Group Analytic Contexts, Issue 77, September 2017

86 Group-Analytic Society International - Contexts
The Non-Reconciled
By Helena Klímová
I fly to London for a discussion about Brexit, and I fill in a
questionnaire: after name and address they are asking me for gender
and offer me: female, male, transgender, other. Being essentially
conservative myself, I select female. In the next column, ethnicity
offers me eighteen possibilities, such as: Indian, African, Caribbean,
other black, Chinese.... but I don’t dare. I’m tempted by white British,
only it wouldn’t work, it’s not true. The only one left is white other –
and doesn’t that sound a little second-class? Aren’t they asking me
about the colour of my skin? You’re allowed to do that in England?
Besides, my own ethnicity is missing here...
So here am I, walking around London, a central-European
mischling, and admiring those various identities in practice. How rich
was the Creator’s imagination! I have to meet my precious friend of
many years, Janet, female, white British – where else but in the British
Museum? We gaze at a relief of a being with an animal head holding
a handbag, certainly containing tablets of destiny. Just like the one Her
Majesty carries when inspecting the troops... We explore in what way
those ancient Assyrians longed to appease the Godhead, to bow to
their doom. How similar we humans are, in space and time! Janet, next
to me, looks round at the sculptures and suddenly says: but all this we
have stolen... I am astounded: if these statues had not been “stolen”
and looked after in London, they would have been destroyed long ago
at home... Oh, Janet!
I join in in an evening discussion. My British friends tell me
how distressed they are, their sorrow over Brexit; it is undoubtedly
due to conditions at home. I hear a story about a woman from Poland
who has been living in London for years, completely assimilated – and
suddenly she is attacked in the street... I listen to their concerns: The
Poles are now our new blacks... The discussion shifts to the
assassination in France, dozens of people murdered, injured children
in hospital. The discussant (female, white British) seems concerned:
white children get every possible care from doctors and psychologists
immediately, but what about those children in Asia and in Africa...
and I may hear tears in her voice...
I walk around London and look for the motivations behind
the accommodating steps of the Europeans towards human identities:
respect, kindness one to other and to oneself? feelings of guilt reaching
across generations? Oh, Angela!