Dispossession
I can't think of a clever title for this topic. Yet, I can say, my writing on this topic is prompted by the fact that I just finished the book "Eat, Pray, Love," by Elizabeth Gilbert, a wildly popular book which I imagine is read heavily by women. Women my age probably (that's 26, if you have forgotten or thought it was older). Well, Gilbert spends a year traveling to Italy, India and then Bali after a painful, bitter divorce. In Italy she takes language classes and eats a lot, in India she goes to an Ashram, and in Bali she spends time with a medicine man and has an affair with a Brazilian expatriate.
The book's somewhat interesting but Gilbert comes off, in my eyes, as a flake. In fact, she pisses me off a bit because what she and the majority of us first-world liberal types usually do - albeit I've tried to be a little more conscientious - is blah blah blah about meditation and enlightenment and yoga, our connection to god and how we need to follow the example of those wonderfully devout Hindus and Zen Buddhists and all that. Meanwhile, all the meanwhile, forgotting that this line of thinking is a privilege of our origin of wealth, that it is a product of wealth, and that in India, China, Nepal, Burma, the "enlightened" Buddha/Upanishads led crowd subscribe to cruel caste systems, and often their people are deluged by poverty and violence, a direct result of our 20th century colonization and 21st century globalization that inform this system.
I am a believer, by all means, but the dispossession and displacement of self, of individual, group and national selves, simply relinquishes ownership in what is simultaneously beautiful and flawed: our skin, our culture, our past, our values, our religious and spiritual traditions. This is not to say we can not swim in other waters, so to speak, or even adopt them. But, be true.
I can't think of a clever title for this topic. Yet, I can say, my writing on this topic is prompted by the fact that I just finished the book "Eat, Pray, Love," by Elizabeth Gilbert, a wildly popular book which I imagine is read heavily by women. Women my age probably (that's 26, if you have forgotten or thought it was older). Well, Gilbert spends a year traveling to Italy, India and then Bali after a painful, bitter divorce. In Italy she takes language classes and eats a lot, in India she goes to an Ashram, and in Bali she spends time with a medicine man and has an affair with a Brazilian expatriate.
The book's somewhat interesting but Gilbert comes off, in my eyes, as a flake. In fact, she pisses me off a bit because what she and the majority of us first-world liberal types usually do - albeit I've tried to be a little more conscientious - is blah blah blah about meditation and enlightenment and yoga, our connection to god and how we need to follow the example of those wonderfully devout Hindus and Zen Buddhists and all that. Meanwhile, all the meanwhile, forgotting that this line of thinking is a privilege of our origin of wealth, that it is a product of wealth, and that in India, China, Nepal, Burma, the "enlightened" Buddha/Upanishads led crowd subscribe to cruel caste systems, and often their people are deluged by poverty and violence, a direct result of our 20th century colonization and 21st century globalization that inform this system.
I am a believer, by all means, but the dispossession and displacement of self, of individual, group and national selves, simply relinquishes ownership in what is simultaneously beautiful and flawed: our skin, our culture, our past, our values, our religious and spiritual traditions. This is not to say we can not swim in other waters, so to speak, or even adopt them. But, be true.
No comments:
Post a Comment