Museum of the African Diaspora
“Decoding Identity: I Do It For My People”
Feb. 11, 2009

Here is a link to the presentation of this talk, the full text follows below:

http://www.vimeo.com/16127322

I want to thank Erica Agyeman and the Museum of the African Diaspora for this tremendous honor in selecting my work to be shown here at the MOAD. The first time I cam to see this museum, soon after it opened, I secretly thought how cool it would be to show the Perpetrator series here. This wonderful opportunity is truly a dream come true.

 Like most artists, I have a day job: my day job is medicine. I have been a  physician since 1978. Early in my training, I recognized that the essence of medical knowledge was somehow inadequate, that the reductionist approach, taking a person apart into their organs, the organs to the cells, the cells into the molecules of protein and DNA and so forth that made them up, was insufficient to understanding human health and illness. At the very least, it left out the dimension of mind, the influence of other human beings, of culture and society, discrimination, educational disparities, and the spiritual starvation we refer to as addiction.

The medicine that I was taught did not seem to notice that it was part of a larger structure of disease-production. It didn’t occur to my teachers to tell us that illness is a form of memory, a form of communication. I was not taught to listen to the body, only to tell the body what to do. When I began to listen more deeply to my own body, clay, that primordial substance of which we are all made, became my companion on the journey.

 This is what I understand to be true of human beings as we evolved over the millions of years, based on research done by anthropologists studying hunting and gathering peoples. Prior to the development of agriculture, our ancestors regarded the natural world as their garden, which they strolled through gathering food at their leisure. Their social structure was founded on trust, mutual support and generosity, their economics based on abundance. These interpersonal behaviors were selected for and remain in our DNA: when scientists study the brain, they discover that altruism and empathy are hard wired into the pleasure centers of our brains. Even at the most deeply cellular level, we are connected to one another. This is our foundation, these are our roots, this is the true core of human nature.

About 10,000 years ago, less than one percent of our species’ time on the planet, something changed. People in the Eurasian continent began to cultivate cereal grains. Instead of trusting to the earth’s abundance, people now had to work to make the earth yield. Instead of possessing no more than could be carried from one camp to another, people became sedentary and began to accumulate grinding stones and baskets, pottery and granaries. Instead of abundance, they began to know scarcity. Instead of a system based on egalitarianism, people who had a less well developed capacity for empathy and altruism were able to rise to positions of power, where they remain today.

The pieces in the exhibition here and others which I will be showing in this talk, are from a series which I call the Perpetrator series. I use the term perpetrator for anyone who betrays the trust that we as human beings are born entitled to expect from one another. I trace the onset of perpetrator society to the development of agriculture, some factor, whether from the changed relationship to the earth, the shortened time intervals between births, some toxicity of wheat or beer and bread addiction, I don’t even rule out space aliens. People began to act like victims of trauma, and violence took a place beside empathy and altruism as a principle of human interaction.

These days we see our economic structure collapsing, and millions of people are impoverished by the actions of people who have betrayed their trust. At the same time, we see dramatic examples of the foundational human qualities of altruism and empathy, as people respond to one another in times of catastrophe.

This is an image of perpetrator society, insatiably consuming humanity. Most of the pieces in the perpetrator series are created in a clay called Cassius Basaltic, a warm brown clay that becomes black when it is fired. Contrasting with this are elements representing the perpetrator in white clay. There are several reasons for this. Black and white are innocent colors, but in the English language it is almost impossible to find uses of words referring to darkness or black that do not carry a negative connotation. Likewise, whiteness is always associated with goodness, purity and other positive connotations. One goal for this work is to turn these ideas on their heads.

There are no people who are purely black or purely white, and biologists assure us that the concept of race has no meaning in reality. But people who define themselves, however inaccurately, as white have historically betrayed the trust of people all over the world, including the trust of other people who also define themselves as white, and have created artificial categories where none exist. Any work hoping to portray the truth of perpetration must make these points plain.

Perpetrator society has singled out certain trivial differences between people and assigned them artificial meaning and status. Obviously the melanin content of the skin is one of these, as is gender. In this piece, however, I am also interested in the relative value placed on the head, on ideas, over the experience of the body.  At its most basic level, perpetrator society imposes itself on human beings by violence, by inflicting pain and suffering on the body, even as it uses words like freedom and democracy, to appeal to the head, to confuse people and promote dissociation, so they don’t notice how much pain they are in. Perpetrator society separates the mind from the body and privileges the mind, all the while calling itself a material society. When we remove the talking head from our body, and listen to our body speak its own truth, we begin to free ourselves from perpetration.

I began doing sculpture at a relatively late stage in my life, I was in my forties when a friend gave me a bag of clay and I started making little figures.  Those figures represented the fragments of memories of extreme childhood sexual abuse which I was at that time recovering. As I began to come to terms with the experiences of domination and exploitation that had occurred to me, I began to see the parallels with the larger world, the domination and exploitation of whole peoples, of the earth.

I began to notice the anonymity of perpetration. No one looking at my father would have suspected him to be a sadistic pedophile, just as no one can put a name to those whose perversions result in the dismemberment of humanity. We see the work of their hands, who knows what their true names are?

 In fact, those of us who are suffering the most from perpetration are encouraged to believe that we are to blame ourselves. Although there are so many examples of this in the relentless racism and misogyny of our country, I would like to point out another kind of example which we are seeing today in the headlines, namely, the tragic numbers of soldiers who are committing suicide.

Instead of seeing this as the response of normal, sensitive human beings to an insane, brutal and inhuman situation, the army responds as if these are isolated individuals whose personal marital or financial problems have pushed them over the edge. Instead of seeing our entire way of life as creating diseases like high blood pressure and diabetes, we hold individuals responsible for their risk factors. Instead of recognizing how we are manipulated by advertising. we blame “human nature” for our insatiable consumption.

We have to realize that we live in a system which is dedicated to crushing us, and from which it appears there is no escape. Those of us who live in privilege need to remember that our luxury is founded on the inescapable terror faced by other human beings on our planet. The fact that we are not attacked by armed bands of thugs and rapists when we walk out from this building is a matter of chance and time. What is there to keep that from happening here, as it happens to people in Darfur or Congo? As happened for the people who lived on this continent, on this very ground, as swarms of Europeans drove them from their homes? As happened for the villagers in West Africa, raided by slavers? Why do you think that can’t happen here, to us?

I wish I knew where this all came from. It seems so important to study this phenomenon of perpetration.  What happened when we began to rely on wheat and barley instead of berries and nuts and game? When we became sedentary? When we had to work so hard to get our food, instead of strolling around with our friends and loved ones, gathering it effortlessly? And, given the fact that we are not likely to return to the garden, what can we recover of that original altruism and empathy that forms the core of our humanity, even in the context of agriculture?

Whatever the original change was, now it has become self-sustaining. Perpetration begets perpetration. What we see in the inner cities, as young men kill the person they see in the mirror, is as clear an example of the contagion of perpetration as there can be. Go into any prison, ask any child molester or wife beater, and you will find people who were themselves victims. And is this also true of those molesters who operate on the larger scale? The politicians, the bankers, the CEO’s of multinational corporations: the people who are responsible for the suffering of millions, who authorize the rape of our beautiful planet? And yet, here we see hope in the natural variation on which evolution thrives: not every victim becomes a perpetrator.

So many of us live in a fragmented state. Anthropologists have found that the most important determinant of the violence and war making tendencies of a society is the degree to which children are held in close contact with other human beings in early life, and the degree to which children are subjected to corporal punishment. Children who are physically isolated from other human beings, children in car seats and strollers, perhaps,  children put to bed alone, and children who are spanked, slapped, beaten, as are an astonishing percentage of American children: these are traumatized children, their fear and rage compartmentalized, hidden by the face of accommodation. We are learning more and more about trauma, and its long term effects. There is a strong movement, led by those who respect evidence, for non-violent childrearing practices. And there are those who, terrified by a world which feels desperately out of control, advocate violent control of children and women.

One consequence of this style of childrearing is a loss of sensitivity to one’s own pain and the pain of others. A capacity to tolerate hypocrisy in language. The poet and political activist Audre Lorde once said: “The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.”  We call ourselves a free society while having the largest prison population in the world, call ourselves a peace-loving nation while selling more arms than every other country put together. As long as we speak these lies of the perpetrator society as if they were the truth, we will never find a way out. We will always feel afraid and out of control. We must take the perpetrator’s language out of our mouths, examine every word. What does it mean when a father says he loves the child he is molesting? What does it mean when a politician says he is obstructing essential legislation out of concern for the people? The lies are stunning. They paralyze thought. We must find new tools, new language. We must listen to each other.

When we listen to one another, and to our own bodies, we may be quite unprepared for the level of pain we will encounter. Our hearts will break. Breaking open, hearing and being heard, we will begin once again to access the physiology of altruism and empathy which make us human. It won’t require an earthquake or a tsunami for us to feel our deep connections. And when we hear the harmonies that make up the rhythms of the universe, we will recognize and reject the discordance that perpetrator society has imposed on us. Slavery, genocide, trafficking, mass destruction, ecocide, child abuse, we will find ways to bring an end to all of this, though now we listen to these lists of atrocities in numb despair and hopelessness, fixated, as the perpetrators have trained us, in the belief of our own ineffectiveness.

We are of one blood with the natural world. However paved over and chemicalized perpetrator society has tried to make our world in the name of progress (another word to be extracted and deeply examined), I would venture to say that every human being finds solace and healing in the natural world. Each of us is a direct descendant of human beings who walked on the earth as if on the palm of a mother’s hand. Not every evolutionary change is for the better. Paleontology is full of examples of organisms that became too top heavy to survive. Perpetration is one such evolutionary mistake. Fortunately for us, however, we have retained considerable natural variation, and most of us can access what is most deeply human in us, and learn to distinguish it from the lies.

If we can do so, we will find ourselves in a new great awakening, comparable in scope to the transformation into agriculture, but encompassing all of what makes us human, leaving perpetration behind as the birds left behind the dinosaurs from which they evolved.