The Long Memory of Fear and Oppression

I am sitting in on a class this semester about Loyalty, and we have reached the point in our discussions at which to bring in Bonheoffer. Believing the background of this man’s story critical to a proper understanding at least of the context in which he wrote his letters, Prof. Meilaender showed us a film about him.

Neither Bonheoffer or the film are particularly new to me, but it has been some great time since I have read or watched anything to do with him particularly—at least nothing I recall since early high-school.

But I found myself having a very interesting reaction to the film this time around. It managed to trigger a number of memories in my head which I had forgotten, and it upset me.

I moved to Slovakia with my family when I was twelve years old—a very impressionable age—and a few years after the fall of the Iron Curtain. And somehow, I managed to have a lot of the sort of fears expressed in the film.

I had so many nightmares that first year; vivid, torturous, blood-soaked nightmares filled with Nazis and KGB. My parents were killed—sometimes mercifully—in each. I will not describe the dreams to you here, but I can tell you; I remember every single one of them.

There was such a haze of oppression even then that lingered over the country. It probably didn’t help that the war in Kosovo/Serbia took place around then, and our house would shake as the jets flew over and we would wait in long lines of cars while columns upon columns of tanks rolled past. I remember a great scare that same time-frame, too, when it seemed likely that the communist party would reclaim power through the “election” of a man known to be corrupt—suspected even of kidnapping the President’s son! Expatriates had their bags packed and ready to flee, with rendezvous points set up outside the country, and I remember sitting in the sanctuary of my favourite apple tree wondering what would become of all of us.

With the assistance of my older sister, who suffered occasionally from similar nightmares, I mapped out an escape route for her and I to take our younger siblings out of the country to safety with. We never expected to be able to save our parents. We hoped we might be able to get some other children out with us. We made up games where the children had to go through great varieties of physical stress—riding bikes whilst we blasted objects at the wheels (they had to keep going no matter what); making them skirt across iron gates and fences (again, sometimes with objects and mud-balls being hurled at them), and so on. In public school for physical education, the teachers made us climb ropes and scale walls—I always suspected for the same reasons as those “games” I put my siblings through: to give us some capacity for escape.

And though the old government of oppression had fallen, there were shadows of it everywhere. People dressed alike still in those first years of living there, with all in black and grey. Few people asked how anyone else was doing; you didn’t want to know, because you didn’t want to have to report it. Border crossings were still long and hard (though not nearly as long or as hard). Village loudspeaker systems remained in place, used now for simple community reports rather than propaganda, but nevertheless, left over from the not-so-distant past.

And the stories were there. Stories that had always been, but now creeped slowly out into the open. Of my parents’ co-workers, who had been involved in smuggling Bibles. Or of my friends, whose parents or grandparents, aunts or uncles had disappeared into the night courtesy of The Black Cars. Stories of those people who had turned their neighbors, friends, relatives in.

It didn’t help that the police were poor and pulled you over for anything, looking for a bribe from you in order to support their own families. They terrified a twelve year old. It didn’t help that we moved there in winter when the whole world was grey and I had only ever known the colourful warmth and vibrancy of the Caribbean. It didn’t help that we lived in a city, where everyone is stranger to everyone else, when I did not yet understand that concept. It didn’t help that the million and one tiny things which makes a place or country home were all off, or non-existent, in that then-foreign land to me.

And yesterday, as I was mulling over all this in my head and wondering how I should be able to understand these fears, wondering at the nausea that washed over me, wondering how come I had seemed to always have had some of these fears and have known them so vividly already entering Slovakia, I remembered we studied the underground Church in Russia one year when I was seven or nine, and the father was killed and the KGB was everywhere and there were secret meetings and fear—so much fear. And I absorbed it all in my overactive imagination and took it with me to Slovakia, where it had existed, and where the shadows still moved.

I think that one of the reasons I love Slovakia as deeply as I do is because of experiencing those fears, and moving through them with everyone else. When I left the country for the last time two years ago, it had a vibrancy all its own. It had smiles, and laughter, and chatter on the public transportation. It had colourful buildings and clothes, and free theatre and press. It had travel and open (EU) borders. It had a hockey team that won the gold once and made us all go crazy screaming mad with joy and unity. It had its first mall, and then many malls and stores. We wore blue jeans, chewed bubble gum, and listened to rock ‘n’ roll and jazz in cellars and on the open streets. Slovakia fought its way out of the fog of fear and the shadows of oppression, and I was there with it through that, and I am free, too. But I think, the memories and the capacity to understand the incomprehensible will always remain. And that is what I experienced watching the movie in class the other day: the long memory of fear and oppression.

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What Lives We ...

Portraits of Marsab...

By Heather Hill

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Disturbances

Sometimes i get so disturbed over the things that i don't know. i want to know everything. Why does that have to be impossible?

I'm learning how to do print-making right now. Prior to last Tuesday night, I had absolutely no idea what that was. Well, I had seen silk screen pieces before (and wondered where the silk was), and I did attend a gallery of prints and listen to the opening speech, but I still didn't understand it. And now, I'm delving in.

But the problem is, I'm not learning it "officially." I'm just trying to pick it up and pick it out of people who do know it. I hate not knowing, and flitting around the studio as the one helpless person who has to harrass everyone else in order to accomplish anything. And furthermore, I just want to know it already. I had my first go at it last Thursday night, from 9 until 11:30 pm! It was wonderful, and I fell in love with it.

Tonight, though, nothing went right. Not even a little bit. My prints didn't come out well. The ink kept drying too fast because my lines were to fine. The gunk didn't come off the screen very well. And then the door was locked to get into a room I needed, so I had to stop after doing...nothing. Nothing but not do what I wanted. I printed off some overhead transparency, so I will be ready to go, but I have nothing good to show for what I learnt on Thursday, and nothing but a mostly clean silk-screen and a transparency or two for the next time i have the chance to try.

I wish I had studied art when I was still in university. Why didn't I? I feel so inept when i try these things out, and I want so badly to know everything about them. And mostly? Mostly I want to paint. When I was little I would always try painting. I even stole my dad's white-board eisel once and set up a little "art studio" of my own in the garage. It didn't last long, but oh how i loved it. I painted a rock once, and it was really good... but then then someone put it outside and it rained. No more painting. I wish I knew how to use brushes and colours and make those things which are so beautiful that I cry when i see them. And I wish that trying to learn them back handedly worked out a little better. But maybe it is enough for now that i am even making the attempt?

I guess I'd rather be disturbed with my life and try to grow it than be fine with my life and live it narrowly.