Some things are better left unsaid

Never Done: Pitched my politics to a movie star

You don't run into famous movie stars at post-Thanksgiving parties in the other places I've lived. Or at Passover seders. You do in New York. Well, I do. Or, I have. I just did. Not that it's better one way or another. It's just true. I was at one of my favorite parties of the year -- Pat, Dan, and Amanda's annual day-after Thanksgiving leftovers party which always rocks wonderful food and people. (Tshuve!) The food is a combination of the leftovers people don't want and food they bring just for the party. The people are usually an assortment of heady radicals and arty types. I always have deep and fun conversations with new people at this party, which is pretty much my definition of a great party.

I had a conversation with a woman that contextualized a traumatic event that happened to me in Sri Lanka in 1984. I have told the story to many people before, but never to someone who has been able to offer me any insight. I didn't even have to tell this woman the details, and she was able to offer me an analysis of power, culture, and silence specific to that time and place in Sri Lanka's history. I then told her details about the most important political lesson I learned there (about the role of allies during wartime and other political struggle) and she validated it and personalized it for me -- by telling me what was happening for her family at that same political moment.

I hesitate to write what happened, but am nudged to do so by this week's Mussar mide (middah), or character trait: Truth: Say nothing unless you are 100% sure it is true. And for me, since there are so many true things that I tend to keep quiet, I think I will be thinking this week about telling things that are true, even if they are awkward and uncomfortable. And awkward. Also, I have been feeling a little strange in this blog that I mostly write about things I haven't yet done in my life, and that I don't write extensively about things I have done. So ....
I studied Buddhism and Anthropology in college, and I took a semester abroad in Kandy, Sri Lanka, at the University of Peradinaya. I studied Theravada Buddhism, Sinhala language, Social, Economic, and Political History, and had an independent field study. During the field work, I went to the home of the relative of the man who ran the program. The relative was a traditional astrologer, and had agreed to allow me to shadow his work and interview him for 3 weeks. This never happened. Instead, he isolated me from the outside world while never leaving me alone at the house, and sexually threatened me. By that time in my life, at 21, I had been sexually assaulted more than once, both as a teenager and also as a little girl, and this threat really scared me. I don't remember much else from being there, except that he also red baited me for being a Jew, and gloated when Ronald Reagon won his re-election in 1984.

I ended up escaping with the help of the two young girls who worked there, and then walked 20 miles, alone, on small rural roads, back to Kandy, where, when I told the people in my program, they didn't believe me, and didn't set me up with an alternative place to stay. I figured out to stay for a few days at the YWCA before I thought to contact a family I knew from AFS (American Field Service) -- the exchange program I had been on just out of high school. This family took me in immediately, and not only made me feel welcome, safe, and at home, but also allowed me to shadow and interview them in their work: maternal and child welfare. I don't think I told my parents any of these details -- only that I was going to stay with this kind family of doctors.

While I was at these people's home, the civil war between the Sinhalese majority and the Tamil minority flared, with increased attacks on and by both Tamil and Sinhalese people. The family I was then with was Tamil, and they were part of an extensive network of Tamil and ally Sinhalese families who let each other know when police mobs were coming to attack Tamil homes. (Important political lesson about the role of allies during political struggle.)

The family I had fled, and the people who neither believed nor helped me, were Sinhalese, and the family that took me in was Tamil. For 25 years now I have refused to assign any political or cultural significance to those facts -- and maintained that it was coincidence, and not a commentary on Sinhalese or Tamil people or cultures. And yet there's always been a political context lurking behind these events that I couldn't parse. Then at the post-Thanksgiving day party, I met someone who could offer me the context I've been grasping for for 25 years. Context that shed light on the university I was at, where the leftist student movement was in the process of being co-opted into a stool pigeon for the government. Context that let me see how in that political moment at that university, silence was power and power was silence. Context that let me see how the program I was in, which was formed without political aim or ambition on the part of the Eastern Studies programs in the States, was also vulnerable to cooption by people with political aim. Context that will allow me to go back and actually break the isolation of that period in my life. All this in a conversation with someone I had never met before. That's the kind of party it was.

There was also a movie star at the party -- a shy, 20-something New York-based superstar, who is the son of Dan's close work colleague. Dan introduced us, and asked me to give them all the JFREJ (Jews for Racial and Economic Justice) elevator pitch. Which I did. An interesting and awkward conversation ensued, about the Domestic Workers Bill of Rights, before we all transitioned into other conversations. Later, I considered asking the young actor if he was interested in being in a 30-second spot that Josh and I are about to shoot for Center for New Community, to combat anti-immigrants who are co-opting the environmental movement to spread their hate and bigotry. Without knowing his politics or his comfort with using his celebrity for civic engagement, I wasn't sure I wanted to ask. I checked it out with Dan, to see what he, the host with the personal connection, thought. He encouraged me to ask. So I did, and the movie star and I had a second interesting and awkward conversation -- as it turned out, about how and why to use celebrity for a political cause, which is something he is trying to figure out for himself. (I think he's leaning away from doing our project with us, and I actually think he's right to be, but if he does decide to do it, I'll of course tell you all who it is. Otherwise, we'll leave him his privacy.) Then I loved what happened next. Another woman who I had just met suggested that we contact Leonardo DiCaprio, who has an environmental foundation, which is actually an even better idea. (Except for the fact that he does not live in Chelsea, and I am not likely to run into him at a party.)

So, it was a really good party. I haven't even told you about the feminist author, the Psychology Today editor, the internationally acclaimed recording artist, the social worker, the historian, the woman who works for the World Bank, the people who work for foundations, the people who used to work at foundations, or the young people who I can't reduce to their occupations. Or the food. Especially the cannoli. But I see that my version of telling the truth takes time, and if I want to get to the rest of my day, there are some things that are better left unsaid.