love as destructive force

Posted on July 29, 2012 by ofurhe

It’s takes no strength to be a cynic, and I don’t harbor illusions that it’s courageous or noble. But right now this is how I feel, and these are my thoughts and I promised myself I would write these down once a week. Indeed this week I seek to record these thoughts because I fear they might change, and I need to record how I’m feeling now so I can mark my progress in the future, when I might finally grow out of my adolescent views on love.

Love is one of the most destructive and dangerous forces we know. Yet people celebrate it rather than fear it. I’m not talking about what happens after love, heartbreak, divorce and death being its common aftermath. And this isn’t a bros before hos rant about the friends left behind when you pursue your own happiness and spend all your time with a significant other. I’m talking about how love itself is force, producing just as much evil as good.

As a teenager I was discouraged from using the word hate, they said it was too strong, and added unnecessary negativity to the world; but I observed that people are encouraged to use the word love, even overusing it. Most people agree that love and hate are two sides of the same coin, but when we chose to focus only on the one side we forget the other (I feel it is just as important to know how it feels to be hated for no reason as it does to be loved, unconditionally*). I believe that all love can be re-read as hate, its equal and opposite reaction. It seems that much as your are attracted to the things that you love, as much as you want to protect them, this is how much you are disgusted by things you don’t love, and want them to disappear. Every attraction has a reaction.

For many, the ultimate culmination of love is sex, whose ultimate end is a child. People say they love children because they are full of potential, but it’s this potential that scares me. As much potential as a child has to do good, so have they to do evil. Children are the ultimate agents of chaos. Bringing extreme joy and extreme sadness with them, and leaving love and frustration in their wake.

When a person loves another person, this is celebrated, but many will agree that a love of objects can be destructive. People say this love is ‘unhealthy’ and ‘unnatural’. But there’s a reason why we use the same word, love; the feeling is the same. I posit that it’s not the object of love that’s the problem, its’ the act of loving which corrupts relationships. I don’t believe that love is a universal salve, bringing Goodness to everything is is applied to. I’m not arguing that love is not transformative, love changes things, it changes the subject and the object. But change isn’t always good. I think my point here is just that love is dangerous and that people should use discretion around it, not blindly follow it wherever it takes them.

*When I was younger I felt it was my responsibility to hate those I who I thought had never been hated. It’s embarassingly presumptuous to pretend to know what someone else has, or has not felt before. But when you’re a teenager, you think you know what’s best for everyone.

Unusual Things I’m Afraid of

Posted on May 27, 2012 by ofurhe

Here is a list of some slightly unusual things that I avoid and some of the reasons why:

Phones:
Most people think I don’t have a cell phone because I’m stubborn. I am extremely stubborn, so of course that has a lot to do with it (and everything else I do), but I am not a luddite (I’m writing this on an iPad), and in fact the reason I don’t have a cell phone is psychological. I have a fear of phones (phonofobia) because of a traumatic experience I had when I was young.

It seems stupid when I talk about it now, but I think it’ll help to write about it anyway. I think I was maybe 8 years old, I had gone to a summer arts camp called Kids in Clay where I learned to use the potter’s wheel. At the end of the camp they did one last kiln firing (this was my best work, the culmination of 2 weeks or training or whatever) and told us to pick up our pieces within a couple weeks or they would be destroyed and used for mosaics or something. My mom agreed to drive me to pick them up but I had to call them first to make sure they would be open and also that they hadn’t already destroyed my things since I had waited a while. As I remember it, one night, my mom was out and I decided to call the clay studio (I really wanted to pick up this nice vase I had made for her). I must have misdialed because I didn’t get the clay studio I got a very angry man. I called and asked if it was Kids in Clay, and the man screamed obscenities at me, saying I needed to stop calling. It didn’t occur to me to hang up on this person, I was an extremely polite child and I didn’t understand the power of hanging up (I did, later, go through a phase in middle school where I just hung up on everyone… I didn’t have a lot of friends in middle school). He asked who I was and I told him I was Ofurhe Igbinedion, to which he laughed, not believing that such a name could exist. This is probably when I started crying, I could feel his vitriol through the phone. I told him I was only 8 years old, and he didn’t believe me about that either, I’m sure I sounded like a 25 year old, because that’s the body I had, but nonetheless I was telling the truth. He continued to scream at me that I had no business calling him and how did I even get this number. I said I was trying to get my pottery back from Kids in Clay, which he also didn’t believe. Apparently he had recently left his job and had been getting harassing calls from former coworkers, he was convinced I was one of them. I was not. At this point my brother says that he took the phone and told the man to leave me alone and hung up. All I remember is crying, I think I cried the rest of the night, and I don’t think I ever got my pottery back.

This story seems really stupid, but it was really traumatic for me, I actually have tears in my eyes just writing about it. I was a really sensitive kid on an innocent errand and I was subjected to this unhinged man. I have had anxiety around phones ever since. With technology the way that it is, ‘Just email me’ has become my mantra. I have built a life around this, I use my friends phones when necessary, but mostly I don’t get in situations where a phone is the only way out (I’m actually not sure such a situation exists).

Cars:
I’m 24 years old and I don’t know how to drive. I say it’s because I went to boarding school (where I didn’t have a car), then lived in Chicago and New York where the public transportation is more than adequate. People often think I’m taking an environmental stand, which is part of it, but in truth, this is psychological too. Statistically car accidents are one of the leading causes of severe injury and death around the world and I’ve known this for a long time. Both my father and my uncle were nearly killed in car crashes.

Update 5-30-12 according to my mother, my memory of the following is not really accurate, whatevs

My father emmigrated from Nigeria in the 70s and has only gone back a few times since. The last time he went I was around 1 year old, he got in a nearly fatal car crash, came back home, and never went back to Nigeria.

When I was 8 or 10 my father and my uncle got a 280 ZX. I remember the first time they pulled up to the driveway and my brother and I got to ride in it. We all thought it was pretty awesome. My uncle, especially, spent a lot of time working on it. One night when we were little he and my father apparently got into a fight and my uncle drove off in a fit of anger. He almost died that evening, and since the fight was a big one, he didn’t talk to my father for a long time after. I actually haven’t seen him since. I remember my father talking to me about how driving angry is as dangerous as driving drunk.

I was starting to learn how to drive last year, but then I got in a car accident with my roommate. While we weren’t seriously injured, it brought up a lot of anxiety for me and I haven’t been behind a wheel since. Cars are dangerous, and they are a responsibility I don’t feel quite ready for.

When I was in New York I think I only took cabs twice, not just because they’re expensive, but because it always feels like you’re getting into a car with a total stranger, which I find truly disconcerting.

Bikes:
I like riding bikes in open spaces, but I’ve never thought it was fun to do in the city, it always struck me as dangerous. When I was in college, a good friend of mine clipped two bikers on her commute, after which her boyfriend took away her keys. A few years later a friend of mine, Sylvia, died when she was hit by a truck while commuting to work on her bicycle. I know she would want me to keep biking, but it reinforced my idea that biking in a city is inherently too dangerous. One of these days I’ll learn more about bike safety, put on a helmet, bike to work, and think of her. Not today.

Groups of Young Men:
This I mostly have gone over in the Street Harassment Post. I think women of the world could be divided into those that are excited by groups of strange young men and those who fear them. I fall squarely in the latter camp.

Photographs:
I am a lot better about my photophobia lately, but I dare you to find a picture of me from high school. I would do pretty much anything to avoid being in a photo. It wasn’t because I had low self esteem, I was in good shape and actually pretty hot in high school (and aware of it myself). I was mostly afraid that I was being misrepresented. In high school and college it was really important to me to cultivate my mind (otherwise, why move away from California?). I felt that when people looked at a photo of me they saw a black girl, they didn’t see my mind, which I had spent so much time, money and energy to cultivate. Not to mention, if it was a weird picture there is a risk that they would remember me like that forever. A risk I was unwilling to take. A picture only portrays a certain aspect of a single moment, what about all the other aspects of that moment? what about all the other moments?

updated 5-29-12 – When I was born my parents were involved in a spiritual community, they were devotees of a guru named Adi Da. Growing up in the community the children read books that the guru had written, one of the most important ones was called ‘What to Remember to be Happy.’ We had several paper copies of this book as well as the book on tape, it was a mantra and I could recite it by heart right now. The book starts with an image of an apple and says ‘Have you heard this is an apple?’ and continues with a tree and an image of a boy and a girl. It says if you ask people what these things are and where they came from they may say ‘God Made it’ or ‘I don’t know,’ and that in fact, no one knows what these things are and how they came to be (not even our parents, not even the president). The moral of the book is that we are more than what we look like, and no one can take that away from you.

While I know that everyone with any spirituality or religion knows that they are more than what they look like, it was a hugely important tenant of my upbringing. I think that to me I find photography a celebration of what you look like, and it misses the more important thing, the soul, the part that no one can take away from you.

Loud Noises:
This is more general, and there is no real trauma associated with this. I just have very sensitive hearing, and I sleep a lot, so this is a major problem for me. Loud noises make me want to curl up in a ball and die.

I’ll probably keep adding to this as I think of more.

5-27-12 – I guess having sex should go on here, but I don’t really feel this is the appropriate format to discuss this. Suffice it to say, I have no wish to end up pregnant or diseased.

A Wealth

Posted on May 24, 2012 by ofurhe

This morning I woke up from a terrifying nightmare where someone kept trying to read my journals, it was awful. It didn’t take much for me to realize it has something to do with some blogposts I had been planning for today, one more political and one more personal than usual. The personal one I have amended and posted below, and the more political one about the Afghan war I will post soon.

I can’t stop thinking about the visceral feeling of disgust and disdain. They way scorn feels in your body, to be embarrassed or ashamed to even be near something. Lately I have been shown some disgusting parts of my own self. The idea that I have incited this same feeling of revulsion in someone else is truly sad and terrifying. But mostly it’s the emptiest feeling in the world to know that your secrets are out, everyone knew them the whole time, and that some of the ideas you’ve been fighting against were right all along.

But here’s the thing, I have the smartest, most talented and awesome friends in the world. Today I want to celebrate some of the creative achievements of my friends:
A Chapter from Lily’s Book
I’mRevolting’s Revolutionary Collection of Feminist Things
A Travel Video from Jiffles
James’ Geologist Cover Band
My favorite song from Cindy’s new EP
Nat’s Muckraking Journalism (Maybe he can tell me why it was taken down from the New York Daily News?)

If you want me to I’ll take your link down that’s cool, but keep in mind that you guys are the only ones who read this so…

P.s. A bunch of buddies involved in C.A.M.P.

Part 1: Zone of Discomfort

Posted on March 23, 2012 by ofurhe

I’ve read 5 whole books in the past couple weeks. Okay, so each of these books should have taken me less than a day to read and they were mostly distractions from the more serious book that I am ostensibly reading, but they were all great. I read, the Hunger Games Trilogy, Brokeback Mountain (I know it’s a short story, and I actually read most of the stories in Close Range but this one was on its own, so it counts), and Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me (and other concerns). Instead of giving a book report about how great the books were (and all these books were great, except Mockingjay was just okay), I’m gonna talk about my experience reading these books (because a blog is like a therapy session, narcissism is allowed), if you want to know the plots, read them yourself, or watch the movies. I won’t give anything away.

I started the Hunger Games when I left for Afghanistan. When I was working in New York publishing I heard about and saw so many good books that I realized I couldn’t read everything and I was going to need a some ground rules. I settled on this, if I get 3 independent recommendations for the same book it is worth sinking my teeth into (now my definition of the word ‘recommendation’ is extremely broad and in the past I have included the fact that a book is on sale as a recommendation). I had heard good buzz about the Hunger Games so when David Plotz recommended it on the Double X Gabfest, I was waiting outside a local bookstore before I left for New York and I had a new (miles-earning!) credit card burning a hole in my pocket it was the American Express sticker on the door that served as my final recommendation.

I slept on the plane to New York, and while there I was amused enough that I didn’t start reading the book until my flight from Frankfurt to Dubai. By the time I got on the flight from Dubai to Kabul, Katniss was leaving the Capitol for the Hunger Games arena. The irony was not lost on me.

Katniss was prepared, she had her knowledge of hunting, her experience with hunger and her determination to avenge her sister. I had a couple years of Persian and Pashto, experience traveling abroad from an early age, and the determination to stick it to all the haterz who thought I shouldn’t go to Afghanistan. Katniss had her Mockingjay pin, I had postcards from my hometown. Katniss was leaving a land of excess to a go to an impoverished war zone; I was leaving Dubai to go to Kabul.

America is fighting a war in Afghanistan. Apparently Suzanne Collins got the idea for the Hunger Games while watching TV; she was flipping between a reality show and footage of the Iraq war and they started to blend together. The hunger games is, in a way, an extreme reality show, like Survivor except you dont get voted off, you get killed. The destruction is highly televised, the humanity isn’t. In the states, the footage we get of Afghanistan is all of war and destruction. I got to Afghanstan days after the Qur’an burning and the streets were calm, not burning with American effigies. Our tour guide told us that there had been some peaceful protests where the police took care of security, but that these were over. The people we talked to were very upset about what happened, but they had heard Obama’s apology and they understood that it was an accident, they also said their mullas had told them to be patient and calm. These sorts of discrepancies made me wonder whether Kabul was like district 13; had the American media been showing the same loop of angry protestors burning the American flag over the sound of the muezzin? I had all but stopped reading the news coverage of Afghanistan by the time I went to college, I knew people in Kabul who went to work every day, it couldn’t be the burning war zone I saw on TV. What was really going on?*

I wanted to see for myself, and talk to some people, but in a city like Kabul, where billions of dollars come in from foreigners every year, who can you trust? Everyone has an agenda. Even our tour guide wants to show the best face of the country, and his livelihood depends on keeping us happy. We took a lot of pictures, but like the tributes in the arena, everyone knew we were watching from home. How do you smile when you know someone is watching, when they have the ability to drop help from the sky? We interviewed, and filmed, and tried to get to know people and tell their stories, but our time was short and I’m sure some of their messages were lost in translation.

The Hunger Games had a focus on appearances, style, costumes and camouflage. Having never worn a headscarf before, the hijab felt like a costume to me, and I tried my hardest to fit into it. I didn’t have Cinna (or Lenny Kravitz) to help me prepare for the my arena so I just had to wing it. In a way, there is no camouflage more perfect than the burka, hiding in plain sight. I didn’t wear the burka, but with the hijab I could be similarly incognito. At the end of the day instead of looking up to the sky to see the score and hear the anthem, I lay in my bed and listened to the muezzin and wrote about my day.

I tried many things to distract myself so I wouldn’t finish the Hunger Games and I could save it for the trip home. I read a copy of Brokeback Mountain that I found in the guest house, I blogged about my experience, I went to bed early, but in the end, I finished the book, counting on the fact that I would soon be able to buy the sequel in the Dubai airport.

One of the themes in the Hunger Games was fire; the coal in district 12, the way Gale smells like smoke, Katniss’s costume, the fires in the arena. As it was late winter in Afghanistan, fire became a theme of the trip too, children sold smoke for good luck, men warmed their hands in small fires, we visited bakeries where people were crowded around ovens and by the end of the trip each of us smelled like smoke too because each of our rooms in the guest house was heated by a wood chimney. The only time I think I was ever in danger on my trip to Afghanistan was actually in my own room. I was trying to read and was starting to nod off when my room started to fill with smoke. I thought it would go away, and tried to sleep, but I started coughing and noticed by flashlight that the room was hazy, I couldn’t see very well. I was so tired I couldn’t be bothered to get up. When my eyes started to water I tried to open the window by my bed, but the window was covered in plastic to keep the heat in so it wasn’t doing any good. After a few more minutes of coughing I put on my headscarf and went to get the guard. When I opened the door, I saw his look of surprise as smoke billowed out of my room. For a second I felt like Katniss, escaping from the fire that woke her up in the night. But mostly I felt like an idiot when Naqib told me his solution was just to open another window and leave the door open for a few minutes.

On the way home I prepared for my presentation in my hometown. The trip had changed me, and I needed to show that, but I also wanted people to recognize that I was the same person, and that I hadn’t been corrupted by the Middle East. Mostly what I felt though, was dirty. When I got to Dubai my first reaction was that the people looked so white and the airport seemed so clean. Arriving in New York, I felt even grimier after 15 hours on a plane, like Katniss after the games, I needed a skin polish before I got home. I settled for an overpriced mani pedi at JFK.

*I really do not mean to denigrate the journalists who risk life and limb to report the ongoing war. I have the utmost respect for them and the work that they do.

————————————————————————————————-

I have started a new page about my trip to Afghanistan, please visit that page for pictures and some choice thoughts and feelings about the trip. I try to make this blog about my current thoughts and feelings and for or better or for worse, I am no longer in Afghanistan. I’ve touched on the issue of hijab in the last post and in this post I talked about the war so I think that answers some of the major hot topics of the trip. If you have any specific questions please feel free to email me or write in the comments and I’ll try to address them.

Valentine’s Day is Wack

Posted on February 11, 2012 by ofurhe

Wiggity wack? No, just regular
–teen girl squad

Of all the prejudices I come up against every day the most obnoxious, lately, is the simple, pervasive assumption that as a woman, I won’t be satisfied without a husband, 2.5 kids, and a house in the suburbs. When I say I don’t want this, people make another set of assumptions;

A) I’m lying
B) I’m a lesbian
C) I’m in denial
D) I had a bad breakup
E) I don’t know what good sex is like
F) I’m cynical because I come from a broken home
G) I just haven’t found the right guy

Maybe they’re right, or perhaps I’d enjoy one of the more alternative, unmarried relationships recently described in this Atlantic article or this hairpin piece from a few years ago. A relationship with separate beds, or separate rooms, or separate wings (like Beauty and the Beast), or separate houses (like Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera who had adjacent houses joined by a walkway) or maybe even (gasp!) not a romantic relationship at all. Maybe as a child, I didn’t dream of a house with a husband and a white picket fence and a bunch of kids on the lawn, I dreamed of Ms. Honey’s cottage in Matilda (except, SPOILER ALERT; I wouldn’t have adopted Matilda at the end because I don’t like kids).

In writing all these letters for my month of letters I’ve been out shopping for cards and postcards, only to be reminded that it’s Valentine’s day next week and they’ve replaced all the good cards with red and pink hearts. I don’t hate Valentine’s day (who could hate this old school Outkast jam), but I hate the look of pity people give me when I say I’ve never had a date (this fact is true every day, not just Valentine’s day, but somehow people feel more sorry for me on Valentine’s Day). Valentine’s Day celebrates one particular type of romantic love, but as Jane Austen says in Mansfield Park:

“There are as many forms of love as there are moments in time.”

Here’s Steinbeck in a letter to his son:

“There are several kinds of love. One is a selfish, mean, grasping, egotistical thing which uses love for self-importance. This is the ugly and crippling kind. The other is an outpouring of everything good in you—of kindness and consideration and respect—not only the social respect of manners but the greater respect which is recognition of another person as unique and valuable. The first kind can make you sick and small and weak but the second can release in you strength, and courage and goodness and even wisdom you didn’t know you had.”

There is a good quote from Infinite Jest that I want to share, but it’s about 6 pages long. In it David Foster Wallace writes about a paraplegic who made a choice to love without pleasure; to love a woman with no skull, who leaks spinal fluid, has a hook for hands and is in an irreversible coma. To me, this passage made the entire 1000 page book worthwhile.

There is the love between you and your best friend, the love between you and your family, the love between you and your neighbor, anon. How is this love less significant than the love you have with your lover? In a way, the childrens’ version of the holiday is better at celebrating the different forms of love since you have to give cards to everyone, not just the boy you have a crush on.

What other holidays apply only to a certain subset of the population? (Some are religious, but we all get the day off for Christmas)

P.S. Another great post by ehs dub at I’m Revolting, whose birthday is today. You win, all hail the queen.

UPDATE 2/14:
Ryan North stole my idea! JK, only love for Dinosaur Comics.

Social justice

Posted on January 13, 2012 by ofurhe

In my constant struggle for moral clarity and social justice, I have lately been reminded of a troubling fact; justice is as much about lifting people up, as it is about putting (or pulling) people down. It’s not all about rising tides lifting all boats, and bringing people up to the tall bridge (Hanna Rosin’s version of the glass ceiling), it’s also about yanking people down from their pedestals and reminding them what it’s like to feel pain and to be hated just for being who they are.

Obviously you don’t need to be a minority to know what it feels like to be ostracized, we all went through middle school. In adolescence, it seems like everyone’s unbalanced, and sometimes the way you are unbalanced exacerbates someone else’s imbalances. But you can’t seem to help it. Life isn’t fair, and neither is divorce, or sexual harassment, or war, or poverty, or racism, or addiction, or psychosis. It’s not fair that some people are beautiful and others are ugly, that some are born rich, and talented, when the boy you like likes your best friend better, when you’re fired due to budget cuts, when you can’t seem to find the words to say what you want to say, and everyone seems to be speaking a different language altogether.

Everyone feels this, including white people including the beautiful and talented (like Joan Didion), including the 1%. Sometimes I think the occupy movement is mostly about revenge. As much as I crave revenge, there is a certain amount of injustice we just need to accept. And acceptance takes time and patience. And some pain will never go away.

Placeholder

Posted on December 2, 2011 by ofurhe

I don’t have the words today so I’m borrowing other peoples’

as the poet remarks, “Life is a strife, ’tis a struggle, ’tis a dream,” and if he goes on to say it were also “a bubble,” I should feel gratified and sincerely hope some sportive young angel should smash said bubble in his infinite glee and the Almighty bubble-blowing company would start another with rather more of the soothing properties of soap & a little less salt water, one less empty and shiny and one one which there wasn’t such a tendency to slip and pitch, to say nothing of falling off into space & being seen no more.

-Louisa may Alcott, via Eden’s Outcasts

Angela: This life has been a test. If it had been an actual life, you would have received instructions on where to go and what to do.

-Angela Chase, My So-Called Life

I haven’t received my instruction manual for life yet, have you?