In A Race, the Big Mix Ups and Clash of Civilizations


http://www.webcom.com/intvoice/emily8.html


"Enthusiasm doesn't appear to be a factor in modern-day relationships between Filipinas (and other Asian women such as Sri Lankans and Thais) and men of lighter color in the Middle East. Dozens of Asian female domestic workers in that region have reported being raped by their employers. The best-known example of such a woman is Sara Balabagan. A teenager from the Philippines working as a maid in the United Arab Emirates to support her family back home, she stabbed her eighty-four-year-old employer to death when he tried to rape her (talk about a dirty old man!). She was originally sentenced to death for the killing but later acquitted following international protest."

Well. You see what Ms. Reyes didn't do was READ me. First mistake is reading only oneself. Joe Green taught me that. Don't sit in your mirrored rooms so often...get out and do a little research. Lanny taught me to google the odd thing and the not so odd thing. He is a great friend of monumental importance to me as a writer. Always obscure and never unkind.

I've been here and there you see. Mostly here, where I am. On that weird inter-racial island, married to someone from a country that starts with an L, hahahaha. We married quite young, 18. I had no idea that I'd one day be in the epicenter of well...the epicenter of the big Clash. At 18, I didn't know Libya from Lithuania from Liberia. And my husband came to me in the desert near the Gadsden Hotel from the other hemisphere and a place called Liberia. Liberia, as some might already know, is the country "invented" to accomodate repatriated slaves and the name itself is supposed to connote Liberty. Hmm. My husband grew up there during the awfulness of Talbot and Doe and saw unrest few of us could imagine. Massacres and bloodlettings that stagger the imagination. He came to me in the desert to a small town only 4 km from Greater Mexico. I was raised on that sort of bi-valence. I was what we used to call, "a blue-eyed Mexican". I excelled the other gringos in Spanish and was the only 'colorless' student to attend the Spanish Language State Championship which kind of makes me laugh because I know how hard it is for some rednecks to say MEXICAN. I spoke Mexican, not Castillian even though good ole Ines Bidot from Cuba tried very hard to give us the vosotros. Nevermind though, it isn't important. I grew up bi-valent and married a man who spent his adolescence in Liberia and had been born, spent his early childhood on a border, like me, the Lebanese/Israeli border. It is perhaps our common tie. I'll never forget the first time he went with me to our housekeeper's home near Naco Sonora. He felt he was home with her bare concrete floors and the dolls she nailed to the walls which were still in the boxes with plastic wrappers from the factories in which they were made. Those dolls were too valuable to open for Carolina. Good ole Carolina. If only I had another daughter I'd name her accordingly. Carolina. Carolina was terrified of snakes because (as the family myth goes) she saw someone murdered by a rattlesnake once. Oh, the fun my brother and I had chasing her around the house with a plastic snake! We coulda killed her. The smell and taste and feel of home made tortillas, dozens and dozens of them that she'd stack in a huge pile on the counter under a tea towel to keep them from drying out. I make them now but the best I've ever done is five dozen and that required the help of my two daughters. Big dusty job tortilla making. A labor of love.

When I finally traveled to his hometown, a small hamlet which is almost the exact same distance from Israel as Bisbee is from Mexico, I saw the bare concrete floor of his grandparent's lowly home. I wept. No wonder he felt he could sit with Carolina in her "salon", that tattered, warm place where I spent so many hours either picking Carolina up or dropping her off, staying just a little while to eat a bowl of Menudo or a few tamales. No wonder. And no wonder that now, when we go to the south of Lebanon and sit by the old folks in their worn out old hovel, I am finally able to sleep the best sleep. The sleep of centuries. I wake up feeling loved and beautiful and surrounded by some of the best people I've ever known.

My suggestion to those that feel they have been unduly targeted by some imagined hostility to race, read the Dove's Midrash. Read it well. It is the story of the Book of Ruth and how the Clash of Civilizations might be seen from a Bird's Eye View.

http://carmenisacat.blogspot.com/2006/03/new-and-improved-but-never-finished.html