Raoul Wieland tries to balance his natural-born privileges with his own sadness and feelings of being unmoored to any larger social issue.
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This week I presented in front of my class. The topic – artistic responses to oppression. Yes, it was one of those classes. For the last few months we had been discussing civil war, gender based violence, globalization, international trade, neo-colonialism, racism and the list goes on and on. We were supposed to think critically, and there was a flavor of “here is what is wrong and what ought to be done differently” in the air.
Who was I, a middle class Caucasian male attending a prestigious University, to bring up stories of pain and suffering and healing of people I did not know, would never know and did not have the capacity to know?
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I had viewed the presentation as the highlight of the course. I started by saying, “Theory is useful, but it lacks the human element, and for me, artists are the ones who make theory come alive. They remind you that for every grand political theory there are thousands of lives who couldn’t care less about what was being thought about in some distant university. They lived – actually lived – what you were good naturedly conversing about with your classmates”.
I had picked Sierra Leone’s long and brutal civil war as my case study and spoke about the power of poetry to give voice to unimaginable human traumas. I brought a book and quoted how poets found healing in collective words, documenting in bits and pieces both violence and small spaces of peace. I mentioned how their lines sang pain, expressed sorrow and the loss of innocence and how they groped for pathways home that no longer seemed to exist.
I was idealistic and proclaimed how poetry does not cover the continuous swells of experiences as if they did not exist, but it keeps noticing, making it the historical enemy of human forgetfulness.
I talked about voice and meaning and pain and healing and at the end the class was silent, then applauded and I waited for questions. One such question had been forming in my mind as I presented and I was dreading having to answer it.
Who was I, a middle class Caucasian male attending a prestigious University, to bring up stories of pain and suffering and healing of people I did not know, would never know and did not have the capacity to know? Who was I to hoist poetry up and up and state how powerful it could be as a means to heal, find voice and find meaning?
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When I finally faced myself that afternoon, sitting by the Vancouver ocean, listening to the waves, it was with cynicism and my smile was sad. Ever since I had stepped into the role of a student and had written my first paper on subject [fill in the blank] , I had been discussing someone, somewhere, far removed from my reality. As much as we were taught to be dispassionate observers of facts and truth(s) I couldn’t help but feel that we were violating someone’s story, speaking for them, about them, but never with them. Our perception of their life, as experienced through teachings and readings, became, for all intents and purposes, their life.
I say “they”, you see. I have no names to share. I only know ‘these people’ as some ‘distant other’.
I come and speak from a place of privilege. An interesting word, “privilege”. I read somewhere that for a straight ‘white’ male in my position, privilege is like living life at a default setting (yes, a video game analogy) of easy while all others have their life set to medium or difficult. Makes sense to me.
Where does this leave me, however? Sometimes I feel sad, depressed, lonely, frightened; sometimes I cry or can’t sleep at night or feel utterly lost. In such situations, I had made it a game to tell my vulnerable self that whatever I was feeling was not nearly as bad as what someone else, somewhere else was going through. Therefore, I ought to… oh no, “man up”, and get on with my life.
Over time this strategy has come back to haunt me. Now, whenever these feelings come creeping up I look at them with disgust. They are illegitimate. It is as if I cannot allow myself to feel them because I, in some way, do not do them justice. My pain, so a voice says, is small compared to other pains and laughable. So I attempt to rid myself of all these ridiculous feelings and shun them. I am an individual of privilege; I ought not to feel self-pity, a self-pity that seemed to be an affront to everyone that suffered more and deeper.
This has made things build up within me and I feel tense; restless. I want to escape and yell, scream and break free… But how?
To this day, I still do not really know how to deal with this seeming contradiction. On the one hand there is me, privileged, healthy, well-off and living a rather decent life and on the other hand there is also me, feeling what I feel of sadness, loneliness, despair…
I have an inkling that what seems like a contradiction might actually not be one at all and that there is no patent on what can or cannot be called a legitimate feeling. The poet Rainer Maria Rilke once said that “the point is, to live everything”. Perhaps what he meant was that our feelings need to be lived to the fullest? That they ought to be given the space to develop and be given respect as something that is undeniably part of ourselves and therefore, sacred?
Photo: Pixabay
You can approach life through the notion that you matter and that your right to self-express is inherently worthy of exercise, or you can approach it through the notion that ritual self-torture and self-abasement is necessary conditions of being a worthwhile person, and life will never force you to change, you have to change the script. “Oh my parents had some extra money therefore nothing I say matters, who I am to talk”—cut that crap out. There’s some validity to the notion of intergenerational sins and unearned privilege and so on, but do not allow those notions to ride you… Read more »
Hi Raoul ✺” Ever since I had stepped into the role of a student and had written my first paper on subject [fill in the blank] , I had been discussing someone, somewhere, far removed from my reality. As much as we were taught to be dispassionate observers of facts and truth(s) I couldn’t help but feel that we were violating someone’s story, speaking for them, about them, but never with them. Our perception of their life, as experienced through teachings and readings, became, for all intents and purposes, their life.”✺ Raoul, who says you can not speak with them… Read more »
The one percent ARE privileged. I tend to think hashing out all the other privilege differentials is a merry-go-round we should get off of. I’m suspicious of “privilege” because it came out of Wellsley, an elite location itself. Every time I’ve heard the term used, it’s been by some one richer than I (and white.) I tend to think better economic equity (domestic and global) would solve these problems. I was also a university professor, but overwhelmingly taught working class students. The privilege discourse won’t work on them.
Exactly, the entire concept is flawed because it’s alienating to the people who aren’t causing the problems in the first place. Every time someone tells me I have privilege.. I laugh.. and I think back to the fact I went to a school where the roof leaked, I was on free meals, my mom had to use wic and food stamps to keep us fed and we often had holes in our shoes and clothes that were ratty cause there was no money.. I’m still struggling now, just the same as all the other people around me seem to be.… Read more »
No.
As a white male, according to many, I am “privileged.” I hope my my voice is legitimate but appears in many cases isn’t legitimate simply because I’m a white guy. That’s not to say it’s never legitimate but as they say, people do judge a book by it’s cover.
That’s not to say it’s never legitimate but as they say, people do judge a book by it’s cover. And that’s a problem. On one hand we’re supposed to respect the perspectives and experiences of others but as soon we can fit someone into a category judging by cover is exactly what happens. That’s why people get so hung up on privilege this and privilege that. It saves them the trouble of actually learning about someone. Why take the time to actually learn about someone when you can just decide you know their life by seeing what group(s) they fit… Read more »
Males as a category aren’t privileged.
I guess you could always make yourself into a quadraplegic and burn all your skin off.. then you’d be puce color and disabled.. no more privledge.. Or you know.. you could quit listening to a bunch of bullshit and just accept that you had nothing to do with creating the inequalities of the world, but simply sticking your head in the sand won’t make them go away either.
If “Straight white males” & “Straight white females” aren’t allowed to teach about Seirra Leone.. how the hell are people in predominantly white countries supposed to learn about Seirra Leone?
Without empathy there can be no healing. If you can’t feel for the plight of people you have or haven’t met then you wont act to make sure it never happens again. I would argue the voice of those with empathy is as important as those in pain. Between them lies the middle ground of acceptance, friendship, forgiveness and tolerance.