I have been saying things like this: Aspects of the adoration of Cajuns to which I object include the ubiquity of the fleur-de-lys and the nostalgia for empire, along with the desire to parlay that into becoming kings in a new, corporate empire. If you want credit for being a poor peasant and you’ve decided to become a king’s man, you don’t have my solidarity, even if I, a member of the literate classes for centuries, am more privileged in some ways than you. But no amount of gumbo, beer, or neo-folk music can compensate for what has been gleefully done to the environment here in the last hundred years. And you are far from the only people who have suffered language oppression, and you gave yours up easily. The religion in which you wrap yourself has produced some of the worst pedophiles, and has done so locally. And I enjoy, appreciate, and participate in Cajun culture FAR more than do those who tout certain clichés like new discoveries. I abhor the exceptionalism and the abuses committed in its name.
I feel as though I am in a life-or-death battle with the revered Cajun culture, trying to save my life by no longer allowing abuse, or internalizing it when it happens. But what about doing as GS says, allow myself to be the one defeated? He says things like this: If you stand on the side of the defeated then you will be with the defeated. Which is also to say, to some extent, defeated. That doesn’t change that we are building. Remember Petrow, who stopped the nuclear apocalypse. Or not. Who’s to say. Where’s the story.
I am not convinced I have actually learned a great deal new from my distress of the past two weeks. The main takeaway is realizing how wounded I am and I am not sure the wound can be healed, just cared for, not protected in the sense of hiding but in the sense of being treated tenderly.
Being the one defeated and respecting that, still going on, being solidary but not sacrificing, not trying to have constructive engagement with the forces of ill any longer (in my psychoanalytic terms, not trying to earn anything from my mother any longer, not emulating my father any longer; these are the things I wanted to learn when I went to analysis half my life ago, and was not allowed to learn, but that I needed then and now still need). Politically, standing with the defeated and thus being one of them.
Today’s text is on Deleuze and Guattari and I should read it seriously, sweetly.
Axé.
coldhearted scientist وداد 