Whores or Saints

This has nothing to do with art. Its about a book I’m currently reading. (Yet, if you stretch it far enough, you might find the two are interconnected,) The central theme of the memoir has had such an impact on me I feel a need to share how it resonated so profoundly with aspects of my own history. Dragging up memories which I still, 30 years later, have difficulty coming to terms with. Its about religion. The book is Tara Westover’s #Educated. It has as its core theme the impact of religious fanaticism and her astonishingly resilient drive to drag herself out of it. At least I hope so-I’m only halfway through the book but all signs indicate she will overcome.

If you’ve read as many inspirational self-help books as I have, you’ll concur that the primary motivation for getting over the bad stuff, which sticks like gum to the soles of one’s shoes, is self-forgiveness. The negative notions of self which the formative childhood mind can and will so readily import, like a sponge sucking up water, (if unfortunate enough to have been exposed to negative definitions of self at such an impressionable age), can at a later stage in life be identified and blamed on role models, as and when we realise the source. But the regrettable behavioural mistakes we sometimes make, usually targeting loved ones, when we are “grown up”-who can we pin the blame on those for? Residual fallout?

Reading Tara’s Westover’s account of her childhood made my blood boil. She grew up within the environment of a radically fatalistic Mormon family, where among other things like resistance to trust medical care and educational institutions, female sexuality was abhorred and aggressively punished, covered up, denied. But this could easily be applicable to any fanatically religious family. I recall during my time in the Middle East between the 70s-90s when I was a practising Muslim, hearing women say they’d been advised not to seek dental treatment to fix their serious dental issues because it would amount to the sinful act of tampering with God’s design. Or if they were to contemplate the idea of visiting a salon to pluck their thick eyebrows would receive the repugnance of their local iman as if they were contemplating having a sex change. (I wont even begin to touch on the rationale dictating that women cover up to protect their modesty). I was shocked. It didn’t sit well with my understanding of Islam being a fundamentally practical and pragmatic manual for living a good life. If in Islamic scriptures, for example, you are advised that if fasting might negatively impact on your state of health, such as if you are pregnant, that you can postpone fasting, then surely it follows that issues like dental hygiene which can have very negative impacts on one’s health, can be treated in the same pragmatic way? These were women who, I concluded, were unable to think for themselves, women who needed a man to define them. Tara for much of her “coming of age” did the same. Her violent brother detested her developing sexuality and sought to violently beat it out of her. Why? Because he feared it?

Fortunately, I never experienced violence at the hands of a male peer or parent. In fact my father was the iconically perfect father, caring and compassionate. The violence both physical and emotional came later when I was married. I tolerated it because somehow I had internalised the notion, through my Catholic upbringing, that to prove my worth I must learn to tolerate abuse, forgive it and rise above it. Like Christ, the ultimate victim of unwarranted undeserved punishment.

My conclusion is that as long as males can cope with their childhood bound insecurities regarding their sexual identity without the need to resort to religious fundamentalism, they are as good as and as bad as women coping with defining their sexual identity. As soon as males dip into the murky pool of religion in an attempt to define their sexual dominance, we are all f**ked.

I read somewhere a hilarious comment from the inimitable comic genius #RobinWilliams; “Gods joke on mankind: putting a recreational centre next to a recycling plant”. Here’s another:

My reaction to this magnificent and deeply moving memoir is driven by a tiny resonant murmur of recognition seated deep in the reservoirs of my memory. I’ve been there and done it. IT accounted for my decision to abandon my beloved sister at her greatest time of need. Several years later IT accounted for my decision to not attend either my father’s or my mothers’ funerals. At those times I could lamely justify my decisions with fairly valid excuses that I was a single divorced mother struggling to attend to my four children. I have to some extent forgiven myself for it. Religious fervour of the most distorted misinformed nature drove me to make those cruelly callous decisions. The irony is that those decisions were devised within the chambers of a heart which had always, and continues to be, compassionate and caring. The ultimate irony is that in Tara Westover’s harrowing account of her escape from religious fundamentalism, it is not her whom I relate to. It’s her father. Her mad father who, driven by religious fervour devoid of any rational thinking, put his loved ones repeatedly at such physical and emotion risks. Yet loving them at the same time. Any harm, and it happened often, that befell them was, in his reasoning, beyond his control. It was God’s will.

I didn’t subscribe to such extreme fatalism when it came to my kids. I could and would fight like a lioness for them. The question, quietly heaving like an asthmatic elephant in the room, is the one I can’t yet fully honestly answer.