Susan Midalia

Hatred

What is hatred? And how can we stem the tide of so much hatred in the world?

In response to these questions, you may write either a formal essay, a short story, a poem or a feature article.

Due date: 5th August 2021

Lara sat at her study desk, pondering the assignment. Hatred. Another big thing to think about. Monumental, her teacher would call it, because she liked giving them important words and Lara liked receiving them. But stem the tide? Really? Ms Blake always said she abhorred cliches because they were lazy and boring and she expected her students to think beyond the predictable modes of expression. She was passionate about language, she said, and not just mechanical things like spelling and grammar. What was that quote she’d written on the board? The limits of my language mean the limits of my world. She hadn’t explained it, just left you to think about it for yourself, so Lara had googled it and discovered it was really complicated and a bit weird because it meant if something couldn’t be described in words then it didn’t even exist. She’d even tried reading a couple of articles about language and the not-existing thing but ended up feeling even more confused, so she’d pretty much decided that philosophy wasn’t her thing. Her older brother was studying philosophy and he was way smarter than she would ever be, but he said that her mind was still developing and maybe when she hit her twenties she’d be able to think in the abstract.

Lara knew that hatred was an abstract word because you couldn’t see, hear, taste, smell or touch it. Ms Blake had explained that abstract was the opposite of concrete, not the stuff they use in buildings but things like iPhones or pizzas that you could apprehend through your senses and apprehend wasn’t quite the same as know and that made Lara feel confused again. But she did know there was a lot of hatred in the world, you saw it on TV all the time and it was all over social media, about race and being gay and religion and men beating up women or killing them. Lara’s best friend Daisy said the world would never get better until men stopped hating women. It was called misogyny, she said, and she’d told the class how the the word came from misein, meaning to hate, and gyne, meaning woman. It was ancient Greek, apparently. She’d given them other words as well, like patriarchy and oppression, and while Lara was grateful for these additions to the limits of her language, Ms Blake only said thank you, Daisy, now can we all get on with the lesson? But none of these words are helping me right now, Lara thought. They made her think of all the distant places she saw on the news and people she didn’t know and would likely never know, and she wanted her assignment to be real. It was called being authentic, Ms Blake had told them, but Daisy had put up her hand and said there was no such thing as authenticity and Ms Blake had gritted her teeth and luckily the bell went and they’d all trooped off to maths.

Sitting at her desk, trying to make a start, Lara hadn’t even decided which form to use, except she’d definitely ruled out writing a poem because poetry was completely mystifying to her. She’d said that to Ms Blake when the class had to write a poem, hoping she’d be allowed to write a story instead, but Ms Blake only said that mystifying is an excellent word and maybe Lara could use it in a poem about mists. That had kind of nudged something in Lara’s brain but in the end she’d written a really stupid poem about loving nature, which she didn’t, not a bit, because nature was rain on your birthday and grass stains on your white sneakers and ugly bugs that flew into your hair.

Then her mum opened the door without knocking. Lara hated when she did that, it was an invasion of her privacy, and everyone was entitled to their privacy, even kids. But seeing her mum’s weary face at the door, and remembering how hard she worked and how she cooked delicious meals and had come to every single netball game in the course of two whole years even though Lara knew she was a major embarrassment at netball, she decided that hatred was too strong a word. She disliked her mum coming into her room without knocking. It annoyed her. Irritated her. Especially when she’d told her a million times not to do it. Her mum was a neuroscientist, which meant knowing about anatomy and biology and maths and other really difficult stuff. Maybe her mum would know something about hatred in a scientific kind of way. Did she? Her mum nodded and told her about experiments which scanned the brains of people while they looked at pictures of people they hated.

‘The scans are remarkable,’ her mum said. ‘They show increased activity in the middle frontal gyrus, right putamen, bilaterally in the premotor cortex, in the frontal pole, and in the medial insular cortex of the human brain.’ Then her mum smiled. ‘It’s all a bit remote, isn’t it?’ she said. ‘Why don’t you ask your father for a different approach? And don’t forget to wash your hands for dinner.’

Lara’s dad was a psychologist, which meant he spent a lot of time listening to people who were unhappy or anxious or couldn’t stand being in the same room as their mother. Sometimes he came home and grumbled over dinner about tiresome, self-indulgent clients. Lara didn’t think it was really fair to take people’s money and be fed up with them at the same time, but she needed some tips for her assignment. She made her way to the dinner table, ready to ask her dad the monumental question, but he was putting on his jacket and heading off to deal with a crisis, he said, although he did manage to tell her that hatred is an emotion, manifest in feelings of animosity, anger, disgust or resentment, directed at certain individuals or groups.

Lara sat at the table, tossing his words around in her head. He’d given her a lot to think about. Like, was there any difference between all the emotions he’d described? Was animosity the same as anger? And while disgust was a pretty strong word, the kind you’d use when you saw a cockroach scuttling across the floor with its horrible feelers twitching like crazy and its ugly crunchy body that looked like dates, which was why she couldn’t bear looking at a date let alone eating one … She’d lost her train of thought, and why was thought like a train, anyway? What did that even mean? She flipped back to the emotions her dad had described but she couldn’t remember the last one.

Her brother plonked himself down at the table and asked if she was OK. He always seemed to know when she wasn’t OK, which was really nice of him. So she told him about her assignment and how vexing it was. (She was proud of using vexing.)

Her brother nodded. Sagely, she thought.

‘The philosopher Aristotle distinguished hatred from anger and rage,’ he said. ‘He argued that only hatred involved the desire to annihilate its object.’

Lara took this in.

‘However,’ her brother said, ‘the philosopher David Hume claimed that hatred was indefinable.’

Lara found this claim completely useless.

She asked if there was ice cream for dessert.

Nearly two weeks had staggered by and Lara had googled loads of stuff about race and gender and religion, but she still hadn’t made a start. She’d even taken a day off school to try and get her head into gear but she just couldn’t find a way into hatred. Then, as she scrambled through her heaps of notes and highlighted passages, her brother’s words came back to her: how David Hume called hatred indefinable. Maybe thatcould be her assignment. It would be a different angle, wouldn’t it? Clever. Then again, maybe it wouldn’t be answering the question, or maybe it would in a slanted kind of way. And maybe slanted was good. More interestingthan a strictly correct answer. So she typed David Hume hatred and came up with his words.

Tis altogether impossible to give any definition of the passions of love and hatred; and that because they produce merely a simple impression, without any mixture or composition. 'Twou'd be as unnecessary to attempt any description of them, drawn from their nature, origin, causes and objects; and that both because these are the subjects of our present enquiry, and because these passions of themselves are sufficiently known from our common feeling and experience.

Well! What was that supposed to mean? Apart from the Tis and T’would, which showed that David Hume had lived a long time ago. What was a simple impression, and why did he have to make it sound so complicated? And was he saying that love and hate were the same? What did that mean? Maybe if she read someone who could explain David Hume hatred, she’d get the point, or lots of points, by the way he was carrying on. But all she could find was incredibly tangled up stuff like associationist science and recalcitrant phenomena. She wondered what it would be like to be married to someone like David Hume and not understand a word he said. Would you just talk about the weather or your favourite TV show? Bore each other witless? But maybe she wouldn’t get married at all. Daisy definitely wasn’t getting married, she said, because boys were the fucking pits. She and Daisy had been best friends since day care, which was oceans of years away, and even though Daisy was super smart, she always explained stuff carefully without making Lara feel stupid. Not like Lara’s dad, whose words could sound like he was looking down his nose at you. He did it to Lara’s brother too, even though Mitch had won prizes for his studies and their dad said there’s more to life than winning prizes and rambled on about the importance of your character and Mitch had winked at her and they’d both rolled their eyes.

Her phone rang. It was Daisy. Daisy shrieking and shouting about Lara missing all the drama at school … how Lara should have been there … so much terrible stuff going on and she didn’t know where to start.

‘Just start at the beginning,’ Lara said, which she knew was kind of an ironic thing for her to say. Under the circumstances.

‘Well, for one thing …’

Lara could picture her friend, her hands clenched, her eyes all angry.

‘Shit-for-brains Will Sampson asked me to the movies,’ Daisy said.

‘That creep! You didn’t say yes, did you?’

‘Don’t be an idiot. I told him I was too busy writing my poem about hatred. So instead of asking me about my poem, he carried on about how girls have no idea what it feels like to be rejected and so I said girls could release boys from the pressure by taking the initiative and asking them to the movies and how we had to get past these traditional ideas about gender. So he said – wait for it – he said that girls who ask boys out are sluts! So I said even if he didn’t mind me being a slut I wouldn’t ask him out because he was trapped in a rigid way of thinking. I started explaining the whore/Madonna complex and he said I was too smart for my own good and then – wait for it – he told me I needed a good fuck to sort me out.’

Lara gasped. ‘That’s hatred!’ she said. ‘Misogyny,’ she added.

‘Darn tootin, gal!’ Daisy said, in her Dolly Parton drawl. ‘Yet another example of males feeling threatened by smart females. Anyway, there’s a whole lot more drama I need to tell you about.’

Lara put Daisy on speaker phone.

‘Not only is Will Sampson a rotten misogynist,’ Daisy said. He’s also a vile homophobe. You should have heard the awful stuff he said about Ned.’

Lara loved Ned. He’d come out to the class earlier that year, and afterwards she’d given him the biggest hug and wished in her silent self that he wasn’t gay. Not because being gay was wrong but because she fancied him and because she loved his kind way of being in the world. Everyone loved Ned, didn’t they?

‘He called Ned worthless scum!’ Daisy shouted. ‘Can you believe that? He said God hated poofs and Ned would burn in hell after he died.’

‘I didn’t know Will was religious,’ Lara said.

Daisy snorted. ‘Just the hateful kind. Not the ones who support refugees and say we must have compassion and all that. Anyway, Charlie and Jason sorted him out.’

‘You mean …’

‘No, they didn’t beat him up, they’re much too civilized for that. They just stood next to him in the urinal, one on either side, and kept pointing at his dick and laughing.’

‘Clever,’ Lara said.

‘And let me tell you about Brendon.’

‘Another shit-for-brains,’ Lara said, getting into the swing of it.

‘Absolutely,’ Daisy said. ‘Tahlia told me that Brendon called her last night and said she should go back to Iran. He couldn’t even get that right because Tahlia, as you know, comes from Iraq! Anyway, he called Tahlia a terrorist and said she couldn’t speak proper English, which is really stupid coming from a boy who’s semi-literate. Poor Tahlia was sobbing when I saw her at the bus stop but a whole bunch of kids were holding her hand and saying how Brendon was a fucking racist and how Tahlia would always be their friend.’

She sighed.

‘So you missed all the hate,’ she said. ‘And a whole lot of love as well.’

After the call ended, Lara felt so churned up. She pictured Ned’s stricken face. Worthless scum. What would it feel like to have those hateful words hurled at you just because you liked boys? Who cares who does what to who, Lara thought, as long as people are happy doing it. What was shit-for-brains Will Sampson so angry about? What gave him the right to … And what about poor Tahlia? Lara pictured her sobbing at the bus stop, saw tears rolling down her rosy face. How could anyone hate Tahlia, she was the sweetest girl in the world and always helped people with their maths assignments and she spoke English really well for someone who’d only been in Australia for a couple of years. And as for Daisy. Daisy could stand up for herself, for sure, but it wasn’t enough to argue back, she said, she was going to do a course in self-defence and Lara should do it, too, all girls should do it. But why should girls have to, Lara wondered. Why didn’t Will Sampson do a course in not being so full of hate?

She looked at the time on her laptop. Eleven pm. How the hell would she make the deadline?

She managed to finish her assignment and had even followed the rubric. She despised the word rubric: it was cold and hard and ended with a full stop. She knew she hadn’t developed her ideas because she’d wasted too much time googling and thinking and getting nowhere and too much time listening to Daisy on the phone and feeling shocked and upset. But still, she always learnt a lot from listening to Daisy and she really admired her, which was why she’d felt just a tiny bit hurt when Daisy called her an idiot, even though she’d meant it as a joke and even though Lara accepted that she wasn’t the brightest kid in the universe. Still, she’d done it. She’d made the deadline, which was way better than getting zero for a failure to submit an assignment without a prior exemption.

She’d drawn a map. A map consisting of three different territories marked out in different colours: The Glorious Land of Homophobia (green), The Magnificent State of Racism (white) and The Blissful Peninsula of Misogyny (red). She’d written an explanation for how to deal with hatred (making sure not to use stem the tide):

My plan is to round up all the haters and persuade them to live in their particular areas of hate, although they will be united by the title One Nation. Enclosed in their own special territories, they will talk amongst themselves in a spirit of harmonious self-righteousness, while the people full of love in the rest of the world, which I like to think is the vast majority of the world, will get on with loving each other.

Two days later, Ms Blake handed back their assignments. She’d given Lara an E, which was almost an F, which was pretty bad. Diabolical, really. Then Lara read the comments: A child’s drawing is not an acceptable submission for a high school assignment … a failure to use the conventions of a particular genre for persuasive purposes … a lack of definitions and examples … clearly a rushed job … most disappointing.

Lara sighed, then shrugged. Fair enough, she thought, although she would have liked a bit more credit for her impressive mode of expression.

After class, Daisy asked to see Lara’s assignment. She looked at the map for a long time, then read the explanation. She shook her head.

‘Ms Blake just doesn’t get it,’ she said. ‘You’ve captured the simplicity of a child’s view of the world but in a knowing kind of way. It’s like you’ve deliberately returned to a time when children don’t make judgements about the colour of someone’s skin or whether or not they have a dick between their legs.’

Lara wasn’t sure if a dick could be anywhere else, but still, she was pretty chuffed by Daisy’s praise. Really chuffed. Then she asked to see Daisy’s assignment. Her poem. It began with How does he hate me? Let me count the ways. It was full of amazing words like visceral and combative and existential threat. Lara knew she would have to read it a whole bunch of times to make sense of it, but she loved the use of rhyme and some kind of sonnet that she didn’t know the name for. She told Daisy it was breathtaking. Then she saw the grade: B minus. Because of a failure to acknowledge your use of a well-known textual allusion.Daisy said she was now thoroughly convinced that the teacher hated her, but Lara said maybe it wasn’t hatred, maybe Ms Blake just felt threatened by Daisy’s cleverness, just like creepy Will Sampson did and couldn’t Daisy see that?

Daisy sighed, hugely.

‘I guess I didn’t want to,’ she said. ‘Because it feels even worse when the perpetrator is female.’

Then she gave Lara a gargantuan smile and asked if she could frame her map and hang it on her bedroom wall.

‘It’s just so damn inventive,’ she said.