Re-membering
Cree artist, Jules Koostachin, came to my decolonial aesthetics class and shared her artwork and advice about what it means to create as decolonial action. She shared with us a list of tools for "art as resistance":
Art as a tool to deconstruct the fantasy
Art as tool of empowerment
Art as tool for social change
Art as tool to create alterNATIVEs to a colonial narrative
Art as tool to inform on diverse relations
Art as tool to create alterNATIVE education (who's? Your own).
Art as tool for creating platform for marginalized communities and cultural groups to share
This list also brought me back to our first class and another list...a "recipe for change", though I cannot remember who Mimi referenced this to, but I'll look back into it. Recipe for change: 1. Proximate 2. Discomfort 3. Realistic 4. Hope
Jules managed to simplify and get to the core of some ways to begin thinking about what a decolonial aesthetic/aesthesis might look like...(hmm more process driven, maybe)?
I went to a media arts workshop with Aleesa Cohene a couple weeks back and she used a list of rules to edit her films...those rules are open to change, but they are intimate and shared with people as a gifted tool for news ways to think through creative process. To this degree of creating rules and guidelines for creating, I think that I will take Jules' preliminaries into my own creative process.
Language: When Jules began sharing with us some of her experiences teaching/speaking Cree and what it be like experientially to re-learn your language...this struck a chord with me.
In Lee Maracle's book, Memory Serves, she writes about directional memory as directed through questions and reflection...(I haven't fully come into how I understand this)...but in my shortened understanding, it brought me think about language and how many of us today have to "re-member" our language...still piecing things together... it's this embodied way to write the word: re-member... it speaks to limbs, a reaching and pulling action, from the feet.
This re-membering reinforces a slow-burning fire that has been raging and loving inside of me.
It wasn’t until I came out west that I began to learn about my roots. This might sound paradoxical, but those roots made themselves known by experiencing the strong Indigenous presence here in BC; there is an ever-growing resilience and resurgence here among the Coast Salish nations, something that isn’t comparable to what exists in Nova Scotia. For my little, isolated province, it became evident to me how Mi’kmaq and Métis people are even more isolated from not only urban areas and resources, but from one another. Each Mi’kmaq nation is scattered throughout the province, where most reservations experience the pressures of environmental racism and the hand of provincial/federal politics at work. Though it is in my paradoxical re-connection to roots that compels me to return to the place-baseness that exists inside of them and go home to Nova Scotia. Eventually... I haven't yet, because of a list of complex reasons, but the one I will share here is because of fear. I know if I return home, this fire...the one that has been so steady and gently crackling beneath every thought...is that I cannot avoid the inherent responsibility I feel to learn my language. And that scared me. What if I fail and embarrass myself? What if my mind is too dry and crusty to learn? If I begin, there will be no permissible giving up, there will be no end or turning away. It is a choice offered to my spirit. It will change everything.
On this note of language....these days, my mind is stretching into French... but not the kind that I learned in school...in the middle of my thought, I will find myself tonguing through sounds of a French-like language, shhhéé c'que, words that seem like they're on the edge of my lip...if only I could find it, it would really help to explain whatever it is that I'm thinking, i think at myself who's busy thinking...but I never know the word, and instead, make sounds inside my head (or sometimes out loud) trying to do my nearly complete thought justice. I can never find anything complete and end up roosting into my smile, feeling a distant sort of warmth undulate beneath my skull.
Last night I shared this with my partner. She speaks 5 different languages, 3 of them native to her home country, Ghana. English is her second language, Spanish is her fifth. Lately, she's been speaking more and more Twe around me and her voice is able to express inflections that do not come through when she speaks in English. While I cannot understand the words, I understand their meaning and context...the words become felt, and I feel I know her better in these moments. "Thought has emotionality. It has a spirit, an intended outcome that is never isolated from history, from story, from aspirations. We remember this when we experience something new. Sqwa: lewel, which means felt ideas, felt thought, take us to a felt knowing, and it feels more reliable than an idea arrived at by instruction, deduction, reduction, simple arithmetical reasoning, or any other sort of objective analytical process. It feels trustworthy" (14-15, Maracle). It makes me wonder if the sounds that rumble inside my mind and then out through my voice is Chiac, a French and Mi'kmaq influenced language that my grandparents spoke, a language that I only got to hear mostly when I was an infant and only a handful of times throughout my adult life.
We chatted about this, in our personal paralanguage, and wondered about what it will be like when I go home to learn my language. I had mentioned what if I told myself, as a way into my fear, to think of it as a creative process that I must be in constant reflexive documentation of. I think about refusing to speak my colonial language and only speaking Mi'kmaq for a year straight. I think about how that would change my relationships to my family who refuse to call me anything other than Pocahontas because they fear what they don't know. I wonder how this might alter their perspective and create possibilities to forge a love that exceeds miscalculated exchanges of words. I wonder how my daily life would change, from buying produce from the local farmers markets, getting gas, small-talk passer-by hellos and how are yous, to how I might not be able to write poetry, write anything, sing my music or tell my partner about my crazy day trying to order 2lbs of onions from the farmer or how my dad and I just looked at each other because we couldn't say anything and he's never looked me in the eye before what if I reminded myself of when I was taught that art doesn't translate well into our language because art and life are synonymous. Ooohhhhummmm........and the sounds percolate inside my kidneys and spread into my knees, directing them forward.
