Les Damnes et Les Douens

[Excerpt from Disability Studies talk at UWI, 2009]
I want to turn now to one of our most cherished folkloric metaphors for disability and our ability to disable our selves in Trinidad & Tobago, the tragedy and fear of the return of the souls of Caliban’s neglected and rejected, dead, un-baptized children, Fanon’s damnes de la terre, dis-embodied in the form of the “deformed”, “twisted” and “obzocky” Douens that haunt and hunt us. Douens, those deformed liminal “creatures” with feet pointing “backwards” the embodied receptacles of our collective fears and failures. Why do we say that their/our feet point ‘backwards’, who says that the head points the way ‘forward’? Who says that they are deformed and obzocky? Why are they monsters and not men? They/we are the result of a different, parallel, developmental pathway to that which took place in the European hinterland, the other, ‘dark’ side of the modernity-colonialism project (Mignolo) in which man was given value based on hue/hew and Wynter’s Man rose to rule. Our/their difference is not deviance or abnormal. It is part of a continuum of global capitalism’s imperial evolution and development that began over 500 years ago.

We Douens perform our disability daily. We refuse to learn new ways to walk, more than this we continue to refuse to be taught by the relationships, the ongoing, unfolding conversations among our differently designed bodies (biology), our environments (eco-geography), and our hys-stories . We attempt to mimic the gaits of bodies not our own, to walk as if on lands not separated by seas and suffering and silences. Seduced, we continuously stumble into each other, gyre (gaia) hating, reducing the truth, beauty and wisdom of the statement, ‘the movement is the mas, the mas is the movement’; the moment is the mas, the mas is the moment, to mono-manic-monument – mere masturbation.

Can we claim our othering other, our ‘obzockiness’ as our own beautiful, differently, not-half, made, whole selves? How can we learn to walk when our feet point and carry us away from the future that our eyes and heart bring us a longing for? A culture cannot escape itself! There is nothing and nowhere for it to escape to. Indeed, a culture cannot escape itself it can only dynamically transform itself, moment by moment in a developmental timescale, and in doing so, transforms itself, its context, and its knowledge about the relations between itself and its context. How can it do so? A philosopher will answer that he needs new concepts…
......
In the society of Douens which now admits a historical global dimension of wasted lives (Bauman, 2004) and waste-as-way-of-life, an awareness of intervulnerability and interdependence is one way for all to move forward. One keeps an eye firmly on the future, the other leads in the choreography, the mas, moving the two together in a direction which one cannot see, except perhaps in glimpses and glances, seashells of amnesia, but who must trust the fidelity of the one who describes the course, the, Curriculum Vitae, the course of Life, that they both take, negotiating the terrain, their roles and each other through dialogue. Both teaching and learning from and with each other and from the journey undertaken.

Caramel Maroon - defining my self.

And so I begin…
My blue ballpoint pen rests uncomfortably upon the blue lined notebook paper. Its broken clip leaves a scar like a soldier’s shattered helmet. It cuts a cross, crucifying lines, point extruded, ready, quivering with every shallow breath and nervous shake of restless feet, betraying the throbbing in my left cheek that comes from holding tongue and thought in check. She sits, waiting for me to pick her up, pull sword from stone, and press into memory of forgotten trees. No ink will spill past that meatus today. I can no more be unfaithful to my muse as to myself.

“The pen that moves and the tongue that speaks, without examined piety, authors ruin.”
“Silence scribes those who suffer under institution’s indigent gaze into memory’s shadow.”

I am brown, and yellow and red, dirty proud blood – rhizome of memory of Eastern caravans and caravels – caramel maroon – residue of sugar’s ménage with fire, oil, and iron.

I, inheritor of dust and salt and coral fragment, scratch a comma in this world, by downing tool, leaving white gaping wound to ponder abscess of flesh’s future – abject history…

A Kumbla Consciousness

Earlier this year I was writing a poem to deal with my outrage and sense of powerlessness at the abuses of power and privilege in Trinidad and Tobago (T&T). It began, “Our stories are our Gourds,/Womb of generations’ pain.” But “pain” was not quite the right word. I asked Shalini for help. I needed a word to encapsulate ideas of dynamic change, infectious entanglements, metamorphosis, amnesia, and the claustrophobia of a world held in tension. Kumbla, a word held in tension.

This is how Erna Broder, Jamaican novelist, describes it in her 1980 novel Jane and Louisa Will Soon Come Home:
“A kumbla is like a beach ball. It bounces with the sea but never goes down. …But the kumbla is not just a beach ball. The kumbla is an egg shell, not a chicken's egg or a bird's egg shell. …It does not crack if it is hit. It is pliable as sail cloth. Your kumbla will not open unless you rip its seams open. It is a round seamless calabash that protects you without caring. Your kumbla is a parachute. You, only you, pull the cord to rip its seams. From the inside. For you.”

I liked its rhythm. “Our stories are our Gourds,/Womb of generations’ kumblas,/Vessels for collecting and reflecting.” It fit. The word itself was a kumbla for the ideas and images in the rest of the poem. For me, a kumbla has become a metaphor for a mutating contested space, nurturing but potentially imprisoning—like school, like education…like T&T. Structures implicated in each other’s becoming, inviting in, offering safe space, respite, but easily becoming another Euclidean prison. A friend pointed out that kumbla was a Maroon word, a remnant of the languages of slaves, who survived by pulling the cord for themselves, taking their own freedom. A kumbla is about survival.

Brodber prefaces her description of the concept of the kumbla with the story of Anansi and Dryhead, the King of the Sea (note the irony). Facing starvation and death, Anansi and Tucuma, his eldest son, take a risk and fish in Dryhead’s waters. After being caught, he negotiates with Dryhead to let him leave with one of his children. He tells his son, Tucuma, repeatedly to “Go eena kumbla,” which acts as a code for him to change his disguise. In this way Anansi tricks Dryhead and saves himself and his son. Rhonda Cobham, a Trinbagonian Professor at Amherst College, suggests that kumbla is a metaphor for the strategies and sometimes disfiguring devices used by New World blacks to protect their children as they struggled to survive in this New World. She also uncovers another aspect of the story. Tucuma, she learns, means “the one born away from home,” and suggests that although we may not have known it, through these stories we have passed on narratives of survival, “naming ourselves as survivors in the process.”

I am working with the concept now, aiming to loosen the word from its moorings within Caribbean and literary discourse so that it might drift into contested waters and help me to articulate a theory for a Caribbean curriculum. Who, what, and where are our kumblas in education in the Caribbean? I see them in our mas camps, panyards, kitchens, gardens, gayelles, rum shops, and, occasionally, even in that space called school; cosmogenic calabashes, wombs of space, that we have anesthetised and tried to sterilise, unsuccessfully. As Brodber writes later, “the trouble with the kumbla is the getting out of the kumbla. It is a protective device. If you dwell too long in it, it makes you delicate.. skin white…Vision extra-sensitive to the sun…Weak, thin, tired like a breach baby.” I fear we have remained too long in ours, given birth to too many delicate douens.

We must embrace all of our ancestral heritages, learn from them, but be prepared to pull the cords that bind, for ourselves. We must develop our Caribbean consciousness, a kumbla consciousness, part of our maroon heritage, a sense of the possibilities for becoming already inherent in the world around and within us. Jane and Louisa ends with the line, “We are getting ready,” which had been preceded by images of hopeful expectancy. Indeed the idea, image and metaphor of womb spaces is a central motif in the work of Caribbean artists such as Leroy Clarke and as Guyanese writer Wilson Harris notes with hope at the end of the womb of space, “To convert rooted deprivations into complex parables of freedom and truth is a formidable but not impossible task." It is time. Time to buss open dem Gourds. From the inside. For you. For us.

Fear of Queer

“If it were only that people have diversities of taste, that is reason enough for not attempting to shape them after all one model. But different persons also require different conditions for their spiritual development; and can no more exist healthily in the same moral, than all the variety of plants can exist in the same physical atmosphere and climate. The same things which are helps to one person towards the cultivation of his higher nature, are hindrances to another…Unless there is a corresponding diversity in their modes of life, they neither obtain their fair share of happiness, nor grow up to the mental, moral, and aesthetic stature of which their nature is capable.”
(John Stuart Mill- On Liberty)

“We do not really see through our eyes or hear through our ears, but through our beliefs. To put our beliefs on hold is to cease to exist as ourselves for a moment” (Lisa Delpit – The Silenced Dialogue: Power and Pedagogy in educating other people’s children).

Whether you agree or disagree with J.K. Rowling’s decision to ‘out’ Albus Dumbeldore, the late Headmaster of Hogwarts, and one of the most beloved characters from the children’s literary phenomenon and cultural marketing machine that is Harry Potter, the fact remains that she continues to make historical and courageous strides that few educators are capable of making. What Rowling, and the celebrity media circus around all things Potter, have done is interrupt our ‘normal’ unquestioning and uncritical state of being by challenging us to put our beliefs on hold and to think! Though literary and cultural critics point to the absence of explicit text in which the character himself confirms this disposition, there is also no evidence that Dumbeldore was straight. Rowling’s interruption then forces us to ask how and why is it that we automatically assumed that he must have been heterosexual?

Interruption is a common theme/meme in critiques of the privilege given to oppressive narratives in education and society that go by any number of “isms,” such as chauvinism, sexism, racism, nepotism, and elitism. The word ‘interruption’ derives from the Latin interruptus, inter – between and rumpere – to break. Literally, an interruption is a “breaking in between,” a speaking out of turn, a queering/querying of established and entrenched habits of thinking, speaking, doing, and being. Queer here does not represent the identities of gay, lesbian, bisexual, or transgendered; rather it marks work, like that of Rowling, Dumbeldore, Delpitt, Freire, Illich Butler, and many others, that refuses “the heterosexual bribe,” that is, the sociocultural rewards of power, prestige, and privilege offered to those who inscribe their behaviours, thinking, products, and performances within the range of normal heterosexual identities.

Dumbeldore’s ‘queerness’ is evident in the different ways that he directly challenges orthodox and oppressive conceptions of masculinity. In the realm of fashion, he flouts the standards of normative masculinity in his ‘gay’ attire. As a leader, his sensitivity, vulnerability, openness, respect, sense of justice and tolerance for the diversity of all creatures, both magical and Muggle, was often juxtaposed and in sharp contrast to the ignorant, intolerant, fearful, spiteful, hateful, cruel, unjust and abusive authority exhibited by characters like Cornelius Fudge, Minister of Magic or Defense Against the Dark Arts Teacher, Dolores Umbridge. His characteristics speak to the embodiment of a standard of Holy humanity founded on the simple yet powerful ideal of Love for difference. A standard that those, like Lord Voldemort and his Death Eaters, seduced and corrupted in the pursuit of the heterosexual bribe, and psychologically crippled by prescriptive, restrictive and normative forms of masculinity, are incapable of ever fully appreciating or realising.

Schools are notoriously conservative and heteronormative. The (at the time) recent decision by the Jamaican Ministry of Education to advise schools not to adopt a textbook that advocated a wider definition of family, functions as an act of political erasure and silencing that perpetuates a belief that, as Gerald Unks, editor of the Gay Teen writes, “homosexuals do not exist. They are 'non-persons' in the finest Stalinist sense. They have fought no battles, held no offices, explored nowhere, written no literature, built nothing, invented nothing and solved no equations.” Among students, queer and faggot are often labels applied to boys who do not aggressively pursue the opposite sex or spend much of their time alone or studying in order to regulate behaviour. Impugning sexual orientation is a strong form of peer control exerted by adolescents of all ages from primary school to parliament. Such bullying ought to be seen as intolerable as using epithets like {insert racist, sexist, ableist slur here} to position an individual as less than human. Unfortunately it is not.

Betty Anne Blaine writing in the Jamaica Observer (06 Nov) expresses concern about a “marching brigade of homosexual activism” seeking to capitalise on reneged parental responsibilities. She is right in advocating for healthy and balanced discussion and dialogue and for teachers and parents to be better educated on the issues. This will require courage to suspend our belief systems temporarily and to listen to each other with reverence and open hearts and minds. A starting point is to acknowledge the existence and contributions of persons of “difference” within our academic disciplines and societies. This is the road already traveled by women, ethnic and religious minorities and the differently enabled. Though, I might add, with insufficient frequency in the majority of schools’ curricula.

In mathematics for example most learn (hopefully) about the role of binary codes in computers. Fewer have learnt that the device was made possible by the work of English mathematician, Alan Turing, who during World War II played a significant part in deciphering German Enigma messages. Even fewer yet will learn that Alan Turing was gay. He first became aware of his homosexuality during adolescence, and, during the postwar period, suffered the ignominy of having the details of his private life dissected in the press. Forced to undergo hormone treatments to ‘cure’ his homosexual urges, and suffering from relentless public exposure, the shy genius committed suicide at the age of 41. Turing’s case, while not unique, is one of the more tragic, depriving humanity of one of its most beautiful and brilliant minds.

Educators, activists and policy-shapers must also confront homophobic rhetoric courageously armed with credible and trustworthy evidence and research drawn from anthropological, biological, psychological, and sociological sources. For example, the argument that homosexuality is rare or anomalous in nature is called into question by the observation and documentation of same sex couplings in more than 450 different vertebrate species and countless invertebrate species. Joan Roughgarden, a transgendered professor of Biology at Stanford, who conducted the research, argues in Evolution’s Rainbow that sex is not only for passing on genes as every science student learns, rather using co-operative game theory she builds a case that sex is an important aspect of social co-operation and suggests that homosexuality is a feature of advanced animal communities. These and other models in the natural and social sciences attempt to explain why homosexuality as a ‘trait’ occurs and persists in natural populations.

Here in the Caribbean, confronting the consequences of the HIV/AIDS pandemic, homophobia, and socially sanctioned sexual violence, we have interrupting work to do with our children and communities. Sexuality education, it is argued, must move beyond providing mere information about sex and become more involved in probing questions around the production of knowledge about sexuality. Unlike its coital counterpart, ‘curriculum interruptus’ is less concerned with preventing procreative potentialities, interrupting the continuity of life and dependent on patriarchal responsibilities that are often reneged upon in our Caribbean contexts, rather it is more concerned with re-establishing those obscured connections between those acts of disruption that have left individuals and groups with no connection to their futures, pasts or presents. Interrupting our sometimes corrupt and bankrupt visions of Curriculum may cause an eruption. Educators might consider structuring curriculum events that juxtapose ideas, identities, and experiences that are not normally associated with one another to create structures and occasions which facilitate a loosening of language/thinking, “to become more elastic, more able to collect new interpretations and announce new possibilities,” as this piece has attempted to do. Perhaps, by loosening the stranglehold of the singularity of sameness we may become freer to imagine and create newer, more just possibilities of what education and our societies might become.

First Kiss - A metaphor for beginning to teach

Do you remember your first kiss? For me it was an awkward teenage experience: fumbling, figuring out the physics of suction, marvelling at the neurochemistry of pleasure and swimming in a synaesthetic ocean of sensations - tastes, touches, smells and sounds. If you were anything like me, your first kiss was an amateurish affair, messy and ill-structured, satisfying in the way that leaves you not quite filled and certainly not empty, but rather desiring to know if it could indeed be better—the desire that leads to experimentation and variation with the second and third kisses, which indeed were better. In school nobody teaches you about kissing; this type of learning is one that has to take place in dialogic communion with another—it is an intimate act of social learning, one that can only take place in a relationship of mutual trust and intervulnerability. It is the type of learning where one learns both from and with an Other; where one is simultaneously teacher and student, never master but always learner. One’s first kiss sometimes leads to many other fulfilling firsts.

The first years of teaching are very much like one’s first kiss. One has finally worked up the courage to stand in front of a group of strangers and ask them to enter into an intimate relationship with you, to lower their natural barriers and allow you to enter into their sacred space. Apprehension and expectation; vulnerability faces vulnerability; the possibility of rejection palpable. These first years are often just as messy, awkward, and ill-structured as one’s first kiss, but if they are indeed satisfying in the way that neither fills nor drains you, the desire to do better that can emerge provides the impetus for really learning what it means to honour the gift of vulnerability offered to you, and how to care for your own vulnerability as a teacher/educator. One learns that one learns with and from one’s students and that one’s vulnerability as a teacher is intertwined with one’s students, as are their and your successes. Learning becomes an attractor of a classroom whose evolution is no longer constrained by concerns about teacher-centredness versus student-centredness. Learning as a process of ongoing experimentation and gradual imperceptible refinements of knowledge (content and pedagogical), technique, disposition, and philosophy moves the beginning teacher to the recognition of the privilege of inhabiting a space that is ever constituted, transformed, and maintained through ethical and loving relationships with others.

This type of learning, especially for novice teachers, is never easy as valued identities necessarily mutate over time. The first years of teaching are a problematic, confusing, conflicting, and sometimes painful space from which to operate as “one is already” even while “one is becoming” a teacher. Even with teacher preparation and experience there is a beautiful terror that teachers feel standing in front of their charges on the first day. For others there is the gradual realisation that the intellectual, emotional, and physical commitments that are required to teach are not quite aligned with their own competencies, expectations, or values, nor are the commitments demanded of teachers often commensurate with the financial reimbursement. This is valuable learning nevertheless. Not every person you kiss you end up marrying!

The first year of marriage is much like the first year of teaching—future husbands be warned! A lot of difficult and necessary learning has to take place as one learns to live sustainably in a relationship that is always both interdependent and intervulnerable. What helps a marriage or any committed relationship, including didactic ones, to survive is the nurturing of conditions for the ongoing emergence and deepening of relationships of mutual learning—learning from and with another: sometimes teacher, sometimes student, but never master. These learning relationships, though, are founded on mutual trust and respect for difference, funded by an ongoing commitment to dialogue and meaningful conversation, and fuelled by the ever-emerging desire to know, do, and become better learners. In time, my wife and I will place our first kisses on our own children and we will smile knowing that, we, and they, have a lifetime of learning and awkward first kiss experiences ahead of us.

The memory of a first kiss experience is a blessing, reminding us that meaningful learning is often the product of intimate social interaction. In the gift of a first kiss we awaken to the potential of a life filled with love through learning with and from others, and we are roused to a deep compassion and concern for their well-being. Teachers, remember your first kiss.

Some thoughts on Faith and Reason

We have faculties of both reason and faith which are not antagonistic. Faith begets a Hope which may at times prompt us to act in ways that seem to undermine bloodless reason. But a faith completely unemcumbered, freed from the necessity of and for reason risks idolatry, inhospitability and inhumanity, and likewise for a reason which fails to acknowledge its indebtedness and continued dependence on the generous germ that is embodied in the grace-fullness of faith. Independent reason alone cannot give rise to Hope, it can however give force and direction to purpose, but purpose itself is a child of Hope.

One of the most important lessons that those who are positioned as impoverished, marginalized, oppressed, the liminal, les damnes, have taught me is the value of patience. To be patient is not to be idle, but to work with joy towards a hope that is made more manifest and meaningful moment by moment. In this and other issues I will be patient as I and others continue to advocate in faith for a better, more hospitable, Trinidad and Tobago, for all, every creed and race, via reason.

I just don't get it...?

I held my tongue on the GCE debacle but here comes this article out of the Express that just gets my blood boiling...is it just me? Can someome explain the logic of it to me or am I just too old and stupid to understand?
[I've had to edit this post and remove the industrial strength language].
SEA results get more high-techAnna Ramdass aramdass@trinidadexpress.com
Friday, May 15th 2009
"Government has invested $100,000 in a system by which students would be able to get their SEA examination results by text messages this year, says Education Minister Esther Le Gendre.

Speaking at the post-Cabinet press conference at the Diplomatic Centre, St Ann's, Le Gendre said that Cabinet approved that some $30,000 would be spent to put the required enhancements in place within the Ministry and another $70,000 would be paid to the telecommunications providers for the service.

She said the SEA results could be easily accessed by these mobile SMS messages as well as on the Education Ministry's website.

The Minister stressed, however, that the actual exam result slip remains the official document. She noted that in 2007 the Ministry launched its website and SEA results were also available on this site.

She said from next month parents and students would be able to register for the service by texting the student's ID to a particular number during the period June 1 to 23.

Le Gendre said students would also receive text messages as to the date of registration for the secondary school they passed for."

Okay here are my concerns.
1) Nowhere is an acceptable educational rationale given for why it was necessary to invest in this system. I am willing to believe that there is some justification behind the decision to invest 100,000 dollars on this system. What problem is it meant to solve? What is it supposed to do better or more effeciently given that the hardcopy result paper remains the legal and official result? How is it an improvement? None of these important questions are addressed by the Minister

2) I don't mean to be prophetic but given the less than stellar track receord of the Ministry I feel reasonably confident in saying that there is likely to be a mix up somewhere with persons receiving the wrong texts...with the accompanying emotional trauma or joy and subsequent anger and Ministerial apologia...we've played that track this week already. Notice dey done cover dey @$$ already with the disclaimer about the paper being the official result. Being a completely automated system no one will be able to be held accountable far less answerable for these mistakes...ay yes sweet T& T, SNAFU.

3) Now onto economic concerns. Do students or their parents have to pay to access their results via SMS or is it a free service? I see $$$ $igns in the eyes of some telecom executives if this is the case as every body and dey mudder and dey fadder and dey aunty checks the chile result for themself. Basically we are paying for something that it appears that we have no need for, since no reason is given as yet. Or in reality we are paying so that a few people would not be inconveniened to go spend some time at an important moment in their child's life. And I wonder who those people are and where they work?

4) How much of this investment will be a recurrent expenditure for the MoE and consequently for the people of Trinidad and Tobago? According to the article this seems like TSTT and Digicel can now count on sharing $70,000 each year, that should be good news for them in these lean economic times. And of course if the costs of texts go up (though they should be going down according to some basic economic pricniples)... I really would like to see this agreement between the MoE and the telecoms

5) This investment serves to further entrench the Common Entrance/SEA making it less likely that it will be removed any time in the near future despite repeated calls by myself and others to rethink the design and purpose of this assessment instrument as a selection tool given the real negative consequences that it has wrought on our children and nation's psyche...but that argument is a dead horse by now the amount of time it get beat to no avail.

Dear Prime Minister can we please get a competent and sensible Minister of Education at least once during your term in office?
Okay I feel better now, I think my BP is back to normal.
TGFB...Thank God For Blogging!