the Evangelical Caste System

The "evangelical caste system" is what Jocelyn Andersen calls an ecclesiastical and household construct based on "old arguments traditionally used to keep men and women enslaved in illegitimate bondage based on sex." After conducting "extensive personal research into the Patriarchy movement" and after reading the Bible carefully for herself with respect to the Patriarchy, Andersen is coming out with a book entitled Woman this is WAR! Gender, Slavery, and the Evangelical Caste System.

The last time I heard anyone use the word caste to refer to any part of the Christian church was toward the end of last year.  This raised an eyebrow, I imagine, but was hardly the passionate, provocative declaration that Andersen is making, and that she has to make, because she's a woman, a woman with an all too common story this late in human history.

In November last year, blogger Peter Kirk called the historical teaching that has promoted "Church leadership by a special caste of pastors or priests" a "deeply de-Christian doctrine."  In other words, the notion and practice of a caste system is not to be seen as Christian at all.  Kirk, an Anglican, doesn't look at the systematic construct of an ecclesiastical caste in relation to gender so much, and he casts blame for such a doctrine on the Christian appropriation of "the values of the world." Nonetheless, he sees as another "deeply de-Christian doctrine" the idea that "Leadership is male"; that's a "concept," he says, "which also seems to have been imported into the church from the surrounding culture." One of Kirk's responders, Gary Simmons, commented to speculate that pragmatism and not the assimilation of culture values is the source: "I agree there should be no formal 'caste,' but as an American of Protestant background from the Bible Belt, I will tell you that having no clear authority structure (like a caste) has its drawbacks and frustrations."  They, and none of Kirk's other responders with him, further discussed male leadership as part of the caste and how that, as biblical teaching, might be outdated or de-christian or damaging to women, men, and children.  Perhaps other things were more interesting to them in the conversation because they are not women and are men.

In a recent related post at another blog, John Hobbins defends Christians in general and bashes what he calls "standard-issue feminists" in particular (as if there's a necessary divide between the two beyond his own thinking); the former but not the latter, he says, have reduced the global gendercide reported by the Economist.  Hobbins asserts that "Korean Christianity remains strongly complementarian [i.e. the male is the leader] in the pulpit and the home" to suggest that such teaching and practice "stands in contradiction to femicide" but that, in contrast, "democratic capitalists and feminists ... have failed" [in opposing male-over-female hierarchies] to so stand against gendercide.  Hobbins is "an ordained pastor in the Waldensian Church" and a prolific blogger.

In a responsive post today at yet another blog, Suzanne McCarthy points out that male bible-bloggers who are the most read, Hobbins included, create a very odd position for female bible-bloggers.  It's not just the strong assertions, like Hobbins's, that complementarianism (i.e. the caste-like teaching and practice) is actually helping women in the church around the world but it's also the censorship that a powerful male bible-blogger engages in (albeit at his own well-read blog) that limits women in the conversation about the very caste system that silences many.

However, perhaps Andersen's new book will get more of us talking and will allow women to talk with men and with one another.  The comparisons of a caste with some domains of evangelicalism (along the lines of gender and slavery) should have more of us considering whether and how we rank.

naming Africana griosh

Here's an excerpt from "THE STORY IN THE NAME," the very first section of the very first chapter ("The AFRICANA BIBLE: A RATIONALE") in The Africana Bible: Reading Israel's Scriptures from Africa and the African Diaspora.  The quotation below begins with the second paragraph.  This opener to the book is written by Hugh R. Page, Jr., Hebraist and Africanist.  (HT David Ker, linguist and translator in Africa)

----->>

     In some ways, the title The Africana Bible seems an odd designation for a work that seeks, in its conversation with the Bible, to bring to bear intellectual riches of the peoples and cultures of Africa and the African diaspora.  Why the Latin terminology (that is, Africana) instead of a name derived from Akan, Kiswahili, or some other African language?  Why not a simpler, perhaps catchier title?  Would not a straightforward designation such as The African and African American Commentary on the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament be preferable?  In some circles, an appeal to nomenclature is made to resolve, once and for all, the fraught issues of classification and ownership.  In others, it is one stage, albeit an important one, in an analytical process....
      However, naming can also indicate problems that exist in defining genres, roles, and relationships.  It can call attention to the inchoate nature of realities that appear to be fixed.  It can raise questions about artifacts, cultures, or ideas.  It can allude to processes intended to promote reflection or foster contemplation.  Such is the case with the title The Africana Bible.  It suggests a mode of discourse that does not easily fit into the genre of commentary, insofar as that classification is popularly construed....
      [I]t is equally fitting to apply Barbara Holmes's designation griosh to the present volume.  Holmes's reflections on this term are instructive:

I have coined a different word to refer to hermeneutical skills that are particular to black bible interpretation.  The word is griosh, which is derived from the word griot, referring to African storytellers, who were also historians and keepers of cultural memory.  The sound sh is a symbolic marker of the hush arbors where Christian diasporan faith perspectives were honed.  (Holmes 2004:120)

      I see The Africana Bible as a work produced by those who function as poets and "storytellers" in academic, church, and other settings.  One of its main functions is to empower readers to ask questions and to consider further the meaning and implications of the First Testament and cognate writings for communities that revere them, that have been shaped by them, and that -- in some instances -- have be destablized by interpretations of them....  [T]his should encourage readers to trouble terms like Africana (that is, pertaining to things African and African Diasporan), Bible, commentary, and community.  It should promote consideration of important questions such as these:  Once texts are generated, are they no longer "owned" by their authors?  How do texts and their potential meanings change once they are gathered into an anthology like the Hebrew Bible?  Is there truly an overarching Africana culture?  Can we speak any longer of the existence of a (that is, a single) Bible acknowledged as authoritative in the Africana world?  What are the distinguishing markers of a community -- Africana or other?  To what extent is identity, within a community or on and individual basis, an absolute and noncontingent construction? 
    

Encomium of Mary Daly

 [update: *below in a post script]

In black history month of all times, why praise Mary Daly of all people? Yes, we all know she died a month ago today. But why not remember somebody like Audre Lorde, whom white Mary so infamously would not acknowledge? Why don't we remember people? And how do we recollect them? As if from the grave they can have power over us still alive; will their ghosts overpower me?

*I want to say that I was very surprised reading early January blogs (but not posting then myself) to see how many "feminists" were slow to speak of or were silent at the death of Daly. Were you surprised at how few "bible" bloggers mentioned Daly at all? And when any, anybody, re-member-ed Mary Daly, wasn't it strange -- almost chorus-like -- that refrain that "she pissed me off" or at least "she surely went too far"?

For me, if there's anything Mary Daly teaches us to recall it's that we can, do, and must listen rhetorically. Actually it was Audre Lorde's listening to Mary Daly that started that. Or was it Krista Ratcliffe's listening to Aristotle -- the way afrafeminist poet Maya Angelou listens to him -- overhearing him talking but not allowing many of us to listen? Or was Ratcliffe's listening in on Lorde, and Daly, in dialog, almost, again? Listen:

...eavesdropping may be employed effectively not only as a rhetorical tactic but also as an ethical choice, or a tactical ethic.
     To define eavesdropping for rhetoric and composition studies, I invoke one aspect of Mary Daly's method of "gynocentric writing"--that is, uncovering gender potentialities in words by studying their dictionary definitions, reworking them, and excavating their etymologies (24). The goal of Daly's method is to expose gendered dismissals of words and mine their "obsolete meanings" (24). For eavesdrop, a common dictionary definition is "to listen secretly to the private conversations of others" (Webster's New World). At first glance, this definition connotes a gendered dismissal of the term, a dismissal accomplished by associating eavesdropping with a feminine busybodiness--remember, for example, Gladys Kravitz, the nosy neighbor on the television series Bewitched? But at second hearing, this definition resonates with Daly-esque possibilities. I found Old English etymologies of eaves suggesting "edge" and "margin" and "border" (Webster's New World; New Shorter OED): I found an archaic definition of eavesdropping suggesting "to learn or overhear" (Webster's Third); I found a Middle English definition of eavesdropper suggesting "one who stands on the eavesdrop [the spot where water drops from the eaves] in order to listen to conversations inside the house" (Random House).
     Together, these lexical threads weave a composite of eavesdropping that signifies an effective rhetorical tactic. Its moves include: choosing to stand outside . . . in an uncomfortable spot . . . on the border of knowing and not knowing . . . granting others the inside position . . . listening to learn. From such a composite, eavesdropping emerges not as a gendered busybodiness but as a rhetorical tactic of purposely positioning oneself on the edge of one's own knowing so as to overhear and learn from others and, I would add, from oneself. (pages 104-05 of Rhetorical Listening: Identification, Gender, Whiteness).

You and I -- "red and yellow black and white" -- remember this month, remember black history, the black histories and herstories, how Audre Lorde listens and speaks and remembers Mary Daly (with Krista Ratcliffe eavesdropping, and us with her).  What tactic, what ethic, what rhetoric must we choose?
----

*  post script

I wrote this post quickly, yesterday.  And today I suppose some of you just may want an explanation for how the postmortem passé praise for Mary Daly sounded, to me anyways, somewhat like the encomia of Helen by men like Isocrates and Gorgias.  Someday we may want to listen to the rhetorics, the feminisms, of Helen and Gorgias.  But Bettany Hughes, historian, gets us thinking, presently, the following:

When, in Ancient Greece, the rhetorician Gorgias stood up and delivered his 'Encomium of Helen' (a defence of Helen of Troy's indefensible character) - this was a great joke. How can you laud the most sluttish femme fatale of all time? But the rhetoric also got people thinking - maybe, just maybe the skilled speaker had a point.

And we all know that Hughes has much to say about Helen.

I first learned of Daly's death from a Facebook status post.  It was a quick post by the non-black, non-woman, non-homosexual, non-theologian, fellow feminist, astute academic, bible believing Hugo Schwyzer.  One of his status posts on January 3rd was this one:

getting word that iconic feminist theologian Mary Daly died today. She made me uncomfortable every time I read her work, and that's high praise -- she was extraordinarily adept at provoking productive, transformative discomfort.

At his blog, Schwyzer didn't say much more about Daly except when posting more than a week later his thoughts entitled, Neither male nor female: Jesus as man, Jesus as role model.  Here's the bit:

I’m not a theologian. I’ve read theology, talked about theology, studied theology (medieval Franciscan scholasticism was a doctoral field of mine at UCLA), but I’m not a theologian. Others have wrestled with these questions for centuries, and feminist theologians in particular (one notes at this point the passing eight days ago of the important, if controversial, Mary Daly) have offered critical analyses of our reflexive habit of referring to God as male.

Jesus, however, certainly was physiologically male. In his human aspect, he was a man (the early church fathers struggled against those who could not bring themselves to acknowledge that Jesus pooped and peed). And from my standpoint, the maleness of Jesus Christ matters because in his life and ministry and relationships, Jesus himself embodies a full and complete manhood....

Given that Daly, probably infamously, wrote The Church and the Second Sex and Beyond God the Father, it's no surprise that Schwyzer writes of her in this context.

The best posts on Daly listened to her speaking for herself, or as herself, in the contexts of her church or her college and her life.  Some of these are blog posts by Melissa McEwan, Suzanne McCarthy, Courtney Martin, Michael Carden, "the Feminist Texican," and Amelia Thomson-DeVeaux.
 
Besides Suzanne and Michael, the only other "biblio"-blogger on the Top 50 Biblioblogger list to mention Daly's death at all is Celucien Joseph, who posted the well-written NYT obit.  Mostly silence.  Huh?

Other feminist bloggers and blogger friends, it seems, recalled Daly in the context of her "sinning," her "racism," her "transphobia."  Do a google blog search if you need to remember. 

Or listen for yourself, eavesdrop rhetorically.

Euripides & St. Peter: Feminist & Weaker Sexist?

In this post, I want to get us examining (re-examining perhaps) a word that Euripides and then St. Peter used in reference to women. First, however, I would like to look at what readers of Euripides have said about him and his "feminism." And then could we conjecture about Peter's view of women?  Finally, shall we compare how the two men use the one word?

Euripides is the Greek playwright. And the Peter I'm interested in is the Jewish disciple of Jesus writing in Greek nearly five hundred years later -- the one who's called Saint Peter.

Of Euripides, much has been written with respect to his views on women.  For example, historian F. A. Wright, in his Feminism in Greek Literature from Homer to Aristotle, says this:

“Euripides and Plato are almost the only [male] authors who show any true appreciation of a woman's real qualities, and to Euripides and Plato, Aristotle, by the whole trend of his [sexist, bigoted] prejudices, was opposed.”

Likewise, English professor Louis Markos, in his From Achilles to Christ: Why Christians Should Read the Pagan Classics, says this:

“The 'sentimental' Euripides is a self-conscious artist who cannot ignore his own age to sweep his reader off to a mythic neverland.  He was keenly aware of the injustices of his day--the brutalities of war, the subjugation of women, the ill treatment of foreigners and illegitimate children--and he projected these contemporary issues and struggles back into the legendary settings of his tragedies, rather as Arthur Miller's The Crucible projects the dangers of McCarthyism back into the 'legendary' days of Puritan New England.  That the plays of Euripides make their points without sinking into polemic or allegory is a tribute to the complex and subtle artistry of their maker.  They are a tribute as well to his insight into human nature and his gift for giving dramatic voice to the mental anguish and internal rage of the dispossessed.”

In addition, Anne Carson, a Greek classicist and translator of several of Euripides's works, says this of the nature of the playwright:

“He was also concerned with people as people--with what it's like to be a human being in a family, in a fantasy, in a longing, in a mistake.”

And Ann Nyland, a Greek classicist and translator of the New Testament, finds the Greek words of Euripides to be helpful in understanding the words of the writers of the gospels, Acts, the epistles, and Revelation -- especially as the words that figure in the often-ignored “case of gender (mis)translation and anything pertaining to women” in much Bible translation.

Now, has anyone said about St. Peter that he showed “true appreciation of a woman's real qualities” and that he “was keenly aware of the injustices of his day--the brutalities of war, the subjugation of women, the ill treatment of foreigners and illegitimate children”?

Well, maybe.

Suzanne McCarthy posted recently that Peter Leithart is suggesting what she calls “an unusual interpretation” of I Peter 3:7 in Leithart's blog post.  The interpretation is that St. Peter is perhaps less sexist than his fellows and his predecessors.  In fact, St Peter may even favor women -- promoting them from a more sexist Judaism to a more feminist Christianity.

The phrase so unusually interpreted is ὡς ἀσθενεστέρῳ σκεύει.  It can be transliterated hos asthenestero skeuei, and it has been often translated as “as weaker vessels.”  St. Peter's word that Leithart keys in on is σκεύει / skeuei /.  Leithart interprets it as “temple” vessels for the “New [Christian Church, not-old-Jewish Tabernacle] Covenant.”  Christian wives, as such “vessels,” are now by St. Peter included in the “service.”

From here, I'd like us to compare how the “feminist” Euripides used the word σκεύει / skeuei / with how the perhaps “weaker-sexist” St. Peter used it.

The main objection in comparing how the two men used the word is their contexts and their time.  Euripides writes during a life time of world war nearly 500 years before St. Peter writes during the days of a fairly stable empire.  So to overcome the objection, I want to look at an author who is a likely contemporary of Peter.  I want to show that Chariton, writing the first-century novel Callirhoe, uses the word in question the way Euripides did some centuries earlier.

Here's from the translation by G. P. Goold:

“That is why I [Callirhoe, the beautiful woman protagonist of the novel] have been handed over like a mere chattel [σκεῦος, / skeuos /] to I know not whom...”

Elsewhere in the novel written in the first century (when St. Peter wrote his letter), there is this:

“...next, a royal abundance of funeral offerings, first the gold and silver of the dowry, a beautiful array of garments [κάλλος καὶ κόσμος / kallos kai kosmos /] (for Hermocrates had contributed much from the spoils of the war), and the gifts of relatives and friends. Last of all followed the wealth of Chaereas...”

What I am trying to show is how the word σκεῦος, / skeuos / relates to women.  It has to do with material goods, which Goold translates “mere chattel.”  The second quote given is to show the war context and specific examples of the sorts of σκεῦος, / skeuos /, imagined by a novel's author and by his readers.

Now, we can turn to Euripides.  In the play, The Suppliant Women, we read the following conversation between two characters.  The English translation is by E. P. Coleridge (and we wish Carson had translated this play too); but watch for the Greek word of Euripides, which is reinserted within the brackets below:

Iphis -- Why do you deck yourself in that apparel?

[σκευῇ / skeue / δὲ τῇδε τοῦ χάριν κοσμεῖς / kosmeis / δέμας]    

[[UPDATE -- I just found Michael Wodhull's 1888 rendering, a more literal translation of this line above as:

"But on what account Thy person with that habit hast thou graced?"]]

Evadne -- This robe conveys a strange meaning, father.

Iphis -- You have no look of mourning for your lord.

Evadne -- No, the reason why I am decked in this way is new, perhaps.

Iphis -- Do you then appear before a funeral-pyre?

Evadne -- Yes, for here it is I come to take the prize of victory.

Iphis -- What victory do you mean? I want to learn this from you.

Evadne -- A victory over all women on whom the sun looks down.

Here, the characters of Euripides understand the word σκευῇ /skeue/ to refer to material goods, and in this case to “apparel.” [[or something like a worn “habit.”]]

In comparing Euripides's (and Chariton's) use of the word σκευῇ /skeue/ with St. Peter's use of it, we are left with questions:

Is St. Peter instructing married men to look at their wives as “weaker vessels” or perhaps as “fragile and feeble material goods”?

And if St. Peter is using the word in the same way other writers have used it, then does this make St. Peter more of a feminist or even some sort of “weaker” sexist?

Or, given the Bible as some "God-inspired" text that surely somehow favors men and women equally and always, should we just stop asking these sorts of questions?

The F Word (and the R word, the T word, the B word)

Feminism.  It's a word in the English dictionary.  It has a stable, objective meaning.  We'd all agree, for example, that it does not mean "cowboy" or "vivorum" or "复杂性" or "σκεῦος."  And yet, are you neutral in your understanding of "feminism"?  Doesn't the word (and your use of it in writing or in speaking or even in reading and in listening) immediately cause you to participate in its force, subjectively?  "No, I am not a feminist," you might protest.  And most of us would, likely, agree with you.  But then we all -- each one of us -- could get into an argument over who "is" a feminist and who is not a feminist.  Among self identifying feminists, this happens regularly, so that there are "waves" and there are kinds ("afrafeminism" and "womanism" and "academic" feminism and so forth) and there are memories of Mary Daly post mortem in which she's a "dangerous" or a "radical" or a "theological" or a "no longer representative of me and my sort of" feminist.  The safest definition of the word "feminist" I have found so far is "a supporter of feminism."  But what if a true "feminist" could care less about "feminism" per se?  Feminism cares about feminism?  You get the point of my personal questions, don't you?  There's an inclusivity in the questions whether you're finding yourself on the outside or the inside of this word "feminism."  These are rhetorical questions, aren't they?

Rhetoric.   You know what that word means, don't you?

Translation.  As with feminism and rhetoric, translation begs for experts.  You can get a Ph.D. in it.  And if you have less than that, well then, what other kind of training is necessary to talk about it, or to do it "right" and not wrong?

Bible.  If we all could agree that it really means βιβλία [biblía] "books," then there would be so much less disagreement, right? We might not have to define biblioblogger or learn to read Alexa ratings or to count down from 50 or to count women so delicately if we're not one or so vigorously even if we are one or to "draft criteria for inclusion in" or to pronounce "niche" correctly. It might not matter so much whether someone else includes me or you so much or not. Alas. words. I know what they mean but then they change, change you, change me.

Academic Writing

My spouse is an award-winning writer, a professional one. She read some of my dissertation, and laughed. That wasn't the effect I'd intended my writing to have on her. And it was my writing (not necessarily what I was writing about) that caused the involuntary smirk on her face. Mind you, she's not that sort of person who would think lesser of somebody else's effort. It's just she saw how much effort I put into the thing, with that effect.

Academic prose is hilarious that way. It pretends to be serious about serious things. It follows certain commandments. Thou shalt not meander. Thou shalt not have more than one main thesis. Thou shalt not forget the interesting introduction and the clear conclusion. Etc.

When you read Aristotle, you get a good model for straightforward academic prose. Only you do it then in English.

When you read somebody like Nancy Mairs, then you have to rethink everything. She's an academic (in rhetoric and composition) who teaches writing like one of those Greek sophists -- only she calls what she does "voice lessons," and she does it in English. Playfully serious wordplay, I guess. Here are a couple of my favorite quotations from Mairs's book, Voice Lessons:

Publication of any sort is an intrinsically social act, "I" having no reason to speak aloud unless I posit "you" there listening; but your presence is especially vital if I am seeking not to disclose the economic benefits of fish farming in Zäire, or to recount the imaginary tribulations of an adulterous doctor's wife in nineteenth-century France, but to reconnect myself—now so utterly transformed by events unlike any I've experienced before as to seem a stranger even to myself—to the human community....lending materiality to my readerly ideal, transform monologue into intercourse.

In a single sentence [the reviewer] reimposed the very dichotomies I had constructed the book in order to call into question, putting electrified fences around the categories “academy” “criticism,” and “writing” to keep the various critters from intermingling, maybe interbreeding to create some nameless monster very like the one I aspire to be.

And in case you're wondering, my wife doesn't write like either Aristotle or Mairs. She doesn't have to. She doesn't work or live in the AkaDemy in the West.

Paul's "Sarx" and Malik Nidal Hasan's "Pound of Flesh"

Soon I'd like to post on "Exactly What Paul Meant by Sarx." But Malik Nidal Hasan has caused a profound tragedy, and we need to assign blame or otherwise to make sense, so I'm coming back to Paul's precise intention more precisely another day.

Today's post has 2 Parts.

Part 1: Paul's "Flesh"

When I was a kid, my parents and my other evangelical Christian teachers used to warn me about The World, The Flesh, and The Devil. The World included tv where one could watch Flip Wilson's character Geraldine confirm "The Devil made me do it." And The Flesh was one of a three-parter in The World, as in the Bible (the leather-bound thin-paper red-letter NRSV I was made to read and memorize):

Do not love the world or the things in the world. The love of the Father is not in those who love the world; for all that is in the world—the desire of the flesh, the desire of the eyes, the pride in riches—comes not from the Father but from the world. And the world and its desire are passing away, but those who do the will of God live for ever. I John 2:15-16

But God was ironic if I wasn't to love The World or to have the desire of The Flesh. He was as ironic as Geraldine in The World talking like a Christian blaming The Devil. (Here's how I got that as the kid of missionaries in a war zone, Việt Nam, where I was made to go to Vietnamese church every Sunday where I'd hear this: "Đức Chúa Trời yêu thương thế gian" and "Ngôi Lời ở thế gian" and "Ngôi Lời đã trở nên xác thịt.") In other words, God got to love The World, and Jesus was in The World, and Jesus became Flesh. That's what John (aka Giaêng) also said about God and Jesus in my NRSV (John 3:16, John 1:10, and John 1:14).

God loves The World; but we must not. Jesus was in The World in The Flesh; but we must avoid the desires of The Flesh.  But of course, we are not God or Jesus. So John comes along to make that crystal clear. He comes along, after Paul, to keep us from doing what God and Jesus did. Don't love The World and especially don't have the desire of The Flesh. John (in I John) was listening more precisely and more carefully to Paul; and Paul (as the NRSV and the Vietnamese Bible arranged it) had already written a few books and chapters and pages earlier to confirm with precision and with sense, this very sense:

"For I know that nothing good dwells within me, that is, in my flesh. I can will what is right, but I cannot do it." (Romans 7:18)

Nobody yet had the (New) Living Bible or (Today's) New International Version (2011) to flesh out the understanding that "thịt" and "flesh" mean "sinful nature." And that's what Paul may mean, and may mean exactly by "sarx." So Douglas Moo is making decisions -- now with bibliobloggers and translationbloggers making decisions about his decisions.

What are the consequences of Paul's "Sarx"?  What's the sense you make of it?

Part 2: Making sense of a "Pound of Flesh"

The terrorism of Malik Nidal Hasan is arresting to so many of us, directly injurious to thirty of us and murderous to thirteen of us. How do we make sense of it?

Top biblioblogger Dr. Jim West jumps in early asking for "the faithful to pray for all involved" and wondering about "a war without an end in sight and being waged for no clear objective" and saying that Hasan "snapped" and that that does "show just how much pressure our military personnel are under."

And Polycarp, at his blog "The Church of Jesus Christ," responds to the early reports that Hasan was killed (although now we know he was shot by a female officer but now is alive, stable, and refusing to answer questions). Polycarp says "let us remember the example of the Amish and while we pray for those afflicted by this tragedy, the families left behind, let us too remember his family"; and the example of the Amish that Watts links to is this:  to forgive the dead terrorist with concern for "the welfare of the killer's family."

Feminist blogger Phyllis Chesler says "Call me 'Islamophobic,' call me 'psychic,' call me what you will." And she says that most may call Hasan the victim.  She says that in her post entitled "The Jihadist Is Always the Victim."

And a blogger who calls himself "Improvable" asks a rhetorical question with respect to Hasan. The blogger says: "So he decides to take out as many infidels as he could to get his pound of flesh for the jehad?"

Now we in the West hear Shakespeare, and we hear Shylock saying of Antonio: "The pound of flesh which I demand of him Is deerely bought, 'tis mine, and I will haue it."

The Bible, the Koran, the words of William Shakespeare. These are texts that demand interpretation, texts and interpretations that we may use for hope and healing and for terror and death. What does it matter exactly what "sarx" and what "pound of flesh" mean if they're mostly tools of terror?

What are the consequences of Malik Nidal Hasan's "Pound of Flesh"?  What's the sense you make of it?

Word Weaving

Picture this: Jane Stranz and colleagues are weaving words in wordplay with "prayers, poems and personal stories."

Births, Babies, and Bastards: Just Words

Eliminating racism
Empowering women

--sign on the side of the ywca van west-bound on I-30 this morning in Fort Worth, Texas USA

The origin is a masculine myth. . . .
The question, ‘Where do I come from?’ is basically a masculine, much more than a feminine question. The quest for origins, illustrated by Oedipus, doesn’t haunt a feminine unconscious. Rather it’s the beginning, or beginnings, the manner of beginning, not promptly with the phallus, but starting on all sides at once, that makes a feminine writing. A feminine text starts on all sides at once, starts twenty times, thirty times, over.

--Hélène Cixous, “Castration or Decapitation?” tr. Annette Kuhn, Signs 7 (Autumn 1981): 53. fr. Nancy Mairs, “Essaying the Feminine,” Voice Lessons: On Becoming a (Woman) Writer, 85

Around the blogosphere are signs of word birth, and questions of origins or of beginnings, with more questions about legitimacy or otherings.

• April DeConick has begun a new word for better work in history writing. So far, the begininngs are here, and here, and here, and here, and here.
• Some men (yes some of us men) are concerned about the origin of an old word. (Don’t ask us what haunts us, please; and you have to scroll down past the pics of one Mr. Bean to the real serious hauntings.)
• Othering men (yes that kind) used original words to dis-empower women through words
• Other othering men used others original words, not to eliminate, but to perpetuate the denigration of human beings of races "darker."
• Jonathan Tilove more than a year ago wanted to know the origins of one of Barack Obama’s phrases.

“Our First Woman President”

Toni Morrison was perhaps the first to say that “Bill Clinton is our first black president.” Now that she endorses the Senator from Illinois, I've been asking whether she may be able some day to say that “Barack Obama is our first woman president.”

Now Aristotelians seem to want to explain away such words. In fact, we’d all do well to hear what Morrison says, but let’s first listen to why an Aristotelian won’t.

AN ARISTOTELIAN EXPLANATION

The Aristotelian first classifies Morrison and her text. For example, the Aristotelian writer for an Oxford University Press encyclopedia concisely captures her this way: “Morrison, Toni (b. 1931), novelist, essayist, editor, short fiction writer, lecturer, educator, and Nobel Prize laureate.” Her text? “African American literature.” And sometimes, “literary criticism.” Hence, perhaps here, “political commentary” by a mere “novelist.”

What Morrison is not, and what her text is not, must also be very important, therefore. She’s not a political authority. Neither do her words constitute an authoritative text on presidents. Besides, Bill Clinton is not black, and Barack Obama is not a woman. The most extreme binary classification is this: Morrison is not a writer inspired with something like plenary inspiration. Her words are not God’s words.

(The extreme classifications may, for the Aristotelian, suggest a sort of Platonic ideal with a sliding scale. But don’t think the binary principle of non-contradiction is entirely lost. Aristotle didn’t completely abandon all he heard from Plato. Neither do contemporary Aristotelians. For instance, although Aristotle’s pure logic is not enough for Eleanor Rosch, prototype theory is just fine. And if Rosch won’t admit it, Aristotle did write some about “more or less” and did not just use pure “either or.” Likewise, George Lakoff would reject Aristotle’s pure method of objectivity, especially cold objectivity as Platonic Noam Chomsky uses it to view syntax abstractly; Lakoff nonetheless more-or-less-coldly observes metaphors we live by, a real specialty of Aristotle. In addition, Richard Rhodes gets a preacher to preach as if against Aristotle: “We must escape the slavery of words and give loyal adherence to meanings instead. Words should express ideas, not originate them.” But Rhodes and Aristotle together could care less about translation of words, because meaningful, prototypical, natural classes are the really important thing and are, for Rhodes at least, what makes prototypical translation possible, if you’ll pardon the circularity of the argument.)

So, a quick review of the Aristotelian’s method: first, the classification by binary features; second, the classification by hierarchy. What Morrison is (not), and what Morrison does (not) mean, maps her naturally, and in the extreme as below the man whose words mean what God’s words mean. (The Aristotelian rhetorician would say, then, that all of a sudden we’ve got an enthymeme: that what Morrison says is rhetorically not important, at least when compared to what God says. But let’s get back to words, to meanings, to logic.)

There are other things going on here for the Aristotelian logician, so let’s listen a bit more.

Because Morrison’s words are so like the man’s words that are God’s words, there has to be further distancing from her and her text. The Rhodesian Aristotelian does that this way:

>first classification as in “God’s meanings, naturally, are not Morrison’s” and “We’ve got a category mismatch here, a big issue in translation.”

>second hierarchy as in “In fact, it takes some significant training to get to recognize the differences between first order communication and second and third order communication. Literary critics, who should know better, are actually the worst. If they understood these distinctions even a little we never would have gotten into this post-modernism mess.”

>therefore if Morrison has written “Bill Clinton is the first black president” or writes someday “Barack Obama is the first woman president,” then we may just dismiss her and her meanings. Fair enough, the first order stuff, those words she uses, might be observed as “not for the faint in heart.” Okay, fine, it may appear she’s writing “in a stream of consciousness mode” and using “the kind of extreme terms Jesus did.” But come on, folks, “it’s the meanings that are important and that the words are only tools to get to the meanings.”

THE WORDS OF (THE FEMINIST THE AFRAFEMINIST THE WOMANIST THE NOVELIST THE LITERARY CRITIC) an old woman blind but wise

Jesus isn’t the only one who throws stories beside the stories of the one who has ears to hear (otherwise rendering deaf those who would claim to hear and making blind those who claim to see). C. S. Lewis isn’t the only one resisting Aristotelian modernism and saying (as an outsider reflecting on somebody else’s psalms): words have “second meanings,” which also means that what anyone’s words mean is always more than what he or she only intends them to mean. Kenneth L. Pike isn’t the only one who says (going beyond Rosch with the very first words of his Introduction to Linguistic Concepts): “When [a] man studies ‘things,’ he injects part of himself into their definition. What is a chair, if there is no [hu]man to sit on it? A flute, with no player? A concert, with no listeners? A saw, with no carpenter? The relevance or intended use of a thing is part of its nature as experienced by us—a component added to it by its designer or user or deduced by an observer. . . . [T]he observer universally affects the data and becomes part of the data. . . . The beginner’s ear [because she or he is an outsider] may play tricks on [her or] him and [may] refuse to listen at all, and ‘tell’ [her or] him that the words sound the same. . . Seeing or hearing or learning is facilitated when the observer has a stake in the outcome.”

Morrison has a stake in the outcome of her words. If they make you laugh, then you get them. They get you too. If you’re listening to her say that “Bill Clinton is the first black president” or hear her say “Barack Obama is the first woman president,” then you begin to affect her words and her words begin to become part of you. If you’re American and a voter, then there’s a stake in the outcome of Morrison’s words for you. If you’re black, then yes a stake. If you’re a woman, then yes a stake.

But even if you’re not any of those, you can listen from any of “several cultures” to “an old woman. Blind but wise. Or was it an old man? A guru, perhaps. Or a griot soothing restless children.” Or is it not Morrison? Or not God? And if you listen closely, to this parable, to someone else’s story thrown beside your own, then what? What’s “the end?” You may know who’s saying this to you: “I trust you now. I trust you with the [thing] that is not in your hands because you have truly caught it. Look. How lovely it is, this thing we have done - together.” You may get these words: “we are our brother's keeper; we are our sister's keeper; . . . we are all tied together in a single garment of destiny.”

Update: Girl with Pen

Womanism, Fascism, and DE Translation

George Lakoff’s and Eugene Nida’s theories of language and of translation fail to do enough. Their theories, in their efforts at Aristotelian objectivism, would bear Moses’s authority and would keep Onesimus.

(Warning: in this post, there’s a little word play but little child’s play. In other words, this thing is full of high-horse, academic jargon, which is where much power language lives. Dialog is welcome here, because in translation, especially "dynamic equivalence" or DE translation, there's still too much silencing of the marginalized.)

First, then, two true stories about children and words. Call them personal testimonies to the power of parables. Not long ago, a friend of mine told me her grade school daughter came home from school and declared: “Mommy, I know the ‘d-word’ and I know the ‘s-word’ and I know the ‘f-word’ too.” My friend replied, “Oh, Melissa, I’m so sorry you have to learn these words. Who told you what they mean?” But the little girl persisted: “the ‘d-word’ is ‘dumb,’ and the ‘s-word’ is ‘stupid’ and the ‘f-word’ is ‘faker.’” The mother suppressed her smile and her sigh of relief, and proceeded to give her child a lesson in the proper and improper uses of such "four letter words." The second true parable is this: my son when in grade school came home and asked, “Mom, is sex bad?” My wife gave him a long answer, dynamically equivalent to his question. But I’ll explain the problems below.

Linguists and others familiar with the work of George Lakoff may note how my title here plays on one of his: Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal about the Mind. Likely, some of you will remember Lakoff’s opener. He begins: “Many readers, I suspect, will take the title of this book as suggesting that women, fire, and dangerous things have something in common—say, that women are fiery and dangerous.” (He confesses that he is “inspired by the Australian aboriginal language Dyirbal, which has a category, balan, that actually includes women, fire, and dangerous things.”) With sure, confident certainty, he recalls the mixed reactions to his word play: “Most feminists I’ve mentioned it to have loved the title for that reason, though some have hated it for the same reason” (page 5).

Lakoff shows the arbitrary-but-common, nevertheless-coherent Dyirbal category of balan and its appositioned members. (Fortunately for his readers, Lakoff translates these members into English as “women,” “fire,” and “dangerous things” ). Unfortunately, in unveiling his title and its unifying term, balan, he can’t help but make a point about divisiveness among readers. Ironically, Lakoff can only assume he stands above them with a more unified, a more objective, approach. And yet you, reading closely (in English only), should be able to see his own arbitrary and coherent category of overlapping but varying members of readers: (1) “many readers,” (2) “most feminists,” and (3) “some [feminists who] have hated.”

That is, Lakoff believes that all of those “many readers” (e.g., those in group 1) can’t help but “take” his title to represent “women, fire, and dangerous things” as having “something in common.” Likewise, he believes that all of those “most feminists” (e.g., those in group 2) hold the same three variants in the title (e.g., “women,” and “fire,” and “dangerous things”) as part of the same single category (e.g., the “something in common. . . for that [same] reason”). And Lakoff believes that each and every one of the “some [feminists who] have hated” the title (e.g., those in group 3) have nonetheless belonged in the category with all of those who will take the three noun phrases of his main title to belong to the same single category (e.g., all readers). In summary, as Dyirbal holds together at least three unlikely terms in a single-word category so Lakoff identifies as dynamically equivalent his three explicitly-named groups of readers.

But neither Lakoff nor any of us reading his title can easily identify a single categorical word in English (such as balan, so superficially foregrounded in Dyirbal) that would name his category and ours (e.g., the category “that actually includes” the variant members (1) “many readers,” (2) “most feminists,” and (3) “some [feminists who] have hated [the title]”). If the common meaning were not so “transparent,” we English readers should perhaps agree on the noun phrase, readers. You see, Lakoff is trying to keep all of his readers (in one big dynamic readership). And he’s telling us all, as if objectively, something about our categories and our minds that we cannot categorize and comprehend either alone or collectively as part of a group of his readers. After more than 580 pages of carefully explicated examples, Lakoff begins his “Afterword,” by writing:

I began work on this book with the knowledge that objectivist views of the mind have a very wide currency in the academic world. Among my principal aims has been to characterize that view, name it, point out that it is an opinion, not a fundamental truth, and raise the question of its validity, so that is can be discussed in the open and no longer be presumed automatically as part of an unquestioned background. (page 586)

Nevertheless, Lakoff’s unnamed assumptions exemplify and enact the very “objectivist views of the mind” he purports to write against. For all the naming he does do, Lakoff fails to “point out [how his] is an opinion, not a fundamental truth”; and, to be sure, his opinion is that as an expert linguist (not a woman, not even a feminist) tenured at Berkeley he is objectively recording the facts, albeit the now-obvious facts about the dubious “objective views.”

To best interpret his argument, then, we readers can only try to “raise the question [of Lakoff’s argument’s] validity, so that it [is] discussed in the open and [is] no longer presupposed automatically as part of an unquestioned background” (page 586). What we have to attempt to do, now, is to show that Lakoff’s book (and our reading and critiquing it) is based on profound, unnamed, and unquestioned categories of belief, from our own subjective perspectives. What we might end up seeing is that his argument-belief contradiction (and even ours) is emblematic of slippery, sloppy language that DE translators want to tidy up. From his title to his closing words, Lakoff counts on all of his readers to believe certain categories, to suspend their disbelief, and to take his categories for granted as theirs. And we do go along, even if we “hate” it. But, oddly, Lakoff is careful to report, as an “objectivist” would, that there are the “some [feminists who] have hated [his title].” Suspiciously, the author himself cannot observe his title to be hateful or hate provoking. It’s “some feminists” who are in that category, and he is not.

So we can go on: neither Lakoff nor we his readers can easily fathom something more profound and problematic. That is this: if Lakoff could ever have written the book in Dyirbal, then how transparent balan would be to the Aboriginal native speakers. Of course, not much considering what deep suppositions they might have about us, we may tend to presume them to be illiterates and not necessarily speakers of English, and not linguists, feminists, or thinking people of any discipline. Yet wouldn’t and shouldn’t they be suspicious that we might read (as Lakoff suggests in English we will) the phrase “women, fire, and dangerous things” as suggesting “that women are fiery and dangerous”? Is it not a stretch to imagine, analogously, that readers (of English or of Dyirbal) would take the title “Womanism, Fascism, and Dynamic Equivalence Translation” to mean that womanism and fascism are dynamically equal? As we interpret, we do prefer not to be interpreted.

Specifically, we desire our vocabularies not to be mixed, our beliefs not to be contradicted, and our categories not to be exposed. Otherwise, when drawing sharp lines of distinction, we might be found sitting on the side of the others we criticize. Such is the case of George Lakoff (e.g., exposing objectivist views by employing the objectivist perspective, that would transcend a feminist and an Aboriginal critique). But he knows that he, and we, and they all do play the dynamic equivalence game.

We might have gone on long enough here. You can get “the meanings” of womanism and fascism and dynamic equivalency translation theory from a dictionary or an encyclopedia.

But I do think we’d do well to see what’s going on. There are positions of power, for any reader, for any translator. And the insider and outsider positions are subjective. Even the most objective scientist will use his or her head and his or her heart and stomach. Even the most artsy translator will find, in a text to be translated and its translation, at least these three alternative perspectives: particle (i.e., a unit), or wave (i.e., dynamism and change), or field (i.e., relativity in context). (Such is the contribution of the late great Kenneth Pike to language and translation). So Lakoff is on to something, wanting to resist objectivity, if he could only acknowledge how he assumes power over, say, feminists who hate his title and the Dyirbal speakers he presumes to speak for. And Nida, by referring to his translation approach as “dynamic equivalence” is on to something. Dynamic seems to be wavy (though it isn’t always in DE). Equivalence assumes a field of relationship (albeit an impossibly ideal one). And Translation (as DE) likes to think of itself as an objective thing, a particle if you will. But.

Let’s listen to a womanist, then a fascist. And let’s see how dynamically equivalent we may be to them. (I haven’t forgotten the children in the true parables above. We’ll hear them out too).

Now Alice Walker, the afrafeminist who coined “womanism,” didn’t write the Bible. She did write a book called The Temple of My Familiar. Let’s listen in on some of the characters’ conversations:

“‘You are saying,’ I asked her, ‘that all evil, like racism or sexism, is a result of sickness?’

“‘Not only that,’ she whispered, ‘the child will always, as an adult, do to someone else whatever was done to him when he was a child. It is how we, as human beings, are made. I shudder to think what Hitler’s childhood was like,’ she said. (page 310)

“ . . . I told her bluntly that I was in therapy, trying to get to the roots of my anger against white people. I didn’t tell her it was particularly against whites who were blond. I guess I was afraid she’d say, like so many people do: Well, everybody hates Nazis. That’s what they think I mean. They think of Hitler’s Aryan race as played by bleached-blond actors on TV. That image is, I know, only a small part of it. (page 326)

Now Lakoff and Nida might protest here. This is literature. The categories in non-literary works are not equal to others. Apples and oranges. We ought to know better.

So let’s all keep moving, then. To something more familiar. To translation of a didactic text or an epistolary one. How about these:

“Es ist immer der gleiche Jude. Daß diese Selbstverständlichkeit von einem normalen heutigen Ministerialrat oder höheren Polizeibeamten nicht begriffen wird, ist freilich auch selbstverständlich”
Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf

“He is always the same Jew. That so obvious a fact is not recognized by the average head-clerk in a German government department, or by an officer in the police administration, is also a self-evident and natural fact”
Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf (DE translator James Murphy)

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”
Thomas Jefferson, The Declaration of Independence

So let’s start with the most familiar (since, fortunately, more of us read the Bible and the Declaration of Independence it’s based on more than we do Mein Kampf).

Thomas Jefferson’s Declaration may name some (e.g., “the merciless Indian Savages”) while it unnames others (e.g., black males and women, regardless of color but especially black women). But it excludes all of them equally from the category of “all men created equal.” Moreover, the liberating document—invoking the names of God and of Nature—binds together, in an unintended dynamic equivalence, the revolutionary colonizers and their abusive King into one elite group: property owners, who are white men. These truths, if they are “to be self-evident,” we must hold; and we hold them to a certain advantage: our own. To read the Declaration of Independence otherwise is to see the inequalities in its explicit and implicit “natural” classes of ownership, race, and gender.

But “we” might be outsiders to a Nazi’s experience, and more to Alice Walker’s characters’ experiences. Neither we nor Adolf Hitler or Walker will interpret as equal both (A) his Übermensch and (B) the reality of her whispering black women. And only few of us (namely translator James Murphy) might see the phrase “self-evident” as a good translation of freilich; not many of us could believe or should want to imply that Hitler follows some method of Jefferson and is thereby less sinister. However, we all know that human beings have the power to call disparate things equal. Likewise, “we” in community can “hold these truths” in our collective subjectivity “to be self evident.” And we acknowledge our Creator, depending on our perspective of outsider or insider, as creating all men and women equal.

So back to the parables. My friend and her daughter were in learning conversation. Each was learning from the other. What the girl meant by “the s- word” was not anything “stupid” at all. And when calling it a “four-letter word,” the mother could take the context, and the power issues on the playground, and discover that the demeaning-term category often includes five letters.

And my son? After awkwardly listening to his mother discuss good sex and bad, he replied. “No Mom; not sex. Sucks. Is sucks a bad word?”

(No, DE translators; not authority, rather “Moses’s seat.” And not Onesimus the slave; rather “Handy” the handy name of a human being “above a slave in the flesh and in the Master.”)