Hope

She wasn’t walking into the food bank. She was tiptoeing. Embarrassment all over. Embarrassment that came across as rudeness. Luckily for me, heaven dictated that at that very same moment the supervisor happened to drop by. Otherwise I would have jumped right away to the quick conclusion that this lady was just someone looking for trouble.

Our hospitality volunteer brought her a steamy cup of freshly brewed coffee and invited her to take a seat. I showed her a chair next to my desk. It was when she sat down that I was able to see that what I had in my office was a world that was crumbling down, coming apart, shattering to pieces. Her deep sigh spoke volumes of a life overburdened by despair. As she started to unfold her story between careful sips of boiling coffee it became evident that she was entering into the darkest night of her life.

There is a centuries old narrative that tells a story of darkness being defeated by a tiny ray of light. It goes on saying that out of this struggle life came into being. Only because darkness was put down we can now speak of beauty, and joy, and all those wonderful things that make life worth living. The way I read this story out of an ancient book makes me imagine a bird hovering over a dark abyss.

That old story also speaks of what I was seeing right in front of my eyes listening to this woman over a cup of coffee. Hope happens whenever there is darkness. Do not think that just because there is no light then there’s no way forward. No siree! (oops! No madame!!).

Darkness comes in different shapes. It is usually associated to despair, or to the end of some kind of road we have been traveling. Darkness is a no exit alleyway; a dream that refuses to come true. Darkness has the ability to engulf us. Its arms seem to multiply around us as they embrace us tight as if it were an unwelcome lover. It is an unwelcome lover, for sure.

What does it take for us to shake us free from such an invasive embrace? For the woman of my story, it meant to take her embarrassment with her and bring it along to have a cup of coffee with me. As we were ready for a second cup, her story gave place to another one full of initiatives that would enable her to walk across the valley of dark shadows she was going through.

Now, I’m having here a problem with language. Well, another problem on top of my thick accent. I say this because in my mother tongue, hope is a feminine word. Hope is never associated to a masculine world. On top of that, history and reality insist on showing us that this business of sending darkness to the back seat so that hope should lead the way has been done mostly by women.

Whenever darkness is being pierced by some warm ray of light it’s because a woman is deciding to dust herself off, pick up the pieces and put on her shoulders the task to craft a new beginning for her and those close to her. The Greek from of old they imagined that the world rested on the powerful shoulders of a male god. This deity was Atlas. Perhaps we should forgive them because they were talking from a point of history in which not many things had happened yet. Thus, they never knew that actually that Atlas must be a woman.

And so, the woman in my story found in the midst of her own darkness the she had within herself a heart strong enough to conceive hope. Darkness, her unwelcome lover was sent packing.

(Oswaldo Guayasamin, Manos de la esperanza - The Hands of Hope)

Straw Dogs

They say that it is usual for men to come to a point in their lives in which they either snap, or dramatically change their focuses in life or just walk away from familiar surroundings. Therapists speak of a journey to some elusive land that pulls men in even though there are no maps to ensure a safe travel. Those in the know thus make reference to the great myths that involve trips into the unknown: Jason and his Argonauts going after some golden fleece, Ulysses spending 10 years on a trip that he would normally make in few days, or the multitude of knights blazing just as many trails in order to get to the exact place in the dessert in which they would be able to get hold of the Holy Grail. All of these legends speak of a deeply rooted longing in mostly but not exclusively male psychology that impels men to all of a sudden turn their backs and break free. What could be those breaking points that turn a person's life around for better or worse?

With this question in mind I went back to Sam Peckinpah’s “Straw Dogs” (1971 http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0067800). A young Dustin Hoffman plays David Summer, a researcher who is breaking ground in the field of Math and thus needs some time away to finish his research. He rents a cottage in England and goes with his wife, Amy (Susan George), on a sabbatical. The cottage belongs to his wife’s family and it’s located in the little town his wife grew up in. Once there, the young professor becomes a foreigner in a rather hostile environment. The men in the village think of him as a weakling while openly lust after his wife, specially her old flame from her teen years. The increasingly escalating tension boils up to an awful mix of rape, violence and murder that provide the context for this young professor to affirm himself as a male. Following a line similar to William Golding’s “The Lord of the Flies” and Jonathan Littell's “The Kindly Ones,” Sam Peckinpah unearth the beast that lies dormant inside of the most civilized and law abiding souls. Whenever it comes to proves one’s mettle, violence seems to present itself as the most appealing route to follow.

Hoffman’s character descends from a pedestal of snobbery on which he has perched his sense of worth to test himself as just another man in a backward village. However, at the end, as he drove away from a destroyed house leaving behind a wife he has neglected all the time, David Summer sports a smile that tells of a newly discovered freedom, as if he has just gotten hold of the Holy Grail, or the golden fleece, or Ulysses’s Ithaca. Yet, in Peckinpah the recovered male self is not marked by either a sense of going back home or finding the way home. Ironically, the final smile of this professor is punctuated by his contradictory words: “I don’t know my way home.” Sadly, violence is presented as a rite of passage that specially men cannot avoid. Does it have to be that way?