How Do You Tell the Ugly Stories?

Most of us experience a lot of things, simply being alive. Good things, bad things, meh things. We tell each other about them, or we don't, depending on whether we find it worth telling about. But sometimes, just sometimes, something really, really ugly happens. Of the sort where you may have to deal with it for the rest of your life. You might not want to tell people, but sometimes they need to know, for whichever reason is applicable. That is not something that anybody can really do anything about, except maybe by fundamentally changing how people treat each other, but I find myself wondering – when to tell? And how?

Så slap dog af, det var jo bare for sjov!

Jeg er tilbage på bloggen! Juhu! Og starter hårdt ud efter pausen (som skyldtes en arbejdsplads hvor ”vi har ytringsfrihed, men...”) med en historie, jeg hørte sidste år i toget. Der er en pointe med den, så stick with me.

En gruppe unge damer skulle på Skanderborg-festival, og sludrede løs på vejen dertil, så hele togvognen kunne overhøre, hvordan de gav hinanden tips og advarsler. Særligt det sidste: det nye fede blandt ungdommen nu til dags er åbenbart, at når man er stærkt beruset på en festival, og de unge mænd spiller øl-bowling, og der går en kvinde forbi, de synes ser pæn ud, må en af dem råbe ”tiger-mis!”, og derefter løbe efter hende, og vælte hende omkuld lige der midt i det hele, hvad enten hun synes det er sjovt eller ej. Så bare lige så I ved det, piger, hvis I ser nogen, der spiller øl-bowling, så gå langt udenom!

Troy: The National Order of Things 3000 Years Ago

For reasons not to be elaborated upon here (full disclosure: they involved Eric Bana) I recently chose to use 3 hours of my precious holidays watching Troy again, after spending approx. 7 years on forgetting why I didn't like it. It's (very loosely!) ”inspired” by the Iliad, but I have no intentions of going into all the reasons why I think that was not a successful venture – let it suffice to say that when I studied “knowledge of ancient times” (aka “old-øvl”) in high school, when asked to let us watch Troy in class as “relevant to the subject” (we had been reading and analysing excerpts of the Iliad), our teacher actually preferred to let us watch Disney's “Herkules”, as that was deemed closer to its original source material. Yeah.* But before I digress even further, to what I want to treat you today is a lecture on nationalism and the National Order of Things, inspired by how it was allowed to seep into a film that is supposed to take place more than 3000 years ago, where the very concept of nation would not make any sense whatsoever. Spoiler warning: I am not impressed.

Language as exclusionary practice

The language you speak defines who will understand you. So you speak the language you think serves better to make yourself understood in any given context. Seems like a no-brainer, right? But sometimes you probably also choose a language in order to not be understood, by whoever is the excluded one in the group. It's the dynamics of this that I would like to dig into today.