Skip to main content

Fears & Films

Last night I watched12 Years a Slave. It was upsetting and disturbing, and rightly so. Based on a true story, it chronicled how Solomon Nor thup, a free black man, was kidnapped and sold into slavery in the 1840's.

I found myself hiding behind my scarf.

They're actors, I told myself, This is a movie set. They're acting. That is not real blood.

And then the next voice jumped in.

But it really happened. Maybe not exactly like this, but worse. To more people. Who weren't actors. This isn't pure fiction. And this isn't over..

I feel a bit ill today, thinking about it all.


About who I might have been if I had been born two hundred years ago and what I might have turned a blind eye to. About Grampie and last week's blogpost, about this photo series, about my friends' documentary on sex-trafficking & prostitution, and the horrors of sexual violence:


I fear many things for my life, but I do not fear being enslaved.
I don't fear being victimized repeatedly without any means of escape.
I do not fear living in fear for my life or my safety.


I fear being too loud, I fear being too pushy,
I fear forcing my perspective on others.
I fear that I'll talk too much about one thing and people will stop listening to anything I say.


More than that, I fear being a silent bystander while evil unfolds.
I fear that the little things I do are not enough.
I fear that fear will hold me back or that a lack of hope will prevent me from doing anything.

I fear that my perspective on the world will only extend to my own backyard, that I will be like the kind-hearted slaveowner played by Benedict Cumberbatch, who, when confronted with the truth of Northup's past, backed away, saying, "I can't hear this! I can't hear!"

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Simone Weil: On "Forms of the Implicit Love of God"

Simone Weil time again! One of the essays in Waiting for God  is entitled "Forms of the Implicit Love of God." Her main argument is that before a soul has "direct contact" with God, there are three types of love that are implicitly  the love of God, though they seem to have a different explicit  object. That is, in loving X, you are really loving Y. (in this case, Y = God). As for the X of the equation, she lists: Love of neighbor  Love of the beauty of the world  Love of religious practices  and a special sidebar to Friendship “Each has the virtue of a sacrament,” she writes. Each of these loves is something to be respected, honoured, and understood both symbolically and concretely. On each page of this essay, I found myself underlining profound, challenging, and thought-provoking words. There's so much to consider that I've gone back several times, mulling it over and wondering how my life would look if I truly believed even half of these thin

Esse - Czeslaw Milosz

I'm on a bit of a poetry binge this week, and Monday afternoon found me lying on the luxurious shag rug of a friend's tiny apartment, re-reading some of my favourite poets (ee cummings, William Carlos Williams, Czeslaw Milosz). It is an adventure to re-open a collection and wonder what will pop out, knowing something you've read before will strike you afresh, or you will be reminded of a particularly moving line that you had somehow forgotten. Like this piece from Milosz, which floors me. Every. damn.* time. The first time I read it, I lay in a park with a friend (this same friend who offered me her rug as my reading burrow) and demanded that I share it with her. I spoke it carefully, and then, into the post-reading silence, I slammed the book shut, and dropped it as loudly as I could onto the grass. "I'm never reading anything again," I declared, "What else is there to say?" Esse I looked at that face, dumbfounded. The lights of métro st

I Like to Keep My Issues Drawn

It's Sunday night and I am multi-tasking. Paid some bills, catching up on free musical downloads from the past month, thinking about the mix-tape I need to make and planning my last assignment for writing class. Shortly, I will abandon the laptop to write my first draft by hand. But until then, I am thinking about music. This song played for me earlier this afternoon, as I attempted to nap. I woke up somewhere between 5 and 5:30 this morning, then lay in bed until 8 o'clock flipping sides and thinking about every part of my life that exists. It wasn't stressful, but it wasn't quite restful either...This past month, I have spent a lot of time rebuffing lies and refusing to believe that the inside of my heart and mind can never change. I feel like Florence + The Machine 's song "Shake it Out" captures many of these feelings & thoughts. (addendum: is the line "I like to keep my issues strong or drawn ?" Lyrics sites have it as "stro