“The challenge for each one of you is to take up these ideals of tolerance and respect for others and put them to practical use in your schools, your communities and throughout your lives.
Nelson Mandela, 2011
A year ago I was in the midst of finalizing the final draft of The Matriarch Matrix. A story full of twists and turns. Perhaps too many for most readers. For in part, it was designed to demonstrate the principles of tolerance and its link to human stereotypes among readers.
Why is tolerance important? Peace for mankind comes when we as humans take the time to be open and learn about the culture, history, and beliefs of those who appear different from us. Think about how much of the world’s strife comes when the exact opposite happens.
Judging something rapidly is likely a self-survival mechanism inherited from our most ancient ancestors. Making a snap decision could mean the difference between life and death. But when such a decision is not needed for survival, then what is the harm in taking the time to understand the other party better?
Through the course of The Matriarch Matrix I lead the reader into situations where one might make a judgment which later, if the reader is still open-minded, they will find that judgment would be wrong. I have read each and every review of this book in detail. Those who stay open-minded write one type of review. Those whose minds closed down part way into the book write something else. I appreciate the thoughtfulness of those who recognized this book as a metaphor for our times.
The metaphor of oppression and violence as tools of genocide
The story of Zara and the oppression of her people, the Kurds, the largest ethnic group in the world without a geographic political nation, represent what has happened to numerous ethnic minorities around the world today and throughout the millennia. I pulled no punches in this book describing the violence and organized rape that oppressed people endure. Why? Because we must learn from the atrocities of the past and the current so we can strive to not have these crimes against humanity to persist in our future. My parents’ generation lived through violent occupation and survived such atrocities which irrevocably altered their views of the world. A number of reviewers noted the emotional roller coaster within the book. I wrote the ancient ancestor sections with particular attention to elicit deep feelings by readers in hope that more people will be willing to speak out against the violence we see happening all around us.
Everything that I described has been documented in the news or in historical records. I purposely made a fictional people from the past as the perpetrators of these heinous acts as to not stereotype any ethnic or cultural group today. For the assigning of blame to any group perpetuates intolerance.
For the Kurds, not only were the acts of oppression part of their history but still occur in this day and age. See the links below:
http://www.newsweek.com/rape-weapon-war-wielded-against-girls-women-syria-un-report-says-846887
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/05/world/middleeast/syria-video-kurds.html?partner=rss&emc=rss
The taking of 3,000 Yazidi women in Sinjar, Iraq by the Daesh in 2015, repeated what has happened across the ages. These women were sold in markets as sex slaves.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/jul/25/slaves-of-isis-the-long-walk-of-the-yazidi-women
The same is still happening in Africa and Southeast Asia today.
https://www.cnn.com/2017/12/14/africa/hrw-kenya-election-sexual-violence-report-intl/index.html
I had hoped for more readers to be inspired to speak out against the violence that is happening today all around them. But for some, they could only react and pass judgment to the first chapters of the ancient people which symbolized the violence and oppression of the ages. Intolerance in action.
Follow the money
One of the messages in The Matriarch Matrix is how power struggles and wars ultimately are about resources. Often these conflicts are sugar-coated with words about how bad the other side is or a religious reason. But if you follow the money, inevitably you will find control of key resources is the root.
For example, the fictional Father Jean-Paul Sobiros comes from the south of France and traces his ancestry to the Cathars, a dualist Christian sect. A million Cathars were killed in the Albigensian Crusade authorized by Pope Innocent III. Was this a religious war or was it the way the barons of northern France justified plundering the riches of the south?
And thus, the fictional Peter Gollinger laments that oil dominates the world’s politics. Look at the lands where the Kurds live. Mostly oil-rich and mineral-rich territories. Look at the recent conflicts in Turkey, Syria, and Iraq. Are these politically motivated or based on control of the oil? To let the Kurds have semi-autonomous rule means they might control oil fields and other valuable commodities.
Before one judges too quickly, look for the motivations behind the glossy surface. Too often people in power prey upon our weakness to accept their stories.
Growing up knowing hate
When a child grows up thinking that the world around them hates them, they learn to hate back. The fictional Zara grew up knowing the love of her parents, of her relatives, of God. But as she ventures outside her community, she learns of the hatred others have of her people and by default, her. Over her teen years, she begins to stray from the teaching of her family, to stray from her faith, and hate begins its cancerous ways devouring the love within her soul. The Matriarch Matrix is a story of how such a lost soul finds her way back to the love she once knew through her tolerance of someone who is her exact opposite. Someone who at first seems to her an irrelevant, disrespectful fool. Someone who many readers have dissed his character. I grew up with many people who were like Peter Gollinger. Hence he represents the composite of many real people. And these folks are no different from any other – they seek respect. And so does Peter, who meets a woman, Zara, who is so far beyond him he can only stand in awe. It is through him, through his tolerance that Zara learns to shed her hate, shed the cancerous nodules in her soul.
When Zara meets Peter, she is intolerant of him. Those who grow up being hated begin to assume the worst of what others think of them. We see this so often in our press today how minorities view an incident which the majority did not see the same way. An oppressed minority is on the alert for being attacked and reacts according. So does Zara which is demonstrated by how she verbally attacks first. Her intolerance blinds her to those who might be on her side.
I purposely chose to write Zara as very religious. Many Kurds are not very religious which I am told is why they suffered particular persecution by the Daesh. In Zara, I wanted to address the Islamophobia that millions face throughout Europe and the Americas. It is the same bias, same discrimination, same hatred that many ethnic minorities face throughout the world. It is the manifestation of intolerance.
Europe’s experiment with multiculturalism, or the side-by-side existence of different cultures, has failed throughout the continent. Integration requires a minimum basis of shared values, that is, a culture of mutual tolerance and respect – in other words, what constitutes the heart of European culture.
Walter Kasper, German Roman Catholic Cardinal and theologian
The stereotypical heroic man
Poor Peter. He gets no respect. Many readers felt he was weak. Or weak compared to Zara. I wrote him as courageous, but not in the American Hollywood superhero way. He was courageous enough to take the time to understand Zara, his exact opposite. He was courageous enough to stand up to the most powerful monstrous man in the world defending her honour. But he curls into a ball when the bombs dropped.
One of my most important life mentors fought in the French Resistance when he was a teen. He was not courageous when he blew up Nazi trains and bridges when he saved Allied bomber pilots from capture. He said he was but a crazy teenager. My friend was Jewish fighting the oppression of the Nazi’s who would have killed him if he were ever to be captured. And that he was only to be saved by the ingenuity of a Catholic priest who told him to say he was circumcised because he was North African.
My mentor told me of the concentration camp he was sent to next to the V2 rocket factories which were bombed by the Allies. He crawled into a ball in terror of the bombs which fell on a weekly basis. One time when he emerged from his ball, he found his friend next to him without his head. Even courageous people crawl into balls. And so I wrote Peter as so.
Those raised on Hollywood movies have an appetite for seeing the superhuman male. Courageous when bombs and bullets are flying. Real people have fear. Real people seek cover when bombs are dropping. Tolerance includes empathy for real people actions and reactions.
Why must the evil ones be killed in the end?
I found it an interesting essay in human desire that a few of my alpha and beta readers commented that they were let down that the “villain” Alexander Murometz did not die in the end. How many Hollywood movies feature the protagonist killing the antagonist in the end to fulfill the audience’s desire for justice?
In writing the final draft of The Matriarch Matrix I let Alexander Murometz explain why he lived.
With a look of disappointment, Alexander says, “Peter, let’s look at things in a different way. So many people want to, they need to villainize others. They need a clear bad guy who suffers the consequences of violating their morality. But isn’t this the essence of intolerance? Isn’t that your own intolerance not seeing who I really have been? Ask yourself, who equipped the world’s greatest militaries with the most advanced tech ever to be invented? Albeit, tech incredibly fragile to the most frightful electromagnetic pulse known to mankind. And who sent you and Zara out there to find the object?”
Perhaps when mankind can truly embrace tolerance and tame the desire to kill those who are considered different, we will finally find peace. Maybe our great grandchildren will live in such a world. Only if we teach our children today the essences of tolerance.
For Further Reading:
Biographies of Iraqi Kurdish women who endured oppression
Four nice vignettes of the lives of Kurdish women in Iran
An inspirational novel about the Cathars
An interview with Alexander Murometz
https://www.tailofthebird.com/exclusive-interview-mr-alexander-murometz-chairman-moxworld-holdings