CHILD SOLDIERS

But I may have “Beasts of No Nation” all wrong.  The promotion is sexy Idris Elba, but the plot is about child soldiers, the back story for the Elba character.   Here’s the beginning of “Beasts of No Nation”:

http://content.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1135918,00.html

“I am tasting blood. I am feeling like vomiting. The whole place around us is shaking, just shaking rotten fruit from the shelf, just sounding like it will be cracking into many piece and falling on top of us. He is grabbing my leg, pulling it so hard that it is like it will be coming apart like meat, and my body is just sliding slowly from the stall out into the light and onto the mud.

In the light, my breath is coming back and using force to open my chest to make me to coughing and my eye to watering. The whole world is spreading before me and I am looking up to the gray sky moving slowly slowly against the top leaf of all the tall tall Iroko tree. And under this, many smaller tree is fighting each other to climb up to the sunlight. All the leaf is dripping with rainwater and shining like jewel or glass. The grasses by the road is so tall and green past any color I am seeing before. This is making me to think of jubilating, dancing, shouting, singing because Kai! I am saying I am finally dead. I am thinking that maybe this boy is spirit and I should be thanking him for bringing me home to the land of spirits, but before I can even be opening my mouth to be saying anything, he is leaving me on my back in the mud.

“I can see the bottom of truck parking just little bit away from me. Two truck is blocking up the whole road and more are parking on the roadside. The piece of cloth covering them is so torn up and full of hole and the paint is coming off to showing so much rust, like blood, making me to thinking the truck is like wounding animal. And around all the truck, just looking like ghost, are soldier. Some is wearing camouflage, other is wearing T-shirt and jean, but it is not mattering because all of the clothe is tearing and having big hole. Some of them is wearing real boot and the rest is wearing slipper. Some of them is standing at attention with their leg so straight that it is looking like they do not have knee. Some of them is going to toilet against the truck and other is going to toilet into the grasses. Almost everybody is carrying gun. . . .”

drawing by a child soldier

The author, Uzodinma Iweala, comes from a professional family and is well-educated himself, having earned an MD.  He interviewed only one girl, aged 9, who had been a soldier and somehow escaped -- if you can call it that, since she is changed forever.  The rest he found through reading.  The book was his pre-med doctoral thesis at Harvard.

The girl was at the age of latency, pre-adolescent, a stage of exceptional “plasticity” in both body and brain.  The protocol for converting an ordinary child from an ordinary family into a “beast” is to force them to violate every belief and attachment they have, including the love of their own mothers.  This is done by defiling, maiming, destroying loved ones in the child's sight, possibly by the child, so that they dissociate from their former selves, become a sort of zombie, and then rebuild or die.

This is not quite the same thing as late adolescents who volunteer for military service because of poverty, delinquency (forced enlistment used to be offered as an alternative to jail), isolation, patriotism, seeking adventure, hero worship, and other tangled motives.  Both my brothers enlisted in the Marines when they were 17.  I think to them it was a coming of age but they were thinking about having graduated from high school, not their age.  Some groups consider the age line to be 18.  Some people consider service a sort of alternative to college for both men and women.  Like college these days, it is an environment that offers opportunity for rape.  This post is not about that.

I want to think in print about traumatized latency and how to resolve it.  Consider this announcement from a professional psych and art website run by Norman Holland.  I’ll leave the date and place since at this point you could attend, but I often learn as much from the announcements as I do from the actual talks.

Two Hobbits, One Improbable Journey: An Analysis of a Traumatized Boy with an Autism Spectrum Disorder Sam Roth, Ph.D. Monday, March 23, 2015  8-9:30pm  Cambridge Hospital, Learning Center C/D I will talk about a four-year psychoanalysis of an 11 year-old boy with an Autism Spectrum Disorder and a history of traumatizing impingement and neglect.  I had to make numerous adaptations of frame and technique to ensure an alliance and protect the play space for treatment to take root and endure.  One parent or the other was present for every analytic hour in the first two years. The child's non-verbal communications conveyed more about his internal states than did his spare use of words.  Board games with thick rule books provided vital scaffolding for efforts the young man and I made to relate to each other and, later, meaningful symbols and shared references for fantasy play, when it eventually emerged. When we began, it seemed vital that I distinguish between trauma and Asperger's Disorder (now Autism Spectrum Disorder).  By the time the analysis ended, I saw the young man as having both.  I hope this talk will convey what I learned about the particular vulnerabilities of children with Autism Spectrum Disorders and trauma, as well as the particular benefits and challenges of working with them in intensive analytic treatment.

__________

Drawing by a child soldier

What Roth means by a “play space” is a sort of shared working platform like the one that is presumed to keep order in the brain, except that meant to be “playful” in the sense that it is pure experiment: no pressure, no goal except exploration.  Art therapy.  The idea is that the adult goes to the child to listen and learn while they move objects or draw or whatever might get them in tune with each other.  It must be safe.  The adult tries to be “with” the child emotionally and mentally to suss out very early structures of belief and attachment and to support the child through the terror and blankness that are bound to occur.  Then to offer from an adult point of view some options, some "re-framings" as we have come to call it.

But who wants to enter the world of a maimed child from a different culture forced to watch or perform atrocities against his family?  How can an ordinary person, even with special training, understand?  This boy had “autism” which means his brain was not functioning properly in the first place, with his unresponsiveness or inappropriate responses possibly triggering abuse and preventing the seeking of help.  Everywhere in every time there are among us children in this state.  It’s not only in the extreme and ungraspable context of African jungle terrorism, but also in suburbia, in drug nests, in poverty holes, and so on -- even in high-end luxurious surroundings.  Remember that boy whose mother tried to protect him -- until he went to a school and shot children?  He shot her first, a self-generated atrocity.

Play therapy

Roth says,  “the child’s non-verbal communications conveyed more about his internal states than did his spare use of words.  Board games with thick rule books provided vital scaffolding for efforts the young man and and made to relate to each other. . .”   Judging from the mention of hobbits, they were playing something based on “Lord of the Rings.”  When Roth speaks of “frame” and “technique” he means what he has learned some formal protocols for guiding what happens, but the truth is such things really have to be done with empathy, heart and courage on the part of both participants.  As he says, when they don't work, they should be dumped.

Who has the skills and the desire?  Who has the time if the parents are both working or one is missing or the remaining one is struggling?  Who has the money to pay for such things when there are elements in our government who would not even pay for a kid’s school lunch if they could help it.  They would line up all the faulty underachieving fat asses lounging around the world and just shoot them.  That is, they think a civilized country is the same as a terrorist army in the jungle.  What traumas made them so fearful?  How do we reframe them?  Who even wants to?  Elected officials are not latency children between 6 and 12.  This is a social and political spectrum disorder.

Another drawing by a former captive child.

If you can stand it, this is a pretty good article about one of Kona’s captives who escaped, made it home, and grew up.  It IS possible.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/africaandindianocean/uganda/10621792/Konys-child-soldiers-When-you-kill-for-the-first-time-you-change.html

"BEASTS OF NO NATION" -- WHAT'S A NATION?

Idris Elba

“Beasts of No Nation.” starring Idris Elba is going to be the next big “game-changer” on Netflix.  I can hardly wait, not just because I’m an Idris Elba fan, but because the concept of “nations” is on the table now.  Of course, since I've spent so many years on the Blackfeet rez, the idea of nations is always walking up the street here, scaring some with its swagger and prompting sneering or sentimentality from newspaper stories.  The white people think they’re a nation, though Valier’s Belgian roots are so recent (about a century) that they get a little distracted about which is their nation, and almost none have any consciousness of how mixed up Belgium’s roots really are, split between France and Germany, also conglomerates. 

Blackfeet, a loose confederacy at first contact, became fragments reduced to a few hundred people -- half of them children -- corraled on reservations and managed first by the army (they were formally assigned to the army in the cabinet) and then by missionaries, a rivalrous free-lance Jesuit contingent and the legally assigned Methodists.  That was the Piegan, Southern Pikuni branch.  The US management plan was to let them die out.  Instead they transformed and regrouped.  Now their problem is how to pry the BIA off their backs and find some way to unite the whole when survival has made them so various, one group going this way and another going that way.  The “half-breed” problem has been solved by physically over the years replacing the dyad “white/red” terms with a spectrum of people.

Another interesting factor is that the Canadian Siksika survivors, assigned to various reserves, were treated by Canada as a separate people who should be preserved that way.  (English empire thinking -- keep the wogs as admirers and clients.)  White people were kept out.  Language was preserved.  Only the ceremonies were suppressed by the inevitable missionaries.  They were meant to be children, dependents, the Queen’s people.

So now, part of the Siksika strategy for a return to the identity of the Nitzitahpi is to reconstitute the three parts of the original coalition in a new cross-border "nation".  (The fourth part, the Scabby Robes, died with Darrell Robes Kipp.)

Israeli soldier -- the more things change, the more they stay the same

The idea of nations is still a fragile one: consider Israel, which was created by displaced peoples from many other places as a kind of compensation for genocidal suffering and persecution.  Not that Jews haven’t contended with that since Pharoah, but that this particular iteration was engineered [sic] by Germans, supposedly the most rational and introspective people, at least since the Thirty Years War in Europe which was supposed to establish where the lines were between nations.  (See “Game of Thrones.”)  Then, supposedly having settled who was in and who was out of which invented coalition of tribes and princedoms (if not kingdoms), those peoples set out on their wooden sailing ships to impose "nations" on all the other continents.

Of course, the Chinese were far more experienced and the only thing that finally brought them into the Euro-world was addiction to opium, which the “modern world” supplied.  The commodities always more valuable than even blood diamonds are drugs and human trafficking.

http://www.walkingbutterfly.com/2010/12/22/when-you-kill-ten-million-africans-you-arent-called-hitler/

Recently, relieved of overlords like King Leopold II of Belgium, some Africans fell back into the original tribal hydraulics.  (Darrell used to talk about tribal hydraulics on the Plains before contact.)  Force and food, force and food.  Sex is secondary, since it can always be forced onto the stigmatized and weak -- the starved.  But now there is the “Liberia dynamic,” which is educated urban people who enter the tribal tides and master a form of surfing on the constant political waves from the larger world.  I will be fascinated to see how this story plays out in terms of the international corporations who can now destroy nations  with their HIV/AIDS or Ebola pharma drugs, as effective as opium politics.

Uzodinma Iweala, author of "Beasts of No Nation"

Harvard grad, like Darrell Kipp.  

I’ve ordered this book -- “Beasts of No Nation," by Uzodinma Iweala.   It’s only a penny plus shipping on Amazon -- but I’m wondering if this is only “The Wire” writ large.  That’s where I learned who Idris Abba is and what he can do. Somehow empires empower wogs even though they try to hold them down.  (I’m deliberately using a pejorative, though one that’s so old and stuffy that it’s almost funny in a bitter way.)  I’m pretty confident it won’t be another version of “Mandingo,” which I found thrown into a corner when I rented a house previously occupied by Blackfeet.  But the movie houses seem to fear this new movie more than “Mandingo” which turned sort of campy.  I mean, the superior black man slave gets boiled alive.  Eeeeks.  I don’t think that works anymore.  (But wait -- how different is that from immolating pilots in a cage?)

The boundary marked by the title of this book/movie is that between the animal (beast -- does that mean domestic, wild or feral?) and the nation. (Hmmm -- guess it must be wild since nations are domestic.)  So at least part of what we’re talking about here is wild versus controlled by some nation.  But not the individual, who might merely be a madman.  Rather a man who is uncontrollable and yet able to control.  He is the bull, the leader of the pack.  We don’t like his methods mostly because (supposedly) we can’t use them.  Predator drones (dragons) are as close as we can come.  (Pretty damned close to immolating people in cages.)

Idris Abba

Machines are ultimate domestic tools because we can disavow our motives in developing them.  A lot of attention is given to smallpox as a destroyer of Native American tribes, but behind the spread of disease was the steam engine that vectored germs from other places up the Mississippi to the heart of the continent and on railroad lines playing off the mercantile dynamics between Canada and the USA, east to west.  Modern jungle transportation (helicopters) seems at first to be the key to winning wars (which is what distinguishes tribes from nations) but they are a phenomenon of fossil fuels.  Conflict will always come back to person-on-person as it did for the Hutu/Tutsi genocide, self-destroying hatred expressed by machetes.  I suppose that could be interpreted as the blooming of seeds planted by Leoopold II.

But who planted these same seeds in the American cities?  The major movie chains are refusing to book the Netflix film of “Beasts of No Nation,” claiming that their motives are commercial, that Netflix is breaking protocol.  I don’t think so.  I think they’re scared.  And Netflix is smiling, because what are home watchers going to do?  If people are not sitting en masse in a theatre, where they can see who’s black or white, how can violence break out?  Will they be empowered to beat their wives and children?  Will they run into the streets waving machetes?  Or will they even vote?  Or order “Game of Thrones” as a “watch-it-again” choice.

Before wolves evolved and heat became electric.

My hope is that such stories will help us at least tell one wog from another, and that the empowerment will be the ability to let Native Americans be who they want to be instead of the conveniently mythic people we want them to be.

Snag = hooking up