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!