changing the very face
This year blogger Abram K-J is reading through the canonical Christian gospels in Greek. He’s posted about that here and has started a private forum here. There, after reading how the Greek in the gospel changes the very face of power, I posted the following:
de-privileging great faith
Matthew 15:21-29 is fraught with privilege. The two stories are bound together by it.
The second story ends by counting men (besides women and children). This crowd is one that Jesus had deeply and instantly and involuntarily felt his unique pity for. He’d healed all their loved ones with ailments. Then he cannot stomach how hungry these 4,000 men are (besides their women and their children).
The first story ends by counting a woman. This is a dog whom Jesus has refused to hear. He reserves his healings not for her child, not for a female’s female offspring, not for an afflicted girl of a girl of the goyim. She is multiply de-privileged. She is born into the wrong race, the wrong sex, the wrong class. She never appears on any census. She has to beg for compassion. None of the men need to feel anything for her.
And yet in this context of hierarchies, of males over females, of sons over daughters, of Israelites over gentiles, of healthy healer over sick and demonized, Jesus gives in famously and surprisingly to this resistance:
Ὦ γύναι,
μεγάλη σου ἡ πίστις·
γενηθήτω σοι ὡς θέλεις.
It should have brought the crowd back to the Lord’s Prayer in the sermon on the mount; it should take Matthew’s Greek readers back:
Πάτερ ἡμῶν ὁ ἐν τοῖς οὐρανοῖς·
Ἁγιασθήτω τὸ ὄνομά σου· ἐλθάτω ἡ βασιλεία σου·
γενηθήτω τὸ θέλημά σου
Jesus has deconstructed the Patriarchal conception of the One God of the One chosen race of men.
He has put this nameless female with her afflicted female child of an unkosher people group so far below heaven and on the last lowest rung of unkosher animals (did she call herself a “bitch”?) up with “Our Father” and with “whatever he wishes is what we must pray for.” And he has said to her “what you’ve wished for really does count. You and your child, though woman, though merely a not-son daughter, really do count!”
—
Post Script:
This month in the United States has been called Black History Month, or as the President decrees it “National African American History Month.”
As we read these two stories in Matthew today, it may be useful to recall why the black woman Kimberlé Williams Crenshaw got us Americans looking at intersectionality more closely. Here are two notable articles:
https://chicagounbou…52&context=uclf
http://www.racialequ…ing-margins.pdf
“It’s not about supplication, it’s about power. It’s not about asking, it’s about demanding. It’s not about convincing those who are currently in power, it’s about changing the very face of power itself.”
Happy International LXX Day
In this 21st century folks of the International Organization for Septuagint & Cognate Studies decree February 8 “International Septuagint Day” because of a decree given 20 centuries ago by the Emperor of Rome in this month on that day:
This decree was intended not only for those communities that had requested the Greek translation [of the Hebrew Bible], but the emperor ordered his secretary Areobindus to proclaim it in all the provinces also (Feb. 13, 553; Novella 146, περὶ Ἑβραίων). The emperor had personal relations with one of the leaders of the Jews, a certain Theodosius, who was highly respected by the Christians; this Theodosius took part in a disputation on Jesus and refused to be converted (Suidas, s.v. Ἰησοῦς).
Women who taught Jesus (and what he learned from them)
Ann Durham taught him (these lessons: to live among & to learn to love and appreciate people who are very different from you religiously, racially, linguistically, socio-economically, sexually – because they’ve taken us in when our family was vulnerable and far from home; to resist folk who doubt your birth certificate and incessantly sneer about your legitimacy; to be okay with yourself when your father leaves the scene after you reach puberty; to be a community organizer & somebody who taps resources to give food to people who are poor and can’t manage well for themselves, or who just won’t for whatever reason, and to do all that with compassion and without judging their motives).
Oh, wait. Ms. Durham is Barack Obama’s mom. I meant Mary, the mother of Jesus, taught him (these lessons: to respect the Egyptians who didn’t throw the family out when they were refugees, in de facto deportation from home because of the actions of the leader of the land; to resist the rumors of illegitimacy and to trust that angels had spoken to your parents; to listen to your mother when your father’s absent; to help out at a wedding, to make a miracle when the so-so wine has waned and the people at the party are already tipsy and there’s only water left to give them; to use what you’ve learned there to serve more people generously and from your deep reserve of compassion and out of the deep resources that they’d never earn for themselves, without judging their motives).
Hillary Clinton taught him (these lessons: to break the Billy Graham Rule; to find yourself alone with a woman everybody loves to hate on; to listen to her with respect; to enjoy a give-and-take with her actually; to forgive her; to encourage her to help others, in compassion, whether they deserve it or not; to change an entire village and to recognize it takes a village).
Oh, wait. Ms. Clinton is Billy Graham’s friend. I meant some unnamed mixed-race woman, in an unnamed village in Samaria, taught him when foolishly Jesus found himself alone with her, tired with her, hungry with her, thirsty with her (these lessons: to trust her to have the resources to slake you and your parched mouth; to listen to her with respect; to enjoy a give-and-take with her actually; to forgive her; to encourage her when she spontaneously runs back to a man who’s not respected her sexually, and to all the others; to support her in her efforts to be an evangelist, a village changer who believes in the power of a village to help folk and to change the world).
The Rev. Father Wil Gafney taught him (these lessons: to listen. Despite what Euro-American seminary-chancellor-disciple John Piper was urging men like you otherwise, just to listen & learn & be moved, then, to action).
Oh wait. That professor teaches seminary men and women elsewhere. I meant that the woman whose daughter got caught up in #metoo taught Jesus. You know, that woman, yes, from those foreign sh-thole countries, Tyre and Sidon, Syrophoenicia, or was it Canaan? Anyway, it’s in Matthew 15 or in Mark 7, in those canonical gospels if we have to go there. She taught him (these lessons: to listen. Despite what your pure-race “make Israel great again” followers are urging men like you otherwise, just to listen & learn & be moved, then to action despite the ostensible cost to the fatherland).
Lottie Moon taught him (these lessons: to trust her to get the good word out when the men are nowhere to be found).
Oh wait. Ms. Moon, who taught hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of men, was that evangelist in China whose name has been used by the Foreign Mission Board or the rebranded International Mission Board to raise funds each Christmastime in Southern Baptist Churches across the US. Fortunately the Southern Baptist Churches are finally apologizing for their race based slavery and are distancing themselves from other groups latched on to white supremacy and are slowly entertaining the notions of what it might be like for women evangelists to teach the male seminarians. I meant Mary Magdalene taught him (these lessons: to trust her to be the first to get the word out when the fellas are all hiding out in some upper room somewhere, doubting).
It’s possible other women taught Jesus (other things too). This may not be the exhaustive list. Who could teach us (more)?
The ESV Goes Beyond Mars and Venus
Carolyn Custis James has written a fun and funny blog post, “The ESV Takes One Small Step for ‘Mankind’!” In it she tells a personal story of a man who had “an annoying habit of pontificating on his [malestrom] views of women, often flinging verses at me [Carolyn], to make sure I knew my place.” She explains how she’d get him reading a verse that particularly indicts “men” apparently and not all of mankind. When she read that same verse translated by the male-only team of ESV translators, nonetheless, she makes a discovery.
And she shares with all of us on this planet under the moon “a significant breach in the ESV’s firm commitment to retain ‘man’ and ‘men’ in universal statements to preserve a so-called ‘masculine feel’ to the Bible.” Read her post here.
Now I’d like us to look at more ESV verses. Let’s start with a set of verses that the ESV editors say point us back to the exact one that Carolyn Custis James has discovered. Let’s begin by looking at what Paul has written in Greek to Jews and Greeks and perhaps to barbarians in Rome. Is he, a male, a man, a Jew, a Roman citizen, writing only just merely to others of his kind, to men only, just to other males, simply to the guys and not the gals? Is this for Men from Mars and not Women from Venus?
Well, we might think so in the context as we read Romans 2. And continue then into Romans 3. Let’s look:
I’ve highlighted the word man and the word one. The ESV men translating are rendering Paul’s Greek, respectively the word ἀκροβυστία and the word ἄνθρωπος.
The consensus of most lexicographers studying the former word of Paul’s is that it refers to the tip of the penis, to the foreskin of the male genital. And readers of the Septuagint, the Jewish translation of the Hebrew scriptures into Hellene writing, can be sure of this too. For example, Genesis 17 has this for the end of verse 10 and the beginning of 11: περιτμηθήσεται ὑμῶν πᾶν ἀρσενικόν, καὶ περιτμηθήσεσθε τὴν σάρκα τῆς ἀκροβυστίας ὑμῶν. Later Jerome looks at the Hebrew scriptures (and possibly at this Greek translation too) and renders that in Latin as follows: et semen tuum post te circumcidetur ex vobis omne masculinum, et circumcidetis carnem praeputii. I mention the Latin for two reasons. First, Paul is snubbing official use of Latin as a citizen of Rome when writing to his fellow Jews and to those who identify as Greeks, using the old lingua franca of the previous Greek empire. Second, for us English only readers today the cognates with this newer imperial language may be more obvious: semen, circumcision, masculinity, carnivore/carnal, and prepuce. The Torah context is G-d’s institution of male circumcision on the eighth day of boy’s life as the physical sign of the sons of Abraham. Paul is writing about that boy-only, male-only, man-only body part. And so the ESV men translating his Greek phrase ἡ ἀκροβυστία make the full phrase “a man who is uncircumcised,” for a male individual retaining penis foreskin into adulthood.
The consensus of most lexicographers studying the latter word of Paul’s is that it refers to mortals in contrast to gods in its earliest uses. As such both men and women are included in the sense of the Hellene phrase. Sometimes, oftentimes, the ESV male only translators will nonetheless make it refer only to men, and not to women. Here’s just one example we’ve noticed before. What we can see, however, is that the ESV for Paul in Romans 3 lets the phrase refer to any “one” whether male or female. The constrast with God is emphasized for “everyone.”
Now, the editors of the ESV get us readers of Paul’s Romans 3 jumping back to the Psalms. They get us looking not just at the verse Carolyn Custis James has shared with us. But they also get us looking at another verse in Psalms. Let’s follow note “c” on this Romans 3 phrase “every one”; and we see that it takes us here:
Again the highlights are mine. What we may want to know in the original Hebrew for Psalm 62:9 is that there are two different phrases we might transliterate as “Adam” and “Ish.” We might put these in stark contrast with “Eve” and with “Isha.” In other words, the two Hebrew words are most of the time, by the ESV translators, rendered as referring only to men, not to women. Even the LXX translators of the Hebrew into Hellene open of the possibility that the reference is only to men: οἱ υἱοὶ τῶν ἀνθρώπων and οἱ υἱοὶ τῶν ἀνθρώπων (or the “sons” of “humans”.)
But here again for the ESV translators, in Psalm 62, there’s the generic English: “Those” and “those.” So when men are mere breaths, mostly deluded, and all liars then, in the ESV, they are also women. Or maybe we could say that at certain points the ESV goes beyond those distinctions of Men are from Mars and Women are from Venus.
Not Nonsense
When I was a kid, my mother taught us a number of songs that had been popular when she was younger. I still sing them sometimes.
We gotta get goin, where we goin,
What are we gonna do?
We’re on our way to nowhere,
The three of us and you.
We sang this one whenever we all needed to get going somewhere, or get going on some project like cleaning the house. I thought of it as a fun, silly song that had a nonsense-syllable refrain.
What’ll we see there, who will be there
What’ll be the great surprise?
There may be senoritas
With dark and flashing eyes!
So I was singing this the other day, as I was putting on my shoes and getting ready to head out for an errand….
We’re on our way
Pack up our pack
And if we stay
We won’t be back
How can we go
We haven’t got a dime
But we’re goin’,
and we’re gonna have a happy time! Sooo…
…when I realized, while singing the first syllable of the refrain that I’d sung dozens of times before, that it wasn’t nonsense after all!
¿Cuánta le gusta, le gusta, le gusta,
le gusta, le gusta, le gusta, le gusta?
¿Cuánta le gusta, le gusta, le gusta,
le gusta, le gusta, le gusta, le gusta?
It was wild: the syllables left my mouth differently, now that I understood that I was singing Spanish. There were breaks between the words now, and I knew roughly what they meant (“How much do you like?”). And they were spelled differently: I’d learned the refrain phonetically as
Quan-tolly-goose-tolly-goose-tolly-goose-tolly-goose-tolly-goose-tolly-goose-tolly-goose-ta
I’ve been gradually learning Spanish using Duolingo for a few weeks (I’m on a 21 day streak, but I had a broken streak before that), and these “(pronoun) gusta” phrases have been used a lot. (I took a year of Spanish in 8th grade, but I don’t remember learning that idiom then. Hermana Carmen was teaching us Castilian, not Latin American Spanish, though; maybe it’s not a common idiom in Spain? Or maybe it just didn’t stick, since the French that I’d studied for longer, and was much more common in the community, had no similar construction.) And I’d hit the “cuanto, cuando, cual” question words a few lessons back. So I had all the pieces at hand to recognize what I was singing.
At present, my mental map of the phrase is still flexible: I can go back and forth between “Cuanta le gusta” and “Quan-tolly-goose-ta” depending on which I fix in my mind before I start to sing. But if I stick to my Spanish lessons as I plan to, I expect I’ll lose the gooses after a while.
To finish this post off, I figured I’d find and include a recording of this piece. When I searched for it, I discovered that the words vary a bit from what I recall, and also from recording to recording. I think the version I learned may have been a combination of the Andrews Sisters (“the three of us”) and Eddie Cantor (“senoritas”). Here they both are:
both of whom are apparently covering the original by Carmen Miranda, in the 1948 musical “A Date with Judy”.
I must say, the most fun and surprising part of the video search was the discovery that caballeros are available as an alternative to senoritas! 🙂
I hope you enjoyed this story of nonsense transforming into language as much as I did while it was happening.
Co-Winners of the 2016 Willis Barnstone Translation Prize
For the 15th annual Willis Barnstone Translation Prize, there are co-winners. Congratulations go to Michele Herman and Rebekah Curry.
—
What translation of a poem did you enter?
Mine was God Birthing, a rendering of the Theogony.
Reading Zora Neale Hurston’s Translanguaging
Which language(s) will we readers read when we read Zora Neale Hurston’s novel, Moses, Man of the Mountain?
Is it standard American English as we construct that language socially? For example, isn’t it English in the standard variety in America that we’re reading when we read this excerpt?
What language, then, are we reading on the page before that brief excerpt? Here it is:
As we read might it be the case that the novelist has more than one language and is herself using all of her voices. It could be that she has us her readers reading her translanguaging as well. If so, do we sense that she’s clearly demarcating her languages on purpose? Do we feel that somehow one language is superior to another or that “sub standard” ought to enter our minds in the uses of language in the novel?
I’m asking because a bit of a conversation around the question of the translanguaging of Susan Rice yesterday. I posted on that here then. And the discussion is going on there at Language Log.
Getting Susan Rice’s Language Right
At Language Log, linguist blogger Mark Liberman writes a quick post in which he starts in with a clip “[f]rom Susan Rice’s interview today with Andrea Mitchell of MSNBC.”
The clip is to show what he describes merely as “an interesting example of emphatic multiple negation:”
I leaked nothing to nobody, and never have and never would.
Susan Rice’s language may be more fully described as translanguaging. Ofelia García and her colleagues describe that this way in their article, “Clarifying translanguaging and deconstructing named languages: A perspective from linguistics“:
Translanguaging is the deployment of a speaker’s full linguistic repertoire without regard for watchful adherence to the socially and politically defined boundaries of named (and usually national and state) languages.
Susan Rice is deploying a full repertoire of linguistic skills.
In this very context, she is speaking political standard American English and personal person-centered African American English.
Oftentimes, these have to be segregated. In the history of the US, unfortunately, and in the present, just as unfortunately, these two languages must be kept apart, as different, as unequal. And so the speaker and the audience are taught to believe that one language is better than than the other and/or that different contexts demand that the two be spoken separately. For example, in Harper Lee’s To Kill A Mockingbird, the white children Jem and Scout call out their black housekeeper Calpurnia for using different languages in different places; and the three together denigrate “colored-folk’s talk” as not “talkin’ right”:
But June Jordan might take exception to this sort of segregation. And when talking of what she calls Standard English and what she calls Black English, June Jordan gives examples of the latter as characterized by “person-centered values” through “the delivery of voice.”
She speaks of translating between the two and of the consequences to punctuate the “person-centered” characteristics:
You cannot “translate” instances of Standard English preoccupied with abstraction or with nothing/nobody evidently alive, into Black English. That would warp the language into uses antithetical to the guiding perspective of its community of users. Rather you must first change those Standard English sentences, themselves, into ideas consistent with the person-centered assumptions of Black English.
Notice her own translanguaging. She uses “nothing/nobody” as a Black English part of her essay also written in Standard English.
When we read her essay, we also see how the characteristics of Black English she enumerates include features much richer than simply “emphatic multiple negation”:
8. In general, if you wish to say something really positive [using Black English], try to formulate the idea using emphatic negative structure.
S.E.: He’s fabulous.
B.E.: He bad.9. Use double or triple negatives for dramatic emphasis.
S.E.: Tina Turner sings out of this world.
B.E.: Ain nobody sing like Tina
She has already explained the sense of Black English as person-centered, as less abstract than Standard American English must be:
Our language devolves from a culture that abhors all abstraction, or anything tending to obscure or delete the fact of the human being who is here and now/the truth of the person who is speaking or listening. Consequently, there is no passive voice construction possible in Black English. For example, you cannot say, “Black English is being eliminated.” You must say, instead, “White people eliminating Black English.” The assumption of the presence of life governs all of Black English. Therefore, overwhelmingly, all action takes place in the language of the present indicative. And every sentence assumes the living and active participation of at least two human beings, the speaker and the listener.
And the Black English title of her essay is a tribute. It’s a tribute to a person whom she describes in her essay. It’s “Nobody Mean More to Me Than You and the Future of Willie Jordan.” The “nobody” in this much-Standard American English essay translanguages into the personal.
When Susan Rice speaks to emphasize, then, she is translanguaging. She’s emphasizing, in Standard-English Black-English, how very respectful and how very personal she must be in her duties as a public servant, the 24th United States National Security Advisor of the US:
I leaked nothing to nobody, and never have and never would.
Let’s talk about how Billy Graham himself recalls agreeing with Hillary Clinton to break his “Billy Graham Rule” and to eat lunch with her alone while having a private conversation in which he finds himself admiring her more than ever, an admiration that only grows.
But first, we may have to talk about how Mike Pence himself says glowing things about Hillary Clinton too, although he’s not admitted to coming to his assessments of her as directly as Billy Graham has. Second, we can let Billy Graham himself talk about what’s being called the “Billy Graham Rule.” Third, then, we can let Billy Graham talk about when Hillary Clinton persuaded him to break this rule. Fourth, we may want to talk about how Billy Graham and Bill Clinton and Hillary Clinton are friends, how the evangelist endorsed her for President and how he personally talked with her, ostensibly in private again, to support her through her decision to stay with her husband after his private infidelities with a White House intern were made public and how Billy Graham considers her a warm and spiritual person whom he continues to admire and to stay in touch with. Fifth, we may not have to talk about Mike Pence again, although we may want to say something more about the Billy Graham rule.
So first, we recall how a couple of days ago, Ashley Parker writes an article for the Washington Post, the title of which invokes the culture war in America: “Karen Pence is the vice president’s ‘prayer warrior,’ gut check and shield.” In it, Parker summarizes a bit from another article:
In 2002, Mike Pence told the Hill that he never eats alone with a woman other than his wife and that he won’t attend events featuring alcohol without her by his side, either.
Parker may have the wrong date for the Hill article. Although it isn’t extant online, there are direct quotations ostensibly from that earlier article in a 2013 blog post by Craig Fehrman:
- In 2001, the newly-elected Pence talked to The Hill about his marriage: “He never dines alone with a woman who is not his wife. And when his wife is absent, he never attends events where alcohol flows. ‘If there’s alcohol being served and people are being loose, I want to have the best-looking brunette in the room standing next to me,’ Pence said. As it happens, Pence frequently turns down invitations for drinks or dinner from male colleagues. ‘It’s about building a zone around your marriage,’ he observed.”
And there’s lot of social media response, isn’t there? Vice President Pence seems to be committed to the so-called “Billy Graham Rule.” Mike Pence may have admired Hillary Clinton at various points to the point where he would not even want to be at a private lunch with her for all of her charm lest she come between him and “the best-looking brunette” as he refers to Karen Pence; but he’s disparaged Hillary Clinton more recently, and his built “zone around” his marriage to “the best-looking brunette” would seem as solid as ever.
Second, here is how Billy Graham says he came up with what others have been calling “The Billy Graham Rule.” This is from page 128 of his autobiography, Just As I Am: The Autobiography of Billy Graham:
Third, then, here is how Billy Graham describes when Hillary Clinton persuaded him to break this rule with her. This is also from his autobiography, starting with page 650, where he discusses his admiration for Bill Clinton:
We notice in his own words how he feels about Hillary Clinton during and then after their private lunch conversation.
Fourth, Billy Graham continued to admire Hillary Clinton to the point where he tells Bill Clinton that he should let her run for president. Nancy Gibbs and Michael Duffy report for Time Magazine:
At the last of his 417 crusades, the one held in New York City in June 2005, evangelist Billy Graham made an unscripted proposal.
Both Bill and Hillary Clinton were sitting with him on stage in Flushing Meadows when Graham greeted them as his “wonderful friends of many years.” “I told him,” Graham said of President Clinton, “when he left the presidency, he should become an evangelist, because he had all the gifts.” Graham paused, and added with a smile, “And he could [let] his wife run the country.”
Gibbs and Duffy continue in their article, noting the following:
Hillary Clinton reports that the evangelist fulfilled a pastoral role during the Monica Lewinsky scandal and helped the First Lady endure the ordeal. At that time, Clinton says, Graham was “incredibly supportive to me personally. And he was very strong in saying, ‘I really understand what you’re doing and I support you.’ He was just very personally there for me.”
She added: “The entire world was judging my decisions and my actions and there weren’t very many people who, frankly, were understanding, and he was. He said, ‘You know, forgiveness is the hardest thing that we’re called upon to do. And we all face it at some point in our lives and I’m just really proud of you for taking it on.”
They allude to other reported-on conversations between Billy Graham and Hillary Clinton of a personal and private nature. And in this same article they point to a source:
Details of the Clinton-Graham conversations are reported for the first time in The Preacher and the Presidents, Billy Graham In the White House, which is being published this week. An excerpt will appear in TIME magazine this Friday….
Of Senator Clinton, Graham said he liked her as a person. “I keep up with her,” Graham said. “I think a lot of Hillary… She is different from the Hillary you see in the media. There is a warm side to her — and a spiritual one.”
Fifth and finally, just a few weeks before Donald Trump named Mike Pence as his choice for Vice President, Tracey Bianchi wrote in Christianity Today an article with this title:
“Ladies Who Lunch—with Men: Do your coworkers follow the Billy Graham Rule?”
Bianchi’s essay was hardly some culture war response to anything Mike Pence had pledged as a Christian evangelical politician building a “zone” for his marriage to “the best-looking brunette.” She does say “Billy Graham’s personal decision for his ministry became a ‘rule'” – and we know that this was personal for him so he wouldn’t become an Elmer Gantry. And we know that Hillary Clinton helped him not hold strictly to this personal decision. Bianchi ends her article by giving this sage advice modeled by Jesus, by Hillary Clinton, and by Billy Graham:
Rather than let fear and mistrust inform our partnerships, let’s choose mutual respect like Jesus modeled when he chose to work alongside and honor women—even if that means going out for lunch.
Ben Carson v The Difficult Miracle of Black Poetesses in America: when slaves are immigrants
The day before I posted “Ben Carson v Frederick Douglass: when slaves are immigrants,” there were many already making much of some many more siding with Dr. Carson and his repeated stubborn assessment of slaves chained in the dark and dank holds of ships crossing the Atlantic as immigrants. For the Washington Post, for example, one Eugene Volokh, an immigrant himself from Ukraine to the United States when a seven-year-old accompanied by his parents, was quick to name those whose words in print and in speech echoed and mirrored those of Dr. Carson, namely Lolita K. Buckner Inniss and Rhonda V. Magee and Geoffrey Heeren and Martin W. Burke and even President Obama.
So let us then add to the voice of the slave named Frederick Douglass the voice of another. But let this addition be in no way some attempt to balance the scales or to make equal the sides. The voice is that of a mere poetess, if many tried her to deny her that name and title.
Here (after a note about her perhaps, an excerpt of a letter by Phillis Wheatley):
Here (a quite different note on Phillis Wheatley, an excerpt from a poem/essay by June Jordan):
If we were to think, to think critically, it could be a little more apparent that what Dr. Carson (and those many others with him) is doing is not unlike what the writer of The Gentleman Magazine is doing. Theirs is an epistemological doing. Their doing is a colonizing construct, an imperial imperative.
“The only way to promote their civilization, to make them serviceble in their generation, and happy in themselves,” the writer writes, “is to introduce them into a state of activity and industry.” And Dr. Carson says, likewise, that they “worked even longer, even harder, for less, [in order to…] pursue prosperity and happiness in this land.”
The writer goes on: “Yet most of these try have been compelled by necessity to leave the place of their nativity.” And so does Dr. Carson: each of them can be called “an involuntary immigrant.”
Their doing is an influencing by names: “Instead of SLAVES, let the Negroes be called ASSISTANT-PLANTERS.” And instead of “slaves” per se, “other immigrants who came in the bottom of slave ships, who worked even harder.”
The undoing of the imperial, colonial project comes when slaves like Frederick Douglass clearly show how the legal category of “immigrant” used by colonists “neither described nor applied to slaves… for the slave [not being fully human like the immigrant is] could not owe service or make a contract.”
But the undoing of the imperial, colonial project comes when slaves like Phillis Wheatley clearly shows by her poetry and through her letters how hurtful it is for any human whether ancient Egyptian or modern British colonist to value others for their economic benefit as commodities.
Here:
Anne Carson on Poetry
Yesterday was “World Poetry Day.”
Sunday, October 30, 2016 was a day when Anne Carson in an interview on her most recent publication, Float, accepted the invitation to offer “a personal definition of what poetry is”:
If prose is a house, poetry is a man on fire running quite fast through it.
As the 45th President’s Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, Ben Carson gave his first public address in which he said slaves were immigrants.
At the 18-minute mark he says:
There were other immigrants who came in the bottom of slave ships, who worked even longer, even harder, for less, but they too had a dream that one day their sons, daughters, grandsons, granddaughters, great grandsons, great granddaughters might pursue prosperity and happiness in this land.
Later on twitter he makes as clear as possible his intent and his definition, repeating what he told the public through his subsequent conversation with a caller on the Armstrong Williams Show:
Carson insists:
You can be an involuntary immigrant.
And there is history to his interpretation and his definition. There is Carson’s own history of making and repeating his interpretation of slaves as immigrants. And there is the history of this interpretation against what Frederick Douglass said in a speech much earlier, in which Douglass reminds listeners that slaves were not considered by their owners to be human beings much less immigrant human beings.
In 1997, Dr. Ben Carson gave his first address at the National Prayer Breakfast at the invitation of President Bill Clinton. There he introduced the notion that African slaves and European immigrants were the same. He repeated portions of this speech in one of his books published a couple of years later:
Then to help his new bid to run for president of the United States, he writes a new book in which he repeats his interpretation. This time he gets very personal, defending his self-identification with Europe “as an African American” by identifying European immigrants, again, with African slaves:
To Carson, the equation of European immigrants and African slaves is a very personal thing indeed. When the first African American president invited him back to speak at the National Prayer Breakfast in 2013, Dr. Carson took the opportunity to slight President Obama and his policies that would somehow make African Americans not in the family with European Americans. Dr. Carson there gives a parable, insinuating that the Democratic president uses government to favor African Americans over European Americans unfairly:
Here’s a parable: A family falls on hard times. Dad loses his job or is demoted to part time work. He has 5 children. He comes to the 5 children, he says we’re going to have to reduce your allowance. Well, they’re not happy about it but – he says, except for John and Susan. They’re, they’re special. They get to keep their allowance. In fact, we’ll give them more. How do you think that’s going to go down? Not too well. Same thing happens. Enough said.
But, Dr. Carson would attempt to remind, African Americans are equal with European Americans when all are given equal education (and not when government treats them unequally); African slaves, after all, were also hard working immigrants just like hard working European immigrants. Again Carson makes this personal:
Two hundred years ago when slavery was going on it was illegal to educate a slave, particularly to teach them to read. Why do you think that was? Because when you educate a man, you liberate a man. And there I was as a youngster placing myself in the same situation that a horrible institution did because I wasn’t taking advantage of the education.
Carson is saying that African slaves who took advantage of their opportunities were just like European immigrants who took advantage of their opportunities. To fail to live and to thrive is simply merely a failure to seize the hard work of hard work and the hard work of self education. Now perhaps Carson was thinking of Frederick Douglass, an African slave, who was taught to read by a European American owner of him and other African slaves.
What Carson fails to acknowledge, however, is that Africans were not considered by Europeans to be human beings. Europeans considered Africans whom they enslaved to be property, to be beasts, like cattle.
Douglass lived through this ontological segregation, this white European view that his black African body was the body not of another human being but of a mere animal.
And so Frederick Douglass gave a different sort of speech than the sort that Ben Carson has given. On October 22, 1883, Douglass said this:
In the dark days of slavery, this Court, on all occasions, gave the greatest importance to intention as a guide to interpretation. The object and intention of the law, it was said, must prevail. Everything in favor of slavery and against the Negro was settled by this object and intention. The Constitution was construed according to its intention. We were over and over again referred to what the framers meant, and plain language was sacrificed that the so affirmed intention of these framers might be positively asserted. When we said in behalf of the Negro that the Constitution of the United States was intended to establish justice and to secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, we were told that the words said so but that that was obviously not its intention; that it was intended to apply only to white people, and that the intention must govern.
When we came to that clause of the Constitution which declares that the immigration or importation of such persons as any of the States may see fit to admit shall not be prohibited, and the friends of liberty declared that that provision of the Constitution did not describe the slave-trade, they were told [by white European American owners of slaves] that while its language applied not to slaves, but to persons, still the object and intention of that clause of the Constitution was plainly to protect the slave-trade, and that that intention was the law. When we came to that clause of the Constitution which declares that “No person held to service or labor in one State, under the laws thereof, escaping into another, shall in consequence of any law or regulation therein be discharged from such service or labor, but shall be delivered up on claim of the party to whom such service or labor may be due,” we [black African Americans] insisted that it [that is, the notion of an immigrant] neither described nor applied to slaves; that it applied only to persons owing service and labor; that slaves did not and could not owe service and labor; that this clause of the Constitution said nothing of slaves or the masters of slaves; that it was silent as to Slave States or free States; that it was simply a provision to enforce a contract; to discharge an obligation between two persons capable of making a contract, and not to force any man into slavery, for the slave [not being a human being] could not owe service or make a contract.
Trump vs. McGee: contrastive readings of John 15:13 in light of radical Islamic terrorism
This week American President Trump quoted John 15:13 in his first address in the US Capitol. He was regarding, as a martyr, “a U.S. Navy Special Operator, Senior Chief William ‘Ryan’ Owens, [who] died as he lived, a warrior, and a hero, battling against terrorism and securing our nation.”
In 2008 and again in 2015 an Irish monk of Worth Abbey, West Sussex, Father Martin McGee also quoted John 15:13 in his books Christian Martyrs for a Muslim People and Dialogue of the Heart: Christian-Muslim Stories of Encounter. He was regarding individuals too: “In 1996 on the night of March 26/27 seven monks from the Trappist monastery of Tibhirine, 96km south of Algiers, were kidnapped by Muslim fundamentalists, and 56 days later, on May 21, all of them were beheaded.”
Already, we may see the contrast of interpretations by Pres. Trump and by Fr. McGee. If you will look more closely with me here, I think you’ll agree that the contrast is very stark. The President, quoting the words of Jesus, begins to sound like the very ones he intends “to demolish and destroy” and “to extinguish from our planet.” The Father, quoting the words of Jesus, begins to sound much different, as he intends “[t]o engage in… interreligious dialogue [that] requires ‘an open and neighbourly spirit,’ a willingness in other words to recognise that whatever our religious differences we all share a common humanity.”
So let’s look more closely together.
President Trump called out “radical Islamic terrorism” and particularly “this vile enemy” namely “ISIS, a network of lawless savages that have slaughtered Muslims and Christians and men and women and children of all faiths and all beliefs.” As Commander-in-Chief he authorized a military operation against this enemy, and he sent Ryan Owen into harms way. Here’s his recognition:
We are blessed to be joined tonight by Carryn Owens, the widow of a U.S. Navy Special Operator, Senior Chief William “Ryan” Owens. Ryan died as he lived: a warrior, and a hero –- battling against terrorism and securing our nation. I just spoke to our great General Mattis, just now, who reconfirmed that, and I quote, “Ryan was a part of a highly successful raid that generated large amounts of vital intelligence that will lead to many more victories in the future against our enemies.” Ryan’s legacy is etched into eternity. Thank you. Thank you. And Ryan is looking down right now, you know that, and he’s very happy because I think he just broke a record [for the length of a standing ovation during my speech]. For as the Bible teaches us [in John 15:13], there is no greater act of love than to lay down one’s life for one’s friends. Ryan laid down his life for his friends, for his country, and for our freedom –- and we will never forget Ryan.
Father McGee, in contrast, wrote of heroes who sent themselves as non-Muslims to learn from and to serve Muslims. One of these non-Muslims was protected from extremists by a Muslim, who gave up his own life in the act of protection. In turn, this non-Muslim and his cohort stayed on living among Muslim sisters and brothers at risk to their own lives. Here are two pages from the respective two books:
and
In summary, we have encountered two different uses of John 15:13.
President Trump, on the on hand, quotes the words of Jesus, and adds to them, to say that his military effort to “to extinguish [his] vile from our planet” necessitated his sending “a U.S. Navy Special Operator, Senior Chief William ‘Ryan’ Owens” into harm’s way, and that his death due to that enemy’s defense of itself, nonetheless, made him “part of a highly successful raid,” and that for this he is in heaven, happy at America’s applause, the recognition of a national martyr.
Father McGee, on the other hand, quotes the words of Jesus, in order to ask with Father Christian the rhetorical question, “Do we [non-Muslims attacked by terrorists] love them [e.g. the Algerian Muslims also attacked by terrorists] enough?” And he suggests, “as Western society struggles to find a way of responding to the fanatical wing of Islam,” that extreme, obsessive militarized attempts at demolishing, destroying, and extinguishing extremists from the planet bears less fruit than does Muslims and Christians laying down their lives for each other in learning from one another and in giving to one another.
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For further research on what might motivate the contrastive views of John 15:13 of Donald Trump and of Father McGee respectively (and some other not unrelated items):
GOP presidential candidate Donald Trump’s view of women in military with men (implying that the national military martyrs must be men, who may be survived by their widows) “26,000 unreported sexual assaults in the military-only 238 convictions. What did these geniuses expect when they put men & women together?“
The GOP 2016 platform on women in combat: “We reiterate our support for both the advancement of women in the military and their exemption from direct ground combat units and infantry battalions.“
The ISIS view of women in combat: “They are not allowed to fight [even if those recruited from the West for marriage to the male fighters since they] are obviously attracted [both] to a medieval ideology, and at the same time,… some attitudes [that] are very Western.“
Father McGee’s view that Muslims sometimes practice what Jesus taught before non-Muslims do: “There were also deeply personal reasons why [Father] Christian should be willing, if necessary, to lay down his life for his friends. While on national service in Algeria in 1959, during the Algerian war of independence, he had befriended a local policeman, Mohammed, a father of 10 and a devout Muslim. One day an attempt was made on Christian’s life. Luckily Mohammed managed to shield him and save his life. The following day, however, his friend was found assassinated by the roadside. This incident left an indelible mark on Christian. He could never forget that an Algerian Muslim friend had sacrificed his life for him.”
Father McGee’s view that extremely religious people are not the only ones to practice what Jesus taught and neither are extremely nationalistic persons either: “This insight is not just shared by Christians but has been lived out by many ordinary Tunisians who courageously risked their lives to save innocent tourists from the IS inspired gunman, Seifeddine Rezgui. One man, Ben Aisha, put it succinctly: ‘You have to understand, I don’t save them [guests] because they are foreigners, but because we are all the same. A Tunisian, an English, an Italian, we have the same body, we have the same soul, we have the same dreams, we are the same people.’“
An American’s recent view on self-denying actions of love: “I am touched by this expression of interfaith – and human – solidarity, and awed by the selflessness of the Muslim community. In return, I am asking more of myself and more of my own [non-Muslim] faith community.“
Jesus translating sex and transgendering
Since the Federal Government is at work to make America great again for transphobic citizens this week, it seemed good to review how some Bible readers are likely to respond.
The majority of Bible readers self-identifying as Southern Baptists have for nearly two years been as clear as they can be publicly on their stance against how “some public school systems are allowing access to bathrooms and locker rooms according to a child’s self-perception of gender and not according to their biological sex.” And so in their own self-perception they have read Jesus reading Genesis as employing a strict and precise binary of “male / female” so that they may, then, as a society of Bible readers, resolve to “affirm God’s original design to create two distinct and complementary sexes, male and female (Gen. 1:27; Matt. 19:4; Mk. 10:6).”
To be absolutely clear, Southern Baptists once upon a time also regarded a strict and precise binary of “master / slave,” invoking the Bible to point to God’s design to create two distinct and complementary classes of human economics; and they’ve now re-read Genesis and Matthew more carefully, in order to re-verse themselves and to apologize:
- for, “Our relationship to African-Americans… hindered from the beginning by the role that slavery played in the formation of the Southern Baptist Convention [by white male masters of slaves]”
- and for “our Southern Baptist forbears [having] defended the right to own slaves, and either [having] participated in, [having] supported, or [having] acquiesced in the particularly inhumane nature of American slavery”
- and for their having “failed, in many cases, to support, and [for having] in some cases opposed, legitimate initiatives to secure the civil rights of African-Americans”
- and for their “Racism [that] has led to discrimination, oppression, injustice, and violence, both in the Civil War and throughout the history of our nation”
- and for “Many of our [white] congregations [who] have intentionally and/or unintentionally excluded African-Americans from worship, membership, and leadership.”
The majority of Southern Baptists have made these declarations, assuming the binary.
Not all white-privileged, white cis-gender male Southern Baptists have always read the Bible in such a strict and precise binary sort of way. Some have read Genesis, for example, the way Jesus might have read it, with regard to human sexuality and human economic classes. And so I want to go to one of these, one Clarence Jordan. He earned a Ph.D. in Koine Greek just to translate the gospels of Jesus into Southern American English.
Here’s Dr. Jordan’s translation from Matthew 19:
And here’s another cis-gender white male Greek scholar translating the same passage similarly. This is from Dr. Richmond Lattimore, who grew up speaking Chinese in China coincidentally and who, while translating the Gospels, became Roman Catholic; here’s from his Matthew 19:
Now, if we go back to the original, to Matthew’s gospel, we read him going back to the original, Moses’s first of five books of the Bible. And Matthew is recording the speech of Jesus, including the quotation of the Hebrew Bible, in Greek. In all likelihood, Jesus was speaking neither Koine Greek nor the old Hebrew of the Scriptures. Nonetheless, he speaks not only of “male/female” but also of this other group of individuals, who, like him, are not ever in a complementary male-over-female marriage. Likely he called them by this phrase:
An important way to read this Greek word for the Semitic phrase of Jesus is with the help of Esther, the Septuagint translation, as follows:
τῷ εὐνούχῳ τοῦ βασιλέως τῷ φύλακι τῶν γυναικῶν
A function of the castrated boys was to be the cis-gender male King’s protectors of his harem of girls and women.
Jesus’s discussion of marriage from the beginning between those grown up being boys and those grown up being girls is followed by a discussion of a different sort of sexual human. And that further discussion describes the choices made about their biological sex parts from the beginning, and imposed by others, and elected by themselves. There is not just the birth sex male, in marriage, over the birth sex female. There is also gender determined, by the birth process, or by others, or by the individual.
The sex “normal” is categorically challenged by Jesus here. Dr. Jordan and Dr. Lattimore are looking not at a purely Semitic phrase סָרִיס. Rather they both consider the translational Greek phrase εὐνοῦχοι. They read this, in this context, not as some sort of “guard” of the “bed” of the King, where he has his orgiastic hetero-sexual sex with virgins and other kept females. Rather, they read what others transliterate as “eunuch” to be those rendered to be without sexual capacity or those who are made sex-less men. This certainly is one way to emphasize the whole discussion of Jesus in Matthew in Greek translation. Since it is Greek, we may find ourselves tending toward the binarying, given how much about sex – in the binary mode – male Greek ancients such as Aristotle were prone to write. But then we would be forgetting how other Greeks, such as Sappho and Aspasia, talked about and wrote about and represented gendering in vastly more dimensioned ways.
Now without a whole lot of trouble some can read the discussion of Jesus here as applying to getting beyond this problem of narrow and precise binarying. And without too much inference there can be applications made to transgender human beings as well as to cis gender ones.
And so I just want to offer this now as a tweetable response to what the President is now doing to so many by fiat. Here is a reasonable translation of Matthew 19, if you can accept it:
Some aren’t biologically “boys” at birth; some are re-sexed by others; some transgender for heaven’s sake. Accept it if you can.Matthew19:12
I’m Not Political
Over the holidays, I had a conversation with a good friend who, when asked to call his senators to support something, adamantly refused. I’m not political, he declared. I vote in every election, but that’s the extent of it. I expect my representatives to represent me, and if they don’t, I’ll vote against them next time.
I was certainly taken aback, but I was especially struck by that assertion that he was “not political”. Because I don’t think what I have now just begun to do is “politics.” I think it is what the founders envisioned when they designed our governmental system. It’s not “politics” — it’s “active citizenship.”
When I was growing up, it was reasonably common to hear Americans referred to in public discourse as citizens. As I got older, somehow this changed — now we are most commonly referred to as consumers or voters (except during campaign speeches when some of us become working families and the rest of us are disappeared).
When I was growing up, I learned the theory of how our government was supposed to work, with elected representatives who were responsible to their constituents. But I never had a civics class per se, and I never had anything like a practicum in active citizenship — so I knew the theory, but I didn’t have a good grasp on how the process actually worked, the nitty-gritty implementation details.
As an adult, occasionally there would be an issue in the news that I cared about, and so I would call my senator or representative, and what I wanted to do was talk to my elected official and argue the merits of my case. But I never got to talk to them – it was staffers who picked up the phone, and I generally got the impression that all they were doing was counting “for” or “against” on the issue in question. It was demoralizing and frustrating. I felt as if I’d called once, so I had had a chance to express my opinion on this issue and I shouldn’t call again.
In the weeks following the election, many people voiced their desire to do something but they weren’t sure what or how, and delightfully, a number of experienced people, including some who presently or formerly worked as staffers, have stepped up to teach us how this active citizenship thing actually works. They have been kind and patient, consistently encouraging people to ask even baby questions, and I am profoundly grateful to them.
So here are some baby lessons that this newly active citizen has learned in the last few weeks:
– It’s okay to call more than once. It’s okay to call every day. This is called keeping the pressure on. They’ll know we’re calling every day because this is an issue that is important to us.
– It’s better to call than to send email. It’s better to call during office hours when you can talk to a staffer than to leave a voicemail. But it’s better to do any of those things than to do none of them. Faxes and letters also work. The important thing is to do what you can.
– If you call and can’t get through because the line is busy, be encouraged! This means that you are not alone: plenty of other active citizens are also calling to express their opinions.
– But also, be persistent: keep calling until you get through. I used to become discouraged and give up after 2 or 3 tries, or figure that the lines were flooded now and I should try again later, or even that I didn’t have to call because obviously everyone else was. Now, I think of it like those contests that radio stations have sometimes, where the Nth caller who can answer the question wins tickets to a concert or so forth. Did you ever enter those? Then you know the key is to hang up and dial again if you get a busy signal, over and over, to try to get through. And it’s easier now than it was when I was a teen – now we have a redial button!
– The national level isn’t the only thing that matters. You’re a citizen of your state and of your city or county, too, and your voice is proportionately louder at the local level because each elected official represents fewer constituents than at the national level. Politicians typically get their start on the local level, so you want to encourage the ones you approve of.
There are plenty more things I don’t know yet, but I’m learning, and I’m determined to stay active even after (please God) things become less dire. Because I’m not political — I’m a citizen.
Tips of the Hat to:
- Whoever it was that wrote something like “the era of armchair citizenship is over” somewhere that I could read it in December but have been unable to find it since for proper citation.
- John Senior for his essay at Political Theology presenting a transactional model of politics with voting as the last step in the process (and contrasting it to a liturgical model, which is the thing that made me read the essay).
- @celeste_pewter as one of those patient, kind, and helpful persons who is sorting out for us what the process is and what are the most important things to do today.
- Doug M, for saying the thing that prompted this essay.
And high-fives to all the other people out there who, like me, are trying to do this for the first time in their lives. I see you, trying to figure things out, asking questions, making calls, writing letters, gradually getting the hang of it. Doing it even though you’re scared. Doing it because you’re scared. I see you. Rock on!
Translating Trump’s speeches
According to translator Bérengère Viennot, the highly non-linear speeches of Trump, particularly his ad-libbed and extemporaneous remarks present particular challenges to translation.
“Trump is not easy to translate, first of all, because, most of the time, when he speaks he seems not to know quite where he’s going. In my essay, I took the example of the interview he gave to The New York Times. He seems to hang onto a word in the question, or to a word that pops into his mind, repeating it over and over again. He shapes his thought around it and, sometimes, succeeds in giving part of an answer — often the same answer: namely, that he won the election. Trump seems to go from point A (the question) to point B (himself, most of the time) with no real logic. It’s as if he had thematic clouds in his head that he would pick from with no need of a logical thread to link them.”
Lost in Trumpslation: An Interview with Bérengère Viennot
“Je ne traduis pas des mots, je traduis des pensées. Des situations, des personnalités, des moments. Et j’emballe tout cela dans un vocabulaire, un champ sémantique qui en français devra créer chez le lecteur la même impression, la même réflexion que celles qui ont été suscitées chez le lecteur d’origine. Dans le cas d’Obama, c’était plutôt simple: la pensée est claire, le message précis et maîtrisé, le vocabulaire châtié, la syntaxe impeccable. Paradoxalement, la pensée de Trump qui est beaucoup plus creuse et qui tourne souvent autour du même sujet (dans le cas de cette interview, sa victoire), est bien plus compliquée à rendre. En cassant les codes du discours, en utilisant un vocabulaire limité et une syntaxe hachée et décousue, cet homme politique (si si, on est bien obligé de lui accorder ce statut maintenant) force le traducteur, il ME force, à réviser, à réduire et à appauvrir mon champ sémantique de travail.”
Pour les traducteurs, Trump est un casse-tête inédit et désolant
BLT 