If You Want to Be Understood, Listen! (Lesson Learned from Babel)

Few weeks ago I finally managed to watch the movie Babel until the end (I bought the pirated DVD in Jakarta last year). This movie tells about peoples in different parts of the world, with different language, different problems that relates one another.

One thing that I felt negative about the movie is that it's another Hollywood-US made movie, where in the main characters, American is described in a positive manner while in a contrary to the other representation of the world. The good looking American Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett are depicted as the hero and innocent victim. A middle aged women that working illegal in the US as a nanny, a man that kill a chicken sadistically by a manual strangulation, party like crazy, and drunk driving while carrying American children illegally across the border is the Mexican. A little boy that shoots a bus and finally injured an American to test a rifle gun that supposed to be used to protect their cattle, a father who hits his children, police officers that brutally tortured people to get confessions, the government that panicly putting security measures afraid allegation of reference to terrorism by the US are the Moroccan (Arabs). A father that neglect his deaf mute daughter, and a rebellious difabled teenager who take off her panty in a fast food restaurant to get the opposite sex's attention, also to appear in full nudity in the front of a police officer to seduce him to have sex with her are Japanese. And I absolutely object with this scene, how the film maker can put an underaged in such manner (an Asian girl!).

The tagline of the movie is "if you want to be understood, listen". It seems like trying to explain that bad things happen to people's lives due to their inablity to meaningfully communicate with each other, even when they speak the same language.

The word Babel is mentioned in the Bible, Genesis 10:10 as the home city of Nimrod. According to Genesis 11:1-9, mankind that survive after the deluge (the big flood in the history of Prophet Noah), traveled from the mountain where the giant ark had rested, and settled in 'a plain in the land of Shinar' (or Senaar). Here, they work together attempted to build a city and a tower whose top might reach unto Heaven, the Tower of Babel. The attempt to build the Tower of Babel had angered God who, in his anger, made each person involved speak a different language which ultimately halted the project and scattered and disconnected the people across the planet. “Therefore is the name of it called Babel (confusion); because the Lord did there confound the language of all the earth: and from thence did the Lord scatter them abroad upon the face of all the earth” (Genesis 11:9).

The destruction is not described in Genesis, but is mentioned in the Book of Jubilees. An interpretive account of the story explains the tower's destruction in terms of humankind's deficiency in comparison to God: within a religious framework, humankind is considered to be an inherently flawed creation dependent on a perfect being for its existence, and thus the construction of the tower is a potentially hubristic act of defiance towards the God who created them. As a result, this story is sometimes used within a religious context to explain the existence of many different languages and races. (Source: Wikipedia)

In Islamic perspective, the diversity of race, skin colours and languages are signs of Allah’s power. “And among His Signs is the creation of the heavens and the earth, and the difference of your languages and colours. Verily, in that are indeed signs for men of sound knowledge” (surah Ar Ruum [Rome] (30): 22). In another article in the Quran (which I embarassly forgot which one) it says that Allah create human beings in many varieties with different minds, tribes, customs, even religions so that they could know each other. This is quite confusing but at the same time amazing and make more sense to me. Allah with His powers could create all human beings in the same form, with the same language, custom and tradition, even sexual orientation and religion but Allah didn’t do it.

In reality human beings tends to relate with people with whom they have similarities, in the contrary they will minimize the the relation, even in conflict with people different from them. "Know" is not simply enough, but it has something to do with "understanding" and "tolerance". These things don’t happen spontaneously, but one must have a willingness to listen to the other, to understand what other people meant by words or an act, signs ore gestures. Maybe the tagline is right that if only everyone in that movie is able to effectively communicate with respect to each other, none of those disasters will happen. But as the scripture says, only the human being that uses their mind may understand and take lesson of anything that happen in their life.