(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

Inarticulacy

I noticed today that I am becoming less and less able to be articulate on cue. It feels troubling, because I rely on articulacy for a certain kind of passing - it is how I have managed to stay afloat thus far in life: by using words and voice to become convincing, accommodating, educated - in the way that I speak, the way I string words together. Losing a grip on this feels difficult, but I am writing this to remind myself that I also welcome it.



1.
I am at a public talk in a town hall, a panel on feminisms. I am in the audience. I have something to say, something that expresses a frustration I feel, but I cannot quite find the courage to say it. Then two other women speak. They speak from a position of difference, and they speak about difference, about who is not in the room, about which writers are not being referenced, about alternative histories, and about how a simple inclusivity may not always be the best or most appropriate tactic. They speak from a place of power but they acknowledge that there is a lack of invitation for their power in the room.

I hear myself in their words. I realise that this is the moment when I might be able to say something, so I raise my hand. And then I speak. Voice noticeably trembling. I speak like someone who has never spoken before, like someone who is not used to speaking in public. I speak about who is already perceived as articulate and who is not. I speak about desire and about anger. I speak about the chairperson as a person of certain privilege and how this certain privilege has allowed her to be in a position of privilege as chairperson. I speak about how it feels important and near-impossible to acknowledge these things. I speak, as an artist, about our responsibility to create structures within which ‘awkward silences’ can be held: structures of gathering within which we can pause, reflect, feel angered or at odds; structures within which we have time to feel challenged and confronted, and in which it is not already time to move on so that we can go home and forget, but in which it is time to find a way to be with each other.

The trembling in my body and voice. The desire to say these things without flipping them from being inarticulate to being articulate. Being inarticulate mostly means becoming invisible, unable to be heard or seen. But being articulate also means a kind of invisibility, a kind of eliding with the main-stream of the argument, gliding into the space of speaking that has already been set up or decided. Sometimes I give myself permission to not reply immediately, and this helps. But if I have not given myself this permission in advance, then I am carried away by the rush and desire towards articulacy.

When people speak of diversity, so often they mean diversity within the terms of expression that are already understood. So someone who speaks, say, in the context of a debate about feminism in a town hall in North Melbourne which also happens to be an arts centre, has to speak in a way that is already able to be heard in that context. If they speak in a way that is not already understood as articulate, their difference is so different that it simply cannot be registered within the frame of the room. I am not talking about myself here. I was afraid to speak, yes, but my language is exactly the language that could be understood in the context. I am talking about the many people who may not even have felt invited into the room.



2.
An academic panel. I am presenting a paper, alongside two other people. I have prepared my paper well, it is clear and articulate, and it is well received. And then it is time for ‘questions’. I express a desire to not engage in the format. I try to say that my paper, the one I just read, the one you said you enjoyed, was exactly about this problem: about how the spaces in which we gather, and the ways in which we are invited to be together in those spaces, affect what is audible and visible within them. I try to express that the format of the question and answer session is a problem for me, because it is already rigged to repeat a certain performance of knowledge, because I want to question its very format. But there is not a way for these words to be heard. The format is set. And so we continue.

I was born in Oxford, England. I have a certain accent. I went to a school and a university where I learnt to be articulate in ways that would buy me privilege. I know that I have the skills to be received as articulate. And yet, during this Q&A, I was deeply inarticulate. I said muddled things, I did not succeed in answering the questions that were being asked. I did not succeed in bringing myself into the room during that moment. And since then, I have replayed that scene many times, knowing now how to speak articulately about the inarticulacy I was experiencing. Later is always easier.

And yet, what bothers me is that I have this feeling that I was exposed – not as the person with the gentle voice and the Oxfordshire accent who can put you at ease, who can be heard if she needs to, and who can be accommodated and accommodating if she needs to – but as something else, woman maybe, she who cannot come to the point, she who does not understand how to become heard and at the same time cannot stop speaking. What terrifies me and saddens me is that there was not a place for that kind of voice in the room.



The feeling is of having the words that we wanted, but only having them later. Or of having the feeling but not the words. Or of having the words, but they were not the kind of words that could be heard in that particular setting. Or of having the right words for that particular setting but having the wrong tone or accent or pitch or body to be accepted as someone who could be heard.

Structures of Listening

Last night, I went to a talk. The talk was about the invisibility of women in art – the way that women only become visible (and valuable) after they are dead. The introduction was all about women’s voices, about how we (in the arts) might work differently, about structures that would allow for new ways of thinking and viewing and making and coming together, and about new spaces for visibility and audibility. And yet, there we were, sitting within a traditional power structure, in a room with experts on stage and the usual question and answer session, and it killed my spirit.

And this keeps happening.

I keep finding myself at events like this where there is no room for thinking, no room for processing, and no consideration given to how this thing might happen. But if we don’t consider how the power structures are operating in the room, then traditional power dynamics emerge. I’m nowhere near the first person to observe this. And yet it keeps happening. I keep finding myself at events where the topic up for discussion is compelling and important, and then there is no way for us, the people in the room, to reach the place we want to discuss. We’re stuck in a place where we perform change but we perform it within structures that are oppressive and non-conducive to the very change that we are discussing.

                                              This change, it happens slowly. It happens over centuries.

Over years, I will keep saying the same thing. I will keep saying that we need to listen better. And what I will mean by that, what I will mean every time I say it or write it or fail to say it, is that we need better structures within which to listen. What I will mean is that this voice you are hearing, it is the voice that is permitted within the structure you have created. And very often there would be a more interesting and more present and more considered voice here if the structure allowed for it. What I will mean is:

What if my voice were invited?

What if I were invited to speak uncertainly, or in a language you can't comprehend? What if there were really space for that? And I don’t mean invited like, “yeah, anyone can speak, anyone is welcome to speak” said from the front of a room in which there is an unspoken hierarchy; but I mean really thinking about how the space invites the words. I mean spaces that have easy exits and different kinds of entrances so that people can find their appropriate way into and out of them. I mean spaces in which the etiquette is clear and transparent. I mean spaces that welcome silence. I mean spaces that welcome silences in which we can hear and understand coercion as well as silences in which we can hear complex thinking that has not yet settled.

What I mean is that every space has a choreography, and to ignore that act of choreography when setting up any kind of event is to ignore a certain politics that holds our conversation. I mean that the aesthetics and the welcome of the space are not an add-on or a frivolity but formative features. How and whether we approach something or someone is entirely determined by what we can see or hear from afar. Politics. Choreography. Aesthetics. It all comes down to the details of how we are invited to be in the room.

Passing the PhD

I recently gave a talk at a conference called The Politics of Passing, and I opened the talk with the following description of my first PhD supervision:

On the first day of my PhD, my supervisor said to me,

‘There might come a time in this project when we’re faced with a decision between doing the PhD that you want to do, and doing the PhD that passes.

And my job will be to encourage you to do the PhD that passes.

That will be my job. And I need you to know that.

But that won’t necessarily be the right choice.’

I keep coming back to thinking about this. The fact that the role of a supervisor is to help a person ‘pass’. And how important it feels to think about this alongside other types of passing – racial passing, passing as able or disabled, passing as one gender or another. Passing and its relationship to success. Because to be successful in a PhD is to pass the PhD. And yet to pass the PhD often involves quoting the “right” names, showing that you are able to follow a particular trajectory, one that has been defined in advance. It is not necessarily about ‘original thinking’ since the trajectory of passing is by definition one that relates to what has gone before or already exists.

My experience of doing a PhD has not been about passing. But to a great extent this is because prior to embarking on the PhD I very consciously lay aside notions of ‘success’ and ‘career’ and I was very clear that in taking on this new project I was not prepared to simply adopt those notions again in another context.

Immediately after my talk (which was concerned with the act of holding open as opposed to the act of passing in relation to a variety of contexts) there was time for one quick question, and someone asked, “Did you pass the PhD?” I laughed, then I answered hurriedly that I hadn’t yet completed it.

But I’ve kept coming back to that question, as one that I didn’t answer seriously. I mean, it was kind of funny, the question, it kind of felt like a joke. ‘So… did you pass?’ I enjoyed it in that way. But I kept thinking about it later not as a joke but as a serious question.

Because this is the only question that remains at the end of a PhD.

And the choice not to do it solely in order to pass feels important and difficult. Difficult in the context of a society that values passing to such a great extent. My experience of life has been this one. If you can pass, if you can pull it off, if you can convince others that you are successful, or white, or educated, or straight, then you can proceed. I have operated quite successfully within this system. But it’s a troubling system.

This doesn’t feel like a particularly novel realisation, I’m sure I’m not the first to write about it. I suppose I just wanted to answer seriously a question (asked after my talk at the conference) that I didn’t answer seriously at the time. And to acknowledge that it was a serious question, and that it’s a serious topic. And to say that I wish there was more time at conferences to sit with a question, to hold it between us, to be in the room with what has been said, before the need for answers enters the space.

Three short thoughts

I wanted to write a blog post about the bananas. I want to unsettle the way we hear things. I want to unsettle the way we see each other. I want to put into words some of the conversations I had with Andy that week, the dialogue, the thinking-through, the working something through within the medium of words. And are words only these things, the signs that we make with our pen-strokes? Are they just as valid when they are spoken and not written or recorded? Are they an extension of our bodies? Are they also these words that I type without leaning in?
*
The phrase ‘lean in’ has become quite popular I’ve noticed. Lean in, lean in, lean in, while I speak quietly and you must listen. Lean in and hear the news. Lean in and show you are part of the club. Lean in, put your weight on me, I will carry you. Lean in if you can bear to trust me with your weight. Lean in to show you are in the club of those who trust and are trusted. It’s a complicated phrase, just like all of them. I think that one of the reasons I like using a microphone when speaking is that I can speak in my quiet voice and other people can hear without needing to signal anything by leaning in. Some people tell me I’m wrong, that a microphone is a physical barrier between me and the audience, that it is more genuine, more friendly, more honest, to speak “naturally”. These people are usually people with loud, resonant voices. People who are used to being heard.
*
I have a feeling that everything about language has become a club. We trust words too much. I wish we had only just invented them and then we might treat them with a kind of wonder, a mistrust, a reluctance, a reticence. We might prod them and not know how they would respond, what kind of creatures they were. We might invent them at once more carefully and carelessly, playing with their form and their weight as they travel between us. We might not kill them with presumption and the expectation of fixity.


Next up: a blog post about the bananas

Black British Feminisms: where and how does the work begin?

Just got back from this event at the Centre for Feminist Research (Goldsmiths). I felt so completely thrilled to be in that room, and of course failed to make any friends because of being too shy, but still, thrilled to be a part of that space in some small way for a moment. And wanted to share some brief immediate thoughts on what made that room so unusual and what this might reveal about how we 'usually' behave, what constraints we act within.

"White hegemonic knowledge stands between the people who really need to have the conversation." - Camel Gupta

I noticed that throughout the evening people were constantly acknowledging influences and inspirations: people in the room, and people not in the room. Creating connections, acknowledging histories and friendships, making visible those lines that are so frequently ignored or passed over within the artistic and academic contexts that I know. Most of these people were strangers to me, but how good it felt to be in a room where people were committed to making visible. An acknowledgement that we cannot work alone and that other people make things possible. And in acknowledging others, in being visible about that connectedness and the fact that only through connection can we be alive let alone make change, there was a banishment of the kind of territorial fear, the tight holding on to ideas and voice, that claims to be about empowerment and freedom, but really only renders us lonely. These voices were heard louder by not being alone.

And there was an impromptu song. And this reminded me of being at ROOTS. And I kind of wanted the whole room to start singing. And that didn't happen, but it did begin to happen, and this was thanks to a poet called Dorothea Smartt who didn't let the way things usually are stop the way things might be.

And I realise this sounds like I just went to some kind of festival - it was for the most part a panel discussion, and it was full of all kinds of smart ideas and people - but what I am saying is that the ideas didn't obliterate the people.


I found myself thinking this: "where and how does the work begin?"

And I found myself answering like this:

Where = in the roots, the systems that give rise to the ways in which we make and do and think and behave and treat each other.

How = by acknowledging each other, by finding ways to bring ourselves into the room, by not being afraid of care and honesty and embodiment, especially when that embodiment looks like something with which we don't yet know how to relate.


*
Black British Feminisms
Thursday 11 December 2014, 6-8pm
The Centre for Feminist Research (Goldsmiths) cohosts the Feminist Review annual panel discussion followed by reception & issue launch

Keynote: Prof. Ann Phoenix (Institute of Education, University of London)

Chair: Dr Suzanne Scafe (London South Bank University/Feminist Review editorial collective)

Panel: Ego Ahaiwe, Sita Balani, Lauren Craig, Camel Gupta, Nydia Swaby

Performance: Dorothea Smartt

Does it matter - an unfinished blog post

Funnily enough, I had just started composing this post when I read this blog post by Sara Ahmed on ‘Perception’ which feels closely related to some of the things I'd been thinking about. She begins:

“When you expose a problem you pose a problem.  I have been thinking more about the problem of how you become the problem because you notice a problem. When exposing a problem is to become a problem then the problem you expose is not revealed.”

It's something I've come up against before - the sense that, although I'm a fairly quiet person, and I definitely make a stand for quietness, I've always felt in danger of being labelled a trouble-maker. Particularly when it comes to pointing out the obvious. Particularly when it comes to issues such as diversity or access.I come to stand for the problem, rather than pointing towards it.

Ahmed's point is a good one (they generally are) and I love her encouragement to other Feminist Killjoys to "Stay maladjusted!" and not cave into this pressure to 'fit in' or become 'easier to digest'.

But in other words, if you are going to point something out that doesn’t fit with the dominant way of thinking, you’d better feel sure about what you’re saying…

And where this interests me is where it meets the notion of listening. Because listening allows for difference of opinion to be present. But it also allows me to shift in relation to what I’m hearing.

This is where I have a major stumble. Because this, what Ahmed points out, exposes a system where binaries rule, where politics is about sticking to your guns, and where in order to create change we need to stick to one argument and push it through until it sticks. Which is a definition of commitment, right? When we commit to something, we continue having faith in it, even when that thing disappoints us or we’re no longer sure about it.

But how does this relate to plurality, and to the notion that we’re always changing?