She who stumbles

So my first couple of posts have received a bit of positive attention, which is nice and flattering, but also pretty scary.

I’m not really new to the blogosphere, but I am new to having a Proper Blog, and to the women of colour blogging community. I like it, but I’m not sure how long that’ll last.

I’ve had a lot of experiences where I joined a new community and was greeted with enthusiasm, only to later find myself on its margins, or outcast entirely, because of my views. Articulating my own interests as a woman of colour isn’t something many people in white-dominated or male-dominated communities are particularly friendly to. It’s not a happy process, to go from lauded to laughed-at within a few years, with basically a lot of argument in between.

So before anyone develops too many expectations of me I should say that I find it really difficult to write.

Orhan Pamuk, the winner of the 2006 Nobel Prize for Literature, said in his acceptance lecture:

A writer is … a person who shuts himself up in a room, sits down at a table, and alone, turns inward … To write is to turn this inward gaze into words

Obviously these measly quotes don’t do justice to the sentiment of the speech or the brilliance of the man, but they highlight what troubles me about writing.

When I turn inwards, I have so much on my mind that it becomes hard to separate what can be written from what can’t, and exactly how I should frame my thoughts in words. I know how concepts are linked and interdependent, but writing makes it hard to express them. You have to stuff everything into a linear structure — start at the beginning, end at the end, move through themes logically in a way that gives people the impression of what you want to say in the space you have to say it in. In my mind, thoughts don’t quite work like that.

‘Turning inward’ for me, is also quite a difficult process because I tend to ruminate and worry. A lot of the time, the worry is about how I present myself, and what people think of me. I feel I have to write something really brilliant and impress everyone every time I put pen to paper (or rather, hand to keyboard), otherwise I’ve wasted my time and everyone else’s.

That’s why, when my supervisor told me yesterday that I have to write a minimum of 6000 words in the form of a draft literature review, and that those words are due less than a week from now, I panicked a bit.
I realise that she’s really pushing me to do my best, and that I do need to produce those words in order to get my thesis done, but it frightens me to think of how much I’ll miss in writing those words.

I anticipated that pressure, which is one of the reasons I started this blog. I wanted to practise my writing and get better at it, so that it’s both intellectually rich and accessible to people outside the academic milieu.

That’s because I have to acknowledge the broader context of these personal issues. It’s something of a luxury to have anxieties about expressing my ideas in writing on the internet when the majority of the world’s population doesn’t even have access to a telephone, let alone a computer.

As zooey pointed out, education enough to express ideas in terms of left-wing academic-activist discourses such as radical women of colour feminisms is real privilege. It’s a privilege which draws upon the power of academia, a power that has come from the oppression of countless millions.

I am complicit in reproducing that privilege by resorting to academia to get my education about global issues, and when I encode those issues in academic language, it’s hard to determine whose side I’m helping. Some days when I really hate myself I believe that my political subjectivity is all a matter of middle-class guilt, my commitment to work in the development sector a fancier form of neo-colonial paternalism. As a middle-class Indian getting an education in an institution modelling itself after great European universities, it’s not much of a stretch to think of myself as entering into a form of colonial management, couched in the slippery language of neoliberal economics.

But I think that part of the battle to express anti-racist thoughts involves addressing our own internalised privileges and prejudices. I think this is because justice is a zero-sum game. You either have it or you don’t. Social justice cannot exist where someone is exploited or oppressed. Articulating a point of view inevitably brings up other points of view, and we have to account for their intersections.

This is why my thesis topic — on whiteness and the Cronulla riot — has gripped me so hard. It’s about me, and it’s about the rest of the world too. It’s about the colonial history of Australia, which is part of the colonial history of the world. The processes that structure race in Australia today also structure the lives of billions of other people. The forces that led to the outbreak of the Cronulla riot are forces that affect other WoC bloggers.

… It can be easy to lose yourself in a sense of global belonging, losing sight of the fact that there are real disjunctures between people, even allies. The blogosphere is replete with them — political arguments turning personal, since the boundary between the two has always been so blurry.

So yeah, I’m still afraid of what people will think. I want to keep an Australian blog, but since global issues are so interconnected with local ones, where do I draw the line? Will people hate me if I don’t blog about something they think is important? How do I deal with it if I offend someone? Or if I get middle-class white denial in comments? Or if someone I know in person finds me here?

… etc. etc. My brain produces thoughts like these all the time. And often, I’m so busy worrying that I don’t write, or work, or get anything done at all.
I’m not asking for advice on managing my anxiety (I’m not an expert at it, but I am learning), but it does take time to work through it, especially when I have so many other things to stress about.

So while I am prioritising this blog, I’m not always in the right state of mind to write in it. I don’t want to abandon it, because writing about these issues is helpful for me, and I want to add an Australian perspective to the already-rich mix of ideas out there. But I do have to produce twenty thousand words of thesis (as well as doing some interviews and transcribing), by June. Eeek.

So, this is my roundabout means of introducing myself (and my anxieties!) to everyone. Hi.
Eeek.