As the world protests and calls for no war we notice the best of us and the worst of us. Like many I watched the bravery of a woman standing up to a Russian soldier, handing him sunflower seeds to grow where his dead body would lay. How utterly depressing. People caught up in a war they don’t want. Nurses and healthcare teams around the world picking up the mess of what’s left.
I was reminded this morning of how it’s International Women’s Day on the 8 March https://www.internationalwomensday.com/Theme. A time for us to look at our role in upholding the patriarchy. Our role in the war fighting for our freedom.
I made a bid for freedom this week. I’ve applied for a job. Two jobs pending in the application process. A paid position doing exactly what I was doing here in a voluntary capacity, 15miles down the road. When I attended a Race Reflections guest speaker event I listened to Bernard Sweeney and Dilean Mac Searraigh they spoke of the parallel system / culture they live in. They talked about the high suicide rate, lowered life expectancy and increased rate of those experiencing homelessness, the invisible scars of racism, the frustration, the prohibition of movement and segregation. The deliberate ways whiteness tries to make you forget who you are, not about melanism we’re reminded by Guilaine Kinouani.
I’m English and I wonder what that means. Last night we watched Where hands touch. There are racist troupes but beyond that, like Layna (Amandla Stenberg) I wondered what it is to be German, I too wonder what it is to be English. (here’s a link to the film trailer https://youtu.be/0t8iVtFGHCc)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6yLkq-jEHKE Bernard Sweeney and Dilean Mac Searraigh talking about beyond the Pale. When I listened to this I think about the enormous great churches we see in rural parts in this country and think how populated it must have been in rural areas compared to now. Yet part of Brexit was not wanting more people here. I guess along the lines of racism, us being ok, the other somehow not. How deep routed the dislike of the other, how we’ve been taught to fear and see difference in the other, internalised and hard to shake off. It makes me think of a group chat I was on. How people who had moved away talk about escaping. I think about how that has been in my family our history of violence as perpetrators and victims, more complicated than the binary.
The resonance with Ireland as what was an honour based society. Proving it is today, with opening visa’s for people from Ukraine. I’m reminded of the people we took in here in the past, walked past that statue in Liverpool Street Station of the children suitcase in hand. People leaving their land who don’t want to leave, forced to find a way to keep themselves safe, students trying to get home. Antiblackness in plain sight.
Our hearts ached on the family zoom as we talked about how desperate people must feel as they pass their children overhead, blood type written on school rucksacks. Then I saw the men walking in solidarity not allowing invaders into their country. Wondered where the women were. An environmental war. Russian soldiers not knowing why they were there, not as they’d been told.
Woke not to the sound of bombs like others have but to a discarded balloon, floated here from heaven knows where, everyday environmental disaster.
The Irish Model created whiteness, (not an attack on ‘white’ people nor a call to genocide but the system of oppression from the 1660’s) it taught us how to other, disconnect people, divide and conquer, taught us people were wild “beyond the pale”. An actual place in Ireland. Ten mile radius that hasn’t left us. People 99.9% related.
Ambushed by books and guns, a ‘normal’ without context to history. The projection of whiteness telling us something is wrong with other, Jesus weaponised. That same person who washed a strangers feet and told us to welcome the stranger, treat them with love.
Meanwhile the children moan about the homework. While we search for the book of the universe the apprentice moves on, without regard for the person who needed to be included.
Move beyond inclusion we are told. Act out of fugitivity, a roaming principle with the power to shift and be responsive (Bayo Akomolafe), reshaping desire, reorient hope, reimagining possibility and do so separate from the fantasies nestled into rights and respectability (from What white people can do next Emma Dabiri 2021).
Perhaps it’s relevant that as people talk about SWIFT we consider how the framework for the modern banking system laid the foundation for colonialism and how that might be different going forward. Meanwhile international travellers can’t pay their hotel bill or take their beloved pet.