I'm on a bit of a blog go-slow at the moment. Between my never-ending dissertation and my end of year (American academic year) annual reports for work, I've churned out enough words to drown a troupe of unsettled elephants. But, in the name of procrastination, I've squeezed out a few more words...
When it comes to people's beliefs about the world, I'm fairly relativist. People think differently in different contexts and who I am to intervene and interfere when I have not experienced the reasons that ground their beliefs? Obviously, this applies only to people who do not have the power to resist my interference, I don't give rocks about interventions if I'm engaged with Super Power People. But see, I'm also a feminist. And sometimes I find myself in spaces where I have to compromise one of those two ideologies. Like at the Wellness Centre.
We still haven't replaced the stolen kitchen grater so I'm chopping the carrots with a bread knife into teeny tiny chunks. Ma'Monica is impressed. "You chop them so small!"
"Yes," I answer happily, "I can't cook anything so with my parents they would always just ask me to chop."
I know immediately that I have said something wrong.
"Why can't you cook?" Ma'Monica stops her soup-stirring mid-stir and turns to me almost accusingly.
I ramble out a lame defense, culminating in "so, well, I just never learnt." I don't know how I can explain to her that it's the men in my family who cook, not the women.
Ma'Monica clucks disapprovingly.
"But I can clean," I add in hurriedly, "I've always been a good cleaner!"
"Good," Ma'Monica nods, "at least you have that."
I relax but Ma'Monica isn't finished, her pause had more to do with increased concentration on the soup and less to do with letting me off the hook.
Wiping her hands on the dishtowel at the stove she turns to me and asserts, "but when you get married you will have to learn to cook. You know that?"
Right. The patriarchy and heteronormativity dance in front of me. I could say something. But then I'm stuck in another set of equally crappy norms: the white woman telling the black woman what's right and what's wrong, the middle-class enlightenment being charitably imposed on the poor, the university-educated telling the uneducated how little they know; all in a language that is native to me, and foreign to Ma'Monica. Stuck. I am stuck. The politics of knowledge dictate that in this interaction, I own the monopoly. If I was convinced that Ma'Monica felt she had the authority to tell me to shut-up and scrub the stainless steel tables with the stuff that makes my hands smell funky, then I would challenge her.
"Ah, but Jenzils," you say, "what about Freire?"
Ooh, you gain the upper hand and I start to cower.
"And then," you might continue, "surely you are obliged to do all you can to even the epistemological playing-field so that you can both challenge one another?"
I curl up into a fetal ball.
But I agree with you. And my agreement is how I got myself knotted into my ridiculously demanding research. It's not your traditional intellectual fist-fight, nay-nay. It's a different kind of demanding: evening the damn playing-field demanding. After almost a year at the Wellness Centre, and mired in privilege and guilt, I'm on the brink of concluding that it's almost impossible. There are brief shudders when I realize the ground has shifted, but I blink and my feet are back on their stilts.
Being an engaged feminist in a world of intersecting playing-fields is kak difficult.
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