/part autoethnography

I once told someone wise everything about how my parents ruined my life, about their traumatic ignorance and my justified indignation. “Nothing will ever change if you don’t forgive,” he says. And I thought, "What a rude thing to say, he’s not even listening."

There, I’m sent for a few more laps around this cycle, a pattern.

Several years and a graduate degree before this conversation, I took my first course in communication studies. We read Pema Chödrön and Robert M. Pirsig beside Burke, Lippmann, McLuhan, and Postman: Amusing Ourselves to Death. I learned about the word “anxiety,” about how there’s a word for that, this feeling I had taken for being alive. The readings came with reconciliation: anxiety understood as an engineering feat of fragmentation on behalf of the mediated environment in which I spawned. What wider reckoning to realize the personal is political.

My future me whispers, “Let this radicalize you.”

Humility, my new favorite word. All that tension at home, the teenage rage: an overgrowth of something that infected them, then spilled into us. It came from their parents and their parents before that, and so on, and we were surrounded in playing out what’s reflected by culture. Alas, it was all mere rhetoric: “communication” writ large. I was even compelled to write an optional undergraduate thesis about how the oppositional grammar and Nietzschean, metaphoric nature of language creates a double-bind. While postmodernism invokes distrust in universal truths and public ideology, communication simultaneously relies on metaphors that make shared meaning and democracy possible.[1] The punchline was to take responsibility.

And I thought this was forgiveness.

Growing up in North Carolina, I knew about racism. It happened casually at the dinner table, in the obvious ongoing segregation of my high school in a “historic” tobacco town. We learned about composing three-fifths of a person, redlining, and the civil rights movement as events isolated and complete. College, far away from home, was the what to do next. Little did I know it would be about environmental ethics, sustainability studies, climate change, and its depletion of the global South, hinting at the spoils of capitalism as severely raced: it’s all connected. The education was euphoric in providing diagnosis pointed toward freedom, feminism: the world’s problems solved with more compassion, less dissection. Still, I repressed the artist within for fear of *starving* and, instead, ironically obsessed: Why are science and rationality so much more valuable than creativity, intuition?

Eventually, I recovered from finding entire fields research attending to this question.

I moved to Salt Lake City for the University of Utah during the peak of the pandemic. This means also the murder of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and the emerging Black Lives Matter movement amidst growing controversy on wokeism, cancel culture. Yet to understand the deep entanglement here, we read from D Wanzer-Serrano on #RhetoricSoWhite in response to surprisingly recent conversations on #AcademiaSoWhite. The ratio between non-white and white students became tense, palpable, complicated. I heard my accent differently in flashbacks of the massive confederate flag waving against the highway; the way we admired that symbol as kids trying out culture, “not southern enough,” in lament of not being from somewhere deeper.

I needed to understand and experience myself as an unwelcome, invasive body.

The story is that there was a split, a cartesian split, long before Descartes and long after. Arguably arbitrary and still anything but, the ruling mind grew apart from its body—individual, political, environmental—and today we see what happens when dissociated for thousands of years: anxiety, bigotry, and addiction; ecocide, ethnocide, and genocide. Patrick Wolfe then reframes the composite “events” of settler colonialism as neither isolated nor complete, but constitutive of an ongoing, “logical” structure of elimination.[2] Sylvia Wynter further explains this structure as not merely a nation-state, systemic racism, nor big brother, but also the rhythm of thought, the coordination of our minds in the belief that Man is the center of the universe. Suffocated by an unfettered ego, self-referenced and replicated, the question of who wrote all the research remains.

Once again, I confront the geometry of metaphors: a restoration of nonlinear time.

I laughed with Michael Pollan’s mention that graduate school is traumatic, though I wasn’t expecting this to mean it would destroy my relationship with reality. I left the academy to pick up the pieces, as Anzaldúa advises: “Deconstruct, construct.” Come travel experience, ensouled epiphanies, and years of integrative practice, I realize I had intellectualized the arbitrary mind/body split to the point of having an arbitrary understanding. In learning Vipassana meditation, I began to feel how our thoughts are not our own, how they’re intertwined with the nervous system rooted in conversation with the environment. In cultivating dialogue with the environment, I heard loving guidance from source. She led me to my ancestors. And when I met my mom’s late mother, we redeemed in each other the shame, guilt, and fear I’d inherited and incorporated.

So, a point of view is in the body.

Ariella Aïsha Azoulay writes that we, citizens granted “rights,” have the right not to be perpetrators. Born into imperialism, baited to support regime-made disasters in exchange for citizenship, may we refuse. In other words, Mignolo determines, DELINK! Culture demands decenter [men; whiteness]. Embrace that trauma exposes us to different realities: Decolonize. It’s like I never needed to forgive my parents, rather, I needed to forgive myself—the river runs through me. I catch and release the white supremacy, misogyny, homophobia, obfuscated as self-hatred, perfectionism, and scarcity. I peel away the layers and finally find there really is no centre. What’s intensely personal becomes inherently relational, lest cycles of violence repeat until this connection is sought. Humility as praxis, now grounded in my lineage, I’m welcome here on Earth.

I study communication because the disconnect is a communication issue.

……

1
Now, I am not so convinced.

2
Wolfe, Patrick. “Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native.” Journal of Genocide Research 8.4 (2006): 387-409.