On Class, Pain and the Perceptions Thereof
Just a few thoughts.
My laptop, along with my housemate's car, were stolen last week, when my house was broken into again. My mother's keyboard stinks, so you'll be blessed with a shorter-than-usual whinge. The thing is: This matter of the theft got me thinking. A few years ago, my cleaning lady, who is an illiterate lady of peasant stock, with a fair amount of power in her family, told me a story: Her little girl, 8 or 9 at the time if I recall, was helping some 'fine lady' dust the carpets in her apartment. THe fine lady lost a gold necklace and accused the little girl of stealing it, and told the mother (my cleaning lady) to either produce the necklace or cough up quite a lot of money. Her mom's reaction was to find out if the girl had stolen the necklace. She (she told me this) beat the girl with a two-by-four until she couldn't move, and then threatened to electrocute her. The girl only said, "have mercy on me, mother". The mom finally convinced that the girl knew nothing about the necklace and the girl spent a week in bed recovering. And the mom paid the lots-of-money to Fine Lady, and I hoped back then, and still do, that Fine Lady choked on it. (My mother stopped me hating our cleaning lady by reminding me that Fine Lady, of course, had threatened to call the police, who would have tortured the girl much worse. That's what my mom does, she stops me hating people. I love her. Without her, I don't know what I'd become. Onwards...)
This reminds me of another anecdote in re someone else from what we call a lower class: too long to tell here, but it involved a doctor wanting to put some stitches in a poor woman's vagina without anasthetic because, he told me, "they don't suffer as you would in their place." He didn't end up doing the operation at all. But I remembered the pretty horrible tradition that still survives in the countryside here, the "dokhla baladi" where once a girl is married, to prove her virginity, she's held down by four women while a fifth pokes her hymen open with a finger wrapped in white cloth, displaying the bloodstained cloth to the family to general rejoicing that their daughter is 'pure'. And I haven't even mentioned circumcisions performed without anaesthetic for both boys and girls. (Me? I'm a wimp. I couldn't even have my hymen broken without anesthetic. So I think of others suffering pain and I cringe. It seems to me that the world has a higher tolerance for pain than I have, which is just one of those things, I suppose, but there's so much suffering everywhere I look, and I'm too much of a wimp to endure much of that, either, or understand it, even, so I get to blog and whinge about it in the hopes that someone will make me understand...)
So... I'm not erudite like the gentleman I'm fortunate enough to have one day translated for, (seriously, what are you still doing here? His blog is incredible), so I can't quote like he does, or even like a lot of, you know, real professors do - I really need to buckle down and at least read Discipline and Punish - but I had these thoughts that I thought I'd share. The thing is, much is made of class warfare. And to me, it's never been about money as much as it is about values. There are people who think it's OK to harass others in the street and yell at them. And... if the class divide for me is between people who think it's fine to beat their children with a plastic clothes-hanger or a two-by-four, or who, confronted with their neighbours doing it, think it's just "discipline", and those who cringe in horror at the mere thought of doing such a thing, then that's how it is for me. 'Course, that cuts across class lines as well - so maybe it isn't as much about class as I thought it was.