The abuse of Joan Baez

Plus: The amazing Barry brothers invent an alphabet; European paper models; shark livers; and the arrest of an wild egg hoarder.

UPDATE: A some readers know, Barbara had open heart surgery on March 7, from which she is recovering. She worked hard to get this issue’s Fulani piece whipped into shape before she went to the hospital. Wild Things will go on a biweekly schedule while she regains her health. We post updates on her recovery on Caring Bridge. Thank you, Kerry

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BIRDS

IT’S EASY TO SPOT Pigeon Guillemots from the ferry across the bay or on beaches and rocks near the shore. Their bodies are dark, their feet and the inside of their beaks a vivid warm red. They fish in small groups and, though they prefer shallower water, can dive as much as 150 feet in search of prey along the bottom. One colony lives among the rocks along the small bay where a ferry lands on Whidbey Island. After a long day of shooting, my friend Tim and I arrived there early to catch the ferry. I wandered out to the shore and watched them take off to fish and then return to squabble for position on the rocks. At one point, a young bird landed in front of me, raised its wings, fluffed up its feathers. and showed off its red feet.

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PSYCHIATRY

Still from the film, Joan Baez: I Am a Noise

Joan’s arc

HELEN BARR, mother of Roseanne Barr, called me at my San Francisco office one day in 1993. Mother Jones, where I worked as a creative director and editor, had recently run a story by Ethan Watters that challenged the Recovered Memory Movement (RCM). Helen hoped we could help exonerate her and her husband Jerry from the highly publicized charges of incest and physical abuse made against them by Roseanne. Helen’s voice was plaintive and pleading, tinged with fear. She was at a loss for how to contest the accusations of her famous daughter and how to handle the shame of them.

Today, it’s hard to remember the grip that RCM held on the national psyche. Well-regarded psychiatrists and their followers claimed we repress traumatic memories that can be vividly “recovered” using suggestive therapeutic techniques such as hypnosis—techniques now known to distort memory. RCM was reinforced by bestselling books, popular television hosts such as Oprah Winfrey, and in the media. It was also profitable. As many as a fifth of American licensed therapists supported RCM practices.

Theories of recovered memories were adapted from Sigmund Freud, whose descriptions of the mind—the id, ego, superego, Oedipus complex—remain ingrained in popular parlance. His conceptions also penetrated academic literary criticism and other disciplines, and still have adherents. But where the later Freud thought neuroses emerged from repressed sexual fantasies, RCM posited that repression consisted of buried memories of actual trauma, particularly sexual abuse.

There is no neurological or experimental support for either the Freudian or RCM versions. Theories of repression “would have us believe that the mind can take the memory of events and hold them in pristine form in the subconscious for years,” said Elizabeth Loftus, a Distinguished Professor at UC Irvine. “There is no laboratory evidence that this is possible.”

RCM also blurred the distinction between recovered memory patients and the many actual victims of sexual abuse who might benefit from therapeutic or legal interventions. “The notion that traumatic events can be repressed and later recovered is the most pernicious bit of folklore ever to infect psychology and psychiatry,” wrote Professor Richard McNally, an expert on trauma and memory at Harvard. As he has shown, rather than forgetting or repressing their traumas, people suffering from PTSD are more often haunted by them.

A RECENT FILM, Joan Baez: I Am a Noise, prompted my memories of the RCM craze. It is a disturbing film. The joyful singer and activist with an infectious smile and Zen resolve in the face of angry mobs and police batons is revealed as plagued by anxiety and depression. Happy photographs and film clips from her childhood and many years as a popular singer are jarringly juxtaposed to pages from personal journals that reflect her inner turmoil.

Baez first entered psychotherapy as a teenager. The voice of an unnamed therapist, recorded during sessions with her, is liberally spread through the film. His affected tone and pop-psych mantras made me cringe. Through therapy, Baez became convinced that she and Mimi Farina, her younger sister, had been sexually abused by their father. She seems to acknowledge that the accusations are hazy, unprovable, denied by other family members, and subject to the vagaries of memory. Yet she considers these “recovered memories” responsible for her lifelong struggles with mental illness. Regarding the film’s depressive tone, a friend who has worked closely with Baez says, “it’s certainly not the feeling you get being with her.”

Baez also suggests that she has multiple personalities— “dissociative identity disorder” in professional lingo—a psychiatric fad popularized by the movie Sybil. “Dissociative” is the connective tissue to RCM. Both ideas revolve around hidden memories and identities revealed in therapy, but unverifiable by independent or reproducible experimental methods. Although critics praised the film as an “intimate” and “honest” account of the much-loved singer, it was arguably an unembarrassed chronicle of psychiatric abuse.

Ethan Watter’s article in Mother Jones, later expanded into a book with Berkeley social psychologist Richard Ofshe, was one of the first to challenge RCM, and it drew angry letters. He and Loftus and other critics of RCM were condemned for re-victimizing victims and even of enabling pedophiles. Since most patients were women, some feminists called it another case of not believing women.

Thirty years later, Ethan’s review of the rise and fall of RCM in the New York Times Magazine, “The Forgotten Lessons of the Recovered Memory Movement,” still drew acidic comments from a few true believers, but a greater number praised the article. Some drew parallels to contemporary trends, including the dramatic spike in teenage girls reporting gender dysphoria. Studies suggesting that social contagion helps explain the rise have been denounced by activists.

Time and again, though, human beings have shown their capacity for spreading rumors and false beliefs as easily as they spread the flu in winter. A distant great aunt of mine, a 56-year-old widow named Mary Parker, was hung in Massachusetts in 1692, one of the last victims of the witch trials. She failed the “touching test”—when she was instructed to touch her hysterical young accusers, they calmed down. Centuries later, Salem’s witch trials were the setting for the cautionary tale told in The Crucible, a play Arthur Miller wrote amidst the fanaticism of the McCarthy era. Today, social media speeds the spread of all manner of social illnesses.

Intelligence does not inoculate us—smart people have spawned many of history’s worst calamities. Science, too, is subject to waves of enthusiasm for wrong-headed and destructive ideas, such as eugenics. The difference is that the scientific community is expected to hold itself to standards of proof that enable debate and require evidence. Rational skepticism and verifiability are two of the stronger safeguards we have against our attraction to totalizing explanations involving hidden forces.

Rosanne Barr later recanted some of her accusations against her parents. But when her mother called that day, all I could really do was to listen sympathetically. The leaders of RCM saw themselves as moral crusaders on behalf of vulnerable victims. From that perch, they became indifferent not only to contrary evidence, but also to the many victims—the broken families, the anguished patients, the falsely accused, the socially ostracized— that they wronged.

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LANGUAGE

Ibrahima and Abdulaye Barry

Writing in beauty

By Barbara Ramsey

REBECCA WILD’S CALLIGRAPHY class could have been an ordinary one: bakers who needed more legible cakes, artsy college students wanting to improve their handwriting, tattoo artists perfecting their Gothic script. But Rebecca was an extraordinary calligraphy teacher and one day in 2009 she met someone even more extraordinary.

Ibrahima Barry was a slight, soft-spoken African man in his early thirties with an accent that required close listening. Rebecca learned that he wanted to improve his script, but she had no idea what script and no inkling of the long road that had led him to her class. That road had begun almost two decades earlier in a Fulani neighborhood in Guinea, West Africa.

When Ibrahima was fourteen and his brother Abdulaye was ten, they came to their father with a problem. They were having trouble learning to write.

For hundreds of years, the Fulani people had traveled, traded, and extended their range over much of West Africa. By the time the Barry brothers were growing up, the Fulani numbered about forty million and had significant populations in Guinea, Nigeria, Senegal, Cameroon, and Mali. But their language (known as Fula, Fulbe, or Peul) had no written script of its own. This is common. Of the world’s approximately 7,000 languages, only about half have a written form.

Their language could be approximated by Arab script or the Latin script brought by the French, but both failed to capture some of its sounds. Many literate Fulani didn’t understand the writing of people from other regions. There was no nation state to create a standardized language curriculum or a single writing system. By the end of the 1980’s, less than twenty percent of the Fulani could read, which meant the language could disappear in a few generations. 

Ibrahima and Abdulaye’s father was well-versed in the Arabic version of Fula. People often sought his help in reading letters from their relatives in far-flung parts of West Africa. He’d become adept at deciphering and “best-guessing” the meanings of these letters. But the boys were frustrated with such guessing and felt it was holding them back. Why not create a written alphabet specifically for their own language?

“Many famous people have tried”, he told them. “But none have succeeded.” The boys were too young to understand that creating a flexible alphabet capable of representing all the specific sounds of a language is unimaginably difficult. When they insisted, their father smiled and wished them well.

And what pair of young kids doesn’t dream of creating a code? The boys labored over it after school, trying out new shapes and figuring out which shape most “looked like” the sound they wanted to represent. After six months of work, they showed their dad their twenty-seven letters (eventually twenty-eight), read from right to left like Arabic. He thought maybe they were just messing around, drawing squiggles.

Nonetheless, he contacted an educated relative who worked for the government to evaluate the boys’ claims. The man put the boys in different rooms so they couldn’t secretly signal each other. He dictated a different word or phrase to each one individually and had him write it down. He then had each boy read the other’s writing and tell him what was on the paper. They passed the test without difficulty. “I think these boys are on to something,” he told their dad.

But would it work in practice? The boys taught their script to their sister, Aissata, who quickly mastered it. They taught it to their friends and their friends’ friends. Adults were keen to learn, especially the Fulani merchants who needed transaction records and the market women who wanted to avoid being cheated. Abdulaye began painstakingly translating school books from Arabic script as well as books requested by friends and neighbors. He and Ibrahima set up an informal classroom in their father’s shop to teach people to read them.

But the brothers wanted more. In 2000, when Ibrahima went to the university in Conakry, Guinea’s capital, he spread the word. He taught the new script to other university students and found teachers eager to add the alphabet to their curriculum. He and his friends wrote new books about how to dig wells, purify water, and use basic math.

This new alphabet needed a name. The word “alphabet” comes from the Greek words for the first two letters, alpha and beta. The teachers suggested the Barrys call their script “ADLaM” after its first four letters— A,D,L, and M. The teachers also helped disseminate ADLaM to schools and learning centers in Guinea, Nigeria, Togo, Senegal, Liberia, and Benin. They created an acronym to remember the name: Alkule Dandayde Lenol Mulugol. It means “the alphabet that protects the people from vanishing.”

Though the Fulani people were enthusiastic, the government in Conakry wasn’t so sure. When Ibrahima started a student newspaper and became president of a group of reform-minded university students, the government branded him a troublemaker and put him in prison for three months. When released, he left for Senegal.

Almost a third of Senegalese are Fula speakers, and word of ADLaM had already spread through the country. One day in a Dakar market, a woman heard him speak Fula. She showed him a book—one he’d written while in Conakry—and asked if he could read it. “Well…maybe, just a little,” he said. A friend of hers, a Fulani from Guinea who sold palm oil, had brought the book to the market and was holding classes to teach the script to other Fulani women.

The brothers knew that ADLaM needed to be computerized. Wanting more education in English and hoping to create a digitized version of the script, Abdulaye moved to the United States, eventually settling in Portland. There, he learned about a UNESCO project that supported the development of linguistic tools for global information networks. UNESCO referred him to a linguist at UC Berkeley. He wrote to her but never heard back.

After Ibrahima joined his brother in 2007, they contacted a software company in Seattle about the project, but the firm demanded a hefty price. To pay it, the brothers took additional jobs and saved money for a year, but the resulting typeface was disappointing. Ibrahima and Abdulaye didn’t find it beautiful enough.

Navajo people speak of “walking in beauty”. The Fulani are the same. The women are famous for engraved gourds, beading, and weaving. Both sexes are known for elaborate body adornment and tattoos. Their headgear is carefully crafted and often decorated with intricate geometric motifs.

And so it was that Ibrahima began Rebecca Wild’s calligraphy class—to learn how to make a more beautiful typeface. She was impressed by his lettering but she’d never before seen such an alphabet. Because the Fulani revere modesty, it took Rebecca another week to learn that he and his brother had invented it. She felt compelled to help.

While working with Ibrahima on the script, Rebecca contacted a friend who arranged for him to attend a local calligraphy conference held at Reed College. Organizers were so impressed that they brought both brothers to Colorado the next year to present to a national conference. For their talk, the brothers invited members of the Fulani community who spoke to the personal and cultural significance of this new way of writing.

The computer scientists and linguists at the Colorado conference included the one from Berkeley who Abdulaye had tried to contact ten years earlier. The brothers met representatives from Google and Microsoft. And they met an editor from Unicode—the text encoding standard for the world’s major writing systems on the internet. From there, things moved quickly. Unicode certified ADLaM in its 2016 release of approved text standards and it became generally available in the 2019 Windows update. There are now multiple ADLaM typefaces. Ibrahima named one of them “Rebecca”.

Note: The full story of ADLaM is much richer than my summary can convey. To hear the Barry Brothers tell their own story in their own words, watch a talk they gave at Google.

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FOR THE LOVE OF TYPE

THESE LETTERS are typographic artworks based on the ADLaM Display font commissioned by Microsoft and designed by Neil Patel, Mark Jamra, and Andrew Footit. They were inspired by the spots, lozenges, and chevron patterns found in traditional textiles of the Fulani culture.

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EXHIBITS

Mill: Ungdomsmollen, Illustreret Familie-Journal, Denmark 1931; Cave: Ali en la Cueva de “Los Cuarenta Ladrones,” Editorial Hernando, Spain 1930s; Ship: Le Marengo, Pellerin, France 1890-1910; Radio: Valvo Rundfunkröhren-Orchester, Valvo Röhren, Germany 1960.

TOM GREENSFELDER, an artist and a friend of over forty years, collects extraordinary paper models from Europe. A selection, assembled by Alexandra Lopez, is being exhibited at August House Studios, 2113 W. Roscoe in Chicago through March 30.

PHOTOGRAPHER Robert Tognoli is a featured artist in March at Grover Gallery in an exhibition entitled Unexpected Scenes in Familiar Places. Robert is one of our LEO photographers who shoot pictures for local environmental organizations, and he is working on a long-term documentary project on local farmers. Grover Gallery, 236 Taylor Street, Port Townsend, Washington.

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Snippets of the week

One of my favorite bits from Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life.

THEY COME FOR THE LIVER. Orcas have a thing for shark livers, which are rich with lipids—energy storing fats and other organic compounds. They famously hunt prey in groups, but recently South African scientists published the first report of a single orca named Starboard hunting. killing, and disemboweling a great white shark—all in less than two minutes. People on boats on Mossel Bay witnessed the event and captured video of Starboard carrying off the shark’s liver.

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Some of the hoarded eggs. Photo by Norfolk Police.

THROW THE BIRD BOOK AT HIM! Daniel Lingham, of Newton St. Faith, England, was caught collecting 2,995 eggs from native birds, including 546 species of “most serious” conservation concern, such as the linnet, green finch, yellowhammer, and house sparrow (yes, it’s endangered in England). The police found the eggs in his bedroom and confiscated his binoculars and egg-blowing kit. What’s worse, Mr. Lingham is a serial offender, having been busted twice before, in 2005 and 2018, for hoarding a total of nine thousand eggs. As punishment, I recommend house arrest with cassowaries fenced in the yard.