The concept 'speed-dating' we engaged in last week made me want to emphasise on something that I don't consider nearly enough in my everyday life, which is the choice of language and the nuance it brings. I was given the concept 'stranger' to discuss. It made me want to consider how one can be a stranger without being a foreigner. I am from here, I was born here, I was raised here, I went to school here. However, I have often felt like a stranger in this city, in this country, even in the family I was born in. It's almost a cliché, but High school especially has the power to make someone feel like a stranger in known hallways, quickly feeling like an outcast if you have the misfortune of being the least bit different from the mass. Everyone has felt like this, that I am sure of, even the people whom I thought fitted in so amazingly. It must be somewhat cliché because it is somewhat true. We all felt like this at one point. A stranger though not a foreigner. I had associated these two words because in French stranger will be translated to 'étranger' and foreigner will be as well. In all the wonder of the language, French still has not found a way to bring nuance to those two concepts, which are, to me, wildly different even though they share a word. English provides this nuance that I think is so important, however. The discussion brought up, for one thing, lots of feelings from High school as well as a clear will to nuance my thoughts more.
Errantry (errance) 18- errantry does not proceed from renunciation nor from frustration regarding a supposedly deteriorated (deterritorialized) situation of origin; it is not a resolute act of rejection or an uncontrolled impulse of abandonment. - The thought of errantry is a poetics, which always infers that at some moment it is told. The tale of errantry is the tale of Relation. 21- The thinking of errancy conceives of totality but willingly renounces any claims to sum it up or possess it. 20- The thought of errantry is not apolitical nor is it inconsistent with the will to identity, which is, after all, nothing other than the search for a freedom within particular surroundings. Rhizomatic thought / rhizome 18- the rhizome- prompting the knowledge that identity is no longer completely within the root but also in Relation. Poetics of Relation 11- each and every identity is extended through a relationship with the Other 20- in the poetics of Relation, one who is erra...
Beautifully put! I have also lived with similar feelings, which led me to write my first book - Ephemeral Territories, which was about the concept of home and errancy. Yesterday I had a stark reminder of what it feels like to be named as the one who does not belong (for me, a lot of the "not belonging" in Quebec comes from having an anglophone name and speaking the between of a multilingual family despite having French as a mother tongue. I can only wonder what it feels like if you add race to the equation). The situation was a PhD defense where I was the external examiner. The main concept of the PhD was the notion of the common/s. This was addressed though sound - specifically sound practices that "activate" an environment like sound walks. In my questions I noted that it might be interesting to think about the "undercommons," particularly in light of those kinds of bodies that might not so readily be allowed to activate, let alone "create" a commons in Montreal and more broadly in Europe (where these artists were from). The artists that were mentioned were all white and I was really wondering whether this kind of artistic practice could even work with bodies that are considered anathema to "the" commons as it is defined by the kind of structural racism we live with. And of course I wondered how the common would include them since the common at the heart of community has always been based on exclusion. I wondered (in my question) as well how an attention to the kinds of books we are reading (Moten, Crawley, Glissant, Weheliye etc) on sound might complicate the reading the candidate was proposing (particularly since the candidate made it clear that her work was to move us from noise to sound in the creation of a common/s), a move itself contrary to the emphasis on noise in all the books we are reading this term. [the reason I am saying common/commons is that in french "le common" does not distinguish between the two as readily and the candidate was not clear on this point (which has real repercussions conceptually, but I let it go)] After the defense, a white Québecois man, in his 50s, I would say, came to talk to me. He said he found my engagement interesting, particularly in light of the way anglophones don't understand the difference between interculturalism and multiculturalism - the latter of which he defined as "métissage." Although we were speaking French and this has happened to me many many times over the years, it took me a while to understand that what he was saying was that I couldn't understand the common/s the candidate was discussing because I was anglophone and therefore intercultural, not multicultural. Taken aback, I turned the conversation to racism, asking him how he addressed that issue given his stance. He told me that racism only came from anglophones. That the francophones in Quebec weren't racist precisely because of their understanding of multiculturalism-métissage. I am sad to say that I didn't take the first opportunity to leave, that I stayed and wasted a lot of energy trying to convince him of his errors. I was shaken afterwards. I know this is not a new story for anyone who is visibly different in Québec (I see this happen every single time my half-Persian partner speaks French). I am just sharing it to remind us that if this can happen to me with regularity (I wrote a PhD about it, after all!), imagine what is happening to PoC in Montreal and in Quebec more broadly every single day.
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