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Streetkids and Streetscapes: Panhandling, Politics and Prophecies

Marjorie Mayers

2001 New York: Peter Lang. 
pp. 180 ISBN  0-8204-5218-1 $30 

Practical Philosophy  (Book Reviews) Spring 2002 Volume 4.2

Reviewed by: John Colbeck

Anyone who wears a suit should read this book and be stirred. It is largely a book of philosophy by street-kids about  us – ‘the suits’ or the power classes. It is about our indifference towards people  – street ‘arabs’ in this case – which is worse than hate. It is we, the ‘great’ power classes who organize everything, who drive desperate people towards apathy, drugs, crime and perhaps, on the international stage,  terrorism, by our  smug, narcissistic indifference? We create poverty, then sweep it out of sight.

The authors  – street-kids whose contributions are put together in the two central chapters  – expose, in remarkably articulate prose, the ways in which we, ‘the suits’ use all the (many) powers at our disposal to make them ‘invisible’. The central chapters are largely written by people of the street, Mike, Gwen, Grub, Neil, Nicole, Crowchild, Jayne, Jar and Zena. In these chapters  their wisdom sayings about themselves, about us – ‘the suits’ – and about our society, including their/our ‘street’ are reproduced, verbatim, with minimum comment.

For me, the focal point of the book is a passage in which a piece of Mike’s writing is reproduced in facsimile. I would like to include it all, but I want you to read the whole book, so I won’t. The writing is visually jagged and, above all, passionately, emotionally jagged – painful both to writer and reader alike.  I quote only a selection of lines from a passage full of anger (p. 102).

‘The Jagged City Frame.’

After the divisions are blurred

and your world shivers cold

in the dark black of loneliness.

Then follow some angry lines about rejection, including, ‘I SIT AND WITHER AND ROT AND DIE!  AND EVERYTHING I EVER THOUGHT WAS ALL ONE BIG JOKE! ... 

Ha, but that sounds too melancholy. .. So I laugh and bear (sic) my teeth and spit at a life spat upon.’ The anger then subsides and Mike withdraws again. ‘The night air sucks my soul into the jagged city frame and I once again become the silent watcher - like the silhouette on the wall that no-one ever sees.  The bent song of a bent reality shines through the smog and I never felt so low.’

The book is also by, and about the author, Marjie. Her passionate spirit shines in every page, as she struggles with the hermeneutic problem of 'interpreting' her people, without interpreting them away, back into silence as unseen silhouettes. She fears that they may be silenced by ‘translation’ – carrying across – into the language of another world – an opposed, largely hostile world of ‘suits’ and academe. In that world they easily become,  not people but faceless, voiceless shadows on walls – subjects, or objects, of a ‘study’. It is a recurring theme that  street people – panhandlers or beggars – are ‘unsightly’ to the ‘suits’.  The suits would much prefer that they were neither seen nor heard, even as shadows or echoes. 

We, the suits and power classes, wield our powers accordingly, to make street people invisible so that we can maintain our attitude of indifference and averted gaze: we employ police to move them on to less ‘visible’ areas;  we pay social workers (not much!) to try, with ‘good’ intentions, to reabsorb them into our respectable world of employment and ‘decent’ homes, working for money like ‘us’, instead of begging for it.  We want them to become stout little pillars of society, like us – our clones  – increasing profits and productivity by consuming more and more. We want them to live happily ever after, as happy, eager-beaver, busy, busy slaves to money – like us. Fairy story Dick Whittingtons and Aladdins all!  A morality of Marjorie Daw:  ‘Johnnie shall have a new master.  He shall have but a penny a day, because he can't work any faster.’ Faster, faster! Busier, busier! Bruised and battered, cut, jagged souls!

It is another theme of the author’s passionate realism that we are all, including Mike himself, responsible for his (and our own) jagged pains. Mike alternates between a proud railing against the conventional hypocrisy of the suits (reminiscent of earlier street-dwellers, Jesus and Diogenes the Cynic), anger and (very rarely) feeling sorry for himself. Mike almost certainly could get work (as a writer, by the look of it) but that would mean joining the monied ‘suits’ whose values he passionately, angrily, determinedly rejects. 

But we, the suits, having more voices, votes and powers that count, have far more responsibility for putting Mike on the street than he has. Few  street people are like Diogenes, who sold all his goods, distributed the money and lived on the street several hundred years before ‘Jesus’ advocated it. Mostly, street-kids are on the street because they have left, or been exiled from, their parental homes, often after abuse. What we are pleased, as Narcissi, to call  their 'sub'-culture is an unflattering mirror-reflection of  our own ‘high’ culture. Like the wicked queen in Snow White, we get angry with the mirror and try to do away with it.  Cracks appear, but it stays to mock us with a ‘cracked’ view of society.

Our actions not only cause and perpetuate the conditions of street people, we also try hard, not to forget them, but never to become aware of them in the first place. In Lyotard’s powerful book Heidegger and ‘the jews’ (symbolic small 't' and 'j'), he suggests that we, with Heidegger, have done a similar job on the holocaust. We have not ‘forgotten’ it, so much as never let it into our consciousness as our own responsibility (mistake). We need first to re-member (re-construct) the holocaust, Lyotard says, before we can forget it and forgive ourselves for it. We were, still are continuously and will go on being – until we re-member ‘properly’ (put together for ourselves), both ‘the nazis’ and ‘the jews’ – equally, but differently (narrowly) miss-taken and miss-taking aims. We ‘aim’ so as to eliminate whole species, including our own, in an accelerating global holocaust. Ours is a holocaust, bigger than Hitler’s, committed by mistake  in a spirit of well-intentioned indifference. We give Hitlers and Bin Ladens their causes and then call them ‘evil’.

In persecuting and oppressing (many of us unawares), we persecute and oppress our (other) selves. As Nelson Mandela observed, we oppressors, too, need liberating – from our narrowly conceived ego-selves, as suits – ‘The Great Powers’ dispensing ‘peace’, in indifference, after a world war. Like a certain emperor, we have no ‘real’ clothes on. Our ‘suits’ are disguises, fig-leaves of conventional consensus and smug, ‘moral’ deception –  a very old story. Mike sees through the fig-leaves for us, to the raw, naked people  – still tribal-spirited – underneath them.

Marjie’s message about street kids is similar. We see them, com-fortably, as ‘them’ and point moral, conventional fingers at ‘them’ (‘ragged’, ‘arabs’), not at ourselves. They are not ‘them’ but ‘us’, our family, children to whom we have given birth (created), as we also create our own 'selves' with (Kantian?) ‘good’ (but narrow) intentions and unawares, by lack of caring. We put our Nelson’s, singular thinking, monocular telescope to our blind eye when we point it in ‘their’ direction, without looking back, re-flecting, on our own responsibility for ‘our’ world.  What we call, misleadingly, ‘the’ world (there are many), and ‘the’ economy,  is ours – our baby. We give birth to it, conceiving it in our concepts, doing a lot of physical creating and organizing of it (building civil-izing cities), too. It then (?), or beforehand (?) – both, in dynamic loops  – gives birth to us.  It makes us what we become  – city suits who are indifferent to ‘arabs’ in streets or Middle Easts. We are creatures who, in large part now, create ourselves.

My experience in reading this book is that Mike, Marjie and her street kids have taken me – a conventional academic ‘suit’ – to the cleaners, ironed me flat, then washed me and put me through a tumble dryer! Comprehensive treatment to change my perspective or mind-set to a washable, renewable, less ‘suitable’ and ‘respectable’ one.  They spoke to my condition.

The book is not perfect but the flaws are minor.  I am content to leave my review as a eulogy of a fine book. I would be proud to have written it. I am humbled, yet also elated, every time I read it. I am not the same after reading it. I hope many people will have the same in-spiring, spiking and breathing in, experience of being re-minded – that we are ‘us’, with and against ‘them’ – and that an indifferent mind-set is worse than hate.

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