We've had days when we were so sure we were on the right track and then days when we prayed that we were doing what was best for you. But one day, I met someone who helped me trust my instincts and, even more, your own power to learn, live, and meet the world on your own terms
We were out having dinner, the three of us … you, your dad, and me … happily chatting and joking.
You were enjoying your meal and making up silly jokes, trying to convince me that you were big enough to have a sip of my cold drink.
Suddenly, the mood changed: something had caught your attention. A little girl had walked in with her two elder sisters, and they seemed to be having an argument. The two elder girls left the little one in the booth to sit all by herself while they waited for the food they had ordered.
The little girl was bigger than you, but you stood up on the bench in the booth where we were seated and asked me if I could move a bit so you could pass. Surprised, I asked you where you were going, and you told me: “Can’t you see that little baba is sad? She’s lonely and she needs me to talk to her.”
Astonished, I looked at your dad, who just smiled. I finally moved and you jumped down and went up to her and introduced yourself. While trying not to look so you didn’t feel shy about it, I heard you say your name to this stranger, and then you just scooted next to her and sat there.
To me it was awkward. The two of you stayed silent. The little girl was clearly shy, and your bold entry seemed to astonish her too. Her sisters, on the other end, were watching, and soon they came over to the booth and said hi to you.
You smiled and left them, running straight into my arms, saying loudly, “You see? I told you she needed me. She was lonely, but now she’s not.”
That night your dad and I had a long conversation. I told him how people had been bombarding me, saying that unschooling was going to make you unsociable and incapable of spending time with those your age.
Their words had been bugging me for days before this happened. “I think the Universe set this up for me,” I told him. I was looking forward to receiving some much needed wisdom from other moms who were unschooling their kids, or your godfather, Manish Jain, who is also unschooling his daughter. But the Universe finally opened my eyes to someone who calmed my fears better than they could have ever done: you.
Your actions that day helped me see that it was you doing the parenting. It was you unschooling me—an awkward turn of roles. The mother becomes the one who learns trust from her daughter.
Thank you for being my greatest teacher, love. My guru.
Letter 6
Awkward
From a politics of the mainstream to a politics of many streams.
—Manish Jain
Dear Alethea,
I have lately enjoyed thinking that the whole world, and not just me, is in speculation—and that this basket-weave of bodies and breath is conducting an inquiry into what it means to be alive, what it means to be at home, and why that matters. Imagine that for a second: I am not searching for hushes in the world; the entire world is flailing and bending and seeking with me, because I am not in the world, I am the world in its specific self-inquiry. I am accompanied in this fabled pilgrimage for good fatherhood, and the world at this very moment is also in search of hushes to enact this ritual with me. Therefore, as I stretch to reach you, to embrace you, in this diffracted moment, I am tugging at the sleeves of distant galaxies; I am disrupting the astronomical and the atomic, leaving tremors and rumors in the wake of these efforts.
It’s a stunning idea, isn’t it? But you know what makes me gasp even more, dear? When I consider one of the more mesmeric implications of this idea that we are in this together for all the questions we pose to the world, and all the claims we make about what feels fair and just, I realize that the asking itself—the mereness of a question—might be inexhaustible in its own right and may not require the redemptive intervention of an answer for it to be valuable or profound in its way.
Questions have a complete partialness. Another way to say this might be to say that the way to think about or think through our problems—how to ask this question of home, how to navigate dislocation, how to reconcile ourselves with the matterings of the world at large, and how to understand pain as the larger project of a community of others—may not be available yet. Let me elaborate.
It is often taken for granted that the opposite of a question is an answer; there is a cosmic, platonic double-step logic about it. Black is to white, as night is to day, as cats are to dogs, and questions are to answers. But what if questions are not free-floating formations that are summarily resolved with answers? What if questions are not made only of words? What if questions are material things, speciated and tactile, with body parts, particular histories of their own, affective accompaniments, genealogical ties, and burial grounds? What if questions are like guests to a home—to be welcomed, catered to, dusted up, considered affectionately, spoken with, and put to bed? And what if giving an answer is sometimes the ethical equivalent of slamming a door on the face of a guest as soon as you’ve said hello?
Could this be the reason why we need tricksters? To slow us down from the treachery of a swift resolution and the quest for a binding reconciliation of contradiction? To keep the world fresh? To help us consider the many ways questions trigger, exert themselves upon, and shape us? Could there be value in the yet unanswered question? What if questions have colors, sometimes spritely and gay, other times dour and withdrawn? What about textures? Can we think of textured questions? Glossy, smooth, and finely finished? Or rough to the touch? Ungainly and threatening? Lustful questions? Desiring questions?
Think about it. A question doesn’t just appear out of the blue like most things Cartesian. It sizzles and pops and snarls and hisses at the frothing edge and moving face of a material process that might have touched exploding nebula and congealing planet and noble rock and riverbed and trellised sky and falling leaf and unrequited skin touch and curdled moon in its becoming. So that an “answer”—equally diffracted and grand—is not always the way to respond to a question. Not even the right way.
A friend of mine, Lori Kane, wrote these words to me when I shared my sentiments with her, and I thought to include them in this letter:
A question feels like a river to me and an answer feels more like a stepping stone placed within it. Useful in slightly shifting the river. Useful to human feet just trying to get across sometimes. Useful as a record that humans come this way often. That you’re not alone. And often most useful when so thoughtfully honed and placed that others are stopped for a moment, can look around, and maybe be swept up into the beauty of the place herself. Or maybe leap from the stone to swim for the fun of it. But an answer wouldn’t have to be a stone. It could be a tree branch too. Something that fell there more clearly of its own accord. This makes me wonder: is an answer more knowable than a question? And this is reminding me that a stone, like an answer, is really under no obligation to be useful at all. The beauty of its presence is plenty.
As I lay on this gritty shore, on the unspoiled and secluded beach of the Great Mattiscombe Sand here in Devon, the sweeping nuance of blue up above, and a crowd of sandy witnesses covering everything in its warm blanket, I think of you. The thick “you.” The little girl I have left five thousand miles away, back home in Chennai, who is now running a slight temperature according to her mum’s urgent yet reassuring message. The screaming tot this pale blue dot belched out that frantic Wednesday evening at 6:33 p.m.—the one I promised, quite “chapless and knocked about the mazard,” to find a home for. And the “little girl” I haven’t met yet, who holds this letter, who crouches on the sands of a different shore, next to me and your mother. In writing these letters to you—a vocation I at first didn’t feel good enough to respond to—I am secreting the has-been, the might-have-been, the might-yet-have-been, and the yet-to-come.
I have many questions. They don’t need answers. Just the asking is good enough.
F
irst, are you in love? Did you just say, “Yes, Dada, I am!” or did you look into the eddying gray-blue ahead of you, recalling a recent heartbreak situation?
Perhaps you have children of your own? Or are content without them?
Does your hair flow like the naive wind, or is it resolute and grounded like my short hair?
Do you cook as wonderfully as your mum? Do you eat meat as I do?
Do you swim? Remember that time your Dada almost drowned—on his birthday swimming in the Yuba River in California? I’m still the only one in the family who is witless in water.
Where do you live? And do you live with others?
What do you do for money? Are there still nation-states and fiat currencies and giant factories?
Are there still dolphins and whales? Spiny crag lizards and Asian elephants?
Are you well?
Are you home?
By the way, I am not here on these sands alone. There are many others here, citizens of these borderlands, who have questions too. In a sense they have been on their own rough trails of enlivenment, gathering metaphorical hushes, wondering what to do with them, taking one unsure step after the other into the not-known. I am here in Devon, teaching a short course at Schumacher College about my quest to find a home for/with you. I am five hushes away from completing the ritual.
There are students here that could be my grandparents, others just as young as my littlest sister. We are all here—veteran activists, poets, one psychologist, one pianist, many storytellers, alternative education practitioners, policymakers, and at least one Irish politician who is running for election and detests establishment politics. We are passionate about justice; angry with industrial activities and their harmful effects on the environment; and learning to reacquaint ourselves with the meat of the earth—with the shit we flush away. A permaculturist is learning to plant her own food; one young man has recently become Christian as an act of rebellion against oppression—recovering the life of Jesus as a young insurgent who challenged the Romans. Together, we are seeking to occupy other places of power, learning to see our naturalization within systems of oppression, and are doing our best to be responsive to futures forgotten.
What have we come to the sea to do? We have come to the sea to honor our many questions, and to surrender them to the waters. We have come because we are bleeding, our skins are rupturing. A deep crisis disturbs us.
Among us, there is a sense of smallness—a not-too-distant and humbling awareness that the planet that seems to stretch out to infinity before our very eyes is but a speck’s mite in the unfathomable expanse of the universe. We know the world doesn’t spin around us. That we are not the center of the universe. We are not even the center of our own selves.
This feels like a humiliation of the bluntest sort. And yet, we have not shrunk away; we are not embarrassed that we’ve never had clothes on even though all this time we have insisted that other earthlings notice the rich embroidery of our ornaments. Instead we are here at this edge—because even though we are very small and blissfully inconsequential, we understand that the same molecules that cooked in the heart of ancient stars, exploding into space, and birthing other planets gave birth to us and the many others around us. In this way, we are here partly because of the continuity of processes around us. We are recognizing that we are not autonomous—so that concepts of size and worth collapse in the face of this web of bodies. If anything, this is a spiritual awakening of some sort.
We are not merely admitting that the world doesn’t spin around us—because owning up to this still preserves, in small doses, the idea that we are apart from the world, instead of what the world is doing.
Our humility lies in recognizing that we are the world’s spin, the dizziness of things. As such, aloofness, independence, or aloneness—whether it takes on the varieties of religious piety, scientific perspicuity, genetic purity, political in/correctness, or militant activism (or resistance by any other name)—is impossible. We are not alone. Everything is compromised. And though we might like to think it so, fixing the world is more complex than getting our act together. We are a troubling congealment of an ongoingness without a name—and we are spread out in a boundaryless play of co-becoming. In this way, our shared humiliation is a coming to our (many) senses and a calling to be witnesses to the strange voices that respond when we call out, “Is there anybody home?”
I cannot believe that I—an African boy who once had to sell chicken barbecue on a street in Lagos to help his fatherless family get by—is now conspiring with these strange yet familiar others. But this is the measure of our times and the strangeness of the moment. Those that are wise have to unlearn their wiseness with the stupid.
When I was younger, the world seemed a simpler place. A lot less complicated. There were undeniable doctrines that were true for me: life was about “making it” or, if one wanted to beat around the bush, “following your passion.” In any case, to do this, one needed to go to school, to speak one-tongue, to travel abroad and see other places, to develop entrepreneurial skills, identify problems, and cash in on providing a solution to those problems. I was “Nigerian”—a citizen of a nation-state, whose good leaders were the ones that made it look like the televised pictures we saw from Europe and America. The purpose of human collectives was to use the natural resources God had given us to make bridges, build factories, make rocket ships that went to the moon, and invent technologies that could save lives. Just as important, perhaps even more so, the meaning of life was to be holy and exclusively devoted to a single faith. All other faiths and their adherents were either stupid, ignorant, or wicked.
But all of this started to change. Slowly but surely, my naive wallpaper started to peel away, exposing other colors I never thought possible. First, in giving myself so completely to my faith, I began noticing its limitations. I had taken deep baths in its philosophical waters, and they didn’t wash the sticky stains my everyday movements in the world gave me. In short, many things didn’t add up: the notion of sin, the exclusivity of religious compliance in a world too culturally complex for single opinions, the very idea of beginnings, and the narratives of destiny. And don’t get me started on the church’s “prosperity gospel” practices that seemed at odds with the conditions of the poor and, worse, totally clueless about the colonial-neoliberal conditions that generated inequality in the first place. It wasn’t that these beliefs became less true or untrue; it is that truth itself became provisional and performative—no longer an act of correctly representing the world as it was behind the scenes, no longer an act of reaching out, since I noticed I was already in touch and complicit in enacting this vicarious barrier between me and the sacred.
It took the implosion of that lone sun in my psychic and intellectual life—Truth with a capital T—for me to notice, in little drops of insight, that “making it” was more often than not an empty phrase for clinging to the rules of life-denying pyramids of social ascendancy. And because there was some hidden dialectic in the concept of “making it”—a “me against the world” or “me in competition with others” thing—I also came to distrust the magical highway that led to one’s place in the sun. And school? In most parts the colonial heritage of a particular way of seeing the world. English? One-tongue. Development? The anthropocentric denial of our more humble place in the world and a quest for transcendence. Being “good”? Yet another flight of Icarus to escape the sensuous, unwieldiness, and ethical extravagance of the material world.
In short, dear Alee, I lost my faith. One day it was … just not there anymore. Swallowed up by the once microscopic traces of doubt that had obviously grown too big. This might sound tragic enough—this loosening of the threads that hold us together. This losing of one’s faith. But, you see, faith might be the lack of resistance to what we hope is possible and true. But doubt is the awareness of those possibilities. I was suddenly “empty” enough to be filled anew, and lost enough to notice that there were other interesting paths, through the nonchala
nt roadside shrubbery, that led to delightfully magical places the highway could never take you to.
This is why we are here. On Great Mattiscombe Sand. This is why we linger at this place where no further steps can be taken. An ancient people like us, called out from captivity, also roamed the shores of the so-called Red Sea for a while. Just when it seemed their strivings for freedom were to be dashed by the heavy approach of their slave masters and former owners, the impossible happened. The sea parted down the middle, splitting into great watery walls on either side, leaving dry ground for escape.
Whereas those people were called out to separate themselves as “holy” (the Hebraic word for “holy” is qadosh, I think—which means “set apart”), we are called into an immersion. Here, we are not expecting pillars of fire and angry clouds of gathering dread. The Atlantic Ocean will not be torn into two before our eyes. That is because our dead end is of a different sort: for a “species” that has lived as if everything were possible, as if we are unlimited and without threshold or edge, we need this dead end to stay resolute. We are not here to get around it; we are here to meet our limitations, to sit with the trouble of discontinuity, to know what it feels like to stop, to know the privilege of being refused further access, to feel the pull of gravity on our feet, to know we are claimed and we are not our own.
We are also not here in some kind of ritual to relinquish the human; surrender is not antihuman. Someone asked me recently, “How do I get rid of the ego?” My response? “Good grief, why would you want to undergo such a terrible procedure?!” (I really should have begun my reply with something more profound, like “Jumping Jehoshaphats!” or “Blistering Barnacles!”) Surrender is not a state of being egoless. In fact, I might argue that the quest for egolessness is the ego’s last defense mechanism—its most patronizing trick that underscores an inability to recognize that it is not at all separate from the rest of the material equation we hesitantly (and often rudely) call “nature.” The ego is not the problem; the problem is maybe the paradigm that amputates it, treats it as diseased and alien, cut off from the rest of the world, out of touch. The “solution” is not to empty ourselves of it, but to notice the umbilical cords that still tether us to a festival of vitality.
These Wilds Beyond Our Fences Page 29
