not here, not this, but something different elsewhere

It feels right to end here, at this point, as we stand at the close, hoping with a childlike wish in our hearts that it isn’t over, that somehow, this will go on. This is a feeling we all know, it is instinctual, natural, embedded in our muscle memory, and in our very essence and being. An irrational ideal, to keep moving without stopping, to never have to anticipate the end of the day, and to just continue on with what fills our hearts with content. It is a hope that the Black radical tradition was built on, a beautiful prayer for an endless trail of beginnings and no ends. Why? Because it was necessary to start from a point of possibility and not loss. To read their story as one of resilience and not abjection. To see their history as one that is not rife with despair, but alive with promise.

The Black radical tradition, to me, is a new Enlightenment, a Black Renaissance, which left behind in its wake a place for everyone. It is a movement that focused on the deconstruction and reordering of the world on different terms. On magic and enchantment, rationality and irrationality, on love but also loss, for the dead and the living. It sought to create a world that did not exist in binaries, but multiplicities; to render each, the black, the white and the grey their due. And in many ways to simply see the world very much through a child’s eyes; benign and uncorrupted by the logic of power.

It is imbibed with a certain ethic, in tune with the idea of a world that is for everyone and so speaks through a secret code, one that is unclaimed and undiscovered because it belongs to everyone and therefore, does not exist in one form. It exists for all of us. The Black radical tradition communicates in a language that does not emerge from violence, but from a place of innocence. Like a prayer, it does not have a definite form, it can be a string of consciousness that speaks exactly as it feels, unfiltered and free. It can be disjointed and eloquent both at the same time, it can defy logic and reproduce it, all on its own terms. But in each case, its form is representative of the larger project, which is not to redefine the world according to a specific structure, rather, to open the world to more than one form of expression.

So then, like when a child is born in to this world and a prayer is said for them, that the world be kind to them, and create a space for them where they can unapologetically be themselves; that world, the multi colored black world, the world of Morrison, Lorde, hooks, Fanon, Cesaire, Du Bois, Malcolm X, Muhammad Ali and so many more; that is the world the black radical tradition leaves behind to us. A world where you are not a problem, where you can see through the veil that seeks to blind you, where the color of your skin does not determine your destiny, where your anatomy does not limit your horizon, and where you don’t have to worry about who is better than you, but rather, worry about how you can become the best version of you. A world where you can simply just be. 

And so, as we began with a prayer, let us end with one;

I am. We are. And that is enough.

 

“Non-violence is the relentless pursuit of truthful ends through moral means.” The means must be as pure as the ends because the argument is that if the means are corrupted so are the ends. Fanon asked all the colonized people of the world to envision a new world which is unlike the European model for if Europe is to be taken as the model, the world that will be created will be in Europe’s image. The image of death, destruction and disease; all for the sake of profit. Oppressive means will never produce a just end. I don’t know much about the philosophy of non-violence or MLK’s and Gandhi’s politics for that matter, but it is, perhaps, possible to place both of them within the framework that Fanon was talking out.

The oppressor can never be defeated with the oppressor’s own tools and the only way we have understood colonization and the African American experience is through the language of violence. The oppressor is created in the process of colonial violence and we have understood oppression, in itself, to be anti-human. In that sense, non-violence, is a strategy of the oppressed to expose the anti-humanness of such a system to the oppressed and the oppressor. Within the philosophy of non-violence, of what little I understand, there is also the argument that the oppressed redeems himself and his humanity by differentiating between himself and the oppressor and gaining a sense of moral superiority and that is perhaps all the oppressed can afford to have too. There is also the idea of how the oppressed can be free from fear because through non-violence they know that they have nothing to fear for it is only pain.

My problem with the idea of non-violence and the claim that the oppressed can redeem himself through this moral superiority from the oppressor is that it, perhaps, downplays on the antagonism that the oppressed feels towards the oppressor. Fanon argues that whenever the colonist calls the colonized “savage”, “inhuman”, he roars with laughter for he knows that is untrue. Despite the colonist’s efforts to destroy and reduce the colonized to the status of a thing, the colonized knows he’s human for he despises the colonizer, he despises his oppression for he knows “this ain’t it.” Fanon’s argument is that when this idea comes to the collective consciousness, the colonized know they can break their shackles. The oppressed know that they are human, precisely because they loathe their oppression.

Pain and violence are all they have known since infancy. The moral framework, the objective framework is defined by their negation, then what are “moral means” for the oppressed? If one’s entire life is a trajectory of violence, and “morality”, itself legitimizes that violence, then perhaps the only answer is smashing that very morality through the violence it legitimizes. But then again, perhaps, another way of smashing that morality is through creating one’s own morality but that “morality” itself is a reaction to the framework already in place for the existence of the oppressed is a product of the violence of the oppressor, so in other words there is no way to free yourself of the oppressor for your existence itself reeks of the violence of the oppressor. And that is where Fanon comes in and says that the whole house must be burned down if there is to be any redemption.

Another question that bothers me when it comes to non-violence is the gender question. Society operates by legitimizing violence against the bodies of women. If women are to resist by this strategy of non-violence, do they continue to let themselves be exposed and abused by the unique forms of violence that they are subject to for the “means” must be as pure as the end? That does not resonate with me, at least, at all. I understand that for MLK and Gandhi, against the oppressive, racist nation state and colonial regime, there was no other way of confrontation possible, and non-violence was a political necessity for it was impossible to carve Malcolm’s black nation in the US but non-violence as a philosophy and ethical movement, from my limited knowledge at least, I am not convinced with.

The black radical tradition is a story and a journey of love. 

The story begins with individuals reduced to bare lives and nothingness. It sows seeds of love with an urge to recognize their existence and redeem their oppressed pasts; it acknowledges their damage, it measures their scars. 

How deep is the scar, it asks? 

Deep. Deep and so infectious that it requires the tyrant to be cured along with the victim if it is to be truly healed. The love is truly radical, for it recognizes the humanity of the oppressed AND the oppressor, and in doing so, it seeks to heal the tyrant and tends to the wretched. 

Finally, in stretching its hold in order to accommodate previously denied ways of being, it promises an inclusive (F)uture that renders possible the existence of multiple future(s).

This love is that of Fanon, so radical that it demands a bigger, more flexible measure to hold the entire humanity in its embrace. 

Like that of Du Bois, it travels back in time to pay its respects to those who lived lonely lives and died forgotten deaths. 

Haartman’s love, that aches to belong to a place that can be called home. 

Hooks’ love, critical but never disdainful- a love that reminds us all of our collective potential to be better, to constantly do better.

Malcolm’s love, a love truly urgent but also uncompromising.

It is a love also like Ali’s. One that reminds us to claim our identity and our names.

To make them say our names.  

Say my name. 

Say my name.

Say it till they get it right.

A love like Anzaldua’s. It demands to be acknowledged, does not beg for it. 

Perhaps also like Morrison’s, for it urges us to bear witness for those who can’t bear witness for themselves.   

Audre Lorde’s love, one that teaches us that incomplete love is no love at all, for much like oppression, there can be no hierarchy of love.

MLK’s love. A love truly vulnerable. A love truly brave. A love that strives to find a home in the ‘not yet’, in perhaps the ‘never will be’ and yet still continues to strive. To live. And to fight. 

It is a love that is revolutionary, for it refuses to settle for scraps. It demands more and better from the present to ensure a better tomorrow.

But it is also kind, gentle and selfless, since it does not want to leave anyone behind. 

It is vulnerable. It recognizes the limited resources we have to redeem our fractured pasts. But it also admits that it is this limitation that necessitates our collective effort, for our humanity is all we have and as long as our humanity is not exclusionary and vengeful, it is enough.

It is exemplary love, for it urges us to lead lives that are reflective of our values, not our conditions. Of our dreams, not our pasts. 

Black radical tradition, then, is a story of a love born out of our mutual vulnerability, unifying us all in our shared humanity. And a story that lives on through the hope of our reunion, at the rendezvous of victory. 

To filter down the Black Radical Tradition (or what little I have studied of it) to the few key points I have learned would be a disservice to all those individuals who spent their entire lives in this pursuit. Nonetheless, I will venture to highlight the objectives the Black Radical Tradition has illuminated right in front of me in my particular context. Maxwele’s words, seconds before he desecrated Cecil Rhodes statue in South Africa, come to mind, “Where are our heroes and ancestors?”. What the Black Radical Tradition has offered me is the vitality of the preservation of histories, stories, works or, in other words, everything that lends force to our voice after centuries of lying crushed beneath the colonial jackboot.

The lack of Urdu books to be found online, on one count, is disturbing to say the least. The Black Radical Tradition has offered me an idea to go about changing this. Extrapolating from that idea, the preservation of material beyond books to ensure nothing is lost in the passage of time or the blood-spattered pages of history has become an objective at the conclusion of this course. The names of our heroes and our history in other words should be preserved as well as those who are yet in the making.

Moreover, the Black Radical Tradition has taught me to find beauty in the most unexpected places. There is a certain aesthetic to be found in Coltrane’s Alabama which is pleasing to the ears. While the subject of the song is grim, the chaotic nature of jazz which somehow falls into place in the holistic view of the melody is beautiful to listen to.

Conclusively, together, they provide hope. To find beauty in the unlikeliest of places and the objective of preserving our tradition serves to establish a blinding bright spot on the horizon. This is what the Black Radical Tradition has offered me: inspiration to follow or at least try to follow the footsteps of those who made the Black Radical Tradition what it is without the bitter cynicism most commonly and often stereotypically associated with those who have strived for years against oppression of all kinds but to no avail.

As soon as a child is born, the world decided whether the child will be male or female. Andaluza argues that from the very beginning a despot duality is imposed on us which divides us in realms of either/or. This duality is oppressive because it is totalizing and leaves no room for any other conception of the self. Andulaza is Mexican, she is a Chicano; she is black and Indian; she is a woman; she is queer.  She has lived on the borderlands her entire life, juggling all her identities all her life.

 She speaks Tex-Mex; that’s her favorite language of the eight languages she speaks. She can instantly switch from Spanish to English in one sentence, in one word. She loves listening to Mexican music, her music, even if they make her feel ashamed for doing so. She can see the Serpent mother, even when they tell her she doesn’t exist. She is Mexican for being Mexican is a state of soul and she is American too for there’s an Anglo within her too. This plurality is what she has inherited, and she can’t possibly be asked to shred one part of an identity for another for within that plurality is home. Home, the smell of “woodsmoke, perfuming my Grandmother’s clothes, her skin. The stench of cow manure and yellow patches in the ground, the crack of a .22 rifle and the reek of cordite. Homemade cheese sizzling in a pan, melting inside a tortilla.” Home is perpetually tied to all her identities, how can she run from one and turn to another when all are home for her.  

She is a woman, she is queer. She believes in the shadow beast within her, the one that refuses to be quiet, the one that refuses “orders from outside authorities. It is a part of me that hates restraints of any kind, even those self-imposed.” She refuses to accept the heteronormativity and misogyny that her culture imposes on her. She refuses to mold herself by the image the world prescribed for her. She calls them out, the Anglos and the Chicano, all those who injure her. “Not me sold out my people but they me.” The mother culture refuses to accommodate her for her culture too remains strangled by the despotic duality she has been calling out her whole life. Home is no longer home.

The world is not a safe place for a woman; a woman is alien in her mother culture and alien to the dominant white culture; men of all races are free to make her their prey. She is pushed to the spaces between the worlds she inhabits, and such is the fear that she cannot move for that is the price of refusing to settle for less than recognition of herself. The dominant culture keeps telling her to lose the accent or “go back to Mexico”. Her own Mexico doesn’t accept her either so where is she to go.

“I have no country because my homeland cast me out; yet all countries are mine because I am every woman’s sister or potential lover. I am cultureless because as a feminist, I challenge the collective religious/cultural male derived beliefs of Indo-Hispanics and Anglos yet I am cultured because I am participating in the creation of another culture, a new story to explain the world and our participation in it, a new value system with images and symbols that connect us to each other and to the planet.”

Andaluza, much like Fanon and all the other thinkers we have studied in the course, invites all of us to think of new ways of inhabiting the world so that we can think about constructing a new human subject which rejects the despotic dualism the world imposes on each of us. Andaluza, through her writing and conception of borderlands explains fully how despotic this duality, which we almost take to be natural, is and the only way to see its despotism and its unnaturalness is if we view the world from Andaluza’s vantage point, Black, Indian, Mexican, Anglo, Woman, Queer, someone who cannot be contained, who cannot be reduced to this or that, someone who is only at home with her pluralism.

“I want the freedom to carve and chisel my own face.” The freedom that any woman can ask of is this, if she is denied home, let her be free to create her own home.     

“And when they appear to destroy me, it will not be long before they appear to destroy you.”

Audre Lorde said that an oppressed group cannot afford to combat oppression on one front. If one is to believe that the right of freedom from intolerance belongs to only one group, that belief, in itself embodies discrimination and exclusion and it won’t be long, before the same forces oppressing others come for you because those forces function on the same belief. Lorde argues that attacks directed against lesbian and gay communities are also anti black because the oppressed mirror one another and of course there are differences in the degree of oppression but the basic principle that they must be excluded and discriminated against applies across the board. In this scheme of things, politics of intersectionality is not only liberating but a necessity.

The Combahee River Collective aimed to establish a political framework that is both anti-racist and anti-sexist. Their main argument being that there can be no emancipatory politics which is not inclusive, and which does not acknowledge those who suffer the most because of inter-sectional oppression. Black feminists supported the Civil Rights Movement wholeheartedly, because the belief was that it was everyone’s fight but if black men refuse to acknowledge their internalized misogyny and continue to marginalize and abuse women, rather base their politics on the patriarchal claim that men are to be leaders and women followers, then they cannot claim to speak for black people. The speak only for black men. If white women are to speak of a universal sisterhood but do not address their internalized racism, against black women, they do not get to claim that speak for all women. They speak only for white women. And if black men and white women do not acknowledge the inadequacy of their politics, they are also guilty of excluding, discriminating and making totalizing claims, the very things they claimed to rally against.

“We reject queenhood, pedestals and walking 10 paces behind. To be recognized as human, and levelly human, is enough.”  The politics of intersectionality, from this lens is a politics of recognition and that is liberating, for there is a refusal to accept the deadening, oppressive silence the world imposes on one’s self. The critique against intersectional politics is that if oppressed groups start seeing their identities as natural and cannot see themselves beyond their fixed identities of black, women, lesbian and so on and so forth, but black feminism is a very wholesome reply to this critique.

 Within their statement, the Combahee River Collective, reiterates that men are not enemies because of their biology but because of the maleness they have been socialized to conform to. Bell Hooks said that being an oppressor in just as anti-human as being the oppressed is; men, themselves are victims of patriarchy. Within that statement the collective also argues that they are Marxist because they understand how freedom can never be divorced from the class question and that capitalism, in itself, promotes a certain kind of masculinity. Hooks argued that the masculinity that the capitalist-patriarchy nexus created derived its power from exercising violence on the bodies of women. Similarly, white women are not inherently evil but if they don’t actively acknowledge the racism that they have been socialized with, they can never form a sisterhood with black women.

These identities are not natural, but they are very real, and, in that sense, emancipatory politics is much more complex and will miss out on what it claims to represent, which is an end to marginalization and discrimination, if it continues to do single issue politics. Oppression has no hierarchy when the ideal is a place for Everyone on the rendezvous of victory.

            Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderland/La Frontera: The New Mestiza,by shedding light upon her people living at the US-Mexican border who conform to neither a fully American identity nor an entirely Mexican identity, brings forth the inhabitants of borderlands that have been phased out of history owing to their non conformity and lack of homogeneity when compared to the rest of the populace. These “borders” are not limited to the physical realm of states but rather spread over into other spheres of life. Borders exist everywhere as Ms. Anzaldúa points out. Between people on the basis of race, religion, caste, creed, sexuality etc. There is a leap between one group and the next which leads to a distinction between the two. The author describe her people who cannot distinguish between the US-Mexican border on multiple levels and possess characteristics of both and have formed a ‘hybrid’ identity. For me, the idea of borders being so deeply embedded in us on multiple levels was a revelation and the most striking thing in Borderland.

The author being a both a Chicana and lesbian activist brilliantly employs her book in her quest to call upon the majority of the people on either side to change their attitudes which are nurturing this divide and silencing of the borderlands. Far from being a highly localized work, the idea of borderland dwellers are apparent elsewhere around the world as well. For example, the case of the Federally Administered Tribal Areas in Pakistan and their inhabitants who have not fully conformed to either a Pakistani identity or Afghan identity for centuries. Their resulting silencing has led to much unrest since the time of the British-Afghan Wars and has spilled over into the current status quo as well. By force of habit and owing to the dominant state narrative, many of us assign wholesome identities, to borderland dwellers, of a binary nature refusing to entertain the possibility of a hybridization between cultures on both sides of the border. Ms. Anzaldúa moves away from this manufactured perspective of culture and people in borderlands to provide these people with their own voice. A direly needed different perspective to fully understand how much even libertarian politics can squash the voice of millions by establishing borders among states which dissect cultural identities as well in their quest to serve national objectives.

All in all, Gloria Anzaldúa’s book struck me with the idea of how long the journey remains yet. Despite covering an entire course, I never once thought about the people living in borderlands, dismissing them as either part of one manufactured identity or the other. Until Ms. Anzaldúa’s book that is.

“What are the words you do not yet have? What do you need to say? What are the tyrannies you swallow day by day and attempt to make your own, until you will sicken and die of them, still in silence?”

The Black Radical tradition has offered me a lot to learn in this course. It has taught me the violence of being static in a zone of non-being, of being defined by someone else, of being riddled out of history as if a certain history never existed at all. Reading about the African diaspora also taught me the tyranny of being uprooted, and then defining again what one’s home is, among many other things. But most of all, the Black Radical Tradition has taught me the importance of rising up from a silence that is somehow, in different levels, imposed upon all of us everyday. The quote by Audre Lorde above culminates in a sense my argument of what that means. It is the importance of recognition as well. The recognition of the violence of silence and language, the violence of definitions. And it has taught be that me that beyond that recognition, and even within it, lies a hope that looked to the future even beyond one’s own existence. Therefore, while I have learned of blackness as a wounded, traumatic history, I have also learned of blackness as the future.

The violence of language, the violence of naming was perhaps the biggest violence that existed in general relations of domination and subordination. Reflecting back on this, I think this idea became important even when we discussed Moscow as the new center during the time of the Communist International. In my second blog when we had to analyze some posters, I picked a one that inverted the moon laterally and that clawed into Moscow, and I said that this is what communism intended to do: it was changing the center. After having read so many more people in the course, I realize that that changing of the center was also a struggle against the preconceived naming of the West as the center. Naming something as static was the violence. And to change it was the struggle. This violence was addressed by many “prophets/prophetesses” we discussed. For CLR James, when he detailed the violence of the slave experience, he centered the history on blackness. For Malcolm X and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr, in the struggles of violence and nonviolence – for the former, even in naming the movement “Human Rights Movement”. For black women that became heroines for me: bell hooks, Ella Baker, Toni Morrison, and so many more, by reading whom I realised the double violence of being silenced by the oppressor outside and within, i.e. the black man.

In essence, what I learned from the Black Radical Tradition was this then: that to have a space in history, a history that was not chartered by the white man, was to recognize how one came to be called what they were and to recognize the inherent hierarchy and power in that. It made me realise the importance of the phrase: There is a space for everyone at the rendezvous of victory. I did not just learn about black history then. This tradition offered me an ethic: to be more aware of the power that exists not just in actions but also in words. To see the violence in preconceived categories. To the extent of making me aware what I write, who do I write about, and why do I write that. . . In the end, therefore, it has taught me to be aware of meaning, and the power within it.

The reading traces Gloria Anzaldúa’s experiences of existing entirely intersectionally. She exists in the borderlands of geography, culture and sexuality. She destroys or at least puts into question these categories into which people are forced to fit into. For her, having to be one thing or the other, compartmentalising into specific, “natural” categories and having to choose between very limited options is nothing less than cruelty. It reduces any possibility of other ways of being. Any identity which does not fit into the set categories and binaries is deemed abnormal and even deviant.

If an identity challenges the norm it is subhuman and nonhuman. Those living in these subversive categories (or borderlands) are constantly struggling to find ways to express themselves while also trying to come to terms with their own duality. They have to live every day as ostracised beings who do not belong while simultaneously being shunned and silenced for who they are. These people need to find ways to deal with their identities which punish them but also are their reality.

As part of the borderlands, she provides great insight into what methods they use to cope. One way in which she describes they do so is by creating a new language, Chicano Spanish. It is a means for them to make the borderlands comfortable and familiar. From her own experience, we can see how difficult it is to be living outside the binaries. She loves her culture and tries to embrace it completely but she is also aware of the toxic elements of it. She disassociates from those parts but does not try to immerse herself in the colonial culture. For doing so she is deemed a sellout by many of her own people. They try to silence her. But she breaks that silence. She believes that if going back to one’s own people is not an option because they do not accept your nonbinary identity (be it of any kind) then one must create a new home and try to keep it open to all, which is a beautiful way to encourage people on the borderlands to start anew, to find new beginnings when the familiar closes its doors on them.