Fields of Exile. Nora Gold
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written during the Holocaust:
First they came for the Communists, and I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a Communist.
Then they came for the Jews, and I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a Jew.
Then they came for the Catholics, and I didn’t speak up because I was a Protestant.
Then they came for me, and by that time there was no one left to speak up.
“Don’t be neutral,” Greg tells them at least once every week. “Truth isn’t neutral. Justice isn’t neutral. Take a stand.”
Suzy’s mantra is different: “Know thyself.” In Suzy’s first class, this sounded terribly naive to Judith. Knowing oneself, she thought, is a lifetime’s work. And maybe even an impossible goal, one you can never achieve. “You never fully know a person,” her father used to say mournfully. “Least of all yourself.” So Judith felt a flash of contempt for Suzy — a quick flash, here and gone, like the sun glinting on the edge of a knife. Contempt for her simple, even simplistic, mind, her lack of intellectual sophistication. As Suzy continued talking, though, Judith realized she only meant self-knowledge in a very limited way: a specific application of this concept to becoming a social work professional, something like “Self-Knowledge for Social Work Practice,” or “A Dummy’s Guide to Self-Knowledge When Working with Clients.”
“For instance,” said Suzy, looking cute in a buttercup-yellow silk shirt, “what if you’re uncomfortable with certain emotions, like anger? And what if you had, for example, a very angry, hostile client, like Cordelia? I’m sure you all remember Cordelia! Would that be hard for you?” Yes, thought Judith. “If so, that’s natural. Very few people like anger, or fear, or guilt. Then again, there are people who are also uncomfortable with love, or joy, or tenderness, and will try at all costs to avoid these feelings.
“And it’s not only emotions,” Suzy continued, scanning the class, sweeping everyone into her range of vision. “It’s values, as well. For example, what if you don’t like a certain sort of person? Simply don’t like — never mind racism, homophobia, or anything like that. For instance, what if you don’t like tall people because — I don’t know why — maybe they make you feel small and insignificant? So you have to know this about yourself, because if a tall client walks in through the door, you’ll react to them a certain way. That isn’t fair. That isn’t ethical. This is your emotional baggage to deal with, and you have to clean it out of yourself.”
Interesting, thought Judith, that Suzy picked tallness as an example, since she is so short. Funny, too, all this clean/dirty imagery. The assumption that all of us are somehow dirty, or polluted — “sinful”? — and part of the task of professionalizing us into social workers is to “clean us up.” Cleaning us through a certain kind of brain-washing. Or is it soul-washing? Maybe they should’ve put showers in the student lounge.
But in subsequent days, she gave all this some serious thought. Whether reading articles, hunting down library books, doing laundry, or cutting vegetables for chicken soup, always somewhere at the back of her mind was, What is knowledge? And what is knowing oneself? That Friday — the day of the week, she recalled, that God created Adam and Eve, who stole from the Tree of Knowledge — she sat in just a striped T-shirt and panties at her kitchen table, soup bubbling on the stove, and wrote her weekly log for Suzy. She began with Socrates — the first, she wrote, to coin the phrase “Know thyself” — and some other Greek philosophers. Then she pulled in Nietzsche, Kant, Kierkegaard, Hegel, and psychologists ranging from Freud and Fromm to the cognitivists, including some from Suzy’s blue-and-yellow book. Next she peppered in some Shakespeare (Polonius), some Bible (Ecclesiastes), and several relevant scraps of Yiddish and Hebrew poetry in translation (Halpern, Heifetz Tussman, Rachel, Ravikovitch, and Amichai). She knew most of these references weren’t from social work and hoped this would be okay. Well, even if it isn’t, she thought, paraphrasing her friend Sammy, what can Suzy do — shoot me? This had become Sammy’s favourite expression ever since Rabin’s assassination. Then she wrote in her log:
As the above sources illustrate, there is no one simple thing called “knowledge.” There are different kinds: knowledge of the mind, heart, soul, and body, and maybe others. Traditionally, since Plato, the mind and body were split, and the only knowledge valued, or even acknowledged(!), by men was knowledge of the mind: rational knowledge. Women, however, have appreciated different forms of knowledge (Belenky et al.’s Women’s Ways of Knowing).
Then, since they were told to include some self-disclosure:
I’ve always listened mainly to my mind, so this year I’d like to be more open to other forms of knowledge. Hopefully this will help me better understand my clients, and respond to them more fully, empathically, and effectively in my professional role.
The following Monday she handed in this log. When she got it back, on the last page there was a big 10/10 in red pen with a circle around it, and underneath it Suzy’s comments in flowing, feminine handwriting:
Excellent work, Judith! Fabulous how you draw on such a wide range of sources, some of them unusual, to explore this concept. You do a nice job of integrating your personal feelings and issues with the ideas in the literature, demonstrating your knowledge of both the heart and mind. An exceptional log from an exceptional student! A pleasure having you in this class!
Soon afterwards, Judith’s logs began to change. They became more loosely related to the content covered in Suzy’s course, and more personal, until they felt almost like a diary. The last time she kept a diary she was twelve and never let anyone read it. But this log-diary is different, she thinks now, sitting in Suzy’s class. Not because it isn’t private or deep; it is. But she doesn’t mind Suzy reading it because Suzy is safe. There’s nothing she could write to Suzy, or say to her in person, that would be unacceptable, or make Suzy not like her anymore. So everything inside of her comes flooding out toward Suzy. Not only in her logs; any place, any time, they’re alone together. For instance, walking with Suzy back to her office every Monday after class. Or last Monday sitting with her over coffee at a round pink-and-aqua table in Le Petit Café, just as she imagined it would happen, to plan the first meeting of SWAC, which will be taking place three days from now. Judith likes just about everything about Suzy. Including her petiteness, her tinkly laughter, and her way of dressing: always conservative on the bottom in dark skirts or slacks, but wildly colourful on the top with her blazingly bright silk shirts.
Judith likes, too, how Suzy looks at her. How she is mirrored in Suzy’s eyes. “You have an extraordinary mind,” Suzy said to her last Monday over coffee. “Yet you’re also extremely sensitive and emotionally attuned. This is a very rare combination. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a student quite like you in all my years of teaching.”
Later on she added, as if musing to herself, “You remind me of myself a few years back.” And she touched Judith on the arm. Softly, like a butterfly resting.
— 9 —
Three days later, on Thursday night, Judith attends the first meeting of the Social Work Anti-oppression Committee. There is no supper with Suzy beforehand because Suzy had an emergency faculty meeting, so Judith, disappointed, worked at home all day and drove in just for SWAC. She arrives at ten to seven and is relieved to see someone there she knows: Lola, from Suzy’s class. Lola is a broad-shouldered sensuous blonde with oversized lips and huge blue eyes, and everything about her is theatrical and slightly larger than life. A week ago she told Judith she was born and raised in Montreal as Lola Katz, but now she is Lola Ibn Hassan from Riyadh. As a McGill undergrad she was involved in left-wing politics, and on her twenty-first birthday she married and ran off with another student who took her to his native Saudi Arabia, forced her for three years to wear a burqa, and forbade her to leave the house unless accompanied by him or one of his three brothers. Lola escaped, she said, in the middle of the night, returning to Canada, but she still lives in terror he’ll find her. Judith listened raptly when Lola told her this, but now, recollecting Lola’s melodramatic style when recounting it, isn’t sure how much she believes. Still, they stand chatting together amicably as the other people drift into the room, and then sit beside each other at the rectangular