Fields of Exile

by Nora Gold

  Judith looks up. Weick is still at the front of the class. She feels like she’s been gone for over an hour, but according to her watch, it’s only been fifteen minutes. Weick says: “We all play many different roles in our lives.” Right, she thinks. All the world’s a stage. “And when two or more roles,” he says, “conflict with each other, this is called inter-role conflict.”

  Like duh. Judith recalls the classic example of this she learned thirteen years ago during her B.S.W.: being both a mother and a student, and having to choose between caring for your child and getting your schoolwork done. Role Theory was interesting when she first learned it back then, but like Systems Theory, it isn’t anymore. Certainly not as interesting as making love to Moshe, or even lying next to him, her body curled around his, in post-coitus contentment, on the grass. So she returns to Moshe. He is still lying where she left him under the tree, but now he has one hand behind his head, and is smoking a cigarette and blowing smoke rings. He too has been listening to Weick, and doesn’t think much of him — “A weak man, you can tell just by looking at him he can’t get it up” — or of Dunhill. She looks up: Weick is watching her. She lowers her eyes — perhaps he just heard what Moshe said about him. That’s crazy, she knows. Of course he couldn’t have. But maybe he could somehow sense the presence of Moshe, her invisible friend. Her favourite aunt, Hilda, now dead, always saw, and sometimes even talked to, Judith’s imaginary friend Max, whom she pulled around on a string when she was four. From Max to Moshe, thinks Judith, rolling her eyes. Oh, well, whatever gets you through —

  Weick, still talking, is staring hard at her now, demanding her full attention. Did he see me roll my eyes? Maybe he thought I was rolling them at him. Just in case, and to deflect his anger, shortly afterwards she raises her hand and respectfully asks a question. Citing the conflicting definitions of inter-role conflict in two different articles, she asks Weick which one he’d recommend. Weick, obviously pleased, says he’s happy at least one student’s doing the readings, and replies at length while Judith arranges a facial expression of polite listening. She even smiles wanly when he makes a stupid joke. Meanwhile she’s thinking this class is a total waste of time. Pam agrees. During their break in the cafeteria half an hour later, Pam sputters that all they’re learning from Weick is how to feign interest and respect; how to endure without looking like you’re enduring; how to survive long, awkward pauses, some of them excruciating; and how to fake-smile encouragingly at an ill-prepared teacher as he flounders for words. “We are learning,” she concludes, “about the power of the guy at the front of the class. Nothing more.”

  “Well, maybe that’s the essence of ‘Knowledge and Values in Social Work,’” Aliza says darkly. “The power of power.”

  “Oooooh,” says Cindy, and bites into her donut.

  Pam laughs, and Cindy chews cheerfully, but Judith doesn’t respond. She’s just decided that from now on, she’s never again going to be the last one out of Weick’s class, or alone with him anywhere. On her way out of the classroom just now, while Cindy, Pam, and Aliza waited impatiently for her in the hallway, she asked Weick a quick question about the topic she’d picked for her midterm paper, and he suggested she drop by his office after class to discuss it further. But she won’t. Because when he made this suggestion, he brought his face, flushed and eager, close to hers, and there was the smell of liquor on his breath.

  * * *

  Next they go to “Introduction to Social Justice” with Greg, or Saint Greg as some of the students have nicknamed him, and if Weick’s class was a creaky old streetcar, this one is a turbo train. Today, as always, there is a sense of urgency and dynamism here, and a passion that strikes Judith as almost religious. Greg, waving his hands around, is still, after six weeks, on the theme of how the rich and powerful oppress and exploit the weak, and how it is the obligation of each and every one of us to use whatever power we have to fight for a fairer distribution of resources, both in Canada and around the world. Judith listens, her bum aching from the hard chair, and she vacillates between the exciting feeling on one hand that she’s part of a revolution, and on the other that Greg is naive and not very bright. Still, as the term progresses, she finds herself using more and more of what she thinks of as “Greg’s words”: socially constructed, classist, marginalized, disenfranchised, globalization. Or, as Bobby put it several days ago, she has begun to speak, and also think, “in black and white.” Even though, of course, that’s a phrase you can’t use anymore — not unless you’re completely politically incorrect, like Bobby. Which she didn’t hesitate to tell him.

  “I’m not ‘politically incorrect’,” said Bobby, looking handsome in a green Ralph Lauren polo sweater with the logo of a horse on it. “I’m free.”

  “No, you’re not,” she retorted. “You’re enslaved to political incorrectness, which is no different than being enslaved to political correctness. You’ve just swapped PI for PC. And you’re hopelessly out of touch with the world around you.”

  “Blah blah blah,” said Bobby, and gave her a hug.

  * * *

  Greg’s favourite mantra is “Take a stand.” Over his desk hangs a tattered copy of the famous poem by Pastor Niemöller written during the Holocaust:

  First they came for the Communists, and I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a Communist.

  Then they came for the Jews, and I didn’t speak up because I wasn’t a Jew.

  Then they came for the Catholics, and I didn’t speak up because I was a Protestant.

  Then they came for me, and by that time there was no one left to speak up.

  “Don’t be neutral,” Greg tells them at least once every week. “Truth isn’t neutral. Justice isn’t neutral. Take a stand.”

  Suzy’s mantra is different: “Know thyself.” In Suzy’s first class, this sounded terribly naive to Judith. Knowing oneself, she thought, is a lifetime’s work. And maybe even an impossible goal, one you can never achieve. “You never fully know a person,” her father used to say mournfully. “Least of all yourself.” So Judith felt a flash of contempt for Suzy — a quick flash, here and gone, like the sun glinting on the edge of a knife. Contempt for her simple, even simplistic, mind, her lack of intellectual sophistication. As Suzy continued talking, though, Judith realized she only meant self-knowledge in a very limited way: a specific application of this concept to becoming a social work professional, something like “Self-Knowledge for Social Work Practice,” or “A Dummy’s Guide to Self-Knowledge When Working with Clients.”

  “For instance,” said Suzy, looking cute in a buttercup-yellow silk shirt, “what if you’re uncomfortable with certain emotions, like anger? And what if you had, for example, a very angry, hostile client, like Cordelia? I’m sure you all remember Cordelia! Would that be hard for you?” Yes, thought Judith. “If so, that’s natural. Very few people like anger, or fear, or guilt. Then again, there are people who are also uncomfortable with love, or joy, or tenderness, and will try at all costs to avoid these feelings.

  “And it’s not only emotions,” Suzy continued, scanning the class, sweeping everyone into her range of vision. “It’s values, as well. For example, what if you don’t like a certain sort of person? Simply don’t like — never mind racism, homophobia, or anything like that. For instance, what if you don’t like tall people because — I don’t know why — maybe they make you feel small and insignificant? So you have to know this about yourself, because if a tall client walks in through the door, you’ll react to them a certain way. That isn’t fair. That isn’t ethical. This is your emotional baggage to deal with, and you have to clean it out of yourself.”

  Interesting, thought Judith, that Suzy picked tallness as an example, since she is so short. Funny, too, all this clean/dirty imagery. The assumption that all of us are somehow dirty, or polluted — “sinful”? — and part of the task of professionalizing us into social workers is to “clean us up.” Cleaning us through a certain kind of brain-washing. Or is it soul-washing? Maybe they sho
uld’ve put showers in the student lounge.

  But in subsequent days, she gave all this some serious thought. Whether reading articles, hunting down library books, doing laundry, or cutting vegetables for chicken soup, always somewhere at the back of her mind was, What is knowledge? And what is knowing oneself? That Friday — the day of the week, she recalled, that God created Adam and Eve, who stole from the Tree of Knowledge — she sat in just a striped T-shirt and panties at her kitchen table, soup bubbling on the stove, and wrote her weekly log for Suzy. She began with Socrates — the first, she wrote, to coin the phrase “Know thyself” — and some other Greek philosophers. Then she pulled in Nietzsche, Kant, Kierkegaard, Hegel, and psychologists ranging from Freud and Fromm to the cognitivists, including some from Suzy’s blue-and-yellow book. Next she peppered in some Shakespeare (Polonius), some Bible (Ecclesiastes), and several relevant scraps of Yiddish and Hebrew poetry in translation (Halpern, Heifetz Tussman, Rachel, Ravikovitch, and Amichai). She knew most of these references weren’t from social work and hoped this would be okay. Well, even if it isn’t, she thought, paraphrasing her friend Sammy, what can Suzy do — shoot me? This had become Sammy’s favourite expression ever since Rabin’s assassination. Then she wrote in her log:

  As the above sources illustrate, there is no one simple thing called “knowledge.” There are different kinds: knowledge of the mind, heart, soul, and body, and maybe others. Traditionally, since Plato, the mind and body were split, and the only knowledge valued, or even acknowledged(!), by men was knowledge of the mind: rational knowledge. Women, however, have appreciated different forms of knowledge (Belenky et al.’s Women’s Ways of Knowing).

  Then, since they were told to include some self-disclosure:

  I’ve always listened mainly to my mind, so this year I’d like to be more open to other forms of knowledge. Hopefully this will help me better understand my clients, and respond to them more fully, empathically, and effectively in my professional role.

  The following Monday she handed in this log. When she got it back, on the last page there was a big 10/10 in red pen with a circle around it, and underneath it Suzy’s comments in flowing, feminine handwriting:

  Excellent work, Judith! Fabulous how you draw on such a wide range of sources, some of them unusual, to explore this concept. You do a nice job of integrating your personal feelings and issues with the ideas in the literature, demonstrating your knowledge of both the heart and mind. An exceptional log from an exceptional student! A pleasure having you in this class!

  Soon afterwards, Judith’s logs began to change. They became more loosely related to the content covered in Suzy’s course, and more personal, until they felt almost like a diary. The last time she kept a diary she was twelve and never let anyone read it. But this log-diary is different, she thinks now, sitting in Suzy’s class. Not because it isn’t private or deep; it is. But she doesn’t mind Suzy reading it because Suzy is safe. There’s nothing she could write to Suzy, or say to her in person, that would be unacceptable, or make Suzy not like her anymore. So everything inside of her comes flooding out toward Suzy. Not only in her logs; any place, any time, they’re alone together. For instance, walking with Suzy back to her office every Monday after class. Or last Monday sitting with her over coffee at a round pink-and-aqua table in Le Petit Café, just as she imagined it would happen, to plan the first meeting of SWAC, which will be taking place three days from now. Judith likes just about everything about Suzy. Including her petiteness, her tinkly laughter, and her way of dressing: always conservative on the bottom in dark skirts or slacks, but wildly colourful on the top with her blazingly bright silk shirts.

  Judith likes, too, how Suzy looks at her. How she is mirrored in Suzy’s eyes. “You have an extraordinary mind,” Suzy said to her last Monday over coffee. “Yet you’re also extremely sensitive and emotionally attuned. This is a very rare combination. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a student quite like you in all my years of teaching.”

  Later on she added, as if musing to herself, “You remind me of myself a few years back.” And she touched Judith on the arm. Softly, like a butterfly resting.

  — 9 —

  Three days later, on Thursday night, Judith attends the first meeting of the Social Work Anti-oppression Committee. There is no supper with Suzy beforehand because Suzy had an emergency faculty meeting, so Judith, disappointed, worked at home all day and drove in just for SWAC. She arrives at ten to seven and is relieved to see someone there she knows: Lola, from Suzy’s class. Lola is a broad-shouldered sensuous blonde with oversized lips and huge blue eyes, and everything about her is theatrical and slightly larger than life. A week ago she told Judith she was born and raised in Montreal as Lola Katz, but now she is Lola Ibn Hassan from Riyadh. As a McGill undergrad she was involved in left-wing politics, and on her twenty-first birthday she married and ran off with another student who took her to his native Saudi Arabia, forced her for three years to wear a burqa, and forbade her to leave the house unless accompanied by him or one of his three brothers. Lola escaped, she said, in the middle of the night, returning to Canada, but she still lives in terror he’ll find her. Judith listened raptly when Lola told her this, but now, recollecting Lola’s melodramatic style when recounting it, isn’t sure how much she believes. Still, they stand chatting together amicably as the other people drift into the room, and then sit beside each other at the rectangular table.

  Suzy calls the meeting to order. It’s a fair-sized committee: in addition to Suzy, Lola, and herself, Judith counts six other people. Chris is a second-year student in the Policy stream, and the school’s representative to the Dunhill Students’ Union (DSU). He wears an earring in his left ear and a ratty leather jacket covered in studs. Janice McVitty is a blonde woman whose hairstyle and neat white blouse and sweater are straight out of the 1950s. Janice has a private practice and is working with Suzy on some community project. Carl Lantern graduated from this school twelve years ago, and is now the Executive Director of First Nations Community Services in Toronto, and the alumni representative on SWAC. An abnormally tall woman says she is a faculty member here at the school and will be retiring at the end of this academic year. She looks like some strange big bird with her amorphous black cape, wild grey-black hair, and intense, mournful glare. In a soft, guttural voice with some undefinable European accent, she says, “I am Hetty Caplar,” but Judith, who finds her startling, even scary, hears instead, “I am Hedda Gabler.” Which makes sense: there is something as grotesquely compelling about this woman as Hedda Gabler herself. The last two committee members are Brenda Chow, a Chinese woman who’s a hospital administrator, and James Roberts, a dark-skinned man in a suit who works for the Children’s Aid Society. Suzy explains that most of this committee is continuing from last year, except for Judith, Lola, and Hetty, and she’s looking forward to these new members’ fresh ideas and energy. Suzy tells everyone Judith is this year’s co-chair; Judith blushes as some people smile and nod at her and others study her appraisingly.

  Then it’s down to business. Tonight being the first meeting of the 2002–2003 academic year, the agenda focuses on planning the upcoming year’s activities. Judith has been worrying intermittently all day about what would be expected of her tonight as co-chair. She realizes now she needn’t have worried, because Suzy runs the whole thing by herself. But she doesn’t mind — in a way it’s a relief. Suzy is a good chair: task-oriented but relaxed and with a sense of humour, and the committee tonight has a free-wheeling, friendly brainstorming session about this year’s Anti-oppression Day, with everyone bandying about ideas, except for Hetty, who sits heavily silent, like a black hole. Several names are tossed around for the keynote speaker — or, as Suzy termed it, “the star.” One name keeps coming up repeatedly — Michael Brier — and after the fifth or sixth time, Judith writes down his name, a reminder to herself to google him when she gets home. Chris in particular is enthusiastic about Brier, saying he’s heard him speak and he’s absolutely brilliant.
Ten minutes later Chris brings him up again, offering to contact him and see if he’d be their keynote.

  “Ask what he charges,” James suggests. “We don’t have much of a budget.”

  “Good point,” says Chris.

  Janice says she has a cousin who knows Brier personally and maybe can get Brier to come at a cheaper rate. She and Chris agree to work together on this and bring some more information to the next meeting.

  “Great,” says Suzy.

  “The main thing is,” says James, “whoever we pick should be passionately committed to social justice. Someone who can serve as a role model for our students and for the profession as a whole.”