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Thursday, December 27, 2012

on "Where are you From"?

I sometimes get asked "Where Are You From?"

This question is asked of me by people of many different backgrounds. Sometimes they are White/Anglo-Australian, sometimes they are European, sometimes they are Aboriginal Australian, sometimes they are other people of Asian descent.

Arlene Textaqueen, who describes themself as "brown... a non-Indigenous person of colour living on stolen Wurundjeri land in the area also known as Melbourne, Australia," has written a poem about being asked this question on their blog. The poem itself is understandably indignant, self-consciously defensive and naming of some of the potentially problematic assumptions that some people have in asking that question...

"Why do you ask?
Is it your curiosity in the ‘origin of my features’?
Is it your fascination for ‘other’ cultures and what they have to offer you?

Why do you desire to establish an exact definition of my difference?
Why do you assume I desire, and am able, to define this difference to you?

Do you show the same interest in determining the ‘ethnic make-up’ of every white face that you see?
Isn’t everyone from somewhere?
Do you not have a heritage?
Why does whiteness make yours invisible yet my brownness make mine subject to your anthropological investigation?

"

Textaqueen acknowledges that the poem is addressed to white people, and then goes on to articulate how they had performed this poem once at a RISE book launch and poetry slam. RISE is the first refugee and asylum seeker organisation in Australia to be run and governed by refugees, asylum seekers and ex-detainees, and is based here in Melbourne.

Textaqueen writes,
"My poem is addressed to white people, like most of my poetry, but it’s not for them. Judging from the laughter it received from many people of colour in the audience (POCS made up the majority of attendees), the people I had hoped would get it, really got it. I did see some uncomfortable white people and this was unfortunately acknowledged by the MC, Victor Victor, after I left the stage, when he apologised if anyone was offended, because that wasn’t ‘our’ intention as it was a night about ‘positivity’. Ramesh, CEO and co-founder of RISE, did ask him to take back the apology, which he did the next time he was on stage. Is there any person, especially any white person, who couldn’t do with being challenged on their less obvious (to them) racisms? And how, and why, should I do that without making some people uncomfortable? Especially considering, as a person of colour living in a white-centric world, I’m always adapting to ‘uncomfortable’ circumstances."

They then go on to give excellent critique and commentary about a culture of white "do-gooder"ness which is also predicated, though perhaps more subtly, on white supremacy and entitlement.


****

"Where I am From!"

While I acknowledge the anger and frustration that Textaqueen is articulating in their post around this question, I have a different experience around this.

First of all, recently, at a RISE Festival fundraiser gathering which I was volunteering at in Federation Square, I was asked "Where are you from?" all day long by African men and women, many of whom are from recently arrived migrant and refugee backgrounds. I would, in turn, ask them the same question, at which point I would hear their stories of migration from here to there, Somalia to Ethiopia, Eritrea to the UAE, and the eventuation of our bodies to being here together, in Federation Square, Melbourne, Australia (on stolen Wurundjeri Aboriginal land).

Our asking these questions of one another was, of course, contextualised by the fact that the whole daylong event was being run by people of colour, and while nominally intended for a broad audience, was disproportionately and visibly attended by other people of colour. That I was asked this question by African folks through the day did not strike me as coming from a place of entitled interrogation, but from a mutual urge to share of our personal history, to share in migrant solidarity, and, in my motivation anyway, in how we might build community together.

Of course, it is different when white people ask me this in white-dominant spaces, but there is a dynamic shift I want to help catalyse; in which this recourse to poetry, as Arlene has written, is less and less needed. Where I can measure the relative worth of a question not only by the extent to which it actively challenges white supremacist and white-normative ways of knowing, but also by the extent to which it is predicated on the shared commitments to learning and sharing of one another (and one another's histories), and to building connection and "country" with one another.

This also means that I am committed to exploring alternatives to addressing pieces on my racial anger toward white people in general. I am interested in building and nurturing a community of other people of colour who value our own subjectivity enough that we would write literature for one another, with one another as an intended audience, not simply in indictment of white people (as important as this may be in its own right), but in mutual inquiry as well.

I honour Textaqueen's anger; indeed, I share that feeling often, but the question "Where are you from" does not belong to white people, and I am personally invested in reclaiming it as a person of colour. "Where are you from" is also a way that people of colour become agents in anthropology (the study of human beings and comparative human cultures), of ourselves, of white people, and of the dominant (white hegemonic) cultures that we are a part of shaping and reshaping.

Personally, while contextually necessary, I am lethargic of a politics of ressentiment, of building personal and communal political identities and movements based primarily on outrage, indignation, and the introjection of our own Otherness. Let's build contexts together in which lethargy and righteous rage are not our modus operandi.

I believe being openly angry at white folks is one way that we "get over it".
(i.e. by naming and directing our anger at white people)

I would like to find some other ways as well, which include discourses, creative methodologies, and ways of being with one another, which go beyond looking for the most powerful ways to stare white people out of the room.

James Baldwin, on loving the innocent...



"The details and symbols of your life have been deliberately constructed to make you believe what white people say about you. Please try to remember that what they believe as well as what they do and cause you to endure, does not testify to your inferiority but to their inhumanity and fear. Please try to be clear, dear James, through the storm which rages about your youthful head today, about the reality which lies behind the words 'acceptance' and 'integration'. There is no reason for you to try to become like white people and there is no basis whatever for their impertinent assumption that they must accept you. The really terrible thing, old buddy, is that you must accept them. And I mean that very seriously. You must accept them and accept them with love. For these innocent people have no other hope. They are, in effect, still trapped in a history which they do not understand; and until they understand it, they cannot be released from it. They have had to believe for many years, and for innumerable reasons, that black men are inferior to white men. Many of them, indeed, know better, but, as you will discover, people find it very difficult to act on what they know."

- James Baldwin
(Extract from 'Letter to My Nephew on the One Hundredth Anniversary of the Emancipation', taken from The Fire Next Time, Dial Press Inc & John Farquharson Ltd., New York, 1963, p22)

Thursday, December 20, 2012

Political Impotence

"In modern states, the citizen is politically impotent. A citizen, it is true, may complain, make suggestions, or cause disruptions, but in the ancient world these were privileges that belonged to any slave." 
- Mark Mirabello


I took this quote off of a new blog I'm reading:
Urban Dissent - Poetry is in the Street
http://urbandissent.wordpress.com/

A Quick Sketch on Developmental Justice

This post is mostly a rambling of my thoughts, not particularly coherent nor created for an audience, for now... But I want to get all of this out before I start creating more coherent posts about these issues.




First.

An observation:
That the post-Ken Wilberian "Integral theory" intellectual and organisational enterprise, (that I have noticed and/or been a part of, online, in the USA, and in Australia) is disproportionately White.



Second.

That unlike English language American Buddhist literature, post-Wilberian Integral Theory is also disproportionately not Jewish (which, from a normative perspective, says as much about English-American Buddhism's "Jewishness" as it says anything about the "goyim", non-Jewish hegemony of Integral theory).

I have been, in my spiritual and philosophical life, largely been influenced by both.



Third.

That through exposure to Ken Wilber's writings, along with meeting up with amazing folks at Sydney Integral, I was also exposed to the following, teleological theory-praxes of individual and collective adult development...

-> Don Beck and Chris Cowan's "Spiral Dynamics"
-> Susanne Cook-Greuter's "Leadership Development Framework"
-> Terri O' Fallon's independent work ... Terri is also one of the key staff in Pacific Integral, that runs the Generating Transformative Change (GTC) program that I have been a part of... (two of their alumni are based in Australia in New Zealand, so they formed South Pacific Integral to host the GTC in this region... I was part of the first cohort here).
-> Bill Tobert's "Action Inquiry"
and more...



Fourth.

Through my learnings and conversations, I have encountered that materialist theories of social justice begin to emerge at particular stages of the development of consciousness (of both individuals and collectives).



Fifth.

Through a few conversations with Terri O'Fallon, I have encountered the idea of Developmental Justice, which is the sense of justice which takes into account the "rights" of people to be "where they are at" developmentally... (i.e. strictly and dogmatically materialist conceptions of justice can themselves be theoretical and practical enactments of Developmental Injustice).



Sixth.

A consideration of the line... "We can measure the health of a nation by the way it treats its indigenous peoples."

(an additional consideration of how many Indigenous peoples (to my knowledge, of Canada, USA, Australia, and New Zealand, among many others for sure) hold the projections of the dominant national culture's hegemonic concerns around savagery, primitivism, "backwardness", and the associated pathologies of "early" cultural developmental levels... part of my interest in developmental justice, then, emerges from considering a few things:

1. These concepts of Indigenous people (as representations of "early" cultural developmental stages... e.g. hunter-gatherer, tribal, animistic, shamanic, etc.) are partially projections of dominant, modernist culture onto certain groups of people who claim Indigenous/Aboriginal heritage.
2. Some communities and individuals of Indigenous/Aboriginal heritage also introject these concepts, turning them into "self-concepts".
3. To the extent that there is, from a modernist perspective, a lived reality of "backwardness" among a disproportionately large number of people of Indigenous/Aboriginal heritage, then the health of a nation is partially contingent not only on how it socialises Indigenous/Aboriginal people (indeed, all people), into modernist ways of being/doing, but also on the extent to which it can graciously hold, the legitimacy of early developmental ways of being-in-the-world. 
4. How well do we nurture national cultures which hold and support spaces in which people can manifest these "early developmental" stages in healthy forms...?
5. This is true not just for indigenous people, but also for people who are of colonial/migrant heritage.
My friend Tim wisely points out that the ways that some people engage these "early developmental" stuff, in modernist, consumerist pathos, is through encouraging magical ideas of Santa Claus, the tooth fairy, etc., but that these are unfortunately, in the context of modernity, encapsulated within a socialisation into consumerist culture
6. That Indigenous/Aboriginal folks are in a unique cultural/ancestral position to be curators of some of these early developmental stages as linked to Land...
i.e. not just in ways that are of or from early developmental perspectives, but as people who hold the unique struggle of integrating (and iterating) considerations of "early" development in "later" developmental considerations of developmental justice within a national and global culture, in the service of the health of the whole spiral [of human developmental potential] (to use language from Beck and Cowan).



Seventh.

This means, also, considering the ways that Integral Theory, in its hegemonic Whiteness (and straightness, and male-dominance, and upper classness, and American-ness, and so on), may re-inscribe some of the same materialist blindspots of modernist injustice, unwittingly.

(in my observation, tending toward exclamations which reveal privilege and ignorance, rather than outright, malicious oppressive intent)



Eighth.

This also means observing my own involvement in Integral, as the normative means through which I articulate or formulate theories and practices of enacting developmental justice.

Healthy skepticism.
Embracing, including, and integrating the baby AND the bathwater.

Thursday, December 13, 2012

Butterflies and Cocoons


"When it comes to religion today, we tend to be long on butterflies and short on cocoons.
Somehow we're going to have to relearn that the deep things of God don't come suddenly"


- Sue Monk Kidd, from "When the Heart Waits"