WAKING TO SEPTEMBER 11

The world both has and has not changed since that fateful day

by Dr. Proma Tagore

September is experienced by most of us at schools across North America as a fresh season of teaching and learning. This past September, instead, was marked by the devastating bombing of the World Trade Center, followed by waves of violence and atrocities, particularly for the people of Afghanistan, for Arab and Muslim communities, for the regions of the Middle East and South Asia, for immigrants, refugees, and racialized peoples in general, globally and in Canada.

Early news reports lamented: “The world has changed forever.” The events of September 11 changed world situations. But I sense that, simultaneously, little has changed. Rather, colonialism and long histories of global racism are becoming visible to some people in new, more provocative ways. The privileges that many individuals in this seemingly “secure” part of the world often take for granted are being shaken. These same privileges are being vehemently defended, as states and people are desperate to hold onto their possessions for safe-keeping.

The world both has and has not changed after September 11.

One of the immediate ways in which I experienced Victoria and the campus differently was that, suddenly, my classrooms felt much more confrontational than usual. There were moments when the classroom transformed into a battleground, so different from the safe, explorative space I seek through my teaching.

My teaching mandate is to examine the ways in which race, gender, sexuality, class, national affiliations and dis-affiliations relate to our own histories and dis/placements. Thus, I encourage students to bring in their life-world experiences to discussions.

In courses such as Colonial and Postcolonial Studies, South Asian Literature or Women’s Writing, it was impossible for us not to consider, out loud and silently, the U.S. bombing of Afghanistan, the painful re-experiencing of communal violence in India and Pakistan, the proliferation of stereotypical images of “Muslim women” in the media or the
continued occupation of Palestine, as well as more local events such as the current treaty referendum, linked to these other examples through an ongoing colonial history of domination and genocide. The world “outside” was and continues to be a battleground, as are the worlds “inside.”

While sometimes difficult, such confrontation can be productive. Larissa Lai, Chinese-Canadian poetess and activist, speaks of “the power and the romance of confrontational politics because there is a purity in that refusal to back down, that refusal to take shit, or to compromise.”

Lai also speaks about the exigencies of simplistic “black and white” politics. She describes the ways in which liberal society “racially designates” First Nations people and people of colour so that they are rendered reductively. She says, too, “I hate the way people tend to reduce activists to their politics, as though they aren’t also members of families, students, teachers, writers, artists, engineers, steel workers or whatever.”

In response to such ways of thinking, Lai views storytelling as a possible “third space,” a way of imagining worlds where “we are infinitely more than the sum of identities that this statistic-crazy society wants to pin on [us].” For people of colour, our stories figure ourselves as intricate, breathful beings and not merely as statistics, numbers to cite and then forget.

A prevalent memory of mine during last September was a persistent question targeted at many people of colour: “Have there been incidents of racism at UVic? Can you name them?” Yet, because of a generalized silence around matters of race in this city, a silence that creates an atmosphere of fear and anxiety, it’s impossible for such “evidence” to safely emerge into the public. Racism must be recognized not simply as spectacular acts of violence but as everyday, normalized experiences that often remain unwitnessed.

Another more inspiring memory that impressed itself upon me during September was a story. It was told during a “speak-out” organized by the Anti-Racist Action Committee (ARAC), an alliance of students, staff, faculty and community members that coalesced in response to September 11. A Muslim woman spoke of her son, who, after the bombing of the World Trade Center, came home every day from elementary school complaining of an illness, one that seemed to change its location and metastasize, until it occupied the whole of his body. First a stomach ache. A headache today, mom. My legs hurt this morning, may I please stay home?

This went on for a week, until he admitted that he wasn’t sick, but scared. He was being singled out at school, sometimes maliciously, sometimes simply because other people held assumptions about him and his relationship to media images and messages.
This account reminded me of another story told by Frantz Fanon, one of the most profound challengers of racism in the 20th century. In an essay entitled “The North African Syndrome,” Fanon describes how a black immigrant living in France sees a doctor about his pain. The doctor asks him to locate where this pain is lodged. The patient says that it resides in his stomach, but points to his heart, then head. The doctor keeps asking questions in an attempt to diagnose and “cure” him but soon dismisses the pain as an imaginary illness, because it can’t be isolated.

Fanon’s piece, like the woman’s story, is spoken in order to name such “syndromes” not as illnesses, but as racism in the works. He argues that colonial medicine, science, and other modes of knowledge actually construct racialized bodies as sites of madness or illness without examining the contexts that produce such experiences. These stories also hold a lesson about how the seeming invisibility of racism at particular moments and places is often racism’s most insidious weapon.

Shoshana Felman, in her book, Testimony, speaks of how crisis, instead of being a paralytic force, may be an educative instigator. This is what happened for me and others at UVic. The formation of ARAC, sparked by a crisis, has been a third space for many of us this year, a space of enormous teaching and learning. One that is not simply confrontational, but where members can engage in dialogue based on a recognition of our stories, experiences and commitments.

Nayyar Javed, one of ARAC’s guest speakers, made me and others reflect in profound ways. She asked us to stop examining the notion of “the racialized other” and instead see how we often construct “the racist as other.” This latter exploration leads to an unravelling, an undoing, an unlearning, and ultimately, for First Nations and people of colour, a new freedom. Such examination forces us to think about the responsibilities we all carry within ourselves to act against racism.

I’m trying to imagine what Nayyar’s insights might mean in my own life. I suspect she is asking us for attentiveness — attention to ourselves, to others, and to the lands that, currently, we are so generously permitted to inhabit. Fostering such attentiveness is one of the small, though enormously complex and time-extending, ways in which we can all work toward creating a more equitable environment.

Dr. Proma Tagore is an assistant professor in the department of English, where she teaches in the areas of colonial, post-colonial, feminist, and queer studies. She’s a member of UVic’s Anti-Racist Action Committee. For more information on ARAC contact Tagore at ptagore@uvic.ca.

Valerie Shore photo