Consciously, I know I’m in a South Africa that is politically, but not socially, post-Apartheid. Even so, the little old white lady’s racist comments surprise me. Complaining about the incompetence of black employees in grocery stores, she proudly notes how she nevertheless carefully pronounces the names on their nametags because they like it when we do that. We use their names – treat them as human – because we love the Lord. And then she tucks her purse under her arm and totters away with a smile and a wave to the three black pastors waiting in the adjacent room for my next interview. I don’t think she knows their names.

Not once in the interview does she lower her voice. She doesn’t know that her condescension, not to mention her conflation of incompetence with a particular skin colour, is racist, so she doesn’t care if they hear. Mistaking my attempts at impartial data collection for affirmation, she misinterprets them as indicating we’re on the same team. I am now filled with anxiety. Did they hear her comments? Will they also mistake me for being on her team and, by extension, hear my attempts at neutrality to be perpetuating the white racism of the South African context? And if they do, will they be right? I know ethnography can’t be neutral when performed in such politically and socially charged situations. Indeed, it can never be. What then are the ethics of data collection when the aesthetic – the appearance, the identity – of the researcher itself functions as a symbol of the worlds that are colliding in her project?

I stop the recording, collect myself, check my notes, and walk into the adjacent room. I smile and shake the pastors’ hands. But now I feel strange repeating their names back to them. We sit down at the table and I realize once again that I actually have no idea what team I’m on.

This is my second day in South Africa. Ever. But I grew up hearing stories situating the lives of my maternal grandparents and their kids, including my mum, on the land I now tread. My grandfather, the principal of a “coloured” high school, was active in the ANC and, from what I hear, was a stubborn, tough, justice-seeking man who pushed things further than the racist legal system could handle. By 1965, he had stirred up enough dust that he was facing imminent imprisonment. And so in 1966, when my mum was eleven-years-old, the family left their homeland, making their way to different parts of Europe. None would ever return.

My mum wound up in a small town in England. Riding the train to her new home she would wonder, where are the mountains? Re-location changed who she was; it changed her body. She stopped being the coloured girl who white boys threw stones at and black boys scorned. Without the differentiating categories of the Apartheid system, her coloured body became black. White boys and the darker-skinned Africans she later met while working in London would still scorn. But throughout adolescence, as a member of the only black family in town, she also began to embody the exotic. Racism’s face, still twisted in a snarl, now also bore the look of desire.

I was fourteen before I started perceiving anything about my bi-raciality as more than a simple and, to me, lovely fact of life. Depending on who I was with and how I styled my hair, or if I had a good tan, the way others perceived me oscillated in ways I found funny, even charming. Sometimes if my dad picked me up from school, acquaintances would ask if I was adopted: “You just look so much more like your mum!” they’d exclaim. My high school best friend was a red-headed white girl, and when she joined us on family outings, people would assume that our family was blended – that she was my dad’s kid from a previous marriage, and I was my mum’s. Divorce was easier to see than racial complexity, and a better explanatory narrative than the idea that a white man and a black woman could produce a little girl who was in the between.

But racial ascriptions can shift over years and I, like my mum, would feel how their construction changes when they cross geographic borders. As we moved from England to Canada, complexion and context made my black identity more difficult to perceive. Now people would see family pictures and blindly accept my dad’s visage while asking awkwardly, “where’s your mother from?” And once again, “are you adopted?” Their questions didn’t bother me, though. They made me feel unique: I had a story to tell.

It wasn’t till I moved to the States that I began to feel the tension between the parts of me that made me me. I learned more about the history of privilege associated with passing around the same time I learned – by experiencing – some of the anger the lighter-skinned sister can evoke. Who I was and always had been stopped feeling clear-cut; it stopped being a simple and lovely fact of my life, and began, instead, to feel complex, confusing, even painful.

I wasn’t passing as white because I wanted to. I was passing as white because of the misconceptions of others and the fact that continually correcting those misconceptions was not only exhausting, but also impossible. How would I introduce myself at parties? “Hi, I’m Natalie – oh, and by the way, I’m bi-racial”? That’s not sustainable!

But the alternative entailed being privy to more types of racism than I could imagine. White racists, thinking I was on their team, would let something slip or, worse, wouldn’t realize they were racist – like the little old lady outside Cape Town. Black racists openly expressed disdain for passers, without realizing I was passing among them.[1] Such privy continually implicated me in narratives that weren’t mine. Each forced from me a story I didn’t feel like telling.

In a time when clear-cut identity politics seem crucial for social movements toward reconciliation, the ability to pass without the desire to do so actually disrupts each and every configuration of them and us we might construct.

And the fact of that disruption intrigued me. I had a choice for how to connect this complex identity to my work. I could help construct a new identity category for theorizing about race, ethnicity (and class, gender, ability and sexuality…). I could tell stories that expand our stories for understanding what identity can be. I could tell the story or, and this is the one chose, I could use the story. I could deploy my identity – in its precise play of visibility and invisibility – to see what kind of knowledge it could produce.  And this is what I found myself, by surprise, able to do in South Africa.

So back to the three black pastors, all now facing me. We weren’t connecting or getting deep. Both my questions and their answers felt stilted. And then one of the men said, “all white people, when they meet you…you can tell they have hate for you as soon as they see you.”  He paused for a second and continued, “no offense to you”.

An awkward ethics had surrounded the conversation with the little old lady. Letting her in on the secret that I wasn’t actually white would have exposed her own assumption. It would have implied my judgment of her racist attitude. That wasn’t my job. And yet it felt icky nonetheless. I had let her leave not knowing who I was.

When the pastor said, “no offense,” he opened a place for me to come out. “It’s no offense to me at all,” I said, “I’m actually not white.” All three looked shocked, and one of them actually lifted his hand and rubbed his skin with an inquisitive expression on his face implying: but your skin is white!  “I know,” I laughed.  “But I’m actually bi-racial.” I told my story – narrated my identity – and then asked, “if you can feel white people’s hate immediately, did you immediately feel that hate coming from me?”  They looked to each other and back to me awkwardly. Then the man who’d made the claim threw up his arms and laughed: “no, no, not you…because you’re a sister.”  “But you didn’t know I was a sister when you met me,” I pushed.  “Nah, you’re cool,” he said dismissively, indicating that this line of questioning was over.

It was a pilot interview, and therefore brief. I couldn’t take the insight further, but I was struck. These three pastors encountered a white person whose heart they could perceive as black. My body, what my body hides and, more so, the revelation that happens in and through that tension, opened a space; this was not a space on which they could write their own story but, rather, one within which an imaginative performance of reconciliation could play out.

The awkwardness with which the pastors answered (and failed to answer) my line of questioning indicated that they had initially encountered me in a mode that now felt inappropriate. My visible whiteness inadvertently goaded their usual response. My blackness didn’t just reveal, but actually made that response a lie because I wasn’t who they thought I was. The pastors experienced how they too commit the sin that angers them so.

This experience was not uncomplicated. In a South Africa that is politically but not socially post-Apartheid, it’s true that these pastors most often do encounter smiling white masks over hate. And yet together we opened up imaginative space to embody future possibility: a genuine moment of reconciled racial difference.

Had they known who I was at the outset – had I immediately narrated my identity to them – we’d have missed this performance. I can’t say much came of this pilot interview beyond this flash of possibility. We lacked the time to open the space further with deep, honest discussion of what actually happened in that moment of misperception. But the experience points out that such conversations might be able to happen. The experience shows that identity can be deployed to produce the type of knowledge that is not just saying things about reconciliation, but which also could aid in the path to reconciliation. In sum, it reveals the possibilities inherent to playing with the aesthetics and the ethics of passing.

Natalie Wigg-Stevenson

Vanderbilt University

[1] I am using these terms, “white racist” and “black racist” somewhat provocatively to evoke what it feels like to be caught in the between. I do, however, realize that the latter especially is a hotly contested concept. Different historical cultural trajectories give rise to different forms of racialized tension and there is, therefore, a difference between forms of racism that grow out of privilege and forms that grow out of oppression. I maintain the language of racism for both, however, because I would argue that every form of race-based disdain should remain open to moral analysis in the fullness of its complexity. I maintain the language in this essay, in particular, because it points to a singular facet of bi-racial life: the experience of being called the N-word as a child hurt in much the same way as being told I wasn’t “black enough” to participate fully in a Black Seminarian fellowship as an adult. I experienced both as assaults on my racial identity; that is, I experienced both as racist.

“We wonder …if it is the sound of that rage which must always remain 
repressed, contained, trapped in the realm of the
 unspeakable”   bell hooks

And if that rage is not uttered, spoken, expressed then what becomes of it?

So much has been written deconstructing the mad white woman relegated to the attic.

Less is known of black female rage for there is usually no place for it.

Its very articulation is a social death sentence especially in mixed company.

Her rememories stay crushed in her body, her archive.

She dare not speak.  Shut your mouth.  Careful.

There is a place for unruly little girls like you who do not know when to be quiet.

When not to offend white sensibilities.

When not to choke. When to submit.

Shhhhhh—Take a deep breath.

Swallow.

There is no safe word.

Days after January 12, 4:53:10pm when the earthquake ravaged my birth country, I told one of my dearest friends that part of me secretly wished I could just go on top of Wesleyan University Foss Hill, get on my knees, raise both arms in the air and just scream on top of my lungs until I was totally spent.

Just don’t let anybody see you, he warned me. We laughed it out and talked about consequences of being deemed unhinged. Indeed, the last thing I need is for people to think I have come undone. I am already outside of the box and something of an endangered species. I am a tenured black woman.  A black Haitian woman at that.  A black Haitian woman who has always spoken her mind way before tenure. A black Haitian woman without a recognizable last name as I like to say to those unfamiliar with my birth country’s class and color politics. I have ascended to and made a space for myself in a new social world that in many ways eluded generations before me without such access or had other freedom dreams. As Bill T Jones has so aptly put it, I have had as much freedom as I have been willing to pay for.  That said, I am an “established” faculty member at a small but well respected university, albeit one whose expressive breadth and professional maneuverings upset disciplinary lines to create “nervous conditions”[1] among purists. Though I was trained as a cultural anthropologist, I cannot afford to lose it, and certainly not in public. I am also an activist, a poet/performance artist and multi-media artist.

So, I did the next best thing, I consolidated all my energies and exposed my pain and rage on stage.

I had been performing my one-woman show “Because when God is too Busy: Haiti, me and THE WORLD” for several years now.  In one of its earliest renditions, I describe this work as a dramatic monologue that considers how the past occupies the present. In it, I weave history, theory and personal narrative in spokenword with Vodou chants to reflect on childhood memories, social (in) justice, spirituality, and the incessant de-humanization of Haitians.

My first full post-quake performance was on February 4^th at the chapel of my home institution. Although I was on sabbatical, I volunteered to perform in part because I simply needed to let it out. This work, which contains musings on my relationship with Haiti from the aftermath of migration in my early teens through a grueling graduate school experience, is part coming of age, part conscientization and part hollering.

It was during the early years of my graduate training that I began to actively perform in part to retain my childhood dream of wanting to be a singer, to ground myself and allow my creative spirit to breathe through a restructuring process that threatened to desensitize me. Performance for me then was a cathartic act of defiance. It became a platform to express my newfound acceptance of the fact that silence is just another structure of power that I simply refused to recreate. A rejection of docility. It was a determination to disclose that, which, must be kept private, if we are not to disrupt the order of things and reap the rewards of playing along. Complicity is condemned. After earning the doctoral degree, and once I began teaching full time, performing became a lifeline, a space to exercise an opposition to the contained or bifurcated self required by professionalism. Most importantly, it has always provided me with the space to continually engage my commitment to Haiti.

Performance for me is what I call an alter(ed)native—“a counter-narrative to the conventionalities of the more dominant approaches in anthropology… It connotes processes of engagement from an anti- and post-colonial stance, with a conscious understanding that there is no clean break with the past. With that in mind, alter(ed)native projects do not offer a new riposte or alternative view, rather they engage existing ones, though these have been altered… co-opted and manipulated to ‘flip the script’ and serve particular anti-and post-colonial goals.” Hence, I begin with the unequivocal premise that colonialism had fractured the subject. Determined to not leave the body behind, the alter(ed)native is a mindful and loving attempt at a gathering of the fragments in pursuit of integration. In that sense, the alter(ed)native is unapologetically a political project.

On the stage, I am motivated by a sheer will to step into and confront the growing and gnawing web of a recurring black Atlantic nightmare with unspoken gendered dimensions that remains archived in our bodies. It is trapped in aspects of what Carl Jung calls our collective consciousness, for lack of a better term.

I did not intend to do this nor was it completely par hazard. Rather, the auto-ethnographic process of deconstructing the personal, in which I engaged in my first book on Jamaica (where I did my doctoral research), spilled into my internal dialogues about Haiti.  As a result, I found myself using my past to make connections to the social that further revealed national and international trends that have been inscribed ad infinitum and could still benefit from more visceral explorations.

The more that I perform, the more it has occurred to me that in fact, we actually know very little of the primordial of Haitian experiences. Though we have seen countless images and heard the cries, the wails especially recently. Random woman covered with dust roaming the street. Searching for their loved ones. Screaming. These are roving disoriented beings historically perceived as devoid of logic.

The show always begins with me chanting somewhere on the premises or in the audience (never back stage). The chant becomes a loop as I walk through the parameters of the space (often to form a circle) until I face the audience then take center stage.  Prior to the earthquake, I chanted the original lyrics I remember from childhood:

Noyé nape noyé

(Drowning we are drowning)

Noyé mapé noyé

(Drowning I am drowning)

Ezili si we’m tonbé lan dlo, pranm non

(Ezili if you see us fall in the sea, take us)

Métres, so we’m tonbé lan dlo, pranm non

(Goddess if you see us fall in the sea, save us)

Sové lavi zenfan yo noyé napé noyé

(Save the lives of your children, because we are drowning)

After the quake, I changed the words. By the time, I performed on February 4^th, there had been over fifty aftershocks. Estimated death was being reported then at 200,000 and the mass graves were being filled with the unidentified. So then drowning became trembling.  Trembling the earth trembled. Trembling we are trembling. Ezili should we tremble again, hold us. Save the lives of your children because the earth is trembling.

I used repetitions of this chant as a portal – to access the body and keep it present. It is interwoven between pieces as a reminder of the ultimate aim of the work. We had gathered here to process and discuss a major catastrophe. I stopped the performance halfway through to present a dispatch from Haiti. I closed the show with words of a conversation with a friend.

After that night, I began to improvise in other performances. I shortened the “me” parts of the original text (and analyses of past moments of conflict in Haiti as these were becoming less immediately consequential given the urgency of the current situation) and began to include voices of people in Haiti. By the time, I did my last performance at LaMaMa on December 13^th, all the original pieces were abruptly interrupted with dispatches from Haiti, of people whom I had either encountered online or interviewed during my two post-quake trips.  Their voices made the performance current. Most importantly, the stage became a platform to give immediate visibility to those without. The show then became a hybrid living newspaper.

With each performance I did in the past year, I became increasingly aware of the fact that we do not know or have never confronted Haiti’s pain. We have talked about it. Written about it incessantly. Some have actually engaged with it. Still we have never sat with it in its rawest form and let it be.  It has always been smothered. Shhhhhh. Not in public and certainly not in mixed company.  Somatic theories tell us that in many ways some of it is still there. Trapped. It remains unprocessed trauma.

This past year, in light of the impact of the earthquake at home and abroad, I began to think more and more about the absence of discussions of psychoanalytical explorations of the experiences of  Haitians in the aftermath of the Revolution. We have no substantive record of those moments of fracture, of pain when screams stemmed from deep within before they found constructed expression, sometimes in rage. The little we know of those moments come from the fearful gaze of colonizers. What did we sound like to ourselves? I keep wondering what could Ayiti – this land where spirits inhabit permanent resting places in nature – tell us about the collective and individual sounds we made in the aftermath of the Revolution.

The earthquake for me is another pivotal moment of collective horror that must not be smothered especially since we have so many tools with which we can record and are recording it.  In the latest installment of the show, I interrupt the personal with individual quotes and statistics about post-quake conditions. The Vodou chants are there as signification of the ethical that is to highlight the moral imperatives at play. Coupled with history, this weave is now deployed to foster more textured and multi-vocal possibilities. This approach is particularly relevant especially since daily life is not compartmentalized. Indeed, people live, make and remake themselves in a messy world that continuously begs for interdisciplinary crossings. I begin with the premise that theory alone simply cannot enclose the object of study, as anthropologist Michel-Rolph Trouillot has succinctly put it.[2] So I go deep within.  I collect what I call my ethnographic collectibles (excess bits unfit for publication because they were too personal, too raw or seemed trivial) and recycle them. I shut out the world to access that which I have been socialized to repress. Trained academic. Repress. Digging deep to finds ways to express a history of violence. Repress. I consciously and rather expertly manipulate my voice and let it out knowing I am crossing boundaries. Re-sowing seeds that caused white fears of a black planet. Exposing bourgeois attachments to the restraint. Trading with different forms of capital. Undoing reason. More specifically undoing enlightened reason.[3]

To perform a reassembly of the fragments Toni Morrison[4] insists needs to occur in a clearing, I select the stage to confront the visceral embedded in the structural. Performance becomes a public clearing of sorts, a site to occupy and articulate the embodied. The primeval. Releasing sound bites of the horror. Unhinging the raw. That which for black women must too often remain unspeakable.

Wailing is my chosen method of intervention.

[1] Taken from Jean Paul Sartre’s introduction to Frantz Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth (1961) as reiterated in “Nervous Conditions: The Stakes in Interdisciplinary Research” Improvising Theory: Process and Temporality in Ethnographic fieldwork by Liisa Malkki and Allaine Cerwonka  (2007).

[2] Trouillot, Michel Rolph. 1992. The Caribbean Region: An Open Frontier in Anthropological Theory. Annual Review of Anthropology. Vol. 21: 19-42.

[3] I thank Gillian Goslinga for pointing out the qualification. Indeed it is enlightenment that is at stake.

[4] Beloved 1987 Knoft

It happens randomly and frequently. Sometimes in the dead of night. Sometimes by the simple fact of listening to an old tune on my iPod. Sometimes it even happens when I observe people on the park, in shopping malls, classrooms and the street. The things I touch, eat, drink, and smell also play into this. All these occurrences remind me that I, a Chinese Malaysian, am, have been, and forever will be, a stranger to all.

Blame it on my western education, or my westernized upbringing. I don’t know. Growing up in Kuala Lumpur in a middle class Chinese family, I am too westernized to be Malaysian. At the same time, my yellow skin impedes me from being recognized westernized. I am caught it a perpetual no man’s land. Just the other day, I was listening to an old Asian tune, and I was reminded once again of my teenage years as a member of an oppressed community in Malaysia – and in the US.

As an urbanite in Malaysia, I possess much access to capital. I’m not talking about the traditional Marxist view of capital either. No, this goes beyond mere finances and money as I venture into the realm of Bourdieu. Indeed, I am considered to middle class and enjoy a comfortable life. But I also enjoy other comforts in life, and these capitals include social, cultural, and religion, thanks to the influence of MTV, Marvel Comics, the Simpsons, Michael Jordan and Nirvana. I weave around the community easily with my mastery of western culture. I am, despite my status as a minority in Malaysia, a privileged person – privilege ala Spivak’s definition of the “postcolonial.” The postcolonial, that is, someone who is a product of the culture of imperialism, fluent in its colonial apparatuses. I may not have realized this then, but you know what they say, ignorance is bliss.

My knowledge in western culture and family’s relative wealth helped propel me to pursue my university studies in the US. In the US, I put whatever privilege and knowledge I possess on western culture to good use. I made white friends with ease. I learned to appreciate football, drank beer, went to rave parties, hayrides, and trucking it up on a frozen lake (I was in Northern Minnesota, go figure). Yes, life was good. My acquisition of social, cultural and religious capital does indeed have its benefits. They helped me become a Christian, (I got to go to heaven, what’s there not to like?), win the heart of a white woman, and the love and affection of many “normal” white, Christian middle class, and heterosexist friends.

But life, or God, or who/whatever, has other plans. When I thrust myself in doctoral studies in religion, I began a love-hate relationship with Academia. I learned cool new words like “hegemony,” “habitus,” and “deconstruction,” among others. But at the same time, I hated the whole idea of pontificating one’s newfound wisdom to those whose minds have been colonized, especially through this thing called postcolonial studies. To be honest, it’s not all that bad. But, it did remind me, forcefully, that whenever I look in the mirror, I see a Chink with a white disguise. Fifty years ago, a very wise man by the name of Frantz Fanon from Martinique questioned this very same notion with the black subject trying to escape his/her own perceived inferiority by embracing the white world. It also reminded me that even though I can pass off well as “one of the guys” and have relative access to the white world, I am constantly reminded of who I “really” am on the inside.

Perhaps the use of the word “Chink” is too jarring for some. Do I hate my own kind? Is my mind too colonized for this? I’d like to see my usage of the word as something akin to black folks use the “N” word. But since I’m not black, I must also assume that my struggles cannot be the same as black folks, and hence it’s not a simple one to one direct translation. I want to use that word to bring to attention that the word “Chink,” while not as prevalently used (no) thanks to our status as the “model minority,” still exists within the vocabulary of the colonizer, ready to be called upon to be used against people like me. So, before we get too comfortable with words like “Asian Americans” or “Asians,” I think a little dose of reality is good for the soul, if not just to fuck with people’s heads. My chinky-ness continues to haunt me today in the white world, and my whiteness haunts me when I am back with my community in Malaysia. I am the man with no skin and no home – the perpetual stranger. I am the conscript and casualty of the new fractured, globalized world.

(Un)fortunately, my body cares. My body cares because it serves to remind me who I am at all times. The things that remind me of what I am become catalysts for my perpetual status as stranger, a stranger who is oppressed but is also oppressing. A Chink who inhabits and recognizes his own privilege of being conversant with the colonial structure, knows the instance of his own colonization, and yet cannot disown it. It is, in Spivak’s term, a place “one cannot not want to inhabit.”

Despite my incessant whining about my own identity, and it is hard and stressful, mind you, I often ask myself if all these things pale in comparison who the truly oppressed subaltern. Who cares about “the stranger,” the musings on belonging and identity, when half the world can’t even eat a decent meal and have a place real home with comfortable beds! Indeed, who cares about the incessant whining of a Third World citizen now living in the First World? I must be careful not to elevate my struggles with identity as the “end all be all” of the postcolonial individual. So here’s the dilemma. On the one hand, struggles of identity should and ought to be taken into account. On the other hand, it’s all too easy to reduce the lived realities of communities into texts, and discourse. I’m sorry, but it is a great insult for people living all their lives in a shithole slum in India, or Malaysia if we are to reduce all things to discourse and text. This, I believe, is a temptation for us inhabiting this postcolonial space.

Last night, I was listening to Asian music on youtube, and immediately I was transported back to the time when I was again as my blissful self as a teenage Chinese boy riding the public bus in Kuala Lumpur on the way to school. I must admit, I was very tempted to stay at that blissful state of mind once again, far away from my contemporary struggles with identity, belonging and the abject material deficiencies many marginalized people are going through as I compose this piece of writing.

1:36am on a Tuesday morning
Thinking about home
Damn those Facebook photo albums

What is to happen to me?
What will I (re)discover?
What will I do?
What will I be?
How will I conduct myself?
How will “research” affect me?

Why so serious?
Why not have fun?
Enjoy yourself!
Think of the food.
Relationships
Family
Places
Faces

Yes, but 5 months is a long time
Perish the thought
It goes by quick, said a friend
It will be over in no time.
That may be true
But I have many thoughts
Especially at 1:36am on a Tuesday morning

I may be exposed as a fraud
Outsider
Elitist
Westernized
Individualistic

But I do miss home
The morning mist descending on the foothills
The chatter of kids going to school
The paper man delivering the newspaper
Dogs cats birds and critters
Those calorie-busting breakfast foods
Scrumptious Indian-Muslim lunches
And traditional Chinese home-cooked dinners
Skyscrapers that symbolizes the decadence and opulence of the elite
Gigantic shopping malls that are symbols of capitalism
While down the street the poor and homeless are begging in Chinatown
The smoke from the local temple’s joss sticks
Invite me to pay my respects to the institution and places built by people I call “my own”
But “my own” really sounds funny these days
For I am neither here nor there

Yes I have many thoughts
Thoughts about home
Impressions about home
The people faces and places
Being me and not being me
At 1:36am on a Tuesday morning.