An open Letter to Anne Hathaway and her haters. What am I missing?

My husband is not big on movie musicals, but after Anne Hathaway was interviewed on The Daily Show, he and I both managed to see the Les Miserables this winter. Indeed, I almost felt a spiritual urgency about seeing the movie. And Anne Hathaway’s performance is what I remember most about it.

I do not want what I am about to write to be misinterpreted. Anne Hathaway does not know what it is like to stand for hours in line at a clinic in Haiti with a sick baby, only to be turned away because she does not have money or the appropriate papers. She does not know what it is like to have a family member disappear in Colombia, or to receive an anonymous letter saying that if she does not leave the area immediately, she will end up dead and floating in the river. She does not know what it is like to have her home demolished because an Israeli settlement wants her family’s land for expansion. She does not know what it is like to face the ongoing loss of land and violation of treaty rights that Indigenous people are constantly facing in North America. She does not know what it is like to live with the casual racism that people of color do day after exhausting day in the United States.

And yet, when I watched her performance, it touched the place the feelings come from when I have witnessed the above struggles of marginalized people as part of my human rights work. Watching her face, I saw the faces of so many other people who have suffered enormous losses. Victor Hugo never experienced the poverty he wrote about so eloquently, and Picasso was not in the Basque village of Guernica when it was bombed by German and Italian warplanes in 1937, but through their art, they brought poverty, injustice, and war to the attention of millions, and people used that art for social change. What Anne Hathaway accomplished in Les Miserables was profound art in that tradition.

So my husband and I were pleased when she acknowledged all the Fantines of the world at the Oscars ceremony, and were shocked at the negative publicity she received afterward. I sent her the letter below care of her management agency in March after we were aware of the publicity (we don’t really follow celebrity culture). This weekend, when I was in Washington DC for my stepdaughter’s graduation, I was riffling through a recent Cosmopolitan in her dorm room as she prepared to move out and saw yet another article on why Anne Hathaway was unlikeable. So, since for some reason, celebrity culture still finds this topic current, I am going to repost the letter here:

Regarding your comment: “Here’s hoping that sometime in the not-too-distant future, the misfortunes of Fantine will only be found in stories—and not in real life.”

March 15, 2013
Dear Ms. Hathaway,
I am not the sort of person who normally writes celebrities. I work for a human rights organization called Christian Peacemaker Teams (cpt.org) and have served on assignments in Haiti, Chiapas, Colombia, Palestine and Israel, Democratic Republic of Congo and with North American Indigenous communities. I have enclosed a newsletter so you will know the sort of thing that normally occupies my time. Like millions of people I was moved by your performance in Les Miserables (My brother—a SAG member—wrote in his January 25 Facebook status: “exercised his sacred right to vote this morning, knowing that the whole of western civilization depends on Anne Hathaway being recognized for her rendition of ‘I Dreamed a Dream.’”) My husband and I watched the Oscar broadcast this year primarily because we had acquaintances who made the documentary, “5 Broken Cameras,” and because of you.

We so appreciated that you gave a nod to all the real-life Fantines in your acceptance speech. I have worked with people who have had most of their choices stripped away and people who have given up everything, including their dignity, for the sake of their children. You captured their despair and conviction in a profound way when you sang, “I dreamed a dream.”

But I would not have written this letter if it hadn’t been for the media in the past weeks obsessing over the darts in your dress and in general everything except your mention of the real Fantines of the world. In fact, the only thing I found about you acknowledging their suffering was a snarky “Anne Hathaway thinks Fantine was real.”

So that’s why I decided to write. Just so you know that my husband and I noticed, and appreciated it. I’m sure Victor Hugo would have too.

Blessings and peace,

Kathleen Kern

My NPR Three-Minute Fiction Entry: “You, Me and Leonard Peltier”

I discovered from reading the writer’s blog associated with NPR’s Three-Minute Fiction contest that writers have no way of finding out whether their 600-words-or-fewer submissions were in the top ten or rejected at the initial sorting out process by creative writing students with no appreciation for the scope of their genius.

Anyway, Round 10 was a story in the form of a voicemail message. Here’s mine:

YOU, ME AND LEONARD PELTIER

By Kathleen Kern

Hey, I heard that the President didn’t pardon Leonard Peltier today, so I know that right about now you’ve thrown some plants against the wall, and shredded the piles of petitions, appeals, and endorsement letters by your computer and all the printouts of celebrities holding up the “Free Leonard Peltier” signs around the office. Or maybe you’re just on your couch sobbing while you watch the Cartoon Network. And that’s okay, too. Anything that doesn’t involved hurting yourself is good.

I hope you didn’t shred the photo of us all at the Mitakuye Oyasin awards banquet last year. The award’s legit, you know. It’s the president that failed, not you. And I’m on the edge of the photo. You could just cut my head out and shred me.

I was going to send you an e-mail, but that seemed inadequate. I mean, all the overtime on nights and weekends, all the rhetorical shrieking with Zuzu, Mark and the others. It was…big. Bigger than just you and me. But I guess since I’m calling you and not them, then this is about you and me, too. You, me, and Leonard Peltier.

I wanted to tell you there’s more to life than your computer, your rage, and Leonard Peltier, but there’s also part of me that’s glad there are angry obsessive people with poor social skills like you who won’t give up on him, because frankly, I like going hours at a time NOT thinking about Leonard Peltier. I like getting seven to eight hours of sleep at night. I like being a Religion and Ethics professor for earnest young Mennonite college students who think I’m exotic because I’ve lived in Washington, DC.

They write letters for Leonard, you know, my students. They’ve been writing to President Obama, asking him for the pardon for weeks. They were shocked, just shocked, when I told them the details of his case, the extradition and everything. Remember what it was like when you could still find something that felt a little bit like joy in your outrage? You probably can’t. I miss it.

There’s one girl, Kayla (so many, many Kaylas here) who asked me this week why I left the campaign. The way she said it, she meant, “Dude, Leonard Peltier’s still in jail, and you’re teaching Intro to Ethics? Seriously?” I wanted to smack that disapproving arch right out of her eyebrow. She’s a senior and I’d hook her up with you and the office, but I don’t think she’s got your stamina, or, for lack of a better word, your soul—even though you don’t believe in souls.

That’s another thing I like besides my job and enough sleep, by the way. I like going to church and believing in God without listening to your snide comments. I never understood why in your cosmology only Leonard was allowed to believe in God.

Sorry; sorry, sorry, sorry. This isn’t why I called…

Umm…you know sometimes I wonder whether my motives for wanting Leonard freed are entirely selfish. I mean it; some days, I my reasons have nothing to do with travesties of justice. Some days I just want him out jail because of how it will change your life and my life.

Because maybe then you’ll be free.
And maybe then you’ll pardon me.

Why the cover of Because the Angels looks the way it does

I am nothing but thrilled by Davey R. Jones’ Amazon review mentioned in my previous blog post. I mean, “Most Surprisingly Good Read of the Decade?” Last night I went through the last 40 of his 81 reviews on Amazon, and mine was the only self-published novel that he had reviewed at all. So what follows should not be interpreted as a criticism of him, or of Taylor Ramage, one of its earliest reviewers who wrote, “Because the Angels is a classic example of why you shouldn’t judge a book by its cover (or its layout, for that matter). Although it’s very sweet that the author’s family got involved in the design process, it’s honestly not too impressive.”

They did not like the cover. In fact, I think I could posit a mathematical theorem based on the titles of their reviews: Taylor titled her review, “Because the Angels: What Christian Fiction Should Really Aim For.” ∴ Grandiose praise of Because the Angels in review titles is in inverse proportion to the reviewer’s regard for the cover design.

So why did I choose to have the cover look the way it did? Well, my novel heavily featured the anime series Blood+, so in my writer’s fantasy, an editor would be bowled over by the novel’s unique concept, of course, and consult me about the cover design. I would suggest that they contact the production company that owns the copyright to Blood+ and get permission to have the main character, Saya, slashing through a collage of photos representing the Iraq War (blood, explosions, Abu Ghraib, etc.) with her sword.

This event did not happen, so I thought about getting a picture of a samurai girl—as a nod to Samurai Champloo, also featured heavily in the novel—doing the same thing. My brother mentioned that my niece was a member of her anime club at school and liked to draw anime characters. That took me on another train of thought. Spike and Marcus, two of the main protagonists, are writing cut-above average fan fiction based on Samurai Champloo into which their anxieties for Spike’s kidnapped sister Margie subconsciously intrude and that eventually gets turned into a trashy fantasy novel. I thought having a somewhat amateurish drawing of a samurai girl against the background mentioned above might actually be in keeping with that subplot. As it happens, my sister-in-law is a professional graphic designer. If you see this ubiquitous Minted.com design all over the web, that’s her:

She took my idea and designed a much more understated background, which I realized was a better choice, but when I said, “Could you put Gandhi heads on the samurai’s kimono?” (Margie, the hostage, is fully committed to nonviolence.) My sister-in-law said, “Sure.”

I had wanted the samurai figure to be wearing sneakers, but neither my niece nor my sister-in-law could get the feet right; hence, the explosion.

But overall, I am still pleased with the result. If the book is ever picked up by a another publisher and they say they want a different design, I will be open to that, of course, but for now, as an indie author, I can only be grateful to have artists, professional and amateur in my family, who listened to my ideas for the cover and for independent reviewers who liked my book—and also didn’t charge me.

I thought my novel DID have a happy ending and “ Most Surprisingly Good Read of the Decade” review for Because the Angels

When I first started getting back comments from people who had read my Shea manuscript, I was taken aback when they referred to the novel’s sad ending, because in my mind, I thought the novel had a happy ending. Good triumphed. The efforts of all the people who sacrificed so much to bring the fascist Christian Republic down succeeded. Iz and Shea reconciled. Yes, a lot of the people who resist the regime die along the way, and my narrator, Islam Goldberg-Jones remains in prison at the end because in the U.S., Federal judges are appointed for life, and the entrenched Christian Republic judiciary and Christian Republic holdovers in the FBI conspire to keep him there. Most of the people who committed the worst atrocities under the Christian Republic never have to pay for their crimes.

But that’s how the world is. Famous and anonymous heroes for millennia have sacrificed their lives, bodies and sanity to bring down tyrants or systems of domination. AIM activist Leonard Peltier, whom most of the world regards as a political prisoner, remains incarcerated today for murder even though the U.S. government lied to get him extradited him from Canada, coerced witnesses, withheld evidence during his trial, and even though an Iowa jury acquitted his co-defendants of the same crime.

Dictators and generals in Latin America like Augusto Pinochet, after their torture states finally fell, lived affluent, comfortable lives for decades afterwards.

People think I’m a glass half-empty kind of person. Sometimes I think that’s true. I think sometimes when the Israeli military occupation of Palestine finally ends, if it does end in my lifetime, that I want to be the one who remembers all the people who gave everything they had to fight it and ended up crippled with despair, as well as the ones who ended up dead. But I also think that while compassion is never wrong, it is also always right to celebrate when grassroots movements succeed in toppling oppressors. We need to take a moment and honor the thousands, even millions of nameless Filipinos, South Africans, Chileans, Serbs, East Timorese, Tunisians etc. who decided simply the time had come when toppling their government was more important than their lives, or, that if they all worked together, they had the power to topple their government with minimal loss of life. By honoring them, we also learn, and when we face tyrants ourselves, we are better equipped.

******
I was tempted to put in a plug for my novel Because the Angels, when the tenth anniversary of the Iraq war rolled around and then decided that was tacky. (The plot is partially based on the experience of my organization, Christian Peacemaker Teams, when four of our colleagues were kidnapped in Baghdad 2005-06). But this morning, I decided I hadn’t plugged it for awhile, so I thought I’d send out a tweet with a link to the Amazon Kindle page. I discovered that someone I didn’t know had written the following review:

Most Surprisingly Good Read of the Decade, April 22, 2013
This review is from: Because the Angels (Kindle Edition)
“BtA wins the most surprisingly good read of the decade. Past the cover art and the anime obsession, the story is fraught with messy, intense, and endearing characters. What’s probably best about the book is the amazingly successful and comedic ending. Without being sappy, the author manages to weave a brilliant resolution to an engrossing tale.”

It’s my first genuinely unsolicited review—probably from the week of free downloads in late February, early March. Davey R. Jones also really like Junot Diaz’s Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, a book I really loved, and books by Mario Vargas Llosa, Madeline L’Engle and about Dietrich Bonhoeffer, so he seems like a kindred spirit. I am assuming he’s not the dead Monkee. Glass half full, see?

How to write about Africa (or how not to write about cultures not your own in general)

Only 5/13ths of the way through of a Bible curriculum assignment due first week of May. So the below post may seem like a blog cop-out. But I also think it reflects my gearing up to re-engage with my Christian Peacemaker Teams work when my sabbatical ends first week of June. I do a lot of writing about people in other cultures, and Wainaina’s essay is a good cautionary note. (One of my colleagues who works on the Colombia team, after she read it on our intra-organizational newslist said how much it annoys her that people always seem to put “poor” before “campesino.”)

This article was originally published in Granta 92.

How to Write About Africa

by by Binyavanga Wainaina

Always use the word ‘Africa’ or ‘Darkness’ or ‘Safari’ in your title. Subtitles may include the words ‘Zanzibar’, ‘Masai’, ‘Zulu’, ‘Zambezi’, ‘Congo’, ‘Nile’, ‘Big’, ‘Sky’, ‘Shadow’, ‘Drum’, ‘Sun’ or ‘Bygone’. Also useful are words such as ‘Guerrillas’, ‘Timeless’, ‘Primordial’ and ‘Tribal’. Note that ‘People’ means Africans who are not black, while ‘The People’ means black Africans.

Never have a picture of a well-adjusted African on the cover of your book, or in it, unless that African has won the Nobel Prize. An AK-47, prominent ribs, naked breasts: use these. If you must include an African, make sure you get one in Masai or Zulu or Dogon dress.

In your text, treat Africa as if it were one country. It is hot and dusty with rolling grasslands and huge herds of animals and tall, thin people who are starving. Or it is hot and steamy with very short people who eat primates. Don’t get bogged down with precise descriptions. Africa is big: fifty-four countries, 900 million people who are too busy starving and dying and warring and emigrating to read your book. The continent is full of deserts, jungles, highlands, savannahs and many other things, but your reader doesn’t care about all that, so keep your descriptions romantic and evocative and unparticular.

Make sure you show how Africans have music and rhythm deep in their souls, and eat things no other humans eat. Do not mention rice and beef and wheat; monkey-brain is an African’s cuisine of choice, along with goat, snake, worms and grubs and all manner of game meat. Make sure you show that you are able to eat such food without flinching, and describe how you learn to enjoy it—because you care.

Taboo subjects: ordinary domestic scenes, love between Africans (unless a death is involved), references to African writers or intellectuals, mention of school-going children who are not suffering from yaws or Ebola fever or female genital mutilation.

Throughout the book, adopt a sotto voice, in conspiracy with the reader, and a sad I-expected-so-much tone. Establish early on that your liberalism is impeccable, and mention near the beginning how much you love Africa, how you fell in love with the place and can’t live without her. Africa is the only continent you can love—take advantage of this. If you are a man, thrust yourself into her warm virgin forests. If you are a woman, treat Africa as a man who wears a bush jacket and disappears off into the sunset. Africa is to be pitied, worshipped or dominated. Whichever angle you take, be sure to leave the strong impression that without your intervention and your important book, Africa is doomed.

Your African characters may include naked warriors, loyal servants, diviners and seers, ancient wise men living in hermitic splendour. Or corrupt politicians, inept polygamous travel-guides, and prostitutes you have slept with. The Loyal Servant always behaves like a seven-year-old and needs a firm hand; he is scared of snakes, good with children, and always involving you in his complex domestic dramas. The Ancient Wise Man always comes from a noble tribe (not the money-grubbing tribes like the Gikuyu, the Igbo or the Shona). He has rheumy eyes and is close to the Earth. The Modern African is a fat man who steals and works in the visa office, refusing to give work permits to qualified Westerners who really care about Africa. He is an enemy of development, always using his government job to make it difficult for pragmatic and good-hearted expats to set up NGOs or Legal Conservation Areas. Or he is an Oxford-educated intellectual turned serial-killing politician in a Savile Row suit. He is a cannibal who likes Cristal champagne, and his mother is a rich witch-doctor who really runs the country.

Among your characters you must always include The Starving African, who wanders the refugee camp nearly naked, and waits for the benevolence of the West. Her children have flies on their eyelids and pot bellies, and her breasts are flat and empty. She must look utterly helpless. She can have no past, no history; such diversions ruin the dramatic moment. Moans are good. She must never say anything about herself in the dialogue except to speak of her (unspeakable) suffering. Also be sure to include a warm and motherly woman who has a rolling laugh and who is concerned for your well-being. Just call her Mama. Her children are all delinquent. These characters should buzz around your main hero, making him look good. Your hero can teach them, bathe them, feed them; he carries lots of babies and has seen Death. Your hero is you (if reportage), or a beautiful, tragic international celebrity/aristocrat who now cares for animals (if fiction).

Bad Western characters may include children of Tory cabinet ministers, Afrikaners, employees of the World Bank. When talking about exploitation by foreigners mention the Chinese and Indian traders. Blame the West for Africa’s situation. But do not be too specific.

Broad brushstrokes throughout are good. Avoid having the African characters laugh, or struggle to educate their kids, or just make do in mundane circumstances. Have them illuminate something about Europe or America in Africa. African characters should be colourful, exotic, larger than life—but empty inside, with no dialogue, no conflicts or resolutions in their stories, no depth or quirks to confuse the cause.

Describe, in detail, naked breasts (young, old, conservative, recently raped, big, small) or mutilated genitals, or enhanced genitals. Or any kind of genitals. And dead bodies. Or, better, naked dead bodies. And especially rotting naked dead bodies. Remember, any work you submit in which people look filthy and miserable will be referred to as the ‘real Africa’, and you want that on your dust jacket. Do not feel queasy about this: you are trying to help them to get aid from the West. The biggest taboo in writing about Africa is to describe or show dead or suffering white people.

Animals, on the other hand, must be treated as well rounded, complex characters. They speak (or grunt while tossing their manes proudly) and have names, ambitions and desires. They also have family values: see how lions teach their children? Elephants are caring, and are good feminists or dignified patriarchs. So are gorillas. Never, ever say anything negative about an elephant or a gorilla. Elephants may attack people’s property, destroy their crops, and even kill them. Always take the side of the elephant. Big cats have public-school accents. Hyenas are fair game and have vaguely Middle Eastern accents. Any short Africans who live in the jungle or desert may be portrayed with good humour (unless they are in conflict with an elephant or chimpanzee or gorilla, in which case they are pure evil).

After celebrity activists and aid workers, conservationists are Africa’s most important people. Do not offend them. You need them to invite you to their 30,000-acre game ranch or ‘conservation area’, and this is the only way you will get to interview the celebrity activist. Often a book cover with a heroic-looking conservationist on it works magic for sales. Anybody white, tanned and wearing khaki who once had a pet antelope or a farm is a conservationist, one who is preserving Africa’s rich heritage. When interviewing him or her, do not ask how much funding they have; do not ask how much money they make off their game. Never ask how much they pay their employees.

Readers will be put off if you don’t mention the light in Africa. And sunsets, the African sunset is a must. It is always big and red. There is always a big sky. Wide empty spaces and game are critical—Africa is the Land of Wide Empty Spaces. When writing about the plight of flora and fauna, make sure you mention that Africa is overpopulated. When your main character is in a desert or jungle living with indigenous peoples (anybody short) it is okay to mention that Africa has been severely depopulated by Aids and War (use caps).

You’ll also need a nightclub called Tropicana, where mercenaries, evil nouveau riche Africans and prostitutes and guerrillas and expats hang out.

Always end your book with Nelson Mandela saying something about rainbows or renaissances. Because you care.

Twitter timesuck, Agent-cycle, Gilead and Writing that pays

I made a decision today to close my Twitter and HooteSuite tabs (I use both, because I use both 300% magnification for an eye disability so I skim HootSuite to look at writing-related tweets and then read everything else on Twitter.) I have found it basically impossible NOT to check it 10x a day. I haven’t listed anything on Ebay for more than a week, which is my usual downtime activity. But now that I have a May 1 deadline for some Bible curriculum lessons—writing that I actually get paid for, I need to strap in. I’m going to check the feeds just twice a day.

So far, I’ve sent out five agent queries and gotten three rejections. I’ve also just heard from the Dana Awards that my manuscript didn’t make even the honorable mentions. So the honeymoon is over. Not everyone sees how exquisite Shea is. I’m back to “if you’re going to be a writer you have to be able to take rejection and x received 60 thousand rejections before it was finally published blah blah blah” mode. I am being a bit more careful about my querying though. Even though I have a template, I’m not sending out the query e-mails on the same day I write them. I’m let them sit and tweaking at them until I feel good about them.

The first draft of my query today—meaning first draft of my final paragraph, “Why I am sending this query to you, Ms. Agent”—was about our shared enthusiasm for Marilynne Robinson’s 2005 novel Gilead. That novel made me feel really hopeful when I read it (or listened to it, since I can’t read normal size fonts anymore.) It made me realize there is a place, post-Tolstoy, for novels about people of faith. Great novels. It’s sad really, that the term “Christian fiction” immediately brings to mind a genre that is formulaic and trite, when faith should be deep, and awesome and profound. Which, of course, Gilead is.

With this agent, I’ve shared a little more personal information than I usually do—like that I’ve not used the link to the Kirkus Review of Because the Angels with some other agents because it has “an interesting approach to Christianity” in the title. I’ll let the letter sit a couple days and see whether I think it’s still a good idea. Wouldn’t someone who loves Gilead be interested in that? But does she get fifty queries a day from people claiming a Gilead kinship? Aaargh!

The downside of the shared enthusiasm is that you become more emotionally invested. Even though I never met this woman, it means more when someone who loves a book you’ve loved rejects you.

But of course, I have a lot to occupy my time. Six weeks until my sabbatical is over, and I have these thirteen lessons about Jesus’ use of the Hebrew Bible to get done, as well as a bunch of boxes in the hall that I said I was going to go through and get out of the hall before my sabbatical was over.

First blogging, Islamic Charitable society

Well folks, now I have both a cellphone and a blog. No wonder people here think I’m younger than 46.

To those of you who are checking in because of my Markie letters, I won’t promise I’m going to keep as up to date on this blog as I do on Markie. Right now we’re a team of 5 and it really isn’t quite enough to accomplish the work we need to accomplish–so I find I’m falling behind on my CPTnet postings, necessary e-mails and other writing.

The two big foci of the work now are organizing and participating in orphanage overnights and visiting people in Wadi Nasara who are getting stoned almost daily by settlers from Kiryat Arba. I’m posting two releases below that haven’t appeared on CPTnet that explain the situation of both.

The United Nations has cited a report we wrote re: the orphanage situation on page 15 of it’s new report to the General Assembly on the Human Rights situation in Palestine:http://unispal.un.org/unispal.nsf/eed216406b50bf6485256ce10072f637/44911f7d52e1cba38525746b00490a94!OpenDocument

Jean Fallon will be leaving us next week and we’ll be only 4. She’s a Maryknoll sister who served 50 years in Japan. As it happens, the only International Solidarity Movement person in Hebron right now is a Japanese guy named Naoki (but everyone at Wadi Nasara calls him “Nokia.”) His English is very limited, so it’s actually been kind of sweet that the two of them can converse in Japanese–he just visibly relaxes when they’re together. I guess that’s one of the nice things about the work here. I mean, in Japan, Naoki, who looks like he’s in his twenties, would probably never strike up a friendship with an American nun in her seventies, but there you go. I have gotten into long theological and biblical discussions with a 22 year old Dutch Mennonite intern here, Marius, which probably would not have happened, otherwise. I mean, there’s only so many people in the world that enjoy that sort of thing and what are the chances I would meet a Dutch guy who enjoys it anywhere else in the world. I’m also enjoying my time with Kathie Uhler (yes it gets confusing) and Jean. We’re all Mennonites and nuns here now.

So, here are the relevant articles. I’m happy to be sleeping in my own bed tonight instead of the orphanage. Fewer mosquitos.

Why we are protecting orphanages run by an Islamic Charity

Before I left for a CPT assignment in Hebron, a relative asked what I would be doing there. I told him I would probably be spending a lot of time at orphanages the Israeli military was trying to close down. “Why are they trying to close them down?” he asked. “Because they are run by Islamic Charities,” I said. “Oh,” he said, nodding, as though the word “Islamic” were a sound reason to deprive several hundred children of a home.

That reaction, however, did not surprise me, given the way that “Islamic” has become synonymous with “terrorist” in western and Israeli culture. And the Israeli military has used this prejudice to justify closing orphanages, schools and other institutions run by the Islamic Charitable Society (ISC) in Hebron, citing a connection between the institution and Hamas.

Yes, most of the Palestinians in Hebron are conservative Muslims—including the 550 employees of the Islamic Charitable Society, and most conservative Muslims support the Palestinian political party of Hamas, just as most conservative Christians in the United States support the Republican Party. That about sums up the connection between ISC and Hamas. A recent U.N. report notes that the Israeli military itself has not found any evidence of illegal activity happening in the ISC institutions.

As I looked for analogies that would explain the situation with Islamic Charities, I thought of the Salvation Army. I remember how much I loved hearing the sound my coins made at Christmas time when I put them in the red metal pot, and the smile the old man in the Salvation Army uniform gave me as he rang his bell beside the pot.

My husband, however, associates the Salvation Army with Oliver North, whom it invited to speak at fundraising events. As someone who cared passionately about the human rights abuses the governments of Central America were committing against their citizens during the 1980s, he thought it was appalling that a Christian organization would provide North a platform, given that his work with U.S. intelligence agencies supported criminals responsible the deaths of thousands of Central Americans.

No one suggested shutting down the Salvation Army’s ministries because of their connection to a man who lied before congress about selling weapons to Iran to fund the Nicaraguan Contras. No one in the United States would suggest shutting down charitable institutions for the needy run by conservative Republican Christians simply because a conservative Republican administration initiated the catastrophic violence in Afghanistan and Iraq.

So our Christian Peacemaker Team in Hebron will continue to sleep in the orphanages and schools run by ISC during this critical period, when most of the children are at home with extended families and the Israeli military might be more likely to wreck them, as it has already wrecked ISC bakeries, warehouses, and workshops. Because they are facilities built for needy children, and all three Abrahamic faiths count the care of children, especially orphans, as a hallmark of basic human morality.

Families in Wadi Nasara under attack from two sides

The families of Wadi Nasara–a valley on the outskirts of Hebron next to which the Kiryat Arba settlement has expanded–have had to put up with increasing amounts of settler harassment over the years. But in March 2007, when Israeli settlers occupied a Palestinian building across the road bordering Wadi Nasera, families in the valley, most belonging to the al-Ja’abari clan, began facing attacks from two sides.

The homes of three al-Ja’abari families lie literally within a stone’s throw of Kiryat Arba. The eighty people (including fifty children) living there face almost daily harassment from neighboring settlers. On 6-7 June 2008, settler youth entered the families’ property and smashed large rocks against the Ja’aberis’ rooftops, seriously damaging ceilings in two homes, and a solar water-heating panel on another. When CPTers David Martin and Kathleen Kern visited the area the following week, M* al-Ja’aberi told them, “They have thrown stones at us for years. They even attacked Israeli peacemakers who visited our homes. But when they set our home on fire a year ago, we knew we needed to seek the help of international peacemakers in the area.” CPT has since begun daily patrols in the area, along with two other international groups working in Hebron.

On 13 June 2008, a group of eight to ten settlers from the “Occupied House,” as local Palestinians refer to it, crossed the road and entered the home of a multi-family dwelling. They shouted threats and attempted to attack people in the home; however Al-Ja’aberi family members managed to push them out. Settlers also regularly throw trash in the families’ yards and “target” the homes with red laser sightings. When asked whether they called the police during altercations, H.* Al-Ja’aberi, the father of one of the families, told Martin, Kern, and Marius Van Hoogstraten, that the police and army always help the settlers when called during such attacks.

“If I am in the yard, settlers will walk by without looking, but if only children are out, they will attack them,” he told the CPTers.

“The kids grow up thinking everyone is equal,” al-Ja’abari continued. “My son doesn’t know there’s an occupation. If he is hit by a settler, he thinks it’s okay to hit back.” Children learn however, that when Palestinians respond in kind to settler assaults, the Israeli authorities will arrest them and not the Israelis.

On top of the additional violence and harassment that the Occupied House has brought to the people of Wadi Nasara, the Israeli military apparatus protecting settlers living in the house has caused significant hardship. A checkpoint now forces H. al-Ja’abari’s family to walk 600 meters down a treacherous, winding path to gain access to a car (The main paved road in the area runs right by the family’s house, but the Israeli army permits only settlers to use it.) He was forced to take this path after undergoing abdominal surgery; the Israeli military would not allow the ambulance to take him home. “Even if I were dying, I would have to walk,” al-Ja’abari said.

*Names have been changed to protect individuals

Passionate Christian Characters, sex, the F-word and Maundy Thursday

I spent this week reading through my novel manuscript carefully, since I had added a big chunk of manuscript—a diary of a teenage character I wrote about in a previous posting— and wanted to make sure that the rest of the novel was in sync with it. Often, when I am at this state this stage of the editing process I enter a state of what I call “Tweaking madness.” I see clunky sentences or awkward paragraphs and I think “How could I have written this? This is so awful! How could I have ever thought this novel was any good?” And usually that’s the time to put it aside until I can look at it with fresh eyes. Because the clunky parts are usually very isolated, and most readers simply breeze past them.

This time, I did catch some awkward phrasing and did some revision, but overall didn’t escalate into “Tweaking Madness.” What I did find as I read through Ralph’s diary, interspersed with the letters and other writings of Shea, my Hosea figure, was a growing sense of unease regarding how Christian the novel was.

I’ve been spending a lot of time learning how to use social media effectively to promote my writing–definitely not there yet–but part of it involves following on Twitter, Facebook, etc. the work of writers and artists whose work you admire. And most of these are secular, for me. Chaim Potok is dead and Marilynne Robinson doesn’t have a Twitter account. I was wondering if Joss Whedon or Margaret Atwood (or more likely fellow Whedon and Atwood enthusiasts) ever stumbled onto Ralph and Shea’s letters, whether they would just zone out immediately, because of their overtly Christian perspective on the world–even if Ralph and Shea were using that perspective to bring down a fascist regime ruling the the United States.

And then there’s the converse problem, Shea is not really “Christian fiction” in the way that the contemporary publishing world defines Christian fiction.It is written from the viewpoint of a philandering husband, and while the sex is not graphically described, it is plentiful and the F-word appears throughout the novel (It’s really odd, my characters can say the F-word, but writing as myself, I say “F-word instead “F—“)

Here is the climactic scene, in which Islam Goldberg-Jones is on trial for providing weapons to the guerrillas trying to bring down the Christian Republic (but the real object of the trial is to defame his wife, Shea.) It’s kind of appropriate actually, for Easter weekend:

“Tell me Mr. Islam Goldberg-Jones. Are you Muslim or Jewish?” the prosecutor began.

“My mother was brought up in a conservative Jewish family, but both of my parents considered themselves atheists. They taught me that God did not exist.”

I heard gasps from the courtroom. They had vetted the audience.

“And did Hoshea Weber know you were an atheist when she married you?”

“Yes.”

“And did she try to convert you?”

I paused and then said, “Not in the way that you mean.”

The military judge said, “Answer his question, Mr. Jones.”

“Goldberg-Jones,” I corrected him.

The bailiff punched the left side of my head, and I heard a consistent high hum in that ear for the rest of the proceedings.

The lawyer rephrased his question. “Did she try to convince you that God exists and that Jesus was the Son of God? Do you believe that Jesus was born of the Virgin Mary, suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, died and buried, rose again and will come to judge the living and the dead?

Shea ascribed what happened next to the Holy Spirit. I will say only this—a quick succession of holos appeared before me, superimposing themselves over the audience in courtroom: Ralph saying—earnest brown eyes wide at having met his first atheist—“But it’s like love, Uncle Iz, you can’t see or hear or touch love, but love still exists”; Ralph clinging to me and sobbing at the border of Akwesasne before he turned back with Hank because Gladys and Edna needed him; Shea smiling at me as we walked and talked in Rock Creek Park and when we lay naked under the ancient Weber family quilt; Leah leaning against the fence at the farm on Thanksgiving day thirteen years ago. Al calling me “son.” My own parents reading Dr. Seuss to me. L’Merci running across the yard at Al and Deborah’s house with Gladys and Edna. All the Webers and I laughing ourselves sick over an only moderately amusing story, because we loved each other. Bernie calling my name, “Ih-ihz.”

“I don’t know whether God is real,” I said. “But I can tell you right now that he’s a hell of a lot more real than you guys and your god are to me. It’s the god you speak of that presides over your tortures and murders and atrocities that doesn’t exist. As for Jesus rising from the dead, today, and today only, I choose to believe in the resurrection because that was Jesus saying ‘Fuck you’ to the Empire who crucified him. And yeah today I believe he will come again to judge us and you all should be really, really afraid.”

I saw the bailiff descending on me with his baton and then everything went black.

So you see my dilemma.

Anyway, I went to the Maundy Thursday service at my church last night and in thinking about Jesus’ sacrifice, it kind of hit me that it’s really not much of a sacrifice for me to be true to who my characters are. They are entitled to be devout Christians, and if a secular public has a problem with that, well, may I not be ashamed of the Gospel of Christ. And if a religious public has a problem with Iz, well, he probably agrees with their assessment of his character. And if their problem with him is that he uses the F-word, that really is their problem, not Iz’s.

When I got home, I found a letter from the Posen Foundation saying I was not among the five finalists in their fiction prize, but that they thought my writing sample had been impressive and they encouraged me to submit again next year. Not sure if that was something they said to everyone, but it sounded like more than boilerplate. The timing after the Maundy Thursday service seemed apropos, since the Foundation is designed to promote secular Jewish culture. I actually knew that Shea would be a longshot for the fellowship, but reasoned that since Iz is a very secular Jewish character, and Hosea was a Jewish prophet, and secular Judaism does have some connection to the Jewish prophetic tradition, it was worth the application. But I also knew that since I applied for the Posen Fellowship, the novel had gotten progressively more Christian. I had kind of thought I might be able to up the Jewish content, if I got the Fellowship, but that just wasn’t happening, so there was a small measure of relief, too. Kind of like dating someone you know you’re ill-suited for, and then being glad that s/he later finds a good match.

Diary of Ralph

I’ve finished Ralph’s diary and have interspersed his entries between the heavier prophetic writings of my character Shea, the Hosea figure in my novel.

I think Ralph’s diary entries serve a dual purpose. They’ll help break up those denser sections and they’ll give another view of my narrator, Iz, and possibly make him less “static” as the agent said.

Ralph can ask the questions, how is it that Uncle Iz, a man I like and look up to, whose company I much prefer to that of my father’s, could cheat on my Aunt Shea? How is it that Juanita and Hank, two people who share my faith, can care about my Uncle Iz, knowing what he did to my Aunt Shea? Maybe in the answering of those questions, some readers will have the patience to stick with Iz until his later transformations.

Or not. But I think maybe I can’t just change Iz to to please the ideologies of people I like or want to impress.

Now there’s the question, can I write authentically in the voice of a gay biracial Mennonite teenage boy?

I really want to send this section to my readers, but I know I need to let it sit for a couple days before I do that. I’ll use the time to revise my timeline.

On my way home and a little novel augmentation

I am sitting at JFK airport–Mad Props to Jet Blue for providing free Wi-fi and ample electrical outlets–in a four hour layover. Took the red-eye from Burbank. My body thinks I landed at 2:30 in the morning and my husband really thinks I need to attend this with him after I land in Rochester at 10:30 a.m.:

Meet the Authors:

Sharon Morgan and Thomas DeWolf

(gatheratthetable.net)

GATHER AT THE TABLE: THE HEALING JOURNEY OF A DAUGHTER OF SLAVERY AND A SON OF THE SLAVE TRADE

Thursday, March 14

12:12 to 1:00pm

Central Library at the Rundel Auditorium

115 South Ave. Rochester, NY

Free of Charge

Normally I would say, “You know, that DOES sound interesting,” but I’m going to be in an altered state for the rest of the day.

Even though the memoir writing trip was abortive, writing-wise, the trip wasn’t a complete write off. I did a big promotional giveaway of my novel Because the Angels and it was at the top of the free downloads in the political novel genre and did surprisingly well in the literary novel downloads as well (although I’m not sure other literary novelists would think it belonged there.) I also got to spend an afternoon with my CPT colleague and friend Tim Nafziger, who gave me the idea to incorporate journal entries of one of my characters, Ralph, into Shea, my current novel. As I started spinning this out in my head, I realized Ralph, who is writing during the years he is 14-16, is gay. That’s one of the things that gives me the deepest satisfaction when I write–when characters seem to tell me who they are instead of me telling them who they are. So thanks, Tim. And thank you for being chief among my encouragers over the years, letting me know that my fiction was something more than a promoter of my mental health.

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