As I toiled to think of a performative utterance or act,
when intentionally performed really meant something else, I was reminded of an
event in my life. When I was a teenager,
my father became furious one night because I arrived home late from a drama
competition. Granted, the competition took place on a school night, and we (the
cast) returned home very late due to the long awards ceremony and traveling
from out of town. My father told me that he didn’t want me to participate in
theatre anymore, and that I was to tell my teacher the next day that I was
going to withdraw from the play and upcoming competitions. This command from my father seemed ridiculous
to me. I was an all “A” student, was
responsible and did my chores, was active in my church, obeyed my parents, etc…I
felt like I was a good kid considering, and I finally found something that I
loved to do! After I told him that I
wouldn’t do such a thing, in his anger he hit me in the face. What meant to be a slap really was an
accidental punch in the nose. The next
evening, my father came to me in tears (which I had never seen from him
before), and asked me to forgive him. He
hugged my rigid, angered body as I regurgitated with a bitter subtext, “I forgive
you.” Though my father appeared relieved
when I uttered those words, he had to have known somehow that I didn’t mean
them...right? Watch this funny clip where Shrek forgives Donkey…or does he? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MzLEjzvygYE
In Dr. Fletcher’s discussion with the grad students last
Wednesday, he talked about how performativity, thanks to Judith Butler, does not
describe reality but affects it. He
summarized from Butler’s writing that “…so many acts are performances that
create realities that create performances…Performance is how we learn the
present.” My act to not forgive my
father really, in truth, hurt me. For
the next several years, that event from high school fueled my anger towards my
parents…morphing into a hatred that eventually affected my health and
relationship with my family. I had
engaged in a repeated performance over time that affected my reality. Eventually I didn’t really have a
relationship with my parents and didn’t want one. I finally learned that forgiveness is a
choice one must make, because it doesn’t happen over time or on its own.
When Nelson Mandela was released from prison in 1990, he had
to consciously leave behind his bitterness and anger or, he felt, he would
still be in prison. Watch this
interesting clip about Nelson Mandela and the Science of Forgiveness. The idea of “forgiveness” is usually thought to live in
the spiritual or philosophical realm; however,
there are new scientific studies being done to explore the effects of forgiveness,
or lack thereof. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FyC-Zma75Aw (Sorry about the long ad before the actual clip!)
As I researched for my
thesis performance this semester, I came across a letter from Iranian-American
Pastor Saeed Abedini that really speaks to this issue. Currently, he is imprisoned in Iran for
his Christian faith, accused of “undermining the authority of the Iranian
government” with an eight year prison sentence in one of the worst prisons of
the world. In his
letter to his wife in early 2013 he writes:
I have been stung so many times
that I have become full of poison. This
is an Iranian saying…It means that we have been bitten by the snakes of this
world so many times that, that all the poison has collected in us and that we
are like the poisonous snake. But if we
sting anyone, we will die…When we don’t forgive, we drink the poison ourselves
and then wait for the other person to die.
And we take the knife that has hurt us and we stab ourselves with it
again! But when we forgive, we pour out
the poison of the enemy and the devil and we don’t let the poison stay in us
and we don’t let the poison make us into poisonous snakes! So that we don’t become like the person we
despised and who persecuted and tortured us…When we forgive, we become free and
we become messengers of peace and reconciliation and goodness.
I love this example. That combination of words can be incredibly powerful or one of the emptiest things imaginable. We consistently throw away phrases such as, "Forgive me" "Im sorry" "I forgive you" "Don't ever be sorry", etc. Somewhere along the line we acknowledged that the to truly forgive someone is an involved and complicated process that may take more time than is productive to take in a work environment or even in a personal relationship. Because of this we just end up performing the gesture of forgiveness or apologizing because we know its the only way to move on to more productive things. The crappy part is that there is a pretty noticeable difference between someone performing the act because they know it is the societal expectation and actually meaning the words that they say. I can think of recent examples in which an individual performed the act of apologizing for something they had done and the group that they had apologized to had mixed feeling about whether it was a sincere gesture endowed with meaning or whether it was merely an act of self preservation. To forgive or to ask for forgiveness is a complicated action- and it seems that the success of the action is not necessarily determined by the intention behind it- but, also by how to receiver of the action chooses to view it.
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