listening
listening
KAI
I’ve spent my whole life cultivating my ability to listen:
to listen through my ears, my eyes, and the mirrors lining countless dance studios. Most importantly, I listened carefully to the desires (both overt and covert) of the teacher or director at the front of the room. I learned to do my best to become whatever it was they wanted: Usually that wasn’t a nearly-6-foot-tall Black woman, but I obviously couldn’t change that. So I listened for all the ways I could work harder and push myself further…further from myself and towards the image of an ideal I could never become. In all this listening, I didn’t learn how to listen to myself about how I wanted to move, when I’d had too much, when something hurt. I did not learn to listen as a tool for self-discovery. White supremacy feeds on us listening outwards, and never inwards. It trains people of color to ignore, to override our guts or soul nerve. I have spent decades ignoring my soul nerve, because if I had listened to it, I might have left this field I love, because it seems to constantly need me to teach it how to love me back, and I'm exhausted.
For me–for US–the path to liberation lies in repairing our relationship to listening inwards. To hearing ourselves and our bodies and trusting what they say to us because our guts already know the way to our liberation, the road map was passed down from our ancestors, it’s up to us to remember-to remind each other how to listen.
SARAH
Why do I practice listening? It's so I can let my listening change me, expand my perspective, and un-organize me into something new.
Here’s an example:
Kai and I are preparing for a workshop. She tells me, “Anti-racist work is not about white self improvement. It's about making the world a safer place for BIPOC” and almost instantly, my mind and body want to tell me a hundred different stories.
I can hear my own defensiveness, which says “Hey! I am trying to be better! I deserve healing too!” I notice my jaw tighten and my brows narrow.
I can hear my own breath get short.
Oh hey, I say to my breath and jaw and the part of me that thinks my healing can only happen in isolation. I hear you. I also want to hear Kai right now.
Kai’s voice and body are clear- like she is setting a boundary that has been wiggled around too many times, but not this time. I hear her speaking to me, directly to me. I feel the rope of connection she has just thrown into my hands, and it is up to me to grab hold.
Ok, now maybe I can be curious about the meaning of the words she has uttered with such clarity of voice and body.
What if my ability to listen right now interrupts and resists white violence? Maybe I can really hear Kai without striking back or running from her (both of which are strategies for silencing her). What if I stay with her words, with her voice and her body speaking the words, words that tell me about how she knows another world is possible? How might I listen in such a way that I take hold of the rope of connection and possibility Kai has thrown me? How could my listening change me, too?
Ok. What a gift. She’s not saying my healing in my own entanglement with racism is not important, she’s saying that I am actually re-centering white wellness over BlPOC life, when I leave my accountability to material changes for BIPOC at the “anti-racist learning door.”
So how are we going to design this workshop we are building together to highlight this pitfall and un-organize the white supremacist world that prioritizes white safety? That’s what this is actually about.
“Racism is a blunt tool that presents itself in blunt ways. The work of reorientation, of listening, of figuring out how we might even give ourselves a chance of arriving in a room together is at once subtle and blunt. It is intricate, delicate, demanding work. And it takes time.”
From Listening Tables by Rajni Shah, in Journal of Sonic Studies
Landmark mapping of one bundle of the vagus nerve