POV - point of view

[ezekielsdaughter]

1

I have it often now, the feeling of having a double consciousness.  And I first noticed it when I was caught flatfooted.  For a moment, I  saw through my own experience.  I was listening to NPR Sunday and the morning puzzle.  The answer to one question depended on a synonym for red.  The answer was “flushed”. 

 

“Nonsense,” I thought.  Flushed doesn’t mean red! Then I did a double-take.  Oh!  Depends on your complexion doesn’t it?   Now, I find it difficult to listen to those morning quizzes without seeing the cultural/physiological references.  Not as simple as “cup and saucer” as “Good Times” simplistically described it years ago.  I remember sneering when I heard that as an example of a cultural reference that only middle class people would know.   I don’t expect to know the Beetles references but “flushed” threw me.

 

2

 

The second case of frisson was reading “Jewish Pirates of the Caribbean: How a generation of swashbuckling Jews carved out an empire in the New World in their quest for treasure, religious freedom—and Revenge”

 

So it begins with the Jews kicked out of Spain at the same time as Columbus sails.  The author plays around with the notion that Columbus had Jewish ancestors but he has more documentation that he had Jewish navigators and some Jews in the crew.  The person who helped convince Isabella to be a patron was a converso.   The author gives the reader an overview of the Jewish exile at the time.  They could not be citizens of any Christian country.  Therefore, they were the prey of all.   There were Jews in the land of Israel, but in general, the crusades and the ascent of Islam had prevented many Jews from remaining in the land.    There was an “idyllic” time when Spain was home to Moors, Jews and Christians.  Ferdinand and Isabella changed all that in their purge of Islam from Spain.  After the Moors were purged, the King and Queen turned on the Jews.  When Spain said convert or die, they tore children from their parents’ arms and baptized them.  You either left or converted.  If you converted, you couldn’t immigrate—less you revert.  Even if you converted, people might still turn you in as a traitor to the faith and you were burned.  Some went to Portugal, a country that wanted Jewish money and navigational ability.  Later, Spain took over Portugal and started burning the conversos of Portugal.  Some were accepted by Holland for the same reason that Portugal took them in.  Some managed to get to Jamaica where they started convincing the English to invite the local pirates in to protect the colony.  (There is lots of summarizing here).   I can’t help but feel for fellow Jews driven from one country to the next and denied citizenship anywhere until Cromwell offers –a few—citizenship in GB.  The desperate desire for citizenship is explained when a few do get British citizenship.  When Spain shows up and starts to cart off British Jews to burn, GB says “ahem” and notes that burning their citizens will be looked upon as an act of war. 

 

The sandpaper feeling comes when you remember what a monster Columbus really was.  Where are the natives of Hispaniola, after all?  The Jews who escaped to the New World are not allowed to farm—even though some try.  They were bought there to trade.  And trade they do, in sugar, in rum—oh this sounds familiar—and slaves.  Farming was taken away from them, the author points out.  As soon as Spain and Portugal realize that sugar is more profitable than searching for gold, the Inquisition is brought in to clear out the Jews.  Even the English merchants in Jamaica begged Cromwell and later King Charles to relieve from “these descendants of the Crucifiers of our Lord.”  Only their continued usefulness to Great Britain against Spain saved them.   The author doesn’t hide the trafficking in slaves but that isn’t the focus of his book.   I don’t know if the trafficking in slaves ended when GB left the slave trading business.  Certainly, the end of the book is more interested in the pirates harassing Spanish ships (hence the “revenge” in the title).   There are mentions here and there of masters who freed their own slaves when the slaves asked to become Jews.  The British describe these Jews of Jamaica as Black because they are a mixture of North African, Spanish, and Portuguese leavened with West Africans.  Looking at photos online, it would be easy to say that they are “Black”.  Louisiana’s old laws would call them so.

 

3

 

So here I am, sister to both the oppressor and the oppressed.  A familiar feeling when American and Black let along American, Jewish, and Black.   As a result, my writing is so mixed.  I expect readers to have a passing knowledge of the Hebrew bible, the Christian bible and a little bit of Black history.  In one story, I expected the reader to know the major Hindu gods and recognize the name of a major African-American college.  Every human being has a mixed or stratified history.  But years and willful forgetfulness separate some readers from the raids, the midnight purges, and rapes that created them.  They know what the word “flushed” means but dozens of other words escape them and those words will never be clues on Sunday morning.

 

My complaining would have more weight if I wrote more fiction.  Lately, I come up with conversations that I wished to write, but no real story.    I am doing a lot of reading.