Pink Socks
I have read two stories this week about pink socks. The first was on a relatively new blog, My True Self, where the anonymous author chronicles her healing journey as she recovers from sexual abuse. Check out her pink sock story here and then scroll through her blog and catch up. I’ve found it to be inspiring and helpful.
The second story was from a book I’m reading with my long-distance friend Wendy, Reading Lolita in Tehran. It chronicles the journey of a group of woman in Iran who illegally form a book group to read things like The Great Gatsby, Pride and Prejudice, and the more inflamatory Lolita. Azar Nafisi tells this tale of a pink sock:
Manna had once written about a pair of poink socks for which she was reprimanded by the Muslim Student’s Association. When she complained to a favorite professor, he started teasing her about how she had already ensnared and trapped her man, Nima, and did not need the pink socks to entrap him further.
….my girls spoke constantly of stolen kisses, films they had never seen and the wind they had never felt on their skin. This generation had no past. Their memory was of half-articulated desire, something they had never had. It was this lack, their sense of longing for the ordinary, taken-for-granted aspects of life that gave their words a certian luminous quality akin to poetry.
I wonder if right now, at this moment, I were to turn to the people sitting next to me in this cafe in a country that is not Iran and talk to them about life in Tehran, how they would react. Would they condemn the tortures, the executions and the extreme acts of agression? I think they would. But what about acts of trangression on our ordinary lives, like the desire to wear pink socks?
What are your “pink socks”? What thing is it that feels like an act of agression in your life, that you sometimes dismiss as being to0 insignificant to name, or to pay attention to? And is there some way you’ve learned to wear them anyway?
back in high school (during the early 80’s while everyone else was preppy) i had a pair of army surplus parachute pants with the drawstring waist and legs. these pants where my way of acting out. my freshman year in college there was a lime green vintage old ladies coat with rhinestone buttons (1983) and a red scarf.
in reading the original pink socks post and now yours i’ve come to realize that i truly don’t have any pieces of my wardrobe that are statements in and of themselves. i need to change that soon!
I am reminded of two books: Parvana’s Journey, about a young girl in Taliban-era Afghanistan who is forced to mascerade as a boy to support her family after her father’s arrest; and The Crystal Drop, by the late Monica Hughes. The latter one especially talks about a small bit of cheap glass that served as an icon, talisman, comforter to two children journeying through post-apocalyptic Alberta (Canada)–their “pink sock” that turned out to symbolize the scarcest of commodities in that time: water.
Being a boy, so to speak, was an act of unspeakable aggression, as courageous as the journey of the two children. What stood out for me most, however, in both books, was the level of compassion in the children despite the horror and stress of their lives.
I would venture that compassion is our collective “pink sock” in this day and age.