Oppression & Criminal Activity - Essay Example

?Ramakrishna Surampudi 09 June Oppression & Criminal Activity (2,250 Words) Social work research indicates that familial background and culturalinfluences can be a cause of criminal tendencies. On its romantic side, poverty makes one contented and honest as in the case of Charlie who ends up as Willie Wonka’s heir. On the other side, poverty is a harsh reality which has a language and dialect of its own and it has the power to adversely influence one’s social and spiritual health. This other side is heartrendingly established by Meridel Le Sueur in her novel ‘The Girl’. The girl is one of those for whom the childhood is not a sweet memory. Quite on the contrary, it is an account of pain, humiliation and patriarchal brutality. It is explicitly revealed in the playfulness and rejoicing of children when the girl’s father is dead. Though the story was originally set in the backdrop of the Great Depression in the United States, its implications remain valid irrespective of time and space; that a delay of four decades in the publication of ‘The Girl’ did not have any effect on its popularity is a testimony to the timelessness of the relevance of its theme. When starvation, sexual abuse, monotony and lack of opportunities become the order of life, they create the ground for the evolution of a naive farm girl into an accomplice in a bank robbery. The girl’s anonymity does not cause any confusion because the applicability of her experiences is universal. It is the same stimulus – poverty – that makes the girl indulge in recreational sex (Coiner 111), gives Belle the courage to operate a speakeasy or pushes Clara into prostitution. It may be noted that none of them ever had any feelings of guilt nor any qualms of conscience over what they did. Le Sueur’s focus in the novel, which was intended as a memorial to the women of the Depression, was primarily on the lives and condition of women of the proletarian class in the thirties, but the story, through the character of Butch, the girl’s lover, incidentally throws light on the evils of the capitalist structure (Sueur 135). Butch’s speech before his death (after the foiled bank robbery attempt) exposes how the system and institutions in vogue contribute to unequal opportunities thereby making a section of the population desperate and furious. The significance of the story’s tragic end is that the desperation and fury of the oppressed are not of any consequence, as is indicated by Clara’s unwept death or the kind of end that Hoink, Ganz and Butch eventually meet with. In the struggle for survival, it is always the mighty that win; the rest is foredoomed to become extinct. The personal good and bad traits of the characters notwithstanding, they have a common source of motivation – lack of options – that drives them towards planning and executing (often unsuccessfully) criminal activities. Modern theories on self-improvement suggest that if one thinks one can do, one can. Examined from the perspective of Butch’s experience, the validity of such theories becomes debatable. Butch feels good, feels strong, has a passion for winning and claims that he is a natural winner, that winning is in his bones. What, then, turns such a man of attitude into a criminal is an eternal mystery. What, however, turns out to be obvious is that poverty is not quite the right platform to produce winners. It is the population at the lower rungs of the economic ladder that fills prisons and never the other way round. By and large, there are prisons because there are slums and these slums produce a lot of blind men with pistols. ‘Blind Man with a Pistol’ by Chester Himes is less a detective novel and more an anti-detective novel in which the plight of the poor and the disenfranchised and their victimization by the law and order enforcement machinery is realistically depicted. The prostitutes, homosexuals and janitors chased by Grave Digger Jones and Coffin Ed Johnson are invariably from ghettos or tenements. Here it is not only the question of survival but also the need of the segregated community, the blacks, to feel their existence which no one seems to acknowledge. The longing for identity and chaotic life make them see violence as a means for instant gratification. The chaos of Harlem is grounded in poverty and despair. More important is the aspect of racial oppression that blacks were subjected to. Just as Le Sueur’s focus was on women’s condition, Himes’s focus was on the condition of African Americans who were discriminated and were vulnerable to violence. Their frustration is manifested in Reverend Sam’s remark: “Everybody ain’t rich like you white folks.” It is suggestive of the poverty of blacks and the kind of things that they are forced to subsist on. The blind man with a pistol is not an individual; it is a portrait of unorganized violence, as Himes states in the preface to the novel. The idea of blindness pervades the novel and the author’s perspective of vision is associated with power. Therefore, the well-to-do are less likely to be prone to blindness and it is the oppressed, that is, the blacks, who are vulnerable since they are socially and economically powerless. So the leaders can take advantage of their blindness (which is synonymous with ignorance, hate, prejudice and powerlessness), make them believe violence can be a solution to all their problems and provoke them to turn violent. Just as weakness signifies blindness, pistol signifies visual and visible power. Violence is projected not as a crime but as a glorified device in the struggle for freedom. The blind, that is, the oppressed, turn to the pistol (which symbolizes masculine power) as a means of overcoming their inner sense of inadequacy that stems from their secondary social status (Forter 198). Thus Himes establishes a cause and effect relation between oppression, blindness and crime. He sensibly weaves these ideas into the narration of the story, for instance, in the scene in which Coffin Ed and Grave Digger tell Anderson who caused the Harlem riot: “Some call him lack of self respect for law and order, some lack of opportunity, some the teachings of the Bible, some the sins of their fathers, some call him ignorance, some poverty, rebellion.” They boldly declare: “We are the victims of your skin.” This is a scene which unequivocally holds the system responsible for crime as illustrated in Sargeant’s attempt to break the church door open in Langston Hughes’ story ‘On the Road’. The conclusion by Grave Diggers is that the riot was started by ‘a blind man with a pistol’ (Boyd). The contradiction here is that the blind man is neither innocent nor guilty. He is the cause of the riot but he is also the victim. He is mad yet deserves to be sympathized with, when the factors that turned him mad are considered. Just as the characters in ‘The Girl’ have no feelings of guilt, the blind in Himes’s novel refuse to admit they are blind. In fact, they are not even aware they are blind. It is true that violence in a civilized society does not make sense. It is as aimless as a blind man’s operation of the pistol. For that matter, nor does Grave Diggers’ conclusion make sense (and the detectives agree). But there are several other things in the system like racial inequality and exploitation and poverty that do not make sense. As long as the stimulus does not change, the response cannot be expected to be different. The boys in Charles Burnett’s movie ‘Killer of Sheep’ are as restless as the impoverished blacks in the Harlem. Stealing a TV set or rowdy play is just fun for them, like William Saroyan’s Aram and Mourad who steal a horse and rationalize. Life is characterized by the pressure of inescapable poverty, unemployment or underemployment, lack of opportunity, a sense of defeat, discontent, insomnia and hopelessness. It is about a struggle of having to choose between living with dignity in the face of glaring poverty and the temptation towards crime. There appears no hope for emancipation. There is opportunity only to compromise. The film exposes the hollowness of the American promise. Stan kills sheep as part of his grueling job, but a bigger issue that no one seems to pay attention to is that there are a large number of people, who dance to Dinah Washington’s haunting version of ‘This Bitter Earth’, who get physically and emotionally worn down by an unexciting life, whose spirits are being assaulted and made to bleed every day of the world, whose destiny seems to be apparently pre-determined like that of the sheep (in the slaughterhouse) which contentedly flock towards their doom. Yet, like the blind man with a pistol, Stan insists that he is not poor. His best effort to be able to appreciate the joy of life and its small pleasures go in vain with the disillusionment life brings each day. The movie portrays a way of life which rejects the conventional values of parenting and evinces a different set of values as acceptable. So Stan is seen exhorting his son to ‘get a thick goddamn brick and knock the (breath) out of whoever’ fighting his brother. Stan wants his son to ‘start learning what life is about’ (IMDB). That they are not happy with what they are, for they are powerless to change their predicament, is suggested by long spells of silence between Stan and his wife. The film does not, as such, portray young blacks turning to crime in the pursuit of quick money. At best, it gives the viewer true-to-life, yet low-key images of children making mischief in the neighborhood of Watts ghetto and minor acts of cruelty suggestive of possible gang violence of a larger scale. Nevertheless, it shows how economic backwardness demoralizes blacks and deprives them of the very joy of life. Without false optimism that promises miracles, the film presents the ground realities of a dehumanized society and the melancholy associated with it. Burnett, however, confines his narrative to the identification and depiction of social problems and observes caution and restraint with regard to offering solutions (King 204). Though the film does not endeavor to stretch the effects of dismal living conditions so far as to produce criminals, it is not difficult to see how such a life of blues in ghettos might eventually inspire youngsters to see crime as an opportunity. In spite of the rave reviews that it received, it took thirty years for ‘Killer of Sheep’ to find a place in theaters and probably Charles Burnett must have experienced the same disappointment as his protagonist Stan did when the car engine fell and broke after a lot of laborious effort to carry it down the steps. The cause of despair from the girl to Burnett is that effort often goes without reward and success and opportunities are not necessarily functions of brilliance, as they are supposed to be. The urban crime drama ‘Shaft’, which portrays a black James Bond, directed by Gordon Parks is a lot different from ‘The Girl’, ‘Blind Man with a Pistol’ and ‘Killer of Sheep’ in that it is essentially a commercial venture and deliberately uses extreme violence to make the film appeal to the audiences (Ryan et al. 123). The protagonist Shaft has a wealthy lifestyle. However, throughout the film, he has to operate in the interstices of crumbling slums of the seventies, the poverty therein, narcotics, gang wars and organized crime by mafia. On the whole, crime in this plot is more like a profession by choice or a matter of character and not in any way an imposition by circumstances. Though the crime story is narrated from a black perspective, it is not a war between colors. It allows white characters that are good-hearted and black characters that are wicked and evil. However, there remains the difference that a white man turning to crime is in defence of the domination of his race while a black man’s aggression is to be seen as a manifestation of his need to assert his identity. From the black man’s perspective, crime is not a law-breaking activity; it is an expression of resistance to racial injustice (Lewis 346). This belief system is further reinforced by themes of blaxploitative movies that almost always invariably deal with street crime, robbery, juvenile violence and drugs. ‘Shaft’, with its black radical group Lumumbas, is no exception to this. Unlike Himes’s detectives, Shaft is not self-conscious about his being black. He is too busy to worry about it. Nor does he have any feeling of helplessness like Stan. He believes he is capable of earning, using his own resources, whatever he might want. All said and done, ‘Shaft’ belongs to the genre of films that projected blacks as sexual and violent groups with criminal tendencies (as in the character of Bumpy Jonas and his guys), in contrast to the earlier genre of films in which white film-makers would portray them as uncivil, comic and uneducated. Both stereotypes stem as much from the poor social, economic and cultural background of blacks as from a racist attitude. Crime is always a result of factors like racism or chauvinism or illiteracy or cultural influences and unfortunately these factors, for most part, are man-made. Still, what is positive about is that if they are man-made, it is possible for man to unbuild so as to make a better tomorrow possible when we do not need to make wars to maintain peace. Works Cited Boyd, Melba J. “Books Noted”. Black World / Negro Digest. Chicago: Johnson Publishing Company, March 1972, Page 51. Coiner, Constance. Better Red: The Writing and Resistance of Tillie Olsen and Meridel Le Sueur. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998. Forter, Greg. Murdering Masculinities: Fantasies of Gender and Violence in the American Crime Novel. New York & London: New York University Press, 2000. Killer of Sheep. © 1990 – 2011. IMDB. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0076263/ King, Geoff. American Independent Cinema. New York: I B Tauris & Co. Ltd., 2005. Le Sueur, Meridel. Ripening: Selected Work (2nd Edition). New York: The Feminist Press (City University of New York), 1990. Lewis, Jon. The New American Cinema. Duke University Press, 1999. Ryan, Michael & Douglas Kellner. Camera Politica: The Politics and Ideology of Contemporary Hollywood Film. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990. Read More