Who am I, Where am I from?

Alicia Maund (April 8, 2007)

What are the strengths of 'seeing' and witnessing our selves, our identity, our histories, our places in the world. Seeing breaks the silence that is marked by the unnamed familiar, familiar language, familiar symbols, familiar discussions. Underneath the silence rumbles: our histories and our selves, seeking witness and resolution. In breaking the silence: heart.... breaks.... open

When this familiar is interrupted, it can manifest as a feeling of urgency, a need to act, to respond quickly, to mend, to fix, to master, the feeling of insecurity. Fear and trembling occur.

The Western response to fear is to escape it. What are we escaping from? Are we afraid of our selves? How can we ?see' another person, if we are afraid of seeing our selves?

One of my many experiences as a child was the multiplicity of people who were present most of the time. My early family had open doors, 24 hours a day, to everyone, known and unknown, for every meal. Open beds and bedrooms for anyone needing a place, day or night, without a timeline on the stay. Every weekday after school we visited with food and music people who couldn't leave their homes. Most Sundays, people from the community came to our house, cooked together, and took van loads of food to the park to pass out. Every Saturday morning my grandmother, who was called "Mother" by the entire community, baked breads and shared more than half. This was not charity. This was community. The distinction is significant. One is of giving from "extra" resources. One is of continuously sharing from your own.

This type of community requires two things. It requires non attachment and it requires trust and shared meanings. Trust comes from living and practicing community. Non attachment comes from complete acceptance of the impermanence of life and of human frailty. And it facilitates breathing through fear.

The escape from, the self, the body, and all of its experiences, is a rejection of ones humanness. In escaping the depths of pain, it also rejects possible heights of human joy and human connection. It is a contradiction since the body and human frailty are inescapable. Ignorance turns out not to be bliss. One stays in an in-between illusion of mastery. And being an illusion, the mastery is constantly evasive, as it does not exist. Being still with the self becomes more distant, participating in emotionally honest community, becomes more unattainable. Without ground, and without self we do not truly see or engage with the world or others.

In 1989 I was the survivor of a violent hostage and assault. During the assault I tried many ways to stay alive, including talking to my assailant. At one point, I decided to try and focus his attention to the pain of my wrists rand my ankles restrained, in hopes that he would let me go. After just a few of my words, his body began to writhe, his face expressing pain, fear and anger. He started repeatedly saying "You are just like my mother. You are just like my sister", over and over again, while he banged his head repeatedly on a bare concrete floor. In that moment there was a stillness and clarity, as I realized, "This isn't about me".

In 2000, myself and another woman of colour were both struggling through the steps and implications of separate human rights cases. We initially had the said support of different social activists. Each time each of us would meet with them, we would call the other afterwards and talk on the phone, to get support from the pain of the interactions.

In conversation with my said "helpers" and "supporters" I would watch my words circle into nothingness. My voice and my presence invisible. Their eyes looked through me, tied up in thoughts, revealed in their language, about how they needed to see themselves, how they struggled to make coherence between their selves, their histories, through what I represented.

I was not present. I watched them each have conversations with themselves. I was not there. The precursor of self knowledge and self resolution is missing. They cannot know who I am or see me, without knowing who they are.

Being the change requires ?seeing' our selves, our identities, our histories. Without that ground, we replicate, re-enact, without knowing. We pass on the pain. That ground is the necessary first step.

How do we see when there's a lot of fog in the way. We have long entered the day when the written word is now necessary to remember and materialism now affects our minds. As a result we have lost the power to hold memory. Without living memory who are we? How are we?

Stripped of the social niceties of name, job, car, neighbourhood, few Westerners have much to say. Many answer "Who am I" by what we do.

Despite technological advances in communication, research shows increased loneliness, isolation, community dissolution and personal and community disconnect. Western culture and Whiteness have lost what peoples have done for centuries: talk, honest, emotionally connected talk and emotional sharing. Talking...Together.

Words and the questions they form are very important. Oral traditions of transmitting history, informing identity, and allowing for individual emotional discernment and processing have been lost. In the words of a Sumba Indonesian elder, "How do we know who we are unless we talk, together".

A tribal Xavante elder, from Brazil, says: "A tree needs balance and roots, so if you know your place, your root, you know balance, and you will certainly know who you are. Then you will know death as you know life". Finding a way through Whiteness to ones self is finding balance and finding roots. Through awareness, re-negotiation, and ancestral communion.

"The dead must still be honoured," the Xavante says, "for life to go on". "They must be honoured and our enemies too. The promise to the dead must be fulfilled or the living will suffer. All must be honoured, named and remembered. They're all people. Living and dead. They are the different parts of one eternal tree, whispering in the wind their questions, one to the other".

The Xavante priest knows his identity, how to live and what he needs, by speaking to the dead. He offers a prayer for the Whites who come into his village to learn from his tribe: "Dear ancestors, How does he know who he is unless we question him? They are like banyan trees, roots in the air, not fixed, they do not know who we are or who they are".

The Xavante live in a defined word, a lattice that secures, but does not constrain, within which they are free to be individuals. Westerners live in a limitless world and are told they are free. But the replacement of community, identity, history, and ancestors, with status and possessions makes Westerners chained by those very possessions and by the fear of loss that accompanies them.

Maybury-Lewis asks: "How can we be free if we don't know who we are. There is no fence in sight, and also no shelter and no trees. That's us. From far it looks like freedom, but from where you stand it looks like being lost, and sometimes with nothing to fall back on, no one to fall back on, you're lonely until death".

Social identity is a map. Era, geography, economics, family, race, gender, sex, locates and maps one and ones' life at birth. Maps one challenges, possibilities, life expectancy, careers, education, health, likelihood of marriage, likelihood of violence, and more. Socialization is the process of learning the rules of ones place on the map. It is internalizing and practicing ones place and relationships. It is how we become.

I remember at about age 5 getting help getting dressed, and not wanting to wear what was laid out for me, a flowery dress with a puffed skirt. The responses of you're not a boy and of how pretty I would be, singled out this difference of gender. By a later age I had learned to like dresses, and enjoyed wearing my favourites. Graced and reciprocated with the attention, approval and admiration of my primary caregivers, the web of emotional learning, and emotional attachment to the identity, that begins as a young child, began to weave. Belonging, Approval and Love were the rewards.

I also remember learning race, I remember people admiring my long hair and its texture, being called pretty wherever I went, in relationship to my long hair and in relation to my being Reds, a term in Trinidad, for those who are mixed, reflecting lighter complexion. The attention was confusing. It had nothing to do with anything I did, no action on my part, but of what others saw "on" me. I understood it as something that I wore, but unlike clothing, I couldn't 'take off'.

In Trinidad's oral and emotionally expressive culture, where conversations with everyone from taxi drivers and passengers, to people at the roti shop, and when getting fresh coconut water from the savannah, would include the intersections of politics, history, humour, laughter, sadness, the self, and a wide range of emotions, I learned the heavy meanings and history associated with this clothing that I couldn't take off.

I embodied simultaneously both social benefits of being Reds, and its history, the stark memory of slave and colonial rapes. It was heavy, painful and sad. I watched, puzzled and interested, by how thick and rich that history lived in the present.

I embodied memory, the richness of life and death, of both my ancestors and of the intricate human experience. I watched it and felt it, as a unique connection with other human beings.

This awareness, the distinct memories of 'seeing' the social identity I was born into, and as I grew into my skin, allowed me conscious negotiation of who my identity was, as I watched history alive on my body, and in all the spaces around me.

I still remember the feelings before I knew my body was Black and Reds, and before I found out I was female. Watching in ecstasy the butterflies flutter and land on me; peering through windows to get a closer look at a lizards slow movement on the trees, as it waited for a butterfly; the feeling in my stomach and my skin, of being scared and amazed at the beauty and fast slithering of the garden snakes, and the feeling of the jump as someone held me in their arms as they jumped over ocean waves.

Our emotions, our dreams, the language of the earth, animals and ancestors around us, our bodies, help all these parts of ourselves, and our life experience talk with each other.

Within our body, our senses, work through memory, and through daily experience, to help us survive, sustain our selves, and negotiate our identities. Re- negotiation is what we need to do, to ?be the change.'

To know ones self requires awareness. Peter Levine says: "Without awareness we have no choice. Some things must be dealt with at the roots".

Responding quickly from anxiety, and not from the roots, does offer momentary release, but without awareness, it is re-enactment, and it remains a conversation with an unknown self. By going with the programmed act, we rarely develop any sustainable insight, and nothing new or original is done. Few people would consciously choose to live their lives and decision making by unconscious re enactments. And yet we do it everyday.

We are one with nature. And as an example, like jellyfish, moving as if one with its surroundings, the smallest changes in its environment generates an immediate response. It re-orients itself to move towards where it feels there is food, or moves away from the presence of danger (Peter Levine, 1997). The external signals from the environment that it receives and the response of the jellyfish occur as one event. This type of attunement to our environment is critical to the survival of all organisms. And so too, our bodies attune to our environment. And our bodies learn race, and other markers of history and society, as part of our response.

Our body expresses its experience through the senses. Like a stream, it shapes itself to its environments. Sight, sounds, smells, touch, and tastes, are present in the body's awareness of its movements, tensions, responses, and learning. The felt sense is closely related to awareness. If you pick up an ice cube, the ice cube will feel cold, smooth, hard, and have a specific shape as you feel it in your hands (Peter Levine, 1997). If it is an ice cube straight from a freezer it might also be sticky, and if holding it for a while there will be a distinct feeling of the ice cube becoming soft, slippery, silky, as it begins to melt, and the feeling wetness and water slipping through your fingers. All of these are important in creating a complete understanding of the ice cube. The same is true of all our sensations.

The felt sense as a tool can help you get to know yourself as a complex, biological, social and spiritual organism. It can help you remember the tone, feel, sound, images, and from that, the content, the thickness, the flesh, of what you learned, how you embodied, who you are, including your race.

We have to learn to feel the body, without interpretation or judgement, as the vehicle where we learned our identities, the histories, that we were born into. This helps to know our selves. Research shows that as early as 3 and completely by the age of six, the constructs of gender and race are learned, formed, and internalized. As socialization becomes more complex, through early childhood, it incorporates into all the aspects of the person and all of their experiences. Adult experiences continue to validate and reinforce the body's early learning, through the rewards and benefits of living the social location. This identity may not be fully conscious but it is certainly active. Contributing to the motives and drives of our behaviour and personality.

Awareness through memory and learning the ability to watch or observe ourselves, will be one of the starting points in re-negotiating our identities, and transforming the personal meanings and manifestation. From becoming the change, external change will flow in interactions, decisions, generationally through transmission of this awareness to children and grandchildren, reclaiming emotional expression, the body, accessing ground and safety, lost oral traditions, as well as creatively responding to the external world, through a new and differently found authenticity.

Through this courage to feel, we are also directly experiencing the rhythmic pulsing of life. We begin to understand and recognize the cyclic patterns, both physical, and social, and historical, from which our reality is woven.

"Our lives are like streams... Our bodies are the banks of the stream, containing our life energy and holding it in bounds while allowing it to freely flow within the banks". (Levine, 1997) History and trauma within the body and within the banks of the stream will not be ignored. It is an inherent part of what brought us here. The only way we will be able to release ourselves, individually and collectively, from re-enacting our traumatic legacies is by transforming them through renegotiation.

Race and racial relationships are both personal internal and external maps, that are collective traumas, for all. It is an injury to the body, the spirit, and the community. But, within every injury is also the seed of healing and renewal. "At the moment our skin is cut or punctured by an external object, magnificent and precise, a series of biochemical events is orchestrated through our bodys' wisdom. The body has been designed to renew itself. These same principles also apply to the healing of psyche, spirit, and soul." (Levine, 1997) Every injury exists within life, and life itself is constantly renewing.

Our reclaiming of historical memory, mourning the losses, making a thread and communion with the ancestors, re-humanizing our selves, re-humanizing others, repairing relationships, dialogue, and letting successive generations witness, is our possibility for resilient strength.

Resilient strength is the opposite of helplessness. Like the tree made strong and resilient by its grounded root system. It is a call for the spirit to return to the body, to initiate healing by reintegrating lost and fragmented portions of your essential self or selves, including our racial identities. It has to start with the personal, the internal, the historically intimate.

Copyright - Alicia Maund, 2007