| Wednesday, April 30, 2008 4:53PM | | | | Human Rights and Ice Cream Cones | Posted By: Gini Alhadeff
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| Tags: “Sometimes you have to put an icecream cone in somebody’s face.” | Witness: A Special Program for High School Students
With Uzodinma Iweala, Patricia McCormick, Amanda Michalopoulou, Jutta Richter, Kashmira Sheth
“Sometimes you have to put an icecream cone in somebody’s face.” This memorable sentence was uttered today by writer Jutta Richter.
Uzodinma Iweala, author of Beasts of No Nation, told a packed auditorium at the Istituto Cervantes on 49th Street that he had “gotten all dressed up to come and meet you guys.” Indeed, he wore gold cufflinks on his striped shirt beneath a navy blue jacket with a white trim, and caramel-colored pants and boots. He didn’t read from his novel, based on the lives of child soldiers in Nigeria, his country of origin, though he was raised in America and educated at Harvard. He braved possible unpopularity among the throng of juniors and seniors from several New York City high schools by giving them an assignment. They were to go on a website, and he dictated the address: “H-t-t-p backward slash, backward slash…” then had to demonstrate what he meant by that backward slash. It was a Department of Justice Website regarding juvenile victims and offenders.
He had started out asking, “How many of you guys know at what age you can join the army?” They knew—21. Then, “How many of you know how old you have to be to be tried as an adult?” They knew—16. And, “How many of you know it can be as early as 13?” They knew—in cases of murder and manslaughter. The internet address Uzo gave was very long to prepare them morally perhaps for the document itself which he said was about 200 pages long. Here was the assignment: to read the document on the subject of how law enforcement treats people under the age of 18, and write him a story, or essay, about it. He would send them a prize—a book. Later, Uzo improved his offer: he would take the first person from the audience who wrote to him to lunch with a lawyer who works on questions of juvenile justice. The “guys” wanted details: what sort of lunch, McDonald’s? No, a nice lunch. How long did the essay need to be? Five double-spaced pages. What point type? Times New Roman, 12 point. Without waiting to read the 200 pages, members of the audience at Iweala's prompting contributed their own stories--being told to move on by the police while innocently waiting for a bus; one girl being accused of trespassing when she was merely paying a friend a visit.
All five panelists had been asked to choose a video from the HUB website (hub.witness. org, “The global channel for human rights.”) HUB’s motto, on a screen behind the panelists, was, “See it, Film it, Change it.” Uzo chose “Books not Bars,” about how young people “are constantly being criminalized,” as one of the activists interviewed in the short put it. “Black youths,” a flashed message informed, “are 48 times more likely to be arrested than white kids,” and “more and more women are going to prison.” One of the reasons, as stated by another activist interviewed was: “Everything here is a gigantic business. It’s a macro-economy. Prisons are built so people can have jobs. Why not build universities?”
Jutta Richter did not choose any video from HUB. She had looked at several but had felt that it was all happening “very far away and they were very big things and I felt very small--what can I do?” She continued, “Definitely human rights is why I became a writer. But it starts right in front of my front door. When I am in a supermarket, in Germany, and I see a mother is beating her child, I speak up to that lady and I tell her I don’t think she is right.” The question, she said, is “What can you do? Not only, “What do you know?” We have to become aware what’s happening in our own neighborhood: “Is my father an alcoholic? Is he beating my mother? Can I do something to change that? Is my teacher a racist? It needs my courage to speak out loudly—that is the hardest we can do.” Another suggestion was to boycott countries of regimes violating human rights: “In Germany most housewives didn’t buy fruit from South Africa while apartheid lasted—that hits the people who earn money by oppressing people.” (Let’s strike the term ‘housewives’.) Jutta read a fragment in which one little girl rebels against another by hitting her in the face with an icecream cone. So Jutta’s concluding incitement was: “Sometimes you have to put an icecream cone in somebody’s face.”
Patricia McCormick has just published a book, Sold, on child prostitution in India and Nepal, on teenage girls taken from their homes and brought to brothels, mainly in Calcutta, where they are “raped six or seven times a day” believing the money they earn will be sent home to their family. They are given injections so they won’t become pregnant but most of them contract HIV infections and “when they begin to show symptoms, by the age of 16 usually, they are put out on the street.” After Patricia’s sister adopted a Haitian child, McCormick became “interested in child trafficking in Haiti. In Haiti with $50 cash there is a place at the airport where you can buy a child to use as cook or slave or for sexual purposes.” That was the subject of the HUB video she chose. McCormick emphasized to her audience her belief that their generation could be, and had been, more effective than their elders in human rights activism around the world: “It’s kids your age who are raising money for families displaced by the tsunami…” she said.
Kashmira Sheth (Blue Jasmine) showed a video titled, Manne Ke Manjeere, which means, if I understood correctly, “Fine tune your mind.” It is sung in Hindi. A woman is woken by her child. She drives a truck through a dusty desert singing this song. She is shown leaving home with her child and a suitcase. She is shown being beaten. As the video advances the story regresses to the cause of the departure and the reason for this song of liberation. By the end dozens of women are singing and dancing in the desert along with the protagonist and her child. Kashmira chose the video because it felt close to home. Her grandmother, who was widowed at the age of 13, fought to be educated. As a child, Kashmira observed that a family her parents knew would not come to their house to eat because they belonged to a higher caste of Brahmins than Kashmira’s family. Her own child, on her first trip back to India at an early age, saw through the car window a young girl begging on the street and thought, “This could be me.” She is now studying to become a human rights lawyer.
Amanda Michalopoulou (I'd Like) struck a literary note and one for the importance of history. In her writing, she said, she observes the psychological nature of relationships—matters of subtle abuse, on an elder sister towards her young sibling, for instance. She chose a video called Comfort Station, about young Korean women in the 1940’s being taken to a camp, a “comfort station” to “serve” from 40 to 70 Japanese soldiers a day. “Being alive itself was a nightmare,” one survivor recounted, “I started envying those among us who had passed away.” She warned about the danger of thinking about countries only in “touristic terms,” Amanda said: “If I thought of Japan, I thought of sushi, of “Lost in Translation,” or of my favorite author, Haruki Murakami. Finally, she talked about empathy, “to be able to be in the other person’s shoes: empathy in life, because then you know how the other feels, and empathy in fiction because then you know how your hero feels.”
The session was deftly moderated by Matisse Bustos Hawkes, and introduced by Guergana Petkova who told of walking the streets of Kosovo as a journalism rookie, a camera in hand, thinking to herself, “I look 12 years old—who’s going to talk to me? This is going to be a failure.” But all those she encountered said, “Please take my picture. I want to tell you what happened to me.” A colleague of hers said that in a community in Africa if you told someone, “I have a problem,” they invariably replied, “If you have a problem, I have a problem—maybe we can do something together.”
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