Table of Contents
Exhaustion in the Discourse
I became exhausted, really exhausted. I have a passion for education and I love working with people in circles of trust and learning. I love facilitating spaces and witnessing people come to new understandings of a concept or, better yet, an understanding of a concept in relation to who they are as a person. To me, this is a worth-while and fulfilling endeavor. However I became despondent about the discourse around inequality and injustice. I became exhausted by the work of social justice education, as it currently is, because there are people who genuinely come into spaces to learn and there are others who come to these spaces to play devil’s advocate. I truly believe that there are instances where devil’s advocacy is relevant and adds nuance to the discussion. There are also times when this becomes very harmful because it can be traumatizing. It can juxtapose intellectualisation, an important but sometimes treacherous exercise, with the daily struggles encountered through the lived experiences of the disempowered. Trying to use words, alone, to explain concepts that sometimes can only be felt through the spirit and the heart, became exhausting and felt inadequate in capturing the true reality of the disenfranchised.
Professor Bayo Akomolafe, who is a prolific thought leader on posthumanism and speaks often about post-activism, has said that ‘eloquence requires a level of stability, and that when you live or experience chaos sometimes all you have is a groan or a sigh’. We live in a world where oppressed people exist invariably in chaos.
Oppression and Chaos
The way I often think about oppression is as a chaos and a crushing of the soul before it is even the chaos of what we experience in the physical world. Oppression requires its victims to bend their wholeness, their purpose and their light to the false masters of hegemony. It asks us to shrink our brilliance into small and fearful molds that do not threaten the status quo. It makes us question truths of the soul that tell us that our humanity is destroyed when we see each other as competitors instead of community; foe instead of friend, and resources before relationships .
This creates chaos internally and externally.
In my work running processes for organizations in crisis due to racism, sexism, religious intolerance, homophobia etc, I have seen that oppressed people find themselves ineloquently communicating the chaos of their soul . This is unfortunate, because we live in a world that punishes us for being ineloquent in moments that wrongly command that we have exactly the right words to express the daily violence of discrimination and oppression.
I became exhausted from the world of words. I became tired of writing up definitions and explaining endlessly. I became worn down by the demands of speaking and scribing in the midst of chaos.
Transition to Art Activism
This is what moved me into the realm of art activism. I was frustrated that I had this education, training and experience in social justice work and an understanding of the systemic, societal and self-imposed structures of exclusion, captured almost exclusively in words. I wanted to find ways to communicate this knowledge outside of words. Art became a way to do this.
Ancestral Legacy through Art
Art found me in two ways. The first was through the death of my brother. My brother passed away very unexpectedly at the age of twenty-three. He was a very talented creative who had a big vision for his work. What I loved about his art, music, and playwriting is that he always wanted to communicate his heart for social justice through it. He wasn’t only an artist, he was also an activist. He was an artivist. Right before he made his life transition he was working on an album. My brother was a queer man. He used this album to express his experiences of growing up in a very conservative, strict Christian home and living at the intersection of justice and religion. My father is a religious leader and my mother works in the legal system, and so my brother was raised, as we all were as siblings, at this intersection while having to navigate his identities. His album was his process of coming to new understandings of his queerness in this world, as well as his spirituality and relationship with himself, our parents, family, friends and lovers. While working on his album, he roped me into his creative process in very small ways, to be honest. However, once we laid him to rest, I felt that he was passing the baton of his legacy in art and activism on to me. He was now an ancestor, with an instruction.
Healing Through Art
Art also came to me in the depths of multiple griefs. I remember shortly after my brother’s funeral, I lay in the middle of my living room with my pink headphones over my ears, blasting a song he had composed, written and recorded called Tread Lightly. My hope was that if I played it loudly enough, it would drown out the groans of grief gasping for air from the depths of my chest that, quite frankly, frightened me. I have returned to this song many times over the past two and a half years and found myself in conversation with my new ancestor. Each time I encountered the sharp words of the manager, the rejection of a lover, the loss of an opportunity, the death of old and treasured versions of myself, I went back to that song to hear my brother telling me to tread lightly on my broken soul. This too, uncovered my need to let go of words and instead experiment with some paint and a brush; with music and poetry, and play. Even without understanding it, this became a way for me to communicate with my Higher Self and to listen deeply to the guidance seeping from my soul. It also became a way to expand my knowledge and my work in social justice.
The Power of Art in Social Justice
Art found me at a time when I was exhausted by my work. I found rest in my brother’s instruction. In taking on his project, it helped me acknowledge the power of art to convey messages that are powerful and profound;. That was what was missing in my work as a social justice educator. I was doing a lot of explaining of things that cannot and need to be explained or argued. Some things required an encounter, and experience. Art is that experience. Art holds space for us to engage with it, interpret it and encounter new meanings that allow us to ask questions, hopefully, that bring us closer to our humanity. These entry points into art have brought me to the work that I do now, which is in deep recognition of Ubuntu bam – my humanity and my inextricable relationship with all that is in me and around me.
ChangeWays Colab: A Platform for Healing
This is primarily why I started ChangeWays Centre for Collaborative Justice. It is my offering to all that is Greater for its lessons on my journey so far. My hope is that this becomes a platform for healing, reaching new knowledge of self and the collective, and tapping into the ancient wisdom that is deep within us all. Through our various dialogue projects, festivals, and creative programs, my hope is that ChangeWays provides a place of imaginative rest for the seekers, the dreamers, and those who dare to redefine what a world of fairness and peace truly looks like, so that we may experience social justice in its theory and practice, but also in its heart and soul.