Learning from the margins

A talk I gave at The Substation on 17 Nov 2018, as part of the 'Crazy Questioning Asians: Building Our Intellectual Traditions' symposium organised by Asian Urban Lab.

When I first got involved with social justice work, I focused my attentions on the reform of systems, driven by the pain I experienced on the margins of society. But in recent years, I have come to see that sometimes, where the system fails, or is absent, it creates an empty space full of mystery. And from that space, perhaps something more beautiful can emerge. I considered how we’ve come to rely on inclusion in systems, rather than in communities, as necessary for our survival. To give one example, we have come to see formal education, and the subjugation of all children to it, as the only acceptable pathway. We work to improve the education system, but we don’t often look outside of it, to discover how children who don’t go to school - of whom there are a few in Singapore - learn precious lessons and skills from their families and communities.

The truly radical prospect that life on the fringes holds is innovation. People on the margins invent other ways of being in the world that challenge and dismantle given truths about what it is to be alive and share this world with each other. When we are cut off from mainstream resources, cannot see our lives reflected in dominant narratives, and don’t have access to conventional ways of “making it”, we make something else. And that something else is not just survival, it’s not just making do. It is a creative process, an invitation for others to awaken from false consciousness, reject their own subjugation and imagine a different way. It is a resounding call to seek our own truths; in the process, perhaps living fuller lives. When we pay attention to people’s stories, when we really listen, and fight the impulse to define their experiences through existing frameworks, we unlearn many harmful and fallacious ideas. Subcultures and countercultures represent diverse responses to the human condition, and if given the space to thrive, they can save us. We must resist the urge to include through assimilation, through offering what *we* value. Conformity is not inclusion. Conversely, nonconformity is possibility. We must look to those who are struggling for answers to our oppression, because in struggling, they are inventing solutions. And not just to their own problems, but to our collective suffering.

While many LGBT movements are fighting for the right of gay couples to marry, queer politics undeniably pose a different and more fundamental challenge to the patriarchal institution of marriage. It carves out more space – for everyone – to create different scripts for romance, partnership, domesticity and family, both within and outside of marriage. Queerness has transformed the way we understand and describe gender and sexuality, and if we allow it to, it can teach us all to recognise the ways in which we are queer, fluid, nonconforming humans.

At the level of the individual microcosm too, I suspect it is our marginal status that allows transformation. The places within us that are wounded, wronged and exiled compel us to question the status quo and connect with others in deeper ways. We each exist in the mainstream and on the margins, simultaneously. They are fluid, shifting categories. In the laboratory of the margins, we destroy convention and experiment with novel responses. Both at the individual and collective level, we would do well to transfer what we learn from the margins to the mainstream.

The margins are generative. They produce so much of what the mainstream comes to value, and, often, co-opt. Art, music, fashion, social movements, new lifestyles, spiritual and intellectual traditions spring from the fringe. Bharathanatyam, which is today celebrated as an Indian classical dance form, and the domain of elite classes like the Brahmins, was once the art and livelihood of Devadasis, Dalit temple dancers bonded to sexual labour. In the 1900s, a concerted project to desexualise, de-commercialise and rebrand the dance form as a symbol of the nation-state and respectable womanhood was undertaken. What used to be a means of economic sustenance for indentured women now is an expensive hobby with strict gatekeepers. This erasure of cultural production on the margins is widespread in our societies. It is an erasure we must resist.

Marginalised communities are early adopters of transformative ideas. An example is restorative justice. Intrinsic to the practices of many indigenous groups, it has gained momentum because of its resonance with communities who are often in conflict with the law, and cannot rely on state protection. Black women in the US were quick to point out that upper class, white feminists’ push for mandatory arrests for domestic violence meant a perpetuation of racist law enforcement against black men.

Persecuted groups have long favoured community-based justice systems focused on accountability, reparations and healing. They recognise the well-documented power of kinship-based interventions in not just reducing individual acts of harm, but strengthening familial ties and, ultimately, shifting cultural norms towards more peaceable ways of living.

As Mia Mingus, a disability activist says, accessibility is not necessarily justice. We shouldn’t merely work towards creating access to the things we already have, but transform what we have. She also points out how much we all have to learn from the compulsory interdependence and vulnerability of disability.

Because many systems are set up to be hostile to nonconforming groups, they don’t believe the illusion that systems can solve our problems or make our dreams come true. They don’t believe that health is provided by hospitals, that justice is produced through the courts, or that safety is protected by the police. They accept realities of the human condition, like fallibility, sorrow and ageing. They value interdependence over independence. They rely on family and community networks, on folk wisdom, and they de-centre the role of money and other mainstream resources in meeting needs. These are strategies that interrupt widely held beliefs about what is necessary for us to be happy, to act, where power lies, who are our allies and whose hearts and minds we must persuade before we can achieve change.

What does learning from the margins really mean? It means that in the push for women’s rights, it’s not enough to talk about including sex workers, migrant wives or working class women. Rather, we must look to them for leadership.

In the push for labour rights, we must look to the SMRT bus drivers’ strike, to the hawkers’ who are speaking up, to the way that domestic workers are organising their communities.

In the push for environmental justice, we must follow in the footsteps of indigenous communities.

In the push for a more equal society that leaves “no child behind”, we must not try to make working class families act more like middle class families – or like Minister Chan Chun Sing says, get rich families to adopt poor families and be positive role models to their children. Many low-income folks have expansive notions of family - they care for children who’re not their own. They raise families on very small budgets. They cook daily meals for elderly and disabled neighbours and take them to their medical appointments. They learn the names of every child in their neighbourhood. They invite troubled youth into their homes. They’d rather their kids be good people than high income earners. Why doesn’t the Minister see these parents as role models?

To learn from the margins is to learn discursively. For this, we must create space for minority groups, subcultures and countercultures to thrive. This requires reclaiming our freedom of information, expression, association and assembly. It requires laws and regulations not to stand in the way of graffiti, street performances, independent media, political cartoons, neighbourhood meetings or a makcik trying to start a curry puff enterprise in her home.

To be intellectually vibrant, we need to celebrate deviance. We need to sit with the places within and between us that are uncertain and rebellious, because they are profound. We must support art produced on the margins – art that disturbs and uplifts us.

We must create more spaces where we relate and act not as professionals, consumers, clients or beneficiaries, but as citizens, as neighbours, as a community of seekers who are excited by mystery, by not knowing. Because if we are willing to admit not knowing, then intellectual growth is possible. In Sanskrit, such a gathering of seekers is called ‘satsang’, which translates loosely to ‘associating with true people’.

We must disrupt a culture where knowledge is wielded as a tool of power and dominance, so that we can recognise it as a gift that enriches our relationships with each other and the world. We must reject the disembodiment of what is “intellectual” – our lived history, feelings and physicality are inextricably connected to our ideas. We must challenge the unilateral, capitalist pursuit of mastery and expertise, so that we can spend more time nurturing our childlike curiosities, our boredom, and meditating on the mundane. We must celebrate our simplicity, our laziness, our leisure. We must treasure solitude, cocooned by community. When all this meandering chaos makes us insecure and tempts us to return to rigidity and hierarchy, we must have spaces to express our anxieties through art, so that we may make peace with the things that are ultimately unknowable. Yet another gift from the margins is the wisdom that the things we cannot change, we can transcend through affect, collective effervescence and catharsis.