The Most Necessary Liberation Struggle of All

The honoring and the freeing of the individual soul is the necessary liberation story for our time. Society has made gains based upon the willingness of individuals identified with an oppressed group, such as women, black people, gay people and other minorities, including holocaust survivors, to voice their pain and to force recognition of their experience of oppression. These groups, in some settings and discourses, are even privileged to speak from their pain, as in a way that people are discouraged from doing in the general society,.

Last night, at The Other Side in Utica, we heard a talk by an African American professor of classics and Africana studies at Hamilton College in which she set the matter of Cleopatra’s contested ethnicity straight. In the course of her establishing the fragile basis for our concept of Cleopatra - a few writers in antiquity who came along well after her death, the insistence by many modern scholars of her being “Greek,”against all the evidence - the speaker interlaced her own story of growing up black in America. For example, one experience she shared was of having been told in 9th grade by her world history teacher that Asia and Africa had made no contributions to history.

Reflecting on all of this as I lay in bed this morning - a powerful time for such reflection for me - I thought of the speaker’s vulnerability in bringing up such stories, in settings where people are not predisposed to consider the suffering of others. Except where it is part of the program as in church or academe, or during times of particular catastrophe, such as the earthquake in Haiti, or Hurricance Katrina’s devastation of New Orleans, this is pretty much everywhere in society. I knew, recollecting from my own experiences in graduate school, that in academia, stories of oppression as a gay person or a black or Asian person are treated very differently. A special place is given to them, their voices are welcomed, in a sincere effort to balance the burying of their stories and their suffering in mainstream society and official history. Such prizes as grants and fellowships can be more readily obtained if one can speak from the pain of being a member of one of these groups.

Let me be clear that in no way whatsoever do I make light of the pain that is inflicted on gay people , black people, Latino people, etc by our society. I’m not a racism denier, nor am I anti-Affirmative Action. Nor do I believe that oppression ended with Civil Rights legislation in the 1960's, as I suspect many people do. For example, the students where I teach, at a local branch of the state university, tend to voice the facile, optimistic cliche that “things are better now,” which frees them, I suppose, and all of us to the degree that we buy it, to pay attention to more important things, like the next text message coming in on the cell phone.

I simply believe that the underlying oppression which all other oppressions arise from is the intolerance for the reality and the expression of the human soul. The individual is the most unprotected “group” within the human species; prejudice, hatred, and violence, including violence against the earth, other species and indigenous cultures, stem from this fundamental spiritual oppression that characterizes pretty much all of modern, post-enlightenment, rational, developed “civilization.”

This oppression, because it is based within the individual, is very different from the others. For one thing, it emphatically includes the “privileged” classes and groups. White, northern European, affluent men, for example, have not been exempted. Although patriarchal predations and brutalities, with its assumptions of privileged status, can never be excused or condoned, men too are a member of this”group“ whose individual natures are violated by their enslavement to a soulless system in turn constructed and maintained by partial humans alienated from their souls.. The oppression of souls is also different in that it is not so much a political condition as an archetypal one. Although there are those who profit, (most definitely!) from the oppression of souls (or simply “soul,” since it is the ground of being that humans share with all other life forms) the focus of the struggle is not on oppressors as such, but on the responsibility of the individual to free her own portion of soul.

Another feature of this soul oppression that makes it different is, as you can see from what I have already said, that the “truth claims” of the individual cannot be backed up with empirical facts. It is a part of the special oppressive condition that that which needs defending is invisible, and thus does not fall into our standard categories of those things that possess “rights.” Like trees and other plant and animal species that cannot speak for themselves, but are accumulating more and more defenders today, the soul has not been granted full legal status. Like a wife in the bad ol’ days, it can be treated pretty much any way its master likes.

And who is its “master?” Well, I am the master of my own soul, as you are of yours. And, as masters, we are likely to be (with exceptions of course) as ignorant of the beauty, worth and dignity of our personal souls as was an antebellum slaveowner of his slave’s personhood, or a drunken abusive husband of his wife’s. We are not reliable persons to be in control of a vulnerable thing like a soul. The reason for this lies in another feature of “soulist” oppression..

Unlike other situations of oppressed peoples, the individual soul is oppressed first by those entrusted with its original care. It receives its initial wounding not from the society, nor from any power-drunk, privileged group or class or gender, but from its human parents within the supposed safety and loving embrace of the family nest. Thus, defense of the soul requires that one let go of the most precious assumption we by-and-large possess: the one that says, in a way that forbids any opposing possibility, “my parents loved me.” And here let me add, that the issue is not whether or not one’s parents really did love their children, but whether or not one can tolerate, based only upon the evidence supplied by one’s subjective feeling and experience, the possibility that they did not. The evidence for this unacceptable knowledge is obtainable only through communication with the deepest level of the soul, depths which by and large our society keeps us from entering. Thus, most of us are thwarted from discovering, let alone freeing, the soul that is silenced and captive within our being.

I sense skepticism budding in the minds of my readers at this point. I wish I could leave out that part about the parents, but I cannot. I want to soften the message so you will not reject it, and me along with it. On the other hand, there is no need to get hung up on that part. Though obtaining the knowledge that your parents did not love you as you assumed they had is essential to defense of the soul, the process does not end with hatred of one’s parents, for that is not the point of the soul’s purpose. The soul’s purpose is to be allowed its measure of expression by its human vehicle, the “you” or the “me” chosen for its time on this earthly plane. The unintentional cruelty of parents, like other more recognized oppressions, is incidental to the larger meaning that the soul is.

With a group of other readers meeting at The Other Side, I have been re-reading the classic tale of a woman’s soul journey, Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God. There are those who would disagree with me, but this story is less focused on the story of racial and gender oppression than on the archetypal journey of the human soul from its initial condition of being buried in matter to the gradual increase of light, and eventual release/expression of the soul incarnate in the person, in this case, Janie Crawford.

Janie is pressured into her first marriage at age 16 by her grandmother, who raised her and who fervently desires for her to be taken care of. Two marriages later, Janie looks back at her grandmother, and sees the relationship differently than she had as a girl. “Here Nanny had taken the biggest thing God ever made, the horizon - for no matter how far a person can go the horizon is still way beyond you - and pinched it into such a little bit of a thing that she could tie it about her granddaughter’s neck tight enough to choke her. She hated the old woman who had twisted her so in the name of love....She (Janie) had found a jewel down inside herself and she had wanted to walk where people could see her and gleam it around. But she had been set in the marketplace to sell.”

As long as Janie believed, in the conventional way, that her grandmother did what she did out of love, the only possible identity for Janie is the ungrateful, undeserving, unworthy (grand)daughter. She has to be able to defend her own spirit, the jewel of her aspiring soul, against the voice that would call her ungrateful and bad. She has to come to know this yearning for more life that is within her, the sense that she must put into language who she is, and “gleam” herself before other people, as sanctioned, or blessed. Such a blessing can come not from any social or familial source, but only from within herself, from the authoritative voice of her own soul. It is not enough for her soul’s journey that she reject the selfish, loutish versions of love offered by her first and second husbands; she must also see through the self-sacrificial love of her grandmother, as even the stronger imprisoning force.

One writer who might agree with my claim that the soul is the most oppressed “group” in contemporary society is John Taylor Gatto, whose prophetic voice against compulsory public schooling authored the book Dumbing Us Down. As it happens, I am using an essay of his in a writing class I teach. I say “as it happens,” because the essay is anthologized in the text, and I was not aware of it when I ordered it. I’m happy to be using the essay and confronting my students with his challenging, passionate ideas about schools and education, but I did not choose it as such.

Yesterday, in fact, I asked the class what they thought about Gatto’s essay, called “Against School.” We were looking for things like “thesis” and “major ideas” in preparation for writing a summary paper. Here is an essay, mind you, that begins by alluding to the pervasive boredom in high schools, a boredom, Gatto emphasizes, shared by students and teachers alike. There could be not one person in my classroom who did not know the boredom referred to, including from their experience right there in my classroom!. However, very few spoke up to comment, or to analyze the argument with me. It was clear that several did not so much want to analyze as object. While a couple of women in the front row voiced unqualified approval, a young man, also up front, wanted to defend some schools, some “excellent teachers,” against Gatto’s charges.

Towards the end of the essay, Gatto writes, “After a long life, and thirty years in the public school trenches, I’ve concluded that genius is as common as dirt.” With this astonishing opinion, he meets the expected objection, one he has heard many times I’m sure, that says some students are just not talented enough to be given the kind of freedom/responsibility for following their own interests and passions that he is suggesting. Sure enough, the young man brought up the very objection, and I pointed out Gatto’s statement to him. He remained unconvinced. And indeed, how does one support this generalization with measurements and verifiable facts? Surely, Mr. Gatto can provide example after example of remarkable, but altogether ordinary students he has known, each capable of following his or her “genius.” But swallowing the statement whole requires one to swallow a formidably large “lump.” Most of us are more comfortable holding to the assumption we’ve been taught: genius is rare, and the rest have been assigned life’s grunt wor, which has consequences for achiever and “underachiever” alike..

Rationally we can grant the argument of differing abilities, but what does it mean to the soul to accept that assumption, an acceptance aided and abetted by the unconsciousness of schools, which ignores the Janie Crawford-like yearning in every human soul for expression of its unique voice and calling?

Our society becomes ever more adept at tuning out that fragile but ultimately powerful voice of the soul. By means of prescription drugs, a deluge of cable and satellite TV channels, constant connectability via cell phones and Internet, unchallenged assumptions about the world and the way it works, whether liberal or conservative, mass schooling, and a thousand other ways, the soul is kept in its place. Everywhere we can see soul pain, the pain of not being seen: we see it in youth suicide, in pervasive violence, and in drug and other addictions, in depression and other mental illness symptoms, in the emptiness of modern living that never satisfies the deeper human need for connection and community, or for a social-political-economic world that reflects our caring and our humanity. We see it in our alienation from nature, in nature subjugated and plundered for its resources as though Nature, the Mother of us all, existed for our benefit.

The good news is that the soul buried in the prison of each body never ceases, and never stops tugging at our coattails to gain our scattered attention. Silenced for lifetimes, she (archetypally, the soul is always represented in feminine form) can awaken and remind us of our individual longing and destiny, the genius in each of us that is “common as dust.” She can reach us through night time dreams, through chance images crossing our awareness, and through the learnings contained in some psychic pain, and other kinds of pain and loss. But the good news is potential only. The release of the soul from captivity is a lifetime journey. It might be wise to remember the words of one who spoke for a people long oppressed:

What happens to a dream deferred?

Does it dry up
like a raisin in the sun?
Or fester like a sore--
And then run?
Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust and sugar over--
like a syrupy sweet?

Maybe it just sags
like a heavy load.

Or does it explode?
.