Prompt : Conflicts can strengthen our understanding of who we are
The ancient art of blacksmithing has always been fascinating to me. Under intense heat and pressure, a true, beautiful, work of art can be fashioned beneath the rhythmic beatings of a blacksmith's hammer. Unfortunately, all too often, steel can be made brittle and painfully fragile in the wrong hands. So it is with life in general. We are the blacksmiths, our sense of self the steel we fashion, and the hammer and anvil the conflicts we face in life. It is how we handle the conflicts we face that determine whether we come out of the furnace of life strong and true, or brittle and weak.
Growing up, I went to a school where people like me were in the minority. Like Sunil from "Stick and Stones and Such Like",I was in an environment where racism was all too real. As sunil was called racial slurs such as 'coon', I too had to handle being called a 'lakia' along with being saddled with the negative connotations the tag gave me. First impressions are everything in this day and age and being Iban in a chinese school, it was all too easy for some to dismiss me as lazy and none to bright.
At first. feelings of confusion and hatred were all too common. But soon after, the stereotypes that bogged me down though vexing. only served to ignite a fire underneath me. I set about trying to prove these people wrong. My favourite author, George R.R Martin once wrote, " Never forget who you are, because the rest of the world will not, wear ir like armour, and it can never used to hurt you." I took these words to heart, used the insults that were thrown my way constructively, and threw myself into my studies. After 5 long years, I graduated with straight As, a first in my family, with the people who had once flung insults my way as friends I still cherish to this day. Through the conflicts i faced, both inner and outer, I managed to strengthen my own understanding of who I was and never succumbed to the pressures of life. In contrast, Sunil gave in to the pressure and conflicts he faced. Rather than standing up for himself, he mutely accepted the labels people slapped on him haphazardly, even going as far as changing his name unofficially to Neil, so as to better fit in the Australian society. Through this, he did gain friends, but what he almost lost was his sense of self, after being diluted by his need to integrate into a predominantly white society. It was only after his mother found out about his name change that he realised that he had to take pride in his race. Through conflict with his mother, who reprimanded him about the meaning of his name, he realised the significance of his name and thus strengthened his understanding of who he was, up to the point where he was unfazed upon learning that his name meant ' dark one', because by then, he was secure in himself.
On the flip side, there are times when conflict, after being mishandled, can lead someone to be further stuck in the mire, leaving them in a state of limbo. Though Sunil managed to find his way eventually, Sandra Laing in the biopic 'Skin', never truly regains her full sense of self up until adulthood, as evidenced by her feelings of depression and despair combined with repeated utterances of "It is too late for me" in the documentary during present day. This is understandable as we learn of a carefree black child born to white parents in apartheid era South Africa, whose idyllic innocence is shattered when the society she is a part of at first, rejects her brutally. Her upbringing complicated things as she is raised as a white child and expresses bemusement when told she is black in school. At school much like Sunil and I, though in a much more traumatic way, Sandra has to deal with racism in a form that is not subtly delivered to say the least. He parent's stubborn insistence that she is white, along with the reality of her skin colour are at odds, leaving her to deal with conflicts no child should be forced to deal with. Unable to reconcile how she feels and how she looks, her feelings of self-loathing grow, to the extent where she deliberately tries to smear dangerous chemicals all over herself, in a bid to make herself appear more white. Parallels can be drawn with the adopted Thai girl in the documentary, "Change My Race." After being adopted by a white couple, the Thai girl fails to reconcile her outward appearance with the white reality she is raised in and as a result, the inner conflict she faces, along with the base need of almost every human essentially, to fit in, leads her down the path to purgatory, a place neither here nor there, and further on to plastic surgery with breast implants.
Noted french poet and philosopher, Arthur Rimbaud once said, " I is another." It is true that a part of us is defined by the people we meet and interact with. But when our beliefs and sense of self are challenged by society and conflicts start to arise, it is all too easy to fall in the trap of blindly conforming, and in the process, lose ourselves. So it was with the Thai girl in 'Change my Race", and with Sandra in 'Skin", when she was a mere child. In the case of Sandra, her struggles should have destroyed her, but instead, she handled her conflicts later on in life beautifully with integrity and gritty stubbornness to the point that she is now relatively content. Conflicts in life are inevitable, merely ap art of growing up, and it is how we handle them that we truly find an inkling of who we really are.
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