Voices form the past

I picked up both English (as language) and my first solid grasps of philosophy in a highly unusual manner. At fifteen I sent a postcard to a death row inmate in California. He wrote back… a lot. In no time, we were writing twice to three times a week. Rob was very interested in my philosophy classes, so I ended up translating all of my lecture notes for him, perusing through the Robert and Collins dictionary.

My grades in both English and Philosophy went right through the roof. Indeed, at one oral examination, I was given the topic of “determinism vs. free will”. This topic had interested Rob very much because of the stories he could tell of the people he was sharing life with on death row. I sailed through that exam, making the absolute highest grade. It sort of made up for my lousy grades in Chemistry, Physics and Maths and got me into the University of my choice, but I divert.

In my first year of University, Rob and I were still writing pretty regularly. I was your typical activist and had joined all the campaigns on campus, even running the Amnesty International society at some point. Rob and I did fall apart after a while. It was not a major disaster since Rob was corresponding with quite a number of people and I was jut one of the lot. Around that time, some of my friends had to actively pull me out of the Human Rights agenda. I was living and breathing the stuff, I was writing all my essays on the topic and spending all my summers interning with activist organisations. I had disappeared behind the cause. I practically talked about nothing else.

About a year later, I picked up Sr. Helen Prejean’s book. I cried through the whole thing. Before reading that book, I had been an isolated French girl with a friend on death row. It was so weird to read my thoughts in somebody else’s book. At some point I wanted to travel to Paris to hear a conference that she was giving. Still, back then, I wasn’t used to crossing the country at a moment’s notice so I ended up not going.

Twenty minutes ago, I got an e-mail telling me that she is coming to Newcastle this Saturday and that our campus’ Cathsoc is going to attend her talk. It caught me a bit off guard, as I’m currently quite busy with other stuff (like finishing a &*$%£* dissertation). But suddenly, all of that surfaced again.

I don’t usually like speaking tours. One of my pet peeves with Human Rights organisations was their habit of demanding that the people we had gotten out of horrible situations come and give talks all around the country every year. Okay, we were not successful that often and we probably did need some success stories. And still I thought that this was brutal. I mean honestly, how many times do we expect these folks to talk about the torture their body suffered to a roomful of people who barely care? Leave them alone! Don’t trap them in the past, don’t define them by what they had to go through, and don’t fucking expect that they will be available to speak to your half-assed activists for the rest of their lives.

So while I don’t like speaking tours I’m still going to that one. It’s going to be weird. Oh and before I forget, if you ever thought that my punctuation was pretty bad you could write to Rob to complain about it.