The (Metaphorical) Amputation of Wangari Maathai
Posted by: Nat Porter in International, Politics
I believe in symbols. I believe that one of the most effective ways a human being can spend his/her life is not to die. If you stand up strong enough for long enough for the things you really care about, your whole life becomes a story, and your name, a reference to an ideal. You become a symbol for those who come after you, and the mere fact that they can cite your sacrifice gives meaning to whatever it was you were standing up for. That symbolism will live as long as people remember you.
The thing about symbols, though, is that they are abbreviations of concepts. A person is not a concept, and abbreviation of any aspect of their life is akin to amputation. Necessarily, when a person becomes a symbol, they stop being a person. That’s why we avoid discussing the character flaws of our icons. We don’t need to discuss MLK’s infidelity or FDR’s polio. The dirty human details, if they do not add to the legacy, are often snipped away.
Still, a glimpse at the person behind the symbol can sometimes reveal a truth about the concept we are attempting to crystallize. If the person’s sacrifice proves the importance of the virtue in question, what if find out that our knowledge of the sacrifice is defective?
I had just heard about the teargassing of Wangari Maathai, when I bumped into someone who knows her online. I had just begun to embark on a rant about how tough she is and how proud I am that she can stand up to the Kenyan government bullying her, trying to silence her message over and over. When I started I did not know just how well my friend knew Maathai, so I was thrilled to be interrupted and offered some perspective:
Wangari will be told “Don’t set up a stage in the middle of a highway.” then she’ll start arguing about the rights she’s due… and then she’ll get beaten… and then she’ll find another obscene place to set up the same stage, like on top of a police station… and then she’ll get maced
and then she’ll relocate to doing it in an allowed location. By this time she’s given the government enough ammunition to justly bomb her, but they settle for tear gas. And in the news, it sounds beautiful. In reality, not very….productive.
Come to think of it, I could not really argue with this. She has always been known for her defiance, so it’s not obviously out of character. As for the wisdom of her strategy, I could not possibly comment, since everything I know about her has been edited and published after the fact, usually by some unavoidably biased party. It’s not so much that I would believe anything my friend told me. It was more that I knew that these words were spoken from personal experience, from a place of respect but not hero-worship.
I had to strongly consider at that point whether or not this was the sort of evidence that should keep Wangari Maathai from being a symbol for me. If her tenacious, unyielding pursuit of change was simply the flip side to blind stubbornness, perhaps her legacy is less martyrdom and more masochism. I don’t know.
It’s not that this conversation was enough to ruin her for me. Even if everything I heard was true, the good far outweighs the flaws. A harsh criticism of her tactics (and maybe even her motives) would not be enough to negate what she has been able to accomplish. Probably, in the end, she will still live on as a symbol for so many people. By the simple invocation of her name, we will be reminded that planting trees can stop war. Why shouldn’t that be enough?
April 14th, 2008 at 11:25 am
Enough for what?
I’m sorry, I tend to be pretty low tolerance when it comes to people getting lauded for walking into an award show. The fact of the matter is that if she does get into the history books, a ‘Jesus Christ Complex’ will develop about her. Where she gets exalted to a superhuman level for being extrahuman and not extraordinary (Don’t get me started on the ’son of God’.)
My point is, people are too stupid nowadays to even be able to distinguish the difference between the moral of the story and the story itself. Which is why we rarely have people sacrifice their all for their fellow man, and yet we have people that would crucify their neighbors ritualistically in rememberance of the same Jesus Christ.
We’re breeding a culture of people that will protest for the sake of protesting, but never stand up for what is right. HUGE difference.
I’d like to see a muthaf*ka plant a tree and end the war in Iraq….
April 14th, 2008 at 12:41 pm
C’mon. If it weren’t for her, what would have happened to this cause? If she weren’t the brazen loud-mouth you seem to think she is, would the Western media have looked up from their lattes? These things don’t get done without international attention, which usually requires some attention from the West, which usually means sensationalism to some extent. At worst, she’s the P Diddy of the Greenbelt Movement.