by Lucy S.
This is a continuation from
“Waves.” There are always more waves, to
either jump and be joyously lifted by, or to knock us down and keep us from
breathing. It all depends upon how big
they are, whom we have to help us, and how well we trust them and ourselves.
I don’t know why it is so hard for me
to hold on to the lesson to trust those who have shown over and over that they
are worthy of trust, and to trust my abilities. It’s not that all people can be
trusted or that I should always assume that I have the abilities for
everything, but I know that I have been fortunate enough to receive an
excellent education and that I have worked hard and written well before. I know
that I care about this project.
Last semester, in my final paper for
the class taught by the professor who is now my advisor, I wrote about a
fantastic novel called Animal’s People
by Indra Sinha. The novel is set in a fictionalized Bhopal, India, where the
worst industrial disaster which has ever happened occurred in a Union Carbide
plant, a subsidiary of a U.S. corporation. Many thousands died when the gas
escaped, and many more lived with serious bodily damage. The company (or
Kampani, as Animal calls it) never cleaned up the disaster or adequately
compensated people for the disaster (not that any compensation would undo it).
Animal is a 20 year old whose parents died that nightmarish night, a young man
who has been bent over most of his life because of the toxins he was exposed
to. But it is not a depressing novel. It
may outrage you, but it is also hilarious and irreverent and full of hope. It
is one of my favorite novels ever. Near the end of my paper, I wrote:
At this point and at many points along the way, I believe
readers find themselves simultaneously trusting Animal, and yet not always
trusting his ‘reading’ or reactions to various people and events; and on his
side without agreeing with everything he does (to put it mildly). And is this
not what it means to live bound to others in this world? There is no formula
for this, no safe separation which keeps us ‘critically distant’ unless we
choose not to trust and love. Yet that would leave us in the least safe
position of all – one of isolation – making our readings of our world , not ‘neutral’
(as if such a state might be reached), but grounded in whatever ideologies we
have internalized minus a feeling for and merging with those we are ‘reading.’
Thus, like Zafar, we must trust, not because those we trust have definitively
proven they can be trusted, but because no real growth is possible without this
trust. We trust and keep trusting, even with or especially because of the flaws
of those we trust. As Animal says, “If you want my story, you’ll have to put up
with how I tell it” (2). And as Judith Butler puts it, “Let’s face it. We’re
undone by each other. And if we’re not, we’re missing something” (20 Precarious Life).
This is the utter vulnerability of relationship. Yet it is
not romanticized sentimentality. To be sure, it is thoroughly steeped in
feeling, but this entangled mass of emotion, intelligence, critical ‘reading,’
and that ungraspable force we call ‘will’(those moments when we are moved from
our previous ways, and we act) – all of this is inherently necessary to making
common cause with each other. And making common cause is crucial to resisting
the corporatized, violent status quo. We cannot wait for the perfect, fully
trustworthy people to show up. With no guarantees, knowing that we may trust
the wrong people and that the results may be painful or even dire if we do, we
nonetheless decide to trust anyway. We must make do with each other, or at
least enough of each other – the ones we decide to trust. From Zafar, among
others in this story, we discover that far more people than we might realize
can be trusted because being trusted so profoundly affects people.
And a bit further, I wrote:
Animal’s People is, among other things, about trust and discernment, and
believing that what we do can make a difference even when we do not think that
we believe it. All along the way, Animal gradually enlarges his ability to
trust, not only the other characters in the novel, but those to whom he is
speaking. It is about the paradoxical step we take to trust even when we do not
quite trust and do not quite have a reason to trust, as in early on, when he
says, [on the tape recorder left by the journalist]:
I’m remembering the eyes that hide inside your eyes, you
said I should ignore you and talk straight to those who’ll read these words, if
I speak from my heart they’ll listen. So from this moment I am no longer
speaking to my friend the Kakadu Jarnalis, name’s Phuoc, I am talking to the
eyes that are reading these words. Now I am talking to you (12).
All of us who read this story are “Eyes.” At some point, we
can become eyes which see from within Animal, rather than only from without,
but this requires our own trust. As Animal learns, not simplistically, but
carefully to trust the right people and remain cynical about those he should be
cynical toward (the Kampani and its government cohorts), likewise we as readers
of this world must try our very hardest to trust the right people. If Sinha
wins us over and proves to us that Animal and his people are the right ones to
trust, we become Animal’s people as well.
This is always the challenge. Whom
should we trust, and how do we know, and how do we keep trusting? It is paradoxical; we find ourselves trusting
even inside of our lack of trust, even as our lack of trust may hurt others at
times, and in turn make them not trust us as much – and yet we forge on
together, and in these relationships, we enact the form of trust and somehow
that too is trust.
And now I think, how could I not trust
my advisor, when he chose this novel, and when he has encouraged and supported
me this whole time, and when I know at least some of his own ethics and care? How
could I not trust myself when I know that I trust the literature, and that my
writing comes out of that trust, and out of love for my ‘people’ – those who
may read what I write, and most of all, those who remain in relationship with
me, even with all of my flaws? I sent my
advisor the latest draft of the final project, expressing some of my worry, and
he said not to worry, that there is always more time for revisions, and I felt
everything open up again so that I could breathe and enjoy the waves instead of
drowning in them.
I don’t have any formulas for this trust.
I know that I have been amazingly fortunate to have such trustworthy, wonderful
people to move through these waves with.
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