Blood

by Lawrence Hill

  In Métis Law in Canada, Jean Teillet argues that the Federal Court ruling correctly defined the Métis as “Indians” for the purposes of Section 91(24) of the Constitution Act, which says that the federal government has exclusive jurisdiction over the affairs of “Indians.” However, Teillet says the court wrongly defined Métis people by virtue of their “Indian ancestry” and therefore failed to recognize that the Métis are a separate and distinct Aboriginal people with their own unique identity, language, and culture.

  Not surprisingly, the ruling has been appealed to the Federal Court of Appeal. From there, it may go on to ßbe heard by the Supreme Court of Canada. This is certainly not the last time that Canadian courts will weigh in on the matter of Indian, Inuit, and Métis identity. Judge Phelan’s reasoning may well be controversial with regard to Métis politics and legal claims, but he certainly appears to have nudged Canada in the right direction by casting aside “degrees of blood purity” as a means of defining human beings.

  U.S. PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA is of black and white ancestry, but can you imagine the ridicule that he would have endured, during any part of his upbringing in the United States, if he had told people that he was white? It would have been a social impossibility. People would have laughed in his face. Black, however, was acceptable. To call himself a black man followed the rule of hypodescent, the one-drop rule, so black it was that Obama had to become.

  For nearly four centuries in the United States and Canada, people of African descent have been considered black if they have the very slightest trace of African ancestry. This was accepted by perpetrators of slavery and segregation, and in many ways it became internalized by black people too, who have often been proud and vocal about asserting their identity, even in cases of minimal African ancestry. To deny it, or so the thinking has gone, has been to sell out and to deny a fundamental truth. Moving forward, however, with DNA tests telling blacks that they have some white ancestry (confirming what everybody already knows) and surprising whites with revelations of black ancestry (outing a truth that many already suspect), it may become increasingly impossible — and perhaps it should — to make definitive declarations of race based on blood identity. Genetic testing — which doesn’t need blood, by the way, but a mere cheek swab — reveals ancestries either so hidden or so distant that they have become invisible to the human eye. Perhaps in the end genetics will move us beyond blood and race.

  If we were not so wedded to the arcane notions of blood, we would be freer to celebrate our various, complex, and divergent identities relating to family and notions of talent and ability, citizenship, and race. We would be more whole, self-accepting people, and less judgemental of others. In this day and age, who among us is not all mixed up?

  Arithmetical calculation related to the makeup of blood for the purposes of fixing a person’s family, level of talent, nationality, or race is fundamentally demeaning. It boils our humanity down to numbers. It breaks us down into parts, often seizing upon one such part and negating others in order to construct a formal (and artificial) identity. It prevents us from recognizing that it is impossible for us to be half of one thing and half of another, and that it is absurd to suggest that one can be all of one thing (such as black) and none of another (white).

  Blood flows efficiently in our arteries and veins, feeding oxygen to our muscles, fighting infection, and regulating body temperature. The magic of blood has the potential to turn toxic, however, when it becomes a metaphor for racial, ethnic, or family identity.

  There is no sin in being proud of your heritage and your ancestors. Do you see yourself as African-American? African-Canadian? Jamaican? Korean? Métis? Irish? Sri Lankan? Japanese? Do you remember what your great-grandparents did, and feel that it is important to continue to uphold their values? Do you feel specific, intimate, family-based connections to certain groups of people? It can be a beautiful thing to draw strength and purpose from a sense of ancestral connection.

  Interviewed for CBC Radio on June 10, 2013, at the Native Canadian Centre of Toronto, a man named Red Bear, also known as Bernie Robinson, reminded listeners that for many years Aboriginal children were beaten in residential schools for speaking their native languages. Now, said Red Bear, who identified himself as pushing sixty, many Native adults are afraid to relearn their lost indigenous languages because they fear it is too late. But, Red Bear suggested, it is never too late: “Anybody who has Aboriginal blood will pick up that language and it will become part of who they are.”

  I don’t believe that the ability to learn a language is truly located in one’s platelets, plasma, and red blood cells. For me, Red Bear’s statement evoked the notion of enduring and unbreakable connections to one’s heritage and culture. Let’s reject the suggestion that blood can be quantified to tell somebody that he can’t hunt, or that she can’t be allowed to live with her own family and must instead be forcefully removed to a residential school. Let’s drop the idea of what you are not allowed to be, or to do, because of who you are, but encourage each other to look for the good in our blood, and in our ancestry. We should let hatred and divisiveness spill from us as if it were bad blood, and search for more genuine and caring ways to imagine human identity and human relations.

  FOUR

  FROM HUMANS TO COCKROACHES:

  BLOOD IN THE VEINS OF POWER AND SPECTACLE

  WHEN I WAS A PRESCHOOL CHILD, I found it hard to imagine that strangers travelling in cars really, truly had lives of their own. I would be in the back seat of the family Volkswagen Beetle, or perched in the tiny luggage compartment behind the back seat, peering out the windows as my mother or father drove. Who were all those other people in those cars? Did they have places to go to? Their own houses? Their own lives, separate from mine? It seemed inconceivable that such a mass of humanity could exist with no relation to me. I couldn’t hear, or touch, or come to know the strangers in those cars, so instead of forcing myself to ponder the ubiquity of mankind, I found it easier to imagine that others who didn’t know me didn’t really have independent lives at all.

  This outlook carried over into my reaction to human suffering. As I began to watch television and movies, I discovered that there were two types of violence on the screen: the kind that I could watch, and the kind that I could not watch. Here was the sort of violence that I could manage, without blinking an eye: Wile E. Coyote gets repeatedly flattened while pursuing his prey, Road Runner, only to rise for yet another indignity a few minutes later. Or, when I was a bit older, the James Bond movie For Your Eyes Only, in which an enemy pursuing Our Hero on skis falls into a snow-spraying machine and comes out the other end as bloody snow. Or, even later, action films depicting good guys mowing down dozens of bad guys with gunfire. These scenes did not trouble me, because the victims — perhaps like the strangers I saw travelling in cars when I was very young — remained faceless. They had no humanity. It didn’t bother me to see them die.

  However, there was another sort of violence that I have never tolerated well. It is when somebody suffers and bleeds up close. To behold their agony while blood flows was, and still is, shocking to me. Before I learned the hard way how viscerally these scenes affected me, I made a fool of myself by fainting once or twice in movie theatres. I went down and out, as if I had been bludg­eoned on the head. I fainted watching Cool Hand Luke, when the prisoner played by Paul Newman is repeatedly punched in the face by a bigger, stronger inmate. When you follow that scene, you find yourself waiting for the punch that will finally draw blood and end the fight. But the fight does not end with the first bloodshed. It goes on and on. I found myself growing ill as Paul Newman (“Luke”) got up and up and up for his repeated beatings. Finally, as he kept getting up, I went down and out.

  I had a protected, privileged middle-class childhood with little exposure to real (as opposed to on-screen) abuse and violence in my day-to-day life. But one situation that terrified me, each time it presented itself, was the schoolyard fight. T
he instant two boys started punching each other, they would be surrounded by a knot of children screaming out, “Fight, fight, fight!” The spectators would stand close together, taut, expectant, demanding results as if they had paid money to watch the spectacle. Once the fisticuffs had begun and chants began to spur the opponents, there was no going back. It was like a volcano. Up and out, the violence had to explode. Those jeering and cheering from the sidelines were not to be denied their thirst to see one person go down — beaten, humiliated, bloodied, and demoted to the very status of the onlooker. There could be only one god — the winner of the fight. The loser would be reclaimed by those watching, and reabsorbed into their midst. His blood flowed right back to where it belonged — alongside theirs, the ordinary mortals’.

  I could not understand how children who seemed reasonable in one moment could in the very next demand that blood be spilled. Why would children, as young as seven or eight, call out for bloodshed? Why did they lust to see the victim debased, his humanity flowing out with his blood? What if it had been them? The scenes upset me partly because they made me feel my own vulnerability. Maybe it could be me in that circle. Maybe others would cheer as my own blood spilled.

  It became clear to me that crowds gave licence to indecent individual behaviour. The mob had the effect of drawing a mask over the victim. The victim was no longer a person with a sore, broken nose and a mother and father and siblings and pet dog at home. The victim was a faceless person, deserving what he got. The victim was like an enemy assailant in a James Bond movie. Who cared if fifteen bullets tore his body apart? The victim’s blood did not matter. It was divorced of humanity. It was blood that didn’t count.

  Who can forget the nightmare of Lara Logan, the CBS journalist who, while covering the celebration of Hosni Mubarak’s resignation in 2011 as the president of Egypt, found herself suddenly attacked and raped in Tahrir Square in Cairo by a large crowd of men? What man, even a brutal sadist and coward, would have dared attack her all by himself, with a huge crowd surrounding him? The massing of men together, in this case, seems to have allowed their evil within to emerge and made it possible for them to carry out the most heinous assault in complete anonymity and with impunity.

  In this chapter, I will examine how blood enters the realm of violence, spectacle, and power. Blood inevitably spills when any of these three human phenomena rear their heads. Violence and power need blood. They feed on it, just as cars feed on gasoline. When we want to hurt people, entertain ourselves at their expense, or capitulate to our most base instincts, we lust for blood. People exercising power are not unlike mosquitoes. Female mosquitoes need blood for proteins used to develop their eggs, and they also need the blood of one person to infect another with disease.

  THROUGHOUT CIVILIZATION, POWER HAS led people to thirst for blood. We have always drawn blood to control, abuse, and annihilate each other. Authorities have repeatedly used the notion of impure blood to whip up fear of individuals or groups, while simultaneously justifying their persecution.

  It is widely believed to be the Sumerians — as far back as 4500 BCE, thousands of years before Aristotle was born — who created the legend of Lilitu, the demon who preyed on sleeping men, made off with their blood, and murdered babies and children. Lilitu is considered by many to be the prototype of the Hebrew Lilith (the first wife of Adam), who figures in Jewish demonology and is mentioned as a demon in the Dead Sea Scrolls, which are considered the oldest surviving manuscripts of material appearing in the Old Testament and in other ancient texts. The figure of Lilith has a low profile in the Old Testament. She is not yet a full-fledged witch, but she will evolve into the role later, in the human imagination.

  In A New History of Witchcraft: Sorcerers, Heretics and Pagans, Jeffrey B. Russell and Brooks Alexander write that the Sumerian Lilitu “was a frigid, barren female spirit with wings and taloned hands and feet; accompanied by owls and lions she swept shrieking through the night, seducing sleeping men or drinking their blood.”

  The image of the demon Lilitu still lingers today. The contemporary New York visual artist Tara McPherson’s painting Lilitu, completed in 2010, depicts a red-haired, black-skinned female demon, naked in a thigh-deep pond, holding the bleeding head of a decapitated man, with poisonous drops arching away from her nipples. You are left with the impression that Lilitu seduced the man before she dispatched him. On her website, McPherson writes: “This painting is based on the Sumerian myth of the demon Lilitu. Representing chaos, seduction and ungodliness. She is a sexually charged yet infertile succubus who behaves aggressively toward men and children killing them at her every whim, her breasts are filled with poison not milk. In her every guise, Lilitu has cast an evil spell on humankind.”

  Blood — or the lack thereof — is a central image in the depiction of the early witch. In the imagination of their persecutors, witches become both irrepressibly sexual bloodsucking fiends who prey on the bodies of sleeping men, and old, frigid, bloodless, crabby hags who cause plagues, destroy crops, and bedevil mankind. The witch seeks the power and vitality of human blood because she herself lacks the life-giving substance in her veins.

  Fears about witches were fed by the portrayal of women as uncontrolled sexual deviants, both in mythology and in actual historical accounts of ancient Greece and Rome.

  In Greek mythology, Dionysus, the god of winemaking and ecstasy, attracted throngs of wild female followers. The maenads, or “raving ones,” also known as the bacchantes in Roman mythology, entered into mad, drunken frenzies in which they would rip apart a bull (the symbol of their god) with their bare hands and then eat its flesh and drink its blood. Peter Paul Rubens is well known for his painting The Bacchanal, which depicts fauns — the upper halves of their bodies human, and the lower halves goat — cavorting naked and drunk with devils and a black woman. Another painting, Bacchanalia, by the twentieth-century Belgian artist Auguste Leveque, shows men and women who are members of a cult of Dionysus. Although known for excesses of orgy and cannibalism, the bacchantes are rendered in a more tender light in the 1887 painting The Women of Amphissa, by the British painter Lawrence Alma-Tadema. In this painting, the bacchantes — all young women — find themselves in the central Greek town of Amphissa, where they have gathered to celebrate Bacchus. They are exhausted after a night of revelry and have fallen asleep at the very time when the soldiers of an invading army might ravish them. In the painting, market women gather around the sleeping or sitting bacchantes to offer them protection and food.

  Out of the mythological stories of the Greek god Dionysus, or his Roman equivalent Bacchus, and his sexually aroused, debauched followers grows a tradition called the Bacchanalia in which people engage in orgy and wild, drunken celebrations. The Roman historian Livy wrote accounts of orgiastic festivals carried out by those celebrating the Greek god. Russell and Alexander note that the Roman Senate outlawed the Bacchanalia in 186 BCE, but the idea of rabid, rampant sexuality, blood lust, and ritualistic murder began to become associated with the idea of witchcraft. Both the classical Greeks and Romans considered magic and sorcery a menace to society. The writers of the Bible were concerned about witchcraft too. Exodus 22:18 says: “Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live.”

  Over the centuries, Europeans became increasingly obsessed with the notion of witchcraft, until fears and rumours reached their peak in a four-hundred-year period beginning around 1400. Estimates vary on the number of people accused, tried, tortured, and executed during the heyday of witch trials. In Witchcraft: A Very Short Introduction, Malcolm Gaskill says that between 90,000 and 100,000 trials were conducted in Europe, Scandinavia, and America between 1400 and 1800. Russell and Alexander offer higher numbers, suggesting that between 1450 and 1750, some 110,000 people were tortured as alleged witches, and 40,000 to 60,000 were executed. This includes the persecution of witches in America through incidents such as the Salem witch trials of 1692, in which nineteen people were executed and more than one hundred jailed
.

  Regardless of the exact number of witches tortured or killed, most of those accused and murdered were women, and much of the lore related to the danger of witches sprang from concerns about blood. Certain descriptions and beliefs recurred. Witches were old women. They consorted with the devil, and slept with him too. They put their supernatural powers to maleficent use, causing every manner of trouble, such as hailstorms, lightning, crop failures, the madness of horses, female infertility, and male sterility. They met in assemblies (“Sabbaths” or “sabbats”) at midnight.

  As early as the middle of the fifteenth century, we have sketches of witches airborne on brooms. For example, the French poet Martin Le Franc’s Le Champion des dames — in which two people converse about witches and witchcraft — offers a marginal illustration of two women flying through the air. One sits astride a broom, and the other, a simple stick. This dates back to about 1440–42.

  In the same era that the Catholic Church demonized and persecuted Jews and Muslims through the Spanish Inquisition, anti-witch inquisitors wrote two documents that influenced European thinking for centuries with regard to women, witchcraft, and blood. The first, written in the 1430s, was penned by an inquisitor of the Duchy of Savoy. The original Latin version was known as Errores Gazariorum. It is known in English as The Errors of the Gazarii or The Errors of the Cathars or Waldensians. As Malcolm Gaskill notes, the treatise describes heretics meeting secretly at night to carry out ghastly behaviours that would later become distinctly associated with witches. The Errors tells of heretics misbehaving at “sabbats” and in “synagogues.” It alleges that these heretics kill children, bring their bodies to the “sabbat,” or assembly, to be eaten, and make lethal powders from their remains. In addition, The Errors says, the devil keeps a list — written in blood — of each heretic who joins the pact.