BioLog

To “act, speak, write, and think otherwise”, in Professor Alexis Gumbs’ words, is harder and more powerful than it might appear at first glance.  Sylvia Wynter’s “Ethno or Socio Poetics” seems to invite the reader to perform just this magic, with an emphasis on both the “other” and the “wise”.  I’ll land lightly and momentarily, like dust, on a few wonderings inspired by this piece:

1. Wynter traces the etymology of the “ethnic ” to the “other”, and therefore “ethnopoetics” to “other-poetry”, crucially and painstakingly distinguished from poetics, true poetics, “eupoetics”, i.e. normal, universal (Western) poetics. 

2.  Wynter describes the “other” as “wise”.  She points to a form of cognition that both precedes and exceeds what she calls classical Western thought (hm?) and its will to dominate nature (as she exemplifies through a passage by Descartes).  I find this claim somewhat dubious (I believe that certain kinds of knowing are accessible to people with the languages and lives capacious enough to hold those knowings, but I don’t believe that these knowings can be cleaved neatly along “First World”-”Third World” lines, as Wynter seems to suggest)–however, I am intrigued by Wynter’s conception of this way of knowing, a poetic way of knowing, which seems to be wisdom’s kin.

3.  Wynter points to two different (but related?) others:  the “other” as a negative term–the alien/subordinate/servant/inferior/primitive in need of civilization and needed by the (broadly) “Western” self as a confirmation of its (natural/cultural) superiority–and the “other” as a positive term–the being who interrupts dangerous homogeneity, the being who acts/speaks/writes/thinks OtherWise.  The ”other” is, in Wynter’s conception, a victim and a troublemaker. 

4.  “Western civilization” as such is both continuous with and radically distinct from its own past, and from the past of the rest of humanity, Wynter seems to claim.  Wynter is clearly not triumphalist in her descriptions of what makes the West exceptional–she points to its comodification of humanity itself as its distinguishing feature, and not in laudatory terms.  Though, again, I’m suspicious (with Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak) of “too easy ‘West-and-the-rest’” conceptions–what fascinates me are Wynter’s ideas about continuity and rupture.  Is the “other” not a being as strange as Western civilization–both completely continuous with its past (and its present society), and radically discontinuous with it? 

5.  Back to etymology: Wynter traced the original (the “for real for real”?) etymology of ethnos (via George Quasha) to the Indo-European “seu” or “self”, “us”, “we”, “the people”.  I love the people.  I love the we, and am happy to be part of the we.  And when I think of the We with no Other, I feel simultaneous elation and dread.  I want, more than anything, a We that holds together, like threads in cloth or roots in soil, enough to end the horrifying violence that “Selves” inflict upon “Others”.  I also want an Other who will always be capable of speaking OtherWise.  I think I can imagine, with Wynter, a We that does not need an Other to exist.  What I can’t imagine, however, is a We that wouldn’t benefit–albeit, perhaps in an annoyed, exhausted way–from an Other who playfully prodded it, like a child or a clown.  The Other is dangerous.  The Other is constantly created to be destroyed.  The Other is wrong.  The Other is wise.  These things are true all at once.

From these ideas, I come to a single question, the starting of poem, or perhaps its form:  Is OtherWise a language?   If it is, can we learn to speak it?  Can I learn to speak it?

Organisms and Knowledge: Kriti’s Summer 2007 Reading List

A fuzzy view into my cluttered mind.  Complete with a schematic.  Wow.

I’m trying to practice writing relatively quickly - as it is, I feel like I take too much time to write anything because I want it to be just right, and this discourages me from writing because I don’t have the time to do it.  I have so many essay ideas, and I feel a real need to start writing them.  So I’m trying an exercise I made up for myself, where I take 1 hour to write down whatever I’m thinking about - not in a stream-of-consciousness form, and not quite in journal entry form, but in a form approaching an essay. These are skeleton essays, sketch essays, speed essays - unfinished, but with the kernel of an idea there. This one feels very truncated because I was only starting to get into the meat of it when time ran out, which makes me wonder whether I want to do outlines (the entire essay in very sketchy form, not a lot of detail or content) or half-baked essays (small portions of the essay with detail and content).  In any case, here goes:

“Tangled knowledge: coming up against the limits of what I can understand” by Kriti

Ultimately, my obsession is with knowledge itself. I am daily stunned by what I don’t know. I am constantly curious about things, asking “What is this? How can this be?” I look into the world and see a gorgeous tangle, a breathtaking tangle, a thicket I would never wish to leave, a bramble whose branches lead inward and outward, earthward and skyward. The bramble, the thicket, the tangle, the web is beyond the capacity of my small mind to hold. The feeling, the daily feeling that catches me where I stand, is the feeling of watching fireworks: there’s a smoky trail in the sky, a whistle and a hum somewhere far away, and the trail is amorphous and difficult to decipher, and there is confusion as I watch to see where it’s going, and an irritation under my skin as I realize it’s too dark outside and even my most earnest attempts to see through squinted eyes are foiled, and then! A chaotic burst, and an orderly pattern in the air. The thing, the idea I had, the connections I was trying to make, the hard-to-trace relationship of everything to everything – it all jumbles inward and then explodes outward into a wondrous, breathtaking, vast and open space.

I squint to follow the trails between things as best I can, and then to hold the web as a whole in my meager mind, and when it proves too much, too large, too intricate, it all dissolves into a warming in my heart and a reverence in my breath. It seems like a rather futile endeavor, all of this tangled journeying, but the rewards are rich. Wonder, I think, is its own reward.

Many different problems share this thickety, brambly form. How from a single cell a being forms with a whole body and a blinking, racing knowledge of the world is one such problem. Another one is how a society comes to be an obstinate thing, with power and domination entrenched in its structure, with the powerful merely changing faces on occasion over centuries. Another is how we who are said to inhabit the same world can have such apparently contradictory knowledges about that ostensibly common world. In all cases, the pursuit of the questions lead to fireworks, to a tangled mess that cannot quite hold, at least in my small mind.

Take for example the problem of contradictory knowledges in a common world – a problem that is close to my heart as I move through my life puzzled daily by the distance between what I know to be true and what those whom I encounter know to be true. The very constant, everyday experience of awe, shock, and sometimes dismay at observing what people-who-are-not-me believe and do often gives me pause. I operate on the premise (where does this premise come from?) that I share something with every person, and that if I understood their lives, I would understand their positions today – their fears, their hatreds, their joys, their sadness’ – no matter how radically different these positions might be from my own. I carry a fairly constant desire within myself to connect with and understand others, though my relatively meager capacity to do so is often pushed to its breaking point despite the fact that I often summon all the resources I can to the task.

One of the most obvious and troubling manifestations of this phenomenon in my life are the racist comments, behaviors, and ideologies I observe on a daily basis. Racism is clear as day to me, identifiable from a mile away, manifest always in a rich set of textures and colors, variations on a common theme. I do not search for it – I would rather not see it at all. But there it is always, waiting for me when I wake up, predictable as sunrise, ubiquitous as air. So when every other day, I encounter someone—either in person or through media—who says that racism does not exist, and that those who believe in its existence are simply misguided or oversensitive or vengeful or anachronistic (or, as a modern twist on the theme, “reverse racists” themselves), I become confused, as if someone told me that my left hand is just a hallucination that I experience alone, that no one else can see it, that it doesn’t actually feel, or grab, or caress, or throb.

“But it’s my left hand,” I say. “I can pull my fingers into a fist and watch them curl, and feel a soft pressure in my palm. I can curl my fingers around a small thing and move it from one place on the earth to another. The fist forms. The thing moves. I do these things with my left hand, and I feel its existence so closely. What do you mean my left hand doesn’t exist?” At which point, my detractor says, “But I can’t feel your fingers curl into a fist, I can’t feel the soft pressure in my palm, I can’t feel the weight and movement of the small object. So your left hand can’t exist.” When I point out that the small object that was once in one place on the earth is now in another place, and that some force must have moved it there, and I offer the hypothesis that it was my left hand that supplied this force, the detractor explains that the object must have moved due to the movement of wind, or something else eternal, free of responsibility, natural. It seems we are at an impasse.

It’s simple to start writing about ignorance. You find something you do not know, and there you begin.

        A library can reduce me to tears. I stand silent in front of it—people shuffle by with their arms overfull with books, or with a single slender volume held gently in two hands that they course over while walking. There are eight stories of books, and millions of stories on each story. I stand there shaken, heartbroken, faced with more knowledge than I could possibly ever access. Even more unsettling, I sense that nothing I could possibly ever create would add to it. My childhood was rife with metaphors about the relationship between the soul and God as the relationship between a drop of water and the ocean. The contribution of a drop of water to the ocean is utterly imperceptible. So it is with any book I may write. So it is with my very life. If you see someone weeping in front of a library, offer her a tissue, and maybe a reassuring touch. There is little more you can do to comfort one who is stricken by her smallness in the face of what she does not know, and of what she cannot do.
        You are familiar with the phrase, “This is what we now know about matter”, or time, or salamanders, or the Ottoman Empire, or Virginia Woolf, or cancer, or cognition, or brains. But what, realistically, do “we” know? Faced with a question I do not have the answer to, I will often say, “I’m sure that it’s known, but I don’t know it.” What is background knowledge? What is the knowledge that we are collectively supposed to be building on to greater and greater heights? Is knowledge a great library, the grand sum of all that has ever been thought or known by every sentient being from the beginning of time? Are those who are more knowledgeable those who have accessed more from this library?
        Anyone could have written this poem, done this experiment, made this observation, connected those dots, solved this algorithm, read those books, planted those seeds, invented that recipe, made that relationship, fought that battle, followed that path. Anyone could have, but only particular people actually did. There is maybe nothing new under the sun then except for us.

We thrash, curse for air
As our strangler declares, look
How violent the Arab.
-”Haiku for the Head Locked”
by Zein El-Amine

Your ignorance runs
Too deep. My pain is too fresh.
We shout across this.
-”‘After’ Colonization”
by Kriti Sharma

Read the rest of this entry »

I think that there needs to be a word and a conceptual category for the idea of “killing or injuring carried out by living beings for the sake of their continued existence”. I think this word is generally called “eating” or “consuming”. When we say that nature is cruel and that there is a violence that is intrinsic to living, I think we’re usually referring to the fact that (a) most beings must kill or injure other beings in order to continue living, and (sometimes) (b) beings use resources to help continue their lives that could have theoretically been used by other living beings to continue their lives, but are no longer available, such that some beings contribute indirectly to the non-living of other beings via use of a theoretically shared resource.

But this use of the word violence is often conflated with the concept of “killing or injuring carried out by living beings which is not necessary to their continued living”. I recognize that the distinction can be blurry at times, particularly when dealing with beings that kill or injure in order to help other beings (both “related” in the purely hereditary sense, and “non-related”) and potential progeny live. But I still think that the distinction is useful, because otherwise we tend to equate “the violence intrinsic to living” with just violence in general - as if all violence was equally “natural” and equally “necessary”.

1. Why do people who possess more than enough things to live healthy and fulfilling lives act like they need more, like they can never get enough? What is enough? When does craving (greed) end, and how can it end?

2. Why such hatred, violence, and war? Why can’t we get along?

3. How are we to communicate meaningfully across difference? How do we maintain individuality, autonomy, and agency, as well as connectedness, empathy, understanding, and a sense of mutual desire for togetherness?

My premises:

1. These questions are old, old questions, but their formulations and their “answers” have changed over time. This means that they lie on some kind of continuum between problems that will always be with us (problems that have their roots in the intrinsic order of the cosmos, in “the way things are”) and problems that are time-space-bound and are mutable (problems that have their roots in human culture, cognition, and social life). It’s very difficult to tease these aspects out from their tangle with each other.

2. It’s the “intrinsic-ness” of these problems to human existence in particular and to life and living in general that have allowed (enticed?) modern biologies to speak to them. That is, biologies, which seek to discover patterns in nature and to characterize living creatures, has had and continues to have something to say about “what is ‘enough’ for living beings and when and why do they go beyond ‘enough’”, “why we fight”, and “how are living beings both connected and separate”. (These same questions are posed and given multiple answers by religions, philosophies, anthropologies, sociologies, psychologies, and economics’, which is important to remember and will be revisited.)

3. I want to look to the natural world to find inklings of answers to these questions, but I don’t know why, and I’m not sure how.

4. I’m going fairly blindly on intuition, desire, inkling, hope, and faith that the living world is not as need- and greed-filled, unnecessarily violent, and hopelessly armored in impenetrable boundaries (through which communication is impossible) as it are often characterized. I have a guess - a well-informed and educated guess based on observation and experience, but a guess none the less - that much of what dominant, mainstream and modern biologies have had to say about this topic are influenced by patriarchal, eurocentric, and positivist biases. I don’t know what I’ll find.

from lex. Something to fuel my fire -

June Jordan on the spirit of resistance:
1. It feels terrific.
2. It knows it will prevail.
3. It’s immune to enemy assessment.
4. It agitates for one’s life, one’s soul.
5. It’s basically and ultimately collective.
6. and 7. IT FEELS TERRIFIC!

This is the front side of a greeting card sold on rent-a-negro.com. Brilliant! These cards are so useful for broaching the topic of racism both candidly and compassionately. I’d like to buy every kind for all occasions, and I’d love to leave them out at Duke for folks just to take either after a difficult day of racist oppression, or to pass on to others.

Mos Def has this song on “The New Danger” called “Bedstuy Parade and Funeral March for Fighters and Lovers”. That’s what I think of when I think of the survivors, and the dead, of Hurricane Katrina.

I just watched Spike Lee’s “When the Levees Broke” and am pretty torn up. There are so many scenes that choke me up - and then there’s one that both catches my throat and makes me light inside. It’s of a New Orleans funeral. The procession to the grave site was graced with beautiful, somber jazz music by a large brass band. Walking away from the grave site, the procession is lively, with a catchy, gorgeous, lively tune - lively. The person being interviewed called it a celebration: “It’s like, ‘I’m sad that you’re gone, but I sure am glad to have known you.’” Then he said something along the lines of, “the celebration is a time for expression. It’s so we don’t stay silent or hushed about death.” I think I’ve never seen or heard anything so beautiful.

Fighters and lovers, fighters and lovers. Fighters and lovers, these dead, these displaced, these daring. These survivors.

As I wrote on my now-defunct blogspot blog: “I don’t get the phrase ‘mere survival’. To me, there is nothing ‘mere’ about it. Survival is not a step one takes on the way to ‘higher’, ‘better’ things. Survival is worthy of all the energy we put into it. It is essential. It is astonishing. It is powerful. It is brave. It is difficult. It is chancy. It is not guaranteed. It is, against all odds. It is a goddamn miracle. Breathe in. Breathe out.”

I wrote those words month ago, but the New Orleans funeral march somehow infuses the words with new meaning. It’s now September 11th again, and a year ago the levees broke, and all over the bombs and bullets are raining - softly drizzling in some places and thundering down in others - and hunger snuffs out light after light after light after miraculous, precious light. No more lights.

Who turned out the lights? How many more funerals for fighters and lovers? And why - why the great conspiratorial hush around death, the unspoken understanding that we will not break out wailing wherever we are, and dance, and grieve, and weep, and weep?