thank you to a_n for affording the development of rainbow tribe project by granting a travel bursary to go to New York in 2017. sorry writing this has been like pulling teeth. thank you for your patience. these blog posts connect the proposal for the grant, my intentions, and experiences and ideas since. its a note take.
“Resilience is the product of agency: knowing that what you do can make a difference,.” (Bessel Van Der Kolk).
Endurance – what an endless demand to endure does to a person – endurance not as aspiration but as a word expressing the realities of “resilience” and “sustain”
Sara ahmed: “what does it mean to have a body that provides an institution with diversity?” Ahmed, Sara. 2012. On Being Included: Racism and Institutional Life. Durham: Duke University Press. 49
Coupled with this: “This oral history of twentieth century violence has never been collated or collected, but it is there and it is shocking.” Olusoga, Black and British: A Forgotten History (2016) p xvii
i am lobbying for a survey on racism sensing it part of British Library or British Museum’s or some such civic duty as a public institution.
Why is it that we do not nationally understand our history of racism, that it is contested? What is hindering our development? Why are our structures so resilient? The racialized categorization of human subjects is one of the most resilient forms of global genocide – lets not shy away from what resilience has achieved – it serves as an useful apparatus with which to dominate and oppress “…resiliency of racial, ethnic, and national schemes….” Henry Louis Gates. Jr in Stuart Hall, The Fateful Triangle Race Ethnicity Nation xii
I think of resilience as a numbness – damage control
Speaking later about Bunce Island a slave fortress, Olusoga provides a useful metaphor in describing the ruins: “…there are sections of wall that remain upright more out of habit than structural integrity.” p4 Resilient weathered structures engrained with blood.
Resilience is elitist and privileged implying that bouncing back into shape is possible. It is not. Let us look at the roots of trauma – individual and collective – and we will find that it is precisely the structures that hark resilience that require critique.
Vulnerability, precariousness, oppression, dehumanisation, threat, genocide, climate catastrophe.
What might make space “safe” or “safer”
What are our fundamental needs that, when met, allow our imaginations to roam free, towards actioning imaginings
