NaNoWriMo Pep Talk: Bread and Roses
Once I went to a lecture by a nun, and it was terrible. She wasn’t the stereotypical nun. She wasn’t Maria Von Trapp, winsome novice who loves fresh air, children and cranky sea captains; she wasn’t a knuckle-cracking, ruler-wielding nightmare; she wasn’t even an obscure theology professor passive-aggressively antagonizing the Vatican from an apartment in Manhattan. She was an awkward, gawky Latina who spoke haltingly, slowly, searching for words, her voice harsh and breaking on every sentence.
“I joined the convent at seventeen and they sent me to El Salvador. I was captured by CIA-trained commandos in the civil war. They locked me in a room with a cement floor and tortured me. They burned me with cigarettes; here are the scars. Some of them were Americans. I heard them speaking English in the next room, deciding what to do with me. God stretched out his hand and saved me, but I will never leave that cement floor, not really. I told my superiors what happened and they tried to help, but the government fought back. They said I lied. They said I was delusional. They said my scars are from kinky lesbian sex. I am not a lesbian. I am a nun. I am a survivor of torture.”
The audience was shocked, unwilling to believe our own government could torture a nun. Unwilling to accept it. Unwilling to look at her scars. Finally someone said, “Sister, I’m so sorry, I don’t mean to imply that you should bear any blame or shame for what was done to you, but...why? Why on earth would commandos torture a nun? I don’t get it. It seems strange that they would choose you.”
She said, "I was a first-grade teacher. I taught children to read.” There was a baffled silence. She sighed. “When you teach children to read, they start to want more. They stop accepting their fate. They have self-esteem, self-respect, a sense of accomplishment. They feel their own worth. They stop cooperating with government oppression and corporate interests, and they start demanding better treatment. No one wants that. So they captured me to make me stop teaching children to read.”
The lecture continued, and she broke down crying, saying, “The worst part is that I cannot go back. The war is over, sort of, and the children in that village in the jungle need a school. They need teachers. But my superiors will not let me go back, because they cannot protect me.” The Catholic Church could not protect a celibate twenty-nine-year-old schoolteacher from being kidnapped by commandos for the heinous crime of teaching children to read.
When my dad was a young boy, he lived in a shack outside Akron, Ohio. They didn’t have running water until 1956. But in about 1962, they got a television, and my dad grew up with Lucy, Ricky, Wally and the Beav. He stayed up to watch the moon landing in 1969 with my uncle, and they talked about what their lives would be like in 2017, on Venus or Mars.
It’s easy to hate on the idiot box. But in those stories, black and white and sixteen inches tall, the children always had food and shoes and nice clothes and a packed lunch and a slingshot. The parents were kind and sober. In those half-hour stories, you might lose a baseball game or a marble, but you came home to a smiling mother with a warm pan of brownies and a father who tucked you into a cozy bed. My dad decided he wanted that life. He taught himself to speak like Walter Cronkite, and he studied hard and worked hard and went to college, and he grew up to win three Pulitzer Prizes for his work as a newspaper journalist. He became a science writer and a professor of English, and he now teaches young kids from Akron how to write their way through college, so they can get out of the shacks and tenements that still fill the Rust Belt. My uncle became a rocket scientist and teaches physics, telling kids they too can go to the moon.
This is why we read. And this is why we write. It teaches us to ask for more: more than work, more than a paycheck, more than the next pair of shoes or loaf of bread. More than to be so tired at day’s end that we park in front of Tiny House Hunters and American Idol and turn our brains off.
We deserve more. We deserve meaning and magic and mystery, and reading and writing are how we make them. No one can stop us. Now go and do it.
“I joined the convent at seventeen and they sent me to El Salvador. I was captured by CIA-trained commandos in the civil war. They locked me in a room with a cement floor and tortured me. They burned me with cigarettes; here are the scars. Some of them were Americans. I heard them speaking English in the next room, deciding what to do with me. God stretched out his hand and saved me, but I will never leave that cement floor, not really. I told my superiors what happened and they tried to help, but the government fought back. They said I lied. They said I was delusional. They said my scars are from kinky lesbian sex. I am not a lesbian. I am a nun. I am a survivor of torture.”
The audience was shocked, unwilling to believe our own government could torture a nun. Unwilling to accept it. Unwilling to look at her scars. Finally someone said, “Sister, I’m so sorry, I don’t mean to imply that you should bear any blame or shame for what was done to you, but...why? Why on earth would commandos torture a nun? I don’t get it. It seems strange that they would choose you.”
She said, "I was a first-grade teacher. I taught children to read.” There was a baffled silence. She sighed. “When you teach children to read, they start to want more. They stop accepting their fate. They have self-esteem, self-respect, a sense of accomplishment. They feel their own worth. They stop cooperating with government oppression and corporate interests, and they start demanding better treatment. No one wants that. So they captured me to make me stop teaching children to read.”
The lecture continued, and she broke down crying, saying, “The worst part is that I cannot go back. The war is over, sort of, and the children in that village in the jungle need a school. They need teachers. But my superiors will not let me go back, because they cannot protect me.” The Catholic Church could not protect a celibate twenty-nine-year-old schoolteacher from being kidnapped by commandos for the heinous crime of teaching children to read.
When my dad was a young boy, he lived in a shack outside Akron, Ohio. They didn’t have running water until 1956. But in about 1962, they got a television, and my dad grew up with Lucy, Ricky, Wally and the Beav. He stayed up to watch the moon landing in 1969 with my uncle, and they talked about what their lives would be like in 2017, on Venus or Mars.
It’s easy to hate on the idiot box. But in those stories, black and white and sixteen inches tall, the children always had food and shoes and nice clothes and a packed lunch and a slingshot. The parents were kind and sober. In those half-hour stories, you might lose a baseball game or a marble, but you came home to a smiling mother with a warm pan of brownies and a father who tucked you into a cozy bed. My dad decided he wanted that life. He taught himself to speak like Walter Cronkite, and he studied hard and worked hard and went to college, and he grew up to win three Pulitzer Prizes for his work as a newspaper journalist. He became a science writer and a professor of English, and he now teaches young kids from Akron how to write their way through college, so they can get out of the shacks and tenements that still fill the Rust Belt. My uncle became a rocket scientist and teaches physics, telling kids they too can go to the moon.
This is why we read. And this is why we write. It teaches us to ask for more: more than work, more than a paycheck, more than the next pair of shoes or loaf of bread. More than to be so tired at day’s end that we park in front of Tiny House Hunters and American Idol and turn our brains off.
We deserve more. We deserve meaning and magic and mystery, and reading and writing are how we make them. No one can stop us. Now go and do it.