A friend was talking to me recently about, what was for her, the trauma of childbirth. Her aversion to the experience was made up of a few factors but what stood out to me was her difficulty with the fact that, despite the drugs and hospital gowns, there was no escaping the primal ‘animal’ struggle of the event. I suspect this was traumatic because the struggle to produce life became a reminder of the potential fallibility of the human body.
The brutal reality (or beautiful reality) of our human vulnerability is glossed over daily in the western world through mediation such as television to endorse a culture fixated with signs of cleanliness, healthiness, and strength. An example of this would be the proliferation of kitchen cleaning product advertisements which zoom in to a microscopic level to find cartoons of ‘germs’ that disappear with a poof when sprayed with [insert favourite brand here]. The fact that humans excrete waste isn’t even thought about when watching a roly-poly dog play with toilet paper, nor does the primitiveness of sex take precedence over the polished image of it created by popular culture. Through the media, western culture has pushed death, like birth, into the realm of hospital gowns and drugs; our own mortality is alienated, even denied.
In Race You There Tze Ming Mok describes Chi Phung’s controversial belief that all newcomers to New Zealand could have the right to live here though “entry by treaty” (23). Phung boycotted the march held following the racial attack against her when organisers weren’t willing to engage with this issue. They were not willing because Phung had touched upon what Mok describes as the “trigger point” (23)-
She believed that the root of white aggression against non-white immigrants and foreign students was premised on white Pakeha denial that they themselves are an immigrant people. (23)
This passage was useful for highlighting the fact that racism is “not as black and white as it may seem”(23), but what it made me think about was something broader than racism, which was sparked by the word ‘denial’. Denial – of death, of the possibility of ones own demise, of ones position of strength being potentially transient – is a problematic mindset for a society. It creates an unspoken gap between where we think we are and where we actually are now.
