Ρουμανία ρει by Andrei Vyktor Georgescu (2020)

Everything like, flows and changes, my dudes. Heraclitus (535 – 475 BC)

My family tree only goes back to Katinka, my grandma’s grandma who was born in Bucești in the middle of the 19th century. I first learned about her after complaining to my grandma about Western-style furniture, and how I wanted cushions, carpets and low-rise tables instead of clunky chairs and bulky sofas that atrophy my muscles. She explained that my interior design aspirations, drawn from Moroccan and Japanese culture, were in fact quite common in the Romanian countryside owing to the long history of Ottoman/Turkish influence.

My surprise was compounded by learning that the most iconic Romanian dish, sarmale, is also of Turkish origin, although they pilfered it from the Persians. The confusion continues with mămăligă, the most crucial staple in the country (often paired with sarmale) which served as Katinka’s main subsistence. Mămăligă, as you might have guessed, also comes from the Ottoman empire, but with a twisted pedigree, since the Ottomans found it in African grain markets, which were supplied by Spanish and Portuguese explorers, who grabbed it from Mexican farmers, who learned maize cultivation from ancient Picosans in the Colorado Plateau.

Bucești in 1867 (taken by Carol Popp de Szathmari)

A few years after I was born, the Romanian Orthodox Church canonized a 15th century prince (of what was then Moldavia) as Ștefan cel Mare și Sfânt, or, Stephen the Great and Holy. His legacy is strongly tied to the brave and skillful way he managed to thwart the Turks, and by extension Islam, although he simply categorized them as pagans and wanted to ‘cut off [their] right hand’. In Vaslui, a 2 hour drive away from Katinka’s town, Ștefan defeated Mehmed II’s Ottoman army in a cinematic victory, where they triumphed despite being outnumbered three to one by 120,000 troops. My favourite detail about this event is how Mara Branković, Mehmed II’s stepmother, pulled a Lady Tremaine and cruelly rubbed the loss in his face, calling it the greatest defeat in Ottoman history.

Of Popes & Princes

Although the fight was motivated by Mehmed II’s greed for power and territory, Ștefan played up the religious angle and wrote to various European rulers reminding them that Moldavia is the gateway to the Christian world, and they would do well to help protect the faith, although they all wound up ignoring him. Ștefan also wrote to Pope Sixtus IV (born Francesco della Rovere) for help, hoping he’d find a more sympathetic ear since Rovere had declared a new crusade on the Ottomans as soon as he became pope. Rovere lavished compliments on Ștefan, calling him ‘the true defender of the Christian faith’ and titling him Champion of Christ. This makes Rovere look like a little bit like a naive idiot, duped by Ștefan’s political ambition.

Della Rovere was actually way more shrewd and ambitious than Ștefan could ever hope to be, and the fact that no practical aid was ever given to Ștefan is a clue that the Pope was just blowing smoke up princely butts. Rovere’s famous crusade on the Ottomans was dropped right after he won control of the city he wanted, making it clear his goal was acquisitive rather than ideological, and afterwards he focused on practical considerations like putting his friends and family into positions of power.

Anyway, back to Katinka, the Church didn’t really seem to be that big of an influence in Romania, even in the last few hundred years. I was surprised to learn that up to the 18th century, marriage in Romanian villages was pretty casual in a way that reminds me of the secular attitude couples have in 21st century Toronto. Moving in with someone was enough to establish a commitment, and moving out was accepted as separation. There were no legalistic documents or official church certificates, just a practical union of two people’s assets and families.

This matches the description of my grandma’s parents and their distinctly unromantic union, with her mother essentially resigning herself to the fact that she needs to live with a man and pump out some kids. The Church eventually began to force people to visit the capital of Bucharest for divorce tribunals so they could keep track of what was going on and collect fees. What I love about this is the wildly baroque language in court documents, which would sometimes open with statements like, ‘with scalding tears I beseech thee’. Those lawyers earned their exorbitant fees.

Baby Steps

Despair (detail) by Ernst Hildebrand (1885)

The darkest story I’ve heard from a family member in regards to the Church shows that not all women were willing to accept their fate to become mothers. He told me that a pile of infant skeletons was found next to a defunct local church, where the priest had been secretly disposing of unwanted babies. When I repeated this story to my grandmother, she was shocked, but went on to tell me that unwanted children were a big problem in the countryside.

She explained that Katinka often helped young women that wanted abortions or developed severe infections as a result of botched attempts, despite the absolute illegality of aborting fetuses, which was punishable by lengthy prison terms. Prostitution and weed were legal though; did Romanians love to party, but hate the consequences? It wasn’t until 1937, a few years after my grandmother was born, that the law made some concessions to women and allowed abortions if the mother’s life was in danger, or if there was a chance of ‘insanity’ being passed on to the fetus. Sadly, the insanity clause was more of a ploy by doctors to extort bribes from desperate women in exchange for a phony certificate. In 1966 the communist dictator Nicolae Ceaușescu reverted to the original 1865 full ban on abortion, eventually turning Romanian orphanages into what Robert Sapolsky called ‘the study subjects of choice for understanding the consequences of massive sensory, intellectual, and emotional deprivation in infants and children‘. The corresponding increase in clandestine abortions also resulted in catastrophic rise in the death of pregnant women.

Katinka was unusual in that she was a widely respected healer in her village, offering the services of a physician, physiotherapist, psychologist, pharmacist, and fortune teller all at once. Most Romanian women in the 19th century were housewives, and would sometimes earn money on the side by knitting, doing people’s laundry, serving booze in pubs, helping in shops, or becoming domestic servants for the rich. However, like the vast majority of Romanian women in the 19th century, Katinka was illiterate. In 1899, it was estimated that only about 4.5% of Romanian women in the countryside could read and write, and 26% of the men, abysmal compared to the rest of Europe. Since peasants didn’t have the skills to write anything down, it explains why my ancestry only goes back four generations. Coincidentally, the birth of Romania as a nation goes back just as far as the birth of Katinka, to the union of Moldavia and Wallachia in 1859.

Charlie’s Angle

The name of the bow (biós) is life (bíos), but its work is death. Heraclitus (535 – 475 BC)

Oh, Pshaw!

Gibbons at Play by Zhu Zhanji (1427)

In the scientific world, 1859 is famous for Charles Darwin’s publication of The Origin of Species. Although he is commonly said to have invented the idea of evolution, Darwin was by no means the one to come up with the idea. Even Darwin’s own grandfather Erasmus speculated that all warm-blooded animals share a common ancestor. But it was Charles and his co-discover Alfred Russell Wallace who finally came up with a detailed explanation of its actual mechanism. Some 2500 years before Darwin, ancient Greek philosophers like Anaximander suggested that life came from the water and evolved from fish-like creatures, after he saw the variety of ways that sharks gave birth, figuring that that they must have changed over time.

Although there are many components to the theory of natural selection, the basic idea is stunningly simple, stating that any variety of creature that isn’t able to reproduce successfully gets killed off, and successful traits get passed on. There’s more to it than that, but on the surface it’s pretty obvious, and when it comes to non-human animals, it’s easy enough to accept for most people. Heraclitus, writing shortly after Anaximander, talked about the key role that death played in the formation of life, although he’s most famous for his pithy remarks on how change characterizes the natural world. But even Wallace, who independently discovered natural selection, had lingering skepticism that foreshadowed modern cognitive dissonance on the subject. He believed that evolution by natural selection accounted for all of the different creatures on the planet, but the one thing that it could not explain was… the human brain.

In 2018, Nicolae Hurduc (the Romanian Minister for Research and Innovation) said he could not imagine how human beings could be related to monkeys. Although he conceded that there’s enormous genetic overlap with monkeys, and that they’re sentient, he still believes that human bodies are essentially different in some way. Strangely enough, he even used the crude reductionist terminology of machines to describe the miracle of the human body. So what’s his solution to this riddle of biology? It’s that human beings come from a parallel world from the future. When pressed for details he said it’s not possible to explain, and anyway, the answer would itself be mysterious, since no one truly understands quantum mechanics.

Waving around quantum theory to support wacky ideas is nothing special, but what’s fascinating to me about Hurduc’s Future People Theory is that it’s strikingly similar to what other Romanians in my family believe about human origins. The thing is, they’re all highly educated people, so the fact they believe such an absurd idea is indicative that there’s something more going on than just a lack of available information, or Communism’s legacy of trying to look away from the past.

After Darwin, it looked like the entire biological world is actually governed by bottom-up principles consisting of molecules and impersonal natural forces that are in constant flux. One of Darwin’s critics, Robert Beverly Mackenzie, indignantly paraphrased the theory of natural selection as suggesting that ‘in order to make a perfect and beautiful machine, it is not requisite to know how to make it‘. This is, in fact, the crazy idea that natural selection implies, and put this way, it’s no wonder people continue to oppose it, even when the evidence is beyond question. In this light, the idea that human beings come from the future is a return to the pre-Darwinian universe, where complex things are made by even more complex things. In the secular version of this return, the source of human identity is placed in an inconceivably advanced technology like time-travel, rather than a deity.

Cold, Old River

Alongside the counter-intuitive nature of Darwin’s idea is the uncomfortable dissolution of boundaries that it inspires. Just as a solid national identity begins to melt as one goes back in time, biological identity becomes slowly transformed into something unrecognizable. When I last visited the Royal Ontario Museum and browsed through the Mesozoic fossils, some part of me just couldn’t parse what I saw into a coherent narrative. Part of me even doubted their reality. With a 3 pound brain, it’s kind of impossible to make sense of trillions of deaths over billions of years, with the vast majority of all species going extinct forever. It gives my life a sense of unbearably potent meaning, along with a bewildering insignificance. It scrambles my inner circuits. Bertold Brecht’s poem only touches on a slight drop of this sentiment:

Who built the seven gates of Thebes?

The books are filled with names of kings.

Was it the kings who hauled the craggy blocks of stone?

And Babylon, so many times destroyed.

Who built the city up each time?

In which of Lima’s houses,

That city glittering with gold, lived those who built it?

In the evening when the Chinese wall was finished

Where did the masons go?

Imperial Rome is full of arcs of triumph.

Who reared them up?

Over whom did the Caesars triumph?

Byzantium lives in song.

Were all her dwellings palaces?

And even in Atlantis of the legend

The night the seas rushed in,

The drowning men still bellowed for their slaves.

Young Alexander conquered India.

He alone? Caesar beat the Gauls.

Was there not even a cook in his army?

Phillip of Spain wept as his fleet was sunk and destroyed.

Were there no other tears?

Frederick the Second triumphed in the Seven Years War.

Who triumphed with him?

Each page a victory

At whose expense the victory ball?

Every ten years a great man.

Who paid the bill?

So many particulars.

So many questions.

I think that part of what motivates the fixation on salient figures, events and epochs is the attempt not to be swallowed up in the abyss of history, composed of countless anonymous and long-forgotten people that migrated from one place to another in hopes of living a decent life. Identifying with great figures and nations creates a tie to a supratemporal entity with greater status than any one member can hope to achieve in their lifetime.

I’m not immune to this; I feel a tinge of instinctive pride when I see a Romanian last name attached to someone in a position of power and respect, like it finally proves my own potential for success, as if an imaginary boundary drawn 160 years ago pooled me in a team against the rest of the world. My minor Greco-Italian roots tempt me to lay claim to beautiful art as if I’d been holding the chisel or the brush myself. Admittedly, the ability to identify with an arbitrary mass of strangers in the form of a nation or ethnicity is probably a necessary step to an even broader concern.

Caravan of Tears

Group of țigani by Carol Popp de Szathmari (1865)

Refusing to claim a clearly defined territory is characteristic of the Roma people, more commonly known as gypsies in the English speaking world and țigani in Romania. In conversations with Romanians from an old generation, I tend to brace myself for something outrageous whenever țigani are mentioned. They’re generally seen as the dregs of society, notorious for their criminal activity and refusal to assimilate into their nation’s culture. When I was 12, I visited Romania after having spent my childhood in Belgium and Canada, and one of the first things I saw was a chubby, shirtless țigan, approximately my own age, offering to clean our taxi car’s window while shivering in the middle of winter. Although to me this was a shocking breakdown of society, the taxi driver was more cynical and saw it as a ploy to pull heartstrings for a quick buck.

In paraphrasing anthropologist Michael Stewart, Diana Appelbaum explains that:

Roma think of their trading activity as the clever outwitting of dull-minded non-Roma. A Roma woman who collects discarded plastic twine behind a factory, lugs it to a village market and sells it to a farmer for tying up grape vines, looks to us like a person who does hard, dirty work for a pittance. However, since she got the twine for nothing and sold it without paying taxes to a farmer foolish enough to pay cash, she and her family see the exchange as an example of the wit and cunning that enable Roma to live without working. Such activities validate the Roma self-conception as a people so clever that they live freely, unlike the oafish hard-working farmers tied to their lands. This understanding stands in stark contrast to the Roma reality of extreme poverty, and it also makes it difficult for Roma who do take regular jobs to maintain their self-esteem and standing within [their] communities.

But even in their attempt for assimilation, the Roma encounter problems. A teacher in the north of England paints a grim picture:

“When I read the exclusion statistics concerning the mass exclusions of the Slovak Roma children, I had to admit to myself that in fifty years working as teacher, head teacher, educationalist and teacher trainer in Canada, Trinidad and Tobago, Mozambique, East London, Grenada, Sheffield and Manchester, I had never encountered such outright, blatant and unacknowledged institutional racism in education.”

He goes on to cite testimony from Slovak Roma and the way that black, brown and white children were united in abusing them and telling them to go back to where they came from, which in their case is particularly ironic given their nomadic lifestyle and history.

Whitey

No one was white before he/she came to America. It took generations, and a vast amount of coercion, before this became a white country. James Baldwin,On Being White . . . And Other Lies

Sunday Mass in Eastern Romania/Moldova by Adolph Chevallier (late 19th/early 20th century)

When I went to a Janice Jo Lee concert in Toronto’s Kensington Market a few years ago, I knew her as the artist who recorded Take a Walk With Me, a sweet song introduced to me by my then-partner. A quirky bonus feature of this concert was that in-between songs, the audience was treated to racist rhetoric targeting ‘white people’. I felt that speaking up in any way or drawing attention to it would mean further derailing the show, so my instinct was to shut up and take it. But as a budding migraine progressed and I heard yet another comment, I didn’t have the strength to tolerate it further, so I walked out of the show, bracing for either a conflict with Lee or my partner.

Luckily for my delicate constitution, no such conflict came. But the incident got me wondering about the meaning of ‘white’, especially since Lee’s Korean ancestry meant she was even paler than I was given my summer tan. Apparently, the slipperiness of the term was a problem early on in its usage. In the Naturalization Act of 1790, only ‘free white people’ were allowed to be citizens, although ‘white’ was actually reserved for people of very specific national origins, not just light-skinned Europeans. Anglo-Saxons & Nordics were at the top of the list, whereas people from Eastern and Southern Europe were seen as risks for polluting the gene pool. As time went on, the criteria for ‘white’ became more relaxed, and prompted some people from more distant nations to argue for their whiteness.

In the case of Takao Ozawa v. United States from 1922, Justice Sutherland argued that while Ozawa may be both free and light-skinned, he was not strictly speaking Caucasian, which invalidated his claim to whiteness. Inspired by this, an Indian Sikh by the name of Bhagat Singh Thing went to court and cited anthropological literature that validated his claim to Caucasian origins. However, Sutherland said that while he may be free and Caucasian in a technical sense, he isn’t white.

True North

Canadian immigration laws in the late 19th century were similar and prioritized the same kind of people, especially those from Scotland, England, the U.S., the Netherlands, and the Scandinavian countries. That being said, the Canadian Minister of the Interior wanted to include some people from Eastern Europe because of their agricultural skill and ability to face the harsh conditions of the Prairies:

When I speak of quality I have in mind, I think, something that is quite different from what is in the mind of the average writer or speaker upon the question of Immigration. I think a stalwart peasant in a sheep-skin coat, born on the soil, whose forefathers have been farmers for ten generations, with a stout wife and a half-dozen children, is good quality.

Stalwart peasants photographed by Adolph Chevallier in the late 19th/early 20th century

More stalwart peasants photographed by Adolph Chevallier in the late 19th/early 20th century

Stout wives photographed by Adolph Chevallier in the late 19th/early 20th century

At the start of 1923, both Eastern-Europeans and Asians were seen as a kind of strong animal, useful for providing food to the country, so they were allowed in as farm labourers. But on July 1st, a.k.a. ‘Humiliation Day’, prohibitions on Asian immigration were severely tightened and would only get worse in 1930, until they calmed a little more 17 years later from mounting pressure. It wasn’t until the 1960’s that Canada started to reconsider racially motivated immigration policies, and it would take until 1978 for the modern image of Canadian immigration to emerge, which prioritized uniting families, helping refugees, and growing the economy. Given such a tolerant immigration policy, by the 1990’s, both Korean and Romanian immigration spiked, and even allowed my humble family to immigrate in 1995.

Along with Canada’s fresh new beginning was the attempt to right the wrongs of the past by establishing Employment Equity. To do this, they inverted Justice Sutherland’s ruling, so anyone who could be reasonably considered non-white was given the bureaucratic stamp of being disadvantaged. Official policy uses the same terminology Sutherland did, referring to “persons, other than Aboriginal people, who are non-Caucasian in race or non-white in colour“. I’m disappointed in the use of Caucasian, since it’s not only a pseudoscientific term, but its origin is explicitly racist and was designed to disparage dark-skinned people from Africa. Nevermind the fact that ‘black’ is one category, even though Africa has by far the greatest genetic diversity of anywhere in the world.

Just as Takao and Bhagat struggled to be classified as white, immigrants would now have to be careful to dissociate themselves from whiteness. The Canadian census forbids people from identifying as ‘mixed’, since ancestry has be explicitly reported in distinct categories for esoteric Canadian race calculus, where “persons who reported ‘Latin American’ and ‘White,’ ‘Arab’ and ‘White,’ or ‘West Asian’ and ‘White’ have been excluded from the visible minority population. Likewise, persons who reported ‘Latin American,’ ‘Arab’ or ‘West Asian’ and who provided a European write-in response such as ‘French’ have been excluded from the visible minority population as well.”

Jung Hearts Be Free

As a Romanian that lives in Koreatown North, I hated being lumped in with Lee’s ‘white people’. It was a harsh reminder that in the real world, it’s prison rules: you gotta pick a side. To quote the anonymous Nihilist #2 from The Big Lebowski: It’s not faaiiir! My first instinct was to indignantly join the victim hierarchy game and play the Romanian refugee card, but I figured there must be a less slimy alternative. Is there anything valuable in the concept of ‘white guilt’? Even though it seemed like an incoherent and useless self-flagellation, I found that Jung’s perspectives on Nazism helped me wrap my head around it.

While he was traveling in India after revelations of Auschwitz & Buchenwald were made public, Jung figured his Swiss passport would sufficiently protect him from being tainted by German atrocities. But as he pointed out, for an Indian this was clearly an event of European civilization. “How would we react if an Indian pointed out indignantly that India’s black spot lay not in Travancore but in Hyderabad?“, he asked. Psychological collective guilt doesn’t care about individual culpability, it’s a kind of ‘magical uncleanness‘ that disregards reason.

Because of its deeply emotional character, it’s much more intimate for people than particulars about who did what. Collective psychological guilt wipes out individual moral details, and its mirror image is the frenzy of the mob, which removes individual responsibility. In part, he locates the origin of such massive social moral failure in Europe’s scientific disenchantment. While spirits and deities were human projections onto nature, science’s obliteration of them meant that they would begin to hide inside the minds of Europeans:

“Just when people were congratulating themselves on having abolished all spooks, it turned out that instead of haunting the attic or old ruins the spooks were flitting about in the heads of apparently normal Europeans. Tyrannical, obsessive, intoxicating ideas and delusions were abroad everywhere, and people began to believe the most absurd things, just as the possessed do.“

This complex of spooks, which Jung unifies as the God of Terror, was perfectly clear in the tyrannical obsessions that continued to take place in Europe. In the eyes of my family, Communism has blighted Romania and caused them to permanently dissociate themselves from the country. Instead of a new era of scientific enlightenment, the self-congratulatory abolition of ‘spooks’ in communist Romania accompanied a near breakdown of society. It’s only a few jumps to get to discriminatory practices in early Canadian history by European settlers, and the contemptible dehumanization of African bodies in the slave trade.

Jung has an ugly strain of racism in his work that exaggerates the special nature of Europeans (described in detail by Farhad Dalal) but I can be more cosmopolitan and suggest that susceptibility to tyranny is not endemic to Europe. For example, a Korean friend expressed strong horror at the human experimentation performed by the Japanese during WWII, saying they were Nazis of Asia. Jung brings up a Pueblo chieftain’s view of Americans/white people as a crazy, possessed race, since they think with their head and not their hearts, which Jung concedes. But I think that’s corny, and I don’t see how one Pueblo chieftain can speak for a vast tradition going back 7,000 years to the birth of Picosa culture.

However, Jung’s goal in outlining the pathological character of Europeans and their collective guilt in the Nazi genocide is to get readers to look closely at their own psychology, to come to terms with the true contents inside. This is far from easy. The mass hysteria that led to the torture and execution of millions by the Nazis is horrific precisely because the people involved were ordinary citizens in an advanced, well-ordered society. All it took was an aberrant idea, along with a personality to voice it, and the dark forces inhabiting human psychology crept through the continent. Such a strain of guilt is not so much concerned with atonement and blessings, but with individuation.

Goodbye, Katinka

Parthenon by Frederic Edwin Church (1871)

I have an extensive journal with plenty of moments of hatred and prejudice that I’m trying to transform into an art project, and it’s painful to see that side of myself, although also kind of entertaining. If I lacked any such shadow, what worth would my virtue have?

Ta-Nehisi Coates has a section in Between the World and Me where he describes wishing death upon hundreds of innocent emergency responders on 9/11, because his innocent friend got killed by a cop in Baltimore. He also compares the Manhattan slave holders to Bin Laden, adding that no American is innocent because of this legacy.

This toxic hatred is outrageous, but engaging at the same time. As someone who rails against the unreflective demonization of groups, he lyrically shows the reader that he is just as capable of it himself. Although I reject his justification, his honesty holds the key to individual moral development. If I were to criticize Lee’s racist rhetoric in this light, it would be that she is not hateful enough, that her shadow is too hidden from her art.

Two thousand years ago, Plutarch praised Socrates for his claim that he’s not an Athenian or a Greek, but rather a citizen of the world. Besides the cringeworthy We Are the World, what comes to mind in response to this idea is that it’s a lame attempt to erase historic, institutional, and economic power imbalances. A real slam dunk, eh? But such criticism is as old as the claim itself. The tension between philosophical ideals and reality is embedded in Plato’s Republic, and contemporaries like Aristophanes wrote entire plays mocking Socrates and portraying him as a useless, out of touch nerd that doesn’t contribute anything to society.

Despite the difficulty of finding Truth, I think that the tradition of the philosopher gives an identity really worth having. It knows no dogma, no spatial boundaries, includes thousands of years, plenty of languages, and compels me to know every human story, take pride in all human accomplishments, as well as feel guilt and shame for every disgusting action perpetrated by others. I can choose to make both Democritus and Frederick Douglass my ancestors.

It’s also an identity that guarantees strife. After all, even if Socrates did remove himself from a myopic group identity (I dunno where Plutarch found that quote tho), he was nonetheless put to death for corrupting his society. Heraclitus died alone, covered in shit, and ripped apart by dogs.

At the end of her life, Katinka moved back in with her son John, migrating to a nearby village called Malu Alb and slept in the same bed as my grandma in a cramped house shared with 8 other people. In the middle of the night, she woke up screaming “John!”, fell out of bed, and died.

My grandma was a young child at the time and it must have been deeply traumatic, although she claims it was an important example of how death can be swift and relatively painless. With this in mind, it might not be death that we should worry about, but what Jung called the God of Terror, which is lodged in our souls and can quickly sink the world into hell. Fearing such a God is the beginning of wisdom—but only the beginning.