Dance Templates and Sex-on-Stage

I. Leaders Club, on Iddi Mosi (the second night of Eid in TZ)

Alex Perullo wrote a brilliant book called Live from Dar (2011) in which he suggests that the success of Tanzanian bands is measured by how enthusiastically the audience responds.  The more the spectators dance, sing along, come up to the stage, get on stage, or shout out their approval, the more successful the musicians are thought to be.  And this determines whether the club/venue will hire the musicians again – cuz every venue wants to provide a good time to their customers. 

The original part of Perullo's thesis is that artists aren’t wholly responsible for the popularity of their performances.  Most old clubs and social halls in the city contain these embedded histories, or what Perullo calls “codes of response” – a kind of ingrained template of dancing and responding for the audience to follow.  After a venue has hosted hundreds or thousands of performances, the space has a kind of happy protocol; a performance is expected from the audience, not just from the band.  This means that older venues tend to host more “successful” performances than newer ones, because the audience is naturally more inclined to sing, whistle, jester, or get up & dance.  Perullo named the Leaders Club as a newer venue in which bands had a difficult time getting the audience to participate; he described one event where the audience sat tepidly in plastic chairs for the duration of the performance.

My first trip to Leaders Club was on the second night of Eid, and spirits were high.  That night, the Club was hosting a competition between two beloved, semi-historical bands: Msondo, who specializes in ngoma (or traditional Tanzanian dance), and Sikinde, whose forté is “Afro-jazz” – an easy-swingin’ fusion genre that bears little resemblance to actual jazz.  Msondo was in full swing when we arrived, and all the Msondo-loyalists were shaking and shimmying in front of the stage.  On an adjacent stage, Sikinde were setting up their instruments and testing their sound-system, prepping for a hard-hittin' retaliation.  The whole thing looked like a rap or dance battle, complete with gangs of supporters on either side.

While there was definitely some mad Afro dancing going down, I understood what Perullo wrote about the hesitance to participate.  There were plenty of middle-aged guys in the audience who were just slouching deep in their plastic chairs, chins on their chests, staring apathetically at the stage.  I sat next to one old dude who had two samosas in hand, and his dress shoes unlaced on the grass in front of him.  

"Which band do you like better?" I asked him.

"Sikinde," he grunted.  He licked the samosa grease off some fingers.

"Why... are they better musicians?" I probed, feeling all anthropological.

"Uhnnn-ghslkh," he snorted from his slouch. I tried to decipher the snort: was that affirmative? ambivalent?

He leaned over very creakily and asked me, still chewing: "Eh.. are you married?" My friend arrived at that precise moment bearing Tangawizis (hardcore TZ ginger-ale) and we quickly downed them before Sikinde started performing.  The rest of the night was spent in unplanned and unregulated and never-before-seen dancing, because at Leaders Club, no one knew what the hell they were supposed to be doing.  Hooray for non-historical venues!

II. Leaders Club last Friday, site of the Tanzania Live Music Festival

We'd actually planned to go out somewhere else last Friday, but after vuting on the porch to too many OK Computer tracks, we suddenly realized it was 11:30 and the event we'd wanted to go to was over.  But we weren't discouraged -- we could hear hyper, syncopated Tanzanian dance tunes wafting down the road from what could only be Leaders Club.  So we followed our ears (or, in our ganjafied clarity, what we understood to be our vibrating hearts) down the road to the music.  At the gate, they made us pay the standard 3-dollar entry fee, and in return, we got these tickets that said Tanzania Live Music Festival. 

We all looked at each other like, "Did you know this was a festival?"

Inside, we saw a massive outdoor stage looming on one side of the field.  There were hundreds of empty chairs in front of the stage, and a glitzy crowd milling around in the grass.  Only the front row of chairs was occupied by some fashionistas, and a guy with grills.  We danced and swayed for a while in the dark, until someone suggested, "Wanna sit down and rest for a while?"  But as we headed toward the plastic chairs, a huge guard stepped in front of us and demanded to see our VIP tickets.

"Show me VIP ticket," he said.

I looked at him: "Uhhhhmmm......"  At that point I had a hard time responding, because I was registering every festival-decibel with ultra-high acuity, and also because I couldn't understand why anyone would pay $15 to have access to plastic chairs.

"Get out!" he said, pointing to the dark abyss beyond the chair-area and the sound-booth, to where some ladies were adjusting the fabric over each other's bums.  

"But... we aren't even in the VIP section right now," I reminded him.  

"Out, out!"  he said, snapping his fingers like an angry mom.  

The bands/ dance troupes that performed that night were mostly bongo flava (Tanzania's mainstream blend of hip-hop and bad pop) and each successive group seemed like it was trying to outdo all the others in terms of sexual provocativeness.  I know I was absorbing everything through a mental magnifying glass, but it seemed like they were making totally shocking group-sex configurations on stage, wearing either tight weird bodysuits, or these retro-fringy cheerleading costumes that were worse than Halloween in an American college. And at some point they were so risqué that we all disintegrated into laughter -- we were laughing so hard that we had to lie down in the grass.  What was happening on stage was actually grotesque and terrifying.  Live Music Fest?  More like "Come watch live porn with your friends and family."   But everyone else was thinking the same thing -- a few Tanzanians around us were looking at the ground, some were watching with utter absorption, and most people were just laughing til they ached.

Then it started raining, and a Zanzibari mama-group came on, dressed in demure floor-length dresses. We got up and danced in the dark and the tumbling night-water to some wholesome muzik.  One of the sound-booth guys told us the festival would go til morning, but we left around 3, when the world was still feeling alriiiiiiiiight.

The Rift Valley Muzik-Fest and a Sounded Ethos

It’s 8:00, Saturday morning – too early to be awake after the festivities of the night before.  But I really need to pee, and bright sunlight is already leaking in through the top of the tent, so I groggily zip open the door-flap and crawl outside.  The grass beneath my knees is tough and yellow – typical terrain for the central Kenyan highlands.  As I stumble through the campsite, I see some early signs of life between the hundreds of quiet tents: thin lines of smoke trailing up from campfires, some early-risers making coffee under an acacia tree.  I pass one circle of revelers who haven’t gone to bed yet; they’re lounging in lawn-chairs, smoking and chatting.

“Come have a beer!” shouts one of the happy strangers.  A beer is the last thing I want before breakfast, but they seem so friendly that I stroll over anyway.

“Did you just wake up?” asks this Indian-Kenyan guy. “Because you look like it!” 

“Wewe!” says his girlfriend, slapping his shoulder in mock reprimand.  She turns to me: “Believe me, you look better than he does right now.”  This is the prevailing mood at Fisherman’s Camp at Lake Naivasha: free, generous, jestering.  I have to decline many more offers of early-morning alcohol before I reach the outhouses.

Last week, Fisherman’s Camp was the site of the third annual Rift Valley Festival, a three-day music celebration, showcasing artists from Kenya and the UK.  The festival was initially founded by two brothers, Sean and Ivan Ross, who according to the event's website, “have years of experience promoting events in the UK and deep roots in Kenya.  They came up with the idea of a festival as the perfect means to celebrate on an international stage the richness of East African culture and music as well as promote the unity and beauty of Kenya.”

The Rift Valley Festival is ostensibly a meeting-of-worlds and a coming-together of different musical styles.  During the festival, Kenyan artists of various genres commanded the stage – DJs, rappers, dance troupes, and even the illustrious diva Suzanna Owiyo – interspersed with dance sessions deejayed by UK artists.  And when you looked out at everyone hipping and hopping and high-fiving under the strobe lights, the audience was undeniably cosmopolitan and multicolored. 

But I couldn’t help asking myself: was the festival really a mashup of “worlds”?  Over the course of the weekend, it seemed to me that the lines between “worlds” were still quite evident and not-yet-blurred.   Despite the high-quality musical performances, the festival was saturated with an East-meets-West self-consciousness that has long been the hallmark of Nairobi’s pop culture portals and leisure spaces.

Maybe I shouldn’t use the phrase "East-meets-West" to describe the Ross brothers' hyper-deliberate “international stage."  In his latest book, the renowned scholar and activist Hamid Dabashi argues that “the East” and “the West” are essentially fictive constructs that reinforce human divides each time we use them to designate massive swathes of geography and culture.  He refers to this time-worn branding practice as “other-worlding” – a way of imagining entire cultural constellations in opposition to our own, whether we hail from the fictional “East” or the chimeric “West.”  Even (or especially) for those of us with an uncomfortable foot in both worlds, the terms can feel reductive and divisive.

But Dabashi posits a solution to this constructed divide, a solution that he already sees at work in the revolutions in the Middle East: To dissolve our uncommon ethnos within a common ethos.  He believes that the divisions of humanity (if we must have them) should be along ethical lines: uniting those who are committed to common ideals against those who would repress or deny the realization of such ideals.  He writes that if we hope to face our imminent political and environmental crises with any grace or strength, we can no longer sort ourselves into crippling ethno-cultural categories.  In short, Dabashi proposes an ethical map of the world, a new ideological geography.

In Nairobi, more than almost anywhere else on earth, ethnos and ethos are constantly vying for supremacy as human categories.  And more often than not, ethnos seems to be winning out.  Many of Nairobi’s rappers define their art as either like or unlike American art; Somalian and Sudanese immigrants are often treated coldly when they cross the border; many expats try not to leave their “mini-European” neighborhoods; and, as was tragically revealed in the last general elections, tribal loyalties can even overshadow the desire for peaceful democracy.  Ethnos prevails in Nairobi as a site of both association and antagonism.

But then there are many bright and beautiful moments, in the city and beyond, that are marked by a uniting ethos.  There are spaces and times in which gatherings of Kenyans and Kenyan-wannabes (in our many-colored, multilingual, striped and storied complexity) are categorized only by what we love – by what we collectively know and believe. There are times when communities of Kenya-dwellers are animated by the same uni-joyous forces; and at the Rift Valley Festival, I witnessed quite a lot of communality and shared love of sound.  Maybe they were just hours of music-induced euphoria, but maybe also we believed in some of the same things at the same time: how good it feels to dance under the wide Kenyan night, how beautiful the music, how beautiful each other, how beautiful the world.

Unfortunately, some attendees’ die-hard habits of “other-worlding” were not entirely lost in the beats of the music-fest; on Friday, I met some British kids who had spent their whole lives in Kenya and knew only two words in Kiswahili: ati! (an expression of disapproval) and we njoo (you, come here).

Maybe I’ll take that pre-breakfast beer after all.

Da "Music Scene" (Etymology?)

Since the ostensible focus of my year in Africa is “the music scene,” I’ve been meaning to jot down some music-related observations from the City of Peace.

First, a long side-note: I recently read this interesting (if too well-structured) article by Kay Shelemay called “Musical Communities: Rethinking the Collective in Music.”  She writes that in recent decades, ethnomusicologists have been forced to reconsider the term “community” as a unit of study; as our global population becomes increasingly diasporic, techni-centric and mobile, it becomes difficult to use “community” to refer to a group of people living in the same space and sharing the same histories and traditions.  Instead, “community” tends to be something imagined, flexible, instable, a term too generous in its possible applications to be used in any technically nominal sense.  Shelemay thinks that as the word “community” loses some of its relevance, social theorists have started to focus instead on “ patterns of mobility, that… provide new models for studying routes instead of roots.”  I love that idea of conceptualizing humans and their relationships as mobile, chartable, linear – as routes that intersect at times, routes that run parallel for long or short whiles, routes that get tangled into knots in those places where communities stabilize for a period.  It’s a conceptual model that accounts for both spatial and temporal change. 

In my personal conversations/relationships lately, it seems like people are taking stock of their lives and fleshing out their identities and describing their pasts in a way that resembles drawing constellations.  Very few people I know identify with just one or two locatable nodes on the globe, or “communities.”  Instead, they are multi-nodal people, with warm, important communities that they belong to (or belonged to) in different times and spaces.  To me, the interesting part of this personal-identity-model are the liminalities, the connecting threads, the parts of every person that tie all their home-spaces together, the phantom lines in the night sky that you draw between the stars to make a picture that makes sense.

Anyway, what I wanted to mention was how Shelemay identified alternative words that scholars are using to describe “musical communities” – terms that have more specificity than “community,” or at least have not been so hollowed-out.  These include:

(1)  Subculture (theorized by Mark Slobin, Dick Hebdige)
(2)  Art worlds (coined by Howard S. Becker)
(3)  Musical pathways (coined by Ruth Finnegan)
(4)  The music scene (theorized by Edward Said, Barry Shanks, Will Straw)

All of the above would potentially work as units of study, but the term “music scene” seemed to be the most applicable in Tanzania.  Will Straw describes “the music scene” as “a rubric that reconciles two contrary pressures: one towards the stabilization of local historical continuities, and the other which works to disrupt such continuities, to cosmopolitanize and relativize them…The point is not to designate particular cultural spaces as one or the other, but to examine the ways in which particular music practices produce a sense of community within the conditions of metropolitan music scenes.” 

I love that definition, because in Tanzania, most musical performances seem to espouse these seemingly-opposite impulses to (1) be proudly and uniquely Tanzanian, to rework historical national tropes into new sounds; and on the other hand, (2) to be modern and cosmopolitan, to de-Tanzania-ify the sounds, to create something with a broad-base appeal.  Many artists (especially in hip hop) are constantly trying to create sonic art that is self-complete and self-justifying, i.e. not reliant on historic-national context for its power; at the same time, every successful Tanzanian artist needs to be tuned-in to the national pulse, either engaging with issues of national consequence, or purposefully circumventing them.  With bands who perform in traditional Tanzanian styles (i.e. ngoma, kwaya), these contradictory impulses are not quite as obvious; their performances are, by definition, deeply embedded in national tradition, and the only hint of that second impulse is the desire to “update” their sound, to make their performance feel “fresh.”

Since that side-note went too long, I’ll write about actual TZ music in the next post!

January Bluez

January lives in a cement-block, blue-door, one-room apartment with his coworker Onesimo.  It’s small – just enough space for two beds side-by-side, and a dresser.  In the daytime, they keep one bed folded up against the wall to create some standing room.  There’s one large window, with a Masai-shuka strung up as a casual curtain, and the ever-present Tanzanian mosquito net bundled close to the ceiling.  Over the dresser is a pretty big mirror, and the dresser-top is littered with typical male necessities and vanities: un-lidded Vaseline jars, condoms, aftershave, small metal razors, one long-toothed comb, a tin of shoe-shine.

When January finally invited me to come over, I was very pleased.  Seeing the inside of a guy’s room – how he lives, the objects he keeps safe, what he lets fall to the ground, how he arranges his small domestic life – is exhilarating, illuminating.  Intimate in the same way that secret-telling is intimate.  His transistor radio takes up significant space in the tiny room, balanced on an overturned plastic bucket so it’s level with the bed.  He fiddles with the dials as we talk without even looking at the radio, finding all the right frequencies, memory or instinct in his fingertips.  

January steps outside to take a phone call, and I start examining the small things on the windowsill by his bed.  A cassette tape: Bob Marley’s Legend.  A pamphlet titled “10 Tips for Great Sex.”  One well-worn book: the autobiography of Malcolm X.   I pick up the book, and it falls open to a section that has clearly been read more often than the rest.  January comes back into the room, and I grin and hold up the book and ask him if he liked it. “Sana,” he tells me, and takes the book from my hands the way a mother takes back her baby from someone who’s been holding it carelessly. 

“But there’s a book I love even more,” he says, and reaches into a backpack hanging from the wall.  He pulls out a scrappy brown envelope, and from the envelope, a thick volume titled Birds of Eastern Africa.  He hands it to me, “My bible.”  I know January loves birds; when we’re together, even the birds that seem small or dull to me are a total distraction to him, they command his utter interest.  When we're hanging out, his eyes follow any movement in the sky or in the bushes: zoning in, analyzing, naming.  Afterwards, he tries quickly to reengage in the conversation, but it’s like talking to someone who has just had a dream or seen a spirit, someone touched by a divinity you didn’t see yourself.

I flipped through the bird-book – more than 400 pages, 4 to 5 birds to a page – and January was looking over my shoulder, mouthing things to himself as I turned pages.  It slowly dawned on me, with every worn-out page, that he had memorized every single species in the book – their colors, wing shapes, names, migration patterns. 

Loose Ends a Ethnomusikology

Under konsideration: “Midnight at the Barrelhouse: Why Ethnomusicology Matters Now,” a lecture delivered by George Lipsitz at the Society for Ethnomusicology in Los Angeles, 2010

Early on in his talk, Lipsitz sums up why ethnomusicology matters today: “At its best, ethnomusicology teaches us about the dynamics of difference, about the generative results that follow from recognizing that cultures are not the same even though we all share a common humanity. In the face of scholarly and civic traditions that find difference so vexing that they frequently can only offer us an unsatisfactory choice between disembodied universalism on the one hand and parochial particularism on the other, ethnomusicology enables us to imagine a third option: a universalism rich with particulars grounded in the dialogue of all, the dignity of each, and the supremacy of none. In short, ethnomusicology can help us see which differences make a difference.”

I love that explanation, because the thing I adore most about music is how it's a universalism rich with particulars -- it's something we all understand and are part of, even if we treasure or create or obsess about or are possessed by vastly different aspects of it.  And one thing that draws me to the study of music & musical communities is how, the more time you spend steeped in sound (and steepin' in it with other people), the more clearly and undeniably you understand and love those two truths about music: its utter democracy on the one hand, and on the other, its strange and ceaseless particularities, the sounded form of 7 billion human hearts.

Lipsitz focuses on the lives of two American musico-political revolutionaries, Johnny Otis and Americo Paredes; both were genius-musicians and charismatic inciters of public action in the 1930s, who represented the submerged ethnic bodies of black Americans and Latin American immigrants, respectively. Their music (along with the music of many other musicians who boasted more than one cultural loyalty), helped to transform "immigrants from unwanted aliens into redemptive insiders by celebrating ethnicity and immigration as the quintessential American experiences [...] Like many in their generational cohort, Paredes and Otis found their country’s culture more democratic than its politics.”  In my limited life experience, I've always found music to be a natural leveler, a meeting ground, an eraser of hierarchies.  Not to say it's a place where people agree or like the exact same thing or feel the same beat -- but somehow, subjectivity itself is validated; in music, we're all creating or being created by sound.

At one point, Lipsitz suggests that "good research about cultural life inevitably has to address the political dimensions of that life... Our work becomes weaker rather than stronger if we evade the power dynamics that pervade the production of culture and scholarship about it. As Toni Morrison says, ‘Excising the political from the life of the mind is a sacrifice that has proven costly. I think of this erasure as a kind of trembling hypochondria always curing itself with unnecessary surgery’.”  Those sentences sting like salt in new wounds, because for so long I was allergic to politics, especially in the realm of "culture"...so reluctant to understand music with any political context or cerebrality.  Music just seemed too beautiful and divine to mar with politics, and while I wouldn't have said this out loud, thinking about music seemed like an impossibility, an oxymoronic sin, a way of neutralizing the immediacy and visceral-ness of pure sound.  Music was something almost holy to me, too sacred to intellectualize if I didn't have to.  

Then a little over a year ago, I met this guy who understood music in its totality, and was consumed by it, somebody whose whole self was music: the way his body moved was music, and he talked in deep rhythms, and the way he thought about societies and individuals was in terms of sound and composition.  He was all music, and no one could say he didn't love it.  But he was also one of the most intensely political people I'd ever met, and instead of seeing a conflict between politics and music, he saw a necessary symbiosis: an inseparability.  He showed me how music became certainly less holy when you paid attention to its manifestations and eruptions in our unequal societies, when you considered its makers and audiences and censors and critics, but that that's where music gained flesh and blood and a beating heart -- that's where it became real, incarnate.  For so long, I'd seen music as an internality, a phenomenon of the spirit, when in truth, music is so beautiful and potentially revolutionary because it externalizes -- because it makes once-silenced spirits recognizable to others, because through music we acknowledge each other as being cut from the same basic cloth, because it gives anyone who was once-unvoiced and still-unheard some kind of traction in our clamorous world.

Feelin Dat

Songs always seem to me material in some way, with distinct shapes, densities, sizes -- and they come at me with the physical fullness of objects, grooved or grainy or melting slowly like ice in my throat and spreading into my arteries; they possess me.  Maybe then it sounds like I’m talking about music as a spiritual thing, something that “fills my soul,” but I mean more than that.  I mean it fills my physical body.  If it’s good music, I'm completely replaced by it: its backbeats replace my heartbeat, its harmonic flows replace my blood flow, my respiratory system is coordinated or disjunct to the exact degree the music is (un) measured.

I guess, if we're being really technical, music does have a sonar shape, actual vibrations that affect and are affected by objects -- thus qualifying music as a real part of the material realm.  But I think we tend to vastly underestimate music’s physical affectivities.  Like, most of the songs on Radiohead’s King of Limbs album can (without the aid of any drugs) exactly reproduce in you the experience of being high – that strange lightness of limbs, exhaustion in your diaphragm, red coals in your groin, that spiraling mind, fluidity of thought, the sense that you are a body both teeming and emptied, an easy jaw and cumbersome lips, loose and roving shoulders that you know belong somewhere.

Ongea Nami, Tuko Free

So far, Dar es Salaam has been an absurd linguistic acid-trip.

Got dat Kiswahili on fast recall when I'm using it in simple contexts like bargaining, or asking directions, or swapping niceties with friends.  I wouldn't say those conversations are superficial, but they're essentially scripted.  If you're not trying to articulate new thoughts, it's easy to sound fluent.

In sharp relief, I have one friend here who I sensed was a kindred spirit the moment we met.  In our first ten minutes of conversation, we hit these daunting language barriers because of the complexity of the things we wanted to talk about.  I was suddenly speaking Kiswahili like a three-year-old -- the only words I seemed to know were dry, simple, unspecific.  Those higher-order relationships are the best and most tiring ones, because you're constantly straining toward a point of understanding: reading extralingual clues, and trying out new words all the time to maintain some thread of connection.   It takes more than two engaged minds to reach understanding; you need two effortful spirits to fill in the gaps between insufficient words, to intuit attempted meanings. Yesterday I learned some new words like tai-samaki is fish-eagle and mikoko are mangrove trees and mapinduzi are revolutionaries, and to describe a coup you say haki haitapatikani ila ncha ya upanga (or something, sijui), and I learned the words for hypocrite (mnafiki) and principled (kanuni), and we made up a new Kiswahili word for the sand-dollars we found on the ground: dola wa mchanga.

But for every moment of surprising clarity, we met with an aching lack of language.

The couple I rent from are Zimbabwean and Irish.  There are also two Malawian women who work on the compound, and both are pretty fluent in Kiswahili as a second language, and we all communicate in this weird amalgam of Kiswahili and English.  The other renters are a Hungarian family who don't really know either language.  They move around the house, strange and silent.  The wife smiles and points at things and tries to communicate; the husband keeps his eyes on the ground, pretending there are no other humans around. He doesn't know any English or Kiswahili -- not a word.  Every time I look at him, he seems utterly trapped inside his own body, horribly mute.

The other night, I went to a music event that was well-frequented by expats from all over Europe.  Everyone was mingling between songs, and I found that with most of them, regardless of where they came from (Spain, France, Sweden), Kiswahili was our natural linguistic meeting-point.  I finally understand, experientially, why Kiswahili is such an effective trade language: it's an ideal common ground, an easily-acquired, politically-neutral tongue.

Another guy I met this week (at the music event) was the exact counterpoint to the mute -- he was fluid and alight and played easily with three languages, making jokes in Kiswahili, Spanish and English, feeling the pulse of each individual tongue as he spoke it.  He was such a free being, so easily expressed.  Later on, I found out he knew another language: he played the guitar with his eyes closed, Marley and Los Lobos, strumming and humming on a wooden tabletop, slipping into his fourth and most divine tongue.  I know there are other reasons those two men are the way they are, but the Hungarian's silence and the other's absolute liberty confirm what I've always thought:  that language sets you free.

I had a creative writing professor in college who told me I should read Ryzard Kapuscinski's translated works, that I could learn a lot from him.  He said that my prose had similar characteristics, sounding as if it had been translated from another language, containing foreign cadences, and word choices that were just wrong enough to sound like poetry.  I remember feeling so happy that he heard another world thrumming beneath my writing, one far away from Harvard.  Whenever I write, I hope to tap into the old-forgotten, once-learned rhythms of the land I love madly, and am afraid, always, of being shut out of those rhythms permanently, of losing my memory of them, my access to them.  

I'm finally reading Kapuscinski this week, his travelogue Travels with Herodotus, and he has a paragraph on language that astounds me.  In the book, he has just arrived in India, and cannot speak the local language.  He writes: "I understood that every distinct geographical universe had its own mystery and that one can decipher it only by learning the local language. Without it, the universe will remain impenetrable and unknowable, even if one were to spend entire years in it.  I noticed, too, the relationship between naming and being, because I realized upon my return to the hotel that in town I had seen only that which I had been able to name: For example, I remembered the acacia tree, but not the tree standing next to it, whose name I did not know.  I understood, in short, that the more words I knew, the richer, fuller, and more variegated would be the world that opened before me, and which I could capture."

In Which Shani Unpacks her Apolitical Impulse

To me, the saddest truths about the world are sometimes too unbearable to think about -- I don't want to acknowledge everyone who is oppressed, silenced, terrorized or dominated because it feels like too much to carry (even the knowledge of it is too much to carry), and I'd rather not.  Sometimes I think I cannot.  So I close myself to portals-of-pain and try not to understand other subjectivities or other states of being.  And lately I've begun to see that I need friends, peers, coworkers and confidantes who will force me to look at, acknowledge and consider the hardest truths, and hopefully, against all of my inertia, act.  My natural inclination has always been toward apoliticism, but I don't want to be apolitical -- it's just a defense mechanism that I developed starting from my earliest encounters with oppression.

Here's a fact: partly cuz of my personality (I'm crazy about that categorizin' shit!) and partly cuz of how I grew up across continents, I have high capacity for empathy.  I don't mean I'm kind or empathetic (the opposite, usually), but if I choose to empathize, or if I begin empathizing against my will, I become completely replaced by the other person's subjectivity.  I almost totally lose my own feelings, thoughts and mental frameworks in the process of seeing through someone else's eyes.  I'm not exaggerating; it's true that sometimes I empathize with the wrong people, with the vapid or the vain or the the vicious people.  I can empathize with anyone who fascinates me enough that I adopt their stances and status and mental states.  Sometimes it happens in weird places -- at a bar, at a table playing cards, at dinner.  I will feel the walls of myself melting away, feel myself morphing into the mold of the other person; I begin interpreting the room, the gathering, the entire world as I think they would.  It can temporarily make me a stranger to myself.  It always happens when I fall in love, collapsing into the other person somehow.

Maybe then that explains why I shield myself, when I can, from the people in the greatest pain -- shield myself from their stories, their realities, their voices, for fear that I'll begin to identify with their aching hearts and bodies in the only involuntarily totalizing way I know how.  I'm so afraid that I'm becoming callous, that I've already become callous, in these efforts at emotional self-preservation.