Tag: social justice

Doing the Most (and Never Enough)

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I really am fine, or as fine as I can be, all things considered…

Teaching is incredibly rewarding and my thesis is pretty much writing itself after all the obsessive research and more than a few false starts.

I’m working on getting the care that I need. If you know me well enough to be worried after reading this blog, you also know that writing is my automatic response for anything that happens in my life, and not necessarily a cry for help nor a word-for-word rendering of the parts of my life no one can ever really know but me.

I’m caught in a place that is familiar to most people who are trying to find the joints between art, activism, academic work, and living as a whole human being. You can do you research about people and cultures, solidify their place in history, but by the time your work is actually done, the people you claim to care about could be long dead. What use are you to them while they are still living?

 I just need to write.

***

When the bus plunges forward to an abrupt stop, I feel as though the force is going to take me with it. Take me out, through the window and onto the asphalt on a bed of broken windscreen and motor oil. The woman next to me is laughing too loud, to deep, to wide, too open; all the way back to her wisdom teeth and down her throat. Something on that stranger’s sandwich smells sour, as if it has been sitting on a glass shelf under a sweating spotlight for more hours than the package would recommend. Everything is entirely too much. Needless to say, I feel overwhelmed, and not just by the unending stream of news reporting brutality and collapse that is most certainly not new, but feels somehow even more urgent and threatening by the day.

I’m overwhelmed, so that every late-night message alert from one of my students, or an email reminder “touching base on your student loan,” feels like a bell ringing right next to my ear drum. Goddess forbid someone drop a heavy object upstairs, because that might as well be a rubber boot stomping on the inside of my head. The blender in the kitchen next door is a drill hammering directly onto my collarbone, and the shower running two doors down is more like a burst pipe emptying onto the floor around my bed. I’m overwhelmed in a way that I can only explain in these exaggerated terms, (except this is how it really feels), to demonstrate how any emotional or physical stimuli seem to have taken on several additional dimensions beyond what one would expect of livable reality.

The usually reliable neatness of my symptoms list is now no more than black marks skidding across the page where there used to be words (ants are too orderly). At least, it might as well be, because the sensation of the world pressing against my skin to the point where the pain is unbearable is new and doesn’t fit anywhere between “nervousness” and “paranoia.” Another new and even more concerning development is the compulsion I feel to punish myself for…what, I’m not completely sure. Self-deprecation is one thing; I’m so familiar with that mild sort of shame that my footprints leave footprints in the same grooves where I have stepped down that path many times before.

Normally, my issue is that I’m embarrassed or annoyed with myself for an inconsiderate or cruel thing I did or said years before I could have claimed to know better.

But this is different. The problem now seems to be that I exist at all. My smallest infractions send me spiraling around and down towards self-loathing and other horrid and unutterable thoughts. My default setting is now that I don’t deserve rest or reward because I haven’t worked hard enough, haven’t graded enough papers, haven’t written enough pages of my thesis, haven’t been pleasant enough to the people in my life who become collateral damage to my chaotic self.

Because it’ll never be enough. I’ve been given too much I don’t deserve and there will never be a way to pay…I’ll eat when I’ve completed a satisfactory amount of work, which is usually hours after the stomach ache from hunger itself gives up in the hopes that I’ll change my mind and stop for food at some point.

I’ll take a break and go to meet with that person, or just go outside for fresh air when I’ve earned it, so probably never.

I’ll pause and join the rest of the house for a chat when I’m done reading this book, I need it for my research, I need it to tell me how to more present, to be more useful and the next and the next…read on the bus, in bed, in between in-betweens, even when fatigued from learning more about how we’ve created a world that is killing us all some more quickly than others.

It’s urgent.

I’ll wash and oil and braid my hair when I have a moment to spare, so not for the next few weeks until the next deadline passes, or until my curls and kinks can only be coaxed out of knots with a wide-toothed comb (and I am sure to lose a lot in the process).

I am my own predator. Anything about myself is fair game. Every unanswered message and missed meet-up is another failure. Any mundane setback is evidence of another thing I can’t do, another indication that I am not worthy. My current target is now the cavernous gap between my political convictions and the way I am living my life. Cavernous because my only option is to fall fast and far through the weak foundation of what I think I know and what I actually do…

Girl, like the one and only time you gave in to name-dropping an influential, or maybe even [in]famous, relative to slide around the bureaucracy of the passport office at home. Is “one and only” one time too many when I claim to understand how corruption works? Let’s hear some of that talk about privilege, hmm? How many volunteer shifts missed until I just stop going? How many times to be judgmental, or to compromise my own humanity by my inability or unwillingness to empathize with anyone who cries “white tears?” Or like the fact that I’m using this space to seek validation that I am indeed a “good” person doing my best? Is that what I’m doing? Who has time for my self-indulgence/self-flagellation-self at all?

Whatever is happening now is ugly. My writing has turned from confession and the occasional celebration into another opportunity to turn against my myself. I am living the combination of trying to move around as an artist concerned with what my work is going to mean in this world, attempting to navigate how I wield power and squirm under its heel at the same time, and this genetic? hormonal? all of the above? tendency to be ruthless with my self where I should be gentle. Whatever is happening now is ugly, and I would be lying if I said I wasn’t a little frightened.

***

Here are some of the things outside off (but not necessarily unrelated to) my self that I’ve been thinking and talking and teaching about over the past few weeks (and also trying to figure out things I can *do*.) Give them a read? It’s urgent.

 

 

 

 

Hunting Game

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Neither eloquent poetry, nor well-constructed lines of prose are enough to convey the impact of your actions. In fact, your corruption isn’t worthy of being immortalized through these noble art forms. Instead, here are a few directives you might want to take into consideration; the public is aware that a thorough stakeout…I meant investigation, takes time. In the meantime, should we spill some blood in an ancestral ritual to ensure that the dead are sent to a less tumultuous place? Or sprinkle it over everything; letting it settle on the reports and evaluations and statements, signed and banished to the dark recesses of a municipal building basement? Are we expected to watch in silence as it seeps into the scorching tar where it fell, stewing like the remnants of slaughtered prey, evidence of another successful day on the prowl?

You earned your fatigues, your hunter’s honor; you were certain this was your calling. Maybe you grew up with a broad-shouldered father, whose presence filled an entire room. The top of his head seemed to brush the ceiling, and his metal adornments reflected the light in a way you had only seen stars shine. Or maybe you sat wide-eyed in front of the television every Saturday morning as your favorite heroes emptied the streets of all that was vile, all the monsters that hid under your bed at night and the gnarled hands in shadowy hiding places snatching innocent souls. It’s possible that you spent your early years escaping these shadows and vowed never to lose yourself in them.

Somewhere along the way, your straight and narrow path turned into a dark alleyway stinking of smoke and retribution. You lost your purpose; the meaning of “doing your job” was hidden deep in the maze of morality, obscured by rows and rows of red tape. You became another obedient cog in a machine whose furnace is only satisfied with the ashes of the hopes and dreams of a people; their rights and dignity are logs for the eternally raging flame. You flashed, and shot, and slammed, and cuffed. After all, that’s the only language these people understand.

Perhaps you are just trying your best. You titter nervously beside the water cooler as your colleagues spit insults and crude humor, just so you don’t seem like a judgmental spoilsport. But you’re an okay kind of guy, you really are. After all, you grew up with friends that represented at least a fraction of the rainbow spectrum. We’re all people, aren’t we? The amount of melanin they were blessed (or cursed) with doesn’t change the way you view them. Or maybe you’ve studied the machine’s manual meticulously. You make sure to project your voice, but not too much; you starch your shirt and give firm handshakes. You color within the lines, most importantly, you always stay on the sidewalk. There’s nothing wrong with this, I have no right to judge you. You can’t go out there and look crazy in front of people! You are, and forever will be, an ambassador for everyone who shares the minutest percentage of your ancestry. That is absolutely unfair, and of course it’s not your fault if the others won’t pull up and shape up.

So when is the next expedition scheduled to take place? Or is it underway right now? Should we take cover? I suppose we must rid ourselves of the audacity to merely exist anywhere in the vicinity of your playground, I’m sorry, game reserve. Remain calm, hold onto rationality- to talk about calm at a time when rage is striking the ground like thunder thrown from heaven? To point out that remaining calm is easier said than done is a tired understatement. Let us wash the streets, scrub them with the tears of all the mothers left standing with empty hands, with the nectar of the futures that were stunted before they even thought about blooming. Unfortunately this isn’t strong enough to wash the residue and hate off your hands. Perhaps we can form a committee and convene a meeting to probe further into the question of fixing this putrid system which authorized you to aim and fire in the first place.

Welcome to Dysfunction

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Something is out of joint. This is more than a fog settling on the horizon, something more disturbing than a bad omen. More than the twisted ankle you got that day you tried to grasp the branch just fingertips out of reach. The darkest storm clouds are swirling in the middle of harmattan. Something unnatural has occurred, like a hand reaching beyond the chest and squeezing the heart ever so slightly. The once-eager cadets in their shiny uniforms are offbeat and out of step, gold buttons hanging by a thread on the front of their jackets. Our mothers would say the gods have been angered. Welcome to dysfunction, where the owners of the house are long past the point of keeping up appearances. They have inherited a homestead in ruins, a place haunted by the phantoms of its torrid past. A relic, a shrine to fallen greatness long forgotten, stands in the place where the Atlantic once kissed shores littered with gold dust and “undiscovered” treasures. A view of the past filtered through the longing of sepia-toned lenses is necessary, to demonstrate just how weak the foundations have become.

Welcome to a place where the owners of the house stopped trying generations ago to cover the cracks with lashings of whitewash, whitewash spilled everywhere, whitewash smothered on the curb to demonstrate prosperity and booming bank balances for the visitors. And yet the real heirs to this relic are the ones who suffer. They have become tenants, squatters even, as they watch their protectors sell away what’s left of their inheritance, brick by crumbling brick. Where food once burst forth from the ground, now only weeds and parasites deign to sprout. The owners have carried the juiciest fruit away to foreign lands, only to bring back a glossy product encased with slogans and false hope, promising to transform lives. That new car means an automatic promotion, a house in a gated community, and water that flows all the time and not when it so chooses, (almost as though a petulant child is tampering with the source just to annoy those dreadful people who think they are important because they happen to be taller.) That bar of chocolate and bottle of purified water mean that your hair (also imported) will flow behind you, driven by an invisible fan, as you step into the world of your dreams.

Dreams sold at exorbitant prices, after all…(“Abeg you know petrol has gone higher ooh”). Dreams built on the backs of a few people’s hard work, only for an even smaller select few to enjoy. But what haven’t you already heard? Worry is welded to the faces of everyone you know. Anxiety is a permanent and unwanted houseguest, that relative that promises to leave once they’re back on their feet, but is still there after years of “weighing the best options”. Furrowed foreheads are the latest accessories and a chorus of deep sighs is sweeping across language barriers, and ages, and degrees, and classes. Actually, maybe not classes. Trust is an antiquated abstraction that has been filed away in case a use is found for it somewhere in the distant future. And the house owners pretend to sympathize, but they hide behind inappropriate jokes and poorly timed pep talks, relying on that staple sense of humor to make it through.

You are now entering dysfunction, where the tenants can see the reflection of their distended bellies in the tinted windows of the new toy the owner brought home today. Even the neighbors who used to peek disdainfully through the hedge at those “other people” are now beginning to feel the outrage. Can we break off this shiny metal and turn it into something useful? Burn it to ignite a fire in the deactivated consciences of those who have sat idly while the house continued to crash  around our heads, or those who actively dismantled it, a piece of gravel here, a louver blade there. Now the neighbors and distant relatives are clamoring to be heard. But the landlord’s primary interest is keeping the title deeds clutched tightly to his chest, or balled up in the same fist he uses to shower blows on a populace on their knees. But you see, now, outrage has become a legitimate emotion to express. It has been signed in triplicate and has sat on a civil servant’s desk for six months. It has even been rubber-stamped, notarized, sealed with wax and has obtained all the relevant permits. It has been brought before committees and tribunals and found worthy. It has also been discussed in  ministry offices, barbershops, chop bars, and over brunch at the latest hotspot. It’s official; dysfunction may be here to stay?

All animals are equal, but some are more equal than others.

-Animal Farm, George Orwell