The West always defined itself as the civilization, or maybe it is the civilization that is always defined as the West? But what allows civilization to define itself – its technological development; its philosophical thinking? There might also be a difference to find, between civilization and then civilized. To most people, the civilization is associated with the urban city, or at least their own, (to them) well-known country. But to be civilized instead focuses more upon behavior, state of mind, and attitude towards others. However, our civilization is not always civilized; it has a history of violence, war, genocide and oppression of other races – something hard to define as civilized, or even human. But that is mostly forgotten, as we occidentals tend to see ourselves as the world’s saviors; we invented almost everything, hence we are the civilization… But I digress;
The essay by Eula Biss runs in three segments; two longer, text-heavy parts, and then a short, concluding part. From the first to the second part there is a great change of mood, as the first part mostly devotes itself to describing the history of the telephone, and the quite silly struggle between private persons and the telephone companies that came out of putting up the telephone poles; however in the second part, that is divided from the first by three little stars, the essay suddenly focuses greatly upon the fact that a lot of black men were hanged in the telephone poles, and almost nothing about the continuing development of the telephone itself is mentioned – only that the “Early telephone calls were full of noise.” (line 95) and, at the very end of the second part, that “Bell had lived to complete the first call from New York to San Francisco, which required 14,000 miles of copper wire and 130,000 telephone poles.” (line 134)
Part two begins with the sentence, “In 1898, (…) a black man was hanged from a telephone pole.” (line 65) and though this fact is not elaborated on, similar sentences are used all through the five-line “stanza”, and they reoccur throughout all of part two, chopping up the text, seeming meaningless yet important.
Even though the hanged black man comes greatly unexpected, the darker mood of the essay is nevertheless boded already in line 9; “Even not it is an impossible idea, that we all are connected, all of us.”
This statement stands alone, with no connection to the two larger blocks of text around it, and it somehow warns us that something more serious than just the history of the telephone is on the line here, and after finishing the essay, my thoughts were returned to this message given to us at the very beginning, all by themselves.
We are told in the essay that the telephone was invented for connecting people across great distances, but that the first thing it really did was driving people apart – first historically described as a “War on Telephone Poles”, where people cut down the poles as soon as they were put up; defending themselves violently against poles. But as an invention, the telephone is spoken fondly of, as a devise for bringing “the human family closer in touch.” (line 64)
With this part one ends, leading directly on to the telling about the hanged black men, and suddenly the essay appears not to be about the invention of the telephone at all. Instead, Biss quite surprisingly (and in a quite neat way) turns this around to be an unspoken, yet very outspoken critique of the so-called civilized and technologically superior America, around the beginning of the last century. And it is ironic and disturbing, that the telephone poles that carry the very equipment for this “connector of mankind”, are the same things used for the racist and mostly unfounded lynching of black people. That is most significantly described in the last block of text in part two;
“In 1921, the year before Bell died, four companies of the National Guard were called out to end a race war in Tulsa that began when a white woman accused a black man of rape.
Bell had lived to complete the first call from New York to San Francisco, which required 14,000 miles of copper wire and 130,000 telephone poles.”
After reading through part two of the essay, where almost every second sentence describes a man being hanged from a telephone pole, this little historical fact loses its innocence and seems most unsavoury – at least I see the 130,000 poles from New York to San Francisco with a dark silhouette dangling from each and every one of them.
And though “The poles, of course, were not to blame,” (line 91) they here create a symbol for the bizarre combination of the enlightened and technologically developed country and its racist, brutal behavior towards the black. “Now, I tell my sister, these poles, these wires do not look the same to me. Nothing is innocent, my sister reminds me. But nothing, I would like to think, remains unrepentant.” (line 142-143)
This comes from the third and concluding part, where the voice of the author actually shows – the telephone equipment has gone from something that once caught the eye as beautiful, to something that creates disturbing associations, and though no one is being lynched and hanged in the telephone poles in our days, the telephone did not connect all of us, as said earlier. Our “civilization” still allows race, gender, religion and what not, to divide “the human family” into small fragments, and though our part of the world has come far since the days of the race riots in America, the xenophobia and racism remains inside many people of the western civilization.