Going into the Difficulty

[TLDR: This blog post is a long and involved exploration of the complexities around having published a book that includes a chapter with focus on someone who has since been identified as an abuser.

But perhaps you are simply here because you were looking forward to reading my book, Experiments in Listening, but then realised it contains mention of Chris Goode, and are having second thoughts. If so, here are some options for you!

If you want to read Experiments in Listening, but would feel triggered by reading the part that mentions Chris, then you have two options. There are a series of five zines that contain preludes from each of the chapters, and are a friendly option for encountering the main ideas without going into the fine detail. These are available (free) for print-at-home from the my website, and contain no mention of Chris or his work. Alternatively, if you want to read the book as a whole (thank you for your deep curiosity! please feel free to use discount code RLFANDF30) but you want to avoid the parts where Chris is mentioned, you could skip, or navigate with self-care, pages 169-219. ]

TW: brief mentions of suicide, child harms


This is a blog post that involves some detailed questioning around Chris Goode, his life and death, and my friendship with him. If you don’t care about those things, or if reading about those things will feel harmful to you, please don’t continue. This writing is part of my process of working through the complexities of the situation I find myself in, as someone who was friends with Chris for many years, and who worked with him on a project of my own fairly recently. I am sharing it in case it may be resonant and helpful for anyone else.

Specifically, this writing comes as a response to the following situation.

I have just published my first full-length book, called Experiments in Listening, which I’ve been working on one way or another since 2013. It was supposed to go to print in 2019, got delayed, had to change publishers, and I finally signed off on it at the end of April this year. The book details some of the work I did between 2013 and 2016 in which I began to feel into my own understanding of the relationships between listening, performance, and being. Specifically, it details (in a slightly academic mode) my own journey towards understanding the ways in which human encounters always take place across difference, and the possibilities that being-in-audience (as an explicitly attentive mode of being-with) might offer as a form of resistance to dominant voice-centered, presentational ways of being.

Between the time when I signed off on the manuscript, and the time of its publication, someone who plays a role in the final chapter of the book died by suicide. That person was Chris Goode.

For those who don’t know already, Chris killed himself after he was arrested on possession of child sexual exploitation material. Since then, more and more of the story has come out, and the story is one of harm and abuse - Chris was abusive in his working relationships, groomed young men, and was addicted to watching pornography in which young children were being harmed. He never repented for these behaviours, and in fact consistently tried to justify them under the banner of queerness and within his own performance works. Now that he is dead, and a fuller picture of the harms he caused is becoming known, some people in the industry are calling for all traces of his works to be destroyed, in order for him to have no legacy.

Chris was a friend of mine for about twenty years. In the fifth and final chapter of Experiments in Listening he is framed explicitly as a friend. Since the book was already at press when this news came out, there was nothing I could do to reframe this within the book itself. So this blog post is partly a working-through of what it means to publicily declare friendship with someone who is now known as an abuser. And it is partly a reckoning with this moment in time, asking the question: what does it mean to move forward from here?

In some ways, this is a follow up to the blog post I wrote when I first heard about Chris’ death. It is written with deep faith that we can move forward from here, together. But only if we centre care, love, and slowness, for ourselves and for others. And only if we are prepared to embrace the complexities and challenges of doing that work.

Experiments in Listening

The backstory is this.

In 2013, I had decided to abandon my career as a performance maker.* I don’t think I knew why exactly, but I understood that my relationship with something I had always thought would be core to my identity (making performance) was coming to an end. It was a long goodbye, and it felt deeply sad. But I knew it was important to trust the process that was unfolding.

Before I had a chance to figure out what my new life might look like outside the constraints of being a career artist, something extraordinary happened. Someone showed up. That person was Gerry Harris, a professor at Lancaster University who knew my work as a performance maker, and asked whether I would consider doing a PhD as a way of reflecting on the work I had made over the past 14 years, and as a way of processing my decision to leave.

I was very unsure about this invitation. I had already been to university as an undergraduate, and it struck me as the kind of place where I decidedly did not belong. I had also just walked away from one industry and wasn’t very interested in entering another. And yet, the idea of spending three years in dialogue with Gerry was appealing. And it was a funded position. So I applied. I was accepted, and got the funding. And I decided to trust that this was the path I was meant to follow.

It was a ‘practice as research’ PhD, which meant that I would need to do some of the thinking through performance practice rather than only through writing. Initially, this felt like it would be in conflict with my desire to move away from performance-making. But I soon realised that this could be an opportunity to examine the parameters of what I had been calling ‘performance’. And this is how Experiments in Listening (the name of a project, which I later borrowed for the title of the book) was born.

Experiments in Listening was a project that I had been dreaming in some form for years. It was about inviting two people who were friends to be together, in a state of listening, while being witnessed. It was about bringing together familiarity and strangeness. Today I would frame it as a project that was about bringing our internal and external selves into dialogue. The project relied on me working with performers who were experienced enough to be comfortable with ‘not-doing’ in front of an audience, and with whom I was comfortable enough to call ‘friend’. The three people I invited to work with me were Karen Christopher, Andy Smith, and Chris Goode.

The project involved me spending a week working with each of the three friends, a week in which we attempted to do nothing more than be attentive – to each other, to the room, to what might arise when we were not prescribing it. Alongside us each time was a filmmaker, who was present in the room, doing their own listening with a camera. Later, I held a series of sharings during which audiences brought their own listening to the three films that had been made in those rooms. Each dialogue had a different filmmaker, and for the dialogue with Chris, Griffyn Gilligan (who Chris and I had at the time just recently met, but would go on to become Chris’ husband) was the filmmaker.

*

Skip ahead. On the night of my PhD viva, I held a screening of the three Experiments in Listening films, for my examiners and a public audience. In that audience was someone who would carry me through the following years, someone who would later become part of my chosen family. At that time, we had only recently met, and were about to begin a creative mentoring relationship.

Some days after the screening, we had our first mentoring session together. That day, this person asked me why I had chosen not to work with any people of colour for Experiments in Listening. I will never forget that moment. I was stopped in my tracks. I fumbled around for an answer. I said that it was because I didn’t have any friends who are also performance-makers and people of colour and who would be the right fit for this project, and this was because I had grown up inside a performance-making scene that was very white. To some extent, it was true. But another answer to this same question was: because it didn’t even occur to me that this would be important. The truth that finally came into view for me in that moment was that, although I had been interrogating identity politics at surface level through my work for many years, I had never taken the time or had the courage to work through my own internalised racism. In the years that followed, I began this work. It is ongoing and will last a lifetime.

So why mention this here? Because this story, the story of how I came to confront my own internalised racism, and began to reorient my world, is part of the story of Experiments in Listening and part of the story of my friendship with Chris.

During those week-long dialogues, during the screenings, and during the writing of the book, I was very slowly starting to understand the ways in which my lack of internal rigour had led to default worlds around me. I started to understand the extent to which it was structural racism that forced me to leave the theatre/performance industry. And I started to realise, too, that I have the capacity to create the worlds I live within.


Chapter Five of the book, the chapter that is about Experiments in Listening, begins with the following paragraph:

“[I]f listening, as I am proposing it, is a gathering of bodies and of attention, then it seems at best inadequate and at worst dangerous for that gathering to happen without an acknowledgment of the histories and geographies that have shaped those bodies and their capacity for attentiveness. […]

The main players in this chapter—Karen Christopher, Chris Goode, and Andy Smith—have all already appeared as writers in previous chapters, where, slightly uncomfortably but according to academic convention, I have referred to them by their last names. In this chapter, they come back on a first-name basis, as performers and friends. Somewhere in here, among the signs ‘friend’ and ‘writer’ and ‘artist’ and ‘audience’, are human beings with complex identities and emotions, meeting each other in many contexts, across time, and in different places. In this chapter, I ask what happens when we meet each other as complex beings in the context of performance.”

This final chapter of the book includes the beginnings of my realisation that my relationship with Chris could never be reciprocal until we both did the work of addressing the ways in which structural inequities manifest through our bodies.

In June 2019, just under two years before Chris ended his life, we had an email exchange, initiated by Chris, in which I invited us to re-examine default behaviours within our friendship. As part of this exchange, I wrote:

“I have become aware (in part through the project of our dialogue during Experiments in Listening, or rather the beautiful film that Griffyn made) that our relationship has been one in which I bring myself to you, and enter into your world. I have never succeeded in bringing my full self to that relationship. This is on both of us, and I do not expect you to take sole responsibility. I feel we have both inhabited patterns of behaviour that played with power in ways I am no longer prepared to do. […] I am trying to change those patterns.”

I invited Chris to join me in creating a new chapter of our friendship. Chris didn’t tell me directly that he was not prepared to do this work. He indicated that he had heard me, and that we were moving forward with respect and care for each other. I later found out that he had blocked me on twitter, and was spreading false information about me. It has become clear that this was part of a bigger pattern in which Chris was being asked to reckon with his relationship to power and privilege, and was not prepared to, or was not ready to, or was not able to do that work.

I am not sharing this with you in order to demonstrate that I was or am morally superior to Chris, or anyone. These kinds of comparisons feel reductive, and dangerous. I am in a process that I know will last a lifetime, and my own understanding of how to confront these truths is boundaried, as we all are, by my own lived experiences. What I am trying to do is point towards what feels like an important piece of the puzzle – which is that this work happens somewhere between inside and outside. It happens between us, but it also happens inside of us. And those things are not separate.

I draw a line between this story and the worlds within which it occurs. Which means that I am part of the story too. It is our story. They are our worlds. And we are the ones who make them real.

What happens now?

There has been a strong call from some people in the UK theatre industry to destroy all evidence that Chris existed, to write him out of (theatre-making) history. I understand where this comes from, and feel supportive of the need to re-examine and re-write at both a personal and systemic level. I also fully recognise the importance of showing up for survivors in exactly the ways they need. At the same time, I have a fear that these calls for destruction might be where the work of this moment ends, leading us from one dangerous archetype (the figure of the lone genius) to another (the figure of the villain, who can be eradicated, thus eradicating harm from our community). And so this blog post, as well as being specifically about the situation I find myself in relating to my book, is also a call for complexity.

I heard the news about Chris’ death in the same moment that other excavations were happening, literally revealing bodily evidence of the many years of child abuse and genocide that have occurred on the lands that are colonially known as Canada. Evidence of histories that have largely been ignored, in spite of repeated reports and campaigns for justice. The two stories arrived in proximity, and they felt utterly connected. They are both stories about harms that were happening and continue to happen within structures that are upheld by white supremacy. They are stories about what we choose to ignore. And they are stories about the tightly-wound relationships between power, hero-worshipping, and violence. These stories are not in the past. We can’t eradicate them by destroying the evidence that they existed. Our work now is to transform those narratives, and part of that work lies inside us. In recognising our own attachments to those narratives, in recognising that we are part of the stories we tell.

Grappling with my own internalised racism, and other attachments to privilege, is at once the most challenging and transformative work I have ever done. I feel like I am late in starting this work, and I am clumsy as I try to work out what’s needed. It is often devastating, rendering me slow as I work through shame or grief, and it is most certainly not linear. Somedays, it feels hard to justify this internal work, in a world that demands evidence of productivity, in a world that demands immediate evidence that justice is being served. But ever since Chris died, I have felt more certain than ever that this work is important. That it is the most important work we can do.

My book exists without acknowledgment of the series of events that would follow its printing. It occupies an awkward place in this narrative, a kind of strange innocence, of words written before things were known. But the truth is that all of us who knew Chris knew that he played with power. We knew that he was fascinated by harm. Arguably, anyone who was close with Chris for any length of time felt his capacity for harm, and held it together with the knowledge that he also had a capacity for great tenderness.

In the book, describing a scene in the film that Griffyn made, I write:

“In my recollection of this dialogue, Chris and I were caring, careful, and vulnerable, meeting each other on equal terms. Griffyn’s film reveals to me something that I already know in theory, but that is much harder to grasp in practice, which is that—while we might be caring, careful, and vulnerable—we never meet on equal terms, and this must be the starting point for any dialogue.”

I, like many people, spent years filtering out, forgiving, or stepping away from the more problematic moments in my friendship with Chris. This was only possible because I was living and making work inside a system that itself was built through violence, erasure, and extreme gaslighting. Slowly, because slowly is the only way to do this work, I am learning to feel and to notice these patterns in all of my relationships, and to become braver in taking actions to reorient them.

I am not trying to suggest that everyone’s work looks the same as mine. Of course it doesn’t. The whole point of this work is to recognise that we are all implicated differently in these networks of power, violence, and abuse. The call I am making is to recognise the seemingly quiet and internal work of learning to feel again, of listening to self, as part of our collective movement towards freedom. It is complex, confusing, and non-linear. It can feel slow, and it can feel invisible. It is sometimes painful, sometimes impossible, and sometimes, at moments, joyful. It happens at once within and between us. This, I believe, is how change happens.



* I later realised that what I was abandoning was not performance-making or ‘being an artist’ but the uphill struggle of trying to make a career within an industry that upheld patriarchal, capitalist, colonialist values. Abandoning the idea of ‘career’ (i.e. a damaging fiction of linear progression) was the best thing I have ever done, and it eventually left me feeling more like an artist than ever before.

Reading list (some things that inspire me in this work)

We Will not Cancel Us by adrienne maree brown

Living on Stolen Land by Ambelin Kwaymullina

As We Have Always Done (and everything) by Leanne Betasamosake Simpson

Leaving Evidence blog by Mia Mingus  

Catching Teller Crow by Ambelin Kwaymullina and Ezekiel Kwaymullina

Love and Rage by Lama Rod Owens

also:

(on this blog) 'Breaking Open: the work of listening in a racist world'

Arriving and arriving and arriving

As you will likely know, I have spent the past five years in movement. First a move from London to Sydney with my partner, where we have lived on the unceded lands of the Gadigal people for what was initially supposed to be three years and has now extended into an indefinite time. Then in late 2018 I took the most beautiful opportunity to work with Luis Carlos Sotelo Castro helping set up the Acts of Listening Lab at Concordia University on the unceded lands of the Kanien’kehá:ka Nation in Tiohtià:ke/Montréal – a position that should have lasted two years but which I have (with deep regret) left early due to the pandemic. During the time I was working there, I travelled back and forth across the world more than once a year in order to sustain both my job and my relationship with my partner. Now I find myself suddenly back in Sydney; the apartment I have been calling home sitting empty in Montreal; my (elderly) parents and sister in England; extensive blood family in India; chosen family all over the world. I have been living globally, dropping into communities and friendships, writing letters and sending voicelets, but never staying long enough on the ground to be counted (on). All of this movement that so many of us took for granted has come to a sudden standstill. In my last blog post, I reflected a little on the feelings of pain and confrontation that change (actual, real change, as opposed to the kind of change I can experience without destabilising my own privilege or comfort) brings. This one feels more personal – a reflection on my own journey – a document of what that kind of once carefree movement across borders has felt like in these past months – and a record of the kindnesses and questions I have encountered along the way. It’s a long read, I imagine only of interest to friends who care to know how I’ve been going. If you’re up for the long read right now, thank you for your companionship.

1. Tiohtià:ke/Montréal

Mid-March. I’m in my beautiful sublet in Montreal, on the 21st floor, overlooking the city. My university has closed. All my work for this year has been cancelled. I understand that staying isolated is an act of love that I have the luxury to perform, so I go into my own early lockdown, avoiding any time in other people’s homes, and only going out when absolutely necessary, washing hands frequently and using rubbing alcohol to wipe down door handles and occasional grocery purchases. I already hate this social distancing, and I notice how much I appreciate the looks. Over the next two weeks I notice more and more human connection. People smiling under masks, so their smile is visible in their eyes. People leaving distance between us as we pass, but nodding, as if to say: yes, we are doing this for each other.

When the isolation began, I left a note for my elderly neighbours on either side, asking them to contact me if they needed anything, and offering to do groceries. It feels like we often make these kinds of gestures, but they are rarely followed up. This time, it’s different. We have to reach out. The lady next door calls me. She speaks french. I understand just enough to be able to communicate. She tells me that she is well but she is over seventy and has been advised to stay home. She asks how we would do it if I were to get groceries for her. We come up with a system. A few days later, she calls again to say it’s time.  She leaves empty shopping bags, a detailed shopping list in careful handwriting, and some money in an envelope outside my door, knocking loudly before returning to her apartment. I go down and buy things for her from three different shops in our building. I wear a mask. I am careful with touching things. I wipe them down before leaving them outside her door, giving a knock, and walking away. She calls out, “Merci beaucoup.” She phones later to thank me for my kindness. It doesn’t feel like kindness. It feels like reciprocity. Reciprocity is what I have long been hungry for.

I make hot chocolate and cake for a small group of people who are living on the streets very near my home. I figure they must be suffering because of the social distancing. I am very careful not to touch anything or breathe on anything while I bake, and hand over the goods in a paper bag while wearing winter gloves. They are full of joy. I am full of joy. We chat a little, at a distance. I learn that one of them is called Lola. During this time as most of us have looked more and more harried and worried, this small group of people has continued smiling every day. I am so grateful for their smiles, and wish I had made friends with them earlier in my time living here. What is it that stops us from being kind to each other, or even noticing each other? The learnt behaviours of capitalism become easier to notice and more noticably absurd to me during this time.

Over these two weeks, the pandemic is declared, and things start changing swiftly around the world. It suddenly feels like nothing is a given. I feel into both the challenge and the possibility of this. I wonder about whether I should try and return home to Sydney, to be with my partner. I flip and flop in my decision, one day to the next. I am safe in Montreal. I have a beautiful apartment, and a good network of friends and chosen family who will take care of each other. I am seen and held. It doesn’t make sense to travel during a pandemic. I want to stay. And I also know that in wanting to stay I am holding on to a life that no longer exists.

At a certain point I realise that no one can make this decision for me. There is something profoundly liberating about this. I am used to looking over at someone else to check whether I am doing right or wrong, good or bad. And now? Suddenly there is no validation of right or wrong that comes from outside, because nobody knows, and nobody is even pretending to know. There is only a decision that I have to make and that I have to live with. So many of these decisions being made every day by each of us. Heart choices, hard choices that will determine whether we get to be with loved ones when they die.

I wait, feeling into the decision.

I know it will come.

And then, against many odds, I decide to leave.



2. Travel



There is a narrative that starts to surface around this time: go home. It is a simple narrative, and a simplifying narrative. It says that everyone should return home. And for some people, it is more or less clear what this means. For some people, it is an easy decision. Home = one place. Family = one unit, or one location, or one person. For some people, home = safety or security, and returning is an option. For others, not. Many people tell me it would make them happy to know that I am with my partner during this time. I know that it will make me happy to be with my partner, and that I will be safe there. But I am deeply resistant to the idea that this is the only narrative, or even the most important narrative of this moment. I have many loves, many lives, many homes. Perhaps more importantly I feel that now, more than ever, we must connect with a wider sense of what it means to be family. I want to use this moment to open up, not to close down.

In spite of this, I decide to leave, and to travel during the pandemic, knowing that it might be a very long time before this kind of choice is available to me if I stay. I leave knowing that I cannot come back, that Canada has closed its borders, and so has Australia. It is a one way decision. I have spent the past years moving between worlds. I strongly believe that this is a role I have been born into – queerness fluidity not-knowing and inbetweenness are written into me at a very deep level. But I also know that flying in an aeroplane is not the only way to move between worlds.

In the moment I make my decision to leave, I understand that everything I need is within me. I am keenly aware of my privilege as I spend $2,000 on a one-way ticket to a country in which I have ‘permanent residency’ on unceded lands. I feel something that I have been lucky enough to experience only a few times in my life: that my movement is shaped by government policy, and my freedom is held in place by the decisions made at borders. And at the same time, something shifts inside me as I accept this reality. I trust something deeper, a history that is longer than those borders or governments, and therefore both longer and wider than my life.

At 7.15am on the morning of my scheduled (evening) departure, I check my flight status online, and find out that my flight has been cancelled and I have been rebooked onto a flight that leaves at 8am. I knew this might happen. We have moved into a world where getting a notification of a change or cancellation is rare. Airlines are barely functioning. I throw my clothes on, call a taxi, and head straight to the airport. I am lucky there are still taxis operating in Montreal. I am lucky that there are still just enough flights that Air Canada can re-route me that day. And then, without any goodbyes, I am on my way to Sydney, via Toronto and Vancouver, unshowered, hungry, my belongings shoved into all the vessels I could appropriate into suitcases on short notice. I contact friends and ask them if they can clean up after me. I left my apartment with dirty dishes in the sink, a half-eaten meal in the fridge, my bedclothes in dissaray from my rushed departure. Many of my belongings are still in Montreal, but belongings feel secondary in this moment. As I struggle through airports over the next 30 hours, lugging a cheap midi keyboard under my arm and three other bags full of stuff, I understand that being in this body is the only thing that matters. I feel like a human being, part of a species, struggling to survive, riding out this collapse that we have made and trying to learn how to plant seeds for a simpler and wiser future.

I spend hours waiting in Toronto airport, and then again in Vancouver airport. Both airports feel like an embrace between chaos and emptiness. There are no trolleys, barely any people, and almost all the shops are shut. Airport staff, airline staff, and travellers are dotted around in various levels of protective gear. A few people seem to have no protection at all, going about their business, gathering in groups, as if there were no pandemic. Many people, myself included, wear disposible gloves and masks. I see one person in a full body suit, with gloves, mask, and goggles. I am wearing a tailored suit and a silk shirt. I usually wear super comfy clothes when travelling long distance. But this time I wanted to feel glamorous. Glamour as armour, as safety, a talisman to get me safely across the world one last time.

During the flight, they don’t serve any drinks apart from bottled water, which is limited to two tiny bottles per person. There are no meal services on the short flights, and on the sixteen-hour flight they bring around pre-packed food, once in the evening, once in the morning. There are no ‘special meals’. When one of the crew members realises that I cannot eat the prepackaged meal they have brought around, he sends half of his meal to my seat, so that I have something to eat. I am bowled over by this gesture. Some of the crew members are, understandably, snappy and rude, their fear and exhaustion seeping through. But in this moment this person chooses to be compassionate and I am flooded with gratitude at his kindness. What used to be a transactional relationship within a service economy suddenly feels as if it has transformed into a reciprocal one. Throughout my experience of travelling during the pandemic, I have encountered people who are choosing this as a moment of connection and compassion. Every time it happens, I notice how much it changes me, how it feels like it changes everything.



3. Quarantine

It was two days before leaving that I found out the Australian Government was going to make everyone arriving into the country quarantine for 14 days in “hotels or other accommodation”. I almost lost my nerve. The Australian Government is known for its xenophobia and racism. It sounded terrifying. And when we walked off the plane, and I saw the people from first class and business class, I smiled to myself thinking: we’re all in this together, even the people who travelled first class. I have to say this brought me some joy. It was only later that I realised this was going to work in my favour. Later I realised that because we were all citizens and permanent residents, we would be treated well, and because this ‘we’ included those who have power, financial or otherwise, we would be treated really well.

The hotel I am housed in is a four star hotel – somewhere I would never be able to afford to stay in for two weeks on my own terms. There is a desk, there are two double beds, there is a beautiful bathroom with a bath and a shower. For two weeks, we are served food three times a day, and can order snacks from the hotel menu. We are given fresh towels and toiletries every two days, and fresh sheets once a week. I can call the hotel staff at any time to make a request or ask a question. After a few days, they even introduce a grocery service, so that families can order extra provisions. At the same time, populations of less importance to the government – refugees, prisoners, the homeless – are denied safe accomodation.

During this time, people keep asking me if I’m okay – I mean, friends ask, but also mental health nurses call to check on me, the Red Cross calls twice, and medical staff call every day to see if I have any symptoms. One day, I get into a short conversation with the nurse who has called. I tell her I am grateful for the work she is doing, the work they are all doing to look after us. She says that my kind words have made her day, and that I am the only person who has said something positive to her about the work they are doing. I hear on the news and from friends that some people are complaining about ‘prison-like’ conditions in the quarantine hotels because we are not allowed to leave our rooms. I find their phrasing deeply offensive at a time when prisoners are at such high risk of contracting the virus. I dream about a world in which people in prison and others who are in vulnerable situations receive the same treatment as I am receiving. I have a deep hope that all those people who are struggling with their quarantine hotel experience will dedicate their post-quarantine life to prison reform.

I come to treasure the interactions I have with staff at the hotel, and even with the police. None  of these are face to face. Each of our meals comes in a paper bag, and every night someone writes a joke or little message by hand on the bag that houses our dinner. This detail is amazing to me – in the middle of a pandemic, within a police operated quarantine, someone thought this was important. I start drawing little pictures and leaving them out with my dinner bag when I have finished to say thank you. About halfway through my stay, I receive a note form the police:

Near the end of my stay, I get a knock on the door, and am surprised to find that when I open it there are two people standing outside. Usually there is a knock and when I open the door there is food or towels. This time, two male-presenting white-passing Aussie policemen greet me and say they are doing a room check. They take my name, and my phone number, and then they leave. They are friendly and formal. I find myself longing to keep them there, to make some kind of chat that would mean we would stand around and banter for a while. But I am totally lacking the language of banter that would be appropriate for this situation. I hear others further down the corridor laughing. I close the door and feel a deep longing. Later, it strikes me that I am craving human to human connection. It doesn’t matter who the people are. I never thought I would feel fondly towards the police, or that they would thank me for my drawings. This is an upside-down state for me. It is an indication that things are not as normal, and that what was assumed can be un-assumed. Confusing as they are, these are the moments when I have felt grounded in all of this: the moments when I remember and live into the fact that care and compassion are all that we have.



4. (always) Arriving














Back in my apartment in Sydney. I wake every morning and wonder if I will be arrived yet. This question about arriving is a luxury. I have enough time and space in my life right now to notice that I am often expecting to wake into my childhood bed these days, that I don’t know which season comes next, that the timelines in my life are jumbled around. I know that these are ways in which my body is processing this moment with its own intelligence.

I have often written or spoken about things like kindness and difficulty, care and (dis)ease, or reciprocity. Now I come back to them as urgent matters. I feel more than ever that we need to re-learn for ourselves how to both give and receive, separate from desire or shame or guilt or greed. How to develop the skills to do this without going into a mode of protection and separation from each other. We are not our money, our love, our resources. But we have a choice to allow those to flow or not flow.

Turning this world upside down, in the small ways, can bring about change. Or rather, turning this world upside down allows for change. We can make that change ourselves, in small ways, amending the systems that used to be default in our own behaviours. I can make friends with my neighbours, inside and outside the building where I live. I can cook for someone who does not have that skill or cannot find the energy. I can ask my friends to be there for me. This is the work of reciprocity. It is complex, and it is simple.

Now I am trying to do the work of not returning, not going back into old patterns.

Now I am trying to feel my way into what reciprocity looks like at a deeper level.

Now I am looking for allies who are ready to turn things around, or are already doing this work.

Now I realise that the work of arriving and arriving and arriving I’ve been doing over these years was preparation for this moment of collapse. I am not ready, and maybe that is the point.

Becoming and becoming and becoming.




*

with heartfelt thanks to CIFAS, who have supported me during this time without need for any outcome, allowing me time and space to process and write and develop the work of reciprocity

Today everything changes

These words will resonate so differently, even in a week.
But here are some thoughts, from where I am right now,
March 21st, a marker of Spring or Autumn in some places.
2020, a marker of change on this planet.
Tiohtià:ke/Montréal.
Alone in my apartment.
Falling through uncertainty.

I’ll tell you a secret, something I’ve always been a bit ashamed of. When things fall apart, when projects fail, or plans – even big ones – fall through, a small part of me rises up. I feel excited by change, by the possibiltiies of thinking wider, of cancelling and finding another route at another time, of starting all over again. I think of myself as a good leader in these moments because even as I might feel challenged, I love feeling new futures emerge.

But this time, none of that. Just grief for a whole life lost. My plans this year – to deliver listening workshops and a beautiful symposium, to celebrate my dad’s 80th birthday, to be with my family who live in other countries – all cancelled. Universities closing. Borders closing. Everything closing. I am left with some hard decisions about whether I can or should travel to be with loved ones. And even harder decisions to come.

When the wildfires raged earlier this year where I and others were living, I thought: this is a time of reckoning. I wrote the last blog post in response to that moment, while wondering how to write from what felt like the end of a world. At that time, I felt a certain horror that everything kept functioning while the world was on fire. But now I feel the horror of everything shutting down and breaking apart. It is this, it turns out, this virus moving very much like wildfire, that provides the moment of reckoning. And I am not ready for how much that reckoning hurts.

I have a cardboard sign I made for the climate march in Montreal last year. It says, "Today everything changes." It was the first sign I ever made for a rally. I felt so proud of it. I brought it with me to a performance I did that night, and then I brought it home with me. Ever since, I have looked at it and it has looked at me. A kind of daily impasse has developed. I started to wonder what it even meant.

But now everything has changed.

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What I haven’t done yet is slowed down enough to really feel the changing rhythms of this city, this mountain, to know these birds. What I haven’t done, in a long time, is felt into the rhythms of sleeping and waking without electronic input. What I haven’t done is let go of my plans. Instead, I have postponed them in my mind, to carry on with later.

Some plans will get postponed.

Some plans will get postponed indefinitely.

I want to remember that I have everything I need inside me, now and always – not in a ‘my’ and ‘mine’ kind of way, but in the sense that we are universes. In the sense that looking in is already also looking out, if we let it be that way. In the sense that my inside is not separate from the world. And the world as I have known and lived it is breaking open.

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Many years ago my friend Mark Trezona gave me a pack of cards he had made. They were designed to help with running an Action Learning Set. Each had an open question that would help someone think through a problem they were confronting in their lives. I still use this pack, and treasure it. But there are two questions from the pack that I carry inside me:

What is the most radical thing you could do?

and

What is the simplest thing you could do?*

I wrote in my last blog post that I have been struggling to argue for listening in a world that needs action. I was thinking about the way that listening in a time of urgency sometimes feels inadequate or even silly. And I still feel it. I feel the trace of those thoughts in here, in this moment. But I also feel something different. I feel that listening is here, right here, urgently and proudly present in this moment. It’s not feeling ashamed any more in the face of activism. Today listening and being are activism. This moment, a deep acknowledgment that we are intricately bound whether we like it or not. That my touch, my breath itself, affect your breath, your capacity to live. The virus and its behaviours are us.

As we find ourselves in global shutdown, breakdown, and the sorrows that come with this collapse, I have a feeling that we must do what is at once simplest and most radical. Take to the roots. Know or trust that we have what we need within us. And listen in before we move forward.




*the actual questions are: ‘What is the most radical thing you could do to get what you want?’ and ‘What is the simplest useful thing you could do?’ but they have simplified in my head

Listening / in a time of urgency

It seems I have a tradition here of first signalling another blog post that has inspired me to finally sit down and write this one. Today it is ‘umb’ by So Mayer, which – exactly one month ago – flung me into the present moment, reminding me that writing doesn’t have to go somewhere else, be something else. That it can sit right in what is happening, even when that thing is unspeakable, hard to process, unprecedented, and beyond the confines of this language system I have found myself bound to.

So’s words don’t try to move beyond a state of (n)umbness, but to speak from it. The deep strong resonances their words create in my body remind me that the work I am constantly trying to make happen in the world is about just this: providing places and times when humans can come together and do nothing, move nothing forward. Places and times when we can be together without the need to also demonstrate that we are here.

It’s quite hard to say that out loud with conviction. The debate about whether this listening-gathering work I do has any worth goes around and around inside my head, as well as passing between me and brilliant others who do activist work that allies listening with politics in more obvious ways than mine. As I write it, now and every time, I feel ‘need for change’ and ‘need for action’ telling me that I should be doing something different. How can I argue that we should stay still, be together, without action, in a moment like this? The world is quite literally on fire.

“Numb. Succumb. A rhyme lost and found in the silence of an excrescent letter is a signal alerting us to be ready. To hold, open, even as we are going under. To let things echo in the hollow, however uncomfortable and hard – in their complexity, in their absoluteness, in their burden – to speak or to keep silent.

In that strange, held, horrible, heart-hollowing moment between the two – speech and silence – in the –umb, is listening.”

– So Mayer, umb

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The blog post I began writing back in September was about a series of events I recently organised called Listening Tables – gatherings in which a group of up to 25 people collectively performs an act of reorientation, attempting to meet across difference from a place of listening, while taking on roles that we are not usually assigned within mainstream culture. In other words, an attempt to literally change who gets a seat at the table, who is heard, and how listening happens.

In a document about the project, I describe it as follows.

Each event will take place in two halves:

From 5-6.30pm ten people will drop into a place of listening, and collectively discover the words that arise from there. This is the Listening Table. Audience members who are not taking part in the Listening Table will have the opportunity to listen in via headphones from another room.

From 6.30-8pm we will enjoy a more convivial gathering in which everyone will be invited into a loosely held discussion together, shaped by the Listening Table that has just taken place.

It sounds joyful, doesn’t it? That’s the betrayal of words. The reality of doing this work is that it feels like a full body encounter with the stuckness, stubborness, and confrontedness of human beings facing change. It is some of the most complicated and challenging work I have ever done.

As anyone who has attended a workshop or gathering that I’ve organised in the past few years knows, I like to hold space by proposing parameters that challenge default modes of communicating. Something like:

No questions.
Silence and speaking are equally valid.
Anything is welcome.
Challenge your usual behaviours, so that those who are usually heard might find this a place in which to practise listening, and those who are usually unable to come to voice might find enough time and space to be able to speak.

These parameters always provoke relief/revelation and frustration in equal measure. By which I mean that there are always people who are frustrated by the amount of silence, who find the invitation to listen constraining, challenging, even violent; and there are always people who find the very same invitation a huge relief, a revelation. I have repeatedly been surprised that the ways in which people interpret the invitation fall so clearly down race lines: those who are used to being heard tend to find the experience silencing and oppressive, and are often the people in the room who pass as white and/or male; those who are used to not being heard are more likely to find it generous, and generative, even tender.

(image from Listening Table I)

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Listening has a relationship with the unspoken, of course. When a room of people are collectively attempting to listen, there will be things that are not spoken that might otherwise have been voiced. And there will be things that are unspoken because they cannot yet be voiced. And there will be silencing, of self, perhaps, or coming to voice. And these things will be felt in bodies with histories, threaded through with the resonances of other stories from other lives, before and after, and alongside: our peers, mentors, parents, siblings, lovers, friends, and those who we pass by without realising that they changed our lives.

And yet, the invitation to listen is not an invitation to keep things unspoken. For me, it is actually quite the contrary. When we attempt to listen, we can more clearly perceive the extent of what is not heard, what is not said, and how speaking or declaring are only a part of what we share, navigate, and negotiate together with other humans. The things that are unspoken sit in the room with us. In the act of sharing listening, a slower, more careful dialogue unfolds. Unless it is arrested.


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Listening  Safety  Whiteness.

Already those three words, sitting next to each other, do so much work. And that work lands differently in our different bodies. What is obvious in seeing those three words together changes as they are read by different eyes or heard by different ears.


When I say that I’ve been surprised that people’s behaviours so often fall along race lines, perhaps what I mean is that I’m disappointed at the impossibility of the task. My goal is not to reorient spaces that usually centre whiteness. My goal is to do the listening work that becomes possible having performed this reorientation. But it is hard not to get stuck reeling at the apparent enormity of the first task. The reorientation is such a surprise for some that they seem to experience a strong sense of vertigo. In response to this sensation, they hold on tight. And it is hard, if not impossible, to hold on tight and listen.


I want to keep safe those who are usually harmed within those spaces.

:
:

But I also want to let go of the illusion that I can keep anyone safe.


During the time that I've been running Listening Tables, I have come back to those three words again and again. I've been forced to feel the violences that run through a room when they are brought into proximity. And I've been forced to confront my own limits, my own desires, my own hurt.


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I’ve been living and working on the unceded lands of the Gadigal people these past few months, witnessing the immense fires that are beyond my human understanding (though caused by human, and specifically colonial, actions) growing and changing every day. I have been trying to sit with the idea that there is no going 'back to normal'. That we are not okay, we are not okay, we are not okay. How is it possible to sit with these feelings without turning completely inwards with despair?


There have been moments in the last few months when I’ve felt shattered by these Listening Tables, and wondered whether I have the capacity to continue this work. You might think that the recent wildfires would have me turn my back on this kind of thing in favour of something more on the ground. It certainly feels strange to prioritise sitting in a quiet room, listening for what might arise between a group of strangers, while the world ends violently around us. But as it turns out, I believe in this work. I believe that, if nothing else, it reveals the underlying structures that hold us – the histories and ignorances that we would like to think belong in other bodies, somewhere out there. And it asks us to to sit with those feelings, knowing that we are not okay, together.

Trusting that the change will come wider and longer with this pause.

(Too many notes) on: armouring, smiling, wonder, killjoys, applause, racism, and reciprocity

This is pretty much a mash up of blog posts I’ve drafted and never finished over the last couple of years. Today, I decide they are all related. Today I publish this mix of thoughts, all joined up without the lines, differently dated and side by side. Find what calls to you. Make your own lines and alliances. Jump in and out. Or don’t. I share them for my own pleasure, and warmly invite you to be alongside me if it’s our moment.


smiling [06/19]

I was watching back some video of myself the other day. This is not something I usually do. The video was of me describing something quite painful, an incident that was bound up in racism. I was watching it back – listening, in fact – in order to transcribe my own words to help me prepare for a talk I was about to give. I was transcribing my words in order to understand something of my own language around resistance, invisibility, voicelessness, and my own shadows. But what I noticed most of all as I transcribed this video is that I smile throughout. Not a small smile, but a broad all-teeth smile. The one people often compliment me on. When I look back at it, I see that smile as a grimace, and as armour. It says: here I am, all armour in position, ready to make myself vulnerable at your pleasure. It’s disturbing. Always smiling, always ready to be in agreement, always the one to find a solution, never wanting to disrupt too much. The smile, I realised, is a pre-emptive way of being in the world. It foresees rejection, fear, and difficulty, and is underlined by shame. It offers protection. It says: I am already smiling, so how can you harm me? But the harm is already done.  Smile!


applause [12/17]

I’ve always found the applause of theatre audiences troubling. I dutifully applaude at the end of most shows, but somewhere in me I have always had a feeling that I was in trouble. What I mean by this is that when I have seen a really powerful show, and then it ends, I often don’t feel like applauding, so when I applaude I am following along with a convention that feels fundamentally wrong in that moment. I’m troubled by the idea of what that applause does, and what it stands for. My experience is always that applause comes thick and fast, often moments before a show has finished or a final echo of sound has finished resonating. It is as if audience members want to leave the experience behind as quickly as possible – closing the door on whatever has been opened during the performance, to return to a more familiar terrain. The applause is closely followed by questions about what we all feel about the show we’ve seen. Did you like it? What did you think of it? Did we have a good time?

A few months ago, I was lucky enough to be in the audience for Hannah Gadsby’s show Nanette.* The show was everything I have read about it – funny, devastating, painful, honest. And like many people, I would describe it as one of the best shows I have ever seen. But it also brought something into focus for me, about what it means to be in audience and how that is related to being alive in the world with other people. Because at the end of the show, after a standing ovation and two short bows, many of us in tears, Hannah Gadsby left the stage, and the house lights went up and everyone filed out of the theatre. And it kind of broke my heart that it felt possible for us to walk out of the theatre like that, to move back into sociality so easily, with a round of applause. Because the show had been difficult and confronting, and had opened up something so rare that I feel like it’s barely touched on in most shows I have seen.

And yes it was all the stuff before that led up to this moment, but I realised that this moment always breaks my heart a little. When we sit together and share something like that, something that is about what happens when we are in a theatre, and that is simultaneously about what happens when we look at each other in the world - how we make stories about ourselves and about others, how we cause violence to each other, how we are capable of so much more - when we see something like that, and then we are left sitting in a room together, I want to know that we are not capable of simply walking back out into our lives. I want to know that something like that changes us, that it allows us to relate to each other differently, that maybe we take a moment to see whether another person is okay. I want to know that we could sit together quietly before dispersing.

It told me so much about how we function as a society inside late capitalism [& the performance I saw was at the Sydney Opera House, fully resonant with a violent colonial present] that I had been sitting in a room with hundreds of people, and we had shared an incredibly moving experience, and many of us were weeping, and yet when the house lights went up most people went to the bar and made chat with the people they already knew, or travelled home. Transaction completed. There was no room for processing, no room for quietness or difficulty or awkwardness, no room for messiness, no room for being together across difference. It was almost as if the being together had never happened.

* I saw Nanette in the theatre, not in its later Netflix version, and I think these are fundamentally different experiences


wonder [10/17]

A few weeks ago I began a Feminist Killjoys Reading Group on Darug land in Western Sydney. Each day we read a blog post from Sara Ahmed’s feministkilljoys.com and we talked about our own experiences in relation to the ideas in that blog post. On the second day, I introduced the blog post called ‘Feminist Wonder’. In it, Ahmed writes about wonder as something that is not necessarily outside history, or outside politics, but that brings historicity into view as something made. Something that has been made and can therefore be unmade. And then she writes about shattering:

“I am interested in how consciousness of gender (say, as a way of directing human traffic) can be a world consciousness that can leave us shattered. But shattering is also what enables us to become alive to possibility. Becoming feminist can inject life into a world by allowing you to recognise not only that things acquire shape over time, but that this shape is not necessary or inevitable; that possibilities are not always lost, even when we have given them up.”

This is what it felt like to me at the end of Hannah Gadsby’s show, like the world had been exposed as made, in a moment of both horror and wonder. The show left me feeling shattered. I think this is a good word for it. And the theatre, as I have known it, is one of the places where I can experience this shattering feeling without needing to put myself back together too soon. A world made and unmade. Constructed through wonder. In the company of others.

And I ask myself: what do you need in order to feel safe enough to become shattered?


racism [07/18]

I recently published something that had at its centre my own experience of a racist incident. An incident that you might call ‘mildly racist’. But these are the ones that pull at my guts, and I have come to believe that while some racism can cause more immediate harm than other forms of racism, the idea that some racism might be ‘mild’ is misleading. The small things are perhaps the most poisonous. It is in the detail that the violence is rooted.

But you see the thing is that when I published this something, I knew the fallout would be too great, and I left it out. I left the word ‘racist’ out of the writing. Cowardly? Maybe. … because… it was minor / I did not want to deal with the consequences of calling this person out / my life has been filled with these minor incidents of eradication / they seem not worth telling. I am, finally, able to feel them deeply, but I have no idea what to do with them. They do not feel like they warrant attention from a wider audience. And yet, they have shaped me, held my body in place, and taught me to be very quiet for a very long time. And now I want to do something with all those moments, because they are gathering, and they are teaching me that it is not an indulgence but a responsibility to both feel them and share them with others.


feminist killjoys [12/18]

“If we think with and through orientation, we might allow the moments of disorientation to gather, almost as if they were bodies around a different table. We might, in the gathering, face a different way. Queer objects might take us to the very limits of social gathering, even when they still lead us to gather at the table. Indeed, to live out a politics of disorientation might be to sustain wonder about the very forms of social gathering.” – Sara Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology

This is one of my favourite Sara Ahmed quotes. I come back to it again and again, finding myself differently in relation to it. I read it out loud at some of the first sessions of the Feminist Killjoys Reading Group. To set the scene. To say: you are welcome here. To say: we can do this differently. And to say: but it will take work – the work of sustaining wonder about the very forms of social gathering.

How attention is distributed is political. It is the most political thing.

Several years later, the Feminist Killjoys Reading Group continues. Now there is a core group of five who meet regularly and organise monthly events at which anyone is welcome. It is a growing community. And creating this community is one of the ways of saying: it takes work to be a killjoy, and we need each other in order to be able to continue doing this work. In order for this work to exist, part of the work needs to be the work of finding solidarity. And not parcelling each other up in the process.

The other day, I spent time with some of the killjoys reflecting on the work we have done so far. One of the reflections was: We have survived. We took this as celebration. Survival as celebration. We all knew what this meant. To have continued, to have survived, means we are doing the work.


reciprocity [05/19]

I keep having this conversation with friends, peers, people I’m mentoring. I find it is particularly something that comes up around people who have been raised as girls and women, and that it is particularly heightened in racialised bodies. It is an inability to receive. A difficulty in finding oneself worthy of receiving a gift, a kindness, attention, gratitude, or praise. It is an inability to perceive worth in self. But the conversation I keep coming back to is about reciprocity. What it takes to create/allow flow in the world, to create/allow community and conversation and belonging. That it takes both give and receive. The ability to be generous and to take a stand in one’s own body and belong there. They are always linked. To be able to receive what is being offered, to be able to both see and be seen. This work is transformative, and hard, and necessary for survival.   reciprocity

Not a tight community, but a community

A few days ago I was lucky enough to be on a panel with the wonderful artist Rosemary Lee, who has inspired me for many years. She said something that struck me. She said,

What I’m looking for is a community. Not a tight community, but a wider community.

There was something important about this for me. The idea of community so often gets presented as a tight-knit and overstated set of similarities, based on place or race or gender or age. It inevitably has outsiders and insiders. It sometimes has artists ‘coming in’ to ‘do projects’. These communities do exist, of course, and there is value in feeling like one is inside a tight-knit community sometimes. But in relation to arts practices, and in relation to my life and needs, I find that this notion of community as something solid and contained is always deeply problematic, and will primarily generate a feeling of outsiderness for me – something that will feel difficult to enter into.

A loose-knit community feels so much more like something I might aspire to both create and be within. It feels like something that has space to breathe, that might change, over time and space, that might welcome newness without drawing too much attention to it. And that one day might fall apart in a way that wasn’t alarming or threatening, just the course of things.

I’m interested in how we might allow those kind of spaces, and how we might hold those kinds of spaces. I’m interested in how to hold something just enough, not to constrain, and not to let go completely, but just to hold and commit for as long as it is there.