In today’s matchup we have the cross-dressing ex-slave,
Onion/Henry, who is taken along on John Brown’s road to occupying Harper’s
Ferry and taking a stand against slavery, versus the bullied Japanese
high-school girl, Naoko, who goes to live at her great-grandmother’s Zen
Buddhist temple after her father attempts suicide. There are a number of
sections of each that require the reader to suspend disbelief, and the commentary
of this round touches on one of them: how does Onion maintain the illusion that
he is a woman for so long, in front of so many people, in a brothel, and as the
second woman in a household full of men? I also want to know how Naoko’s mother
fails to realize that her only daughter has dropped out of school and become a
prostitute at a maid-themed café. And why Nao’s own tsunami-inflicted death
ends up being less affecting than the death of one of John Brown’s mentally
disadvantaged sons. But let’s start with what we do know.
John Brown’s raid on Harper’s Ferry was well-intentioned but
poorly planned, motivated more by theological righteousness than expedience,
political concern, or well-connected scheming. John Brown sabotages his own
plan by moving the date of his attack around without communicating with his
reinforcements, choosing a location that is very well-protected and in the
midst of unfriendly territory, and believing that no matter what he does, he
can’t fail, because the Lord is on his side. He doesn’t make a plan B. He
barely has a plan for retreat, and comes to realize at the end that his beliefs
will even carry him through imprisonment and death, because he sees himself as
something of a Messiah figure. I read a New Yorker article recently about the
Branch Davidians, which reminded me quite a bit of John Brown. David Koresh
wasn’t fighting for human rights, but he also believed that as long as he could
communicate his religious message, his subsequent capture and imprisonment
would be tolerable. Does John Brown’s motivation for his failed takeover of
Harper’s Ferry justify his actions? Certainly if someone tried something
similar now, they would be considered a terrorist—was John Brown a terrorist?
Does knowing that his heart was in the right place and that history bore out
his wishes change how his siege of the armory must have felt to the people who
lived and worked there? Or to the slaves who saw what he was doing and knew it would
fail? To the free blacks who had to consider whether to help him in principle
and potentially die or lose their freedom, or leave him to his own devices and
feel complicit with the forces that moved against him? I think this is both one
of the simplest questions THE GOOD LORD BIRD raises, and also one of the most
interesting. Onion doesn’t join Brown’s stand out of principle, but because he
realizes he has failed to uphold a promise to Brown, and doesn’t want to betray
his friend. Although Onion is basically opposed to slavery, he never believes
that Brown’s plan will work. He comes to Brown’s aid because Brown was a second
father figure to him, and because he feels he owes Brown his loyalty, which
ends up being a stronger conviction than the inherent wrongness of slavery.
In Naoko’s story, the doomed fighter is her great-uncle, a
conscripted kamikaze pilot in World War Two. Although the pilot generally
appreciates the life he has had in Japan, and has affection for his countrymen,
he understands that the war is wrong, that the methods by which it is fought
are unjust, and that the enemy is also a scared young man like him, who shouldn’t
be killed for wanting to protect his country. His experiences provoke Nao first
to pride, when she thinks he carried out his military mission and died a
martyr, then to regret for her former feelings when she learns that he crashed
his plane into the ocean, leaving his mission unfulfilled but his morality
uncompromised. Her duality of feeling brings up an interesting tension that we see
today, as our country embroils itself in conflict after conflict that have
little bearing on the United States’ direct survival, but a large bearing on
the survival of individual Americans who enlist. We want very much to be proud
of servicemen and –women, while at the same time want to condemn these wars,
and their collateral damage and torture and disruption of provincial Middle
Eastern lives. Yet in the specifics, this brings the average person into a
direct contradiction; success may involve ordering a strike against a group of
militants, and that same strike may kill the militants as well as some innocent
goat-tending bystanders. Were the pilot who was ordered to perform that strike
instead to crash his plane into the Hindu Kush, rather than kill a fellow man
who may not directly wish him ill, I doubt we would feel the way that Naoko
does. But Naoko is more certain of herself and of her feelings than Onion, and
does less to brook discussion; though both are reporting on events for posterity
in the form of a journal or private papers, Onion has a deeper conversation
with himself than Naoko does, and pushes himself farther to find the truth.
My round winner and ToB’s: THE GOOD LORD BIRD
Read the official Tournament review here.
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