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HBO Max has removed the Oscar-winning 1939 film from its platform citing that it perpetuates inaccurate and disturbing stereotypes about race and a racist mythology about American history.

Gone With the Wind was my favourite book and then movie when I was growing up. I read it again and again from age thirteen to sixteen. I even had that famous picture up on my wall of ‘Mammy’ tightening the corset on Scarlett’s ‘sixteen inch’ waist as Scarlett held on to the bedpost, Scarlett’s dark curls cascading down her back.

I was known for loving this book (ask anyone who went to school with me), which I imagined was literary. I also believed that the women were strong, and I was thrilled by the galloping historical narrative and the epic romance.

However, I slowly became awakened to the principle ethos of both book and movie. I wrote my college essay when applying to college on this awakening. Ironically, I attended the same college (Smith College) as Margaret Mitchell who went down in Smith history for refusing to remain in any classroom in which a Black woman entered. Mitchell was a confirmed racist even for her time. Her 1936 novel glorified the slave market and the movie does as well.

One can always find ways to defend a book or movie by emphasising something seemingly positive such as its supposed “strong” female character. And it might have been easy for some to romanticise feisty and loyal Mammy while ignoring the fact that she is given no real name, children or family of her own and that her loyalty came in the form of a blind devotion to whites who owned her. A de-eroticized foil to the fiery Scarlett, Mammy was played in the film by Hattie McDaniel who was the first African American woman to receive an Oscar.*

I remember the other slave woman character in the novel, Prissy, played by Butterly McQueen** in the film, who Scarlett slaps across the face. This humiliating physical abuse is presented in such a way where it seems that the slap was deserved. The book suppresses the thought that if the slap occurred in the other direction, the slave woman would have been murdered by whites. I also remember the glorification of the Ku Klux Klan in the book and movie—remember when Frank and the other “heroes” in the narrative go out at night to terrorise Black people? Mitchell and the film’s directors set up this scene and the events leading up to it in such a way to make readers and viewers feel that these men are spreading terror for good reasons, to protect the white man’s honor and the white woman’s safety. For Mitchell, the Ku Klux Klan was understandable and necessary and its members were victims.

I heartily support the film’s removal from HBO during this time of international awakening. And I admire HBO Max for their plan to bring it back along with a statement about its historical context in order to prompt observations about and an analysis of the shocking values this world-famous and beloved movie espouses.

It is empowering to let go of something immoral we thought we loved. That is how we grow.

 

*At the Oscars, McDaniel was required to sit at a segregated table at the far wall of the room. The hotel had a no-blacks policy, but allowed McDaniel in as a favor. The discrimination continued after the awards ceremony where McDaniel was denied entry to the after parties. Another black woman did not win an Oscar again for 50 years. In the weeks prior to McDaniel winning her Oscar, the producer of Gone With the Wind, omitted the faces of the black actors on the posters advertising the movie in the South. None of the black cast members, including Hattie McDaniel, were allowed to attend the premiere for the movie.

**Butterfly McQueen (pictured above), like Hattie McDaniel, was unable to attend the movie’s premiere because it was held at a whites-only theatre. Often typecast as a maid, she said: “I didn’t mind playing a maid the first time, because I thought that was how you got into the business. But after I did the same thing over and over, I resented it. I didn’t mind being funny, but I didn’t like being stupid.”

Yusef Komunyakaa’s poem ‘Facing It’ is a poem of pain and healing. Yet there is no emotional language in the poem. Words like pain, trauma, sadness, loss, grief do not appear. In the third line, a word linked to emotion does appear: ‘tears’. However, even then, it comes in the context of the speaker telling himself to not feel, to repress his emotion: ‘ I said I wouldn’t / dammit: No tears’, which is followed by the dialectal line ‘I’m stone. I’m flesh’ apparently suggesting that the speaker is attempting to become ‘stone’, non-human, like the ‘granite’ his face fades into.  The speaker has flashbacks to his traumatic experience in the Vietnam war as he stands in front of the memorial which lists the names of fallen soldiers. Again, there is a scarcity of emotional language, a dearth. Rather, fleeting images are offered of the past. The speaker communicates his pain through these images and through the final one where he imagines that a woman is trying to erase the names of the dead, but then he realises she is ‘brushing a boy’s hair’. This final image of a mother caring for her son represents gentleness, healing, sanity, reality. The emotion is potent yet the language of emotion does not exist. The unsaid is the crux of this poem, the engine, the epicentre. Reticence and restraint drive the emotion — the speaker seems vulnerable precisely because he refuses to enlist emotional language. He can’t bear to use those kinds of words. It would be too much for him. And they would fall flat on the reader. Denial, repression, metaphor and fantasy pervade the poem. The unsaid allows him to face ‘it’, allows the reader to face it, allows him to communicate his pain and healing to the reader more than direct language ever could.

Facing It

Something stops. This is the beginning. Roland Barthes writes about how he loves to leave a movie theatre. How it’s after the movie stops that the experience begins. Emily Dickinson points out that when the bells stop ringing, the church service begins. And when the cogs in a wheel stop, someone has arrived. It’s then that the visitors step out of the carriage, you can finally see a hand, a face. These moments are ‘Positive’, are ‘Circumference’, are ‘Ultimate’.

When Bells stop ringing — Church — begins –
The Positive — of Bells —
When Cogs — stop — that’s Circumference —
The Ultimate — of Wheels.

Reticence. Take care with even a quiet remark. It may create  fire. Emily Dickinson wrote:

A Man may make a Remark –

In itself – a quiet thing

That may furnish the Fuse unto a Spark

In dormant nature – lain –

 

Let us divide – with skill –

Let us discourse – with care –

Powder exists in Charcoal –

Before it exists in Fire –

 

 

This Week’s Torah portion: Vayigash

Telling the Truth Slant

When Jacob hears from his sons that Joseph is alive the verse says, ‘he did not believe them.’ לֹא־הֶֽאֱמִ֖ין לָהֶֽם

Why didn’t their words feel true? He had been waiting twenty-two years to hear this news about his beloved son. But when he finally hears it, he rejects it.

What the brothers say to their father is simple: עוד יוסף חי  (Yosef still lives).

The 11^thcentury French commentator Rashi writes that when Jacob heard the words of his sons, Jacob’s heart went away from believing these words.

I think the Torah is telling us something about words. That they are limited and don’t always hold the power to communicate.

Sometimes we just can’t hear plain words.

When the nineteenth century American poet Emily Dickinson read in a newspaper about a friend’s husband who had passed away, she wrote a letter to her grieving friend that began, ‘We read the words but know them not’.

In another letter to a friend Dickinson, after her own father passed away, writes: ‘It is too soon for language’.

In the same way, language was ‘too soon’ for Jacob.

How does Jacob finally absorb this new information? It’s not through words.

Emily Dickinson began a poem with the line, ‘Tell all the truth but tell is slant’. Dickinson was suggesting here that the truth can be communicated, but it must be told slant, indirectly, not straight.

The Torah tells us the slant way that the truth was communicated to Jacob:

The verse says, ‘and he saw the wagons that Joseph had sent to carry him, and the spirit of their father Joseph was revived.’

Rashi says this means that: The Shechina (God’s presence) which had been separated from him because of his grief, rested upon him once again.

In other words, Jacob could only be ready, be spiritually whole enough to know the news that Joseph was alive not from communication through words but when he was given a non-verbal sign, in this case, the wagons. The wagons were telling the truth slant.

Rashi quotes the midrash: the wagons were a sign from Joseph to remind the father of the topic they were learning together the last time before he left the family – it was the section dealing with the heifer that was beheaded and the wagons were a sign of this.

Jewish tradition is so aware of the need to communicate truth with a slant that there are a few other midrashim about how Jacob came to absorb the new shocking information about his son being alive without words.

One of the other midrashim says that Jacob’s grand-daughter played a harp in order to communicate to her grandfather that Joseph was alive.

The Torah places such a high value on this ability, this gift to communicate without only words, that tradition says that Jacob gave a blessing to his grand-daughter that she would live forever.

The Torah is encouraging us to notice the limits of language in our own lives and bring that acknowledgment to our interactions with people. Holding back words and finding other ways to communicate is always something to consider. For example, sometimes simply sitting with someone who is sad in silence can offer so much comfort. This can be one of the greatest gifts we can give.

In Measure for Measure when the Duke proposes marriage to Isabella, she does not reply. Her response is interpreted differently in different productions.  Her silent acceptance of his proposal is the most common in performance. However, her response can also be interpreted as ‘no.’ Shakespeare, usually praised for the bounty of his language, is less known for his silences and moments of reticence (think of Cordelia’s ‘nothing’.) When Isabella does not respond to the Duke, this is one of Shakespeare’s moments of reticence or ‘open silences’. #reticence #shakespeare #measureformeasure #opensilences

 

“Now we talk / about everything incessantly, / our moans and grunts turned on a spit / into warm vowels and elegant consonants. / We say plethora, demitasse, ozone and love. / We think we know what each sound means. / There are times when something so joyous / or so horrible happens our only response / is an intake of breath, and then we’re back at the truth of it” — Dorianne Laux

Rabbi Mordecai Becher talks about the art of silence in this video where he tells the story of his teacher Rabbi Moshe Shapiro teaching a class. Rabbi Shapiro noticed a recorder that had been placed on the table by a student; it clicked occasionally. The rabbi asked, “What’s with the clicking?” A student responded: “It’s a voice operated recording. When you speak it records and when you’re silent it stops recording. The clicking is the turning on and off of the device.” The rabbi replied, “That is unfortunate. Silence is also communication.”

Rabbi Becher mentions that in the Talmud there is a discussion about the pauses when God spoke to Moses, allowing for Moses to absorb, understand and reflect on what he was being told.

And he quotes from The Book of Job: “Wisdom comes from nothing.” Many say this means that in order to learn something, silence is useful and in fact is the necessary pre-requisite to wisdom.

I would like to practice silence today. When writing a poem, deliberately creating silences. When reading a poem or other text, noticing the silences. In a conversation, to listen and remain quiet for as long as possible, really hear what is being said. When alone stay quiet for two minutes. Notice the silences between the clicking of the keys on the keypad, the car noises outside, the ticking of the clock, birds twittering. Commas, white space, breath. Will I discover? Will my thoughts pour into those spaces? Will my hair comb into them? The deer filling the parks. Bees bumping. This day. (after Alice Miller, “In Time” from Nowhere Nearer.)

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Wendy Shalit wrote, “Now that we’ll have a President who has said, ‘I don’t have heroes,’ I suppose we must all somehow, step up & become heroes for one another.”
7:44 AM – 9 Nov 2016