rethinking community

When part of your identity disappears

This piece is dedicated to the following exceptional humans in my life who live, love and breathe community; Stefan Hostetter, Fahreen Ladak, Lois Kunkle, Denise Soueidan-O’Leary, Hannah Rengligh, Linda Barretto-Burns and Karim Rizkallah

_________________________________________________________________

‘Lord, we know who we are
Yet we know not what we may be’
-Jay Z, Marcy Me, 444,
quoting Ophelia in Hamlet

We can only ever know ourselves in relation to others. A person is only tall in relation to someone shorter. We are human because the trees and beavers and rocks are not. I am wealthy compared to those living on the streets of Mumbai, but not as wealthy when compared to Jeff Bezos. Everything we know about ourselves is relative and can only be known in relation to what it is not. We not only exist in relation to one another but can only ever actually understand ourselves through relationship.

Prior to the pandemic, this appeared most clearly in mainstream discourse in anti-oppression work and activism. People in non-dominant identities asserting and reclaiming their selfhood, dignity, customs and traditions in relation to dominant society. Indigenous, Black, Brown and Asian folks taking up space in predominantly white media, commerce and governance. Women, non-binary and transgender folks taking up space in governments and boardrooms. Resistance and reclamation.

After a year of largely not encountering each other, I’ve peeled back layers to my own identity. Without the reference point of others to understand who I am myself, I’ve been going through a strange and unexpectedly beautiful identity crisis. I believe this is because I’ve lost a core part of who I am. Or that part of me is so deep in hibernation that it is triggering the same grief as if it were gone for good, though I know it will eventually return. Losing a limb or a cognitive ability such as memory or speech can cause frustration and grief, so it makes sense to name grief as part of my experience. What I’ve lost is not a body part or even a permanent ability, but rather a circumstantial one.

I’ve lost the part of myself that I cherish most. Joshua, the community gatherer and convener, has seemingly dissolved into the ether without the ability to be embodied in practice.

The exuberance and zeal that I naturally moved through the world with prior to the pandemic has been outlawed for over a full calendar year. Out of precaution, we have been forced to treat each human we encounter as if they carried a pathogen that could potentially kill us. This goes against every community-oriented instinct I have.

A lot of people speak about community as if it were solely based on a common identity or interest that somehow transcends being space-based, referring to groups such as ‘the Black community,’ ‘the immigrant community’ or ‘the cycling community.’ These groups all contain multitudes of lived experiences and are diffused across the world. People in these groups share varying amounts of common history, interests or pursuits, and may have some baseline commonality. I believe that these categories are too wide and may lead to essentialism: the view that each generalized community marker has a set of attributes that are foundational to its identity and function. There is a great danger to conceptualizing community in this way. It creates the slippery slope to viewing groups of people who are named as part of a particular community as monolithic. The Peruvian-American rapper Immortal Technique eloquently breaks the assumption that race is a fully shared experience and common denominator in his epic track, The Poverty of Philosophy stating ‘I have more in common with most working and middle-class white people than I do with most rich Black and Latino people.’ He skillfully challenges the notion that there is a unified ‘Latino’ perspective or vote.

Expanding on those three examples, folks referred to as the ‘Black community’ on Turtle Island might be decedents of slaves, immigrants or born and raised by descendants of slaves or immigrants. Each are very different experiences. To say ‘Black Community’ conflates a wide variety of experiences, bringing Oprah Winfrey and George Floyd into the same essentialist category. While they may share some history, I agree with Immortal Technique that class is a much more substantive subjectivity that is often left out of analysis. For folks living in countries that are predominantly Black, the term ‘Black community’ wouldn’t make sense due to the lack of other racial identities to contrast it to. We only exist in relation to one another. Immigrants have a multitude of reasons that have brought them to canada. My dad is an immigrant but has been in canada longer than myself, and I was born and raised here. My housemate has been in canada for 18 months, and the stage of his journey and his particular life experience, is far from being in the same categorical community as my father. My friend Steph is a young white native-English speaking woman who came to Toronto from California in her 20s and who identifies far less with an immigrant community than my housemate Mohammed, as a native-Arabic speaking middle-eastern man. Finally, people who ride bikes do so for quite a few different reasons, the main ones being recreation, exercise and transportation. Though the reasons may not be mutually exclusive, ‘lyrcas’ and ‘city-cyclists’ can barely be said to be engaging in the same activity. In Holland and much of Europe, the bicycle is seen as a vehicle for transportation but in most of North America, it is largely seen as a form of recreation. Because of this, the sub-cultures within the umbrella of the broad ‘cycling community’ such as bmx’ers, long distance pedal-heads or bike messengers may have a stronger sense of community than capturing all different types of cyclists as part of a unitive ‘cyclist community.’

I break all this down so extensively because I am a firm believer that the recipe for community is primarily comprised of two key elements; proximity and a willingness to engage with Love.

If we are not proximal to one another (which we haven’t been for a year), we do not deeply encounter one another and it is easier to create harmful and false narratives about each other. To truly encounter each other is to encounter parts of ourselves, often parts that we are afraid to grapple with. When encountering someone with an opinion, identity or lived experience far from our own, we may be afraid to say or do the ‘wrong’ thing and cause harm. We may also subconsciously desire our judgement of another to be confirmed, leaving no room for transformation and implicitly asserting our own rightness or superiority of belief or action. This is why the second core element of community I name is the willingness to engage with Love. I generally capitalize the word Love because I conceptualize it as the animating force of life. Not a puffy, romanticized Disney-love (which gets a lower-case l), but a gritty, resilient, powerful Love that gives us strength to ante up after devastating losses and ongoing injustices- the kind of pain and grief that the world is experiencing right now. A bell hooks or MLK Jr ethic of Love that leaves no room for ambiguity of its character or force. This is the Love that will get us through this pandemic and the future crises and atrocities that will surely come. Love does not mean absence of pain, but rather a willingness to look it in the eye and reach into that never-ending well of compassion. The strength and caliber of a Love that has no end cannot come solely from ourselves as much as that would please our egos. Different traditions have come to know or name such Love through various theological concepts and language such as Jah, Kitchie Manitou, God, Allah, YHWH, Adonai, but it is so expansive and beyond the grasp of the human psyche that it cannot truly be named or captured in any language. This mystical Love is a mystery to be experienced and surrendered to, rather than a force to be named and systematized, which is what the mind prefers to do because it maintains the illusion of superiority and control.

True Love is transformative, which means being transformed, over and over and by experiences and situations we may least expect. For me, during this time of global crisis and my own inner turmoil of identity crisis, I’ve been struggling to surrender to Love by anticipating the future and working toward building back, focusing more on my agency than my powerlessness. That powerlessness is a gift but the colonized western mind I think my way through the world with, doesn’t see that powerlessness as appealing, as it prefers certainty and control. When I listen to Love, I am clearly being told to follow my spiritual mantra, (gifted to me by one of my spiritual teachers, Kendrick Lamar) to ‘sit down, be humble.’

Our society largely consumes Black art, particularly rap, as entertainment to be enjoyed rather than prophetic messages of Love to be transformed by. In doing so, we often miss the prophetic and transformative Love embedded in the messages of liberation arising from the genre. Lamar’s 2017 album, DAMN is a follow up to his 2015 To Pimp A Butterfly (TPAB). The latter being a response to police brutality, featuring the song Alright which became an anthem to the BLM movement. Between the release of TPAB and DAMN, Kendrick went through an inner journey where he recognized that he could not change the world until he changed himself. This is the spiritual liminal space that I believe myself and many others are swimming in. To release from the need or control, to do, or enact social change and to be transformed by Love. From that transformation the work becomes more fruitful.

This time apart has been a rare opportunity that has forced me to see that within myself which I’d likely never have the strength to look at otherwise, much less with such clarity and honesty. I’ve always been quite good at not identifying my sense of self or self-worth with what I have. One of my formational experiences was reading Naomi Klien’s No Logo at 14 years old and proceeding to spend the next two years of teenage angst cutting the labels out of the backs of my shirts, often leaving small holes. I don’t aspire to have or overly value ‘nice’ physical objects. I have, however, internalized the message of capitalism that I am what I do, even if what I do is in the realm of social change rather than business or government or a field with more worldly prestige. We are all so much more than what we have or what we do. In this bustling world of commerce, communication, rush and overstimulation, perhaps the last radical act is to simply be with one’s self and make time to listen to that never ending well of Love that lives within. We too often suffocate the potential for such transformative experiences with ‘doing’ everything we can to avoid such vulnerability. I often avoid it by naming it as boredom or a waste of time, but most often by succumbing to the violence of the world through activism and overwork.

These words by the mystic, Thomas Merton, carry a great deal of truth for me and so may other young activists I know. To truly see the world’s pain and be committed to its care, is to take on more than is one’s own. When I do this, it makes me the source of love rather than the Great Love that is trying to move through me if I were to simply sit down, be humble, and do what is being asked of me by the circumstance I find myself in.

There is a mystical Christian tradition of contemplative practice that involves just that- contemplation and action. To contemplate is to go under what I call the proverbial Turtle Shell. To rest in silence and perhaps even darkness, with a hard shell to the world’s pain which is never-ending. From that place of inner calm and grounded-ness, we can stick our necks out of our turtle shell with clarity around what action is ours to do and what is not. Being largely at home and digitally bombarded by news of pain and suffering can make deep contemplation challenging and, as Merton says, ‘kill the inner root of wisdom that makes the work fruitful.’

Human society is incredible — we’ve created, begun manufacturing and distributing vaccines for a novel virus within a year of the initial outbreak. We have built skyscrapers, complex sewage systems and energy grids that are serving us constantly and nearly invisibly. We’ve created a robust information network that connects us by light moving through fiberoptic cables on the ocean’s floor. Yet for all this progress, we still haven’t prioritized feeding our entire species. We have yet to surrender to Love, and while that is a collective pursuit, it must also be done individually and to me this extended time apart is a beautiful though not painless gift. Few spiritual gifts come without pain.

This is a cosmic time to sit down and be humble and really rethink who we are as individuals and as a species. How can I know who I am if not in relation to others? Without being transformed by encountering and communing with others in common cause, like all of us, I’m left mostly in isolation to watch the pain of the world livestreamed into my living room with little room to act. How might I surrender to the gifts under my turtle shell, even if it may be less stimulating than the world outside? How might I be the turtle as I aspire to be?

How might I be transformed during this cosmic time of being separated? How might I know what is and is not mine to do?

I offer no answers, just questions, and this admonishment by the poet Rainer Maria Rilke,

“Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.”