tyresias | Other's words to the forefront / les paroles des autres en premier plan

Last week during my Wednesday night class, I held my classmates accountable for refusing to discuss their complicity in systemic racism shown in their preference to discuss the safer topic of US media and politics. One white man came back that I was asking for something difficult because my classmates and I are not, in his opinion, close enough to discuss what I propose. A white woman made a point to find me at break and proposed that I speak with my friends and loved ones about the subjects I wanted because they and I are closer. Who knew closeness enabled more honest discourse!? It is my experience that the opposite is common. Unwilling to shatter this woman's precious views of the world, I instead confronted her with an equally true dilemma: my loved ones and friends have not read my class readings. I can hardly expect them to have a clue what I'm referencing. My proffesor proposed that I bid my time until nearer the end of the course, when classmates will feel closer and more able to confront each other's _isms. There are 5 weeks of class left and we are not there yet. Hmm...

In any case, recent appreciation for transcribing some of my readings has prompted me to do a weekly post of other quotes. I hope this will lead to dialogue within the simultaneously safer and colder realities of this virtual world. None of the quotes in this week's selection are longer than a page single paced but all of them combined will take more than 2 minutes to read. Read those that engage you in full, skip over others. They may or may not be related to any others. Comment on those that spoke to you, made you reflect or on those that disengaged you quickly, with why if you prefer. I will challenge myself not to offer my thoughts on any within the post. My bias will still be evident to the critical eye noticing what I do and don't quote, how much I quote, etc. and I will do my best to be accountable when shortcomings are shown to me.

Si le concept de communauté est présent un peu partout, on retrouve cependant toujours la même ambivalence entre une définition géographique ou sociologique de celle-ci. Tantôt la communauté est circonscrite à une localité précise; ailleurs, elle ne fait référence qu’à un groupe de personnes ayant des caractéristiques communes.
-Apprendre sa communauté par les sciences humaines

On observe que deux visions de la communauté sont présentées et peuvent parfois même se retrouver en opposition.

La première présente une communauté bâtie sur des origines et une histoire communes, souvent représentée par les traditions et le patrimoine. Selon cette approche de la définition, les membres de la communauté partagent une même langue et une même culture, des modes de vie communs et des systèmes de valeurs partagés, dans un contexte où les traditions jouent un rôle de premier plan. Cette communauté présente une certaine uniformité dans les manières d’être et de penser et y puise sa force et les bases de son épanouissement.

La seconde définition qu’on offre de la communauté est plutôt fondée sur le pluralisme et la diversité. Elle tient compte de la diversification croissante des populations et cible plutôt les espaces communs et la participation des membres de la communauté à des actions convergentes. La communauté ainsi définie reconnaît du fait même une plus grande diversité interne sur les plans linguistique et culturel. Les croyances et les valeurs font place aux différences dans l’activité humaine et peuvent même aller jusqu’à reconnaître que cette communauté puisse se caractériser par une certaine fragmentation.

La langue est le facteur reconnu comme principal élément d’unité et d’identification de la communauté. Outil de communication et d’interaction, à la fois dans la sphère privée et dans la sphère publique, elle apparaît comme jouant un rôle de premier plan dans la cohésion du groupe. […] La culture est l’ensemble des comportements collectifs et des modes de vie partagés par un groupe d’êtres humains. […] L’identité est le résultat d’une histoire commune. […] La religion est historiquement un des principaux fondements de l’identité francophone. Elle continue à jouer un rôle rassembleur de premier plan dans plusieurs milieux minoritaires. […] L’identité et l’engagement sont intimement liés par les dimensions individuelles et sociales de chaque élève. L’identité de la personne est fortement influencée par son parcours et son expérience alors que son engagement déterminera le rapport de cette personne avec différents groupes d’appartenance. Il va sans dire que la construction d’une identité qui mène à l’engagement dans la vie communautaire francophone est au cœur même du mandat de l’école de langue française en milieu minoritaire.
-Apprendre sa communauté : aperçut général

While the concept of a community is widespread, the same ambivalence is found between a geographic and sociological definition of a community. Sometimes a community is circumscribed within a specific location, whereas on the other occasions, it only refers to a group of people with common characteristics.
-Knowing One’s Community through social studies

Two visions of the community were observed, and they could sometimes be opposed to one another.

The former presents a vision of a community built on common origins and a common history, which is frequently represented by traditions and heritage. Based on this approach to the definition, a members of the community have the same language and culture, a common lifestyle and a shared system of values, in a context in which traditions play a key role. This community is somewhat homogeneous in terms of how people live and think, and derives its strength and vitality from this.

The second definition of the community is based instead on pluralism and diversity. It factors in the growing diversification of populations and instead targets common spaces and the involvement of community members in convergent forms of action. The community, as defined in this manner, therefore acknowledges greater inner diversity from the linguistic and cultural standpoint. Beliefs and values can accommodate differences in human activity and even go so far as to recognize that the community is typified by a degree of fragmentation.

Language is the acknowledged key factor in community unity and identity. Language, which is a tool for communication and interactions, in both the private and public spheres, appears to play a decisive role in group cohesion. […] Culture is the set of collective behaviours and ways of living shared by a group of human beings. […] Identity is the outcome of a common history. […] Religion is historically one of the major foundations upon which the Francophone identity rests. It continues to play a key rallying role in many minority communities. […] Identity and engagement are intimately bound up in the individual and social dimensions of every student. A person’s identity is heavily influenced by background and experience, but it is the level of people’s engagement that determines their relationship with the different groups to which they belong. Needless to say, identity building that leads to engagement in Francophone community life lies at the very core of the mandate shouldered by minority French-language schools.
-Knowing One’s Community: general overview

LJ ate the original descriptor of the below quote. Redefining "the West" as it has been experienced by an Indian emigrant.

The depth of the ideological creation of “the West” in India’s history, to which a postcolonial feminist such as me is an heir, can perhaps find no more vivid and ironic depiction than that the discipline of “English studies” had its very inception and beginnings in nineteenth-century colonial India, prior to its institutionalization in Britain itself. In Ashis Nandy’s words, therefore, the modern West is less a geographical or temporal entity than a psychological space (and surely a social, economic, and cultural space as well): “The West is now everywhere, within the West and outside: in structures and in minds.” What name, then, might one give to such a configuration of “the West” as a transnational category, capable of extending beyond geographical determinations and creating new and specific loci of power/knowledge through the manifold processes of Westernization?
If the historical formation of the class that effectively came to direct the Indian nation is often alluded to, so is the conspicuous presence of women among its professional ranks. One of the legacies of the Indian nationalist movement is that middle and upper class women have been less invisible within academic and public institutions than their counterparts in the geographical West. To give a particularly striking historical example, two women graduated from Calcutta University in 1883, before women in Britain were granted academic credentials. Or think of Toru Dutt (1856-1877), who published her first book of verse translations, A Sheaf Gleaned from French Fields, at the age of twenty. This was by no means an uncomplicated process of Westernization – it was precisely such women who were subjected to profoundly modern reinventions of tradition in the battle for a national culture.
-Mary E. John

Pumped full of drug that contraindicated for people suffering from dehydration, I was fortunate not to die in that Indiana cell. It is possible that drinking urine, a substance that is usually placed more on the side of poison that the side of cure, saved my life. What almost killed me was a medical system in which care of the body and care of the mind are cut off from each other, a system in which physicians neglect the psychological impact of the removal of a sexual organ, and psychiatrists ignore the history of the body.
[…] If the connection between a “test” and a “testis” ever crossed their minds, they did not let it deflect them from indoctrinating me into their belief that schizophrenia is a genetic condition, a hereditary defect, and perhaps a reason to discourage “patients” from reproducing. Etymologically, the words “schizophrenia” and “castration” are related via the Greek verb, keazein, to split. […]
Is it not time to abandon the dangerous prejudice that life without sanity is equivalent to death?
-Richard A. Ingram

I learnt that semester that the teaching of Native American literature must be linked with the spirit of resistance that has been a part of Native American survival. As Joy Hargo says, “the Indian wars never ended in this country” (the Woman Who Fell from the Sky, 43). The way events at OU relate to my larger story is that they were a beginning point for me, and they have everything to do with a personal struggle for identity. They were a beginning in the sense that I could finally turn loose some of that pent-up internalization, struggling with who I am as an Indian person, as a gay man, wanting to speak but feeling constrained and inarticulate. In joining the rally that started to build for some kind of justice at OU, I think I began to focus on something outside myself – the political struggle of a community of people against racism – and the whole issue of who I am was subsumed by the more important question of who we are. I began to see that every angle of vision from which I saw myself was refracted through the larger lens of being Indian and fighting for survival. It was no longer a matter of reconciling being gay with being Indian but of being Indian, period, and understanding being gay in Indian terms.
It may sound funny, but sometimes my life makes the most sense to me when I think of it as a narrative kind of like a creation story, where you start with chaos, confusion, as in the Creek story where everyone is stumbling about in a thick fog, bumping into each other and getting hurt.-Craig Womack, Howling at the Moon

“Look! A Negro!” It was a passing sting. I attempted a smile.
“Look! A Negro!” Absolutely. I was beginning to enjoy myself.
“Look! A Negro!” The circle was gradually getting smaller. I was really enjoying myself.
“Maman, look, a Negro; I’m scared! Scared! Scared!” Now they were beginning to be scared of me. I wanted to kill myself laughing, but laughter had become out of the question.
            I couldn’t take it any longer, for I already knew there were legends, stories, history, and especially the historicity that Jaspers had taught me. As a result, the body scheme, attacked in several places, collapsed, giving way to an epidermal racial schema. In the train, it was a question of begin aware of my body, no longer in the third person but in triple. In the train, instead of one seat, they left me two or three. I was no longer enjoying myself. I was unable to discover the feverish coordinates of the world. I existed in triple: I was taking up room. I approach the Other … and the Other, evasive, hostile, but not opaque, transparent and absent, vanished. Nausea.
            I was responsible not only for my body but also for my race and my ancestors. I cast an objective gaze over myself, discovered my blackness, my ethnic features; deafened by cannibalism, backwardness, fetishism, racial stigmas, slave traders, and above all, yes, above all, the grinning Y a bon Banania.
[…]
The white man killed my father
Because my father was proud
The white man raped my mother
Because my mother was beautiful
The white man wore out my brother in the hot sun of the roads
Because my brother was strong
Then the white man turned to me
His hands red with blood
Spat black his contempt into my face
And in his master’s voice:
“Hey boy, a pastis, a towel, some water.”
[…]
            The crippled soldier from the Pacific war tells my brother: “Get used to your color the way I got used to my stump. We are both casualties.”
            Yet, with all my being, I refuse to accept this amputation. I feel my soul as vast as the world, truly a soul as deep as the deepest of rivers; my chest has the power to expand to infinity. I was made to give and they prescribe for me the humility of the cripple. When I opened my eyes yesterday I saw the sky in total revulsion. I tried to get up but the eviscerated silence surged toward me with paralysed wings. Not responsible for my acts, as the crossroads between Nothingness and Infinity, I began to weep.
-Franz Fanon – Black Skin, White Masks

To understand Fanon’s text, one has to engage diverse philosophical traditions and note both the ways in which he disrupts those narratives and remains enmeshed within them. Fanon embraced psychoanalysis but pointed to the ethnocentrism of its Oedipalism. He absorbed Marxism but pointed to the Eurocentric limits of its class analysis. He incorporated existentialism but pointed to the social aporia engendered by a subjectivist voluntarism, seen as irrelevant for colonized people. If Fanon’s word “situational” calls up Sartre, it also calls up Fanon’s own critique of Sartre and phenomenology as insufficiently situated, as failing to acknowledge the specific nature of the constraints on human freedom typical of the colonized world.
-Ella Shohat

To Whom It May Concern:
I am not what I have tried to be!
Will I ever be able to write a few words correctly?
Will I ever learn not to misspell words?
No. Never. I am a cobbler.
-John Petracca

The “No. Never” in this passage haunts me. It’s a dead weight that contradicts my grandfather’s life’s work – the mountains of lore, short stories, letters, aphorisms that he composed in his shoe repair shop and jotted onto the material of his trade, whole treatises squeezed onto the backs of the tabs used to mark down what part of the shoe needed fixing, with a word inevitably broken by the hole punched O at the top or bottom of the tab. My grandfather hoped to be a writer, and he was. My grandfather hoped to express his thoughts and feelings in the language of the new culture he had entered, but this presented a variety of problems. To be a laborer and a writer in this culture was not allowed; there were no means by which his writing could become public. He wore the mantle of English uncomfortably; sometimes English simply was not adequate to his task. Two generations later, I am unable to read the passages he produced in Italian; the language, and with it, the ineffable and therefore perhaps most pressing aspects of my familial and class identity have been erased from the realm of useful knowledge.
In spite of what I have yet to know, I remain sure that speech, song, and the written word were survival tactics for my family. In the Depression years, my grandfather seems to have used irony in his journal as a strategy for getting by and as a tool for restaking his dislodged self:

It is cloudy and warm. The water company served notice threatening to close my supply of water if I don’t pay my bill! It is not grand? And to think that here we have no public water places where I could fetch it home! 1pm – the Gas and Electric Company has sent its two cents in. I must be a prominent person, for everyone points his finger at me!

[…]
My mother gave my father some of the most impassioned and persuasive speeches on civil rights that I have ever heard. In the early seventies, she wrote feminist sermons for a progressive parish priest; she used her poetry to leave the church and the bad marriage to which it yoked her and to enter a new, more various, city-bound community as a small-press editor and an organizer of readings and forums. But, powerful as writing, music, or the spoken word might be, none of these media could ever really materialize as divining rod. If the water company turns the water off, so shall it be. Poetry readings won’t bring the bacon home, so my mother struggles daily as a legal secretary against the delegitimizing of her experience and knowledge, her identity. A working-class person’s daily thoughts, a shoemaker’s poetry, may be just the resources higher education needs to divine itself, to plumb the depths of its mechanisms of exclusion, its refusals to know or to find marginal knowledge(s), in the best sense of the word, useful.
-Mary Capello, John Petracca’s grand-daughter.