Excellent article:
http://mrzine. monthlyreview. org/drennan26120 7.htmlRe-evaluating Adoption: Validating the Local
by Daniel Drennan
After it was reported that a French NGO named Arche de Zoé had
attempted to airlift a planeload of children out of Chad for adoption
in France, Ann Veneman, Executive Director of UNICEF, stated:“This is not something that should be tolerated by the international
community. It is unacceptable to see children taken out of their
home countries without compliance with national and international
laws.”
Her outrage unfortunately reflects a one-sided worldview concerning
adoption today. It can be traced back to Pearl S. Buck and other
advocates from the middle of last century who saw in international
adoption a “saving grace” for children around the globe. This
sentiment, echoed in Arche de Zoé’s mission statement, has always
served as an excuse to use “orphans” as props, backdrops, and camera
fodder. Operation Babylift, the post-Vietnam War media relations
effort of the United States government, attempted to give Americans a
positive spin on its role in the war. Unwitnessed, however, were
distraught Vietnamese mothers, tearfully separated from their
children who were forced onto waiting airplanes for transport
overseas. Adoption’s current vogue due to Hollywood celebrity public
relations campaigns, which date back to the days of Joan Crawford,
exemplifies but one of its more cynical manifestations. More
recently, an article in New York magazine basically asks parents to
quantify the unquantifiable: the love they have for their adopted
children. These examples, including the statement from UNICEF,
likewise reflect only one side of the debate: namely that of the
adoptive parent, couple, and country.
This perception focuses solely on the unique instance of adoption as
beneficent act; viewed only by itself, out of context, this is
perhaps an inarguable truth. Yet individual adoption is deceptively
marketed and packaged around this humanistic aspect. It mistakenly
presupposes a globally valid nuclear family, as well as a concept of
Third-World deliverance coming in individual doses from the developed
regions of the world; it extols the child as now “better off,”
or “lucky,” or “chosen.” It depicts adoption as better than nothing
and proclaims that little can be done on an individual level to
change the global situation. Adoption can thus be seen to fulfill
certain needs of dominant global culture, not just those of parents
wishing to start a family, and focuses on children who are (perhaps
ideally) least capable to speak for themselves.
These arguments, however, do not hold up to scrutiny and raise more
questions than they answer. At the general level, the idea that
nothing can be done to effect change in the world is self-deceiving
and reflects a willful ignorance of the sacrifices required to make
that change: the standard of living of the First World comes at the
expense of the Third World; and there are things that could be done
to greatly alleviate if not eliminate poverty in the world today if
the collective will to do so, which would require change in the
standard of living of the First World, existed. More specifically,
even if we accept the premise that adopting children lifts them out
of poverty or “saves” them, it is possible to argue that another
First-World consumer in fact makes things worse on a global scale.
To further deliberate: adoption on the international level creates
a “demand” for orphans that is answered by Third-World countries and
the agencies that serve them with a “supply” of children; it is
problematic to bring a foreign-born child into a non-multi-cultural
environment; individualistic, nuclear family-based cultures undo
other more community-based cultures. Do we simply deny that baby
theft and brokering exist? Is it not paradoxical that underclass
children in First-World societies go unadopted, often for racist and
ageist reasons? What aberrant First-Worldist rationale allows for
the adoption of Third-World children, while forbidding adults from
these same Third-World countries to emigrate, or while deporting
those already present back to their home countries?
Extending this logically: does the Caribbean immigrant nanny in New
York City (ironically perhaps tending to a Third-World adopted infant
while far from her own family) not have the same rights as the mother
she serves? As the Chadian village that has been convinced that
there is a “better life” elsewhere for its children? As the adopted
child who never asked to grow up in an alien and often alienating
culture? Do they all have nothing to say because there is no
equality of stature, no parity of action available to them, no
ability to travel to Europe or America to select a white baby for
themselves, no recognition of their way of life as valid, because
they have no privilege and are exploitable? Should the world become
suddenly egalitarian, all children given a place in their respective
communities if not families, what would childless couples do then?It is obvious why no one hears this side of the argument. The truth
stings, and we recoil in the face of it, as when listening to news
reports of the recent scandal from Chad; or when I hear a mother
state of her daughter adopted from a former Soviet republic: “Of
course I bought my baby!”; or when I stare at the check that my
orphanage in Lebanon “accepted” as a gift from my parents; or when I
realize that all of the names on my documentation that might link me
to a birth family are completely falsified.
The blind eye turned to this bigger picture naturally overlooks the
reality of adopted children’s lives. Those who spent years in my
orphanage remember being told that some parents-cadeaux (gift-
parents) were coming to “choose a lucky child.” We are chastised
that we should stop searching for something that cannot be ours. For
many here, we are “les enfants du peché” — the children of sin –
and are not welcome, or else we are grudgingly received with grating
platitudes. This article will tar me as an ungrateful adoptee, which
is the furthest thing from the truth. None of the above monological
attitudes take into consideration the thoughts, feelings, or needs of
the very subjects of their so-called advocacy. They are meant to
deflect questioning and derail criticism, while disparaging non-First-
World views concerning adoption. They place adopted children in an
existential limbo which is unjust, uncharitable, and ignoble.
Many of us recall being informed that we are fortunate since adoption
is not allowed “among the Muslims.” To those who are raised
believing in the supremacy of the couple and child(ren)-based social
unit, the very idea of growing up in an orphanage, with no “family,”
or otherwise under “guardianship, ” is unfathomable, if not
horrifying. Since moving back to Lebanon three years ago, I have
realized that the Qur’anic invocation concerning adoption has
everything to do with children maintaining their lineage, their name,
and their place in the community. Most remarkable then is the fact
that these very concepts — of lineage, name, appearance, and
original community — are the issues that most plague adult
adoptees. So it should come as no surprise that those who find their
birth parents — for example, as documented in the film, Daughter of
Danang, or the recent Reader’s Digest article entitled “The Lost
Princess” — are often welcomed “home” by a village and not just a
single family, in a complete reversal of their original trip to their
adoptive land. This has been most astonishing for me in Lebanon, in
terms of who has extended their community to me, beyond any
preconceived expectations, much less familial or communal ties.
There can be no feigning shock that the willful and deliberate
misunderstanding of family and community should result in this most
recent African scandal and the protests it begets, or that those
destined for so-called salvation should be the ones who suffer most.
Many of the adoptees from my orphanage share one desire: the honest
truth and an open discussion of their earliest days. This is where
the original spin meets on-the-street reality, and it is a violent
and unendurable encounter. Coming back to Lebanon has been nothing
if not a rude awakening, and if I am no longer looking for my birth
parents it is because I see in this search a selfish act, living now
as I do in a place with an unimaginable poverty level and a political
situation that is unstable to say the very least. Searching is thus
a luxury, and I have let it go; comparatively speaking, I have
nothing to complain about: what I have discovered regarding the
abandonment and adoption of all of us who were processed through the
orphanage in Beirut is too terrible to bear sometimes. I am loathe
to hear questions from adoptees starting their search here, because I
have little but heartbreak to extend to them. To continue to view
adoption in its previous mythologised and romanticized manner has for
many of us become insufferable, if not impossible.
At the same time, I am daily witness to endless First-World
interference here on the political, cultural, and economic level and
so can’t help but make the logical leap to add adoption to a long
list of injustices perpetrated from without. And I add my voice to
those from the other side of the adoption myth, from fellow adoptees
and the communities they come from, who now demand that the chance to
critique be afforded those most justified to speak, yet most
silenced. To quote an African Union missive in response to the
recent events in Chad, there exists a lack of “dignity and respect”
on the issue that is but a continuation of how the First World has
historically viewed and treated the rest of humanity. The focus
concerning adoption needs to shift from parent to child, from First
World to Third. It is time to discuss international adoption openly
and honestly, in order to be fair to all those affected by it. It is
time to speak about the trafficking of the most fragile and
defenseless of humans. It is time to speak about the hypocrisy that
ignores the ever-growing gap between the First and Third Worlds and
the terrible abuse of the current power imbalance between them — a
continuation of a sordid history in which the poor, the nether,
the “uncivilized” portions of the planet serve as source material to
be plundered, exported, and sold.In naming their organization “Arche de Zoé” — a play on the French
for “Noah’s Ark” — we can see this age-old romanticism and arrogant
interference semantically revealed: there are children saved, and the
rest — the unfortunate children of sin — damned to their fate.
This NGO and by extension the First World thus play God, with
disastrous results. This missionary idea condemns people to their
given status without considering it a direct function of the vagaries
of international economic, political, and cultural systems put in
place by the First World at the expense of the Third. We must
acknowledge what international adoption represents, and what its
consequences are, not just locally or individually, but globally and
in terms of our shared humanity. To simply accept one perspective of
adoption, one that doesn’t give voice to adoptees and those of their
places of origin simply because it validates our sense of self, is
morally and ethically untenable.
Long after this story dies down, and Angelina Jolie and Madonna are
out of the news, and the millionth casting call for Annie takes
place, it is the children as well as their original communities who
still have to live with and process what has happened to them. I
would restate Ms. Veneman’s statement thus:
“It is unacceptable to see children taken out of their home
countries.”
Period. This admission, this truly local starting point, might
hopefully shift the attention of adoptive parents beyond the children
they have welcomed into their families to the world far outside their
homes; a shift, by extension, from the North to the South, from the
First World to the Third. It might also allow us to see,
acknowledge, and validate for the first time the “world family” we
are thus connected to. Most telling in the Arche de Zoé affair is
the difference between the protest against the actions of this NGO in
terms of “international law” and the outcry of a different kind that
is directed against the received wisdom, the salvationist sentiment
itself: a protest that seeks to address issues of globalization,
world politics, local cultures, and international economics, directly
challenges the prevailing notions of presumed universalist culture,
rightly puts adoption back into context, and thus requires much more
of us all in terms of good will, altruism, and selflessness.
To admit this, to shift perspectives, to recognize the other’s
viewpoint, would allow those of the developed world to understand
what this most recent scandal represents to those they share the
planet with, and would reveal that in the spectrum of adoption it is
impossible to separate what deserves outrage from what does not; the
application of make-up to Chadian children in an effort to literally
paint them as Darfour refugees in preparation for their kidnapping
from Africa is just one end of the spectrum, one manifestation of
problems systemic to a First-World view of things. When voice is
given to all concerned, when the discussion is finally and honestly
balanced, only then will adoption no longer be tainted with the
lingering remnants of an unjustly divided world.
