LPN Newsletter - Fall 2009

FEATURED ARTICLE - Knowledge & Expertise from LPN

How to Send "Postcards to Afghanistan"

The account of a bystander to war who, in his Third Age, realizes he has to engage the conflict one way or another.

By Kendall Dudley, LPN New England

Editor's Note: Kendall Dudley teaches in the Greater Boston area, presents at national career and art therapy conferences, and runs public art events based on current day issues. He's also a painter and regularly teaches autobiography and vivid journaling at retreat and adult education centers. He recently received a grant from the Boston Area Returned Peace Corps Volunteers for a series of public art projects that foster connections between Muslims and Americans.

Two things tipped me off that I'd gone over an edge of some kind. First, a year ago, I'd find myself standing, riveted, watching news clips of the Afghan war until 3 a.m. Other nights, I'd fall into bed around 2, only to see one of my many books on the war and read until dawn. Night Letters: Inside Wartime Afghanistan, by Rob Schultheis, provided a particularly vivid account of Afghan wars since the stone age . . . his book kept me up nights in a row.

If I needed confirmation of my interest in the Middle East and my reactions to the lunacy of aggression, terror and state-sponsored mayhem, here it was. But, unlike similar moments, the current Afghan war has hit me differently than earlier iterations of violence. Something has been shifting in me, which to some, might suggest my need for a couch and medication. Instead, I see it as the surfacing of something vital and urgent, the unanticipated expression of values, core memories and feelings that have been gathering form and energy offstage, waiting, perhaps, for circumstance to call them to life. This is vague but I go on.

You see, I think it's a matter of realizing that over my life I've been dropping seeds for my future-self to discover. Seeds with which to construct something new. Some of them have already expressed themselves in the work I do. But there are other seeds that have been waiting their turn. I name a few that I am discovering in my path:

• A grim fascination with the charismatic aspects of war, the culture of war and the lure that certain forms of violence have for individuals, especially men
• A disturbing awareness of society's tolerance for war and its ready choice of war as a way to solve problems
• My own vivid memories of Peace Corps life in Iran, my travels to Afghanistan and the people I met plus the troubled, stark and beautiful land
• A residual mix of guilt, anger, despair, hope and sorrow born of many wars spent as a radio bystander (Balkan wars, Rwanda, Chechnya, Iraq) - this sludge of feelings shifting between slumbering and waking in me, surfacing in conversations, dreams and the choices of things to see and read

In the past, these sets of feelings and ideas would recede in favor of the need to look good, pay bills, and drive within the lines. And if it weren't for the painful splinters that have recently lodged in me, I might have carried these memories and emotions for another round before doing something about them. But not now. As a friend once said at the birth of his first child, he can't read the newspaper without crying. The veil between the sorrows of others and my own experience of their suffering grows thinner and thinner.

Images stick to me of the women and girls being raped and having acid sprayed in their faces and men so poor and rootless they have to join the forces of the wicked to survive. It goes on with the media reports of Afghanistan and Pakistan's disintegration, part victims, part perpetrators of their own destruction. And then there are the minds, hearts and bodies of citizens, soldiers, aid workers and people of varied stripes and motives that are being broken day by day.

Today, I can't only feel sickened by the stories coming at me as I did during the Balkan wars. I have to feel sickened and do something! Is it time, or age, or the shedding of fears that make me no longer willing to accept the burdens of being a bystander? Is it the effects of having mentors like Woody Woodward, the absolutely fearless leader of a band of lesbian motorcyclists who rode a lush green BMW, wore a blonde rainbow Mohawk and who died at 64 having lived to the very last inch of her last mile? Has something shifted in my brain and body chemistry to help me listen and respond to life's call with fewer fears of consequences? When I die, don't I want to have been used to the fullest, my talents exhausted from good work?

I research my kit bag for what I can bring to this, as yet, unnamed work that appears before me. I have some practiced talents (teaching, writing, art, public speaking, quirky thinking). I have many things I'm so-so at doing (organizing, technology, connecting people with one another) and things I do quite badly (budgets, remembering certain details, linear thinking). Having said all that, there is no telling what skills may emerge and improve when fused to an idea that moves towards me from out of the shadows.

To help understand the work I am to do, I go to what moves me the most - activities that awaken and blend me. They are, among many things, primarily based in art. I put on Philip Glass and Moby, wizards of penetrating sound, and vanish inside painting to see what emerges, to see what I don't know I've been looking at. It is early 2008 and I have started a series of abstract marks, looking for images that can push me further. I see what appears to be the veiled image of a woman standing under a ruined arch. This fuels my thinking about wartime Berlin and then Bosnia. I find I am starting to picture abandoned Bosnian villages and the forests where people are running to hide from the Serbs. But as I paint, I see the Serbs have already entered the woods and are waiting for the villagers. Through the action of moving paint across paper and canvas, I discover what's in me. My painting cuts holes in the walls that I erect to keep me from feeling what I know.

My paintings lead me in two directions. The first direction leads toward developing work for a show in Cambridge based on the uses and abuses of historic and cultural memory, the second, toward the idea of creating a series of public art events that would, perhaps, use the Islamic veil as a dominant image. I think that preparing work for the show softened and readied me for the next unanticipated moment: seeing the working conditions of the leather dyers in Fez, Morocco.

What I thought would be an interesting cultural moment turned into something quite different. I came upon men who work in pits with fresh animal skins and the stench and chemicals that clean and penetrate the hides. Instead of being "interested" in what I saw, I felt the effects of witnessing feudal labor . . . seeing a form of suffering so intense that tears flooded my vision.

In Morocco, I also saw women in a variety of veils, some covered completely, others more symbolic than real. I thought about the cultural differences that keep me from understanding what I am seeing, and how the symbols of a culture are manipulated to achieve specific ends. I thought about the ways that the symbols of Iraqi aggression were waved at us and sufficient numbers of us were willing to believe what we were told. The veil seemed a useful symbol around which to discuss appearances and realties and how it is we perceive "otherness".

What if I designed projects that used the veil as icon and lightening rod for issues of multiculturalism, feminism and fear of the "other?" An Iranian proverb goes, "when it's dark enough you can see the stars." Maybe, the light is starting to glimmer.

I am standing in front of the TV again and an Afghan girl who has been disfigured by acid is telling me she is going back to school - her education is too important to be halted by fear. I want to write and tell her how much I admire her. How could I do this? If I found a way, would others want to embrace her strength and pain as well? Would she feel our concern and support? This idea is not focusing on Afghani veils but is a softer way, perhaps, of raising questions of cultural difference while extending a compassionate hand.

Postcards. Simple acts of recognition and declarations of desire to connect through pictures and a note. What if I developed a project around the idea of sending Postcards to Afghanistan . . . that would be a step! Postcards whose writing and imagery and power could help focus our attention for a moment on the lives of Afghans and for a moment open a connection. In that brief open moment, something wonderful might enter, linger and become a seed.

Many issues to resolve. How to foster a connection with Afghans? Do I find schools and hospitals, orphanages? I'll have to find a way of translating the postcards, find a way to "deliver" them, and nurture whatever conversations emerge on this side and that. Who else has done something like this that I could learn from or even partner with in the future? I start seeing multiple applications of the idea, some that might even take me to Afghanistan . . .

But wait, what is the next step?

Arlington's annual Town Day could provide an opportunity to launch this idea!

So I write, call, research and locate a grant from the Boston Area Returned Peace Corps Volunteers and First Parish Unitarian Universalist Church that has frontage on the Town Day site. They tell me they will support the project through their Religious Education and Social Justice programs. Local newspapers say they will cover the event, too. Some of the steps here are familiar but they are accompanied by urgency and resonance. I will still watch TV, but sitting down now. I'm finding a place for the anxiety that previously kept me on my feet.

I don't know where this project will lead but it has a life of its own in me now. I'm not experiencing my reactions alone or within a limited sphere. The inner is becoming outer and no matter what happens on Town Day, the way forward will make itself known for as I've learned, I can't see what's beyond the door until I am willing to walk up to it, check my options and take a step.

This project, "Postcards to Afghanistan" is supported by a grant from the Boston Area Returned Peace Corps Volunteers and will appear as part of Arlington Town Day activities. In it, passersby are invited to write, draw, collage and paint "postcards"of concern and support to Afghans--especially women and children. These cards will be converted into electronic files, provided some translation, then "packaged" and sent to several schools in Afghanistan yet to be identified.

This project builds upon Greg Mortensen's Pennies For Peace project that has involved school children in this country learning about Afghani children and contributing to school construction there. The project seeks to involve adults, too, through this consciousness-raising art project. It is hoped that the "postcards" from this project (painted, collaged and written wooden panels 2x1 feet and 2x4 feet) will be exhibited in schools, community centers and businesses while also becoming resource materials for sermons, public discussions, educational programs and news articles on Afghanistan. This project is humanitarian more than political.

Post Script: Town Day was September 26, 2009 at which 150 people stopped to talk, write and create postcards. The event was covered by the press and a professor I just met said she would take copies of these postcards to a school on her next return to Afghanistan in October. A road of sorts is opening.

Kendall Dudley is a member of LPN and a consultant with LIFEWORKS Career & Life Design of Belmont, Massachusetts (www.artofretirement.com).
Telephone: 617.489.9999.
Email: lifeworksdesign@verizon.net.
Website: www.lifeworkscareers.com.