Jenny

    These are images of a tattoo my friend recently gave me. It is a memorial to a woman whose life experience changed my life.

    When I was a teenager I went to my Oma’s (German for grandmother) house in the Bronx for summer vacation. When I arrived I found my Oma quite distraught. She told me she had lost her long and dear friend, Jenny. She told me that she was put in charge of selling Jenny’s house, and asked me if I would go there with her the next day to help her clean up.

    And so the next morning my Oma and I started driving to Jenny’s. I had never really paid much attention to my Oma’s stories, and didn’t think I was going to listen to this one either (we did not get along at all for over a decade), but she started telling me about this woman and her life, Jenny. The daughter of a shoe repairman and a horror of a father. As a little girl Jenny was only able to play in the backyard. The front of the house was the shoe repair store, and the room behind, a very small room, was where the family lived. As a teenager, she was not allowed to go hang out with her friends. Going to school was her only freedom, and the only time my Oma would see her, because my Oma started hanging out with other friends who were allowed to go out, who were allowed to be teenagers. As an adult Jenny was not allowed to date anyone. She lived her whole life, and never knew the touch of a lover. Imagine, to die never knowing the touch of love?            
    She stayed and worked for her father, repairing and shining shoes. She never left that house, my Oma said, until her death. Her family members had all died off, but Jenny remained alone in the house that was her cage for all of those years.

    My Oma becomes quiet and I feel the car come to a stop. “Here we are.” All of a sudden my soul is trembling. I got lost in the harsh pain of Jenny’s story. But it was just a story. A sad one, but almost not real to me. And here we were, in front of her actual house. A house that looked like it was beaten by time. The door window had a faded logo of a shoe repair emblem. We walked in. Broken shoe repair supplies that looked like they hadn’t been touched by a human since1940 were on the ground everywhere, covered in cobwebs. My grandmother pointed to the next room. The door was open and I could see an old bed sticking out. “That is where she slept and died. This neighborhood got really bad in the last few years, and Jenny would pretend to stay asleep while burglars would break through her window and steal her jewelry”, my Oma told me. I was heart broken, and felt like I couldn’t move any further, until something caught my eye. A stack of framed portraits stood against the wall in the corner. I immediately went to them and started flipping through each one. Old family portraits and photos. I kept flipping through, and one stopped me dead. A beautiful and stunning little girl, in a flowing white dress. Her face was sweet and reassuring. Untainted and full of love. It was Jenny. My heart wept. But at the same time it wept it filled my soul with conviction.

    This was not an isolated incident, a lone story of a great girl with an abusive father who destroyed her life. No, this is the story what our culture can do to human beings. This is the story of power and patriarchy. This is the story of how our desire for freedom and love is systematically stamped out of us. We are all taught to be good little girls and boys and never question why life is so unfulfilling. This is the story of a death culture, a culture that destroys innocent life, just because it has the power to do so. This is the story of the very society we live in and are a part of, a society that I hate and will spend my life fighting against until I am dead.

     It is also a story that can help us remember. It so often happens within this culture, that people’s life experiences are buried and forgotten. Vaclav Havel once said: “The struggle against oppression is the struggle of memory against forgetting.” We must never forget what this culture does to people, and what it does to the natural world. We must fight to see through the cultural ambitions and symbols of success we are taught to pursue, and come out on the other side with our own caring, individual selves in tact. We must honor our hero’s and heroines from the past. We must honor Jenny, and fight for a world where we could have possibly saved her from this evil misery.

Comments

[Raus]

Thank you Peiro.

[Clarence Dobel]

Hi Piero!

I really lik you're blog and I check in to see when you write new ideas in here!
Your tatoo is cool too! I'm a real enviornmentalist like you and I want cool tatoos like that. I also agree about what you said about society and I hate it so much too! I think that the story of Jenny is so sad and I like how it is you're inspiraion for your revolutionary ideas!

I have a question about the tatoo? It is so cool looking but I have a question. Is the girl breaking out of the mirror and running with the birds? I see the girl in the cage at the bottom of the mirror and I see the black silowet of the girl and the birds on the back of your arms. Is the girl running with the birds(flying birds-freedom) Jenny who has breaken free of her own idea of herself? Or her Dad's idea of keeping her? No offence! I think its so cool! But I want understand how you mean it?

-Clay Dobel

[Peiro]

Hey Clay,

Thanks a lot for your kind words! You have it pretty close. The idea of the tattoo is that Jenny as the innocent young girl she was has smashed through her picture frame, and has run away, free from the horror of her life. And all of the images in the frame, including the cage, is sort of telling the story of her life and what happened to her.

If you have any more questions let me know.

Take care,

Peiro