Writing Race Roma 3D

Backdrop Madiba Long Live

When science, art, literature, and philosophy are simply the manifestation of personality they are on a level where glorious and dazzling achievements are possible, which can make a man’s name live for thousands of years. But above this level, far above, separated by an abyss, is the level where the highest things are achieved. These things are essentially anonymous. (Weil, 2012, from La Table Ronde; as cited in Dingle, 2012)

I was going to speak at a conference in Norway, May 2013. The conference was, among other things, about the silencing of the concept of “race/racism” and attempts to put it back into the dialogue on educational inclusion and social justice. Racism happens, but we seem to be hiding realities of the concept in political correct rhetoric about multiculturalism, diversity, tolerance and so on. At the conference, realities were depicted by well done facts . . . Critical interpretive research and theory have so far not changed reality it seems, and have not changed methodologies. It seems that masters’ tools cannot dismantle masters’ house.

One evening in January as I prepared for the conference, the Norwegian Broadcasting Cooperation (NRK) showed a documentary film about the former Swedish Prime Minister, Oluf Palme, and Bishop Desmond Tutu was asked about the importance of Oluf Palme in the antiapartheid struggle in South Africa? Nelson Mandela/Madiba spent 27 years in prison. Tutu answered,

Palme was a natural color blind and therefore an important reason why we did not turn anti-white.

This answer brought me right into complexities rather than pros and cons regarding the silencing of “race/racism” and attempts to put it back into the dialogue. It brought me into the importance of strengthening the subject position in both education and research. But I am not naïve. I am not trying to be politically correct. On the contrary it is the most difficult, aporetic ruinous Madiba way. I try. I work. Freedom, inclusion and tolerance located in acts. No distant view on own existence. Facts alone are not going to help us. There is, however, no lack of ontological weight here: The measure of void nothingness being “infinity, virtuality and justice” (Barad, 2012). There is thus substance/knowledge not always. Onto-stories are flattened stories but not, representing a sensible scaling down of thinking about what I can do differently. No monumentalizing. No big words, but my words only, my methods my words enabling me to change—me—something (more on this below). I am afraid of creating just another type of shame. How black is black? How white is white? Are there good and bad Roma? Good and bad Norwegians? And even silence might not sound the same for everyone. I acknowledge, however, that “race” and “racism” is relevant as research object all too often. Again, Racism happens. It is structural, systematic, and permeating cultures. We are the same . . . not . . . you and I. And I can only change me changing you.

Will improved public sanitary conditions invite more Roma to come and beg for money? This is one of our discussions. Are Roma spreading like virus across Europe due to the Schengen Convention? Is virus human? I give. I don’t. I walk around. I find it unpleasant that every 50 meters there is a beggar in my town. I give to the old lady. How is it possible that she is here? Today, a woman gave birth to a child 12 weeks before term. She was living in a tent in the woods outside of Oslo, our capital. She and the child can stay a couple of nights at hospital. It is an emergency situation (http://www.nyhetene24.no/norge/romkvinne-f%c3%b8dte-12-uker-for-tidlig-i-skogen-p%c3%a5-sognsvann-1). As EU citizens, Roma have the right to European Health Insurance Cards. ³ Formalities, however, prevent them from having such cards or their own governments have not given them their cards. I renewed my card yesterday. It took a social security number and a couple of clicks on my computer. Until 2011, Norway had granted 730 million Norwegian kroner to development projects in Romania. So far, only three projects worth 1.1 million targets Roma and their development. Another 2.3 billion are, however, now granted for the time period 2013-2016 (http://www.nyhetene24.no/norge/bare-11-av-730-millioner-g%c3%a5r-til-romfolk-1). My body rises up into my language sometimes and I am a problem even if I try not to.

—And Again Nobody’s Here but Me

I suppose I had always hoped that, through an act of will and the effort of practice, I might be someone else, might alter my personality and even my appearance, that I might in fact create myself, but instead I found myself trapped in the very character which made such a thought possible and such a wish mine. Any work dealing with questions of possibility must lead to new work. (Hejinian, 2002, p. 65)

I try to be ruin/ous . . . my body rises up into my language and I have nowhere to hide from myself. Unanswerable questions produce stuttering of interpretations, yet they cannot be dismissed.

I try to make my language stutter and interrupt its usual workings. I try to resist capturing Roma, Race, and I—X—by ideology or language: X resisting incorporation into representational schemata. Identity, so to speak, is out, simultaneously therefore revealing the routine machinations of representation. I am trying to avoid being trapped in language. For a language of inquiry problems, concepts and methods are therefore not discriminating enough.

When frontier lines between language and body are not properly drawn, and the body rises up into my language, I am, however, brought to the ruins. It is destructive, revealing, but what I need to build anew. Build something anew. Something that does not exist apart from the propositions that expresses it or the body from which it issues. It is something, a sound thus another language entering into a new relationship with my body. This something is sense or the pure event (Deleuze, 1990).

In my hometown, one of the churches is open all night long. It is a place for contemplation. It is a place for a chat and a cup of coffee if you need one, and if you just don’t want to go home to an empty lonely flat sometimes. I volunteer some nights as host. There are lonely people, tourists, drug addicts and people in search of company for a couple of hours. People are just waiting for the late buss home. The past 2 years, many Roma have slept on the church benches. One night, a woman of my age gave me a couple of roses. I said, “I cannot buy roses from you in the church. I am not allowed to in here.” She smiled and shook her head. “Gift church,” she said. “Put in vase to give nice.”

One way of doing this is to refuse to forget the bodily engagements of language: the way speech comes from the body—from the lungs and the entails, issuing from the mouth, yet tied to the movements of tongue. Speech affects other bodies, registering not only in the brain and the ears, but in the heartbeat and the skin, in the sensations that we learn, later, to label surprise, boredom, shame or interest. Indeed the predicament of stuttering encapsulates the entanglement of body and language—it lodges in the body but gets expressed in the language system. The stutter is a point of vibration and impasse where sounds is no longer a bodily noise—such as a cough or a yawn—but still cannot quite free itself from the body and deliver itself up to the discipline of syntax and the logic of propositions. (MacLure, 2011, p. 1000, italics in original)

Unmask, unmasked, unmasking myself. I body stutter language stage myself. I perform myself. It is a self body language 3D staging. I am digitalizing myself making pixeled particle self portraits playing with stereotypes. I do not want to tell anything that I have not or could not experience myself. Unmask, unmasked unmasking myself. It is not me.

New York–based artist, Cindy Sherman, ⁴ is famous for her photographs of women in which she is not only the photographer but also the subject. Her art might seem grotesque, but I think it can increase my self-insight and respect for others: Teaching me without didactics through magic mirrors how I act how I think. Introducing doubts about what I see. Vomit, blood, body parts, weird horror films . . . I am fascinated. I am behind and in front of the camera. I am starring myself without giving anything away.

Everyone thinks these are self-portraits but they aren’t meant to be. I just use myself as a model because I know I can push myself to extremes, make each shot as ugly or goofy or silly as possible. (http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/c/cindy_sherman.html#Bf2usPsScDf2OX4G.99)

Roma is intriguing and fascinating. This is partly because of their mysterious origins, and partly I guess, because of the romance of nomadism. They have always resisted assimilation. They have survived as a distinct people, but they have also been the victims of other people’s nationalism and xenophobia. At least 400,000 Roma were killed in Hitler’s concentration camps just for being Roma (http://holocaust-trampexx.blogspot.no/2008/06/holocaust-fakta.html). What might their future be within a Europe in strain? It is another way not lapsing into piety or romanticism.

I feel I’m anonymous in my work. When I look at the pictures, I never see myself; they aren’t self-portraits. Sometimes I disappear. (http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/c/cindy_sherman.html#Bf2usPsScDf2OX4G.99)

It is baroque perhaps. At least I try to open up a “baroque space” (Jones, Holmes, & MacLure, 2010; MacLure, 2011, 2013) offering fuzzy details and no simple linear logics. Random field notes. Disjointed, filled with unremitting dissonances, not providing accurate pictures. Constantly changing key and meter and speedily running through. Still, elaborated and with many details. Using exaggerated motions and clear, easily interpreted detail to produce drama, tension, exuberance, and grandeur—as in dignity. Confronting myself, hopefully nudging thinking outside of my habitual framing mechanisms. Losing my footing and forcing me to think. A baroque 3D writing style or, etymologically speaking, a “rough or imperfect pearl” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baroque). It is rewarding but intimidating and unpleasant and sometimes I almost “ontologically panic” (MacLure, 2006), but then again there is this “thereness” and “thingpower” (Jones, 2013) of things . . . roses . . . and the forces of this in me: “A pause, a rose, something on paper” (Hejinian, 2002, p. 7), and in this I enable myself, I possibilize myself. I formulate myself ontologically. I give. I don’t. I walk around. I give. I don’t. There are words and things, entanglements of matter and meaning. My individuation is always done in a collective.

In my hometown, we have a street magazine. It is sold by people, for example, incapable of regular employment. Drug addicts sell magazines instead of begging and worse, stealing. Half of the income goes directly to the seller. Lately, Roma also sell this magazine. I have not bought it lately.

  Language is one of the principle forms our curiosity takes.

The language of poetry is a language of inquiry.

Poetry takes as its premise that language (all language) is a

medium for experiencing experience. It provides us with the

consciousness of consciousness.

  To experience is to go through or over the limit (the word

comes from the Greek paras (term, limit)); or, to experience

is to go beyond where one is, which is to say to be beyond

where one was (re.the prepositional form peran (beyond)).

(Hejinian, 2000:344).

Becoming of the Same Place and Kinship

Logic tends to force similarities but that’s not what we mean by “sharing existence. (Hejinian, 2000, p. 392)

The word encounter told or untold, circulates in this article as a kind of Derridean (Derrida, 1993) Deleuzeguattarian (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987) refrain . . . all lines; an “aggregate of matters of expression,” or a repeating syntactical hyphen performing links between truly active moments as ongoing ethical linguistic as in poetical inquiry. Realist encounters with begging, beggars, Roma, race, my country my body me . . . Encounters and moments of incipience coming into what Hannah Arendt (1958) calls “the condition of natality,” the condition we all have in common and the importance of being exactly there (p. 177). I am witness. I am there. I try.

There are lines of affects and affects of force. There are lines of response and attention. There is noise moving, there is moving noise. And the possibilities we get in engagement. The main object is thus being interested and to engage: not only critique and extract but engage.

That is the force and “beingness” (Taylor, 2013) of an object: The force of “beingness” of engagement. It is a force of immanent living and live bodies: Entangled materialities and the physicality of relationship: The entangled materiality of engagement with/in Roma, race, I. Physical molecules of entanglements. It is a molecular movement entanglement as this beginning to be made of the same thing and of the same place. Entangled past present future stories our entanglements already entangled: Molecular kinships of people me in “throwntogetterness” (Taylor, 2013): Intra actions of always already entangled relations and constitutive inclusion (Barad, 2007, 2012).

Begging is legal in Norway. Making it illegal is another discussion that we have. Camping in public areas not regulated for such purposes is illegal in Norway. People who do can be chased away or physically removed. There are examples that Roma have collectively been arrested and chased (Phil, 2013). This is also one of our debates. What is individual protection and human rights? The other day, I read in the local newspaper that there was no invasion of beggars to our town, Trondheim, this summer (Skjetne, 2013). The police had expected a higher number of beggars than last year, but no increase in numbers could be registered. The same goes for the number of beggars in Oslo. There is no invasion. In addition, in my town, the Salvation Army offers free food, a shower and laundry facilities 3 days a week. In Oslo, you can now get a place to sleep for only 15 kroner a night. That is approximately two and a half U.S. dollars or two Euros. “There is room for no more than 30 Roma in Trondheim. If more come they get less money,” says Lisbeth Klevland who is the local Salvation Army administrator to the newspaper. The police say that their earlier warnings about a possible increase in the number of Roma leading to an increase in petty crime, was unsubstantiated. “We have no reason to say that more criminal acts are committed by foreign citizens,” says Bjørn Are Kattem at Trondheim Police district.

One can’t say that being human is voluntary but it does tell a story that to another human won’t seem pointless

To another human one acts one intervenes. (Hejinian, 2000, pp. 394-395)

Transversal subjectivities and risky becomings: Something is starting to “glow” (MacLure, 2013). There are thus micro-intensity moments of learning again in this cartography of my embodied and embedded positions: Learning the destruction of words and the potentiality of virtuality. I am problem not I am Roma not. I am provocation. I am you we, they, us, he, she, it in my micro-ontology of self making. I try to live with/in science collectively in this onto-story of mine. Meeting the stuff of my research memories, hunches, processes, patterns, trial-and-error practices. The failure encounters that constitutes me, and now sometimes I too disappear.

Identity being out, then there is politics: “Defending the rights of Roma is a necessary defense of Norwegian rule of law” (Phil, 2013). Reason—this something-new-glow operates in the border between concepts. In the empirical in the material I see me. The ontological turn is an ethical turn. It is a formulation of the subject ontologically. The way I see this it is the ontology of “I” and human dignity.

From 2006 to 2012, a total of 16,700 Roma have moved from Romania and Bulgaria to Berlin, the capital of Germany. It is a permanent move toward better living conditions. “The answers and tasks are education, employment, healthcare and housing” (Evenrud, 2013, p. 23). Solutions must be found locally, but this also has a European dimension:

To stabilize the situation for Roma in their home countries and give them the possibilities of a life in dignity, EU countries like Romania and Bulgaria must be supported. They must also be pressured to execute the help and support programmes that are already there. These possibilities are often not used [says integration administrator, Dilek Kolat]. (Evenrud, 2013, p. 23)

This is ultimately about a Europe in transition, about a possibilizing of Roma ontology.

My Practices of Difference, My Language of Inquiry

One begins as a student but becomes a friend of clouds: Back and backward, why, wide and wider. Such that art is inseparable from the search for reality. (Hejinian, 2002, p. 119)

My imaginary of future research on Roma/race issues is therefore to be showing me through the political potential of intensities of attention and engagement, connections, and disturbances thus my will and authenticity; the political power of my 3D writing. Crafting of text is important. Creating contaminated texts that is, not knitting together but pulling apart then knit together and the methods I decreate and the changes in/with me: My shifty assemblage amalgamations connecting with and speaking to my desires waiting for the right words to come. Giving the moments a form which includes us in/and the unforeseen presenting itself with/in/through iterative processes and nonrepresentational decentered language.

Ultimately, this is about the destruction of concepts and data or virtual empirical materiality; language in a matter of sense: My mortality, my dignity, your dignity again and again, and ours together. I try. Sometimes, I am surprised. It is about creating exceeding forms of contracts. An eventful woman I am: The spectacular reality the manifold.