, I was reading a novel. I only regret not getting up to hug him as he went out the door, but on the other hand, maybe it’s better I didn’t push that boundary too far…
His sister eventually returned from karate, sniffed the air and said “Did you leave some for me?” She devoured two plates full of the stuff, plus veges on the side, and then drank all the water that the vegetables had cooked in. After all, she’d spent 8 hours at university today, plus an hour and a half of karate. She had earned her appetite.
“Yum,” she said, “Do you like this stuff too, Mum?”
“It’s bitter, isn’t it?” I said.
“No – here, you taste it.”
I did. It tasted like a mild vegetable soup.
My partner, who is vegetarian, goes to her Christian lesbian group on a Thursday, so I didn’t need to worry about having meat for tea. This pilaf is good made with mushrooms instead, but if you use mushrooms, sauté them with a lot of chopped onions first, and use a bit of stock in the water.
I fantasise a little that when I’m at work today and my daughter is at uni, my partner might lift the lid off the leftover chicken liver pilaf that’s in the fridge, and just take a tiny taste. I know she’s vegetarian for political and ethical reasons, but if she just tasted my pilaf, it might be good for her, and for the baby.
In recalling my vegetarian years, the transition phase came after I bought dill pickles and mettwurst at the Central Market. My kids were still preschoolers at that time. We ate these foods ravenously and I realised again how much I was missing the food I had grown up with. But I didn’t know how to prepare meat dishes.
Then I went to my very first Passover Seder. It was the Communal Seder at the Reform Synagogue here in Adelaide. On every table was a little dish of chopped livers, made – I found out later, by the husband of the head of the Catering Committee. Well – I took one taste and could not stop. It was so delicious!
This is a fitting memory as we approach the Passover Season once again this year. My daughter asked me last night when we were going to have our family Seder. “Then we get to have chicken livers again!” she said gleefully, “and I’m going to eat a lot of Charoset, as well. I still don’t understand why people don’t make that at other times of the year!”
“Well, if you learn to make it, you can have it whenever you like,” I told her.
All is well at our house, when chicken livers are on the menu.
Chicken Liver Pilaf
500g free range chicken livers – chopped fine
1 tablespoon olive oil
4-6 cloves garlic – chopped fine
½ cup chopped parsley (celery plus leaves is a good substitute)
2 cups basmati rice – washed once, soaked in cold water, then drained
1 cup dried blackcurrants, or sultanas
2 teaspoons cracked black pepper
6 cups water
½ cup toasted pine nuts
salt to taste (when serving)
1.Use a heavy-based pot if possible. Sautee livers gently in oil.
2.Add garlic and parsley, stir intermittently for about 5 minutes.
3.Add pepper, rice and currants, stir well. The idea is to mix everything together so that the oil will stop the rice from sticking.
4.Pour on the water, bring to the boil, put the lid on, turn the heat down, and allow to cook undisturbed until the rice has absorbed the liquid (15 minutes approximately). It’s ok to lift the lid to check on the rice, but try not to open the pot too often because it lets too much steam escape.
5. Stir in the toasted pine nuts just before serving.
Serve with cucumber and yoghurt, and a side dish of vegetables of your choice.
Cucumber and Yoghurt Salad
This is a close relation to the Turkish cacik and the Greek tzatziki, but milder. I think there is a European cucumber salad too, that’s very like this one.
1 large cucumber, grated and drained.
pinch of salt
scant teaspoon dried mint, or 1 teaspoon fresh mint, chopped finely
2 teaspoons dried dill tips, or 4 teaspoons fresh dill tips, chopped finely
dash of lemon juice or white vinegar
2 cups plain yoghurt (greek style is good)
Mix well and refrigerate until serving time.
© Melina Magdalena (2010)
“ I’m off to cook chicken livers for my children now,” I announced to my colleagues as I left the office.
“What?” asked one of them.
“Chicken livers – we all love them. When we were really poor we found out they’re one of the cheapest sources of iron-rich foods.”
As soon as I was ready to cook, I measured out 2 cups of basmati rice, washed it once and left it to soak in some cold water for 15 minutes.
My son accepted my dinner invitation with one proviso. He was going for a run later, with an old school friend, so he couldn’t stay all evening. (He must be doing OK again, if he was willing to see me.) I had told him I would cook fish, so it wasn’t just the lure of the chicken livers.
I bought 500g free range chicken livers last time I was at the Central Market. Well, haha – when they were attached to the chickens they were not free range. I froze them and then thawed them in the fridge overnight, but they were still half-frozen this afternoon when I was ready to cook. That made it easy to slice and dice them into small pieces.
My daughter had her first prac in a piggery today, and she was not going to go to karate if she smelled too bad. But she really wanted to go to karate, so I agreed to drop her off after she had a shower. (She usually catches the bus.) She made sure I would leave her some pilaf for when she got home.
I heated a little olive oil in a heavy-based saucepan and saut̩ed the livers whilst I chopped up a lot of garlic very fine, and added it to the livers. Our parsley dried up in the late summer sun, so I had to make do with some celery chopped fine. Parsley is better Рit looks good to have the dark green flecks, and it adds flavour. The celery went in next.
After I learned to make this dish, I used to cook it a few times each year – always in sufficient quantities that we could eat the leftovers for breakfast, and lunch next day. It’s a simple recipe, and so nutritious and delicious. I do recall once, during the most strenuous growing times, there were no leftovers – everything was eaten and the bowls were licked clean.
I strained the rice and added it to the garlic, celery and livers, and stirred frequently with a wooden spoon. We were out of currants, so I throw in a couple of handsful of sultanas, and about 2 teaspoons of cracked black pepper. Then 6 cups of water (no need for stock because the livers make it flavourful), stir it through one last time, turn up the heat, put the lid on, and let it cook.
Despite the extra drive to Kilkenny and back to get my daughter to karate, I managed to prepare the cucumber and yoghurt by the time my son arrived, and I was chopping some vegetables for a side dish. His face lit up.
“What are we having? That smells good! Ah, vegetables!” (It was just carrot, cauliflower and broccoli in a pot with some water – nothing special. (He’s not eating terribly well at his Dad’s, I note.)
He sat down to read bits of the newspapers that were lying around on the table. There was an article about the primary school he and his sister used to go to. There was a lot of sport in the Messenger this week. There was an image of virile masculinity on the front cover – representatives of all the SANFL football clubs with their faces and shoulders painted. My son called them a rude name. He didn’t sign up for football this season, on the grounds of unfitness. I’m thankful once again, that he has friends to go running with.
Here’s how I prepared the cucumber and yoghurt salad: grate a large cucumber, drain off the juice and drink it – it’s delicious. Sprinkle on a pinch of salt, a scant teaspoon of dried mint and twice that amount of dill tips. Scoop in a lot of plain yoghurt, and dribble a dash of lemon juice or white vinegar over the top. Mix well, and stash in the fridge to serve with the pilaf.
My son and I dished up enormous quantities and sat down together at the table to eat and chat about life, university and whatever he felt like telling me about. I managed not to annoy him too much with details from my working life.
“What’s the kid going to be?” he asked at one point, “a girl or a boy?”
“We don’t know yet,” I said. Then – “Everyone says it’s a boy.”
He looked at me sharply – “Who’s everyone?”
“Oh you know,” I mumbled, regretting bringing up hocus pocus, because now he’s living with his Dad such matters are clearly off limits, “People who think they have a feeling about such things. They all think it’s a boy.”
“But the doctor?”
“No, we didn’t get it looked into. It’s going to be a surprise.”
At that point I realised I’d forgotten to toast the pine nuts – whoops! So I got up and did that, then added some to the pilaf on our plates and the rest to the pilaf still in the pot.
After tea, he used the computer in the dining room to do some study. I used my laptop in the lounge room to check my emails. It was very companionable. He left for his run before his sister came home. By that time, I was reading a novel. I only regret not getting up to hug him as he went out the door, but on the other hand, maybe it’s better I didn’t push that boundary too far…
His sister eventually returned from karate, sniffed the air and said “Did you leave some for me?” She devoured two plates full of the stuff, plus veges on the side, and then drank all the water that the vegetables had cooked in. After all, she’d spent 8 hours at university today, plus an hour and a half of karate. She had earned her appetite.
“Yum,” she said, “Do you like this stuff too, Mum?”
“It’s bitter, isn’t it?” I said.
“No – here, you taste it.”
I did. It tasted like a mild vegetable soup.
My partner, who is vegetarian, goes to her Christian lesbian group on a Thursday, so I didn’t need to worry about having meat for tea. This pilaf is good made with mushrooms instead, but if you use mushrooms, sauté them with a lot of chopped onions first, and use a bit of stock in the water.
I fantasise a little that when I’m at work today and my daughter is at uni, my partner might lift the lid off the leftover chicken liver pilaf that’s in the fridge, and just take a tiny taste. I know she’s vegetarian for political and ethical reasons, but if she just tasted my pilaf, it might be good for her, and for the baby.
In recalling my vegetarian years, the transition phase came after I bought dill pickles and mettwurst at the Central Market. My kids were still preschoolers at that time. We ate these foods ravenously and I realised again how much I was missing the food I had grown up with. But I didn’t know how to prepare meat dishes.
Then I went to my very first Passover Seder. It was the Communal Seder at the Reform Synagogue here in Adelaide. On every table was a little dish of chopped livers, made – I found out later, by the husband of the head of the Catering Committee. Well – I took one taste and could not stop. It was so delicious!
This is a fitting memory as we approach the Passover Season once again this year. My daughter asked me last night when we were going to have our family Seder. “Then we get to have chicken livers again!” she said gleefully, “and I’m going to eat a lot of Charoset, as well. I still don’t understand why people don’t make that at other times of the year!”
“Well, if you learn to make it, you can have it whenever you like,” I told her.
All is well at our house, when chicken livers are on the menu.
Chicken Liver Pilaf
500g free range chicken livers – chopped fine
1 tablespoon olive oil
4-6 cloves garlic – chopped fine
½ cup chopped parsley (celery plus leaves is a good substitute)
2 cups basmati rice – washed once, soaked in cold water, then drained
1 cup dried blackcurrants, or sultanas
2 teaspoons cracked black pepper
6 cups water
½ cup toasted pine nuts
salt to taste (when serving)
1.Use a heavy-based pot if possible. Sautee livers gently in oil.
2.Add garlic and parsley, stir intermittently for about 5 minutes.
3.Add pepper, rice and currants, stir well. The idea is to mix everything together so that the oil will stop the rice from sticking.
4.Pour on the water, bring to the boil, put the lid on, turn the heat down, and allow to cook undisturbed until the rice has absorbed the liquid (15 minutes approximately). It’s ok to lift the lid to check on the rice, but try not to open the pot too often because it lets too much steam escape.
5. Stir in the toasted pine nuts just before serving.
Serve with cucumber and yoghurt, and a side dish of vegetables of your choice.
Cucumber and Yoghurt Salad
This is a close relation to the Turkish cacik and the Greek tzatziki, but milder. I think there is a European cucumber salad too, that’s very like this one.
1 large cucumber, grated and drained.
pinch of salt
scant teaspoon dried mint, or 1 teaspoon fresh mint, chopped finely
2 teaspoons dried dill tips, or 4 teaspoons fresh dill tips, chopped finely
dash of lemon juice or white vinegar
2 cups plain yoghurt (greek style is good)
Mix well and refrigerate until serving time.
Thursday, March 18, 2010
And Ain't I A Human?
Ain’t I A Human?*
© Melina Magdalena (2010)
*paraphrased from Sojourner Truth’s 1851 speech “Ain’t I A Woman?
While we prepared for our union, deliberately not called a wedding, we laughed a little bitterly about the role of institutionalized worship in our relationship. A Reform Jewish Rabbi would have been happy to formalize my partnership with another woman; if only she had also been a Jew; a Christian cleric might have been persuaded to officiate at a mixed-faith ceremony; if only it had not been a same-sex union. And on and on and on the merry-go-round turns, scarcely deviating in its course of division, subjugation and demoralisation.
As for the state of our union? A year and a bit down the track, all of our friends and family members refer to our carefully and cumbersomely titled “Promise Making Ceremony and Celebration” as our wedding. We bow to the inevitable, and do the same. There is no essential difference between our marriage and how any couple learns to make a life together. Life is good. We are expecting our first child in a couple of months, and so our world expands, unfolds and blossoms.
By the way we did mention God – and even Jesus – in our ceremony. The multitude sanctioning our union by their presence included a Catholic nun and representatives of Protestant Christian ministry in their double digits, but sadly no representatives of Jewish ministry, mostly because I have chosen in my last ten years or so, not to engage with my Jewish world on an institutional level. No lightning struck.
The reflections by Gordon Preece, commissioning editor of Zadok Perspectives , on an article written by my beloved’s mother, and printed in No. 106 of this publication, (Autumn 2010) deny our humanity in a vicious and sustained attack upon us as lesbians. I found it shocking, but my beloved assures me that she could have a “conversation” of this nature every day of every week of her life, with someone in “the church”, if she chose to embark on such a self-abnegating venture, which she doesn’t.
The banality of Preece’s so-called scholarship is exposed by the various and oft-cited authoritative texts and ideas to which he refers in his editorial, compared with the single source chosen by him to represent queer thinking – the lyrics to the satirical and deliberately outrageous song by Lily Allen and Gregory Kurstin. In a paragraph where Preece denies church leadership roles for “practising gays”, he demands that “Both sides should move from hostility to hospitality”. Preece is sadly mistaken to assume that his carefully scripted attack on queer humanity is any less damaging than Allen and Kurstin’s song lyrics, just because of the format he has chosen. His attack cuts far more deeply, because it is couched in hypocritically nice language of “clarity and charity”, which very clearly expresses his hatred for me as a lesbian.
=Fuck You Very Much is a refreshingly honest response to those who like to practice their bigoted faith with low acts of hypocrisy and violence against people like me. I’m not just referring to Gay Bashing, as practiced against men in Australia; Corrective Rape, practiced against lesbians in South Africa, and Other Forms of Murder, practiced against homosexuals, transsexuals and queer people the world over, from Uganda to the = United States of America .
Homophobia is mainstream hatred which queer people face every day of our lives, from the ordinary bigoted people who inhabit the worlds in which we as queer people also dwell. The idea that homosexual people are not human enough to lead other human beings in a church context is as homophobic and potentially murderous as physical violence. With his denial of church leadership roles for “practising gays”, Preece advocates spiritual murder.
The issue is always the same. Whether it is the colour of one’s skin; one’s status as a slave or free born; the religious heritage of one’s grandparents and other forebears; the language one learned as a child; the borders of the nation where one was born; physical deformity, infirmity or simply difference, human beings are expert formulators of reasons as to why some people are awarded the title of being human, whilst others are resolutely denied that privilege. Such narrow-mindedness is almost amusing, in an issue of this publication which is sub-titled “Difference & Difficulty”. I cannot laugh at it however. It makes me angry. I must express that anger, lest I internalise it and fall into a depression. Unlike my beloved, I do not have decades of resistance behind me, to bolster my reactions.
Preece has a plethora of groups to choose from in this issue of Zadok. Should he marginalise and condemn people with mental illness? No, that is no longer politically correct, because sufferers who are appropriately medicated can live fulfilling (heterosexual) lives. People with schizophrenia may be dangerous and street-people are tragic, but Preece correctly defines mentally ill people as victims who are deserving of Christian charity. Perhaps then, the spotlight should be turned on the women and men of the church who remain single? Does their failure to marry not mask the fact that they are running around and engaging in illicit sexual relationships outside the institution of marriage? We cannot, surely, in good conscience, accuse virgin missionaries of such shenanigans. Let us let the single people be. Ok, so if not the mentally ill, nor the single people, what about people whose physical bodies fail to match up with what we refer to as normal? These are people whose bodies work in different ways from ours; those who compensate for a lack of hearing, by developing a rich and creative culture from which normal people are barred from participating, simply because we do hear. They are shutting us out. Should we not shun them, and stop them from cultural expression? Surely not! Jesus is cited as specifically including people with disabilities in his house as “an indispensable part of God’s family”. We must instead demand that these groups return the favour.
It is notable that Preece avoids the debate over whether homosexuality is a choice, or biological. The choice that he mentions involves homosexual practice versus (presumably) celibacy. I fail to understand how my homosexual practice hurts anyone at all. The artificiality of separating sexuality from sex is highlighted when religion tries to defend its homophobic stance. The only people who are supposed to be having sex are those who are having sex with their heterosexual marriage partner. So he can have sex with his wife. Fine. But two women or two men who are in a committed marriage-like relationship are not supposed to express themselves sexually, because…?
For religious adherents, whether they be Christian or Jewish, (since those are the two religious systems that come directly into play in my life), around the heart of the fear of same-sex attraction lies a framework of control devices – belief systems, dogma and rules – that are designed to ensure compliance and conformity. This structure need not be thorn-covered, to divide the acceptable, from the unacceptable. Anyone who is born unable to conform and comply because of the nature of their being is constricted and tortured if he or she is brought up within that structure. My partner describes how wonderfully safe it felt during her childhood, to know her boundaries and where she fit in. She also tells how impossible it was to fit in, when she discovered that she was the wrong sexuality. This was not something she could alter, but in order for her to survive, her worldview had to shift radically in order to accommodate her difference.
Preece expresses concern that in our postmodern world we are kneeling down to difference. He suggests that the concept of difference has taken centre stage on the altar of our western culture and threatens to become the idol of our religious focus, as well. It is a strange fear. Fashioned by God as we were – perhaps even created in the image of God – diversity exists at the deepest level of creation. What use is there in denying the differences that exist between us? With such a fear focus, Preece forgets that there is much more that unites us, than what divides us from one another.
The fear of what is similar lies at the heart of homophobia. Heterosexual people fear homosexuality not because it hurts them or even affects them directly in any way at all, but because they have been taught that it is something to be feared and avoided. To be called homosexual is to be called sub-human and abnormal – Preece has clearly never conquered an upbringing where he was told that homosexuals are mutant deviant dangerous monsters. I can presume he would pass this message onto his own offspring as well, which is monstrous.
The issue is always the same, and it is sad that a publication which purports to “promote informed theological reflection and engagement by people from all walks of life, in relation to Australian public, working, and personal life” continues to support homophobia and to deny the status of homosexual people as human beings. Naturally, issues around bisexuality, transgender and intersex people are ignored in his editorial. It is as though Preece, as representative of Christian thought on the matter, remains firmly blinkered to the realities of human diversity. As my beloved’s mother points out – Jesus was not so blinkered.
What is it, to be human? Like my beloved, I also work with new-comers to Australia. It is work that never fails to move me, in many directions. One of my students posed this question last week, in an English class. We were on the topic of Open Questions; based around the wh- words: who, what, where, why, which, when and how. He wrote on his form “Why are you a human?” and proceeded to parade that question past his bemused classmates, who were unprepared for such a deeply philosophical task. (Their questions were at a different level: “When did you come to Australia?” “Where do you live?” “Which bus do you catch?”) No one could offer a satisfactory response to my deep-thinker and when I turned the question upon him, he could only laugh, and say “I asked you first!”
The concept of a tribe of homosexuals is no less frightening than any tribe of outsiders. For those within the tribe there is at least a feeling of safety in numbers. The reality is that in most Christian congregations there is likely to be a smaller ratio of queer Christians than the 8-10% cited by my mother-ex-law in her article. The reasons for this are clear. Queer people are hated and feared by most Christians and would see little benefit in participating in church unless they had a personal faith that sustained them to find worth in their existence and their participation that was able to raise them above that hatred. A relationship with God (Jesus) might do the trick. I hesitate to posit that this relationship with God could be labelled “Christian” because of the obvious contradictions this poses in a world of mainstream homophobes who also use that label.
As a Jew, I was taught always to heed the fact that as an eternally homeless stranger myself, I can expect no less a welcome than that, which I am willing to offer to other strangers. The apartheid to which my mother-ex-law refers in her article, which “We have practised with our homophobic shudders and avoidance of encounter”, is something which my beloved has experienced all her life, as a member of Christian congregations, and it is wrong. It also exists in Jewish congregations.
As teachers, my partner and I are lucky enough, partly through working directly with marginalised new-comers to Australia, to reach a level of self-understanding that enables us to love our oppressors. We acknowledge that the hatred continually thrust in our direction, does not need to destroy our sense of well-being and purpose. In order to triumph, to flourish and to express our love for the world, we do not need to descend to the level of expressing hatred towards those who hate us.
The merry-go-round grapples with shallow concepts such as acceptance and tolerance at the same time as using a cattle prod to push us further away from the spotlight, and slam the doors of churches (and synagogues) behind us. Walls of words are built to keep us apart from the deserving minions, so that we might not taint the purity of so-called Christ-centred practice.
There is little depth to Preece’s preaching against homosexual humanity. He fails even to take a baby step in the direction of informed research collected about homosexuals. If he had bothered to do so, he would have discovered that many queer people also develop mental illness as a result of their mistreatment by mainstream society and marginalisation by Christians. Many homosexual adults remain single because they have been taught that same-sex relationships are not sanctioned by God and are therefore evil. Though they are attracted to people of the same sex, they choose celibacy in order to not be ostracised from their communities. Thirdly, some people with disabilities are also homosexual. How will “the church” deal with those?
Preece does not mention the unforgivable fact that a same-sex-attracted young person who has grown up in a church community is far more likely to kill himself or herself at discovering that he or she is not heterosexual, than a queer person who grew up outside Christian practice. Perhaps he recommends suicide as the better answer, for queer Christians?
© Melina Magdalena (2010)
*paraphrased from Sojourner Truth’s 1851 speech “Ain’t I A Woman?
While we prepared for our union, deliberately not called a wedding, we laughed a little bitterly about the role of institutionalized worship in our relationship. A Reform Jewish Rabbi would have been happy to formalize my partnership with another woman; if only she had also been a Jew; a Christian cleric might have been persuaded to officiate at a mixed-faith ceremony; if only it had not been a same-sex union. And on and on and on the merry-go-round turns, scarcely deviating in its course of division, subjugation and demoralisation.
As for the state of our union? A year and a bit down the track, all of our friends and family members refer to our carefully and cumbersomely titled “Promise Making Ceremony and Celebration” as our wedding. We bow to the inevitable, and do the same. There is no essential difference between our marriage and how any couple learns to make a life together. Life is good. We are expecting our first child in a couple of months, and so our world expands, unfolds and blossoms.
By the way we did mention God – and even Jesus – in our ceremony. The multitude sanctioning our union by their presence included a Catholic nun and representatives of Protestant Christian ministry in their double digits, but sadly no representatives of Jewish ministry, mostly because I have chosen in my last ten years or so, not to engage with my Jewish world on an institutional level. No lightning struck.
The reflections by Gordon Preece, commissioning editor of Zadok Perspectives , on an article written by my beloved’s mother, and printed in No. 106 of this publication, (Autumn 2010) deny our humanity in a vicious and sustained attack upon us as lesbians. I found it shocking, but my beloved assures me that she could have a “conversation” of this nature every day of every week of her life, with someone in “the church”, if she chose to embark on such a self-abnegating venture, which she doesn’t.
The banality of Preece’s so-called scholarship is exposed by the various and oft-cited authoritative texts and ideas to which he refers in his editorial, compared with the single source chosen by him to represent queer thinking – the lyrics to the satirical and deliberately outrageous song by Lily Allen and Gregory Kurstin. In a paragraph where Preece denies church leadership roles for “practising gays”, he demands that “Both sides should move from hostility to hospitality”. Preece is sadly mistaken to assume that his carefully scripted attack on queer humanity is any less damaging than Allen and Kurstin’s song lyrics, just because of the format he has chosen. His attack cuts far more deeply, because it is couched in hypocritically nice language of “clarity and charity”, which very clearly expresses his hatred for me as a lesbian.
=Fuck You Very Much is a refreshingly honest response to those who like to practice their bigoted faith with low acts of hypocrisy and violence against people like me. I’m not just referring to Gay Bashing, as practiced against men in Australia; Corrective Rape, practiced against lesbians in South Africa, and Other Forms of Murder, practiced against homosexuals, transsexuals and queer people the world over, from Uganda to the = United States of America .
Homophobia is mainstream hatred which queer people face every day of our lives, from the ordinary bigoted people who inhabit the worlds in which we as queer people also dwell. The idea that homosexual people are not human enough to lead other human beings in a church context is as homophobic and potentially murderous as physical violence. With his denial of church leadership roles for “practising gays”, Preece advocates spiritual murder.
The issue is always the same. Whether it is the colour of one’s skin; one’s status as a slave or free born; the religious heritage of one’s grandparents and other forebears; the language one learned as a child; the borders of the nation where one was born; physical deformity, infirmity or simply difference, human beings are expert formulators of reasons as to why some people are awarded the title of being human, whilst others are resolutely denied that privilege. Such narrow-mindedness is almost amusing, in an issue of this publication which is sub-titled “Difference & Difficulty”. I cannot laugh at it however. It makes me angry. I must express that anger, lest I internalise it and fall into a depression. Unlike my beloved, I do not have decades of resistance behind me, to bolster my reactions.
Preece has a plethora of groups to choose from in this issue of Zadok. Should he marginalise and condemn people with mental illness? No, that is no longer politically correct, because sufferers who are appropriately medicated can live fulfilling (heterosexual) lives. People with schizophrenia may be dangerous and street-people are tragic, but Preece correctly defines mentally ill people as victims who are deserving of Christian charity. Perhaps then, the spotlight should be turned on the women and men of the church who remain single? Does their failure to marry not mask the fact that they are running around and engaging in illicit sexual relationships outside the institution of marriage? We cannot, surely, in good conscience, accuse virgin missionaries of such shenanigans. Let us let the single people be. Ok, so if not the mentally ill, nor the single people, what about people whose physical bodies fail to match up with what we refer to as normal? These are people whose bodies work in different ways from ours; those who compensate for a lack of hearing, by developing a rich and creative culture from which normal people are barred from participating, simply because we do hear. They are shutting us out. Should we not shun them, and stop them from cultural expression? Surely not! Jesus is cited as specifically including people with disabilities in his house as “an indispensable part of God’s family”. We must instead demand that these groups return the favour.
It is notable that Preece avoids the debate over whether homosexuality is a choice, or biological. The choice that he mentions involves homosexual practice versus (presumably) celibacy. I fail to understand how my homosexual practice hurts anyone at all. The artificiality of separating sexuality from sex is highlighted when religion tries to defend its homophobic stance. The only people who are supposed to be having sex are those who are having sex with their heterosexual marriage partner. So he can have sex with his wife. Fine. But two women or two men who are in a committed marriage-like relationship are not supposed to express themselves sexually, because…?
For religious adherents, whether they be Christian or Jewish, (since those are the two religious systems that come directly into play in my life), around the heart of the fear of same-sex attraction lies a framework of control devices – belief systems, dogma and rules – that are designed to ensure compliance and conformity. This structure need not be thorn-covered, to divide the acceptable, from the unacceptable. Anyone who is born unable to conform and comply because of the nature of their being is constricted and tortured if he or she is brought up within that structure. My partner describes how wonderfully safe it felt during her childhood, to know her boundaries and where she fit in. She also tells how impossible it was to fit in, when she discovered that she was the wrong sexuality. This was not something she could alter, but in order for her to survive, her worldview had to shift radically in order to accommodate her difference.
Preece expresses concern that in our postmodern world we are kneeling down to difference. He suggests that the concept of difference has taken centre stage on the altar of our western culture and threatens to become the idol of our religious focus, as well. It is a strange fear. Fashioned by God as we were – perhaps even created in the image of God – diversity exists at the deepest level of creation. What use is there in denying the differences that exist between us? With such a fear focus, Preece forgets that there is much more that unites us, than what divides us from one another.
The fear of what is similar lies at the heart of homophobia. Heterosexual people fear homosexuality not because it hurts them or even affects them directly in any way at all, but because they have been taught that it is something to be feared and avoided. To be called homosexual is to be called sub-human and abnormal – Preece has clearly never conquered an upbringing where he was told that homosexuals are mutant deviant dangerous monsters. I can presume he would pass this message onto his own offspring as well, which is monstrous.
The issue is always the same, and it is sad that a publication which purports to “promote informed theological reflection and engagement by people from all walks of life, in relation to Australian public, working, and personal life” continues to support homophobia and to deny the status of homosexual people as human beings. Naturally, issues around bisexuality, transgender and intersex people are ignored in his editorial. It is as though Preece, as representative of Christian thought on the matter, remains firmly blinkered to the realities of human diversity. As my beloved’s mother points out – Jesus was not so blinkered.
What is it, to be human? Like my beloved, I also work with new-comers to Australia. It is work that never fails to move me, in many directions. One of my students posed this question last week, in an English class. We were on the topic of Open Questions; based around the wh- words: who, what, where, why, which, when and how. He wrote on his form “Why are you a human?” and proceeded to parade that question past his bemused classmates, who were unprepared for such a deeply philosophical task. (Their questions were at a different level: “When did you come to Australia?” “Where do you live?” “Which bus do you catch?”) No one could offer a satisfactory response to my deep-thinker and when I turned the question upon him, he could only laugh, and say “I asked you first!”
The concept of a tribe of homosexuals is no less frightening than any tribe of outsiders. For those within the tribe there is at least a feeling of safety in numbers. The reality is that in most Christian congregations there is likely to be a smaller ratio of queer Christians than the 8-10% cited by my mother-ex-law in her article. The reasons for this are clear. Queer people are hated and feared by most Christians and would see little benefit in participating in church unless they had a personal faith that sustained them to find worth in their existence and their participation that was able to raise them above that hatred. A relationship with God (Jesus) might do the trick. I hesitate to posit that this relationship with God could be labelled “Christian” because of the obvious contradictions this poses in a world of mainstream homophobes who also use that label.
As a Jew, I was taught always to heed the fact that as an eternally homeless stranger myself, I can expect no less a welcome than that, which I am willing to offer to other strangers. The apartheid to which my mother-ex-law refers in her article, which “We have practised with our homophobic shudders and avoidance of encounter”, is something which my beloved has experienced all her life, as a member of Christian congregations, and it is wrong. It also exists in Jewish congregations.
As teachers, my partner and I are lucky enough, partly through working directly with marginalised new-comers to Australia, to reach a level of self-understanding that enables us to love our oppressors. We acknowledge that the hatred continually thrust in our direction, does not need to destroy our sense of well-being and purpose. In order to triumph, to flourish and to express our love for the world, we do not need to descend to the level of expressing hatred towards those who hate us.
The merry-go-round grapples with shallow concepts such as acceptance and tolerance at the same time as using a cattle prod to push us further away from the spotlight, and slam the doors of churches (and synagogues) behind us. Walls of words are built to keep us apart from the deserving minions, so that we might not taint the purity of so-called Christ-centred practice.
There is little depth to Preece’s preaching against homosexual humanity. He fails even to take a baby step in the direction of informed research collected about homosexuals. If he had bothered to do so, he would have discovered that many queer people also develop mental illness as a result of their mistreatment by mainstream society and marginalisation by Christians. Many homosexual adults remain single because they have been taught that same-sex relationships are not sanctioned by God and are therefore evil. Though they are attracted to people of the same sex, they choose celibacy in order to not be ostracised from their communities. Thirdly, some people with disabilities are also homosexual. How will “the church” deal with those?
Preece does not mention the unforgivable fact that a same-sex-attracted young person who has grown up in a church community is far more likely to kill himself or herself at discovering that he or she is not heterosexual, than a queer person who grew up outside Christian practice. Perhaps he recommends suicide as the better answer, for queer Christians?
Saturday, January 09, 2010
On Exposure: a journey
On Exposure: a journey (Joel Magarey, Wakefield Press, 2009)
I the Reader
I approached Joel Magarey’s book Exposure: A Journey with twin measures of hope and scepticism. I hoped that he might enlighten me about certain aspects of my own life during my late teens and twenties, but I was sceptical that there was very much to discover through the perspective of someone who was actually writing about something else.
I took the book personally – after all, Penny was Best Woman to the man I married, Joel juggled at our wedding, and Basil’s band provided the music at the reception afterwards. The shattered constellation of my first marriage remains as a facet of my identity that looms large when an old ghost like Joel pops into view from time to time.
Had my first marriage lasted, we would be coming up to our twentieth anniversary this month. It’s a staggering idea. It is significant that Joel’s book appeared in 2009 – a year during which I have been learning how to be a partner within a new marriage; how to mother children in their late teens, when I myself became a mother; and some different ways and contexts there are to be Christian. My response to the book is necessarily framed within this context, and would have been a very different response had my circumstances not changed so greatly.
I was never taught that suffering is the human condition; or that good can emerge from suffering. These kinds of Christian ideas were foreign to me and in bumping up against them again as a mature woman in my 30s I find myself better able to deal with them than I was, in my late teens.
Joel and I grew up in two very different worlds. Our respective backgrounds set us up to impact upon one another in different ways. The fact that I as a non-Catholic ended up pregnant and married at 19 is ironic. I recall the sex education that I received at school – we were told about condoms yes, but only for prevention of AIDS and other STDs. I knew about the birth control pill yes, but only for sexually active young women (not me) and those whose menstrual agonies were such, that the Pill could alleviate their severity. I got pregnant very easily and thoughtlessly. I did not entertain the notion of terminating the pregnancy, even though I wasn’t sure how it had happened or how having a baby was going to affect my life. The idea of abortion was repugnant to me.
It might sound quite odd, but the fact is that I was brought up in silence more than spokenness, when it comes to sex and marriage. I had never been inculcated into the idea that the best way for humans to live is as part of a heterosexual couple who have children together. I had not been taught that I needed a partner at all. I did not feel loneliness or isolation – I was filled instead with the ebullience of knowing I had my life to live and that I could be the person I wanted to be.
Some might have assumed that I grew up in a permissive household – that is far from my experience! The unwritten rules that I unwittingly broke were not defined and never made explicit to me until it was too late. So I was fascinated to learn that Joel was explicitly taught about those things I didn’t know about – what it means to have sex with someone, and how the consequences of these acts may impact on his future life choices.
Book Review
Exposure moves frequently between times – distant past, recent past, present – but never into the future. This structure effectively builds and maintains momentum and injects suspense into the narrative. As an insider I was aware of certain elements of the story, but still found myself guessing and occasionally gasping with surprise whilst reading it. I finished the story wondering – what next?
I enjoyed immensely the well-crafted descriptive elements of the travel narrative. I was conscious of reading Joel’s descriptions, closing my eyes and imagining the skies, lakes, mountains and weather conditions of those faraway places.
Although Joel’s diagnosis and experience of Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD) is prominent in Exposure, I see the main themes as being sex and responsibility, inlaid with a heavy dose of questions about morality.
Extramarital sex and the unwanted child are prominent triggers for the OCD, and occur as motifs throughout the narrative. These issues are linked with the relationships that Joel writes about, most obviously his relationship with Penny, but they are never framed within the expected context of marriage. This forms the underlying crux of the matter. The idea of marriage pops up at the tail end of Joel’s narrative, after long journeys of separation and rapturous rejoining. Penny and Joel’s relationship could be seen as a kind of marriage, with the implicit understanding that these years of learning how to travel and live together were all part of a togetherness that would continue to be built upon in years to come.
One of the largest limitations of the novel is in itself significant, because it functions as a signpost as to why things turned out the way that they did. The lack of insight into Penny as a person with her own needs, her own motivations, her own desires and her own responses has left me wanting to know so much more about her.
When it comes to the crunch, Ahmad and Joel set themselves up as rivals, with Penny choosing one and rejecting the other. However, this still seems to occur without Joel’s realising that Penny has some agency in the matter – she has needs and desires that he has not yet considered fully in light of their relationship and its future.
I am intensely curious about Penny’s life now. When I heard what she had done, I was appalled. It looked to me as though she had deliberately placed herself in a position of being oppressed and repressed. It felt to me at the time as though she were punishing herself. I could not imagine her choice as being real. Knowing more now than I did then, about other cultures, I have a less closed-minded attitude as to who she might have become within the structure of her chosen culture. I would love to hear what her experiences have been; how she has grown within the parameters placed around her, what she has been able to achieve and discover about herself, her husband, her new family and the culture in which she now lives, loves and works.
My Narrative
As a 16, 17 and 18 year old, the years between meeting the man I married and our wedding itself, I was still firmly fixed on my future as being one of
- travelling and seeing the world
- learning languages and getting to know the people of the world
- never getting married
- never having children
- living independently with my cats
- writing, making, creating, studying.
Ever afraid of being forced to do things against my will, I was well aware that I was not on the ball when it came to producing appropriate reactions and responses to what confronted me. I have always required more time to process things than is generally allowed me, particularly by intelligent, selfish, manipulative and aggressive young men who see themselves as invincible and entitled to whatever catches their fancy at any given moment. Isn’t that how I ended up pregnant in the first place?
Of those who condemned my actions in leaving that marriage after three years, one of the strongest came from Joel’s father, whom I had known from my first days at university, when I was part of the Sudan Relief Committee that held its meetings in his staff room in the Napier Building at Adelaide University.
Kevin took me aside at a New Year’s Eve party some time after I had left. I described the circumstances that had led me to my leaving and he told me I was wrong. He painted a picture for me of some of the lowest, most difficult points of his marriage and explained that such things occur in every marriage; that they don’t mean the marriage should break or be destroyed; rather that the people in that marriage need to work harder to strengthen the marriage.
I had no idea what he was talking about. It made me very angry to hear him blame me for breaking up my marriage. It felt as though he conceptualised marriage as a separate entity from the two people who had entered into the institution; an entity precious and valuable as to subjugate both parties into its service, to their ultimate self-denial and self-destruction. And I wanted no part of such a condition. I was unwilling to bend and to break myself down in order to fit into the mould of marriage, if in fact that was, what marriage meant.
The thought that parents can lecture children about sex and marriage fills me with a certain amount of dread, particularly as I have also failed to make this a part of my children’s education. I wonder to what extent my ideas about being the poor girl who set such a bad example to her peers had any impact on the moral struggles that Joel experienced as a sexually active young man who had been exceptionally well educated on the evil consequences of sex outside marriage?
When I was pregnant with my first child, Joel waylaid me at one end of our share house and mischievously teased me, trying to convince me that if I were to have sex with him it wouldn’t matter at all, because I was already pregnant – whom could it possibly harm? (Secondhand Notoriety, 2007) I have pondered Joel’s behaviour many times since that afternoon, and assigned several possible reasons to it. Was he jealous; was this some kind of resistance action against the institution of marriage; was he just testosterone-driven? He scared me.
His sister took me aside and encouraged me at one point after I had already fallen pregnant. She said it is idiotic to “wait to have sex until you’re married”, because you can never know whether you’ll be sexually compatible with your chosen partner until you try. I was just embarrassed. None of this had been my idea.
I attended Joel’s birthday party at his family home just off King William Road. I wonder whether this was the party he describes, where he and Penny first got together? I remember walking home from that party to my parents’ house in Payneham. I was unaccustomed to being out so late at night, but the young man whom I regarded at that time as my “best friend”, entertained me and encouraged me as we walked. I recall our late night walks with some fondness.
Just before I agreed to have sex for the first time in my late teens I was confronted with a similar situation to the Penny / Ahmad / Joel triangle. I wanted neither suitor. Attracted to neither man, I was not looking for marriage, and the situation was both ludicrous and unwelcome. When I first heard about Penny, I wondered whether something similar had happened to her. I assumed it had, and I pitied her.
Penny is clearly an unconventional woman, with her own ideas about right and wrong. We see this in Exposure mapped out through Joel’s eyes as they form their bonds and celebrate their relationship outside the bounds of his parents’ explicit expectations. I also remember Penny as an important member of the Legal team assisting protesters at the Narrungar Protests (late 1980s to early 1990s). She is capable and smart. Her plain-spoken sensible attitude was refreshing, matched against the snobbish and intellectual cynicism that prevailed during our university days. It should not be mistaken for stupidity or a simplistic Pollyannaish response to the world.
I felt squeamish, reading the idealised version of Penny’s character – just as squeamish as when twenty years ago she was held up to me as an example of the kind of woman I ought to be aspiring to become. And I wonder, who was she, who has she become?
What I remember about Penny is worth remembering. She was independent and resourceful, and lived alone, without any family around her, in a little converted garage off Grange Road. I never thought very much about how she afforded this, although at that time our peers were dependent on their parents for support. She was interesting and knowledgeable, and passionate about seeing the world. She was left-wing and alternative. During my fuzzy-headed days of reproduction and new motherhood, I failed to take very much in, but I do remember seeing books and posters at her place that roused my interest and caused me to howl in the depths of my soul for the chances to see the world that I had given up, having married and borne children so very young.
I recall a conversation Penny and I had, that terrible spring when I had lost all control of my own life and future. The man I married set this conversation up, just as he had carefully impregnated me and then injected me with the poison of his own anti-abortion beliefs. Penny may well have been aware of this, but she would have trusted me as an intelligent young woman to be capable of seeing the other side and making my own choices and decisions.
We were outside the Art Gallery on North Terrace. I was a little awestruck, as Penny had never really paid me much attention. My husband-to-be and I had already performed our “Three Foetuses” manoeuvre on the floor of the university refectory so that the whole group had been clued into the fact that we had (unprotected) sex and conceived a child, as he had planned. That I remained clueless was an option no one seemed to have considered, and it probably didn’t matter to anyone but me.
The way I operated mostly back then, was on pure intuition, and my intuition has always been excellent. I would tune in to the person who was speaking to me at the time, intuit what she or he wanted me to say, and say it. It was simple. That it bypassed any interpretation, decision and choice-making on my part was beside the point. I did not allow myself the slightest bit of agency.
“You know the choice is up to you,” Penny said. Or something very like that. Startled, I said “What do you mean?” “You don’t have to have a baby.” “Oh,” I replied brightly, defensively, feeling as though Penny were a traitor, steering me up the steep path towards abortion. “It’s OK. I understand. But I want to have this baby.” “Well that’s all right then,” Penny said gently, “just as long as you don’t forget it’s your choice.”
Months later, my husband and I went to her place to meet some friends for a meal. Our baby, a winter child, was just a few weeks old. We travelled across town on at least two buses. The weather was cold and wet. The food wasn’t ready on time, because keeping to time was unimportant. No one but me was responsible for anything but themselves. I was hungry, tired, nipple-sore and miserable, being both on show as “the new mother” and overlooked as a human being with needs of my own. I sat in a corner with my baby and cried. Penny was kind and sensible. She took my husband aside and suggested he take me home to rest. I was very grateful to her.
I the Reader
I approached Joel Magarey’s book Exposure: A Journey with twin measures of hope and scepticism. I hoped that he might enlighten me about certain aspects of my own life during my late teens and twenties, but I was sceptical that there was very much to discover through the perspective of someone who was actually writing about something else.
I took the book personally – after all, Penny was Best Woman to the man I married, Joel juggled at our wedding, and Basil’s band provided the music at the reception afterwards. The shattered constellation of my first marriage remains as a facet of my identity that looms large when an old ghost like Joel pops into view from time to time.
Had my first marriage lasted, we would be coming up to our twentieth anniversary this month. It’s a staggering idea. It is significant that Joel’s book appeared in 2009 – a year during which I have been learning how to be a partner within a new marriage; how to mother children in their late teens, when I myself became a mother; and some different ways and contexts there are to be Christian. My response to the book is necessarily framed within this context, and would have been a very different response had my circumstances not changed so greatly.
I was never taught that suffering is the human condition; or that good can emerge from suffering. These kinds of Christian ideas were foreign to me and in bumping up against them again as a mature woman in my 30s I find myself better able to deal with them than I was, in my late teens.
Joel and I grew up in two very different worlds. Our respective backgrounds set us up to impact upon one another in different ways. The fact that I as a non-Catholic ended up pregnant and married at 19 is ironic. I recall the sex education that I received at school – we were told about condoms yes, but only for prevention of AIDS and other STDs. I knew about the birth control pill yes, but only for sexually active young women (not me) and those whose menstrual agonies were such, that the Pill could alleviate their severity. I got pregnant very easily and thoughtlessly. I did not entertain the notion of terminating the pregnancy, even though I wasn’t sure how it had happened or how having a baby was going to affect my life. The idea of abortion was repugnant to me.
It might sound quite odd, but the fact is that I was brought up in silence more than spokenness, when it comes to sex and marriage. I had never been inculcated into the idea that the best way for humans to live is as part of a heterosexual couple who have children together. I had not been taught that I needed a partner at all. I did not feel loneliness or isolation – I was filled instead with the ebullience of knowing I had my life to live and that I could be the person I wanted to be.
Some might have assumed that I grew up in a permissive household – that is far from my experience! The unwritten rules that I unwittingly broke were not defined and never made explicit to me until it was too late. So I was fascinated to learn that Joel was explicitly taught about those things I didn’t know about – what it means to have sex with someone, and how the consequences of these acts may impact on his future life choices.
Book Review
Exposure moves frequently between times – distant past, recent past, present – but never into the future. This structure effectively builds and maintains momentum and injects suspense into the narrative. As an insider I was aware of certain elements of the story, but still found myself guessing and occasionally gasping with surprise whilst reading it. I finished the story wondering – what next?
I enjoyed immensely the well-crafted descriptive elements of the travel narrative. I was conscious of reading Joel’s descriptions, closing my eyes and imagining the skies, lakes, mountains and weather conditions of those faraway places.
Although Joel’s diagnosis and experience of Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD) is prominent in Exposure, I see the main themes as being sex and responsibility, inlaid with a heavy dose of questions about morality.
Extramarital sex and the unwanted child are prominent triggers for the OCD, and occur as motifs throughout the narrative. These issues are linked with the relationships that Joel writes about, most obviously his relationship with Penny, but they are never framed within the expected context of marriage. This forms the underlying crux of the matter. The idea of marriage pops up at the tail end of Joel’s narrative, after long journeys of separation and rapturous rejoining. Penny and Joel’s relationship could be seen as a kind of marriage, with the implicit understanding that these years of learning how to travel and live together were all part of a togetherness that would continue to be built upon in years to come.
One of the largest limitations of the novel is in itself significant, because it functions as a signpost as to why things turned out the way that they did. The lack of insight into Penny as a person with her own needs, her own motivations, her own desires and her own responses has left me wanting to know so much more about her.
When it comes to the crunch, Ahmad and Joel set themselves up as rivals, with Penny choosing one and rejecting the other. However, this still seems to occur without Joel’s realising that Penny has some agency in the matter – she has needs and desires that he has not yet considered fully in light of their relationship and its future.
I am intensely curious about Penny’s life now. When I heard what she had done, I was appalled. It looked to me as though she had deliberately placed herself in a position of being oppressed and repressed. It felt to me at the time as though she were punishing herself. I could not imagine her choice as being real. Knowing more now than I did then, about other cultures, I have a less closed-minded attitude as to who she might have become within the structure of her chosen culture. I would love to hear what her experiences have been; how she has grown within the parameters placed around her, what she has been able to achieve and discover about herself, her husband, her new family and the culture in which she now lives, loves and works.
My Narrative
As a 16, 17 and 18 year old, the years between meeting the man I married and our wedding itself, I was still firmly fixed on my future as being one of
- travelling and seeing the world
- learning languages and getting to know the people of the world
- never getting married
- never having children
- living independently with my cats
- writing, making, creating, studying.
Ever afraid of being forced to do things against my will, I was well aware that I was not on the ball when it came to producing appropriate reactions and responses to what confronted me. I have always required more time to process things than is generally allowed me, particularly by intelligent, selfish, manipulative and aggressive young men who see themselves as invincible and entitled to whatever catches their fancy at any given moment. Isn’t that how I ended up pregnant in the first place?
Of those who condemned my actions in leaving that marriage after three years, one of the strongest came from Joel’s father, whom I had known from my first days at university, when I was part of the Sudan Relief Committee that held its meetings in his staff room in the Napier Building at Adelaide University.
Kevin took me aside at a New Year’s Eve party some time after I had left. I described the circumstances that had led me to my leaving and he told me I was wrong. He painted a picture for me of some of the lowest, most difficult points of his marriage and explained that such things occur in every marriage; that they don’t mean the marriage should break or be destroyed; rather that the people in that marriage need to work harder to strengthen the marriage.
I had no idea what he was talking about. It made me very angry to hear him blame me for breaking up my marriage. It felt as though he conceptualised marriage as a separate entity from the two people who had entered into the institution; an entity precious and valuable as to subjugate both parties into its service, to their ultimate self-denial and self-destruction. And I wanted no part of such a condition. I was unwilling to bend and to break myself down in order to fit into the mould of marriage, if in fact that was, what marriage meant.
The thought that parents can lecture children about sex and marriage fills me with a certain amount of dread, particularly as I have also failed to make this a part of my children’s education. I wonder to what extent my ideas about being the poor girl who set such a bad example to her peers had any impact on the moral struggles that Joel experienced as a sexually active young man who had been exceptionally well educated on the evil consequences of sex outside marriage?
When I was pregnant with my first child, Joel waylaid me at one end of our share house and mischievously teased me, trying to convince me that if I were to have sex with him it wouldn’t matter at all, because I was already pregnant – whom could it possibly harm? (Secondhand Notoriety, 2007) I have pondered Joel’s behaviour many times since that afternoon, and assigned several possible reasons to it. Was he jealous; was this some kind of resistance action against the institution of marriage; was he just testosterone-driven? He scared me.
His sister took me aside and encouraged me at one point after I had already fallen pregnant. She said it is idiotic to “wait to have sex until you’re married”, because you can never know whether you’ll be sexually compatible with your chosen partner until you try. I was just embarrassed. None of this had been my idea.
I attended Joel’s birthday party at his family home just off King William Road. I wonder whether this was the party he describes, where he and Penny first got together? I remember walking home from that party to my parents’ house in Payneham. I was unaccustomed to being out so late at night, but the young man whom I regarded at that time as my “best friend”, entertained me and encouraged me as we walked. I recall our late night walks with some fondness.
Just before I agreed to have sex for the first time in my late teens I was confronted with a similar situation to the Penny / Ahmad / Joel triangle. I wanted neither suitor. Attracted to neither man, I was not looking for marriage, and the situation was both ludicrous and unwelcome. When I first heard about Penny, I wondered whether something similar had happened to her. I assumed it had, and I pitied her.
Penny is clearly an unconventional woman, with her own ideas about right and wrong. We see this in Exposure mapped out through Joel’s eyes as they form their bonds and celebrate their relationship outside the bounds of his parents’ explicit expectations. I also remember Penny as an important member of the Legal team assisting protesters at the Narrungar Protests (late 1980s to early 1990s). She is capable and smart. Her plain-spoken sensible attitude was refreshing, matched against the snobbish and intellectual cynicism that prevailed during our university days. It should not be mistaken for stupidity or a simplistic Pollyannaish response to the world.
I felt squeamish, reading the idealised version of Penny’s character – just as squeamish as when twenty years ago she was held up to me as an example of the kind of woman I ought to be aspiring to become. And I wonder, who was she, who has she become?
What I remember about Penny is worth remembering. She was independent and resourceful, and lived alone, without any family around her, in a little converted garage off Grange Road. I never thought very much about how she afforded this, although at that time our peers were dependent on their parents for support. She was interesting and knowledgeable, and passionate about seeing the world. She was left-wing and alternative. During my fuzzy-headed days of reproduction and new motherhood, I failed to take very much in, but I do remember seeing books and posters at her place that roused my interest and caused me to howl in the depths of my soul for the chances to see the world that I had given up, having married and borne children so very young.
I recall a conversation Penny and I had, that terrible spring when I had lost all control of my own life and future. The man I married set this conversation up, just as he had carefully impregnated me and then injected me with the poison of his own anti-abortion beliefs. Penny may well have been aware of this, but she would have trusted me as an intelligent young woman to be capable of seeing the other side and making my own choices and decisions.
We were outside the Art Gallery on North Terrace. I was a little awestruck, as Penny had never really paid me much attention. My husband-to-be and I had already performed our “Three Foetuses” manoeuvre on the floor of the university refectory so that the whole group had been clued into the fact that we had (unprotected) sex and conceived a child, as he had planned. That I remained clueless was an option no one seemed to have considered, and it probably didn’t matter to anyone but me.
The way I operated mostly back then, was on pure intuition, and my intuition has always been excellent. I would tune in to the person who was speaking to me at the time, intuit what she or he wanted me to say, and say it. It was simple. That it bypassed any interpretation, decision and choice-making on my part was beside the point. I did not allow myself the slightest bit of agency.
“You know the choice is up to you,” Penny said. Or something very like that. Startled, I said “What do you mean?” “You don’t have to have a baby.” “Oh,” I replied brightly, defensively, feeling as though Penny were a traitor, steering me up the steep path towards abortion. “It’s OK. I understand. But I want to have this baby.” “Well that’s all right then,” Penny said gently, “just as long as you don’t forget it’s your choice.”
Months later, my husband and I went to her place to meet some friends for a meal. Our baby, a winter child, was just a few weeks old. We travelled across town on at least two buses. The weather was cold and wet. The food wasn’t ready on time, because keeping to time was unimportant. No one but me was responsible for anything but themselves. I was hungry, tired, nipple-sore and miserable, being both on show as “the new mother” and overlooked as a human being with needs of my own. I sat in a corner with my baby and cried. Penny was kind and sensible. She took my husband aside and suggested he take me home to rest. I was very grateful to her.
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