On Being Invisible

Last night I had my students read "Marrakesh" by George Orwell.   It's an essay I read when I was in graduate school that has always stayed with me.  It speaks of streams of urine running down roads and donkeys who work diligently for a decade, drop dead, then are eaten by wild dogs before their bodies grow cold.  Mostly, though, it talks about Orwell's sudden awareness of the "brown people" who labor there.  He writes about seeing bundles of sticks walking by each day and only realizing later they were carried by old women.

I'm teaching the class to go beyond just a book report or a reaction paper to forming a solid thesis in response to a literary text.  It's a concept none of them seem to have been taught before, though they are the brightest class I've had in four semesters.  I could tell I was losing them when I began the lecture by waxing nostalgic on the fun in trying to invent a thesis that had not been done before, but when I had them read "Marrakesh," I could tell they were shocked I would introduce such an inflammatory work, especially since so many of them were brown or black and the essay speaks of the invisibility of the inhabitants of the city and the Senegalese army.  I reminded them that Orwell was writing in the late thirties, a time when Jews were accused of owning the world, even though in Marrakesh, they made only pennies a day.  I also reminded them that the world was not always so politically correct as it is now, and back then people just said the things that unfortunately I believe so many still think but do not say today.

The students all recognized what it is to be marginalized, but this new vocabulary and forum for discussion seemed new to them.  I take for granted that academia is a place to examine without emotion and bring to the forefront the things in society of which no one is proud.

On the way home, I was listening to the replay of "This American Life" on NPR.  They were talking in Act Three about Elizabeth Smart and how she walked the streets of Salt Lake City with her captors and nobody saw her.  She went to a party.  People talked to her.  Someone she'd known since she was four saw her at a gas station.  Nobody recognized her - partly because she was wearing a veil, and partly because they were so used to seeing her homeless captors that they ceased to see them, even when two became three there by the Burger King or Blockbuster.

Many who were interviewed for the story said that even though the third person in a veil was young, they never assumed Elizabeth was their daughter - they all assumed she was a second wife.  Those who were interviewed attached no judgment to their assumptions about polygamy.  The story went on to say that many in Salt Lake City have polygamous ancestors, and they accept it without supporting it with a combination of recognition and shame, not wanting to acknowledge what is so hard to understand.

Heather Armstrong of Dooce had a great entry the other day about her thoughts on polygamy and the new show on HBO.  I read the entry with interest and remembered it last night when I realized that the mixed emotions she describes are what enabled Elizabeth Smart to be invisible - not on Heather's part, necessarily - but on the part of those who were interviewed for "This American Life."

In much the same way, the Moroccans were invisible to Orwell.  People who clean office buildings are invisible to the white-collar workers. The homeless are invisible to commuters.  I think one section from "Marrakesh" on the topic of invisibility is the most disturbing:  "For several weeks, always at about the same time of day, the file of old women had hobbled past the house with their firewood, and though they had registered themselves on my eyeballs I cannot truly say that I had seen them. Firewood was passing-that was how I saw it. It was only that one day I happened to be walking behind them, and the curious up-and-down motion of a load of wood drew my attention to the human being underneath it. Then for the first time I noticed the poor old earth-coloured bodies, bodies reduced to bones and leathery skin, bent double under the crushing weight. Yet I suppose I had not been five minutes on Moroccan soil before I noticed the overloading of the donkeys and was infuriated by it."

See people today.