Reviews
 

The Devil's Playground

Expecting Adam: A True Story of Birth, Rebirth and Everyday Magic

So What's Your Revolution My Brotha': The Rebirth of Krazy Horse

Video Review

The Devil’s Playground
Stick Figure Productions, 2001
Directed by Lucy Walker
Produced by Steve Canter

Reviewed by David Harrison

What comes to mind when you hear the word “Amish”? More than likely, for most of us, it is an image of a horse-drawn buggy, or a plow pulled by draft horses, the beards of the men or the bonnets worn by the women. The Devil’s Playground explores this familiar side of Amish culture, but it also reveals some surprises: massive interstate parties attended by thousands of drunken teenagers, drug-dealing, addiction, and depression, realities most of us would not associate with the common assumptions of Amish pastoral bliss.

The Devil’s Playground focuses on the Amish rite of passage called rumspringa. Literally translated rumspringa means “running around,” but it has a much deeper significance than this superficial definition connotes. At the core of Amish beliefs is the idea that it is inappropriate to baptize infants. The Amish believe that only an adult can accept the responsibilities and implications of baptism, that the decision to “accept Christ” must be a conscious, freely-chosen one (it was this practice that led to their persecution in Europe and their emigration to the United States). The time of rumspringa begins at age sixteen, when Amish youth are deemed old enough in their society’s eyes to start weighing this important life choice. Amish children are freed from the rules of the church for a period ranging from several months to several years, depending on the individual. They are granted access to “the devil’s playground”—the outside, “english” world—and allowed to go as wild as they choose. The hope is that the youth will get their fill of worldly indulgences, sate their temptations, and then return to the Amish church. No matter what they do during rumspringa, or how long they take to make their decision, Amish youth will always be welcomed back if they decide to “settle down.” Once they return and are baptized, however, they are bound to Amish church rules for life.

The Devil’s Playground follows the diverse rumspringa stories of various Amish young people. Velda recounts her struggles with depression as a girl, the feeling that she “had nowhere to go,” and her difficult decision to leave the Amish way of life four weeks before her wedding. She is subsequently shunned by her family and her community, but finds a tenuous solace in the freedom of having a job and the excitement of going to college in a big city. Gerald moves from home, gets a factory job, and rents a trailer so he can have cable TV, “a fridge full of beer,” and week-long parties. By the end of the film, exhausted and disillusioned by his lifestyle, he decides to move back home with his parents, but not necessarily to join the Amish church. Joann describes the extensive partying she did during rumspringa, articulates her regrets, but expresses an overriding excitement about returning to her traditional way of life. After her baptism, Joann refuses to be filmed any more, but reports to the filmmakers that her life as an Amish housewife is “everything I hoped it would be.”

The “star” of the documentary, however, is Faron Yoder. The viewer is introduced to Faron in the midst of his rumspringa phase, which he calls “a vaccination against temptation later on.” Faron is a tentative but thoughtful young man; his interviews are filled with the usual and understandable teenage contradictions. In almost the same breath, he expresses his love for his non-Amish girlfriend and his “english” ways, while claiming that “the Amish church is a good religion…that will get you into heaven.”

These doubts and confusions push Faron through many descents and rebirths. For a time, he is living on his own as a drug dealer addicted to methamphetamines. After a police raid on an Amish drug house, Faron bargains for his own freedom by wearing a wire to convict higher level dealers. Death threats are issued against his life, and he decides to move back home. His parents welcome him, despite the small-town scandal of his arrest, and his father puts him to work in the family’s lawn furniture business. Faron is excited by the work, and begins to study and embrace many aspects of his heritage. He meets an Amish girlfriend, Emma, and feels as if he is moving towards joining the church and “settling down.” But when Emma, who is three years younger than him, leaves Faron and moves to Florida as a result of her own rumspringa experimentation, Faron descends again. He is fired by his father from his job, moves out, and falls back into drug use. When he sees the destructiveness of this pattern, with the help of his other questioning Amish friends, he packs his car and goes to Florida to be reunited with Emma. His story ends with him still wondering about his future, saying, “I’m not ‘english;’ I’m not Amish. I’m just me. Jesus didn’t get baptized till he was 32.”

The skillful interviews that unfold these stories are accentuated throughout by stunning images and cinematography. The viewer is exposed to countless visual juxtapositions, like a traditional Amish buggy parked in front of McDonald’s. We watch as a teary-eyed Velda, long-since shunned for her departure from the church, tries on the wedding dress she never wore, a dress she made with her own hands. She admires her sewing skills, but once she puts on the dress she tells us sadly, “It makes me feel like I did when I was a little girl.” In the mist of an Indiana farmland dawn, we watch as an Amish teenager awakens in the back of a pickup truck after a night of partying. He sits up, rubs his eyes, and looks around. Something in his expression, something captured by the camera, reveals that no matter the night of partying, this young man is at home, this land belongs to him and he to it in some fundamental way. It is a subtle revelation of the very uniqueness that the Amish strive for through their culture.

Despite the differences in lifestyles, and the apparent remoteness of Amish life from that of mainstream America, there are powerful lessons to be learned here about teenagers and their need for supportive rites of passage. The Amish seem to appreciate the importance of what sociologists call a period of “liminality,” an in-between time where young people (or for that matter, anyone going through a powerful transition) can explore, experiment, and test, free from the constraints of their previous lives and selves. It is this very time of liminality that helps them recreate themselves and move on as someone different and more complete than who they were before the transition.

At apparent odds with some of the other deeply held beliefs of their culture, Amish adults and parents manifest an incredible trust, openness, and liberality during rumspringa. They allow the partying to take place in their fields. They may implore caution and express disapproval in regards to the young people’s actions, but they do not assert disallowance. In perhaps the most striking example of this attitude, a sub-rite within rumspringa is the idea of “bed courtship,” where dating teenagers are allowed to share the same bed in the girl’s home.

Most importantly, though, is the knowing on the part of young people that they will always be welcomed back no matter what. In interview after interview, The Devil’s Playground reveals the stability and sense of security this simple fact gives to Amish young people. It infuses them with the confidence to fully embrace all of their doubts, all of their temptations, and make an honest decision about the course of their lives.

For some, rumspringa is the mythological descent before the prodigal return; for others it is freedom, the chance to break away. Either way, the Amish as a culture have succeeded in creating a ritual that allows their young people, no matter what they decide, to be reborn in powerful and transformative ways. The importance and effectiveness of this rite of passage is perhaps nowhere more obvious than in the numbers of Amish young people who do in fact decide to return to the Amish church. Despite the easy conveniences and powerful seductions offered by today’s modern world, the current baptism rate for Amish young people is 90 percent, the highest it has ever been since the founding of the church in 1693. Maybe it is the beauty of the Amish way of life; maybe it is the shallow banality of consumer culture; maybe it is simply that Amish young people feel they have no other real choice, that the consequences of leaving are too great. But maybe it is the rite of rumspringa itself, the way it honors young people and affirms their unique transitions, that inspires so many to return and embrace a culture that gives them the respect they deserve.
 

Book Review

Expecting Adam: A True Story of Birth, Rebirth and Everyday Magic
by Martha Beck. Berkley Books, N.Y. 2000. $13.95

Reviewed by Ruth Ann Smalley

Imagine a young couple at Harvard University, working diligently toward their advanced degrees. Fully “Harvardized,” each has learned to see the world in purely rational terms and has accepted a value system that places careers and professional status above all else. They have learned to mask emotions and submerge intuitive promptings; one even creates a persona she calls Fang— “fearless, aggressive, sardonic, voraciously competitive”—to help keep up the appearance of success under extreme pressure.

Then imagine that the couple discovers they are expecting a baby (not in the career plan) and later, that the baby will probably be affected by Down Syndrome. The book deals with their decision to continue the pregnancy (definitely not in the Harvard plan), and the series of ordeals and miracles that follow.

Martha and John Beck are this couple, and they are not imaginary. Martha explains that this book is “a work of nonfiction,” a work that she had tried to write twice before as a novel, because the events, she knew, would seem so unbelievable to so many readers. Their story, filled with challenges and written with verve and often surprising humor, is a perfect illustration of the kind of rite of passage that could be called “coming-to-knowing.” Ivy-League intellectuals confront the full force of the mystery of being human, their initiator an unborn baby. The fact that they insist on bearing this child in such a context—one which values only a certain, measurable, kind of intelligence—increases their difficulties, as they are constantly met with cruelly-expressed disapproval and even condemnation.
One of Becks’ most penetrating social discoveries comes when they realize that peers, medical practitioners, mentors, and even family members actually feel threatened by their decision to have the baby. Because so many in their circle harbor their own personal fears that only high intelligence has made them valued, or even loved at all, they cannot bear the idea that the Becks will accept a child of “below normal” intelligence.

It is in the personal, spiritual realm however, that the Becks experience the deepest changes. In his book, Blackfoot Physics: A Journey into the Native American Universe, F. David Peat explains the “process of coming-to-knowing” that is common to traditional Native American culture, and his description is helpful here. He says that the process “gives him or her access to a certain sort of power, not necessarily power in the personal sense, but in the way a person can come into relationship with the energies and animating spirits of the universe” (55). This is exactly what happens to the Becks, as, to their bewilderment, they begin experiencing “everyday magic.” Their path is daunting: Martha’s pregnancy is severely complicated by an undiagnosed autoimmune disease and John’s new internship requires him to fly to Japan every few weeks. In the stressful months that follow their discovery about the baby, they come fully, if often incredulously, into relationship with universal energies and animating spirits. The power they access is absolutely at odds with their academic socialization; their relationship with it alters, literally, everything about their lives.

Their story is inspiring, both for its devastating exposure of the small-mindedness of the particular academic culture in which they have been barely surviving, and for the courage with which Martha relates the extraordinary transformation that leads them out into a rich, full life. Joseph Campbell’s description of “the hero’s deed” in The Power of Myth fits the Becks very well, as they have “gone into the dark forest, into the world of fire, of original experience. Original experience has not been interpreted for you, and so you’ve got to work out your life for yourself. Either you can take it or you can’t. You don’t have to go far off the interpreted path to find yourself in very difficult situations. The courage to face the trials and to bring a whole new body of possibilities into the field of interpreted experience for other people to experience—that is the hero’s deed” (41). The story of Expecting Adam truly does bring a whole new body of possibilities into the field of interpreted experience. Read it, and it could, indeed, become an important part of your own process of coming-to-knowing.
 

Book Review

So what’s your revolution, my brotha’?: The Rebirth of Krazy Horse by Victorio Reyes
Rebel Army Media, 2002
 

Written by Deanna DiCarlo

The customs of observing rites of passage may vary across cultures, but most cultures include some kind of ceremony, ranging from simple acknowledgments to elaborate rituals, to celebrate birth, coming of age, marriage, parting ways, achieving elder status, or facing final farewells. We can include distinct examples from the diverse populations and religions within the United States: Christian baptism, Jewish bas mitzvah, Native American death rituals. Weddings are a huge industry here in the U.S., and at Borders or Barnes and Noble we can find a wedding-planning section that comprises roughly the same (or more!) shelf-space as gay and lesbian or Latino studies. More than half of us who have been married have also experienced the bittersweet closure of divorce when those final papers arrive to be signed. These rites are both solemn and joyous, and respecting the myriad of traditions within our country is an important step in developing a world view that exceeds one’s own experience and heritage. A big question remains, however: what does one do to honor the markings of a new chapter in one’s life when one is actively trying to follow a path that not only functions outside of mainstream American culture, but also works to actively critique it? If your name is Victorio Reyes, you compose a book of poems tracing your personal struggle and examining its intersecting connections with global political movements.

Victorio Reyes, 29, is an activist and poet currently based in Albany, NY. He has read his work on the radio program Democracy Now, and he recently returned from a national book tour reading and promoting Krazy Horse. Included with the purchase of his book you will find a spoken-word CD of Reyes passionately performing six of his poems in front of an enthusiastically receptive audience. Poetry, for Reyes, is an active practice of celebrating life and giving voice to political struggle; for him, it seems, the two are intertwined.

The Rebirth of Krazy Horse features blurbs on the back cover from Saul Williams who describes it as “words of fire,” and from Barbara Smith, who writes that this book is “urgently contemporary” and “part of a great tradition of revolutionary writing.” Smith also writes that Reyes “relentlessly inspires our struggles for justice.” In the introduction to June Jordan’s Poetry for the People, Jordan herself writes that “poetry is a political action undertaken for the sake of information, the faith, the exorcism, and the lyrical intervention, that telling the truth makes possible. Poetry means taking control of the language of your life.” Subtitled “Poems for the Struggle,” Reyes’ book clearly belongs in this sphere of fervently political poetry. His thirty-seven poems were written over a five-year period and are composed in both English and Spanish, and they address needs for resistance within and against global, capitalist systems of exploitation. Reyes’ topics include but are not limited to freeing Mumia Abu-Jamal, the Zapatista movement, Puerto Rican liberation, the Amadou Diallo murder, and the MOVE bombing. What strikes me as a reader of Reyes’ poetry is how consistently he weaves personal struggles to understand loss, fear, anger, and defeatism in our personal lives with the difficulty of living a life of active contention in a country that works so hard to mask its participation in heinous political actions both at home and abroad.

In his introduction to Krazy Horse, Reyes writes, “It is my belief that revolution starts within.” In a clear, accessible voice, he continues:

When we examine the nature of violence that exists in our society it becomes clear that there are many unresolved issues from this nation’s past. The objectification of women, the enslavement of Africans, and the genocide of Native Americans have never been resolved in this country. This is why we must fight poverty, sexism, the prison industrial complex, and the destruction of our trees; if we cannot address the violence that is under our nose, we can never expect to prevent violence in any form.

This book embodies the idea that the personal is political, that acting locally and evolving personally contribute to working toward a more positive global existence. It is filled with descriptions of rites of passage: some of birthing, some of dying, but most of the struggle to come of age in a way that reflects one’s personal and political convictions. There are relationship poems, poems that celebrate friendships, poems that are lovingly dedicated to the memory of his late parents, poems that express anger, poems that pray for justice. The common thread running throughout all is the challenge of being active in local, national, and global battles for human rights, the choices we can make to open our eyes and see, the temptation to turn a blind eye to what is not always clearly visible, and the dire need to educate ourselves and our communities about what nastiness sometimes goes down in the name of democracy, all the while developing ourselves as responsible, caring, loving human beings. Reyes is acutely aware that these are no easy feats. In fact, it is the false opposition between the personal and the social that his work encourages us to examine.
Many of the poems in Krazy Horse depict a subject coming to consciousness regarding racism and classism in the United States. In a piece entitled “Exiled in Upstate New York,” Reyes describes those moments of recognizing how one is considered “different” when one is a person of color growing up in a largely white community:

You think I look different?
No shit, you try growing up
in Binghamton, NY.
In Binghamton, the only thing Puerto Rican
was me.

The struggle to maintain an alternative personal vision in a culture of assimilation is also addressed in “Notes from the Hills of Chiapas.” In this poem, the speaker rants his frustration about the illusions of choice and racial and gender equality that capitalism provides:

So what’s your revolution
my brotha?
Equal access to mind-numbing desk jobs
Economic stability
So you can buy meat in a box
and corn in a can
Do you wish that all brown people
could own a big screen TV
So our children can be programmed in style?
Is it your dream for a
Black president,
A female Vice,
A Latino Speaker of the House,
And gay CEO’s?

The speaker longs to understand success in a holistic, non-materialistic way, and at the same time urges his audience to recognize that success defined as “access” keeps a system of exploitation in tact, and enables us to be spiritually separated from ourselves and each other. The difficulty of making connections with brothers and sisters in struggle, past and present, is another persistent theme in Reyes’ work. He develops this theme in “Inalienable.” Written in the first person, the speaker imagines he has traveled lifetimes all over the globe. He speaks of early human migration from Africa and Asia to the Americas. He seeks connections between ancient cultures and contemporary ones by saying, “I built the pyramids the same time I invented rap.” He calls attention to the fact that those connections have an ugly history by addressing African enslavement: “And of course I ran across these plains/you call the midwest/on my way to the Atlantic coast/where I met myself stepping off a boat/and onto an auction block.” His speaker lists all the names he has been given throughout centuries of oppression: Cinque, Malcolm, Sojourner, Mumia, Tupac. The lines that give the collection its title appear at the end of this poem, when the speaker stops moving throughout the ages and identifies the name he has chosen to address the present: “But for this second/this unique separate moment in time/for this very specific section of history/my name is Krazy Horse/and I’ve come back to take the land.” The call to act in the present moment of the speaker’s consciousness is blended with the imaginative wish for the rebirth of Krazy Horse: “I won’t let them kill Mumia/ ‘cause I won’t stand aside and look/My name is Krazy Horse and I/came back to take the land that they took...” This is the last line of the poem, and the ellipses suggest the past and present struggles for human rights the speaker is identifying with will continue on into the future.

The final poem in this collection is entitled “Heroes Don’t Exist,” and it portrays an unnamed female goddess-activist, one who is tired from struggling personally and politically through the years, but who heroically toils onward each day anyway. The poem’s subject has experienced and seen the worst in humanity--rape, hunger, war–but remains active in human rights work because she knows that along with consciousness comes responsibility: “Warriors lose the right to be ignorant and the joy of innocence” because there is “No room for the dazed expressions of people laughing/and joking in restaurants listening/to Journey on the jukebox mixed with Mary J. Blige.” To give her a human presence, she is repeatedly described with her “left hand perched on her hip, right hand in the air/helping to navigate through conversations/scars mixed with dirt/days spent working the earth,/glasses tipped down to reveal/cold stares next to sweet smiles/wounds still fresh.” She is mortal, she is flawed, and she is strong, the kind of strength that is often invisible because it lies beneath a bedraggled and weary surface.

The heroes of The Rebirth of Krazy Horse are the men and women who work for justice even when nearly every signal within American life suggests we instead sedate ourselves with pop culture. These heroes have invested their youth, their families, their lives for the greater good. These poems aren’t perfect poems if your standards lie somewhere along the lines of the Modern Language Association or the Iowa Writer’s Workshop. If that’s your thing, well, you should perhaps read Krazy Horse anyway because what you will find is the work of a bilingual, socially conscious, and politically convicted poet whose voice and passion are unmistakable. Krazy Horse reminds us that heroes do exist both within ourselves and in our communities, and insists that they exist because monsters are real, too. The next time we think about giving up, we should visit awhile with Reyes’ unnamed, but definitely not unsung heroine when she thinks, “I can’t go on,” but “catches herself in mid-thought,” remembering that “her people are still hungry/and she still has air to breathe.” We can learn from how “she takes a second for a deep breath and reminds herself/there is work to be done/and mouths to be fed.” The Rebirth of Krazy Horse alerts us that a personal rite of passage by way of gaining political consciousness can happen at any age in any moment in time, and learning to value those moments and act upon them is a vital part of that rite. An action we can take right now is to read this timely book of poetry written by a man who has struggled to find his voice, and let it inspire us to find our own.
 

Top of Page