The weight symbols carry

After the shooting at Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life synagogue, my fiancée bought us the Stronger Than Hate t-shirts:

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The t-shirt makers, in partnership with the Pittsburgh Steelers football team, send the proceeds to the Jewish Federation of Greater Pittsburgh’s Fund for Victims of Terror, benefiting the synagogue in this case. In support of the victims of the shooting, the Steelers allowed their modified logo to be displayed broadly, including clothing, signs, and stickers.

This show of solidarity throughout the city boosted our morale, and my fiancée thought to also pack the shirts for our trip to Israel where we would be spreading the message of unity with the Jewish community there. However, when my aunt saw our shirts, she was stunned.

She explained that to wear the symbol of the Star of David in Jerusalem would represent nationalism against Palestinian Moslems and anyone else not Jewish. Well, that’s not the message we wanted to send!

In the United States, where Jewish Americans are the minority, the symbol represents support.

In Israel, where the Jewish community is a majority, the symbol reverses itself as supremacist.

This 4th of July, Nike planned to release a shoe sporting the Betsy Ross flag design:

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The company quickly cancelled the shoes when former football quarterback Colin Kaepernick pointed out its racist symbolism. Originally a symbol of pride for US independence from England—representing the 13 colonies—the design is now being waved by White Supremacists. Different groups of US nationalists are using various symbols prominent during the time of slavery in order to intimidate minorities in the country.

And US Americans are pitted against one another as they argue for and against Nike’s decision.

This controversy over the Betsy Ross symbolism makes me think of Frederick Douglass when abolitionists thought to honor him by asking him to speak at a 4th of July celebration. The date was 1852. Furthermore, the Fugitive Slave Law had been passed two years prior, which extended the danger of slavery into the free states. Douglass titled his speech: What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?:

Fellow-citizens; above your national, tumultuous joy, I hear the mournful wail of millions! whose chains, heavy and grievous yesterday, are, to-day, rendered more intolerable by the jubilee shouts that reach them. If I do forget, if I do not faithfully remember those bleeding children of sorrow this day, “may my right hand forget her cunning, and may my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth!” To forget them, to pass lightly over their wrongs, and to chime in with the popular theme, would be treason most scandalous and shocking, and would make me a reproach before God and the world. My subject, then fellow-citizens, is AMERICAN SLAVERY.

I think about the conversations we need to have as a country about the wrongs of our past in order to heal together, and certainly the diverse effects of these symbols give us a place to start.

Germany had this conversation within her borders and with Israel and the Jewish community worldwide. South Africans have done this during Mandela’s presidency (1994-1999). Indeed, Maya Angelou writes in her poem for Bill Clinton’s inauguration in 1993: History, despite its wrenching pain, cannot be unlived, and if faced with courage, need not be lived again.”

Here is my new ritual: To listen to Dr. Angelou every 4th of July:

Degas ballerina sculpture … and meandering storytelling

Photo by Edie; sculpture on display at The Frick Pittsburgh, July 2018

Photo by Edie; sculpture on display at The Frick Pittsburgh, July 2018

I know Degas’s paintings for his ballerinas but I never knew he also made this sculpture – bronze with cloth for the tutu and hair ribbon. Cloth for the tutu and hair ribbon. It seems it would’ve been very unusual in his time period (1880s) to step outside the usual all-bronze cast.

When I googled the sculpture, it turns out that Degas did use an unusual medium, but not what I thought. His original sculpture was made using a real bodice, tutu, ballet slippers, and real hair – and cast in beeswax. The full sculpture was covered in beeswax except for the tutu and hair ribbon.

Apparently the bronze version (a number of them) was made afterwards by his heirs.

The sculpture by Degas received mixed reviews at the time, for numerous reasons.

I’m fixed on the cloth. I imagine an artist who sidestepped the classics because he had to go his own way, bringing the texture to life.

This makes me think of Nikki Giovanni who sidesteps the classics of poetry books when her writing moves among poetry, prose, mail correspondence, a movie:

From Whence Cometh My Help*

It should be a movie. Starring S. Epatha Merkerson as Ethel Smith. She would be driving down I-81 right before the Hollins exit. There would be some smooth jazz, a Coltrane piece from Giants Steps or maybe something by…

and then more poetry (Quilting the Black-Eyed Pea: Poems and Not Quite Poems). Giovanni and Degas both had to do their own thing, which makes great art.

Playwright Diana Burbano has recently written a blog piece about why fewer women than men seem to send plays out for production—even when invited, “qualified women will say no.” Burbano notices a number of wonderful plays by women that don’t follow “a strict narrative structure” (or classic structure). “Why isn’t it OK for these plays to change the way a story is laid out?” Burbano says; “I wonder if trying to shoehorn themselves into a rigid structure isn’t half the reason so many women feel uncomfortable submitting? Perhaps they feel they will never get it ‘right.’”

I agree with Burbano that we’ve got to keep sending out our plays, written our way. I’m ever optimistic that great art prevails. “The narrative is starting to change,” Burbano says: “People like me LIKE your meandering storytelling, and we are starting to be the people who will be the first to learn of your work.”

 

*From whence cometh my help: the African American community at Hollins College