Some post-6150 thoughts - Thursday, October 18, 2007

The following is a message i wrote to the participants of 6150 section B after the October 18th class. - chris cavanagh

There's something missing in our exploration of popular education and postcolonialism. And I'm not exactly sure how to build it in more. A few of you have reminded me why this work is so important. You have mentioned how emotionally difficult engaging this material is. Some of you have even mentioned tears. And so I'm reminded of some important truths of this work. Not the least of which is that it can take an emotional toll. Which is, of course, all part of learning and growing. Except that I find the classroom environment and even popular education pedagogy for that matter, rather poor at attending to our emotional needs. Better, perhaps, than dominant pedagogies. But even popular education theory and practice is still catching up with our actual experience of engaging the many hard and sorrowful truths of injustice, cruelty, waste.

I want to affirm that, for many of us, dealing with this material is emotionally very difficult. And this deserves respect and care. First of all from ourselves, of course. And I do hope that you each exercise what self-care you can. For my part, I wonder about the obligations of popular education praxis for the care of the self. Or, put another way, how do we theorize this care and how do we put it into practice?

While popular education is about love and suffering and compassion it is also about joy and humour (but more on these latter two items later). One of the themes running through Paulo Freire's work is love. Though there is yet an enormous amount of work in both theorizing and putting into practice this notion. Each year for the past few I have given a talk based on a 'zine article I wrote some time ago. It's called On Broken Hearts and you can find a version of it here.

It is, in part, inspired by a quote from that strange old testament book, Ecclesiastes (1:18): In much wisdom is much grief: and he that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow.

These words have been a kind of mantra for me for a long time. And still I forget. This is an obviously ancient piece of wisdom that all educators would do well to remember as we ask ourselves, "who am I to educate someone else?"


My thoughts for the moment turn to how we practice this wisdom in the classroom. Generally our emotional life is either put on hold or simply ignored altogether when we are in a classroom setting. We all abide by conventions (common sense) about regulating the emotional content of our communication. At its worst this is what Foucault, in Discipline and Punish, has called the "docile body." The challenge for popular education classroom practice is how we negotiate space for our emotional selves. Especially given the wide diversity of cultures usually represented and how emotion is variously structured and practiced. Do we simply abide by the hegemonic common sense that treats the greater part of our emotional selves as something to be dealt with in private? Or can we find and/or create ways that can give space and time to at least some of the emotional energies that we stir up? For sure, some of us need to turn to resources like friends, family, journals, therapists and counsellors. But, in addition to private means, what can we do in the public spheres/arenas such as the classroom? I know about one situation in which a friend who is aboriginal is studying law where the law program actually provides access to therapy for what is a predictable need for many people as they are obliged to contend with histories of abuse and loss. And there is the "despair" work of Buddhist Joanna Macy that you can read about in her book Coming Back to Life.

J'net, my partner, who is making breakfast while I type this, suggests that we can make rituals that can allow us to move our emotion – she explains that this comes from the teaching that ritual is a way of giving our prayers (our inner worlds) a physical form; for example, lighting a candle, burning our tissue paper when we cry, washing our face. As well as recognizing that there are numerous ways in which feeling is moved – not simply crying – such as sweating, getting cold, leg-twitching, yawning and more. These are common ways of releasing emotional energy. Each of these, I would say, is better than another common response: apathy.

Apathy, etymologically speaking, means "no pathos" where "pathos" means "emotion". But "pathos" is also ancient Greek for "suffering". And therein lies one of the answers to the vast amount of apathy that we live with in this world and in ourselves. As is all-too-human we do not want to suffer. We shy away from the flame, the knife, the cliff-edge. But a flame can fuel, a knife can cut away confusion and the cliff-edge can be a great place from which to fly.

It is so easy to get angry at the apathetic. Even at ourselves when being so. But how much harder is it to see that apathy is a shield against suffering as well as the fear of suffering. And who are any of us to tell people to give up their coping strategies? What if they do abandon apathy only to find themselves overwhelmed and rendered incapable of action as a result? Where will we be when they then ask for help? Thus the wisdom in the Ecclesiastes quote.

Despite reminding myself of Ecclesiates advice, I yet forget what an emotional storm can be stirred up in the processes of learning about racism, colonialism, genocide and, of course and always, the resistance to all that. Years ago, Deborah Barndt recommended Susan Griffin's A Chorus of Stones to me. In it Griffin is exploring her family history and what is allowed to be remembered and what has been made forgotten.

I am beginning to believe that we know everything, that all history, including the history of each family, is part of us, such that, when we hear any secret revealed, a secret about a grandfather, or an uncle, or a secret about the battle of Dresden in 1945, our lives are made suddenly clearer to us, as the unnatural heaviness of unspoken truth is dispersed. For perhaps we are like stones; our own history and the history of the world embedded in us, we hold a sorrow deep within and cannot weep until that history is sung.

What Griffin showed me with her exploration is that even histories of which we are unaware have a powerful effect on us. Perhaps this is not so hard to believe in the context of a family. It is a sad case for many children that they are made to answer for their parents' disappointments and losses – the "sins of the father" and all that. Though, of course, many people, by the same token, are inheritors of joy and love. It is typical, though, I would say, that the latter are celebrated while the former are disappeared and forgotten, though nonetheless passed on. This makes of them a pernicious influence on our lives. And we find ourselves reproducing behaviours that we have come to loathe without knowing why. It has often been touted that one day you will look into the mirror and discover that you have become your parent. This is usually bandied about as a cautionary tale about something that will horrify us. Of course, if one's parents were wonderful, loving, generous people, the warning is unnecessary.

I think it a fair sentiment when encountering and engaging this material to ask, "what has this got to do with me?" And to worry that in some way there is an implication that despite generations that may have passed, you are somehow "guilty" for crimes of one's ancestors. We see this expressed through the common sense behaviour of denial of having any responsibility for past deeds performed with such phrases as, "I had nothing to do with the slave trade? Why should I have to answer for that? It happened hundreds of years ago? And besides, my family suffered too. It wasn't all milk and honey for my grandparents who had to immigrate from [fill in the blank]…" And so on.

But power and privilege and history are not so simple. Sure you may not have been personally involved in the slave trade. But you live in a world that remains powerfully shaped by the history of slavery and the modern manifestations (ubiquitous and abundant) of racism. We each of us continue either to benefit or suffer from racism.

As we open our minds to new knowledge, we unavoidably expose our hearts as well. And not surprisingly that just might hurt.

To choose to embrace these histories, this knowledge, this power/knowledge, these new truth regimes is to necessitate having to reorient ourselves with our friends, family, life-world and so on. This can be very difficult for some of us. It can be painful and lonely. And there is no promise that once you have managed some of this reorientation that your relationship with your family and friends will be "better". While it may be more truthful, you may also find that bearing those truths creates greater distance between you and your loved ones. The risk of alienation and loneliness is real. Sometimes that is the trade off, the bargain – as you learn new truths, you become something different. More than simply learning new facts, new behaviours, you find that you are a different person altogether. And this can be scary.

I ramble on now. So will wrap up with a reiteration: what are the obligations of a postcolonial popular education praxis in all this? I don't mean to offer any certainties, but rather to share with you my ongoing, if at times meandering and always provisional, thinking.

Peace

chris

PS - what i haven't written of here is another important piece to this whole puzzle and that is joy and celebration and humour. Leroy Little Bear mentions humour ever-so-briefly. And the role of humour in aboriginal culture and pedagogy is something worth looking at closely and from which there is much to learn (from Coyote trickster tales to all the tricksters of all the many first nations to the practices of Hopi clowning to so much more). I quite accidentally came across this book: Laughter Out of Place: Race, Class, Violence, and Sexuality in a Rio Shantytown by Donna M. Goldstein that is the next book i'm tracking down. If i can find the time i'd like to introduce yo to some of the thinking of Mikhail Bakhtin (the carnivalesque) and James Scottt ( Weapons of the Weak and Domination and the Arts of Resistance). And i did mention all-too-briefly, Maria Lugones' Playfull World-Travelling and Loving Perception that is a virtual manifesto for working across difference. - c

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chris cavanagh
www.comeuppance.blogspot.com