TOM: In your role with the American Friends Service Committee, you’ve had the opportunity to be at trouble spots all over the world. I was wondering what images you carry with you, particularly on the topic of the impact on fatherhood in situations of political instability.
DAD: What comes up is not the fathers, but the mothers. The father was often the absent—disappeared, gone somewhere else in the struggle. It’s the mothers taking care of the kids under the most desperate circumstances in the refugee camps and on the road. My experiences were especially in the Middle East and in Latin America, where in many ways women are defined into a kind of secondary status, and yet it’s the resilience of those women trying to keep the kids together, trying to get enough food, huddling in a tent or in a shelter or just plain on the road, trying to get away from the violence. It’s the women, the mothering role that they’re carrying out, that seems much more evident, in my experience anyway, than the fathers.
TOM: And what countries, in particular, are you thinking of?
DAD: Salvador, Nicaragua, particularly, in Central America. Especially the Palestinians variously situated throughout the Middle East. With Cambodia, it was just so desolate when I took that trip in ’79—but we saw scattered people because they were driven off into the countryside or being held in mass encampments at the edge of Phnom Penh. We drove out to a provincial center where there was a clinic , which was all they had for a hospital—no real medical supplies, no real medical training, but people were coming in, in hopes of care. There we saw a woman with a child on her hip.
The interpreter said she’d been eating grass for three days. The child’s head was sort of rolling over and the eyes were unfocused. (It was not expected to survive.) She looked like she was at the point of extremity also. I took her picture, a photo that in some way became an iconic image for what was happening to the whole of the Cambodian people in that really terrible time, through the Pol Pot era and after when people were left with no crops in the fields. We just didn’t see rice in paddies anywhere on that trip and so that woman and her child, I think, in some way graphically capture what the real damage to the people of Cambodia was. But again, it was a mother and not a father.
Next: Death Camps
Photo Credit: Swarthmore College
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Hi, Tom-
I took a couple of courses with your dad at Cornell in spring and fall of 1970 (so he was not at U Mass then). He was a wonderful lecturer and one of the teachers I admired most at Cornell. He definitely influenced my views on race. He was also a tough grader, which did not help my GPA at all, but it was worth it. I was interested and pleased to hear of the direction his life took and that he is alive and well in beautiful Rockport, Maine.
Tom, It took me a couple year’s after my Father Passed away in September of 1999, to understand who he was but more importantly The man I thought I had to be… I think our Fathers, seem so Hero like as children in our eye’s! As we age and mature, They have exspectation’s and we tend to think or believe what they want for us, is Not in our plan’s. So we fighnt it every step along the way. Tom, My Dad many times through out my childhood made me feel WEAK and Unexcepted! Growing up My eye’s saw his… Read more »
What an interesting guy your dad is, Tom!.
One of the striking things that comes through this conversation is that despite your returning to the father/son theme over and over, in so many instances that you and your dad address the fathers were not present, or the men were not in family situations etc. Makes it clear how major a shift your generation is in the midst of, and how timely your focus is!
Thanks for showing open interest in your son’s cause, Jean Matlack, in your comment here and your own interview in May. Discovering his TGMP work is one of the best things that’s happened for me in the past few months. It does my heart good to see Tom honoring his father and mother while finding his own way!
Excellent interview, Tom. I am very glad that you were able to sit down and connect with your father like this. As much as we think we know our dads at times, there is always more to the story—small (or in your case, large) details that would have gone otherwise untold unless you spend quality talk time.
I enjoyed this. You both are good men.