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Often when the radical voice speaks about domination, we are speaking to those who dominate. Their presence changes the nature and direction of out words. Language is also a place of struggle.
· I have been working to change the way I speak and write, to incorporate in the manner of telling a sense of place, of not just how I am in the present but where I am coming from, the multiple voices within me.
· Dare I speak to the oppressed and oppressor in the same voice? Dare I speak to you in a language that will move beyond the boundaries of domination - a language that will not bind you, fence you in, or hold you.
· The oppressed struggle in language to recover ourselves, to reconcile, to reunite, to renew. Our words are not without meaning, they are an action, a resistance.
· Private speech (black vernacular speech) in public discourse.
· In new cultural practices, cultural texts - in film, black literature, critical theory, there is an effort to remember that is expressive of the need to create spaces where one is able to redeem and reclaim the past, legacies of pain, suffering, and triumph in ways that transform present reality.
· “Our struggle is also a struggle of memory against forgetting”; a politicization of memory that distinguishes nostalgia, that longing for something to be as it once was, a kind of useless act, and that remembering that serves to illuminate and transform the present.
· Black folks coming from poor, underclass communities, who enter universities or privileged cultural settings unwilling to surrender every vestige of who we were before we were there, all “sign” of our class and cultural “difference”, who are unwilling to play the toll of “exotic other” must create spaces within that culture of domination if we are to survive while, our souls intact.
o Everywhere we got there is pressure to silence our voices, to co-opt and undermine them.
· Spaces of radical openness- without such spaces, we would not survive. Our living depends on our ability to conceptualize alternatives, often improvised. Theorizing this experience aesthetically, critically is an agenda for radical cultural practice.
o This space of radical openness is a margin - a profound edge. Locating oneself there is difficult yet necessary. It is not a “safe” place. One is always at risk. One needs a community of resistance.
· To be in the margin is to be part of the whole but outside the main body. We can enter the main body through labour but are always forced to return to the margin.
· We looked both from the outside in and from the inside out. We focused our attention on the center as well as the margin. We understood both. This mode of seeing reminded us of the existence of a whole universe, a main body made up of both margin and center. Our survival depended on an ongoing public awareness of the separation between margin and center and on ongoing private acknowledgement that we were a necessary, vital part of the whole.
· This sense of wholeness, impressed upon our consciousness by the structure of our daily lives, provided us with an oppositional world view - a mode of seeing unknown to most of our oppressors, that sustained us, aided us in our struggle to transcend poverty and despair, strengthened our sense of self and our solidarity.
· The marginality is more than a site of deprivation, it is also a site of radical possibility, a space of resistance. It was this marginality that I was naming as a central location for the production of a counter hegemonic discourse that is not just found in words but in habits of being and the way one lives. As such I was not speaking of a marginality one wishes to lose - to give up or surrender as part of moving into the center - but rather as a site one stays in, clings to even because it nourishes one’s capacity to resists. It offers to one the possibility of radical perspective from which to see and create, to imagine alternatives, new worlds.
· Understanding marginality as position and place of resistance is crucial for oppressed, exploited, colonized people. It we only view the margin as a sign, marking the condition of our pain and deprivation then a certain hopelessness and despair, a deep nihilism penetrates in a destructive way the very ground of our being. It is there in that space of collective despair that one’s creativity, one’s imagination is at risk, there that one’s mind is fully colonized, there that the freedom one longs for is lost.
· Bell Hooks- I am not trying to romantically reinscribe the notion of that space of marginality where the oppressed live apart from their oppressors as pure. I want to say that these margins have been both sites of repression and sites of resistance.
· Spaces can be real and imagined. Spaces can tell stories and unfold histories. Spaces can be interrupted, appropriated and transformed through artistic and literary practice.