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Listen to thisFor the past two months I have been involved in a conversation with my friend Kiaras Gharabaghi, a regular contributor to CYC-Online magazine (check out his column) about politics in Child and Youth Care. A passionate spokesperson for better programs and spaces for youth, he initiated the conversation by more or less wondering out loud with me in an e-mail about why members of our field, including the two of us, haven’t been more effective at promoting good Child and Youth Care on a broader scale (he said it in more detail and much better than I can).
In one of my first e-mail responses I wrote:
Thanks for your thoughts on this topic – really got me thinking. Some of my musings/ramblings in response are:
I, of course, agree most with the third point you make. For me it more or less begins with Foucault’s notion that care of self is the ethos of civilized society and the belief that the way we interact with youth and our friends and colleagues is interconnected with the way we interact with others. To be political we have to, as Hans Skott Myhre writes from his Post Marxist perspective, make ourselves visible, then as Gerry Fewster says from the interpersonal perspective, bring self to the moment and be open and available to mirror back our experience of the other as we work together for change.
In my own experience I seem to fail in political actions, debates, exchanges when I move too far away from this and think change is out there someplace or that some organization or group or union or collective action can do it for me. I think this is perhaps the major reason we have not succeeded yet in our efforts to organize as a profession (or, at least not achieved the political change we have hoped for). We have worked together collectively because we believe in the power of collective action and rightfully so, but the part we have ignored is that it really does begin with the individual worker and the way he or she shows and conducts self in the social, political, developmental, relational world of Child and Youth Care.
In this regard, our field has not produced a sufficient number of leaders (practitioners, administrators, professors, etc), examples, and genuine stories of practice to draw the attention needed for significant political, professional and social change. We have worked too hard at pulling along workers into our political movement rather than nourishing and developing workers who have the creativity, dignity, intellect, and self-confidence to grab the bull by the horns and umph needed to sway and move public opinion, politicians, and funding. We need more people who are fulfilled and content in the Child and Youth Care (at home), know and accept it is their choice to be here, and who can show and tell the story of the power of youth work by being in it and articulating what they see, hear, and experience.
From early in my career I have felt that the most powerful thing a worker can do from a practical and political point of view is to articulate what he or she sees and experiences on a daily basis. Knowledge is power only if it can be shared or put into action. Unfortunately we are still a field in which our voice is not loud enough and often our story is filtered through the words of those who have only a distant connection with what we do. There are many wonderful exceptions but not enough yet.
We are, of course, political beings who first and foremost change or influence political systems through our interactions with others. We try to use our power in positive ways to get what we believe the youth and we need to solve the social ills. We lead by example, by being ethical, concerned, caring citizens in our daily practice.
Shortly after we started this conversation, I came across a used copy of Albert Camus The First Man in an independent bookstore in my neighborhood, and found it relevant to what we had been talking about. So I began to write down some of my thoughts about the book, the man, and the way he created political change, then, because I was so moved by the story about his youth, it began to turn into an article. I shared some of my thoughts about Camus with Kiaras and he said he enjoyed what I had to say. Since I think it is also relevant to discussions about leadership (recently on CYC-Net) going on in our field, I thought I would test it out here on CYC-Net online magazine and see if anyone is willing to give me some feedback so I could continue my discussion with Kiaras more enlightened:
Albert Camus' The First Man was published in 1995, thirty-five years after his death in a car crash in 1960. The manuscript was found in the car. I recently found a used copy at an independent bookstore in my neighborhood in Milwaukee. The novel was based on his middle-aged reflections on his father’s death in WWI and his poor childhood in Algeria. As a professor of youth work and creative writer, I was eager to read it.
The story for the delay in publication is well known to Camus scholars. As a prelude to this discussion, it bares retelling. According to his daughter Catherine’s account, (in the Introduction), the work was kept from the public eye because, her mother, Francine, thought it would not be well received. At the time of his death, Camus had alienated French intellectuals, including Sartre, who favored a French communist regime and an independent Algeria under Arab rule. “For his part,” Catherine wrote, Camus “had condemned the Gulag, Stalin's trials, and totalitarianism in the belief that ideology must serve humanity not the contrary, and that the ends did not justify the means.”
He was also in favor of a federated, multicultural Algeria in which Arab and European peoples would live side by side and be equally represented. Thus, just a few years after receiving the Nobel Prize for Literature, Camus the philosopher, journalist, pacifist, activist, and novelist was unpopular among many of the intellectuals in France and elsewhere. He had antagonized both the left and the right. At the time of his death he was lonely and under attack from all sides to destroy the man and his art, Catherine wrote.
Catherine and Jean her twin brother waited several more years after their mother’s death in 1979 to publish the book. Catherine said she had to “learn how to deal with a work of literature” while involved with some of her father’s other works. Then by the 1980s “voices had emerged that suggested Camus had not been so wrong and the old disputes had died down.” So, afraid that someone else might publish it first, and convinced that an autobiographical account of their father’s life would be of interest to his fans and historians, the children decided to share the book with the public.
The original handwritten work had long rolling sentences and paragraphs instead of the shorter, concise sentences and minimal passages Camus was noted for. With minor edits, the children decided to leave the manuscript in its raw form because this would allow readers to hear their father’s “true voice.” The cover jacket suggested it was his most personal account. “The result is a moving journey through lost landscapes of youth that also discloses the wellspring of Camus aesthetic powers and moral vision.”
After reading her introduction and a few passages in the bookstore, I took the book home and began to read the rest. Wanting to know more about how his youth shaped his philosophy and life as a writer, I read slowly, drawn in by his images, over the next few weeks while savoring several of the scenes of his childhood and my own in which I saw many parallels.
In Camus there is always more. His ideas and thoughts about social life, war, culture, and world affairs are perhaps more relevant than ever today with the conflicts in Africa, the middle-east, and US involvement. Although I don’t pretend to be a Camus scholar, I have been fascinated by his thinking and writing since, like many others, I read The Stranger as a young man. I liked the simple, straightforward, minimal way he presented questions and moral dilemmas for the reader to think about in The Stranger, and later in his short stories. Often when I wrote my own stories and essays, I turned to this work for ideas about working with detachment, developing a sense of place, letting work stand by itself, presenting moral dilemmas, and creating scenes that rang true.
In more recent years, I read his short stories in Exile, his articles in Combat, the newspaper of the resistance organization by the same name that he was part of, and passages from his recently published notebooks, where, at times in the midst of despair, his search for meaning and place seemed comforting, and strangely optimistic, especially when in some of his darkest moments he would use his aesthetic powers to find self again on a walk in the countryside (the wellsprings of his philosophy).
For instance on a trip later in his life to Italy, he wrote in his notebook:
“The day before yesterday, on the Forum – in the part that is badly ruined (close to the Coliseum), not in that extravagant flea market of pretentious columns found under Campidoglio – then on the admirable Palentine Hill where nothing exhausts the silence, the peace, the world always emerging and always perfect, I began to rediscover myself. It is this that the great images of the past serve when nature can accommodate them extinguish the sound that lies dormant in them to gather the hearts and forces that will better serve the present and the future. It is felt on the Via Appia where even though I arrived at the end of the afternoon, I felt it inside me, while I was walking, a heart so full that life could have left me then. But I knew it would continue, that there is a force within me that moves forward” – from Albert Camus Notebooks, 1951-1959 (2008, p. 121).
This search for self, his acceptance of death as part of life and the final outcome and the contrasts and paradoxes evoked from the dualisms at the center of his philosophy makes Camus more alive for me than many other writers and thinkers. He comes across as a “real” (he was not a Saint), self questioning compassionate, peace loving man who had acted on and wrote with a certain sense of certainty about his beliefs. Further, like Vaclav Havel another writer/activist I admire, Camus saw the absurdities and injustices in the world and yet continued to speak out on behalf of humanity and peace, and against nihilism in favor of the human desire to make meaning by choice and interpretation.
Perhaps not by coincidence, when I found The First Man I was in an e-mail conversation with a Canadian colleague about politics in youth work. We were questioning why we hadn’t been more effective as a profession in advocating for the care of troubled children and youth. Along with many scholars, students and practitioners of youth work, we were concerned that our efforts had not convinced the general public and politicians in the US and Canada to provide the resources for the relationship based developmental approach, the field had argued for to help troubled youth overcome poverty and abuse. We had tried to reason with and appeal to people in power with our research, writing, teaching, action, and speaking. Yet our countries seemed to be ignoring this evidence in favor of the latest quick fix, cheaper, ideologically driven approaches that were doomed to failure over the long run.
As Camus argued and tried to show in his life and work, I knew the way youth workers went about their work and lives was interconnected with social and political change. They did not live in isolation from the systems in which youth developed. If these systems promoted bad policies passed down from the top this was in part their fault. It was their job to make sure the system served them and the youth and not vice versa. This being the case I could not help but wonder why on the one hand we could be so certain about the power of good youth work, and on other hand so confused by the disconnect between this and the systems of governance in our countries that seemed to allow one incident after another of bad practice to be disguised as something positive. Why had we not been able to practice what we preached about changing lives and systems in our attempt to mobilize support for better care for youth?
Camus often wondered why his views and the views of his colleagues had not been more influential after WWII in making France a leader in social justice and human rights. This self-doubt and questioning along with his faith in human beings led to the work of deep questioning that made him the Nobel Prize winner. In presenting his views, as a journalist, activist, and novelist, in a way that encouraged readers to question their own morality and actions, he contributed significantly to the collective consciousness among people seeking meaning in truth and human justice.
Likewise in his fiction, Camus drew readers into his stories so they could make their own choices about right and wrong with the hope (I believe) that they would know justice when they saw it. For example, in his review of The Stranger in Existentialism is a Humanism Sartre wrote: “The choice the great novelists like Camus make is to rely on images rather than arguments because of their belief in the futility or all explanatory principals. Instead they rely on the power of words that appeal to the senses.”
Perhaps, it is this “appealing to the senses” along with his search for place and justice that attracts me to Camus the most, I am not sure. I know I am not alone when I say that more than most writers and novelists he seemed to be able to create scenes and situations that encouraged readers to try to resolve the dilemmas he presented with questioning that led to an opening of the mind and senses.
Thus, in addition to its relevance to current events, The First Man interested me for at least two reasons. I wanted to see how Camus the man and child developed as a humanist and activist who spoke out for peace and justice and influenced so many others with his actions. I was also just simply interested in his youth and what it might teach me that I could introduce to students and integrate into my own study of youth.
The change in style was a pleasant surprise, as his daughter and son thought it might be. Similar to when I read Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons, Hemingway’s Nick Adams Stories, Marguerite Duras, The Lover, Virginia Woolf’s the Waves, or Norman Maclean's A River Runs Through It, I became absorbed in a the places and experiences of youth. Early on it was obvious how his aesthetic powers were shaped by his youth and in turn how this helped him reflect back with new insight. In many of the scenes I saw his youth unfolding with a similar longing, searching, and tension for something more without saying it that the authors above exhibited in their characters' movements across their landscapes.
The story is based on a middle aged man's Jacques Cormery return home and reflections on how the loss of his father in WWI when he was a young boy shaped his childhood in Algeria and his development as an adult. Camus in middle age found himself ready to address some of the questions of his impoverished, fatherless childhood. He takes us forward and back in time while exploring in his unique way the social, cultural, familial, and moral issues of the period as he is raised by a stern Spanish grandmother, a passive, illiterate, almost deaf but loving mother, and a variety of men including uncles and eventually a school teacher who becomes like a surrogate father and feeds his hunger for discovery.
Good novelists like Camus create images that ring true and connect readers with their experiences. We are drawn into the story because we can relate. Although we grew up in very different times and places, his youth in Algeria reminded me of my youth in Milwaukee, Wisconsin in the 1950s and 1960s. My father, about Camus age, had also lost his father as a young boy and grew up in poverty with his mother. There were also many scenes that evoked memories of the lives of the poor and troubled boys I knew.
Soon I found myself juxtaposing his scenes with sketches I have been writing about my own youth. In youth work as in many human service fields, we try to know self so we can know the other, and Camus gave me knew insights into my experiences and the experiences of youth I had worked with.
(The article will expand from here with these insights).
* * *
So what were the lessons learned so far from The First Man about how Camus' youth shaped him as a philosopher and activist? Perhaps what I already knew or expected: it was his love of youth and ability to evoke similar feelings in others that played a major role in the development of his philosophy. As he grew older he continued to learn from his youth: the good/bad, confusing/enlightening, sad/happy, lusting/longing, frightened/brave, searching/experimenting youth that is part of all of us.
Because his learning and experience of youth was part of him unfolding in the present, he was human, vulnerable, understanding, knowledgeable, genuine, open to the other, self questioning, and clearer about what he believed in a way that invited others to join. Just the way a competent youth worker who simultaneously interacts with youth and acts to change systems.
Camus loved and wanted to know the rich all encompassing youth that informed him throughout his life and this made him a compassionate empathetic activist who “showed” by being internally and externally consistent: he walked the talk. It seems to me the more people like this we have in our field the more likely we are to achieve our social, developmental and political goals. It will take time, but it is the “place” where change occurs.
