Breaking open: the work of listening in a racist world

This is a transcript from a talk I gave last week, to mark the end of my two-year postdoc at Concordia’s Acts of Listening Lab. It was written to be listened to live with an audience, but I hope that something comes through from the written words.

To celebrate the International Day of Listening, join Acts of Listening Lab postdoctoral fellow Rajni Shah as they reflect on two years of research into the work of listening across difference. This talk will include reflections on Rajni’s ‘Listening Tables’ series, as well as personal reflections from their own embodied experiences as a non-binary person of colour living on unceded lands. Those who identify as QTBIPOC are especially welcomed.

Start here:

As a listener (including those who are reading) I invite you to begin by thinking about what it means for your listening to meet my listening, in this online meeting place. This is a slow, somewhat meditative talk. It asks you to bring your listening. So before you go any further, take some time to listen in to your own body. Ask yourself:

What do I need in order to be able to listen right now?

Do you need to be here, reading or listening to this talk? Is now the moment? Perhaps when you tuned in, you found that you need something else right now. If so, please honour that desire.

If now is the right moment, please take one action to help yourself arrive into your own listening. This might be making a cup of tea, running a bath, meditating, changing your location, putting on music, or anything else that will allow you to feel just a little more arrived.

When you’re ready, we’ll begin.



Acknowledgments

I acknowledge that I wrote and recorded this talk as a visitor on Gadigal lands and waters. I offer deep respect and gratitude to Gadigal elders past, present, and emerging, and to all Indigenous peoples around the world who are doing the heart work of continuing and resisting.

I acknowledge the kookaburras and the lizards, and the many other creatures who were close by as I wrote this talk, whose songs and dances teach me about time.

I acknowledge the whales, who are making their passage south as I write this.

I acknowledge my own heritage and blood family, who are from the Kumaoni region in present-day Uttarakhand, India.

And I acknowledge and thank all the people who made the Listening Tables project. Luis, Caite, Andrea, MJ, and Alana at the Acts of Listening Lab. Guest listeners Ellen, Leo, Savita, and Eldad. The listeners who came back each time to share and grow this practice: Emma, Hanss, Seçkin, Victoria, and Ayumi. And all those who attended Listening Tables between August and November 2019.

Thank you.

*

I try to turn things right side up.

Which is the same as to say,

I turn things upside down.

Which is the same as to say,

I try to make sense of the world.

Which is the same as to say,

I tried to rearrange the room in order to rearrange our thoughts,

which is a way of saying,

I invited us to rearrange our minds and hearts by inviting us to rearrange the room, the table,
                                    and our listening.

1. Breaking

The first Listening Table. Tiohtià:ke/Montréal. August 2019.

I am nervous, and newly arrived back on to these lands. I came from unceded Gadigal lands, where I was not invited, and arrived on the unceded lands of the Kanien’kehá:ka Nation, where I was not invited, into the University, where I was invited, but which itself is at the heart of a history of peoples and actions that were not invited.

In any one moment, there are so many arrivals.
Harms done, that continue to harm.
Harms done that continue to be done.

I am aware of this discomfort, the shame of mobility and the histories that enable or necessitate it, the shame of racisms, my own and others, the shame that pours through lineage into our bodies.

On this day, same as most days, I am trying to find new ways to arrive myself.

At the first Listening Table, I was nervous. 30 people arrived. They had, as invited, brought food to share. Their hearts were suddenly right there, beating, in the room, expectant, and to a greater or lesser degree, trusting me to hold their experience. And I was nervous, and this is how it began.

I had arrived hours earlier, more than five hours earlier to set up the room. I like to give myself the time to arrive, see, here I was again, trying to give myself the time and space I needed to arrive. But when the people came into the room, I was nervous, I moved quickly. I remember myself losing the ground beneath my feet. I remember myself not yet feeling arrived from those lands, these lands, the bright sparkling waters and thick air of Gadigal country. Not knowing how to be arrived in that room. Not knowing how to be oriented.

That first table, I had no idea how things would go. I had a plan, of course. The plan was this. During the first hour, in one room, the Acts of Listening Lab, are ten people around a beautiful table. Microphones at the table. Pretty light hanging in the middle of the room. Those people, the ten, mostly strangers to each other, are invited to sit together for a full hour and wait for words to arrive. Those people are invited to meet across difference through listening.

A chance to be heard, and held.
A seat at the table.

And in the other room, the one that is called the Sun Room, the room in which we would be meeting now, in which I’m imagining us all sharing this talk, in the Sun Room are the rest of the 30. There are papered tables, pens and pencils, plants, natural light, cushions, chairs, and headphones through which these people can listen in to the listening conversation that is happening between the ten in the Acts of Listening Lab across the hallway. Later, in the second hour, we will come together, and share food, and share words.

This was the plan. And this is how it went. In some ways, it went exactly to plan.

I began with an introduction. And as part of this introduction, I invited us to enter into a process during which we would, together, select who would go into the Acts of Listening Lab, to sit at the table, and who would listen in from the Sun Room. I said something like this:

“The work of Listening Tables is about reorientation. It’s about the fact that how attention is distributed is political. One way of thinking about it is that it is about what happens when we centre the margins in order to problematise default behaviours. To this end, in considering whether you want to take part in the Table, please ask yourself whether yours is a voice and a body that you see represented in all its diversity in mainstream media, whether yours is a voice that is heard, that has agency in the world. If so, maybe it is your turn to listen in, to take a different role, in order for us to collectively reorient. If yours is a voice that you feel is unheard, unrepresented, placed at the margins, then you might consider stepping up, to take your place at the table, even if this feels a little challenging or takes some bravery.”

I like to make invitations in this way, clear enough that there is an intention that can be heard, but open enough that each person can gather around that invitation in the ways that resonate for them. Rather than me determining which bodies need to sit at the table, the invitation asks each person to determine for themselves which role they will take on that evening. It was an invitation to both listen in and listen out, to place ourselves at the point where those things meet.

What I didn’t say explicitly is that this is an anti-racist practice.

I wondered, in the weeks and months after that first Listening Table, whether I should have been more blunt.

Racism is a blunt tool that presents itself in blunt ways. The work of reorientation, of listening, of figuring out how we might even stand a chance of arriving in a room together, is at once subtle and blunt. It is careful, delicate, difficult work, and it is incredibly simple.

*

I’ve thought about trying to explain to you what actually happened during that first table. The complexities of the listening experiences that presented themselves over those few hours we spent together, and the many obstacles to listening that were present. I’ve thought about trying to explain how some people seemed so aware of their bodies and voices in relation to others, and others seemed not to be aware at all, and how these behaviours fell so devastatingly neatly along lines of racialisation and speaking privilege. But every time I try to put the facts of that evening into words, I get knotted up in the complexity of its emotions. It would take me more than the hour that we have to talk my way into that knot, and then I would have to leave us all knotted up.

Knotted up is a place I’ve been and know.
But I’d rather focus on loosening the knots than recreating them.


What I will say is this.

White supremacy was present with us in that room, during that first table, in all its hard armour.

Unexpressed pain and anger and grief were present, and they obliterated the possibility of listening.

Tenderness was present, as was warmth, trust, and desire.

Harm was done.

Hurt was felt.

And in the midst of all this, solidarity was present, and listening was present.

*

After the first Listening Table, a dear friend asked me: why didn’t you make it a closed space? Why not make it a project for people who identify as Black, Indigenous, and people of colour? My answer is that I love being in BIPOC-only spaces. I seek them out. I love leading for BIPOC communities. I love the places we are able to go together, the trust, the delicacy, the respect, the world-making that happens when we’re not dealing with the assumptions of whiteness. But those can’t be the only spaces in which we are able to express ourselves. They can’t be the only spaces in which we are seen and heard. And they can’t be the only spaces in which we are centered.

What happened during and following that first Listening Table was shattering. It was messy and hard and deeply felt for many people. And I changed things, of course I changed things as the project moved forward and evolved. But I also started to understand something about that shattered place.

I started to understand that this is the work.

I started to understand, to trust, that this is urgent work.

I started to understand how much work it would take.

It is hard work.

It is heart and spirit work.

It takes time and patience and persistence.

It takes trust and vulnerability and not knowing.

And it will always include breaking.

2. Open

It is just over a year since that first Listening Table.

Surprisingly, I am writing this talk from a place of breaking open.

At first, I feel this as an opposition. The task of writing a talk and the task of being with my own breaking open feel at odds. But I am curious to know what will come from this moment of thin spirit, thin skin. So I invite them to be one. I write as one who is breaking open. I write from a place that is in close kinship with the unbearable, with the unbearables. Some humans would call this the work of decolonising self. Some would call it sickness, or failure. Some would call it transformation. And some would pretend really hard that it was not happening.

But it is happening.

I am breaking open.

We are breaking open.

For many years, I did not do this blunt work. I was more subtle, more refined, and more successful. I was much more pleasing to those who needed pleasing, and much more approachable, and much less sensitive. I did everything I needed to do in order to survive. Or maybe, I did everything I needed to in order to help others survive. Or maybe, and I fear this one is the closest to the truth, maybe I did everything I needed to do in order to help systems of oppression stay alive. I hated the idea of finding solidarity with other people of colour, because I did not want to see race. I did not want to see racism. What I didn’t realise was what is now so obvious to me: that I was holding racism in place, and it was destroying me.

*

My parents bet their survival on rationalising the world. I bet mine on feeling it. Such a risky strategy! It leaves me feeling the sicknesses of systems that I carry inside me and am a part of. It leaves me a weak player, a sad and angry player, and sometimes, oftentimes, a non-player. My parents feel contentment, and they wish the same for me. The other day, one of them said to me: “I worry that you’re too focused on the negative. You have to make the best of what is here.”

What they don’t know is that the work I am doing is joy work. It is the work of making room for joy, and feeling joy in this body, as a world-making way of being. Sometimes, it feels like breaking open. Sometimes it feels like battle. Sometimes it feels like being a killjoy. Sometimes it feels like dreaming. Sometimes it feels like I am spinning away into other realms. And sometimes, the best of times, I remember that my joy exists right now, alongside all the other joys and sorrows. Sometimes, I remember that this moment isn’t one moment in a sequence of moments, but one moment in alongside and intertwined with many other moments. Sometimes I remember to unhook myself from the blinkered behaviours I have learnt for survival, and I live in alignment with my joy. Sometimes, this is the work. The work of feeling joy.



what needs saying in this moment?

I want to live in an expanded world where there is room for all of us.

Do you want this too?

But really?

Even if it means destroying what you have built?



what needs saying in this moment?

nothing needs saying. nothing more needs saying. nothing more can be said.

stop trying to speak yourself into the future.

stop trying to mend.

your listening reveals your own boundaries. uncovers the earth. opens up the possibility that you might notice the moon.

your own listening doesn’t even try to be separate from the vibrations of this planet.

your own listening asks for surrender.



what needs saying in this moment?

no more questions.

hold the moment open.

break the moment open.

and stay there.

3. The Work

What does it mean to reclaim that phrase, “the work”?

I take everything that I used to consider ‘not work’ and place it inside that phrase these days.

So breaking open is the work.

Taking rest is the work.

Having a conversation that spills over from where or what I intended, is the work.

Being held is the work.

Saying “I love you” and feeling it is the work.

Intimate friendship is the work.

Saying “no” is the work.

Holding change is the work.

Attending to the pain in my body is the work.

Crying is the work.

Dreaming is the work.

Listening is the work.

*

In my introduction to the first Listening Table, I said: “Let’s trust in the process, let’s trust we are the people who need to be in this room.”

I do believe that we were the people who needed to be in the room. Even the person who told me afterwards that they had a horrible time at the Listening Table, that they hated not being able to talk more, that they felt constrained and attacked and disappointed that they had trusted me. And that they wished they had listened in to their own desire to say “no” instead of feeling compelled by my invitation to show up. I have to trust that this was their work on that day.

I do believe that we were the people who needed to be in the room. I include in this my own inability to arrive, my own chaos and mess, my own desire to hold it all together, and my inability to do so. The ways in which things spilled over the edges and taught me from there.

What fascinates me about attempting to listen with others is that it shows me things I could not see on my own. Or at least, it lets me notice things I have known but didn’t want to know. It is as if in the attempt to listen there is a surface-rising that takes place. Patterns, beliefs, assumptions, violences, histories, inequities float to the surface.

And there they are, announcing themselves, very seriously and very lightly.

“Here we are. Just as we have always been. But this time, you’re listening.”

If we are listening, if we are paying attention, it is almost clumsy, almost funny, how these structural inequities play themselves out. Our histories, our assumptions, our held tongues and polite conversations hold themselves up to us. And we laugh or hate or cry or look away, but they are there.

This is the work.

4. Listening

I think about the Acts of Listening Lab exactly as its name suggests: as a laboratory for listening, in which we conduct experiments in listening. In which we hope to come a little closer to understanding what listening is, and what it might be. In which we practice something called listening. The Listening Tables were conceived from this idea, that there was a place in which some people could come together to explore listening, to examine listening, to listen.

But listening, as I understand it – a practice which some might call ‘being’ or ‘feeling’ or ‘attending’ – listening without already knowing what we are listening to, is a big ask. It’s a big ask in a world that revolves hard around short attention spans, around goal-oriented tasks, around doing and producing and declaring ourselves. In a world that moves fast towards naming, calling out, and acting. In a world that does not value slowness, or multi-generational thinking.

So these attempts to practice listening are often met with resistance.
They are resistant and they create resistance.

Each Listening Table had a guest listener. Someone who had been invited to listen, to bring their listening to the table. This was part of the experiment. Every time I told someone about this idea of a guest listener, they didn’t understand what it could mean. We are so attached to the declarative, to words and their meanings, that it is hard for us to understand what it might mean to bring a listening. When I told people about it, it was almost like I was telling them about a guest nothingness. “But what will they do?” people would ask, those people including some of the guest listeners themselves. “They will listen.” I would reply, but no one could grasp what this could possibly mean. Even after we had these conversations, most people assumed that the role of the guest listener would involve speaking. This tells me a lot about how we value listening and how we value speaking.

A guest listener is someone who is invited to listen.

Someone who is invited to bring their listening, in the knowledge that each person’s listening changes the room, changes the work that can happen in the room.

In the knowledge that listening is work.

That each of us is changing, creating, manifesting the world through our listening.

That each of our listenings are linked.

And indeed, each guest listener brought such a different energy to the table. And not only that, but the fact that the guest listener was different each time changed who was in the room, and how they came into that room. This was most clear when my mum was the guest listener. People came to that table with a desire to meet my mum, or with an expectation of what it might mean to have a parent, an elder, in the room. And my mum is blind, so her listening, her experience of what it means to sit quietly in a room, was shaped by her experience of blindness. And her blindness, and her relationship to me, shaped my own listening, and my own being at that table. At the end of the night, so many people thanked my mum for her presence, for what she brought. And she didn’t understand what she had brought, or what she had done, that had so moved those people. Because it wasn’t her. It was her in relation to all of us, and all of us in relation to each other.

Each of our listenings are linked. In fact, to name them as ‘each’ feels inappropriate to the work of listening. We are creating each other all the time. We are creating our worlds all the time. We are listening each other into being all the time. It is how we orient ourselves. And it is happening, whether we acknowledge it or not.

5. A racist world

[one minute’s silence - listen]

6. A world

for the listeners
for the healers
for the seekers
for the killjoys

for the guests   and the hosts
for the spirits
for the ghosts
for the circles   and the spirals    and the mountains      and the songs

for stumbling
for tumbling
for shattering
for failing
for overflow
for being-with
for holding open
for breaking open
and for shutting down

for saying no
again and again
until it is time to say yes

for the circles   and the spirals    and the mountains      and the songs
for the lizards    and the whales    and the kookaburras    and the ants

for saying no
again and again
until it is time to say yes

for you, who need to hear this.
you know who you are. we know who we are.

Thank you for your listening.

[end]

(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

Some days air to hip.

Some  days  air  to  hip.  Some  skeleton.  Passage   through  the  body  and  the  week.  A  fizzy  head  and  shoulders  on  Monday.  Some  days  the  white  men  in  my  life  watch  over  me.  They  read  these  words  over  my  shoulder.  They tell  me  what  is  funny  and  what  is  not  funny.  They  tell  me  what  to   avoid, what  is  too  much.  They  align  me  with  a  certain  way  of  being  in   the  world:   not  the  mainstream,  but  the  alternative  white  scene  I   suppose   you  could    call  it.   The  world  orbits  around  whiteness  so  hard.  I  understand  early  on  that  there  is  something  to  understand   and  that  it  is  outside  of  me.  Meanwhile,  I  spend  the   morning    sending   good  energy  and  breath  down  into   my  hip,    because  I  can  soften  it  this  way,   healing  myself.

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.

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.