By Sahana Arun Kumar
This is a long letter of invitation that starts on a flight. When you are airborne and in flight mode locked in a gigantic carrier, your country and nationality are immaterial, your immigration status is suspended, and you belong to nothing but survival. You along with the two hundred other passengers in flight with you, crouched side by side, privy to shuffles and gasps and opinions. How do you sit together in that enclosed space, cut off from the worldly encumbrances that define us? How do you create new codes of social conduct amidst knocking elbows and knees? Do you build more walls in close proximity, or let more of them collapse because of the transience of connection? How many differences stand out, and how many similarities get overshadowed? How do you connect and disengage from the people around us?
An Instagram reel of a White American woman (let’s call her Carla) in business class yelling at the airline steward to move the Black man (Mark) sitting next to her popped up on my account. Mark looked resolutely ahead with a tired smile frozen on his face. Carla was certain that he didn’t have the ticket to be in business class, and needed to be booted to economy. The steward, also a White male, tried to diffuse the situation by repeatedly assuring her that there was no reason to doubt the man. Someone tried to intervene, but she shut them down. After being hounded for a couple of minutes, the steward offered her solution: either she move to Economy or she disembark the plane. He firmly tapped her armrest to pressure her to make a decision. She resisted a little but quickly stormed off camera, possibly embarrassed at having drawn enough attention to herself, but nonetheless outraged by the unfairness of the situation. The flight clapped and cheered on her departure.
This incident speaks to the theme of ‘sitting with difference’, upon which were founded a series of workshops from February to May 2024, which is the purpose of this letter. Like this letter, the workshops were a labour of love. Conceptualised and conducted by Josh, Zarina and I (Sahana), students of the Department of Education, CANVAS invited participants for an immersive active listening experience - to prompts, to each other, and to themselves. There were a total of 5 workshops, each motivated by an emotion, its parts, politics and lifecourse. Each session was one hour long with a fluid, prompt-driven format, and one or two arts-based activities. Every session was thematically organised, with space for unplanned, undirected conversations. And ‘decolonisation’ by its very nature defies control, order, structure, and demands openness, curiosity, and a spark of adventure. It requests the courage to extend yourself beyond what you know, and allow the unknown to reach you, touch you, and talk to you. The less you control, the more you gain from the learning process. The less you rely on what you know, the more you set learning free.
And so, as facilitators, we set up an orientation of learning from the session and the participants. We wanted to connect with the people who signed up for our workshops, to their motivations for coming for something so vague and shapeless (our posters had very little information, sometimes no words besides a venue, date and time), and what were their connections to the practice of decoloniality. The conversations generated new conversations and questions that were teased as topics for the next workshop. The continuity between sessions reminded us that: 1) everything is connected, and can be seen as more similar than dissimilar; 2) not all questions have answers and need to be left alone to pave their own way; and 3) the same conversations can mould and evolve with time.
We also considered ambient sights and sounds to facilitate a concentrated experience. There were writings and visuals connected with our chosen topic usually put up around the room, and a playlist of songs selected by the facilitators played at the start and sometimes during the art segment of the session. For the first three sessions, we employed the same room for our workshops and let our previously mounted material remain and carry forward. Due to logistical reasons our rooms had to be changed for the last two sessions.
We started the series on Valentine’s Day in February 2024. Commercial uses of Valentine’s Day can be perceived as reductive, and privilege sexual/romantic love between two people. A restrictive definition of love can have divisive effects on the youth, resulting in reactions that swing from desperation to ‘find someone’ to abject dismissal and cynicism towards it. We wanted to reclaim other avenues of love, and forms of celebration that did not include red balloons, roses, cake and candy. For example, the love of study, education and the bond shared between a teacher and their students. Besides all the ways in which it falls into dangerous, violating territory, can we describe this mutuality that fuels the joint activity of learning? Zarina (facilitator) brought up a story of belonging, and defining love through the feeling of home. Does the absence of a home mean an absence of love? Or the other way around? Josh (facilitator) talked about connections to people through music and lyrics. A last example I brought up was parental love, and that sparked off sharing from another participant who connected with their mother in similar frustrating ways, and was hard put to call that anything but love.
Like Valentine’s Day, we used tangible concrete phenomena to talk about abstract and complex experiences. The self-disclosures were not intended, but they established a connection that allowed the same participants to return and for new participants to discover something in these sessions. For our second session, we did a 15 minute walk together in silence, drawing on Gallagher et al.’s work on ‘listening differently’. The previous session had brought up a reckoning with oneself. In admitting the people we love, we declare ourselves as loving and generous with love. And the baring of oneself is an act of courage. We walked without our belongings to be with the environment and ourselves for 15 minutes. But we did it together. The walk resulted in little talk after, and that reflective space was poured into an art session. Some participants drew what they observed in their surroundings, and others drew something they observed within. All were struck by the novelty of the experience without headphones.
The third session was situated at the brink of spring break, and we wouldn’t meet for another month after. We knew that ‘sitting with difference’ couldn’t be a single conversation, and the purpose of a series of workshops was a visceral, unrestricted (as much as possible of course) submersion. So what did they (we) think of ‘difference’ now after two workshops? The conversation started with Josh’s and Zarina’s story of friendship, that allows multiple differences to live in harmony and tenderness (if you didn’t catch it then, you may have caught a snippet of it in their graduation speech). The story opened up the conversation of people and their coloured lives and sense of belonging. How many meanings can colour carry? How do we ignore or validate colour around us? How does colour make a home for itself? Is there a way to acknowledge the courage it takes to own one’s colour, and make it belong? The group was a colour-ful bunch and provoked some wonderful conversations of acknowledging colour around us. It was interesting to note that a White participant shared their eagerness to learn and reflect, while a Brown participant felt too tired to keep fighting and justifying. How might colour colour our experience?
The penultimate session moved from the ‘courage to belong’ to ‘judgement’, that hinders the movement. It was the first time we had picked up a theme with a visibly negative flavour, and the ethics of practice were challenged to a greater degree. Apprehensions of keeping conversations safe yet stimulating had been a part of every workshop. We were constantly checking the consent of every participant, ensuring they had the option to stay or leave, and communicating if something didn’t bode well with them. So for this session, we created six stations of different kinds of sounds (two were musical instruments, two were sounds in public spaces, one was the sounds in a household kitchen, and one was the sound of rain) dispersed around the room that people could listen to as they entered. We then shared the associations evoked by the sounds, and how we listened to sounds. A household kitchen sounded much like the kitchen in my own parental home. The railway station audio clip did not sound at all like a railway station in the UK. Sounds in the everyday make their way into our associations of space. Judgement becomes a way of assessing and choosing. For example, the silence was very loud when I first moved to York, because sounds of street dogs, neighbouring kitchens and the general humdrum of life had been my usual background score in my hometown. Judgement converts into stereotyping when it is used to harm an other. The discussion was followed by a story-building activity, where a ten-by-ten grid of fifty different faces was shown, and each participant selected one face to weave a story of that person. This form of appraising was the benign and helpful side to judgements, that stemmed from a curiosity to know and befriend.
Our final session employed ‘assemblage theory’ to tie up all the ‘sitting in difference’ we had been doing. Assemblages are constructions that come through the act of assembling material that already exists, that may not necessarily be viewed as artistic, and whose functions change in the assemblage (here’s a helpful video to understand). The final product is often a commentary on life. So all of the creations over the previous four workshops, the art and the writing, along with extra art supplies, were collected and in groups of two or three participants worked on an assemblage. The only condition was that they couldn’t talk to each other during their task. One group was decisive from the start, and knew very quickly what they were building. Another communicated through the placement of objects and halfway through expressed joy at their converging ideas. The third was more engrossed in the process of pasting things together and adding colour to their creation. That’s how we build a home, bit by bit, trace after trace, memory after memory, until it becomes ‘mine/ours’. It builds through uncertainties and unexpected trajectories, just like habits and adaptations, and they come to be one’s habitat. And these habitats are built together, in community, not alone. Contributions made in the form of gifts, purchases, whimsical steals, spills, tears and cracks, passionate creations, urgent decisions, all come to make it a home.
I had first suggested art as a form of engagement with decoloniality nearly a year ago. I had never imagined that to materialise into multiple workshops led by us students. I felt responsible for the success of these workshops. To break existing structures in our minds, we first need a way to access them, right? And we need a way to mitigate the devastation of the chaos and rubble. I expected attendance in larger numbers, because who wouldn’t want to talk and feel and art? I expected it to be transformational in a long-standing fulfilling way. Very soon these ideas were debunked, and instead I came to be less of a facilitator and more a co-creator in the sessions. Not everybody was interested in decoloniality, and those who were showed up enthusiastically in different ways (which includes printing flyers, buying art supplies, even sending us a cheer). I developed wonderful friendships with other members of DEC, and am assured that they are always sitting by me as we think about life, love and art. And I am encouraged to run this again at the department of Education at the University of York. What Josh, Zarina and I started together was just a spoonful of a bubbling cauldron of ideas. So if you have managed to stick with me so far, have a sliver of interest in this thing called ‘decolonisation’, and would like to ‘sit with difference’, join our movement in the Decolonising Education Collective.
Sahana
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