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| Juliette Fogra |
EDITOR: Weizhen, the author of this blog, and a well-educated and single Chinese citizen living in Northern China, reacts to Jordan Peterson's interviewer with Juliette Fogra the illustrator of his Beyond Order:12 More Rules for Life.
The interview can be found on YouTube here: Beyond Order: The illustrator/ Julietta Fogra - Jordan B. Peterson Podcast S4 E9. Oddly enough Fogra's name appears no where in the book except for her signature on the illustrations themselves. When books are registered for their ISBN and copyright information and illustrator is usually credited. Not here. There is no listing of Fogra's contribution on the copyright page, in the extensive alpha index, nor is she mentioned (as far as I could find) in the book's Coda where Peterson thanks dozens of people who contributed to the book's undertaking. Why is this?
This absence of her name ironically relates to this blog post and Weizhen's comments on how her life in China and Fogra's life growing up in communist community as a Jew, compare and contrast.
I am reading Beyond Order. I can't help but recalling some of the most intense and inspiring exchanges between JBP and Juliette Fogra in his interview of her. You asked what resonated with me? What a good question! One I have to answer and risk strong emotions that are to be stirred up by doing so!
First of all, Fogra was born and grew up in a communist community and felt an outcast as a Jew and she couldn't identify with her religious and social heritage. I used to lament and resent the limitedness of my own upbringing, both micro and macro—growing in a family with no education, a place no culture, a country no moral and a gender no power. I considered myself wronged and wasted. I thought I was the poorest of the poor, perhaps only women in an African cannibalist tribe have a worse fortune. But their suffering is a different kind. They have to endure hunger and fear while I am starved of beauty and meaning.
Now, Fogra, clearly much more talented, grew up in communistic country, being a true outcast, exiled even from her own family, experienced both hunger and fear and a much severe impoverishment of beauty as an artist.
That knowledge put me in perspective.
Then her migration to Israel at the age of 14 would have been enviable to me since my family never had the ability to migrate outside of China. Her misery in a new country without being able to speak the language resonates with me who in my 40s tried to migrate to Germany and couldn't find a spot for myself. I could feel the harrowing loneliness and the inferiority Fogra felt. At times when I was in Germany I was like a 14 year old, defenseless and destitute. (This concerns another topic - like in the story about the modern day sleeping beauty in JP's book, too much sentimentality is infantilizing and a development malfunction that needs to be addressed. I think my mistake lies not in that I went to Germany but I went too late.)
But oh, God's way is above our way. There in the Middle East desert (literally and metaphorically), Fogra met a young man, and lost him, and was devastated. Until one day he called from New York, telling her:" Come to me. I meet people here every day but I can't see any one of them. They don't exist for me. Come, I see you."
She came to NY and was prepared to clean the toilets in this metropolitan city for the sake of her love. There, this shy young woman, who found it hard to survive in Israel, finds a living as an artist in the big apple.
As JP puts it there is nothing trivial about her. Although a rarely gifted artist, she is free of cynicism, conceit and condescension. Crushingly shy, she is also firm in her artistic pursuit. Her admiration and affection for JP is apparent and she genuinely wants to make him happy but she does it by being absolutely true.
In a way, I like her better than JP in the interview. JP was a bit too eager to make his points and theories (useful and wise as they are) known, Fogra was not. She was slow in speaking, and quick to listen. She never seemed to try to impress or even aware before her words got out of her mouth that they were going to be significant and mind blowing. She gave JP her full whole being.
I admire her without any reservation.
And the man who sees her has very good eyes!
