The Ugliest Four Letter Word
First, I would like to thank Kirkus Reviews for naming my novel one of the Best of 2011.
More importantly, I want to address an issue that is disgusting and difficult but it is an issue that must always be addressed until it plagues us no more, an issue that a few of my readers have raised. When Ghost Ants was being considered for publication by one of the Big Six, they asked me if I would remove or modify some passages which would allow them to market the novel to young teens. I said no, and I would say no again. But I urge teenagers to read my book, as I would urge them to read the darkest and bloodiest chapters of history. We should always look for the truth, as ugly as the truth may be.
I was always something of a shit disturber. When I was fifteen, my parents moved my family from a multi-ethnic, blue collar town in New Jersey to Arcadia, California, a segregated, upper middle class suburb of Los Angeles. It was a lovely, peaceful, crime-free land of sprawling ranch houses and built in swimming pools nestled in the foothills of the San Gabriel Mountains. 99% of my classmates were white, most of them were Protestant and many of them were Mormons. Most had never met a black person and would talk about “having seen one” at a gas station or the grocery store, as if they had sighted a ghost. When our football team, the Apaches, played against Pasadena High, the Pasadenans unfurled banners that read, “Integrate Your Tee Pee.” Arcadians did know Mexican-Americans, but only as people who mowed their lawns and cleaned their houses and then returned to their own distant neighborhoods. I heard Latinos frequently referred to as “beaners” and “wet backs”.
Most of our teachers were as conservative as the rest of the community. One of them, a history teacher, told our class it was wrong to “to try and rescue the victims of every flood and earthquake and natural disaster around the world. This is nature’s way of taking care of an excess of humans.” I was the only one who objected to that speech. A few of our teachers felt it was their duty to open the minds of their students, to show them they were privileged and sheltered. One of them tried to arrange a bus tour of Watts and Compton, the black areas of Los Angeles, but parents objected to the idea as unsafe.
I wrote for the school newspaper, and for my final shit disturbing article, I interviewed someone in my art class who was not a typical Arcadian. He was someone from an unprivileged background who had been convicted of a crime and was sent to live at Juvenile Hall. I asked him to describe that world which he said was a difficult and brutal place full of racial tension, where food was contaminated with urine and knife fights were frequent. And just as it happens in adult prisons, this guy was witness to and had to fend off homosexual rape.
The article was printed but it was censored. School authorities did not want Arcadia’s teenagers reading about rape, especially between males. I was angered -- how are we, as a society, going to prevent this kind of violence if we weren’t aware of it? Most Arcadians did not want to concern themselves with this kind of unpleasantness, nor were they interested in the suffering of an invisible poor.
My novel is a grand allegory about the violent, territorial nature of humans, the fact that war is built into us, just as it is inherent in other mammals, birds and insects like ants. This does not excuse us from violence or mean war is inevitable -- unlike ants, humans can reason, can overcome and sublimate their instincts. But when men go to war and permit themselves to kill other men, what coincides is permission to sexually assault women and sometimes other men and children. The sexual coercion of others -- rape -- is a prevalent behavior in many mammalian species and is without question, a part of being human. Today we have read again about an Afghani woman who was imprisoned for 12 years because she was raped by her cousin’s husband. Now she has agreed to marry her rapist whose child she has already born. We must create international pressure on those nations who hold the victim as guilty in the crime of rape. The only appropriate action in dealing with convicted rapists is to imprison them for life so they may never commit their crime again.
Rape is the harshest of all the four letter words, the ugliest to the ear, as it reminds us of our very worst nature and makes us suspect all men. For as long as there have been humans, rape has been accounted for in every culture. Some scientists have made the controversial claim that rape has an evolutionary advantage and that aggressive men who carry rape genes are more likely to reproduce. I question if this is completely true, but it is further justification for granting women full rights over their own bodies and reproductive systems, especially in cases of rape.
Fiction is a lie that tells the truth, and in order for my allegory to be truthful, I had to portray the most warlike people of my tale as engaging in the kinds of acts that involve the conquering of different tribes by killing their men and then sexually enslaving their women. But how did I come up with the sick and twisted notion of a people who murder, pillage and rape in the name of serving their god?
From the Bible.
Stories in the Bible that involve the vanquishing of male enemies and the taking of their land, their property and their young women to “ravish” are typical of human history everywhere. In the Bible, the LORD cares little about the welfare of women and permits fathers to sell their daughters into sexual slavery. One commandment, very sadly missing from the Ten is “Thou shall not rape.” In the Bible, the destruction of enemies and the rape of their women is not just acceptable, it is condoned by the Hebrew’s god. One example is in Zechariah 14: “A day of the Lord is coming, Jerusalem, when your possessions will be plundered and divided up within your very walls. I will gather all the nations to Jerusalem to fight against it; the city will be captured, the houses ransacked, and the women raped.”
It would be naïve to say that war rape, committed and permitted by both the Nazis and the Japanese as recently as World War II, is now a part of our past. Much of the human race has evolved a higher morality since the revision of the Geneva Convention which calls for the protection of women against “indecent assault.” The waging of wars to abduct women is vanishing, but rape as a weapon of psychological and physical devastation is being practiced in the Congo and in other African conflicts at this very moment. Accounts of the traumas to the victims are sickening and frankly, make me wish I belonged to a different and better species.
In the always urgent mission to eliminate violence, we must face up to our history and accept the ugliest impulses as a part of who we are in order to overcome them. The protagonist of my novel, Anand the Roach Boy, embarks on an undercover mission in order to save his people and end a great evil. In order to maintain his cover, he must engage in behavior that he knows is immoral, doing what he can to mitigate his crimes, while waiting for the moment to exact his vengeance. My readers are right to hate him in some of these moments. Like many of the heroes I admire, Gandhi and Martin Luther King among them, Anand is flawed and some of his transgressions are sexual. But that is also another truth about human nature I did not want to avoid: that our greatest heroes – the world changers -- are seldom paragons of virtue. Often, in order to achieve a noble goal, they must sometimes resort to ignoble acts and make compromises. Anand is impulsive, immature and vengeful, and I assure my readers that in the sequel, he will have consequences to pay.
Amazon – Book and Kindle
http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_ss_c_1...
Barnes and Noble - Nook
http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/prophets...
iTunes
http://www.lulu.com/product/ebook/prophe...
Smashwords
http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/...
Kirkus Review
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-review...
Official Website
http://www.prophetsoftheghostants.com
More importantly, I want to address an issue that is disgusting and difficult but it is an issue that must always be addressed until it plagues us no more, an issue that a few of my readers have raised. When Ghost Ants was being considered for publication by one of the Big Six, they asked me if I would remove or modify some passages which would allow them to market the novel to young teens. I said no, and I would say no again. But I urge teenagers to read my book, as I would urge them to read the darkest and bloodiest chapters of history. We should always look for the truth, as ugly as the truth may be.
I was always something of a shit disturber. When I was fifteen, my parents moved my family from a multi-ethnic, blue collar town in New Jersey to Arcadia, California, a segregated, upper middle class suburb of Los Angeles. It was a lovely, peaceful, crime-free land of sprawling ranch houses and built in swimming pools nestled in the foothills of the San Gabriel Mountains. 99% of my classmates were white, most of them were Protestant and many of them were Mormons. Most had never met a black person and would talk about “having seen one” at a gas station or the grocery store, as if they had sighted a ghost. When our football team, the Apaches, played against Pasadena High, the Pasadenans unfurled banners that read, “Integrate Your Tee Pee.” Arcadians did know Mexican-Americans, but only as people who mowed their lawns and cleaned their houses and then returned to their own distant neighborhoods. I heard Latinos frequently referred to as “beaners” and “wet backs”.
Most of our teachers were as conservative as the rest of the community. One of them, a history teacher, told our class it was wrong to “to try and rescue the victims of every flood and earthquake and natural disaster around the world. This is nature’s way of taking care of an excess of humans.” I was the only one who objected to that speech. A few of our teachers felt it was their duty to open the minds of their students, to show them they were privileged and sheltered. One of them tried to arrange a bus tour of Watts and Compton, the black areas of Los Angeles, but parents objected to the idea as unsafe.
I wrote for the school newspaper, and for my final shit disturbing article, I interviewed someone in my art class who was not a typical Arcadian. He was someone from an unprivileged background who had been convicted of a crime and was sent to live at Juvenile Hall. I asked him to describe that world which he said was a difficult and brutal place full of racial tension, where food was contaminated with urine and knife fights were frequent. And just as it happens in adult prisons, this guy was witness to and had to fend off homosexual rape.
The article was printed but it was censored. School authorities did not want Arcadia’s teenagers reading about rape, especially between males. I was angered -- how are we, as a society, going to prevent this kind of violence if we weren’t aware of it? Most Arcadians did not want to concern themselves with this kind of unpleasantness, nor were they interested in the suffering of an invisible poor.
My novel is a grand allegory about the violent, territorial nature of humans, the fact that war is built into us, just as it is inherent in other mammals, birds and insects like ants. This does not excuse us from violence or mean war is inevitable -- unlike ants, humans can reason, can overcome and sublimate their instincts. But when men go to war and permit themselves to kill other men, what coincides is permission to sexually assault women and sometimes other men and children. The sexual coercion of others -- rape -- is a prevalent behavior in many mammalian species and is without question, a part of being human. Today we have read again about an Afghani woman who was imprisoned for 12 years because she was raped by her cousin’s husband. Now she has agreed to marry her rapist whose child she has already born. We must create international pressure on those nations who hold the victim as guilty in the crime of rape. The only appropriate action in dealing with convicted rapists is to imprison them for life so they may never commit their crime again.
Rape is the harshest of all the four letter words, the ugliest to the ear, as it reminds us of our very worst nature and makes us suspect all men. For as long as there have been humans, rape has been accounted for in every culture. Some scientists have made the controversial claim that rape has an evolutionary advantage and that aggressive men who carry rape genes are more likely to reproduce. I question if this is completely true, but it is further justification for granting women full rights over their own bodies and reproductive systems, especially in cases of rape.
Fiction is a lie that tells the truth, and in order for my allegory to be truthful, I had to portray the most warlike people of my tale as engaging in the kinds of acts that involve the conquering of different tribes by killing their men and then sexually enslaving their women. But how did I come up with the sick and twisted notion of a people who murder, pillage and rape in the name of serving their god?
From the Bible.
Stories in the Bible that involve the vanquishing of male enemies and the taking of their land, their property and their young women to “ravish” are typical of human history everywhere. In the Bible, the LORD cares little about the welfare of women and permits fathers to sell their daughters into sexual slavery. One commandment, very sadly missing from the Ten is “Thou shall not rape.” In the Bible, the destruction of enemies and the rape of their women is not just acceptable, it is condoned by the Hebrew’s god. One example is in Zechariah 14: “A day of the Lord is coming, Jerusalem, when your possessions will be plundered and divided up within your very walls. I will gather all the nations to Jerusalem to fight against it; the city will be captured, the houses ransacked, and the women raped.”
It would be naïve to say that war rape, committed and permitted by both the Nazis and the Japanese as recently as World War II, is now a part of our past. Much of the human race has evolved a higher morality since the revision of the Geneva Convention which calls for the protection of women against “indecent assault.” The waging of wars to abduct women is vanishing, but rape as a weapon of psychological and physical devastation is being practiced in the Congo and in other African conflicts at this very moment. Accounts of the traumas to the victims are sickening and frankly, make me wish I belonged to a different and better species.
In the always urgent mission to eliminate violence, we must face up to our history and accept the ugliest impulses as a part of who we are in order to overcome them. The protagonist of my novel, Anand the Roach Boy, embarks on an undercover mission in order to save his people and end a great evil. In order to maintain his cover, he must engage in behavior that he knows is immoral, doing what he can to mitigate his crimes, while waiting for the moment to exact his vengeance. My readers are right to hate him in some of these moments. Like many of the heroes I admire, Gandhi and Martin Luther King among them, Anand is flawed and some of his transgressions are sexual. But that is also another truth about human nature I did not want to avoid: that our greatest heroes – the world changers -- are seldom paragons of virtue. Often, in order to achieve a noble goal, they must sometimes resort to ignoble acts and make compromises. Anand is impulsive, immature and vengeful, and I assure my readers that in the sequel, he will have consequences to pay.
Amazon – Book and Kindle
http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_ss_c_1...
Barnes and Noble - Nook
http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/prophets...
iTunes
http://www.lulu.com/product/ebook/prophe...
Smashwords
http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/...
Kirkus Review
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-review...
Official Website
http://www.prophetsoftheghostants.com
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Anyone who sends me a hardcopy book is guaranteed a review on both Amazon and Goodreads. Dictum Meum Pactum.