Of Wrongs and Rites
By Nick Child
This In The Media column for Context followed a trip to my native India in 1995. It is laced with my interest in ritual at that time too.
This In The Media column for Context followed a trip to my native India in 1995. It is laced with my interest in ritual at that time too.
A TRAVELLER'S
TALE
"When I was a child, my mother would threaten all unwanted behaviour with the ultimate deterrent: 'You'll end up in the Bin.' And" continues Michael Shotter, child psychiatrist, writing in Hospital Doctor (20.4.95), "so have the mentally ill been a scapegoat group - like gypsies, Jews, blacks and homosexuals - to be ostracised for their differences to protect the fear of difference in ourselves." His article was about the insidious stigmatising of mental health problems in the day-to-day language and character stereotypes which the public, media, politicians (and doctors too) frequently use to confirm their prejudices and reinforce the vicious circle of reaction to the aggression around us. Try it out for yourself - hardly a news report or soap episode goes by without a prejudicial use of 'mad', 'loony', 'psycho' or 'nutter'. Michael Shotter hopes that, in this Year of Tolerance, the media will take a critical look at themselves. Linking stigma and tolerance to my interest in rituals in life and family work, I'll continue with last time's theme of ethnicity and race.
When I was a child, I was much more kindly binned. There were no threats or indeed much communication at all. Born in India, I went to boarding school there when I was five. In retrospect, I found my upset on the first occasion (only) was especially because my Dad hadn't come to see me being brave. At ten, I left Indian boarding schools and moves of house for English ones, irritated by the Ayah's crying as I boarded the plane by myself - my family and I weren't being so stupid. I became a child psychiatrist too, helping families where mine wasn't. I determined as an adult to settle in one place. I took Scotland as my adopted country. I like the sharp edges here, a contrast to Home Counties' cotton wool - cotton wool harvested from centuries of unwitting Norman empire over Angles, Scots and Indians alike. I wouldn't like to be scapegoated or threatened, but cotton wool can be maddening too.
More recently, disenchanted with the particular way the NHS now 'values its staff', and with family encouragement, I packed myself off for a month to South India together with my older son, who has been taking a year out. He's lived all his 18 years in one house and community - by that age, I'd lived in 18 houses and schools. My first visit back after 37 years, it felt a really important ritual journey - for myself, and as father and son 'going off into the jungle to kill a wild boar'. A do-it-yourself 'life story book', the trip completed a circle to fill a gnawing space in me. And indeed it would take a book to do the trip justice!
The grime, the cheap hotels, the crowds, the traffic (following ice-rink rules), the noise, the beggars, the cows wandering freely, the food, the (winter!) hot sun, people's chatter, head waggles and gestures, warmth and liveliness, the swarms of auto-rickshaws (but not of flies), the buses, people's simultaneous interdependence and independence, the food, the clothes and colours, the smells, the roads, the shacks and buildings ancient and modern but usually unkempt, the markets, the restaurants, the fruit and snacks, 'chai'- and coffee- sellers, everything so cheap (for a tourist), people's cleanliness, moustachioed men (friends holding hands), beautiful children and women, the families, love and respect, the road-side and roving sellers of anything and everything, the bargaining and baksheesh, the railway stations and trains, the temples, the paddy-fields, the forests, the plains, the mountains, the Keralan coconut forests, unspoilt beaches and backwaters, the food, the languages, the universal English business signs and newspapers, the widespread but usually limited knowledge of English, the flowers and birds, the monkeys, the big satellite TV dishes, the un-movable bureaucracy, the contented anarchy and separation of social classes, the self-sufficiency, the ancient continuity of history and religions, the vast extended families of Hindu mythology, the saturation of life by ritual, and - I almost forgot - the extreme poverty. I almost forgot poverty because all I could see was richness. Although we saw things I wouldn't have as a child, I felt instantly and constantly at home.
We visited and photographed important places from my past, unbidden experiences then, broken off in unreal suspended animation until validated and re-edited through shared adult eyes now. I buried to rot in the boarding school grounds a selection of my self-imposed burden of newpaper cuttings for this column, returning to their roots a symbol of the consequences of that upbringing. To the endless enquiries, I enjoyed declaring that I was like them 'a native of India'. Father and son, amongst all the other things we shared, did indeed take a dawn ride into the jungle on an elephant, but it wasn't light enough even to shoot photographs, let alone wild animals. Leaving the past behind, we holidayed as much for the present before heading back with a haul of memories, stories, photographs, musical instruments and presents. Back to enjoyably cool, clean and quiet Britain - I'll never see London (there for the March AFT Committee) as big, busy and dirty ever again! Back to work - looking not nearly so bureaucratic or disorganised as it did a month earlier. In fact the whole value system looks different through the spectacles of a trip to another world.
HOME MATCH
And back to the Grand Slam rugby match; and this wonderful analysis by Joyce McMillan (Scotland on Sunday, 12.3.95) of culture, gender and ritual in my other home country:
So next weekend, the auld enemies face one another again. The scene, of course will be Twickenham rather than Bannockburn; but in the hearts and minds of thousands, that will hardly matter. On the shoulders of the Scottish team will rest, as usual, a far greater weight of national pride, hope and longing than any mere sporting fixture should ever have to bear; and across the ground will echo the sound of the song the Scottish people seem to have chosen, by unspoken common consent, as their new national anthem, written by Roy Williamson barely 25 years ago, but already entrenched in folk culture. It's a song, of course, whose words bear some examination. "O Flower of Scotland" it mourns, of those who died in Scotland's last great military victory over the English 681 years ago. "When shall we see the like again? Who fought and died for your wee bit hill and glen..." For what it expresses, with striking clarity, is Scotland's unassuaged longing for victory over the auld enemy, and for the kind of Scotsmen - apparently no longer among us - who had the courage and strength to achieve it. And the fact seems to be that almost 700 years after Bannockburn, and 500 after the appalling national defeat at Flodden, this song - dismal, self-pitying, backward-looking and English-obsessed as it is - touches a place that is still unhealed, that throbs and aches every time some BBC weatherman ignores floods and blizzards in Glasgow, or some announcer can't be bothered to check the pronunciation of a Scottish place name. Of course, you can call these minor insults pin-pricks; but they hurt because they hit the same nerves as much older and deeper injuries, never properly mourned, acknowledged or accepted.
And I thought about all this again in Jackie Leven's brilliant deconstruction (Scotswoman 8.3.95) of Millais' painting The Order of Release in which an immensely commanding and organised looking young Scottish matriarch, child asleep on her shoulder, is seen handing over an order of release to an English redcoat, and receiving her broken and humiliated Highlander husband back into her strong arms. For there is no point in pretending that this corrosive business of national humiliation does not bear more heavily on men than on women. In our culture, until very recently, the defence of the nation or tribe was regarded, categorically, as a task for the menfolk; and if the nation fell under outside rule, it was the men who had to bear the shame of it. Of course, Scottish men have different ways of dealing with this trauma. Some become locked forever in a kind of football fanatical adolescence, reliving unresolved battles every Saturday. Some become touchy wee bastards. Some resign from the business of masculinity altogether, and become old sweetie wives; some become classic sublimated "Scotsmen on the make", shooting up the professional hierarchies of the British state like greased lightning. But they all carry the wound somewhere; which is why, by and large, it is men and not women who gather to cheer, with great visceral roars of pleasure, any team at all that is giving England a stuffing.
Nor is there any point in pretending that this experience has not affected relations between Scottish men and Scottish women...Throughout my childhood in weel doing working class Scotland, I rarely met a woman who didn't speak of her husband either with some contempt, or with a kind of affectionate indulgence that seemed largely maternal; the consensus seemed to be that men "cannae staun up tae things the wey women can". [But] it would be wrong to imagine that this experience of male humiliation is a uniquely Scottish one. On the contrary, every time men suffer an obvious blow at the hands of society, whether by the subjugation of the group to which they belong or - more commonly - by the economic humiliation of redundancy, poverty, rejection by the labour market, this subtle transfer of real confidence from men to women takes place.
In a country like Scotland - and perhaps many others too - women's instinct to mother and protect their menfolk, and not to confront and challenge them, runs fathoms deep. And the trouble is that instinct exists for no trivial reason, but because we have lived in a culture where it has been impossible to deny that men are sometimes damaged by history as badly as women are, and worse. Babying men along like overgrown children, like idiots who can't be trusted to boil an egg or mind their own offspring, like people who cannot bear hard truths and have to be cocooned in a conspiracy of silence, is clearly no lasting answer.. But it has often been our way; and until women stop offering that matronising indulgence to men who should be their equal partners, and men become strong enough in themselves to stop accepting it from women who should be theirs, the road to equal representation, in the public world men have always called their own, is bound to be a difficult one.
RIGHTING WRONGS
Yes, I receive long-held dissatisfactions from both my home countries. For wrongs of the kind that occur within one person's lifetime, like those recovered in my trip to India, the deliberate physical rites of going back can return a sense of solidity and integration. Perhaps now, like others who belong to more than one culture or country - for example, those scapegoated ethnic minorities - I can consider myself to be more qualified as an interested and tolerant citizen of the world. Travel, as they say, broadens the mind. I used to be irritated at (indeed prejudiced about) some of my Indian colleagues' ways. In India, I suffered none of the oppression, fear, poverty, or disrespect that minorities in Britain can expect. But now I know better what it's like to be the odd one out who has to cope with a very different dominant culture . And I can understand where the values and patterns come from, and how they link and serve their families back home. The patterns that irritated me in Britain, don't just fit in India, they are essential to the way life and society have operated there for much much longer than British ways have.
India has absorbed some of those British ways and other temporary British intrusions (including me!) on the way. So, bearing this model of integration in mind as well as the strife and the healing going on in other parts of the world, let's hope that, during (and after) this Year of Tolerance, multi-racial Britain can return our colonial hosts' compliments to actively enjoy and broaden our minds and lives together across colours and cultures of origin - cultures that have been treated so intolerably by the worldwide descendants of those Norman conquerors. Let's not 'fear the differences in ourselves'. And I say that with a hand on both my hearts!
It takes rituals - or, more correctly, all the work that goes before them - to begin to address large and complex wrongs for individuals and small groups over the shorter time scale of one generation. But what kind of ritual process would it take to right the huge international wrongs of centuries ago, such as those between the Scots and English (which are relatively minor compared to other world conflicts)? At a recent conference, I was priveleged to hear John Alderdice, a Psychotherapist and leader of the Alliance party in Northern Ireland, describing something of the work that has been going into the Irish peace process, and of the similarities between his two roles. Out of this came the profoundly significant multi-partisan ritual laying of the wreath in Dublin on 28th April to commemorate for the first time all those Irish who have fought and died in war, whatever their uniform. John Alderdice drew on family systems ideas. Any suggestions for the Anglo-Scottish parallel? After we've practiced on that, we could go for the big ones!
"When I was a child, my mother would threaten all unwanted behaviour with the ultimate deterrent: 'You'll end up in the Bin.' And" continues Michael Shotter, child psychiatrist, writing in Hospital Doctor (20.4.95), "so have the mentally ill been a scapegoat group - like gypsies, Jews, blacks and homosexuals - to be ostracised for their differences to protect the fear of difference in ourselves." His article was about the insidious stigmatising of mental health problems in the day-to-day language and character stereotypes which the public, media, politicians (and doctors too) frequently use to confirm their prejudices and reinforce the vicious circle of reaction to the aggression around us. Try it out for yourself - hardly a news report or soap episode goes by without a prejudicial use of 'mad', 'loony', 'psycho' or 'nutter'. Michael Shotter hopes that, in this Year of Tolerance, the media will take a critical look at themselves. Linking stigma and tolerance to my interest in rituals in life and family work, I'll continue with last time's theme of ethnicity and race.
When I was a child, I was much more kindly binned. There were no threats or indeed much communication at all. Born in India, I went to boarding school there when I was five. In retrospect, I found my upset on the first occasion (only) was especially because my Dad hadn't come to see me being brave. At ten, I left Indian boarding schools and moves of house for English ones, irritated by the Ayah's crying as I boarded the plane by myself - my family and I weren't being so stupid. I became a child psychiatrist too, helping families where mine wasn't. I determined as an adult to settle in one place. I took Scotland as my adopted country. I like the sharp edges here, a contrast to Home Counties' cotton wool - cotton wool harvested from centuries of unwitting Norman empire over Angles, Scots and Indians alike. I wouldn't like to be scapegoated or threatened, but cotton wool can be maddening too.
More recently, disenchanted with the particular way the NHS now 'values its staff', and with family encouragement, I packed myself off for a month to South India together with my older son, who has been taking a year out. He's lived all his 18 years in one house and community - by that age, I'd lived in 18 houses and schools. My first visit back after 37 years, it felt a really important ritual journey - for myself, and as father and son 'going off into the jungle to kill a wild boar'. A do-it-yourself 'life story book', the trip completed a circle to fill a gnawing space in me. And indeed it would take a book to do the trip justice!
The grime, the cheap hotels, the crowds, the traffic (following ice-rink rules), the noise, the beggars, the cows wandering freely, the food, the (winter!) hot sun, people's chatter, head waggles and gestures, warmth and liveliness, the swarms of auto-rickshaws (but not of flies), the buses, people's simultaneous interdependence and independence, the food, the clothes and colours, the smells, the roads, the shacks and buildings ancient and modern but usually unkempt, the markets, the restaurants, the fruit and snacks, 'chai'- and coffee- sellers, everything so cheap (for a tourist), people's cleanliness, moustachioed men (friends holding hands), beautiful children and women, the families, love and respect, the road-side and roving sellers of anything and everything, the bargaining and baksheesh, the railway stations and trains, the temples, the paddy-fields, the forests, the plains, the mountains, the Keralan coconut forests, unspoilt beaches and backwaters, the food, the languages, the universal English business signs and newspapers, the widespread but usually limited knowledge of English, the flowers and birds, the monkeys, the big satellite TV dishes, the un-movable bureaucracy, the contented anarchy and separation of social classes, the self-sufficiency, the ancient continuity of history and religions, the vast extended families of Hindu mythology, the saturation of life by ritual, and - I almost forgot - the extreme poverty. I almost forgot poverty because all I could see was richness. Although we saw things I wouldn't have as a child, I felt instantly and constantly at home.
We visited and photographed important places from my past, unbidden experiences then, broken off in unreal suspended animation until validated and re-edited through shared adult eyes now. I buried to rot in the boarding school grounds a selection of my self-imposed burden of newpaper cuttings for this column, returning to their roots a symbol of the consequences of that upbringing. To the endless enquiries, I enjoyed declaring that I was like them 'a native of India'. Father and son, amongst all the other things we shared, did indeed take a dawn ride into the jungle on an elephant, but it wasn't light enough even to shoot photographs, let alone wild animals. Leaving the past behind, we holidayed as much for the present before heading back with a haul of memories, stories, photographs, musical instruments and presents. Back to enjoyably cool, clean and quiet Britain - I'll never see London (there for the March AFT Committee) as big, busy and dirty ever again! Back to work - looking not nearly so bureaucratic or disorganised as it did a month earlier. In fact the whole value system looks different through the spectacles of a trip to another world.
HOME MATCH
And back to the Grand Slam rugby match; and this wonderful analysis by Joyce McMillan (Scotland on Sunday, 12.3.95) of culture, gender and ritual in my other home country:
So next weekend, the auld enemies face one another again. The scene, of course will be Twickenham rather than Bannockburn; but in the hearts and minds of thousands, that will hardly matter. On the shoulders of the Scottish team will rest, as usual, a far greater weight of national pride, hope and longing than any mere sporting fixture should ever have to bear; and across the ground will echo the sound of the song the Scottish people seem to have chosen, by unspoken common consent, as their new national anthem, written by Roy Williamson barely 25 years ago, but already entrenched in folk culture. It's a song, of course, whose words bear some examination. "O Flower of Scotland" it mourns, of those who died in Scotland's last great military victory over the English 681 years ago. "When shall we see the like again? Who fought and died for your wee bit hill and glen..." For what it expresses, with striking clarity, is Scotland's unassuaged longing for victory over the auld enemy, and for the kind of Scotsmen - apparently no longer among us - who had the courage and strength to achieve it. And the fact seems to be that almost 700 years after Bannockburn, and 500 after the appalling national defeat at Flodden, this song - dismal, self-pitying, backward-looking and English-obsessed as it is - touches a place that is still unhealed, that throbs and aches every time some BBC weatherman ignores floods and blizzards in Glasgow, or some announcer can't be bothered to check the pronunciation of a Scottish place name. Of course, you can call these minor insults pin-pricks; but they hurt because they hit the same nerves as much older and deeper injuries, never properly mourned, acknowledged or accepted.
And I thought about all this again in Jackie Leven's brilliant deconstruction (Scotswoman 8.3.95) of Millais' painting The Order of Release in which an immensely commanding and organised looking young Scottish matriarch, child asleep on her shoulder, is seen handing over an order of release to an English redcoat, and receiving her broken and humiliated Highlander husband back into her strong arms. For there is no point in pretending that this corrosive business of national humiliation does not bear more heavily on men than on women. In our culture, until very recently, the defence of the nation or tribe was regarded, categorically, as a task for the menfolk; and if the nation fell under outside rule, it was the men who had to bear the shame of it. Of course, Scottish men have different ways of dealing with this trauma. Some become locked forever in a kind of football fanatical adolescence, reliving unresolved battles every Saturday. Some become touchy wee bastards. Some resign from the business of masculinity altogether, and become old sweetie wives; some become classic sublimated "Scotsmen on the make", shooting up the professional hierarchies of the British state like greased lightning. But they all carry the wound somewhere; which is why, by and large, it is men and not women who gather to cheer, with great visceral roars of pleasure, any team at all that is giving England a stuffing.
Nor is there any point in pretending that this experience has not affected relations between Scottish men and Scottish women...Throughout my childhood in weel doing working class Scotland, I rarely met a woman who didn't speak of her husband either with some contempt, or with a kind of affectionate indulgence that seemed largely maternal; the consensus seemed to be that men "cannae staun up tae things the wey women can". [But] it would be wrong to imagine that this experience of male humiliation is a uniquely Scottish one. On the contrary, every time men suffer an obvious blow at the hands of society, whether by the subjugation of the group to which they belong or - more commonly - by the economic humiliation of redundancy, poverty, rejection by the labour market, this subtle transfer of real confidence from men to women takes place.
In a country like Scotland - and perhaps many others too - women's instinct to mother and protect their menfolk, and not to confront and challenge them, runs fathoms deep. And the trouble is that instinct exists for no trivial reason, but because we have lived in a culture where it has been impossible to deny that men are sometimes damaged by history as badly as women are, and worse. Babying men along like overgrown children, like idiots who can't be trusted to boil an egg or mind their own offspring, like people who cannot bear hard truths and have to be cocooned in a conspiracy of silence, is clearly no lasting answer.. But it has often been our way; and until women stop offering that matronising indulgence to men who should be their equal partners, and men become strong enough in themselves to stop accepting it from women who should be theirs, the road to equal representation, in the public world men have always called their own, is bound to be a difficult one.
RIGHTING WRONGS
Yes, I receive long-held dissatisfactions from both my home countries. For wrongs of the kind that occur within one person's lifetime, like those recovered in my trip to India, the deliberate physical rites of going back can return a sense of solidity and integration. Perhaps now, like others who belong to more than one culture or country - for example, those scapegoated ethnic minorities - I can consider myself to be more qualified as an interested and tolerant citizen of the world. Travel, as they say, broadens the mind. I used to be irritated at (indeed prejudiced about) some of my Indian colleagues' ways. In India, I suffered none of the oppression, fear, poverty, or disrespect that minorities in Britain can expect. But now I know better what it's like to be the odd one out who has to cope with a very different dominant culture . And I can understand where the values and patterns come from, and how they link and serve their families back home. The patterns that irritated me in Britain, don't just fit in India, they are essential to the way life and society have operated there for much much longer than British ways have.
India has absorbed some of those British ways and other temporary British intrusions (including me!) on the way. So, bearing this model of integration in mind as well as the strife and the healing going on in other parts of the world, let's hope that, during (and after) this Year of Tolerance, multi-racial Britain can return our colonial hosts' compliments to actively enjoy and broaden our minds and lives together across colours and cultures of origin - cultures that have been treated so intolerably by the worldwide descendants of those Norman conquerors. Let's not 'fear the differences in ourselves'. And I say that with a hand on both my hearts!
It takes rituals - or, more correctly, all the work that goes before them - to begin to address large and complex wrongs for individuals and small groups over the shorter time scale of one generation. But what kind of ritual process would it take to right the huge international wrongs of centuries ago, such as those between the Scots and English (which are relatively minor compared to other world conflicts)? At a recent conference, I was priveleged to hear John Alderdice, a Psychotherapist and leader of the Alliance party in Northern Ireland, describing something of the work that has been going into the Irish peace process, and of the similarities between his two roles. Out of this came the profoundly significant multi-partisan ritual laying of the wreath in Dublin on 28th April to commemorate for the first time all those Irish who have fought and died in war, whatever their uniform. John Alderdice drew on family systems ideas. Any suggestions for the Anglo-Scottish parallel? After we've practiced on that, we could go for the big ones!
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