Professors of Practice--Epistolary Practice--Session 1
During the month of April, Jeff Chang and myself co-taught the module “Living Democracy: Image and Culture” of the Professors of Practice course at the Pacific School of Religion, Berkeley.
Below is the epistolary practice I closed each session with—entitled Love-Lectures—in hopes that these letters could bleed from my heart to yours. Here is letter #1
Lavagem do Bonfim. Foto: Fábio Marconi.
In the midst of dismay, alienation, unhealthy bodies, and worldviews, loneliness, isolation and desolation, I feel an urge to sit with these feelings. One of my favorite writers, a formidable human being, has been teaching me about the worlds of words and imagination since I was around 5 years old. His name is Rubem Alves. One of the earliest memories I have from his teachings was this idea that we would do well by striving to be like the primordial artist we all know well—the spider. They create these beautiful works of art, structures that are fragile, beautiful webs made out of threads and gossamer and a leap into the unknown. The thread is hidden inside her body and when she plunges into the void, the weaving begins. The web is within. Even before she leaps, it’s already within. Part of my invitation today is to weave a web over the voids we have before us: distance, social isolation, angst, profound anxiety, groundlessness, a ribcage that seems to be caving in, lack of touch, sadness, unknowingness, fear of what kind of world we will walk into in a few months... One of the ways I stare at this void is by doing a bit of breathing and drawing exercise that Jeff Chang endearingly called doodle therapy. Would you be willing to join me? Think of a word that reveals itself to you when you look within. Take deep breaths. Plunge. Write the word on the center of a sheet of paper. Take one deep breath as you draw a line from one side of the sheet all the way to the opposite corner of the paper. Exhale as you draw a second line. Fill the page with lines as you breathe in and out. As you come to the end of this practice, notice whether your heart and thought frequency has changed…
When I was thinking about what I wanted to say to you today as we end our time together, I thought about the epistolary practices that have connected peoples across space and time. So ancient, so distant, so close, so potent. Several religious traditions use these writing practices. Think of Apostle Paul as he wrote to so many beloved communities in response to specific crises… And here we are, sitting and thinking and feeling our way with blinders through a pandemic. I felt compelled to write you, longhand, as so many of our ancestors with poetic-prophetic verve showed us… Think of all the folks who survived and lived through exiles… imprisonments… Paulo Freire, from whom I learned a lot about education, the necessity to name our worlds and to imagine it anew, wrote a lot of what later became known as his scholarship through letters. So here is my offering to you:
Dear Comrade,
Latin American has lived through horrific totalitarian regimes in the 60s, 70s, 80s, where the shadow of the angel of death hovered over our lives, houses, communities, schools, churches, streets, cities, countries. This angel, dressed as a military dictatorship instituted Martial Law and kept us from gathering in public places, imprisoned, and had our moves controlled by surveillance, confiscating so much that gave us life. I am a child of these horrendous times. And yet, here I am. Living proof that creative animus saves us from the treacherous waters of social instability. Like Brecht, who came to the cities in a time of disorder, as hunger reigned, as turmoil rose, proclaimed: I live in desperate times. Artless, foolish times—with folks without grooves of worry on their foreheads. A time of much silence in the face of pain and terror. And yet, he wrote. Poeticized. A poet-prophet as my Mom, Débora Junker wrote once. Doris Salcedo, another poet-prophet memorialized what she lived through in the period of la violencia in Colombia. Another dictatorship. Her site-specific artworks seem to engrave in our memories and bodies stories that would otherwise be forgotten. Macarena Gómez-Barris calls this artmaking a kind of archiving for the future. You see, art has this power Dear Comrade. It drenches our bodies, brains, memories, spirit with stories that are wet and dripping, as Freire would put it. Art memorializes, commemorates, invents new ways of being when everything around us says we can’t be. When the Colombian government refused to acknowledge the 284 deaths due to the siege of the palacio de la justicia in 1985, some two decades later, Doris Salcedo staged a performance and memorial to mark the 17th anniversary of this horror. Starting precisely at 11:35, on November 6th, 2002, she lowered 284 chairs, marking the tempo of the death of each victim who was shot. The chairs, she explains “are statements of absence, allowing us to be aware of the fragility of life.” Dear Comrade, how will we memorialize all of the deaths we are seeing as Covid-19 continues to kill across the planet, without the rights to a proper burial? Like folks who were tortured and disappeared with during periods of dictatorships in Latin America, we must conjure up all the strength in us to convert these deaths into memories, bring them into the present, and maybe more: into a presence. How do we dignify these stories, make sense of this moment?
Another possibility for resistance comes from the colonial period in Brazil, where colonizers roamed freely in our territories, robbing and enslaving peoples. The story goes that a group of enslaved women in Bahia were charged with the duty of washing the step of a church after the catholic feast of Three Kings. They were to clean the church and have it ready to be used on January 7th. The insurgent spirit in them, their radical imagination transformed this master’s command into an act of religious-performative resistance. These women practiced the Brazilian Yoruba tradition of Candomblé and used the act of the washing of the steps as a ceremony to bless each other and to offer prayer and praise to the Orixá Oxalá. This feast, known as Lavagem do Bonfim is still active in Bahia today and has become an interreligious engagement joined by thousands of people every year. On this day, the church doors remain closed and gifts and prayers are offered to Oxalá. These women resisted their enslaving by setting traps to the colonial nexus that has allowed for this practice to endure.
This procession in the streets of Salvador looks a lot like the artistic intervention Lygia Pape envisioned, namely, Divisor. It was created in 1968 while Marshall was still instituted in Brazil. Groups of two or more people gathered in the streets were seen as conspirators and ran the risk of being interrogated and possibly taken by the police. Through this act of imagination, Pape created the possibility for 200 people to gather at the same time in the streets. The artwork consisted of a wearable cloth with two hundred holes where people’s heads could come through. It was right here that bodies prohibited from gathering were able to do so and move freely through the streets of Brazil, marking their presences, their right to come and go, to impede the death-dealing forces of dictatorship to confiscate their imaginations. Our classrooms, our virtual spaces of the gathering are charged with the power of joy, possibility, and imagination. Laura Pérez Says that they are laboratories for creating new ways of thinking, imagining new ways of conjuring experience, new ways of being. Imagination and spirituality send electric currents through our bodies that bear the power of transforming us into tools for the revolution.
We are on a journey right now, seeking and understanding of what reality is beyond a pandemic, the collapse of democracy, the deterioration of the earth. Are we able to dig into this toolbox to find the textures of our brushes, to exercise and educate our hope, as Frere puts it, to give form and function to our dreams and learn to love radically, with philia, agape, and eros as Pérez urges us? To respect, care, and live with joy? To rehearse what is yet to come, our personal power, to find the sanctity and the sound of the genuine in us? How do we find homes within our comes? Home as the domestic site for healing, as Elisa Facio teaches us? Not in a romanticized manner, for as Anzaldúa reminds us, homes can be dangerous, too. The home within our home is an attempt at growth, Conocimiento. An invitation that is circumscribed with the physical, spatial, ontological, spiritual, temporal. A site that knows of its disappointments, betrayals, violence, and anguish, but that continues to seek negotiation of these different dimensions of being. How are we to move and enter into these journeys without being able to leave our homes? How do we heal? Through internal pilgrimages? Art and religion do bear this capacity, to cause and internal travessia, a movement of spirit, body, mind, the personal, the social. Art helps us move away from deceptive journeys and toward experiences that help us awaken, to feel, to weave the imperceptible back into the perceptible. Art requires our being to be in bodies that co-create our realities anew. Art illuminates our poems, our metaphors the body-knowledge that is inscribed in our beings. It helps us to strategize and smuggle humanity back into our days, setting traps to settler colonialism, racism, sexism, classicism, phobias, and loneliness. It helps us find the places of our own possibilities. And it is right here, Comrade, that we can practice new ways of organizing and intimating the world differently, subjectifying it, not objectifying as Ursula Le Guin reminds us. It is here that we can practice political education, finding the archeology of our pains, as Freire taught us, educating our longings and hopes, expanding our relations into what he calls ones of sibling-ship. I end this letter to you with Alice Walker’s words:
Fear is real.
But so is love.
From you co-dreamer, co-conspirator, co-creator,
Dr. Yô