SermonsChristian Peacemaker Teams

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.
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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.
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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

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 sacrificedleonard_bw 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:
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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?

Feedback

I have a circle of readers I send the “first” draft of my manuscripts new, meaning a draft I’m not embarrassed to have other people see.  One of the people whose opinion I value most is a fellow writer who has very different tastes in literature.  He hates Jane Austen and loves William Faulkner.  I am the opposite, and so we write different sorts of fiction and in a way, that makes him a bit more objective, I think.   He has been more successful than I in the past.  He has an agent,  although he’s had a rather long drought in sales, so I definitely value his opinion on what’s “sellable.”

Which is why I came away from our standard, “I’ll feed you lunch and you give me a critique” encounter depressed  yesterday.  He had liked my first 100 pages, although he said they were hard to read, because of some personal shared life experiences I won’t go into here, and because, like me, it’s not hard for him to imagine the U.S. sliding into religious fascism.  Yesterday, he told me he had to really forced himself to read the the rest of the book, for some of the same reasons mentioned above, and thought it had real problems with pacing, that there was too much exposition, that I had too many climatic points, that in general, the novel had problems that would require a pretty big rewrite.

I’ve been edited a lot, so I don’t generally have a knee-jerk negative response to suggestions I rewrite.  But others who have read the manuscript said they found it hard to put down.  On the other hand, they were fellow members of my organization, Christian Peacemaker Teams, who sort of share my worldview, while my friend is a professional writer, who was giving me a professional assessment from the outside.  On the other hand, he was picking it up and putting it down over the course of a month and is in general too impatient to read Jane Austen.  If a movie doesn’t interest him within the first five minutes, he will walk out.  Some of the places he marked as too much exposition were only two paragraphs long and they covered a period of months.

He liked my second novel, and I realized something today: that novel and all of his novels take place in one location, over a period of a few months, with a few characters.  Shea, my third novel, takes place over a period of thirty years, moves from the U.S., to Canada, to Chiapas, MX, to Scotland and England, and also ties in how global events are impacting the struggle to bring down the fascist Christian Republic regime in the U.S.  Am I being too ambitious? My book is the fictional prison memoir of a political dissident who describes how he, his wife, Shea, and thousands of other ordinary people brought down the fascist regime of the Christian Republic in the United States.  All of the great struggles to bring down fascist and oppressive regimes in recent history have had an international component to them, and my work with Christian Peacemaker Teams basically brings that international component to ordinary people who are struggling nonviolently to resist systemic oppression, so my gut says “no.”

This morning, in my e-mail were two critiques from readers outside of Christian Peacemaker Teams who told me that they found the pacing to be brisk.  They are not writers, but they are readers.  I probably won’t feel completely easy, though, until I have a professional assessment from an editor or agent about how Shea needs to be revised.

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