Jonathan Menon

Book Review -- Mohawk Saint, by Allan Greer

Fri, 25 Apr 2008 12:20:34 -0500

It has often been the lot of religious heroes to have their legacies poked, prodded and squeezed to fit the cultural, psychological and political agendas of more modern times. Catherine Tekakwitha, the unofficial saint of Kahnawake, has been positioned by American Catholics as an icon of nationalism, appropriated by environmentalists as a patroness of ecological values, drawn in storybooks to suit antiquated notions of little Indians frolicking in wooded glades, and even avoided by Canadian First Nations groups seeking to redress an oppressive history of Catholic assimilation. In Mohawk Saint: Catherine Tekakwitha and the Jesuits, Allan Greer cuts through these obscuring accretions to find the person behind the folklore, whose short life inspired the unexpected devotion of two French Jesuits and their unlikely quest to canonize her--a woman who, in her appearance, her language and her way of life, remained to the end a Mohawk. Instead of chronicling the sweeping movements of empires, Greer embroiders an intricate microhistory from the strands of three lives coming from two different worlds, in order to "challenge prevailing views of Iroquois history, particularly on the subject of conversion to Christianity." He crafts a masterful story using a historiographical approach that combines intensive analysis of hagiographies about Catherine's life with a detailed examination of the influences, beliefs and motivations that shaped the inner worlds of his two Jesuits: Claude Chauchetière and Pierre Cholenec. Greer knits together archaeological and ethnographic evidence to reconstruct the hybrid cultural environment which distinguished the French-Iroquois contact zone after the peace of 1667, an area that fringed Lake Ontario and reached eastwards as far as Lake Champlain and Montreal. Mainstream European accounts of missionary encounters have tended to treat North American Natives "primarily as the objects of apostolic attention," rather than as autonomous actors on their own spiritual journey to Christianity. Saint Francis Xavier's crusades among savages in the East Indies established this standard for French Jesuits like Claude Chauchetière, who studied the saint's letters while preparing for his own life of service. Greer's careful rendering debunks these myths and demonstrates that the old concept of conversion offers an insufficient framework for understanding the multifaceted aspects of what went on in Kahnawake. The Jesuits certainly did not "convert" Catherine: she learned Christianity mainly through contact with other Iroquois Christians and sought to circumvent the French priestly monopoly to gain more direct access to Christian mysteries. Neither could the actions of one young Iroquois woman alone "convert" Jesuits brought up within a male-dominated European society and hardened by years of religious training. The mental transformation that allowed them to see reflections of themselves in this Mohawk woman, this "other," came not merely from observing her, but from a predisposition as Jesuits to adapt to different cultures, from their literary battles with the imperatives of Catholic sacred biography, and from the unique cultural milieu in which their encounter took place. Greer begins by dispelling any doubts that Catherine Tekakwitha was, in every conceivable way, a Mohawk. He describes her Algonquin mother's abduction into Mohawk society, Catherine's early life in Gandaouagué, her baptism by the resident Jesuit and the social and economic processes to which she was inseparably bound. Particularly revealing is Greer's long dissection of the crafts and other women's work that Catherine engaged in, although a diagram or two would have helped the reader visualize the objects he describes. An essential aspect of Catherine's character came from the syncretic Iroquois culture. The Iroquois absorbed cultural elements of other peoples as part of living alliance relationships that went beyond simple peace treaties. It is within this context that the idea of Catherine's "conversion" breaks down. Adopting Catholicism from the French was very much an Iroquois thing to do, "in order to partake of what their allies presented as a central element of their identity." Furthermore, Catherine sought to bypass French priests in seeking deeper experiences of Christianity through asceticism, by severe penance and by creating her own Native convent in secret defiance of the patriarchal establishment. By infusing her new belief with the fruits of her Iroquois roots, Catherine went beyond a simple adherence to standard missionary fare to develop her own brand of do-it-yourself Christianity where she was ultimately in control. Francis Xavier, with Portuguese power at his back, had been happy to force baptism on Natives and accept the smashing of idols in place of more meaningful expressions of faith. But as Greer writes elsewhere, other Jesuits in India and China found ways to "infiltrate" the civilizations they lived in, to adopt their languages and cultural attributes to be accepted more easily, and to adapt by compromising on certain points of doctrine and ritual. In New France--where the alliance basis of French-Iroquois relations prevented European cultural practices from dominating Indian ones--Chauchetière and Cholenec were able to recognize aspects of Iroquois culture in Catherine's fervent devotion that matched their mental patterns of what Christian saintliness meant. Yet Chauchetière's and Cholenec's transformation did not result from merely observing Catherine Tekakwitha's life. Equally important were their literary crusades against the embedded cultural prejudices in Catholic thinking, which they faced in seeking sainthood for Catherine. "[A] saint was not really a saint," writes Greer, "without a vita sanctorum," a sacred biography, and both Chauchetière and Cholenec set out to provide one. Struggling to make Catherine conform to hagiographic stock plots forced the two Jesuits to wrestle with her example and to separate, in their own minds, European cultural norms from the heroism that was at the core of their faith. Chauchetière, the more creative, idealistic and unstable of the two, produced a broad portrait that covered the healing miracles attributed to Catherine, her austere way of life, her charity, industry and strength of character, as well as that "certain ineffable holy quality" he had seen in her and that he believed had cured his own tortured soul. Chauchetière, says Greer, struggles on almost every page of his biography "to overcome his own lingering sense that the terms 'holy' and 'Indian' belonged to separate, incommensurable universes." But Cholenec, whose seasoned mind was both more cautious than his younger colleague's and more sensitive to the attitudes of European Catholics, shaped his account of Catherine's saintly behaviour to fit the more conventional theme of celibacy--an aspect of Catherine's life that, if true, was idiosyncratic among Iroquois. Knowing that an Indian virgin was unlikely to be convincing to his audience, Cholenec attempted to fix the facts around the policy. He turned a probably non-existent vow of celibacy into a historical record and used a story of cannibalistic acts by one of Catherine's friends to separate Tekakwitha from the savagery associated with her people. Even though she was Mohawk on the outside, Cholenec was trying to say, she was really a saint. If such a dramatic revolution in cultural understanding was going to happen anywhere, it was going to happen in Kahnawake. This Christian Iroquois settlement, situated on the south bank of the St. Lawrence just upriver from Montreal, was a hybrid town born out of the uncoordinated northward migration of Iroquois as they responded peacefully to the French colonization of Montreal. Even within the syncretic Iroquois culture, Kahnawake was an extreme example of "the Indians' Middle Ground." For Catherine and the Mohawks, Greer explains, they had to "find a way of adjusting to the expectations of the [French] ambient society without melting into it." For the Jesuits, this required heightened scrutiny of their new environment to determine "what came from God and what did not." At least as much as the Mohawks, the Jesuits were "making the best of situations they neither created nor fully understood." The process of transformation, then, was too complex and multifaceted to be captured within traditional, one-way notions of conversion. Throughout Mohawk Saint, Allan Greer makes the compelling case that instead of a contest of cultures, "[t]he language of 'layering' and 'interpenetration' or...the 'braiding' of cultures, better serves us." He also shows that our modern Western mindset is as different from that of 17th century European Jesuits as it is from the Natives they wrote about. Yet to undertake such a complex thing in 200 tightly written pages is not an easy task and, almost inevitably, Greer's treatise begins to fray toward the end. The Epilogue muddies the pristine portrait that he has so painstakingly embellished. It takes the form of a travelogue through the various societies and groups dedicated to Catherine across the western United States. But the purpose of Mohawk Saint is to free the reader from the divergent political and cultural agendas that have encrusted the story of Catherine. Why, then, does Greer only introduce them to us in detail just moments before he leaves us alone with our thoughts? Allan Greer's skill in reconstructing Catherine Tekakwitha as a historical person from hagiographic raw material, and extricating her from the tangle of legend, is extraordinary. His achievement becomes even more astonishing when we realize that within this compelling portrait of a complex woman only four sentences of her actual words appear, and that even these deathbed platitudes were probably invented for hagiographic purposes. But this also underscores the unfortunate fact that even with all the details of Greer's carefully crafted microhistory, he can still only tell us very little about what his main character actually thought and felt about the things she saw, the people she met and the events she lived through. "These are questions," he writes with a trace of sadness, "that no historian can answer."

About this resurrected blog

Sun, 16 Sep 2007 16:11:38 -0500

From November 2005 to September 2006 I used this blog as a place to write every day. It ended up comprising a wide range of things, from well-thought-out essays to off-the-cuff movie reviews, interesting excerpts and fragments to short notices about current news stories, not to mention a whole pile of nonsense that served no purpose other than light mental exercise. Today, after a month of redesigning and then coding everything myself, I am re-launching this site to publish and discuss my own essays, book reviews and considered reflections on political thought and governance, current affairs, literature and life. From time to time I will post movie reviews--and maybe something about baseball--but if you used to come here to find out whatever nonsense there was in my head each day, you will find my future postings to be more considered and focused, not so flippant and less frequent. Please feel free to look at the archives, but just don't hold me responsible for whatever I wrote back then in my youth. To witness my nonsense and thoughtlessness, come and find me on Facebook!

I look forward to your comments. :-) Jonathan

Book Review -- The Other Side of Israel, by Susan Nathan

Fri, 07 Sep 2007 17:33:07 -0500

Every night at 1:05 a.m. the last train departs London's Waterloo station on a 42-minute trek through the privileged communities of southwest London. In nine minutes it reaches Clapham, where in 1807 Evangelical Anglicans convinced Parliament to abolish the slave trade on moral grounds. Six minutes later the train arrives in Wimbledon, which has been a favourite retreat of the wealthy and powerful since Queen Elizabeth I made it fashionable. Today, Wimbledon is an enclave of expensive homes and tidy gardens where well-to-do professionals enjoy a short commute to the halls of Westminster and their offices in Knightsbridge. When Susan Nathan, a middle-aged Jewish woman of Lithuanian and South African descent, left Wimbledon in 1999 to exercise her right of return to Israel, she took her liberal, south London sensibilities with her. Her book, The Other Side of Israel: My Journey Across the Jewish/Arab Divide, examines the moral, social and political injustices suffered by the Arab citizens of Israel--the one million invisible Palestinians, who, because they live inside the state of Israel, are deprived of the international attention that their compatriots in the Occupied Territories have achieved during the two Intifadas. Susan Nathan exposes the abuses committed against Israeli Arabs in education, employment, land rights, public services, the military and the political system. Writing for a popular international audience, and Diaspora Jews in particular, she chronicles the transformation of her own attitudes from the idealized version of Zionism she grew up with to a more informed perspective which she gained by living in the Arab town of Tamra, in the western Galilee. The author argues that whereas concrete walls separate Israel from the Occupied Territories, the Jews and Arabs in Israel are divided by a psychological barrier. She marshals a mountain of evidence to support her contention that Israel is an apartheid state, drawing on her South African heritage as a template. She shows--convincingly--how racism is knitted into the legal and political fabric of the country through Jewish control of the ideology taught in Arab schools, a constant grab for Arab-owned land through a legal framework that favours Jews, denial of basic infrastructure services to Arab areas and a refusal to employ Arabs in important state enterprises. By avoiding the visible elements of the racism that made South Africa infamous, such as separate washrooms for different races, Israel's domestic policies have eluded international scrutiny. Nathan examines in detail the psychological effects of inequality to support her argument that the divide traumatizes both Arabs and Jews and perpetuates a cycle of fear and learned helplessness that paralyzes a search for solutions. For Israeli Arabs the result is hopelessness about the future, an eroded identity and a fading awareness of their own human rights. Arabs feel they have no reason to participate in their own state, and fragmented leadership makes it impossible for them to take any collective action. For Jews, fear and a herd instinct reinforce an exaggerated sense of victimhood which causes them to deny any responsibility for injustices toward Arabs. Nathan laments that Israeli Jews, now in a position of power, have forgotten what it is like to be the minority. Susan Nathan's background as an HIV/AIDS counsellor sheds light on these issues and her attention to the human aspects of the difficult issues she describes lends freshness to the book, as do her vivid descriptions and accessible style. She is fearless in addressing controversial topics, such as the parallel between the Holocaust and the treatment of Arabs. But in most cases she does so with a level of sensitivity that most popular writing about Israel lacks, such as in discussing the role that the hijab plays in the self-esteem of young women and examining the psychological trauma that young Israeli soldiers must cope with in trying to enforce an illegal military occupation. But The Other Side of Israel is as much a story of the disillusionment of a Diaspora Jew when faced with the realities of her promised land as it is a chronicle of injustices suffered by Palestinians. It is an intensely personal account that is heavily influenced by the perspectives Nathan brought with her to Israel. Having one's romantic illusions about life shattered is a common experience for the generation of boys and girls who grew up in England in the 1950s. The children of post-war Britain awoke from their cradles to a conflicted childhood--an upbringing full of heroic stories of Churchill and empire on one hand, and shell-shocked parents and ration books on the other. As a child, Nathan filled this existential gap by inventing fantasies of the exotic places she discovered in the pages of National Geographic and developing a nostalgic, rose-coloured vision of Zionism in response to the muted anti-Semitism she encountered in English boarding schools. When she moved to Israel, Nathan chose to relive the epic journey of previous Jewish immigrants by spending six months in an immigrant absorption centre, instead of taking a more direct route to her new life in Tel Aviv. But her simplistic view of her Jewish homeland collapsed as soon as she came into contact with the reality of power relations between the Jews and Arabs in Israel. She responded to this trauma by exchanging one set of illusions for another. The Other Side of Israel begins like a James Bond novel: Israel is a land populated by heroes and villains where it is impossible not to choose a side. She constructs a highly romantic view of Arab life and motivations around a novel archetype--Hajji, an Arab grandmother. Hajji's life transforms the ordinary into the extraordinary: her household skills are "miraculous" and her understanding of nature, reflected in her gardening, is "profound." And Hajji doesn't simply make a pot of coffee--she conducts a ritual of coffee-making that is practiced with reverence by all Palestinians. Nathan's romantic outlook causes her to expunge the seething anger felt by Palestinians and to refuse to concede any wrongdoing on the Arab side. This is refreshing for readers who are used to a Western media environment where the most common image of a Palestinian Arab is the keffiyeh-wrapped head of a terrorist or a teenager throwing stones. But when it comes to most of the Jews she meets, she is quick to lay blame. Nathan reserves her most passionate criticism--and her weakest argument--for the Jewish left which claims to support peace with the Palestinians. For her, these Jewish parties and peace groups maintain the status quo by failing to address the real issue in the conflict--an inequality of rights between Jews and Arabs. They support the Arabs only as long as the identity of Israel as a Jewish state is not challenged. But in contrast to the impressive evidence provided elsewhere, she bases her attack on anecdotal observations of Jewish/Arab co-existence groups and the spoken words from a few Jews whom she has provoked. She also jumps to unfounded conclusions about the motives of Israeli Jews. A female soldier who is particularly rough at a checkpoint brings to mind stories of female guards in Dachau. Left-wing groups exist only to make themselves feel better about the injustices their country inflicts and to maintain a democratic international image. When an Arab suggests that his people must consider their own faults before blaming Jews, she surmises that he has been "bought" by his employment on the nearby kibbutz. Susan Nathan's emotions are never very far from the surface, and in her critique of the Israeli left they finally get away from her. Accusations of anti-Semitism resurfaced recently against some writers and academics with the angry criticism that greeted last year's paper--and the just-published book--by Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer on the power of the "Israel Lobby" in American politics. As a Jew, Susan Nathan is immune to these charges, but given her extreme moral stance against Israeli policies it is no wonder that her book has received little response in America. In Britain both the Financial Times and the Times Literary Supplement reviewed the book, but no major American publication will touch it. Sales have also been weak on this side of the Atlantic: the original printing of 10,000 copies remains on North American bookstore shelves, while in Britain a paperback edition is selling at least reasonably well and the book is finding its greatest success in Scandinavia which may be due to more balanced opinions about the Middle East that I have heard prevail there. International editions have been published in German, Dutch, French, Italian, Swedish and Finnish--and one is forthcoming in Arabic. The American author John Updike wrote that a reviewer should never criticize an author for not achieving what she never attempted to do. Susan Nathan's book provides only one side of the Israeli Arab issue to be sure, but it is titled, after all, The Other Side of Israel. Susan Nathan attempted to give Israeli Arabs a voice, and she provided a forum for some of them to speak to the world through her personal interviews with them. It is a compassionate, intelligent voice, one that we are not used to hearing in the West. And although The Other Side of Israel may not earn her many friends in the mainstream American media, it is a fresh and candid addition to the literature on the domestic aspects of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Rangers 30, Orioles 3

Fri, 24 Aug 2007 18:07:32 -0500

Here's a box score like you will never again see in your lifetime, or your children's, or their children's.

Site Under Construction

Fri, 24 Aug 2007 04:00:54 -0500

Excuse the mess around here for the next few days. I am redesigning my site and I am using these production pages to do it.

No. 756 -- 7 August 2007

Wed, 08 Aug 2007 19:35:48 -0500

Read the news at MLB.com

So much for TV predictions

Wed, 08 Aug 2007 19:34:32 -0500

I suppose Studio 60 just didn't have it, did it? It was never as good as The West Wing.

Bonds ties Aaron

Sun, 05 Aug 2007 00:58:45 -0500

One of my last blog entries from May 28th a year ago, just before I stopped writing here, reported on Barry Bonds passing Babe Ruth on the all-time home run list by hitting his 715th home run. Today Barry Bonds tied Hank Aaron with number 755. Back then I also wrote that after number 756, that would probably be it for our lifetime in seeing the massive Major League Baseball Home Run records broken. After all, we have seen Roger Maris's record of 61 home runs fall in the last decade, and we may see Henry Aaron's mark fall tomorrow. But then, earlier today, Alex Rodriguez became the youngest player ever to hit his 500th, beating Jimmie Foxx to the mark by 330 days. A-Rod is only playing in his 14th major league season, which means that he could surpass Barry Bonds in the long run. It's going to be fun to wait and see.

Get ready for seven more years of bold, insightful TV

Sun, 17 Sep 2006 23:12:23 -0500

"There's always been a conflict between art and commerce. And now I'm telling you that art is getting its ass kicked." When Air Force One banked away from us and into the blue beyond last May, I lamented the loss of The West Wing, which, for seven long years, kept our hopes alive that with decent leadership government really could be a place where good people do great things. But Aaron Sorkin--the mind behind The West Wing--and friends are back, and where the West Wing offered an alternate view of government, their hot new series is taking aim at the cowardice that has become the television media. While those of you in the great U.S. of A. have to wait until tomorrow for the premiere of Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, we in Canada were treated to it tonight on CTV. After a sketch called "Crazy Christians" is cut at the last minute by the suits, the director of a top TV comedy show blows his stack on camera one night. Now Jordan McDeere, the young, new president of the National Broadcasting System (Amanda Peet, good for her for snagging this role!) has to move quickly to save the network from a media disaster. She decides to hire a dangerous but brilliant writer-director team to run the show and bring integrity and humour back. The catch is that Matt Albie and Danny Tripp were fired from Studio 60 just four years ago by the network's CEO, Jordan's new boss. So here come Matthew Perry and Bradley Whitford into what promises to be utter chaos. Check out the show; it's the top of my list this fall. Mondays at 10:00 p.m. on NBC, and in Canada you can get it a night earlier: Sundays on CTV at 10.

Diplomacy

Thu, 06 Jul 2006 01:13:54 -0500

"Diplomacy is the art of saying "good doggie" until you find a suitable rock." -- Don't know who said it

Kicking away the ladder: Friedrich List and free-trade hypocrisy

Mon, 12 Jun 2006 21:30:13 -0500

Joseph Stiglitz's book "The Roaring Nineties" was one of last year's nudges that convinced me to get out of the business world. What shocked me was how he exposed the hypocrisy that many corporate leaders and other businesspeople exercise every day in thinking about and fighting for the issues that are important to them. It was that and also that I recognized my own role in the grand lies that big business told in the 1990s. I recently looked up an entry on How the World Works about "free-trade hypocrisy", where Andrew Leonard, whom I have mentioned here before, considers again his opinions that although globalization is good, the set of policies we call "free trade" are "in effect a rigged system that locks in the advantages of those already at the top of the heap, at the expense, not only of the developing world, but of blue-collar and middle-class workers in the developed world." He examines this in relation to a book by Robert Wade, in which Wade quotes Friedrich List, a 19th century German economist, who slams free-trade propagandists in the following illuminating way: "It is a very clever common device that when anyone has attained the summit of greatness, he kicks away the ladder by which he has climbed up, in order to deprive others of the means of climbing up after him ... Any nation which by means of protective duties and restrictions on navigation has raised her manufacturing power and her navigation to such a degree of development that no other nation can sustain free competition with her, can do nothing wiser than to throw away these ladders of her greatness, to preach to other nations the benefits of free trade, and to declare in penitent tones that she has hitherto wandered in the paths of error, and has now for the first time succeeded in discovering the truth."

Let's make fun of CNN

Sat, 03 Jun 2006 23:01:00 -0500

Salon.com has a War Room blog entry that takes the mickey out of CNN senior national correspondent John Roberts, and then Wolf Blitzer. It is about how sanctions didn't stop Iraq from having weapons of mass destruction. Wait a minute, what did I say?

Katie's last day

Wed, 31 May 2006 08:53:48 -0500

2006 has been a year of many goodbyes so far. The West Wing, Will & Grace, and more. Today on Today is Katie Couric's last day, and I made sure to clear my schedule to watch her. You see, 15 years ago I tuned in on her first day, a stand-in role when Deborah Norville was on holiday. Cutey Katie was such a hit so quickly that Deborah ended up on permanent vacation. So I am about to catch the second showing of Today on a west coast station. If you didn't see the show, don't worry. Entertainment Weekly has blogged it. Tomorrow I may come back and make some comments on Meredith Vieira's first day. [Note: I just learned that Meredith doesn't start until after the summer hiatus. I'm an idiot.]

X-Men beats Spider-man

Tue, 30 May 2006 11:21:37 -0500

X-Men: The Last Stand took in $120.1 million last weekend, the biggest opening box office weekend in history, surpassing the $115.8 million Spider-Man 2 earned in 2004. I told you it was an amazing film.

715, finally.

Sun, 28 May 2006 19:53:09 -0500

Barry Bonds today surpassed Babe Ruth on the all-time home run list. He hit number 715 off Byung-Hyun Kim of the Colorado Rockies. Let's put aside the controversies for one day and celebrate a great sports moment. Regardless of steroids, here is a magnificant achievement. Only #756 will top it, and that will probably be it for our lifetime.