Nafisa grew up in Queens NY, got some sort of degree in Ethnic Studies and Political Economy, worked in youth organizing/nonprofit, then moved to Kolkata for a fellowship. Somehow she ended up in Atlanta, getting a masters in development practice. Ah, I was thumbing through a book that will remain nameless (as people will be brutal and judgmental if I share) and I couldn’t stop laughing at myself for underlining very specific lines in what otherwise is a long discussion on privatization and “modernization”/industrial development in the global south:
“Empathy would lead to passion, to incandescent anger, to wild indignation, to action. Concern, on the other hand, leads to articles, books, PhDs, fellowships.”
and it continues
”..concern has become a professional enterprise, a profitable business that’s protecting its interests like any other.”
Protest/dissent as “civilized”. You know, I was skirting around this conversation with someone just the other night, and there is no high idealism I have for well-mannered wide-eyed inquiry. Inquiry and research never naturally lead to politicized action. And concerning academic specialization, the conflict we all know, the reason “demystification” and epistemology is something a scholarship or $40,000USD degree gets you:
“Not explaining something is a way of wresting power and holding on to it”
“Today’s world of specialization is bizarre. Specialists and experts end up severing the links between things, isolating them, actually creating barriers that prevent ordinary people from understanding what’s happening to them.”
Another sort of intimacy we all aim for. The intimacy that connects oppression and structures of the world to the everyday. God, the way my organization grapples with developing critical consciousness of the community is infinitely interesting, and uncomfortable. There is a tension that is raised between becoming politically, socially and sexually aware of all the personal violence inflicted on you, then that familiar not-so-elegant jump from the internalized to collectivized identity or understanding how gender, class or caste operates. We have a lot of issues regarding trauma in this regard, because a lot of the very active community leaders are survivors and their particular justice-seeking motive is often marred by an over-active personal vendetta against the state and other patriarchal symbols. Then the issue of being critically conscious but remaining materially poor. Institutionally, our organization too is conflicted in terms of what to focus on. I mean I’m imposing conflict, they probably don’t see it that way. We have two rhetorics going, one is grassroots gender-based organizing and the other is livelihood. I’m curious to see or at least talk about how you reconcile consciousness and poverty when we have one line of ‘empowered’ women gaining access to various income opportunities, then the highly-politicized women who are not economically stable but entrenched in this invaluable work. Work I haven’t actually ever explained in this blog but it’s mind blowing (they deal with the courts, the police, the panchayat, the political partys and challenge them with their own agenda of justice for survivors of rape, domestic abuse, dowery, forced abortion, sexual discrimination and exploitation ect.)
Very quickly, today a board member introduced herself by saying :
That has got to be the best intro I’ve ever heard. Everyone at work as been really wonderful and have been not so subtle in inviting me to extend my fellowship, and to do my higher study (hehhehheh, little do they know..) using my NGO. So options? Continue doing what started doing (..move to brooklyn, read books and organize around racial and economic justice), get a research degree and become totally inaccessible for 4years only to ‘return’ with another mask (plop myself in Dhaka or West Bengal, get loads of money to consult and launch an introspective-but-productive oddesy on identity-globalizationa-violence), suck-it-up and get professional degree just to keep doing what i’m doing (be in bigger apartment in brooklyn but eating the organic shit), or all of the above. EVERYTHING IN OTHER WORDS.
Back to where I started.
