Shunya's Notes

Cargo

Flash fiction by Usha Alexander

“I re-read your letter concerning your great-great-grandmother,” Sam said, opening a yellowed logbook upon his rosewood desk, the cargo manifest of a ship called Goodgrace, owned and captained by his great-grandfather Samuel Collins. Each page was encased in a plastic sleeve, which he turned delicately.

“My old grandma remembered her, the stories she told.” Brenda’s face was serious but not sad as she spoke. “She was probably just a teenager when she came over. She got pregnant on the ship and had her first baby soon after she landed. A boy.” Brenda peered sideways at the high, teak bookshelves surrounding her. "It took a lot of digging to learn the name of the ship."

Brenda wasn’t what the old man expected when he first received the letter requesting access to his family records; though, he’d been unaware of having any expectations until the moment she appeared. Statuesque, in a breezy white top and dark slacks, she stood with both hands clutching a faux-leather purse against her stomach. Her blackish hair diffused toward her shoulders in fuzzy ringlets, charmingly augmented with silver linings. He wondered how many white men—uninvited?—had interceded in generations past to render in her that walnut-brown skin, the indeterminate fall of her hair, surely a world apart from the African ancestress she’d come in search of.

“Impressive library for one family,” she remarked with awe.

“Yes.” He smiled, spread his arms, encouragingly. “Do feel free to have a look around.” He watched her step gingerly among the stacks, perusing the titles of ancient volumes, the pickled histories and cracked tomes gathered by generations of his Connecticut forebears. He admired the broad contours of her brow and cheek, arching and flexing when she paused to read, noting his Harvard diplomas on the wall, remarking on the age and historical value of his books. He could see that she was educated, if from a humble background. She’d probably attended a state school, maybe the first in her family to graduate college. Such things he’d learned to discern from the way a person walked, talked, dressed, smiled, since spending his retirement years as a volunteer physician at a clinic in New Haven.

“Here,” Sam said, inviting her to sit at his desk. He pointed to a page in the mouldering ledger. Brenda stopped and looked at him. He was surprised to see her formerly smooth brow now pinched with panic, as though he’d opened a page in her diary. He felt suddenly awkward, a voyeur pouring over her family secrets. But he determined to remain aloof. How could he, after all, take responsibility for the great errors of history?

“The Goodgrace made only two crossings before human cargo was outlawed.” He faltered, noticing for the first time how ridiculous was the ship’s name. “They’re listed here by sex and age. Sometimes an identifying detail or two.” He added, “Only about three-hundred slaves, in all. It never was the main family business.”

Brenda sat, primly, squinted a long while at the ledger, shoulders hunched, silent, drawing a finger slowly down each page.

He drummed his fingers upon his cheek. Why had he invited her to come? What had he hoped to gain from this awkward encounter with his legacy?

She gasped, her finger stopping under a scrawl: girl 15? tall comely enogh

Beads of sweat clustered upon the curve of Brenda’s nose. She closed her eyes and raised one hand to cover her open mouth, rested the other long forearm against the polished rosewood. Was she trembling?

Sam looked at Brenda, and then beyond her. He imagined her as a girl with dark black skin, shimmering with youth, imagined Captain Collins viewing her; taking her; selling her at auction. Counting his profits. Sam thought of his inheritance. He thought of his family, seeing it now enlarged by an unknown multitude of new and foreign characters, each one real as Captain Collins, as Brenda, as the tall, comely girl, who had toiled in the violence of bondage to the end of her days.

__________________________________________

The image above is of a holding chamber at the old slave market in Zanzibar. Some two-hundred individuals were held in this space for a week at a time, without food or exit; fetid water filled the space between the shelves.

Doniger on Contemporary Indian Prudishness

A key feature of Hindu society today is its powerful strain of sexual prudery. Hindu conservatives see nothing wrong with it of course, and consider it the very essence of Hinduism. They usually blame "phoren" influences for the loosening sexual mores in their midst. Meanwhile, the liberals argue the reverse, and point to a remarkable Hindu past that produced open-minded texts like the Kama Sutra and the erotic temple sculptures of Khajuraho and Konark. They scratch their heads and wonder how this shift happened, and usually blame it on later historical interventions, such as the conservatism of the Muslim ruling elite and the puritanical Protestantism of Europeans.

In this engaging talk (20 mins), Wendy Doniger pokes holes in these simple narratives. She argues that the Europeans, when excavating the Hindu past, possessed the colonizer's lens of scholarship, which has profoundly shaped modern Hindu self-knowledge. The Anglicized Hindus, as I've written elsewhere, began understanding themselves and their culture "through the eyes of the colonizer—using the latter’s concepts, categories, and judgments." Doniger speaks of two prominent ideals in the history of the Hindus, the erotic and the ascetic, that have long coexisted despite being in tension. She notes that while the British oozed Victorian Virtues, Hinduism too had a long and indigenous strain of prudery that predates European colonization. Not surprisingly, this strain got valorized in colonial times, helping create a more standardized "Hinduism" based on the European idea of "religion", at the heart of which they placed the most austere spiritual texts like the Bhagavad Gita, demoting other strands of folk spirituality. Listen to her full argument, and to her Q&A exchange later with Lawrence Cohen.

A Brief History of Paper

Here is an article with some interesting facts on paper. For example, "28 percent of all wood cut in the U.S. is used for papermaking" vs. 35 percent elsewhere due to less recycling. But like oil, with 5 percent of the world population, the U.S. consumes 30 percent of all paper.

Take a minute to look around the room you’re in and notice how many things are made out of paper. There may be books, a few magazines, some printer paper, and perhaps a poster on the wall. Yet, if you consider that each person in the United States uses 749 pounds (340kg) of paper every year (adding up to a whopping 187 billion pounds (85 billion kg) per year for the entire population, by far the largest per capita consumption rate of paper for any country in the world), then you realize that paper comes in many more forms than meets the eye.

World consumption of paper has grown 400 percent in the last 40 years. Now nearly 4 billion trees or 35 percent of the total trees cut around the world are used in paper industries on every continent. Besides what you can see around you, paper comes in many forms from tissue paper to cardboard packaging to stereo speakers to electrical plugs to home insulation to the sole inserts in your tennis shoes. In short, paper is everywhere.

Apparently, the "average American uses about the equivalent of one 100-foot-tall Douglas fir tree in paper and wood products each year." Check out some pictures of the handmade paper process.

The Caging of America

The rate of incarceration in the U.S. is the highest in the world. The number of prisoners has more than tripled to over 0.7 percent of Americans (2.4 million) in the last 30 years, including over 50,000 in solitary confinement. The "money that states spend on prisons has risen at six times the rate of spending on higher education." At the same time, crime in America has fallen sharply during the same period. Are the two related? What sort of ideas inform criminal justice in America? Is the privatizing of prisons the right solution? Adam Gopnik offers some excellent food for thought.

For a great many poor people in America, particularly poor black men, prison is a destination that braids through an ordinary life, much as high school and college do for rich white ones. More than half of all black men without a high-school diploma go to prison at some time in their lives. Mass incarceration on a scale almost unexampled in human history is a fundamental fact of our country today—perhaps the fundamental fact, as slavery was the fundamental fact of 1850. In truth, there are more black men in the grip of the criminal-justice system—in prison, on probation, or on parole—than were in slavery then. Over all, there are now more people under “correctional supervision” in America—more than six million—than were in the Gulag Archipelago under Stalin at its height. That city of the confined and the controlled, Lockuptown, is now the second largest in the United States ...

The scale and the brutality of our prisons are the moral scandal of American life. Every day, at least fifty thousand men—a full house at Yankee Stadium—wake in solitary confinement, often in “supermax” prisons or prison wings, in which men are locked in small cells, where they see no one, cannot freely read and write, and are allowed out just once a day for an hour’s solo “exercise.” (Lock yourself in your bathroom and then imagine you have to stay there for the next ten years, and you will have some sense of the experience.) Prison rape is so endemic—more than seventy thousand prisoners are raped each year—that it is routinely held out as a threat, part of the punishment to be expected. The subject is standard fodder for comedy, and an uncoöperative suspect being threatened with rape in prison is now represented, every night on television, as an ordinary and rather lovable bit of policing. The normalization of prison rape—like eighteenth-century japery about watching men struggle as they die on the gallows—will surely strike our descendants as chillingly sadistic, incomprehensible on the part of people who thought themselves civilized.

More here.  Also see my earlier post on this from April 2007.

The Secret Lives of Molecules

Drew Berry presents "stunning and scientifically accurate animations to illustrate how the molecules in our cells move and interact." Even more astonishing is how all this stuff adds up to make a consciousness that is now typing these words into a computer!

Why Are Men So Violent?

Most answers to this question posit a warlike propensity in men that is shaped by evolution. Jesse Prinz, professor of philosophy at the City University of New York, goes beyond this biological line of inquiry to look for the answers in the social history of humans.

It will not have gone unnoticed that men are more violent than women. Men perpetrate about 90 percent of the world's homicides and start all of the wars. But why? A recent article in a prominent science journal contends that evolution has shaped men to be warriors. More specifically, the authors claim that men are biologically programmed to form coalitions that aggress against neighbors, and they do so in order to get women, either through force or by procuring resources that would make them more desirable. The male warrior hypothesis is alluring because it makes sense of male violence, but it is based on a dubious interpretation of the science. In my new book, I point out that such evolutionary explanations of behavior are often worse than competing historical explanations. The same is true in this case. There are simpler historical explanations of male violence, and understanding these is important for coping with the problem.

A historical explanation of male violence does not eschew biological factors, but it minimizes them and assumes that men and woman are psychologically similar. Consider the biological fact that men have more upper-body strength than women, and assume that both men and women want to obtain as many desirable resources as they can. In hunter-gatherer societies, this strength differential doesn't allow men to fully dominate women, because they depend on the food that women gather. But things change with the advent of intensive agriculture and herding. Strength gives men an advantage over women once heavy ploughs and large animals become central aspects of food production. With this, men become the sole providers, and women start to depend on men economically. The economic dependency allows men to mistreat women, to philander, and to take over labor markets and political institutions. Once men have absolute power, they are reluctant to give it up. It took two world wars and a post-industrial economy for women to obtain basic opportunities and rights.

This historical story can help to explain why men are more violent than women.

More here.

Do Antidepressants Work?

The short answer is yes, but not for the reasons one might imagine. Antidepressants work not because of their active ingredients but because of the placebo effect. In other words, a sugar pill works just as well as the antidepressant, and has none of the side effects of drugs that aim to fix "chemical imbalances" in the brain. This is the conclusion of a fresh new research study by Harvard scientist Irving Kirsch, which adds to an accumulating body of evidence on the medical inefficacy, and the dangers of antidepressants and other overprescribed psychotropic drugs for tens of millions of people who use them everyday (see video below; more resources here).

The Spirit of Cities

In the popular imagination, cities are often associated with distinctive personalities. In India, for instance, Mumbai is often seen as a city of dreams and possibilities. In an interesting new book, Daniel A. Bell & Avner de-Shalit explore the character of cities in greater depth, The Spirit of Cities: Why the Identity of a City Matters in a Global Age. Below is the book abstract; also read the introductory chapter.

Cities shape the lives and outlooks of billions of people, yet they have been overshadowed in contemporary political thought by nation-states, identity groups, and concepts like justice and freedom. The Spirit of Cities revives the classical idea that a city expresses its own distinctive ethos or values. In the ancient world, Athens was synonymous with democracy and Sparta represented military discipline. In this original and engaging book, Daniel Bell and Avner de-Shalit explore how this classical idea can be applied to today's cities, and they explain why philosophy and the social sciences need to rediscover the spirit of cities.

Bell and de-Shalit look at nine modern cities and the prevailing ethos that distinguishes each one. The cities are Jerusalem (religion), Montreal (language), Singapore (nation building), Hong Kong (materialism), Beijing (political power), Oxford (learning), Berlin (tolerance and intolerance), Paris (romance), and New York (ambition). Bell and de-Shalit draw upon the richly varied histories of each city, as well as novels, poems, biographies, tourist guides, architectural landmarks, and the authors' own personal reflections and insights. They show how the ethos of each city is expressed in political, cultural, and economic life, and also how pride in a city's ethos can oppose the homogenizing tendencies of globalization and curb the excesses of nationalism.

The Spirit of Cities is unreservedly impressionistic. Combining strolling and storytelling with cutting-edge theory, the book encourages debate and opens up new avenues of inquiry in philosophy and the social sciences. It is a must-read for lovers of cities everywhere.

Superior Autobiographical Memory

"Lesley Stahl reports on the recently discovered phenomenon of "superior autobiographical memory," the ability to recall nearly every day of one's life." If your remembrance of things past is about average—as I think it is for me (though who knows, it might be worse)—this video will not only astonish you, it might make you feel inadequate and lead you to wonder how your life would have been different with this gift.

Behind the Beautiful Forevers

Katherine Boo, a journalist known for her perceptive writing about the poor and the voiceless, has just published a book about the people of the Annawadi slum in Mumbai. It is getting some really great reviews. Here is an excerpt from one by Thrity Umrigar:

And yet, despite such instances of human decency, the residents of Annawadi are not the saintly, noble poor of much fiction. There are no Tiny Tims or Tom Joads here. They cannot afford to be. Living on subsistence wages, beside sewer lakes and mud-cased pigs and goats, standing in line for hours for a trickle of water, facing the daily threat of the imminent razing of the illegal slum, battling their own superstitions and flaws, killing themselves to pay for a substandard education for their children doesn’t leave much time for human kindness.

This is not poverty porn. Rather, it is an unflinching, unsentimental portrait of the city’s poor - mean, envious, striving. There is no apotheosis in poverty, Boo reminds us. There is only humiliation and a kind of bewilderment.

Affluent Indians are deeply sensitive about the “negative’’ portrayal of their country, and I suppose Boo will come in for her share of criticism. This would be a mistake. “Beautiful Forevers’’ is an astoundingly honest, nonexploitative piece of journalism, a humane, powerful and insightful book that reveals how the world’s poor live, die, and hope in the age of globalization.

More here. Want more reviews? Check out the NY Times, The Caravan, and Bookforum.