A Second Crunchie Proposition

A Second Crunchie Proposition
© Melina Magdalena (2008)

It’s becoming crunchier to own up to having and valuing some kind of spiritual belief system. When I say crunchier, I don’t just mean fashionable, trendier or more hip. Of course what I’m observing could be a flash in the pan, but I have a feeling that it reflects a deeper shift in understanding and appreciation of what it is to be human, and live in this world.

It’s hard to think in terms of generations, but if I consider the folk I grew up with, there were two main camps – those youth groupers who were openly and joyously religious, and the rest of us, who were not. That’s not a fair dichotomy, because many of us were in fact raised to be believers of one sort or another, but those who belonged to the youth groups were a special breed of youngster. I remember being irritated whenever I came into contact with them – and I received a number of invitations to join various social groups, notably the Mormons and Assemblies of God. Why on earth were they were so happy all the time? What was there to be happy about in this severely depressing scary big world we all inhabited? How could they be so insular and blind to all of the faults and dangers?

I remember being furious at the idea that everything bad in the world had somehow been cancelled out because of the death of a certain somebody 2000 years earlier. Not only did it seem grossly unjust for people to claim that his death set them free forever, but I didn’t understand why his death should seem so much more glorified than his life. I was not about to claim sinless status by letting him bear the brunt of my imperfections.

So I was not a youth grouper, but I was a believer and as I grew up into a ratbag activist my belief systems were knocked around pretty badly. It was not then and is still less fashionable now, to be Jewish of course, because the facile mentality of many left-wing political activists of my Australia says that Jewish means supporting Israel. Even naming our firstborn after one of Israel’s most famous traitors was insufficient to rid me of the taint of being both Jewish and American by heritage.

I denied my beliefs completely for a few years, tucking them away into the recesses of my snail shell along with all that other baggage, until I abandoned all hope of belonging to the activist community and felt safe in my isolation, to bring them out into the open once again.

Those activists I hung out with were for the most part not actively religious. There may have been one or two who expressed fond memories of their childhood church-going, and who persisted in identifying with some brand or denomination or other, and there were certainly those who were into alternative beliefs, but it was hard to see how these manifested in the way they lived their lives. Their values and beliefs were as underground as mine. What we emanated was anger and fear, for the most part. We were simply outraged at the state of the world and dismayed that THEY weren’t letting US fix things. The pressure we put ourselves under, to change the world left no room for considering, developing or practising living in the kind of world we wanted it to be.

We felt we had to take action against social conventions and institutions, and we were unsupported and aimless, rootless railers against injustice, without any place to call our own. We didn’t celebrate or worship. We didn’t talk about God. We barely talked about community, unless we were the co-counselling feminists who insisted on discussing process ad infinitum and trying for consensus decision-making in our meetings. At that point I really didn’t relate to feminists at all.

As we began to start families, some of us actively chose to raise our children differently from the way we had been raised. I was charged more than once, with the sin of giving my children too clear a picture of the ills of the world. Give them time to just be kids, my mother urged. They don’t need to know about all that horrible stuff. Don’t deny them the magic you were given, growing up – that feeling that everything is all right, and that even the mysterious can be acceptable. You don’t have to give them answers to everything. Don’t weigh them down with the cares and burdens of the world.

There was a lot of magic in my childhood. I had Santa Claus, I had the Tooth Fairy, I had angels and spirits and fairies and witches and goblins and mermaids and unicorns. I disbelieved those people who told me I was a fool to think any of this was real. I was the credulous kind of little girls whose mother had to tactfully take aside aged 11 and make sure I knew there wasn’t really a Santa. And of course, I also had God.

My God is not and has never been a personal God. Putting into words my ideas about God, I reveal myself to be almost completely a child of my time. Nature words come most easily to mind – wind, air, sky, leaves, rainbows, water, earth, seeds, and life itself. I have a particular affinity to sky. My sophisticated emotionally intelligent self might say that my God is not a vengeful God but rather my God is Joy.

There are two kinds of situations when I feel close to God. I usually have those moments of joy when I am at one with, or having a (usually solitary) encounter with nature. I stop in my tracks and marvel at the utter beauty, fascination and intricate magic of one small aspect of this world we live in. It’s like opening a window to God’s presence. Secondly, I feel joy when I am experiencing the warmth, closeness and connection of my life interwoven with the lives of those around me. This happens frequently in my classroom, with family members and with those rare kindred spirits I encounter from time to time, as well as with my love. In those moments of joy, I feel God is active within and around me.

I need to point out that in the absence of Joy I feel great Fear much of the time. That Fear points to the absence of my awareness of God in those times. I was heavily influenced by my mother’s and my mother’s mother’s beliefs about love, fear and all other such jampolskyesque miracles; (not that simply believing or thinking about these can ever equate to the conscious choice to practice such beliefs).

To my way of thinking, the generation that lives between my parents and me is less god-focused than the generations that embrace it at either end. Many people of that vintage have made concerted efforts to divest themselves of the useless superstitions of their own parents, and to free their offspring from the burdens of belief. I don’t think this was good for the children or their parents. The current pendulum swing back towards beliefs evidences a shift in thinking about the ramifications of spiritual health and emotional well being.

It will be interesting to see how my children become adults. Their parents both come from backgrounds of belief, but while I have explicitly exposed them to my belief system, and worked towards fostering their own spiritual growth, their father chose not to do this. In the last eighteen months one child has moved from the label atheist to agnostic. The other refuses to enter into discussion about beliefs or religion.

Within this new chapter of my life in partnership, I am simply revelling in being encouraged to open up and explore my spiritual side again. It’s amazing and affirming to be encouraged to let those aspects of my identity come out and play. I feel very excited at the prospect of putting concerted effort into revealing and establishing life-giving connections and enacting these meaningfully, whether through liturgy, prayer and ritual, or through conscious choices in our everyday lives.

The second proposition is of course, the ritual that we are creating as a signpost that we are joining one another as we journey through life. It’s fun, and it’s joyful work. Although we come from different traditions and perspectives, there are plenty of ding ding ding moments where we look at one another in frankly quizzical disbelief as if to say ‘you mean this is important to you, too?’ And then there are the head into brick wall moments of ‘Huh?’ All of these are strands in the rich tapestry of life.

Never boring, is it…

Prophecy 31508

Prophecy 31508
© Melina Magdalena (2008)

Dear Mr Sam-I-Am*,
I demand an answer from you.
What is your problem with my daughter?
What is it about her that frightens and threatens you so much?
I do not know what your reading age is,
But YOU are Professor Snape to my daughter’s Hogwarts**
And if you were her employer
She would have grounds to make a serious complaint against you
For your malicious, discriminatory behaviour
and your ruthless vilification of her
She has done nothing to deserve this
And I demand that this behaviour cease immediately

You are a teacher of long experience
Surely my daughter is not so unusual
Why does she stand out as one 16-year-old girl among so many?
What is your problem with my daughter?

I cast about, seeking answers,
Conjuring up fantastic tales of bewitchment and curses
Which I shall not dignify by repeating them here
Because I want to know from the horse’s proverbial mouth
What is your problem with my daughter?
I want your cruelty against her to cease immediately.
I’ve had enough of hearing
From her classmates and from the parents of her classmates,
That you hate and mistreat her in your classroom
It is not funny to say “Good” when she tells you she is leaving early.
It is not funny to refuse her feedback on writing she is keen to improve.
It is not funny to blame her for ruining your lessons
when all that she did was to read from a variant edition of the classroom text.
If you were any kind of teacher
You would have used that opportunity
To elucidate to your audience
The differences between editions
And why it makes life easier
In the classroom
When everyone is reading from the same page

Not that everyone should read from the same page
Indeed – the texts my daughter chooses
Are a reflection of her intense curiosity, openness and inquisitive mind
She has a thirst for knowledge and a keen intelligence to match
That you are steadily draining from her, drop by drop
Do you seek to turn her into some kind of a mindless zombie?
Is that the kind of student you enjoy?
What kind of teacher are you, Mr Sam-I-Am?
And what makes you think
That I will stand by
And allow you to do this to my daughter?
What is your problem with my daughter?
I want an answer – NOW!
I want your childish, churlish behaviour to turn around.
Grow up, Mr Sam-I-Am.

When I met you at our interview you had only negative things to report
About my straight-A daughter student
You seem to be intent
On destroying not only her confidence
But her chances for the future
Where is the justice in this?
What is it about her that warrants and attracts your utter disdain and derision?

I want your answer.
Your behaviour is unjust, unethical, unprofessional, unnecessary and cruel.
I feel you teetering on the edge of some profound unknown
A chasm you will never master
If you persist in shovelling blame onto those
Whom you are causing to suffer
Have you bothered to register in your own psyche the damage you are inflicting?
I cannot imagine that you are an evil person
But your behaviour borders on evil

I tried to say to myself that my daughter
Cannot get along with everyone she meets
That perhaps this experience
Of enduring one year in your classroom
Will help her to know her own strength of character
Will help her to learn where to seek support when she needs it
Will help her to understand in her heart
That she is OK despite what some other people may think of her
But my daughter
Who is bright, studious, motivated and witty
Despite being a sixteen year old teenager of her time
Would rather sit on a bench outside in the cold
Than endure long minutes of humiliation and misery in your classroom

How DARE YOU destroy her joy in learning?
How DARE YOU limit and deride her reading ability?
How DARE YOU question her intelligence?
How DARE YOU threaten her success with her studies?
How DARE YOU put her down in front of her peers?

That is unacceptable.
I want your answer.
What is your problem with my daughter?
And I will not cease
My demand that you stop this terrible behaviour
Until you do.
Get over yourself, Mr Sam-I-Am.
Stop mistreating my daughter.

I warn you
Do not take my words as a challenge
That is not their intention.
Let me tell you something about my daughter
Her spirit is strong
Her integrity was threatened when she was only 2 days old
Since then, she has taught me to be a fighter
As she has fought on her own behalf
In addition,
Her spirit is beautiful
It does not call to be broken
To do so would be a crime
Of unspeakable and unforgivable significance
I warn you once more, Mr Sam-I-Am,
I will rise to my daughter’s defence
Like a rabid dog
Because she has taught me to be strong
And she does not deserve this treatment from you.
No one should suffer such abuse.
Lest you disregard my bark
Know that my bite is much, much worse.


*Dr Seuss (1960) Green Eggs and Ham (Random House Publishers).
** J.K.Rowling (1997) Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone (Bloomsbury Publishers).

A Crunchie Proposition (part one)

A Crunchie Proposition (part one)
(c) Melina Magdalena 2008

I’ve never wanted to be like everyone else. I’ve never longed to do the conventional thing. In fact I have embraced the other, as though being other is more natural to me, than being the same…

Yet by embracing the other, and incorporating aspects of other into my identity, I necessarily move from embracing the strange, to embracing the familiar. Whether it is accepting and celebrating my Jewish heritage, my single mother status, my multiracial family, my lesbian identity, I wear these aspects of identity like a technicoloured coat that spreads over my shoulders, covers my back, welcomes me into the warm embrace of belonging, even as such label might be seen to set me apart from the norm.

And so there are the twin aspects of wondering who am I from the inside, and hovering somewhere outside my body, guessing at the judgments others might make about me from the outside.

Like many people, I had a rocky passage from hiding in a closet of denial with my thumb in my mouth while the many doors kept slamming shut, to coming out of said closet and feeling defiant, sticking out no matter what, like that proverbial sore thumb, angry and exposed. From such strident assertions of my rights to be who I am, I have gradually shifted to a more patient and calm awareness of myself in this world which is to some extent of my own making.

Amazingly, where I find myself today is a beautiful place, full of opportunity, sprinkled with plenty of struggles to keep me honest and aware of my good fortune. I am happy to be me today… but for a long time, a large part of being me has meant not conforming. Not at all. Simply doing my own thing.

I was in my late teens in the late 1980s. The young people around me were dead set against following conventions. We didn’t have a gentle flower power way about us, either. We were brash and rude and our opinions were not always reasoned or coherent. We stood perpetually against and never for. We were anti-war, not pro-peace; anti-establishment, not pro-social justice; anti-car, not pro-public transport; anti-military-industrial-complex, not pro-humanity; we were anti-family, anti-marriage, anti-children and anti-future.

I’ve heard people say that in the shadows of the Cold War the people of my generation lived in a denial of their fear so icy, that many were unable to express what it meant to live from day to day wondering when that mushroom cloud would appear on our horizon. I grew up charmed and sheltered and naive. I wasn’t aware of this fear that permeated the lives of many of my peers. But still, I joined them in standing against whatever it was they said should be opposed.

The man I married had decided that getting married and starting a family would be his non-conformist stance. Or perhaps it was his response to being set adrift in a world of uncertainty. It was an aspect of his existence that he felt he could control.

When I learned that I had choices and I chose to end the marriage I rejected the sentiment of happily-ever-after-dom that had insinuated itself into my psyche despite itself, thanks to social conditioning. Now I knew for sure that THAT was not for me. The course of my life had been altered irrevocably, and I was going to do my damndest to make sure that never happened again. Marriage was really not going to be part of my future.

After 13 years I fell in love again. It was fun, but short-lived. I thought – well at least I know what it is to be loved and to love someone in that way. At least I won’t die without the knowledge that I can physically love another woman. It was liberating. I accepted my lesbian identity once and for all at last. I was (and am) the real deal. No longer that frightened little fence sitter.

I’ve been challenged of late, with discussions about the nature of lover relationships. People I know and people I know of are living polyamorous lives, in which they have multiple love-relationships and extended blended kinds of families. Again, it’s not anything I’ve ever wanted.

I’ve been challenged of late, with my own longing to make myself one with another person; to commit myself to our relationship; to live our lives together… The intention to make this commitment is undeniable, but something in me balks at naming our relationship a marriage.

I feel very reluctant to join the throngs of people who are suddenly embracing their right to celebrate their same-sex relationships. I don’t just want to do it because everyone else is! But I suspect my reluctance has more to do with wanting to be different, than with defining my role within my relationship; my partnership, as anything other than spouse to my beloved.

When I heard
ACT Attorney-General Simon Corbell on Radio National recently, defending the Government’s decision to register same-sex relationships but not to allow us to celebrate them as marriages, I felt the stifling walls of grey bureaucracy closing in around me. How typical it is, that the one perk of being a lesbian mother in a relationship will now be denied me (and my partner), at the same time that the Government openly denies us the right and the pleasure to celebrate our partnership as equally as any heterosexual couple.

What Simon Corbell said was so mean-spirited that as I sat in my car driving to work that day, my whole thinking on the business of marriage was turned around. I burned with a white hot flame of outrage to think that while my duly-registered relationship will be open to scrutiny and monitoring, particularly if we have children together, my partner and I will remain forever outside the circle of married couples. He said we have no right to a ceremony because a ceremony creates the relationship – obviously to the detriment of wider Australian society – whereas signing a register reflects a relationship that is already in existence.

The logic is somehow flawed, hopelessly dated – how many offspring preside at their parents’ weddings these days? Is legitimacy magically and retrospectively conferred upon said children because of the solemn vows to which their parents commit after the fact? The blatant hypocrisy of his position really makes me mad.

Dear Simon even had the gall to claim that the Government’s position on denying same-sex couples the right to marriage while opening up the possibility of registering our relationships was a way of protecting the rights of the children that “these people” might have.( If you listen to the audiocast you’ll notice he seems pathologically unable to say “lesbian” or “gay” though I believe he managed to utter “homosexual” at least once during the interview.)

Again my beloved and I are right on the money as per usual. In addition to being officially designated second-class citizens and not even a strictly de facto couple; as well as the discrimination and endless need to pick winnable battles for recognition of ourselves as a couple and of our family, we will be together in poorer circumstances, rather than in the security of anonymity that we could have gotten away with had we met a decade ago under the admittedly ever-tightening reins of Howard’s regime.

Once upon a time I envied the lesbian families that crossed my path from time to time. For one thing, the women had each other, even though they weren’t recognised as families, and even though the mothers were not recognised as a couple who were sharing the responsibilities for raising their children. In fact, one spouse was entitled to be named a Sole Parent with all the financial benefits that entailed, whether or not her partner was working, studying or indeed collecting Sole Parent benefits herself.

As I say, this was the one perk of being a lesbian mother.

Once the same-sex register is made a reality of 21st century Australia’s Fair Go we lesbian mothers can wave goodbye to any benefits whatsoever. Our families, like all the others, will be on the same punitive Centrelink regime. Even to get the normal rate of what was once called Child Endowment, we will be queuing with outstretched hands. So it goes.

Anyway, turning to a more pleasant topic, just how did our crunchie proposition come about? Incredibly, she and I employed the same linguistic conventions that couples immemorial have used and continue to use. It made no difference that we are both women. We were online at the time, though of course we’d spent the summer together in person. One of us said cheekily, “Will you marry me?” to which the other, with equal audacity and mounting enthusiasm replied “Yes! Yes! YES!” And in evoking this concept, it became real for us, whether or not we choose to label it as marriage.

In been developing our plans for the day, we’ve evolved two distinct ways of referring to it. Our homemade title “Promise Making Ceremony and Celebration” has given way to the more generally understood “Commitment Ceremony”. We are deliberate in choosing not to call it our wedding, or our marriage ceremony, because of course, that would be a lie. We are not entirely happy about this.

She and I and we have been having a lot of fun developing our own liturgy and rituals for our day, and despite the underlying wound that will not heal, of the public denial of our relationship, we expect it to be a meaningful, wonderful occasion to mark the official beginning of our living together. Yes, Mr Corbell, our relationship began last year, on the Melbourne Cup weekend, but our marriage, for lack of any better way to term it, will begin on January 17 2009 (Tevet 21, 5769).

Doin' the Crunchie - part two

Doin' the Crunchie - part two
What's Your Poison?
(c) Melina Magdalena (2008

A couple of weeks ago I went walking in Paradise, down by the riverside. Across the dried-up riverbed in some long grass, I saw a mother and a dog, followed by two little girls. The little girls were brandishing large leafy branches over their heads. They marched along as though on parade. It took a few renditions of their chant before I realized what they were saying:

I love God! I hate Devil!

I wonder what Devil means to them? Interesting that like God, for these little girls, “Devil” implies a vast uncountability. Certainly if the whole world were reduced to simplistic terms of black and white; good and evil, a vast evil threatening, beckoning on the horizon is definitely something to hate and to fear.

And I wonder, what’s your poison?

These days we are so obsessed with number crunching. It seems a lot of it is being done to erase accountability, rather than to face one’s behaviours, consider them and take action to change them if our considerations warrant such action.

If you’re interested in statistics, consider the following:

A recent Australian study found that gay-identified young men (aged 18 - 24) were 3.7 times more likely to attempt suicide. Most of these attempts occurred after the person had self-identified as gay, but before having a same-sex experience and before publicly identifying themselves as gay. Wesley Mission (accessed on-line 14/3/08)

People who are bisexual or homosexual are at greater risk of having depression than people who are heterosexual. This is reflected in suicide statistics which have found that bisexual and homosexual people are six times more likely to attempt suicide than people who are heterosexual. This may relate to people who are homosexual and bisexual being more likely to struggle with their sexual identity and/or being discriminated against or bullied because of their sexuality. BeyondBlue (accessed on-line 14/3/08)

I heard anecdotally this week that within this group of non-heterosexual people, those who had religious upbringings are four times more likely to attempt and succeed in committing suicide than the others. (If any readers can confirm a source for this staggering statistic, I'd be keen to publish it properly.)

CRUNCHY PARENTS
I first came across the term crunchy in the domain of parenting. The criteria for being crunchy parents include our choices about nappies (or no nappies), vaccinations, breastfeeding, co-sleeping and schooling. Take a look at the quiz, and see where you fit. According to this quiz I’m probably not “a natural mama you are – you know, crunchy, like a "granola girl." I only scored 84 out of 130+ and that makes me “pretty crispy”.

But it got me thinking about judgments. I got so upset at the way my food choices were labelled traif – my Jewish identity is clearly a difficult, complex and touchy topic! I’m touchy about a whole lot of other subjects, too – driving a car, cleaning products, meat eating, plastic bags, and all those ecological ideas that position me in a place of power, according to my product and lifestyle choices. I suppose it’s no different from political correctness or that carbon footprint, in that it’s a way to track and judge and compare your actions against those of others, according to someone’s grand plan of what is right and wrong.

Now who’s to say any one of us is more correct than the other? Who gets to make those judgment calls? Who says homeschooling is better than pumping one’s children through the factory process of institutional schooling and socialization? Who says I’m wrong to put my children in childcare so that I can spend my waking hours working in some secondary or tertiary or post-tertiary industry for a living? Who says I should not feed meat to my children? Who says I am irresponsible for keeping cats?

Such ontological and unnecessary questions stem from the years I spent under the tutelage of a professor of linguistics whose belief was that if we stopped talking about the environment as though it were separate from us instead of as though we are part of it, the perceived problems would go away or naturally be dealt with as a matter of course and perception. I think it takes a great deal more than talk. Like the professor, I question my ability as an individual, to make an effective impact on our environment through my product and lifestyle choices. But if it makes me feel good to be contributing in some way, however small, then why should I question it?

I cast my mind back to the days before Linguistics, when I followed, blindly and mutely, the tutelage of another man – my husband. He never doubted his responsibility in taking action to save the world and the environment. Yes, he may have ruled our home with an iron fist, and I may have been the household member who worked hardest to do my bit in order to prove myself to him, but the way we lived back then has many admirable qualities. It took me quite a while to break myself of certain habits. Some I choose to retain, and others I have made my own.

My husband objected to childcare in a big way. But that was one battle I managed to win. My kids both had one half-day session of childcare on a fairly regular basis from the age of one. And when I studied, they had more. His argument was miserly – why pay someone else to look after his kid? And he’s carried this attitude throughout our long years of separation, in refusing to pay child support. I don’t like the idea of long daycare. I prefer the ideal of parents caring for their own children, and I am passionate about the recognition of child rearing as a legitimate form of work.

Homeschooling though, is a notion that just doesn’t grab me. I’m a state school girl, and I’ve sent my kids to state schools, too.

CRUNCHY IN THE BATHROOOM
For example, I had to convince myself it was OK to use hygiene products such as shampoo, conditioner, moisturizer, pads, deodorant and the like, even though they are marketed in plastic packaging. I tried to reuse my bottles for a few years, but the inconvenience broke me of that habit. Life got too busy, what with raising two kids, running a household, studying and working all at once. I’m sure many can relate to that.

These days I’m trying to swing back to the reuse of packaging. I’ve recycled religiously my whole adult life, and I don’t know that I can reduce much more than I already am.

CRUNCHY IN THE LAUNDRY
It goes without saying that my kids only wore cloth nappies. And we washed them in our twin tub. And we recycled a great deal of the water. And we used only soap flakes that had to be dissolved in hot water first. I say “we”, but of course it was mostly “me”, doing my eternal bit for the family and the environment, just as when I dug the bed, planted the seed and raised the homegrown spinach crop that was one of our son’s first foods.

This predated the data that compares the use of water in washing nappies with the ecological cost of disposable nappies. It predates the new technologies of truly disposable nappies. When I have my babies this time, I’ll probably still be washing nappies, but I may also use some truly disposables on occasion, and I’ll feel fine about that.

How does one measure the crunch between these two things? It’s tricky!

The first new appliance I ever bought in my life was a front-loader washing machine. It has 4 stars (out of 6) on its energy rating, and I save the water and dump it on my trees and pot plants.

CRUNCHY IN THE KITCHEN
I had the occasional backslide even while I was still in the marriage. There were the times I bought things I shouldn’t have, like a tub of yoghurt. Heaven forbid we have anything packaged in plastic. Our lifestyle was continuously evolving. When the Jesus Christians visited, they were still able to obtain most of their food from the bins outside supermarkets. In those days, the bins were not locked, and people could get access to an incredible array of products that were discarded because they’d passed their use by date. It was an affront to my husband to be served food that they had prepared – NOT because it came out of a bin, but because of how it had been packaged before it went into that bin.

We weren’t allowed to use food that came from tins, either – only glass and paper were kosher, according to my husband. But I learned to use tins after I left him. They are recycled as a matter of course.

Indeed – food between us was always a fraught issue. I grew up on a plethora of culturally diverse foodstuffs. Both my mother and my father are superb cooks, and I am well used to good food. Ours was a table at which everyone could have second helpings if they so wished. And we always had fresh fruit and salad available.

I was vegetarian through both my pregnancies, except for when I could get away with eating meat, such as at my in-laws house, and (before I left home) at my mother’s table. I used to sneakily patronize one of the Chinese takeaway cafes when I was at uni, and scoff down a lunch of greasy Chinese flavoured meat and vegetables whenever I could get away with it. It wasn’t that I minded being vegetarian, especially if it was the “right” thing to do, but my body craved meat.

So in 1992 when Bernie Maloney of the illustrious sombrero stayed with us for the second time and introduced me to the art of roasting beef and lamb, I happily embraced this concept into my repertoire. After all – not many come with his kind of credentials. I wasn’t willing to limit my diet in the way he did (tomatoes, strawberries, red meat, garlic and kiwi fruit), but I remember coming home from a Palm Sunday Rally at Peace Park to a kitchen filled with the aroma of roast garlic lamb he’d left in a slow oven to cook in our absence. I practically devoured the roast single-handedly, standing up. No surprise to learn I was chronically anaemic due to the depletion of my iron stores during pregnancy and breastfeeding and prolonged unsystematic vegetarianism.

But Bernie went on his way to yet another action, yet another protest somewhere else, and a new regime was put into place in my home. Yes, we might eat meat, but it must be the meat of vermin (rabbit) or native meat (kangaroo). These were not part of my cultural heritage and I could not smell them cooking or eat them without retching.

CRUNCHY ROAD USERS
We were staunch users of public transport. There were many occasions when we were offered lifts in someone’s car, and were obliged to turn them down. I used to stand on Main North Road outside Sefton Plaza, brandishing a homemade banner that read “YOUR CAR STINKS!” Oh yes – I did my bit for the environment. And when the bus came, I folded my banner, stuck it into my backpack, got the kids out of their pusher, folded the pusher single-handedly and loaded us into the bus and we were on our way.

I’m hopelessly addicted to my car. Even now I feel a tremulous excitement every time I get behind the wheel. I feel a sense of freedom and exhilaration – I can go anywhere. I learned to drive when I was 25. Now that I’m 38, I’m wondering how to reduce my car use. I’m still working on that.

CRUNCHY CONSUMPTION
So what’s the story these days, with all the organic cotton garments that are available in chain stores all of a sudden? I’ve not been in the habit of purchasing new clothes at all – and I figure there’s no point in limiting my op shop choices to garments that were not manufactured in China. The garment manufacture maze is very hard to navigate. This year’s Adelaide IWD focused on fairness for Outworkers – garment makers who work from home under very poor industrial conditions. I’ve not been in a financial position to make many choices about what I wear. Maybe this too will change as I enter a new phase of my life.

Well friends, expanding on the original Granola Girl I’m aiming to devise my very own crunchiness quiz. The scoring system is completely arbitrary, but it might be fun. I’ll try to have it up by next week, if other more pressing matters don’t crowd my writing time.

Oh – one last muesli-related story: 1976, we’re visiting my mother’s family in Germany. A cousin in West Germany has two kids around the same age as my brother and me. We stay with them. They have an incredible basement with tricycles and things we can ride around on. Every morning they have muesli for breakfast. You get to make your own! They have a cupboard with a myriad of little wooden drawers. Each drawer contains a different ingredient. You pull out the drawer and use a small scoop to make your own muesli. Never the same twice. What a gift!

What is the relation between Muesli and Granola? One is a brand-name variety of a kind of breakfast cereal, the other is a traditional food from middle Europe. But in Australia we don’t have granola bars – we have muesli bars. Hence the connection.


ps Just for fun, here's a photo from 1985 of my original crunchie Grandma Barnes, eating a gelati in Adelaide. During their working lives, Grandma and Grandpa ran a healthfood store and tree surgery, amongst other vocations as well as raising their brood. When I knew them they were the most amazing gardeners, and Grandpa caught a lot of their protein as well, in the form of fish and venison.

Doin’ the Crunchie – part one

Doin’ the Crunchie – part one
To Traif or not to Traif
© Melina Magdalena 2008


Remember Bert and Ernie – how unbearably earnest, serious and dorky was dear Bert, in contrast to joyous, quirky Ernie? Bert did have his moments of course; who could forget his paper clip
collection? This week I’ve been feeling a little like Bert and like Doin' the Pigeon.

The Jewish Lesbian Group Anthology has finally been published on-line. There’s a poem of mine in there that I hadn’t read since submitting it to the group several years ago. The anthology contains other well written, moving writings from Jewish Australian lesbians.

Making Spaces is about my relationship with my grandmother. I never did show it to her, always intending to share it with her once it had been published. I hope I never make that kind of mistake again.

Reading through some of the other contributions, I laughed and I cried, and was surprised at one point to be shaken by a surge of unexpected rage. This Summer when my sister and my niece were visiting Adelaide, they came over to my house one stinking hot afternoon, with the rest of the family. My niece (under two years of age at the time) was hungry. I bustled about my kitchen, preparing her a kindy lunch. For the uninitiated, that’s a plate of healthy finger food made attractive to the preschooler; less messy than some other meals I could mention. I had some sultanas, cheese, cracker biscuits … “I’ve got some fritz in the fridge”, I said to my sister. Do you think she’d like some of that?

My sister, a vegetarian for many years, had reached a difficult decision to allow her child to eat meat at least in the meantime. My brother-in-law is not a vegetarian. But she whipped her head around at me and snapped “I might allow my child to eat meat, but I’m not letting her eat traif!”

This was not the anger of someone who was feeling insecure. Unlike other aspects of mothering that had been internalised battlegrounds for my sweet sister, this time she clearly felt she was on higher moral ground.

I was swamped by a flood of shame. How could I have suggested that my precious niece put anything filthy and forbidden into her sweet little pure mouth? What kind of Jew am I? What kind of aunt am I? What kind of sister am I?

I’ve taken a little trip down memory lane this week. You know how it is – once you’re sensitised, everything feeds into the sensitivity. In my new NAP Teacher’s training course this week another new teacher made a remark about the assimilation of German Jews and how their assimilation into the German culture was the trigger for the Holocaust. Charming. Is this really the kind of person we want in 2008, around our newly arrived Australians? I don’t think so.

Then there was the blog post I came across, which starts with the paragraph
"I am so sick and tired of the terms slut and whore. I find anyone who uses these terms without thinking is being selfish. These words have caused a lot of harm. The terms slut and whore and the fact that they are still around today is a product of not only the fluency of language, where the word slut has evolved from it's original meaning of “dirty” to mean a demeaning word for sexually active women, and the word “whore's” etymology can be derived from the Danish word “hore” and the Swedish word “hora”, both meaning “one who desires.” (Stephanie Insiengmay, Leogurl’s Blog)

This post works its way through etymological, cultural and religious origins of some the differences between men and women and cultural expectations of our respective sexual behaviours. It’s an interesting piece of writing that resonates with me on many levels, as a woman, a Jew, a lesbian, a rape survivor. Insiengmay eventually reaches her core question – does the Bible condone rape? Well might she pose that question.

I return to the idea of my Jewishness and deplore my lack of authority over this aspect of my identity. What do I know? What kind of Jew am I?

The little I know of the Bible, Torah and other Judeo-Christian texts highlights to me the lack of woman’s voice. For the most part, these texts were produced and promulgated by men who saw no need to include the experiences and voices of women. They are male-dominated, patriarchal documents to which for the most part, I cannot relate. I’m not interested in being the kind of Jew who adheres to something just because others do, when it is meaningless to me.

And when I look at the Bible, I don’t see all of myself reflected in its stories.

As a human being, yes – some stories touch me to the core. I think particularly of Jonah, and how I chose my Jewish name to be Jonina Shirah – dovesong, recalling how a very reluctant Jonah allowed himself to be dragged into the spotlight at last, to deliver his important message. I think of Penelope Farmer’s Eve; she the innocent, who had such a brutal rebirth into a terrifying world of responsibility for others when she had not yet found herself. Lilith of course has been erased from these texts. I think too of Mary of Magdalene, for whom I am also named. And I recall the radio program I heard last week, in which it was postulated that Christianity and Judaism may yet revise their common links on the basis that Jesus would not have separated himself from his people, in order to found a separate, anti-Jew religion. Of course, it was a Christian who made this claim. As a Jew, I don’t have any problems with Jesus the teacher, healer, poet, human, friend.

As a woman, I also think of Esther/Hadassah, she who had it good. She risked it all, to call attention to the need of her people. Like Esther, I am privileged, and am frequently reminded of my responsibility and my opportunities to work towards a fairer and happier world for other women. I think of Na'amah, also written out of the official texts. She was Noah’s wife, who saved the seeds of a drowned world that the world emerging might flourish and feed the survivors. I think of Dinah, who was raped and discarded as damaged goods, unworthy of carrying on our traditions and our line. I think of Lot’s daughters, valued only for the currency of safety the violation of their bodies might award their cowering father.

As a Jew, I love the traditions and stories of Pesach. I am particularly drawn to Zipporah, Moses’ wife. She embraced the strange, the uninitiated, the haunted, and at least according to the animated version of the story, Prince of Egypt, she accompanied him back to the scene of the crime, to help in the liberation of her people. Again, I know little of how she is represented in the texts of my people. I know that Miriam cops a raw deal, and I love the feminist revisitations and interpretations of her power. I wonder about other Jewish heroes and humans, male and female. I know so little of them.

As a lesbian, there is none of my self in these texts. And this is painful. No matter its origins, we are fixated on sex and sexuality in this world, and my identity is skewed in turn. I probably give too much weight to my unbelongingness, but such are the circumstances that surround me and reflect my inner concerns.

Like so many of the men of the Bible, so many of the men who people my world are unpleasant, rough, inconsiderate, mean, cruel, stupid human beings. Not only the men who question the role of provocative t-shirts in inviting women to be raped; not only the man who blames the German Jews for their own annihilation; not only the man at my table today who argued over the use of some words, instead of working towards finding some shared, legitimate meaning to enable us to get on with the task at hand. These are incidental, momentary glimpses into the things that occur in my world on an everyday basis.

When I look around me and see men who are almost all embittered, angry, apparently dispossessed power trippers, who reflect the ills of the communities and the twisted aspects of their social upbringing, it’s no wonder I find so little value in reading the texts of my heritage. They were probably created by men who felt the same way - insecure angry little nothingnesses who falsely enlarge their grandeur because they could not bear to see themselves as such insignificant motes, in this gorgeous, mysterious, vast universe.

So back to the question – how do I justify having fritz in my fridge, and seeing no wrong in serving it to my little niece? If you are what you eat, and I eat fritz, the connection is clear. It is not to Traif or not to Traif, but it is:
What kind of person am I?
Am I Traif?

Apparently, I've been routinely misspelling the word, anyway! Now I know why Miss Holier Than Thou made a point of showing me the correct spelling in a recent text message. Whew! I need to process this anger, and how!

When I started to think about the word, it was easy to reel off a list of adjectival synonyms (though Traifitself is a noun – filthy, dirty, disgusting, damaged, horrible, diseased. And so it goes.

Of course traif is actually the opposite of Kosher, or halachic, or in Muslim-speak, halal. It is the preoccupation of millions who believe that how they prepare their food and keep their homes is more important to G-d, than putting food in the mouths of the hungry. It is the opposite of clean, pure, wholesome and (in current terminology) crunchy.

I looked it up on Google and was taken to a site that claims the word Traif is in some parlance, used to refer to lesbian. Clearly, I am on the right track here. Shall I continue to self-flagellate, never mind that that practice belongs to the adherents of another tradition altogether, to which I do not lay claim? Am I damaged goods, no use to the pure, unmarried, upstanding man who seeks his wife to complete his life, cook and clean and bear his children? So be it.

Why would I wish to forsake being who I am, in order to adhere to and live up to the demands and expectations of others, who would deny me my freedom to live and express myself according to my own moral compass of right, wrong and all the shades of grey in between? Can these others prove to me my failings and my failure to be human? Where is the evidence that the colours that surround us are not more important than the black and white? Why must worth be calculated always upon the brutal dichotomy of an absence and presence that can be seen and measured with the eye and the hand? What about the wildness of spirit, the illumination of heart, and the brilliance of gut?

So if, because, maybe I in my feminist lesbian jewish essence am Traif, is it possible for me to reclaim this, in the same way others have reclaimed queer, wicked, filthy and bad? Can I ameliorate Traif and rekey it to emote and connote only its positive qualities?

Because for me, I think now that Traif has mostly positive qualities. I know who I am. I know where I’ve come from. I know who I am being, and who I am working to become.

T-Shirt Corruption

T-Shirt Corruption
© Melina Magdalena 2008

Synchronicity comes to me this week in the loose conjunction of four events. Firstly, I read A Thousand Splendid Suns, my birthday present from my own splendid son, and the oppression of women in Afghanistan has been heavily on my mind; secondly a teacher at my school displayed a blatant disregard for democratic process and has deprived a fairly elected young Afghan woman of her position of President in our school’s newly formed service club because she is a young Muslim woman; thirdly, a male colleague asked me recently what I thought about a South Australian parliamentarian who blamed the t-shirts women wore, for their being raped; and finally let’s not forget the commemoration of International Women’s Day this week, the eighth of March.

T-Shirt Culture
Just before Valentine’s Day this year, Independent MP Bob Such is reported to have accused women who wear t-shirts with provocative slogans, of demeaning their sex, and encouraging sex attacks. The article does not describe the T-Shirts to which he refers. I was naturally outraged when I heard about this on commercial radio as I drove to school that day.

Such sensationalised trivialised news items always trigger me back to a moment when I remember what I was wearing when I was raped – a flannelette nightgown. Hardly provocative, you might say. And where was I? Tucked up in my own bed.

DO RAPISTS STOP TO READ THEIR VICTIM’S T-SHIRTS? I DON’T THINK SO.

It reminds me of Ramadan 2006, when Sheik Taj Din al-Hilali compared uncovered women to abandoned meat that the cats will come and eat. Remember that?

I don’t know about you, but I don’t tend to go out and eat the meat I find in the street; nor have I ever been tempted to leap upon and have sex with men who wear provocative and demeaning t-shirts, not even during my most desperate sperm-seeking adventures.

I am neither cat, nor man – and I wish no disrespect to either creature. Cats are known to be discriminating. Cats are known to be survivors. Men are human beings, with the same capacity for compassion and empathy as women. I don’t believe it is because a man is a man that he rapes. This proposition is as demeaning and outrageous as the proposition that a woman is to blame for being raped, because of the clothing another woman was wearing. Where is the causal link?

When a (male) colleague raised this issue with me in the staff room recently, I was speechless. I gazed at him with pity and horror – after all, he has two young sons himself. Does he really believe men cannot control their sexual impulses and lust for power over women? I wanted to say to him – just listen to what you’re saying for a moment. Where is the logic? Do you believe this about yourself? And what does it say, about the way you relate to me?

Instead I said simply “No, the women who wear those t-shirts are not the women who get raped.”

As for the t-shirts that I have seen on men’s bodies in the last year or so, here in Australia, where the culture of alcohol prevails, these t-shirts frequently have lewd, crude, boozy messages on them, whether displayed pictorially, through stick figures, or with words. I no more enjoy seeing men dressed in clothes that display their apparently cavalier and uncaring attitude towards women, than I enjoy seeing women who are dressed in clothes that to me, scream sensuality and sexuality. I don’t think this is a new phenomenon, although perhaps the rise of so-called raunch culture amongst young Australian women might be seen as something new, though the web references to it date back to 2006. It’s something I know little about, and find confrontingly uncomfortable.

In some ways it’s odd to compare the ubiquitous and concealing baggy t-shirt favoured by so many people, with the scant, flesh-revealing styles of dress favoured by many contemporary women. From what Bob Such said, it seems it’s the almost defiant messages on the t-shirts worn by young women that have caught and offended his eye, rather than the flashy eye candy of the sleazy and skanky.

I note that Khaled Hosseini quoted in A Thousand Splendid Suns the decree of the Taliban as they took power in Kabul, 1996, several special laws:

Attention women:
You will stay inside your homes at all times. It is not proper for women to wander wimlessly about the streets. If you go outside, you must be accompanied by a mahram, a male relative. If you are caught alone on the street, you will be beaten and sent home.
You will not, under any circumstance, show your face. You will cover with burq when outside. If you do not, you will be severely beaten.
Cosmetics are forbidden.
Jewellery is forbidden.
You will not wear charming clothes.
You will not speak unless spoken to.
You will not make eye contact with men.
You will not laugh in public. If you do, you will be beaten.
You will not paint your nails. If you do, you will lose a finger.
(Khaled Hosseini (2007), A Thousand Splendid Suns, Bloomsbury Publishing, London, New York and Berlin; pages 248-249)

I am tempted to ask – for whose protection are women to be so severely restricted? Is it that men risk their afterlives because they may come into contact with a provocative force so strong that they may temporarily forget their own humanity and commit acts of such depravity that G-d will not forgive them?

Is a woman not a human being? Is she not worthy of freedom of expression, freedom of movement – of laughter, for heaven’s sake? It is such apparently small things that make life worth living.

Service Clubs
Our school has a philosophy of peace and multiculturalism. It is our explicit aim to educate our students so that they may fully embrace life in Australia. Explain to me then how it can come about that a miscarriage of justice is justified and talked away. How does this not contradict everything our school stands for?

I recently took my class to the Australian Electoral Commission, where they learned about elections, the history of voting in Australia, and had a mock election to demonstrate how preferential voting works. The phrase that our guide used continually, was that Australia has free and fair elections. Not one of my adult students had ever had the opportunity to vote in a government election.

How an election which a student won by a landslide, chosen by her peers for the leadership qualities they see in her every day, can be distorted into invalid because of her success, makes no sense to me. As another teacher exclaimed angrily, it does violence to our students who are taught that elections in Australia are free and fair.

The only reason offered for this distortion and perversion was that a young Muslim woman would not be allowed to go out at night and therefore cannot be the president of a service club.

Let alone the obvious answers to this claim – the young woman in question enjoys a trusting relationship with her parents who are also adapting to the different demands of Australian public life, and she is in fact awarded a degree of independence that reflects her background and has shaped her into the person she is – the teachers who decided she could not take on the role she was elected to came to this conclusion without even talking to the person in question. She would not have accepted her nomination, had she believed she would not be able to do a good job in all aspects of the role.

I’m spitting mad about this, but the issue has been hushed up and whitewashed. It smacks of paternalism and racism, and has burst my bubble about my workplace and colleagues.

Happy International Women’s Day 2008.
Clearly, there is more work to be done.

Apology and Dissent - The BIG But!! (part two)

Apology and Dissent - The BIG But!! (part two)
(c) Melina Magdalena

Well well well, I am so happy that Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd spoke an apology on my behalf and on behalf of Australian people past and present, for the horrors, atrocities, bureaucracratic abuses and other wrongs committed by us and on our behalf, with our tacit assent and ignorance, towards Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people of this continent and nation. I was lucky enough to be able to turn on the radio and listen to his address last Wednesday, along with my students, and some other teachers who wanted the opportunity to be part of this occasion. We then had a vigorous and interested discussion about Australia's track record and history, which my students were ready for, all having lived here now for between 3 years and 6 months.

And what I'd wanted to go on and say on this topic has of course changed with changing circumstances... When I Google 100 revs now, I am no longer directed to motorhead sites. Instead, there are numerous articles, letters and posts about the Reverends who hope to march in Sydney's Mardi Gras next month. More on that in a moment.

I also got a direct email reply from my MP, Pyney himself - a surprise. Perhaps I could interpret it as an oblique apology thrust in my direction, for treating me as an insignificant minion whose experiences and ideas were not worth regarding. Or perhaps he sent the same pdf copy of the Sunday Mail article to the thousands in his electorate, who responded to GetUp's call to keep the Liberals humble, and join in The Apology?

My first day back at work this year consisted of a day-long professional development workshop about restorative justice in schools and classrooms. It was my first formal introduction to the ideas and the process.

Restorative Justice can begin with the recognition that forcing an insincere apology from a wrongdoer who is ignorant of what harm s/he has instigated and of its consequences for the wronged, is utterly meaningless, and dissatisfying for both sides. As a young parent I had it modelled to me time and again “Say Sorry!” And again, with a threat to back it up “Say sorry, or you won’t…” Clearly, it was a social convention, and did little to repair the damage or the relationships involved.

So what is the value of Apology?

Apology is an open-handed gesture that someone makes with a particular intention.

The intention can be to preserve the status quo; stop the boat from rocking anymore; pull back from a previously-stated position because it’s too scary to keep up one’s outrage or distance from the fold. This kind of Apology is about giving one’s power away, and placing it at the feet of the Authorities. The Apologiser becomes weaker as an effect of guilt and shame.

You will note my use of “Apologiser” and not “Apologist”. If Apology is made in order to maintain a phony harmony and power-stricken status quo, the Apologiser is in effect, an Apologist for that status quo. A little like the reaction to Brendan Nelson’s so-called Apology (paraphrased as – we did it for your own good, and it hurt us just as much as it hurt you, and you don’t even have the grace to be grateful for our attempts to save you from yourselves).

Apology is just the beginning - the opening of the window of opportunity for a new way of relating.

A sincere Apology is an acknowledgment of Harm, more than it is about wrongdoing, blame or punishment. A sincere Apology is not an easy thing to offer. It takes great moral courage, particularly when the implications are that things are going to have to change. That kind of Apology is about rocking the boat and making a noise.

In Apologising, one can feel bereft of potency – who is to say that my Apology will be accepted with the same sincerity with which it is given? Who is to say that the Harmed Person or People will understand and believe my contrition and my regret? And furthermore, in making this Apology I must acknowledge that the effects of my Harm are further reaching, more deeply rooted, and longer lasting than ever I imagined. The more I listen, the more is exposed; the more deeply I fall into that pit of despair. I must see, and accept the effects of this Harm, no matter where and how it began. My accountability is to the Present, whilst I cannot alter the Past. In making my Apology, I am setting a new course for the Future.

There were some letters in the Sydney Star Observer, in response to 100 Revs. One of them in particular I think demonstrates the ongoing effects of harm and how the effects manifest themselves as they bounce from hurt to anger to fear to anger to hurt again. Can a guarantee be given, that an Apology will not cause further Harm, by raising expectations of healing that are never achieved?

The Harmed often carry a great deal of anger for what has been done to them, and the effects of this. There is no guarantee of graciousness towards the Apologiser. In this sense, an Apology must be unconditional. It is possible that the Harmed are not ready to accept a burden of working with the Apologisers to create new ways of relating. It is possible that the Harmed are stuck inside the web of their distress. When this happens, it does not render an Apology meaningless. It means the Apologiser must seek other, less direct avenues for making amends and creating a new Future.

I think we must remain open to the possibilities that a sincere and unconditional Apology creates.

Here’s an example of an Apology that is sincere but conditional:
Imagine if you will, an Institution with a long history of maltreatment of certain minorities. The maltreatment involves spreading vicious rumours, exclusion and stigmatisation and denial of access or comfort. One day, the Institution is forced to acknowledge and recognise the far-reaching effects of its policies, processes and the behaviours its adherents have promulgated in the name of Convention and not rocking the boat. The Institution makes a decision to formally apologise to the Wronged. The Apology is sincere. The people in the Institution genuinely regret the effects of their policies, processes and behaviours. If they could just separate the effects from the Wronged, (whose behaviour – alas – continues to contravene Convention), perhaps the Wronged would relent and change their ways? Then everyone would be on the same side, and we would all have a happy and unified ending.

The point is, that Apology is not about taking sides, but about building bridges.

The 100 Revs are not requiring those within the GLBTIQ communities who have been harmed by the treatment in churches to change themselves at all, in order for their sincere Apology to be offered. The whole point of taking their Apology onto GLBTIQ turf (the Mardi Gras) is to meet the Harmed in a place where the Harmed are more powerful and have more voice than those who are making the Apology. It is a humble gesture, and one which has caused controversy within the GLBTIQ communities, which, it must be acknowledged, are themselves far from homogenous.

The relationship between Apology and Dissent has something to do with Moral Courage. In acknowledging that things are not perfect, one expresses a desire for change. The effect of a sincere and unconditional Apology can be to shake the very fabric of Convention and tearing at the roots of what passes for a Peaceful Society.

What responsibilities do we have, as Australians who are part of an openly multicultural and culturally diverse society? Must we forever be engaged in acts of Apology, in order to co-exist, because our differences are brought to the fore, whilst our commonalities are reduced to the banal? Surely this is a negative spin on the cultural diversity? Is there not more that unifies us, than divides?

Dissent is a verb of action, whilst Dissension is a noun, a state of being. There are many ways to dissent. Some promote peace; some promote revolution and violence. Fomenters of dissent all work within the understanding of a need for deep and radical change at the heart of the matter.

To dissent is to act when we recognise the need for change. Dissent implies the acknowledgment of Harm, and Dissent can only begin from that recognition. It takes a great deal of moral courage to act in such situations. It means separating oneself from the fold of convention, stepping out and making a noise to attract the attention not only of the Wronged, but also of those who continue to harm, either with intention or through malicious ignorance. Apology is one of the first meaningful actions of Dissent.

It’s nice to think we can all exist in our disconnected bubbles of homogeneity, where everyone thinks and behaves like me, and we all feel safe and comfortable all the time, because we know what’s expected and that’s not too hard to keep up.

Trouble is, as self-seeking and comfort loving as Australia has become, we are also embroiled in serious exploration of individuality and expressions of freedoms. The implications are severe. Our bubbles are not homogenous. The illusion is shattered, every time some individual chooses a different path, and takes it unashamedly, insisting on his or her right to do so and furthermore demanding unconditional acceptance from everyone else.

We are not a homogenous society or culture. It’s about time our thinking caught up with our reality.

When someone comes out as being other than heterosexual, it takes enormous moral courage. An analogy for what it takes to step outside the bubble of one’s comfort zone is the crazy idea that a fish might one day decide for no particular reason that any of its cronies can comprehend, that it wants to live on the land now, and not in the water. Its cronies are too busy running around and asking stupid questions, comparing notes, spreading rumours about the land-dwelling fish, to see that there are vital aspects of that land-dwelling fish’ life that remain the same, and also that the land-dwelling fish would be much happier if her cronies and associates chose to support her in her new venture, rather than condemn her and whisper behind her back; let alone acknowledge what an incredibly brave and gutsy thing she is choosing to do, despite all the flack she is copping from left, right and centre.

And this is where response to the 100 Revs from within their own bubbles, falls far short of the mark. The coming out that the 100 Revs are doing, concerns the idea that belonging could be extended beyond the strict borders of conventionality and heteronormativity, to encompass a broader understanding of human sexuality within the beliefs and thinking of what it is to be Christian, than what has commonly been accepted by church-goers.

Apology and Dissent - the big BUT!!! (Part One)

Apology and dissent – the big BUT!!!
PART ONE © Melina Magdalena 2008

I began this week with a sour taste in my mouth; realizing that my refusal to consider my Uncle F’s apology to my parents was pushing me into the same corner he was trying to scramble out of.

Then came an email from GetUp requesting me to write to my local MP, seeking support for Prime Minister Rudd’s commitment to saying Sorry. My local MP is smarmy Liberal politician Christopher Pyne. I wrote a short, but passionate email, urging him to support The Sorry on the basis that it is just, necessary and important for his future credibility, the credibility of his Party but most of all, for the credibility of the apology that Rudd will make on my behalf, and on behalf of us all, for the wrongdoings past and present Australian perpetrate against Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples of this nation.

Next, I received an email from my sweetheart’s parents. They are among the group of reverends who intend to march in this year’s Sydney Mardi Gras, bearing a public apology to “gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people” for the way they have been treated in general, by churches and the people who attend them. To see their full apology, go here (100 Revs). This endeavour has been widely reported in the last few days. I have heard that those involved are suffering repercussions for the stand that they are choosing to take. Here’s one of the news stories that caught my attention. It links Rudd’s apology to the Stolen Generations with the 100 Revs.

On Lesbian_Parents_Australia this week, a focus has been on the issue of which schools will welcome our children. Many mothers on the site have had bad experiences as non-heterosexuals growing up Catholic, and also with working in Catholic schools. They do not wish their children to grow up stigmatized. This is their basis for choosing not to subject their children to an education in a Catholic school.

So apology has been on my mind a great deal, as my students returned to school and I began my second year of teaching.

We spent a great deal of time in the classroom on Monday discussing and committing to a set of classroom rules and expectations. This group of students has already had up to one year of schooling in an Australian context, and was quickly engaged in a process that is already familiar to them. We made our list, and felt good about it.

Yesterday, a young Sudanese woman interrupted class with a “What the HELL are you doing?” to a young Afghan man as he walked past her, to his seat. I didn’t catch what the hell he had done, and my automatic reaction was to question the woman, rather than the man – I am sorry for this, because it works directly against the principles of Restorative Justice , to which our school is committed. I feel that my reaction definitely falls into a “blaming the victim” mode. I do not know what happened in my classroom, except as a teacher, who was interrupted mid-flow by an interaction, accidental or purposeful, between two students of different genders and different cultural perspectives.

In speculating, it could be the man brushed past her accidentally. This woman often sits with her chair very far out from the desk, in order to work closely at her exercise book. It could be he touched her head (a severe cultural taboo) because she was not wearing one of her wigs that day, and this particular student has a fascination (borne of envy) with African hair. Or it could be something completely different.

Like so many classroom incidentals, it has been left unexamined and unresolved. If we were to devote our full attention to such occurrences each time they arose, we would have scarcely any time for teaching of the content that is deemed so vital.

On the other hand, such classroom incidentals clearly indicate a need for finding a way to work within our multicultural and culturally diverse communities so that we do not end up at perpetual war with one another.

To summarise, the focal points for me this week are:
· Homophobia
· Cultural Diversity
· The nature of formal apology
· Harm and Harmony

And that’s all I’ve managed to pull together this week. More next week, I hope.

Bones in the Family Closet

Bones in the Family Closet and Why I Won't Be Going There Again
(c) Melina Magdalena 2008

Well this is unbelievable, except that he's done it so many times before. I suspect my uncle expects us all to just forgive and forget, like the good Christians we aren't. I think I've had it this time around.

My inbox just went BEEP, as I was sitting here, minding my own business, preparing a worksheet for my students. My first thought was - oh goodie, another person responding to my birthday party invitation - and then I saw the sender's name, and the subject header RE: Children's 'Education' Accounts. My heart skipped a beat or two as I contemplated whether to open the email, fearing I would be subjecting myself to another torrent of abuse and racial vilification, but I went ahead and opened it, ready to delete at a moment's notice, if necessary.

Some background -
In 1980, after my parents brought us to Australia for the second time, it was clear we would be making this our permanent home. To their dismay, we were followed within 2 years by my mother's mother, her second husband, and their youngest two children my Uncle F, who is three years my senior, and my Aunt X, a year my junior. Much more is tucked away in our Family Closet, unspoken and unseen, than is talked about, but these things nevertheless enact their toll upon us all from time to time, as we are held accountable for the actions of our forebears, and find ourselves struggling for breath in the stranglehold of past wrongs that were never revealed, let alone amended.

Forgive the obtuse nature of these revelations - obviously I can't just lay it all out on the table here publically, lest I risk finding myself up to the neckio in legal proceedings by irate family members intent upon preserving the afterlife dignity of the aforementioned. Besides, since no one is willing to go beyond the Pale of Denial and talk about it, nothing has been proved. Without the evidence, all I have ever had to go on, is its very real and somewhat painful consequences.

So, as far as extended family goeth, I have only my aunt and uncle, their spouses and children (4 boys between them) here in Australia. I don't know my American family.

Although my beloved grandmother (their mother) seemed to take a long time between declining and then dying, it all happened in the space of a few intense months, during which I spent a lot of time visiting her in hospital, at home, at hospital again, and finally in the nursing home. I would not change anything about this experience even if I could. I have no regrets and no guilt in my heart, where she is concerned. We had a deeply honest, compassionate and loving relationship; I feel loved and cherished by my grandmother, and I believe she knows how much I loved and cherished her in turn. The only topic we didn't discuss was her late husband. So you can see I held up my end of the bargain, and kept the closet doors firmly childproofed and locked.

In the absence of any other likely villains, Uncle F leapt, quite early on in his career, upon my parents as the source of his anger, alienation and general frustration. Time and time again would go round and round the cycle of betrayal, abuse, apology and contrition. It started when he was quite young. He would steal something from them; sometimes something very precious, such as my great-grandfather's collection of stamps. Spectacularly outraged by the accusation, Uncle F would do a disappearing act. Unlike the stamps, he came back eventually. In returning, he'd try one of two tactics
(a) do a prodigal son manoeuvre and expect to be feasted and feted as the returned lost prince
or
(b) crawl back in on his belly, lower than the proverbially malilgned snake, expecting forgiveness in greater measure than his self-loathing.

As time went on and history repeated itself in expanding histrionics, Uncle F was more often met by suspicion and hurt, than welcome. We're only human, after all.

I would have to say he had it fairly tough, but certainly no tougher than any of us. I first became villainised after he moved out of my house. I was a young wife and mother, going through the great life changes that wifedom and motherhood tend to engender, along with all that other stuff I went through at the same time. Uncle F moved in, took advantage, embellished and embroidered his victim state that had led him to be homeless, ate, drank and made merry and never contributed to household expenses until he moved out again, trailing a wake of anger and hurt behind him that we would feel he ought to have behaved any differently towards us, the only members of his family at that time, who would give him the time of day.


Tja!

whatever!

Ah, the ebbs and the flows... I am reminded of "Watershed", that Indigo Girls' song in which they sing
Every five years or so I look back on my life
And I have a good laugh.
You start at the top, go full circle round
Catch a breeze, take a spill
But ending up where I started again makes me wanna stand still.

Then one day Uncle F found his God and His God found him. He was saved and forgiven for all past wrongdoings - and forgive my faulty understanding of the subject at hand, but it seems he considers himself forgiven of any future misdemeanours as well. The idea of being saved and forgiven extends itself widely from past, through present, to distant future. There is nothing he need do in the meantime, to preserve his State Of Grace. He is free from blame, free from responsibility, free from relationship or consequence.

Considering that Unvle F's transformation more or less coincided with my branch of the family's finding our Jewish feet, some conflict was sure to ensue. I can believe we found the same God, even though I've actually been a believer of some description, all my life. The expressions of our faithful selves naturally took quite divergent paths. We were no more open to expressing ourselves as Christians, than Uncle F was to express himself as a Jew, despite the fact that it was the same family member - my grandmother, his mother, my mother's mother, whose heritage had led us finally to our home of faith.

And so we painted another layer of mutual distrust onto the surface of our Family Closet.

When my grandmother died, she left me a small inheritance - something I had neither anticipated, nor expected. I was dismayed to learn she had left considerably less to her youngest children, my Uncle F and my Aunt X, and I was worried about this on two levels. On the one hand I felt it was unfair, and that as her mere granddaughter, I had no right to my inheritance. On the other hand I was afraid that there would be consequences to my grandmother's choices. I was reassured by various family members, including my Uncle F and my Aunt X, that my grandmother (their mother) had good reasons for choosing to distribute what she could not take with her in the way that she did; and that I should discard any feelings of discomfort about it. So I did.

My mother, (their sister) took steps to pre-empt disturbing consequences, and make amends for her late mother's (in)discretions. She decided she would like to take part of what her mother had left her, and give it to her nephews - the children of Uncle F and his wife, and Aunt X and her husband. In doing so, she enlisted my support. She knew I was on fairly good terms with the pair of them, and she knew that as her only adult child who was in the same city, it would be practical for us to share the signatory role to the accounts she set up in her nephews' names. I agreed to this.

It means that every time I get a bank statement, indeed every time I take a look at my bank accounts online, I get to see the accounts of my four young cousins (aged 1 - 8 years). It has been wryly frustrating over a summer of earning no income, to see my accounts gradually dwindle to nothing, whilst theirs maintain their steady, slow upward pace.

When all this took place, my mother contacted her brother, Uncle F, and her sister, Aunt X, and explained her intentions. These were immediately dismissed and rewritten by her outraged brother, who accused her amongst other things, of believing him to be incapable of providing for his own children. Nevertheless, the accounts exist, and my mother adds to them from month to month, because otherwise they would no accrue any interest at all. My Aunt X has taken quite a different view of the opportunity, and contributes to her son's account quite regularly. The boys will gain access to this money, such that it is, when they turn 18 years old.

As signatory to the accounts, I was fortunate enough to be the recipient of a vitriolic email addressed to my mother from her brother (Uncle F) in January this year. In this email, he accuses my parents of stealing Aunt X's money that she has been contributing to A's (her son) account, in order to fund their own bathroom renovations. Here are some excerpts from this first email, provided as examples of the nature of his communication to us.

"I think it's pretty obvious that I was wrong, and that you are in fact nothing more then [sic!] hypocritical thieves, liars and con-artists ..." (21/1/08)
"I have writen today to ask you (assuming you haven't already spent their
money on your bathroom rennovations [sic!] and/or all the other things I hear
you've been spending on) to transfer B, K and W's deposits directly to X ... to partially remunerate them for the money you so shamelessly have stolen from them."

Now when tempers flare, this kind of strong language is to be expected. What really offends and hurts me is Uncle F's misuse of certain Jewish texts, in this case what he calls "The Gemara (A key part of The Talmud - every Jew's most 'sacred' oral
tradition)" to back up his reasoning for why my mother and father would have behaved in the way he accuses them of behaving.

I am no Jewish scholar. I have not studied anyone's Bible or other religious texts, and I have never claimed to cling to Torah, Talmud or Bible as a person who takes them literally. I think to take such a complex set of texts literally would be crazymaking, because they are narratives that interweave, explore, cry out in anguish and despair, explain, rejoice, contradict and question, as much as they instruct. This I know from my limited experience as a Shul-attending Jew, which I was, for a few years.

Part of Uncle F's transformation into what he calls a Christian has involved a lot of study. He uses this study to explain and justify his behaviours, whether they have been to label his mother and sister as "evil incarnate", or to deny his children any contact with "magic" via evil Disney cartoons.

Setting aside my previous assertion that it could be taking his Bible literally that has produced such crazymaking, I am deeply wounded by my Uncle F's using his so-called knowledge of Judaism to accuse his sister and brother-in-law of theft.

I realised I could not let this lie unchallenged. I could no longer maintain any level of relationship with my Uncle F, if he were so cruel, disrespectful and abusive. The terms he lays out in this email are terms I can no longer condone or ignore. So I replied to him. Here is some of what I write:

"Dear F,
"I am not sure how to respond to this email. It makes me shrivel up inside and want nothing to do with you ever again. And this is such a shame, because I enjoyed visiting you and your family on Christmas Day, and had thought you accepted me as part of your family.... I would like you to refrain from using the Bible and Talmud to back up your defamatory, hurtful, disrespectful and abusive accusations. It seems such hypocrisy that you adhere to a religion that preaches such hatred against others whilst speaking from the other side of its metaphorical mouth of love. I can't see any love in what you've written here, to my mother and your sister....
"As an out lesbian, I know I need to tread carefully around you and your belief system. I have tried hard not to offend you. It is ironic that despite my efforts, you appear to make no consideration on my behalf. Consider for a moment how it feels as a lesbian and a Jew, to receive these accusations? They affect me no less than they affect my parents. There is absolutely no sense of relief in my mind to realise at this moment that you do not accept me; and that on the contrary you deride and revile my existence as a lesbian and a Jew; your niece; the cousin of your children. I had hoped to maintain a friendly and civil relationship with you on terms that I could accept. However, I cannot accept the terms you present in this hateful email to my mother....
"There is no truth in your accusations. I shall not dignify them with a detailed response." (23/1/08)

Clearly, I opened myself up to his further abuse. It did not take long.

".... Melina, I could understand your being upset if I were offering my
interpretations. After all, I am not Jewish, and I have only studied Judaism (off and on) since 2000 to try to understand your parents better. (About 1 year of full time study over those 8 years.) However, because I did't [sic!] offer interpretations cannot understand your being upset at quoting your own oral tradition to you....
"Perhaps your [sic!] upset at having the truth thrust into your face? If so, don't
blame me for the fact that you're following Rabbi's [sic!] so corrupt that G-d sent
His people into captivity through The Babylonianians in the 6th Century BCE
to force them to turn back to Him!
"If you don't like/agree with what's in the Babylonian and Jurusalem [sic!] Talmuds,
I suggest you find another set of beliefs. ....
"I think it's really sad that:
(1) You take personal offense to an email not specifically addressed to you
(2) That you can somehow conclude that I'm attacking your sexuality!!!???
(3) That you can discount my actions to bipolar or some other mental deficiency
(4) That you can attack me for no other reason then I'm trying to help my sister
(5) That you twist my words so... incompetently!!! ....
"This email is one of the worst examples of deflection I've seen in a long time. With your high IQ, combined with your formal education I really expected a lot more... Frankly, I've seen people with half your IQ and no matriculation do far better at changing subjects and avoid accountability." (23/1/08)

I did not reply to this email, but the torrent did not end, there. The next day, I got more in my inbox from him. I could not bear to read it, and stashed it in my 'family' file until today. OK, I've gathered my strength. This time, he makes no pretense of writing to me. After a series of 20 progressively vile, disgusting and violent quotes:

"Oh, I could quote many many A4 size pages containing the vile filth Rabbi's [sic!] have claimed to have been passed on by Moses in your written traditions...
Things these vile individuals claim to be as equally divinely inspired by the All Mighty as the ten commandments, the prophets and the pentatuch [sic!] - but so obviously are so obviously not that Jesus called them painted tombs full of dead mens [sic!] bones. (Beautiful on the outside but dead on the inside.)
"Now... I have shown you MANY examples of religious hatred in your most current and so-called 'holy' writtings... I hereby challenge you to list one (single) solitary example of the teaching of religious hatred by Christianity to justify your false accusation." (24/1/08)

MOST CURRENT?????

What century is this idiot living in, I ask you!

On the subject of my sexuality, he tells me of his sister-in-law, a woman I've never heard him speak of before. Apparently she and her female lover visit Uncle F reguarly:

"We do not treat them any differently then the way we have ever treated you at any time. We do not 'hate' either of them (or you) we love them - just as we love you. We love them as purely as we can - doing our utmost to treat them as Jesus did when he ministered to the prostitutes, murderers, liars, thieves, tax-collectors and/or any other kind of sinner the Pharrisees [sic!] and Saducees condemned as worthy of death by stoning.
"They (the religious leaders of Israel) didn't understand that Christ came not to condemn, but to to turn all sinners back to the Father anymore then you do." (24/1/08)

WHOAH - I can tell you it made me feel a WHOLE lot better to know that my Uncle F regards me and my so-called "lifestyle" in the same category he regards prostitutes, murderers, liars, thieves, tax-collectors and so on. I can also safely assert he does not show the same degree of lovingkindness to my parents, whom he at this point in time also considered to be thieves. He concludes by calling me crazy.

"I think you need serious help when you write things like the above to me.
"Perhaps I will address the more crazy stuff you wrote another time... I'll think about it after I've calmed down." (24/1/08)

My replies to this email are terse "don't bother, F" (24/1/08) and "F, Do not email me again." (24/1/08)

to which he confidently and in sane? mind replies:
"If you cannot accept what I have written, that's fine, and I'll be happy to accept that and not initiate further unwelcome contact...
When you email me, I have the right to reply. Stop emailing me, and I'll stop replying... It's really that simple!"

Unfortunately, is isn't that simple. I did not reply, but alas, received another email from Uncle F today. I paste it here in its entirety, without [sic!]s. He addresses my mother, who is Y. My father is L:

"Y,
"X just rang me to confirm that it was in fact the Bank that had made an accounting mistake which proved your and Ls innocence from all/any wrong-doing regarding the gift account you setup for A.
"I should have known that my initial belief was correct (that you and L are not thieves) and apologise for coming to the wrong conclusion.
"Aditionally, it occurs to me that it is not impossible that you did not know some of the deeper writings - afterall, not everyone studies their history as deeply as I have studied Judaism, and not everyone follows the teachings of Judaism totally.
"Regardless, I am gratified to have been proven wrong, and unconditionally apologise for accusing you of theft, as well as unconditionally apologise for making assumptions that you followed Judaisms total teachings word for word; and hope that 2008 is a fantastic year not only for you - but for all those you care about as well.
"F"

I shan't reply to this further confirmation of his loopiness. I take no responsibility for his loopiness. I won't be going there again.

Adventures in Stasiland (1985)

Adventures in Stasiland (1985)
(c) Melina Magdalena 2008

As I write this post, on Australia Day 2008, I call to mind my younger self on Australia Day 1985, as she prepared to journey to West Germany for a 12 month student exchange. I was 15 years old, and had led a politically sheltered existence. I knew very little of what was going on in the world, and was not prepared for making decisions and choices based on oppression, social justice or politics. I was travelling on a US passport. I only became naturalised as an Australian citizen in 1988, when I was 18 years old.

I'm also revelling in the return of my daughter, after a 2 month student exchange to Vannes, France. She stayed with a family and went to school there, but apparently spent most of her time wandering around the medieval city with the other exchange students. School was irrelevant and boring, and the French students weren't much interested in mixing with the exchange students. It's good to have her home, and to hear the stories she has to tell, about being a foreigner in France.

This afternoon I finished reading Where the Road Leads (2007), the memoires of Jean Calder, an Australian woman who has spent her adult life working with people with disabilities in Lebanon, Egypt and the Gaza Strip. As I reflect on what the Berlin Wall was for me, as a callow 15 year old in 1985, I am conscious of the Wall between Israel and Palestine, and the gross human rights abuses that are being perpetrated in that region of the world, a region I have never visited, but which is often in my thoughts.

Earlier this Summer I read Anna Funder's astonishing book, Stasiland (2002), which opened my eyes wide to some of what was going on in East Germany before that Wall fell. The Stasi were the State's Secret Police, made up of a multitude of bureaucrats, paid informers and unpaid informers. I am horrified by the stories Funder tells in her book, but I am not disbelieving. They set a few puzzle pieces into place for me - things that had affected me, and my family members who lived in East Germany, and things I had not been able to understand until I read the book.

It is interesting to reflect on the passage of time, how that affects the revelation of secrets, and how in turn, the revelation of secrets affects the world as it has changed through the passage of time. The things that can be told, and the things that people are prepared to hear, depend a great deal on what is considered to be acceptable at any given time. Over the past 23 years, I have often thought about what happened to me in East Germany. It is only now, after reading Funder's book, that I am prepared to accept that like so many of the citizens of East Germany, I as a foreigner also fell prey to their evildoings.

I visited my great-uncle, Immo Lucchesi, and his family, three times during 1985, but only two of these visits resulted in our spending any time together. I was rigorously drilled on the border crossing procedures; had my passport in order, and knew what I was allowed, and not allowed to do. I laugh at my younger self now - if only I'd been a more independent, adventurous teenager, I might have taken more notice of my environment. Instead, I relied solely on what I was told, and my own resources. I have no memory of what the Berlin Wall looked like, or what it was like to travel through West Berlin on my way to the East. My memories of East Germany are uniformly grey - no sepia nostalgia - neglected, cheerless and ugly, with a no frills atmosphere.

I was told at the time, that the reason for what happened on my failed visit, was the Sondermarke (special issue postage stamp) that I had chosen to put on the postcard I sent to Onkel Immo, in which I confirmed my arrival date and time to East Berlin. Even as a 15 year old I found this hard to fathom. Who would take the time to go through each and every postal item from West to East Germany; select out those items with the offending stamp; and set them aside or simply throw them away, so that the recipients never knew what they had not received?

Yet after reading Stasiland, I no longer doubt that this was precisely the kind of project to which the East German regime would have devoted a sector of its workforce. It's a shame I don't recall what was on that stamp, but apparently, it was unacceptable to the East German Government. My postcard did not reach my uncle, who was not there at the station to meet me.

A part of me wonders egocentrically whether this was a small, unplanned occurrence as part of a larger-scale effort, or whether it was a more targeted omission. Onkel Immo was well-known as a musician in East Germany. Members of his family were persecuted on many petty levels, that all added up to one big heartache. Unlike the rest of his family, he was able to travel with his orchestra. He was a flautist. He drove back from a tour of China one year, having requested payment in gold. A golden tube lay in the boot of his cardboard Trabi, wrapped in an oily rag. It wasn't detected as he crossed the border back into East Germany. He had it made into a flute, and flaunted his ability to resist the State every time he performed thereafter.

This tale was family legend. It had a huge bearing on my choice to learn the flute when I started highschool. A nice piece of synchronicity is that my second cousin Albrecht Lachmann, (the one who proposed a marriage of convenience to me during the first of my visits to East Germany that year) took me to a production of Mozart's The Magic Flute. Our uncle was not playing that night.

Christa, my exchange mother, put me on the train to Berlin, and waved goodbye from the Hamburg platform. I felt confident. I knew from previous experience that my Tante Ursul would not permit me to leave them any Western money or chocolate, and I had in my bag an appropriate (and legal) set of gifts for my family members.

It was around six in the evening by the time we reached Berlin. I got off the train and went to the area where I would meet my uncle and go home with him. But there was no one there to meet me. I tried to be patient, and work out what to do. I simply stood against a wall, expecting to see someone I knew at any moment. But no one came.

A brainwave! I could call them on the public telephone. But I had no Eastern money. I went to the money exchange desk to ask for help, and to exchange some of my West German marks for East German legal tender. There were people there behind the thick glass. I knew they could see me. One woman sat with her feet on the table, glaring belligerently at me. I gestured politely, knocked on the window, and tried to gain her attention; I had it, but there was no way she was prepared to offer me any assistance - not after hours! She kept on staring at me through the glass, unwilling even to acknowledge our shared humanness.

Later, people asked why I didn't just hop on a taxi with the understanding that my uncle would pay the fare when we reached his home. This idea never occurred to me. I'd never caught a taxi alone before, would never have presumed that my uncle had the money to pay anyway, and was not prepared to get into a taxi with a strange man, when I did not have legal money to pay him with.

So I stood around some more, whilst commuters flowed around me. I felt resentful. They had someplace to go. What was I going to do? Eventually, my gaze fell upon a sign that showed the train timetable. Ah - there was a train back to Hamburg that evening. I could catch it, and at least when I got back to West Germany I knew how to get home from the station. And yes, there was time for me to figure out where to catch it.

I gathered all my courage and approached a middle aged woman. I asked her how to get back to the western side of the station so that I could catch another train. She explained the pathway. From memory, I had to go down some steps, through a short tunnel, around the corner, and up another set of steps. Something like that. I presented my passport and my return train ticket at the counter, as requested. The officers, in their green uniforms, took it away and left me standing there.

After a while, a uniformed someone came onto my side of the counter, and led me into a small room. It had no window, and was furnished with a desk and two chairs. A naked light bulb swung from the ceiling. Unschooled and naive as I was, I still recognised the cultural conventions of an interrogation chamber. He fired questions were at me in rapid German. I struggled to cope.

First, to confirm my personal details, as set down in my passport.
Secondly, to establish my reasons for coming to the GDR (East Germany). Who was I planning to stay with, what was I going to do there, and why hadn't I gone where I was supposed to go?
Thirdly, the bureaucratic necessities, and my failure to observe them correctly. Why hadn't I registered with the police as a foreigner was supposed to? Why had I not exchanged my West German money for East German marks?

While all this was happening, and for years thereafter, all I could see was how these soldiers or police - these human beings, for crying out loud - WHATEVER their role, had all the pieces of my story in front of them. Why couldn't they have taken the small leap of intelligence to assist me in my distress? What would it have taken, to call my uncle for me, and have him not only confirm my story, but also give him the opportunity to pick me up and take me home as planned?

Now I understand - they no doubt saw me as a bona fide East German citizen, posing as a US citizen, trying to make my escape to the illustrious West. I thought my story was straightforward, and my German bad. Perhaps it was not bad enough? I don't remember their searching my luggage. Funder mentions that some would-be escapees placed western goods in their bags in an effort to look like Western tourists. People were also told to cut the tags off their garments "so that they did not read 'People's Own Manufacture" (page 210).

Eventually, my interrogator left the room and returned 10 minutes later with my passport. I ran up the stairs to the platform to see the train to Hamburg just chugging out of the station without me.

The petty meanness of this deliberate act cut me to the quick, but I was determined to be strong, and not let it get to me.

The next train was in 12 hours time. I had a whole night to wait, and nowhere to go. I was hardly your streetwise 15 year old. What could I do? The platform was deserted, so I sat down on a bench and took out my novel to re-read. At least that would help to pass some time. I tried to read slowly.

After a couple of hours, when it was nearing midnight, I was still reading slowly. A trio of soldiers paraded intermittently along the high catwalk that spanned the East German platform. I suppose their role was to look for potential defectors, and that from so high up, they could see just about everything. I heard them shouting and talking amongst themselves, but I tried to ignore them. Eventually, I realised they were trying to get my attention.

"You can't stay here all night!" they shouted sown at me.

"Why not?"

"You just can't."

"Well, where am I supposed to go then?"

"To the West. That's where you belong!"

They laughed at me, and I felt the impact of their derision. At the time I felt sorry for them. I thought perhaps they resented my freedom in comparison with their repression. Now I'm not so sure. Maybe they were just poking fun at me.

I took them seriously, and put away my book. They were armed and dangerous, after all. I asked them how to get to the West, and they told me the route. It involved more steps and more tunnels to get to another train platform in the same station. Uncertain of what I was going to do once I got to the West - would I, for example, be able to get the morning train to Hamburg from the same platform - I left East Germany, and boarded a busy West German subway. I didn't have a ticket, and almost hoped I would be caught. At least then someone would listen to my story, and perhaps assist me.

BErlin Zoo Station - lots of people were getting off, including an elderly woman with her shopping trolley. I followed her out of the train. I must have looked rather lost, because she spoke to me, and asked whether I had anywhere to go. She directed me to the Red Cross office, which was in the station. I later found out that Berlin Zoo was notorious for its drugs, prostitution and other manifestations of homelessness and dysfunction.

I knocked on the window, though it was obvious to me the office was closed. But somebody answered! The shelter was full, but the worker took pity on me, and found a chair for me to sit on, around a table that was crowded with people who were all valiantly trying to sleep, sitting up. Were they all victims of the Sondermarke?

In the morning, we were all given tea and a roll. A worker accompanied me to the correct platform so I could board my train to Hamburg. I thanked her profusely. I can't remember the journey, but I remember wishing I was there already.

I got off the train and ran into Christa's waiting arms. She knew I hadn't reached my destination, and had had no way of knowing where I was in the meantime. She had waited to contact my parents on the off-chance that I might have found my way back to Hamburg on the morning train.

That intuitive optimism saved her a long-distance phone call to Australia! And I had an interesting story to write in my next weekly letter home.

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Jean E Calder (2007) Where the Road Leads, Hachette Australia
Anna Funder (2002) Stasiland, The Text Publishing Company, Victoria, Australia.