Discourse on Hate

hate /het/verb, noun
verb (not used in the progressive tenses)
1 to dislike sth very much: [vn] I hate spinach. I hate Monday mornings. I hate it when people cry. He hated it in France (did not like the life there). I hate the way she always criticizes me. [v -ing] She hates making mistakes. I hate coming home late. [v to inf] He hated to be away from his family. She's a person who hates to make mistakes. I hate to think what would have happened if you hadn't been there. [vn -ing] He hates anyone parking in his space. [vn to inf] She would have hated him to see how her hands shook. I'd hate anything to happen to him. 2 [vn] ~ sb (for sth) to dislike sb very much: The two boys hated each other. I hated myself for feeling jealous. He was her most hated enemy. Sometimes I really hate him. 3 [no passive] [v to inf] used when saying sth that you would prefer not to have to say, or when politely asking to do sth: I hate to say it, but I don't think their marriage will last. I hate to trouble you, but could I use your phone? (Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary)

So much have been written about its cousin - especially in some parts of the globe showered in the (comercially) pinked campaign every second month of the year (boring, boring). But what about its opposite feeling?

It's not that I'm as noble as Dalai Lama or Mahatma or other saintly people if I stay away from hating (people). Or at least, try to. As for my case, it is simply due to my banal fear of adding unnessary wrinkle lines before its time that hating, I believe, could cause. I don't think I ever have an object for this strong word as a noun (hatred). And as a verb, my use of it is not really particular. Time and again, I'd say, 'I hate traffic jam or I hate some crooked politician with funny moustache', but can't really think of a familiar face I ever target the feeling to.

It's most possibly cos my life has been generally 'safe' from state/big man-inflicted tragedy, keeping me reasonless from possesing this strong feeling. All those pains and sadness and other ordeal in life inflicted by other human beings, as far as mine, comes in meager size. There is no holocaust in my life, nor Cultural Revolution, nor 1965 massacre in Indonesia, nor excruciating pain/suffering/humiliation inflicted on those women raped during the Japan occupation or Indonesia's 1998 riots, nor those people caught in the middle of ethnic conflict in Rwanda or the religious one in Moluccas Island or what the world still have to add the long list of human misery until this very second. I just happen to be the lucky ones.

Such acts, as most of us know, can be generated by many reasons. But, when it comes to personal level, can it be also something genetic? If a girl's moderate temper (like mine? ugh) is not really prone into a such, long-term anger which easily morphes into hate - could it be due to her father gene - known to his closest as someone with such a big heart? One's temperament - is that in one's DNA?

If not blood-related, can it be cultural? A certain culture is based on revenge, so I was once told, inherited from some Viking tribe whose customes rooted in mockery and fists and betrayal. So. Does my grandmother's surrounding culture - a serene, 'alus' (refined), dismissive Javanese its female trained throughout her life contributes to my personal trait? (Mind you, not the contradictory, two-faced traits its male-culture possesed by the Central Javanese). Is there really such thing? How valid this analysis? Switch the news channel, and the proof (that human beings can be a profound hater) is aplenty (of men not learning from human kind history,thus failed to stop the vicious cycle of hatred). But why does it sound so simplistic?

If one managed to save his/her soul from being engulfed or empowered by hatred, how strange it could be to be an object of some kind. Arch your eyebrows, but this thing is as old as other worldly sins. You can be hated because the colour of your skin. But when someone you know (even more if once so dearly) lavishes his/her extreme dislike (or anger) on you, hissing the harshest words (from the same lips which once were so able to utter such highly imaginative tender ones), how would you react? After the shock, it might leave you shiver, cold, frozen in sadness, then tremble-shatter, but how it shakes the inner- as much as the outer you? Debris of absurdity scattered, as one may look in dismay at his/her own failure to fathom the moment (when he/she is hated). In the blurred blue print of a soul, what is actually the trigger, and how it actually triggers? I mean, where? Is it in the mind, in the heart, in between? Is it in the course of times, in certain space, in a peculiar apace?

But hate or hatred does not always mean a bad thing. "I hate injustice" so uttered this grand dame of activist I interviewed recently. Decades of violence and injustice has led her lead an extremely rich life, full of good deeds and small miracles woven into her daily life. She entered the list of 1000 women campaigned by a women organisation in Genf to win the Noble Prize this year.

It's said (by some rock star I suppose :-) it takes a man to love a woman to hate her. Nice contradiction - flattering yet illusory. But to contrast the act of hating with the act of loving between the two sexes at a personal level, well, probably Roland Barthes' notions can enlighten. He concluded, the language we use when we are in love is not a language we speak, for it is addressed to ourselves and to our imaginary beloved. It's for that very reason, a lover's discourse is a language of solitude.

(Barthes) Language is a skin: I rub my language against the other. It is as if I had words instead of fingers, or fingers at the tip of my words. My language trembles with desire. The emotion derives from a double contact: on the one hand, a whole activity of discourse discreetly, indirectly focuses upon a single signified, which "I desire you", and releases, nourishes, ramifies it to the point of explosion (language experiences orgasm upon touching itself); careess, brush against, talk up this contact, I extend myself to make the commentary to which I submit the relation endure. (To speak amourously is to expend without an end in sight, without crisis; it is to practice a relation without orgasm. There may exist a literary form of this coitus reservatus: what we call Marivaudage).

Then. What it really takes from one to extremely move from the deed of love to the expression of hate? Or, is the difference between the two is as thin as silk thread? Or can one extreme feeling, for once, wraps around the other inside, like a closed mask? (love inside/as hate or vice versa). Similar to Zhang Xianliang's protagonist in Half Man is a Woman, "I love you that's why I can't stay on with you. I have to hurt you, hurt you so much, so you put me out of your mind." Only, he delivers this paradox as a silent monologue - so loud, yet unsaid. He made her believe that he hates her.

But even if hate is some kind of a lover's discourse, and that might be highly flattering for the object, yet it remains illusory. Eventually, it unfailingly hurts. Probably forever.