The walls near the Mumbai Airport that hide the slums have “Beautiful
Forever, Beautiful Forever” written across them as a means of helping those who are whisked by
imagine a present and future that is at odds with the gritty reality that is
only a few feet away. Katherine Boo
traveled behind those walls to the shacks of Annawadi, a half-acre slum with
3000 inhabitants, to connect with the polyglot peoples that are squatting on
fetid ground next to a lake filled with human and industrial waste. Those who
thrive here are garbage pickers who turn the trash of the airport environs into
cash through recycling. They also drink,
there is a lot of prostitution and use of the available drugs – a local version
of wite-out and various alcoholic beverages, and the children spend time in
sham schools that people run to get government money, but they actually have no
idea how to run a true school nor any interest in doing that (with the
exception of one girl who teaches, in part, to spite her mother – show her
mother how things should be done).
Through interpreters, Boo tracks what led up to and what
resulted from a particularly violent moment – when one of the denizens, a
one-legged woman who entertains men in her hut while her husband is away at
work, douses herself in kerosene and sets herself on fire in order to call
attention to what she calls mistreatment by a family that shares a wall with
her hut. Her hope is that this will
empower her and ruin them. This plot
device holds our interest as we try to puzzle things out and get to know two
main families and a host of other interesting characters in this – I don’t know
what to call it – Shanty Town?
When I traveled to Nicaragua with
the express interest of connecting with various poor people, wherever we went
it was possible to see people precariously perched on every available scrap of
land. They would build shacks of tin and
wood and whatever else was around. From
these shacks, kids dressed in the whitest shirts I have ever seen would emerge and
to go to school (I learned that a process that involved leaving the shirts in
garbage bags to bake under the sun was critical to the whitening process). Though we talked to peasants and to people
who had been helped by microloans to achieve a better standard of living, and
though we went to institutions that worked with the poorest of the poor, we did
not really connect with the people who were squatting on land, though they were
all around us.
Boo connected with shack people (on a different continent
and in a different culture – but in shacks for similar reasons). She observed them and reported on them. The resulting historical novel is part detective
novel, part crime reporting, part social and political commentary (Boo herself is
commenting – though generally doing it by quoting or paraphrasing the residents
of Annawadi), and part anthropology a la Margaret Mead. It is also a bit like psychoanalysis.
In the author notes, Boo acknowledges that the people she
was interacting with had a language that was well suited to describing garbage –
sorting it and making gradations in it.
They did not have a finely honed language to describe their internal
experiences. This language developed
across time as a result of their interactions.
So the scientific paradox emerges that something can’t be observed
without changing it. As true as that may
be of subatomic particles, it is certainly true of anthropology and
psychoanalysis. So part of the dilemma,
for the analyst and the anthropologist, is how best to engage with the people
with whom we work.
Boo describes an interaction between a resident – one of the
heroes of her story – and an almost imaginary person – the teacher in a prison
where the resident is incarcerated and then visits three days a week while on
probation awaiting trial. The teacher
tells stories of morality that the resident takes to heart and embellishes and
works hard to live up to. The resident
imagines that the teacher wants to know how he is doing and will be proud when
he hears about all that the resident has done to live up to the precepts the
teacher has offered. While this story is
important in its own right, psychoanalytically we can wonder if this is a
variation of the resident’s experience of Boo – as someone who is interested in
him, but perhaps feels to him almost imaginary – as if she (Boo is a blond
haired woman from the west) is not completely a real part of his life, but is
also certainly a very important figure that he wants to impress.
Freud’s engagement with the world through his writing
changed it profoundly. We live in a very
different place than we would otherwise be in as a result of his helping us –
not just individually – but culturally – think differently about the thoughts
that we have – sexual thoughts and aggressive thoughts primarily, but he lead
us more generally to wonder about our subjectivity – and what unconscious
forces influence the way that we think.
On the whole I think the world is a better place for that – whole
categories of mental illness have been eradicated in industrial and
post-industrial countries.
Margaret Mead, who was also a very public figure, worked not
just to understand the tribes that she engaged with, but to educate people about
them more generally. In the South
Pacific wing of the Natural History Museum in New York City, the reluctant son
and I discovered on our recent trip that she wanted us to think more carefully
and respectfully about the peoples that we engage with – and to learn from “primitive”
people without burdening them with our hang-ups: She specifically was concerned
that we not introduce our death anxiety and birth aversion to peoples who seamlessly
integrated both of these events into their lived lives.
Boo has a political message here – and it is at heart a very
Roussean one. Her position is that in
our natural state people are good. Bad
things – injustices, even evil is – I think – in Boo’s world something that is
traceable to corrupt and corrupting societal and ultimately governmental influences. She sees us – and cites impressive evidence
of this – as being essentially moral creatures even when in the most dire
circumstances. She notes that the
children were the most reliable witnesses to what had taken place – their observations
seemed least washed with self interest and other distorting factors – and they
tended to agree with each other across lines that divide adults – things like
Muslim vs Hindu and relatively wealthy versus abjectly impoverished. As her witnesses aged – and as they got
further from an event – self-interest became more and more evident in their
reporting.
The heart of goodness, from Boo’s perspective, is a social network
– a web that binds people together. This
is threatened when whatever it is that sustains us – what sustains us
economically – is threatened. She sees this
as being inevitable in a global society with increasingly mobile capital – it is
inevitable that we will see both an improvement in general living standards and
intermittent and painful disruptions in personal well-being. The opportunity is for governments to help
cushion the impact of these disruptions.
Ultimately, then, this becomes political, moral and economic
reporting. But I am aware that
describing the book at this level undermines the level on which it works best –
as a good story, which it certainly is.
Boo starts with the event – the self-immolation. She then goes back in time and helps us
realize how it came to be. And then she
moves forward in time to see the consequences of that (and the global economic
contraction) on a small group of families and individuals that she has helped
us care deeply about. We get to know
these individuals and this micro culture.
We get a sense of how it works.
We resonate with the people she describes – they are not just glimpsed
from a bus or taxi in passing on the way to someplace that feels like many
other places – but are intimate and surprisingly non-exotic people – people we
can identify with.
Openly embracing this culture – living in and among these
individuals over the course of four or five years is a herculean task for
someone who is used to the creature comforts of the first world. I remember at the end of our 5 days in
Nicaragua, as we were processing our experience, an administrator pointing to
the exit sign in the hotel where we were staying – a sign like the signs in
almost all of the buildings we had been in.
In white lettering on a green background, it said (in Spanish) ruta de evacuacion, with an arrow. He said that
had seen these signs the whole time and each time had been reassured that there
was an escape route from this country that felt so foreign and scary to
him. While his reaction was extreme, I
think we all resonated to some extent with his experience.
Boo thanks the people who provided the haven for her to
recover from the reporting. In so far as
this book – to return to the question of whether we, as reporters, can be as
free of self-serving bias as the children, and the question of how to best
scientifically report on what we observe – in so far as Boo has self-serving
biases, she has invested a great deal in exploring them – and I salute her for
that. I also believe, however, her
discovery of goodness in Annawadi, analogous as it is to psychoanalysts
discovery of the inherent good in the people we work with – whether the infants that Stern observes or the adult patient who, despite horrific treatment, works
to engage humanely with those around him or her – this discovery is worth the
investment she has made. Bringing it to our attention, in the way that she
does, has the potential to help us think more charitably about those it would
be much easier to leave sealed safely behind walls that promise a vague and
better future – one that allows us to stay disconnected.
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