Transcript of The Bodymind as Un-colony

Find a transcript below of this event, or you may navigate back to this page to experience the video. 


Ngozi  00:04

Good afternoon, everybody. Thank you for coming today. Get my notes up. Yeah, welcome to DaDaFest International 2022: Hybrid. The festival has been running events in person and online since the 26th of October and this is our last in person event. My name is Ngozi Ugochukwu. I am a black woman wearing a dress. It's very unusual for me with pink, green, white and black shapes on it with a white hat and green shoes. I'm a multidisciplinary artist, and I've been asked by DaDa to introduce the speaker for the Edward Rushton social justice lecture. So yeah, thank you for coming today on the UN International Day of Persons with Disability. DaDa have been holding this event, these lectures, for eight years and I feel honoured to be asked to host it today. I'd like to thank the Museum Liverpool, sorry the Museum in Liverpool, one of the host festivals, one of the host venues for the festival. I'd also like to thank the Arts Council for the funding. Khairani Barokka is a writer, poet and artist. She is a practice based researcher whose work centres Disability Justice and anti colonial practice. Among her honours, she was the modern poet in translation and the inaugural poet in residence, the first non British associate artist in the UK, at the UK's National Centre for Writing and an NYU Trisch Development Departmental Fellow, and is currently UK associate artist at the Delfina Foundation and research fellow at the University of Arts in London. A quote I read about her is about Khairani "expect to laugh think and greatly admire this artist". I couldn't agree more. So please put your hands together for this year's Edward Rushton social justice lecture with Khairani Barokka.

Khairani  02:17

Thank you so much Goz! Towards the Bodymind as Un-colony. Part One. What came before? Halo semuanya. Hello, everyone. Thank you so much to DaDaFest for inviting me here to the Liverpool Museum for hosting, and to all of you here in this space and in the ether. I'm an Indonesian woman with brown skin and short black hair, wearing lipstick, earrings, and a bracelet and a dress with red, brown and black abstract patterning, and boots. A couple of things off the bat. The first is that although my language, Indonesian, has no tenses, whether something is past, present or future depends on context, and there's also the possibility that something exists in more than one tense. Because this talk is in English it will begin with the past, then go to the present then towards the future. And in doing so, I hope to underscore the idea that all of these tenses are inseparable from each other. Secondly, this is a talk I would like to anchor in joy, to begin with joy, to remember joy in the midst of, and to end with you, in a joy steeped in togetherness. As disabled and/or Deaf people around the world, we are no strangers to systemic adversity. Billions of us struggle to survive day to day, increasingly so in late stage capitalism, a term I will certainly discuss today and explain from a disabled perspective in this talk. And, though I was tempted to begin this lecture, delving into the heart of suffering, I wanted to try to be kind to all of you and to myself, and begin by imagining how it must feel to be completely free. What a state of maximum possible joy would feel like, for angling our bodyminds towards this feeling communally is the point of what I'd like to say here today. In a very bodily way, how would all our senses feel true freedom? The crux of our various communities ethos is that each of our bodyminds is so very different. And I cannot presume to tell you what music the specific frequencies of complete liberation would feel like in your flesh. To me, at least, freedom is an ease from all unnecessary tension in the body, including a freedom from the persistent tensions and disruptions of fictional social hierarchies that mean suffering or pleasure, life or death for different peoples based on cruel norms. Freedom always embraces love and love is expensive, is in relationship to others. Being free alone is not nearly as fun as shared liberation. Freedom for the so called self means my loved ones are also free and loved and supported and shown immeasurable grace and kindness in our short, short lives here on Earth. Let's try to focus on what joyful freedom feels like. If you're sighted and feel comfortable doing so please close your eyes. For the next 30 seconds, let's all just be still and embody joyful freedom, joyful freedom enveloping our heads, and our chests and all the other body parts we may have. Just a warm ocean of joy, and liberatedness. You may all now open your eyes if you've been closing them and reenter the room. Thank you for that. That feeling and deepening it is the point of this talk. Throughout this lecture, I'd like to keep layering on to your definitions of joy as liberation, adding definitions that perhaps you have known all your life, in which case I hope this lecture is received by you as a gesture of solidarity and communality rather than any assumption that you have been unaware of these definitions, or perhaps definitions that you are learning about for the first time here. So now that we begin to acknowledge this glorious possibility of liberation, as felt emotion, as physical sensation, as intellectual concept fully embodied, how do we get from where we are now to this state of being for ourselves more often, as often as possible and for all? How do we gesture and move towards that glow? And how do we do so without hurting ourselves or each other anymore? If anything in this talk is difficult for you emotionally, I want you to remember that towardsness. To take comfort in the journey towards joy, to know that all the cruel realities I will be describing are conveyed to contrast, what is with what can and should be, which is to say, a present in which we are all liberated. We do not experience full liberation in the present because we, certainly we in this room today in this moment, and I believe you watching aswell elsewhere, exist within the brutal present of colonisation. The brutal, and I must emphasise this once again, not merely past but present. What is colonisation? Simply put, it's theft, theft of life, theft of land, theft of language and of the arts themselves. Theft of names, theft of safety, theft of freedom from unnecessary pain, theft of joy, and Deaf and/or disabled people have been witnessed to all of it, and deeply wounded by it, and also made complicit in it as we all are today. Despite the fact that many of us I'm sure sport the latest fashion styles and are up with Gen Z lingo, we disabled people are not a new invention. What the world now calls disabled people in English, we've certainly existed before the invention of what we now know as the English language, before any contemporary manifestation of language was birthed from previous forms of language. We have been around. As a disabled woman from Indonesia, who is a migrant here and who truly hates the term "voice of the voiceless", as though those of us from stolen from communities need any kind of saviour to speak for us. I can only speak from my own perspective. So I'm going to take you on a bit of a journey, a travel through time that I think about most often. The journey of how we got from back then to right now and how colonialism has shaped it. How is it that you're finding yourself listening here to me, a very awkward person speaking into a microphone in Liverpool, who was born in the city of Jakarta, Indonesia, yet somehow speaks as though I'm a bookseller from New England, USA. By the way, New England! There's a colonial place name if there ever was, isn't there?! In order to bring you deeper into my vision of our collective joy, here is just one disabled person's view of history, of colonisation as theft, how it began and how it persists. For everyday very quietly, like many millions, I must reckon with how colonisation disabled me, and continues to injure both myself and my disabled communities in Indonesia and the UK and elsewhere.  We begin on dearly beloved islands. What we now know as the nation state of Indonesia, where I'm from is a group of over 17,000 islands. It is the country with the longest coastline in the world because of these islands. And despite what many Western maps will tell you, it is about as wide as the United States. Many people in the West I've spoken to are surprised to learn that Indonesia has the fourth largest population in the world, about 275 million people. A theft of dignity often comes in the form of minimising, in this case making smaller, the entirety of what one is. Indonesia has over 700 different languages and cultures, each with its own history through the millennia. There have been many different kinds of government including various kingdoms, religious systems, Buddhist, Hindu, Muslim, hundreds of kinds of indigenous etc. and ways that culture, language and faith and the arts evolved. Different waves of migration to these islands from what is now Vietnam, what is now India from what is now the Republic of China, from what is now Yemen, and many more places besides, created all the different Indonesian peoples we are. This is why the largest Buddhist temple on Earth Borobudur is on the Indonesian island of Java. It's why Bali is a Hindu Island. It's why I have an Arabic name and my sibling has a Sanskrit one. People existed as stewards to many hundreds of different biomes which are essentially geographically bound communities of living things, different songs, stories, visual art forms, dances arose from living in these very different biomes before European colonialism. Now there are many forms of inequality, and hierarchies existed before European colonisation of Indonesia. A kingdom after all, is a hierarchy in itself. But what gives me hope is that there were just as many names for and concepts for disabilities in each language and culture. And many of them I choose to believe were far more advanced in equality for us than contemporary versions in the Western world. For instance, two cultures that I identify as belonging to are Javanese and Minang. Minang culture is the largest matrilineal culture in the world, meaning the bloodline runs through women and traditionally, we are the ones who can inherit land and property. And Javanese culture has disabled Gods. Already, here, the best parts of my inherited cultures reflect a sophistication the Western world has not often recognised within us, a recognition of the Divine in disabled people and the power of women. And the best of these, these cultures do not reflect the patriarchal, ableist, colonial world they have been forced to conform to. In the 16th century, European quote "exploration and discovery" end quote, began in and around my aforementioned beloved Islands, which meant plunder, theft, in our case to gain control of spices as apparently the food in Europe was quite bland. Theft, which is the bedrock of colonisation, quote "discovery" end quote of places like what is now known as Australia, which belongs to the many First Nations communities that land was viciously and violently stolen from. People who prior to European so called "discovery" had been trading peacefully with people from what is now called Indonesia. Europeans, quote unquote "discovered" nothing here. And in what is now called Indonesia, all manner of Europeans began to see from us claiming our territories as theirs, forcing our ancestors to yield through brutal violence and assault. Whether the British the French, the Portuguese or the Dutch, though the Dutch stake their claim for the longest time. And the various seed of the vastly inhumane system known as colonial capitalism began to be hatched on a larger scale precisely on my aforementioned beloved islands, in what was then known as the Dutch East Indies. For the Dutch East Indies Company was the world's first mega corporation associated with a government, operating under the same violent means as today's mega corporations, oil companies like Shell and mining companies like Freeport McMoRan, both still very active in the same islands. They cut down and shipped off rainforests to build Europe, they forced people off our lands, they forced people to give up our languages and ways of life. They violently imposed Christianity. And the Dutch imposed human slavery in what is now Indonesia for two centuries. These are all processes that were also happening to the indigenous peoples of North and South America, and Africa, of course, with transatlantic slavery as a brutal cornerstone of the colonialism that was happening nearly everywhere on the continent, as mentioned in what is now known as Australia, in other parts of Asia, and what is now known as the Middle East. And by the way, try looking up the origins of these regions' names on colonial maps. The Far East quote unquote, is only the Far East if your vantage point is England after all. Of course, for the majority world as I like to refer to us, rather than the European white minority, none of this is news. There is no such thing as a "developing country". As Walter Rodney's book "How Europe Underdeveloped Africa" will tell you, as billions of people around the world will tell you, there are only historically stolen from communities and historic thieves. And as I'll discuss a bit later, there are certainly countries that are both, including my own. Disabled and/of Deaf people we're not merely witnesses to all of this colonisation. It must be reemphasized. Just like anyone else, disabled people fought for our lives and our families. We fought against enslavement. Throughout everything, Deaf and/or disabled pupils in the now Indonesian archipelago were forced to try to hide Deafness and/or disability for fear of more suffering, or could not possibly hide Deafness and /or disability and suffered more for it. And throughout everything, disabled and Deaf people's created art, and were part of art. The likelihood this art survived, was kept safe, and was distributed was made much smaller by the fact that we were Deaf and or disabled however it was created. We existed throughout these long centuries of brutality and did all the human things: loved, created, throughout. In fact, as my colleague Slamet Amex Thohari's research states, and as I have known all my life, but fully understood only in adulthood, Javanese people had and continued to have disabled gods and depictions of these disabled gods in art. In a little while, I will tell you what happened to this indigenous culture of celebrating disabled people as closer to the divine. After hundreds of years of violent struggle, of people being turned into political prisoners, exiled to other continents, which is why you have people from what is now Indonesia in Sri Lanka, South Africa and Suriname, all former Dutch colonies as well. After being assaulted, after being forced into saying there were only two genders, and one way to love, after having family stolen from us, having all our possessions taken, our rainforest and mangroves and oceans and rivers plundered, Indonesia became independent in 1945. In order to achieve this independence, 1000s of islands and hundreds of cultures had to be subsumed under the title of Indonesia to provide a united front. However, two short decades later, colonialism reared its ugly head again. And this time in diabolical fashion, using its old tactics to create yet another genocide. During the previous centuries of colonisation, the Dutch and other European nations use the tactic of "Divide et Impera", divide and rule, to turn all of our hundreds of cultures against each other, so we would be too busy fighting among ourselves to tackle the overarching European enemies. This time, in 1965, they did so again. With the backing and military support of the Western nations, including arms from the United Kingdom, and a hit list supplied by the US, a military dictatorship seized power in Indonesia, and killed off what would grow to be about 2 million people, in the name of quote unquote "anti-communism". The people who are killed in this genocide were not only suspected communists, including labour organisers, but ethnic, sexual and gender minorities, anyone considered a social threat or socially inferior. This includes, of course, Deaf and/or disabled people. This also includes anyone who was a feminist organiser. In the 1960s, before this genocide, the largest feminist movement in the world was in Indonesia. We native women had been organising national women's conferences from the 1920s even under Dutch colonialism. With the 1965 to 1966 genocide, the largest feminist movement in the world was literally killed off because we were deemed leftists, killed in violent fashion orchestrated by Western governments. These kinds of 20th century genocides and government overthrows in the name of the Cold War, in favour of capitalist military dictatorships were also going on widely elsewhere from Chile to Iran. The 65-66 genocide instituted General Suharto, and a military capitalist dictatorship allowing, the West to seize power over our resources once again, this time through multinational corporations like the aforementioned Shell, and Freeport McMoRan. Their stranglehold has never left. And this violent military capitalist dictatorship lasted until 1998. Leaving physical and or emotional scars on all of us old enough to remember living in it. However, none of us who call ourselves Javanese are colonised alone. Java is the most densely populated island in Indonesia, and especially under Suharto's military capitalist dictatorship, we are the colonisers of other islands. Furthermore, the Indonesian government, especially under the Western backed military dictatorship, has been past coloniser of places like East Timor, and is the current coloniser of Papuan territories, colonialism begets more colonialism. So I was born in the 1980s, in a hospital in Jakarta, Indonesia, that was known for having one really delicious satay street vendor parked outside it. Like everyone birthed in Indonesia for 33 years that General Suharto was president. I was born into a dictatorship that was the result of history of continued colonialism. We, the Javanese people, still have disabled gods, but because our understanding of disabled people as closer to the divine, was violently stamped out by Dutch missionary hospitals, and the medical model of disability brought by Europeans, I was born to a land where disabled people remain deeply marginalised. When my father got a scholarship to study in the US, I joined him for that time before we move back to Indonesia. And so at the age of three, I became bilingual. And that is why I sound like a bookseller from New England, the fact that education was understood to be better in Western countries, and that Western countries are able to provide scholarships to people from elsewhere, and that English has become a sign of the middle and upper classes and stolen from countries, is all a function of colonialism. The fact that when I got my own scholarship to study in the States and came back home to Indonesia, Indonesians were consistently paid lower rates than so called expats, aka Migrants Deluxe. Even those of us Indonesians who got Western educations is also a function of colonialism. That we who are Western educated were routinely paid more than those of us who went to Indonesian universities, and those who went to universities were paid more than those who did not go to a Western sanctioned institute of higher education is also all a result of colonialism, as is the fact that many of us become disabled from the stress of having to leave our countries and families for the chance of a more economically viable life. Let's take a moment to remember how joy feels in our bodyminds again, before we continue. So please close your eyes if you can, and 10 seconds of that warm cloud of joy again. 5, 4, 3, 2, 1  Part Two towardsness. So now we find ourselves in the so called present. Now here we are in Liverpool, England, where the docks traded in humanity itself. Stole children from parents and lovers from each other, forced people to do unimaginable things, which if perpetrated at all, for even one minute would be unconscionable, but was done over 100 years and 100 after that and more. The law forced people to give birth to life begotten by force with the understanding that life, these babies, were to be viewed as others' property their entire lives. Once again, I say all this not to assume you don't