Diving Deep Into Oppositional Beliefs

Abstract

In this article using notions of liminality, I evoke Anzaldúa’s theorizing of nepantlera to demonstrate the pain caused by various oppositional discourses and to posit that self-healing is the key to transformative works in social justice. Beyond discussing border crossings, multiplicity, and disrupting polarizing binaries, I enact the path of becoming a nepantlera by demonstrating trans-temporal healing through writing a letter to my younger self. Noting that relational liberatory discourses are inevitably entangled, I invite myself and the readers to dive deep into our consciousness to explore how pain and suffering may function to forge paths for healing and transformation.

Keywords

liminality nepantla nepantlera transnational hyphen post-oppositional healing de/colonizing

Lokaloka. I came across this term recently and learned, from a brief entry in Wikipedia, that it refers to “a world and no world.” Lokaloka “is a magnificent belt of mountains girdling the outermost of the seven seas and dividing the visible world from the region of darkness. It is believed to be ten thousand yojanas¹ in breadth, and as many in height” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lokaloka).

As a woman from Kolkata, India, who has lived in Canada and the United States since my teenage years, I have read Hindu scriptures from an early age. I sit with this definition, thoughts swirling in my head: of a world and no world, of light and darkness, of natural and artificial boundaries. I explore this idea of Lokaloka further and find that it is mentioned in one of the ancient Vedic texts in India, Śrīmad-Bhāgavatam, a part of the Purāṇas (Dasi, 2012; Prabhupāda, 2012). Śrīmad-Bhāgavatam contains the unfolding of the stories manifested from 10 reincarnations of the Hindu God Krishna. These stories offer connections between materials and transcendental existences, based on the experiences of every reincarnated avatar of Krishna. The term Lokaloka appears in the fifth canto, in Chapter 20, which focuses on the structure of the universe. There, it is explained that Lokaloka is this belt of mountains that act as an in-between space between a world with sunlight and a world without (Prabhupāda, 2012).

My head exploded with the countless possible applications of this concept to my work with transnational women who come to the United States from India to pursue a graduate education. I have worked with these women specifically during their first year in the United States to identify what stood out to them, what looked awry, how they conceptualized who they were in relation to two (or more) nation states, which discourses they used to inform themselves while navigating formal and informal academic spaces, and how they understood notions of home.

Lokaloka reminded me of liminality (Turner, 1964) and the concept of nepantla. Anzaldúa (2002) defines nepantla as

a Náhuatl word meaning tierra entre medio. Transformations occur in this in-between space, an unstable, unpredictable, precarious, always-in-transition space lacking clear boundaries. Nepantla es tierra desconocida, and living in this liminal zone means being in a constant state of displacement—an uncomfortable, even alarming feeling. Most of us dwell in nepantla so much of the time it’s become a sort of “home.” (p. 1)

As I sat with these concepts merging and intersecting, I began to question the false binary oppositions between First and Third Worlds, Us and them, mind and body, intellect and emotions. They seem like binary concepts, in opposition, or perhaps in hyphenated relationship with each other. Michelle Fine (1994) and Kamala Visweswaran (1993) offer insights to working the hyphen as a qualitative researcher and a feminist postcolonial critic, respectively. Their work demonstrates the possibilities of movement one can make between these oppositional discourses. Fine discusses the hyphenated relationship between the Self and the Other in qualitative research where she reminds us that working this hyphen means “reconciling the slippery constructions of Self and Other and the contexts of oppression in which both are invented” (p. 78). This fluid nature of Self and Other, one a constructed version of another, could be used to trace the ways in which this fluidity creates the illusion of stable, separate, oppositional ideas, and consciousness. There is value in Fine’s call for tracing how dominant discourses inscribe our knowledge making, our positionalities, and how our social justice work seamlessly represents the hyphen of Self–Other. Fine reminds that “our work will never arrive but must always struggle between” (p. 75). One way that we can work the Self–Other hyphen as suggested by Fine could be

to engage in social struggles with those who have been exploited and subjugated, we work the hyphen, revealing far more about ourselves, and far more about the structures of Othering. Eroding the fixedness of categories, we and they enter and play with the blurred boundaries that proliferate. (p. 72)

I would add that these boundaries are always already blurred. It is our desire for something stable and fixed informed by our prior histories and educational background that lead us to participate in knowledge making that sustain an illusory separation between oppositional spaces and discourses. This illusory separation is further evident in Visweswaran’s (1993, 1994) work, as a postcolonial critic, marked as a female, Brown body in spaces where her body and her work are positioned to work the hyphen. Marked by the hyphenated term Indian-American, Visweswaran (1994) notes the liminality of here and there, both geographically and ontologically. She contrasts her hyphenated marker with African American as she elaborates:

In the African-American context, the notion of a “diaspora” with “a land of return” is problematic. Such a notion must be located equally in post-civil war “repatriation” schemes launched by whites to return American blacks to Africa, and in the social movements of Marcus Garvey and others who viewed this return as a form of empowerment. Then too there is the fact that few Anglo-Americans recognize the political etymologies of the words “Native American” or “American Indian.” Five hundred years after Columbus, too few “Indian-Americans” recognize how their hyphen participates in the erasure of those on this continent long before Columbus got lost. (p. 302)

The messiness of working the hyphen demonstrates the ways in which oppressive and oppositional discourses are always already connected within the broader local, national, and global discourses. Perhaps a social justice agenda using critical methodologies could focus on the continuous movement of and relationship between/within oppressive and oppositional discourses and the consequent manifestation of social conditions of inequity.

Indeed the notion of nepantla, the space of Lokaloka, and the predicaments of working the hyphen relate well with Turner’s (1964, 1970) work on liminality when he uses the phrase “betwixt and between” to describe the condition of participating in human rituals where people “are neither living nor dead from one aspect, and both living and dead from another. Their condition is one of ambiguity and paradox, a confusion of all the customary categories” (pp. 96-97). Working the hyphen or liminality then can be an indicator of movement between these categories and understanding the fluid nature of these categories, instead of imagining them to be permanently stable and fixed. I have argued elsewhere about this aspect of movement in the experiences of those who can be seen as transnationals as they shuttle these “betwixt and between” spaces (Bhattacharya, 2009).

However, I do not want to create a utopian essentialization of this liminal shuttling by ignoring the violence that can come with working the hyphen. Hyphens are never innocent, nor are researchers who are working the hyphens. Naser Hussein discusses the violence of the hyphen:

Hyphens are radically ambivalent signifiers, for they simultaneously connect and set apart; they simultaneously represent both distance and connection, belonging, and not-belonging. What is even more curious about a hyphenated pair of words is that meaning cannot reside in one word or the other, but can only be understood in movement. “Post-colonial” then suggests a movement away from and yet a vital connection to colonialism. (p. 10)

Therefore, when we work any hyphens, whether they are positionalities of the researcher or hyphens that identify our ambivalent states of being, we are working in movement between the thresholds of multiple worlds and with every visit, these worlds and our understandings of them change, which can create a sense of crisis, a lack of anchoring, a sense of belongingness, perhaps contributing to a need to assimilate/accommodate to something that mitigates such ontological assault, albeit temporarily, while we situate ourselves voluntarily in oppressive spaces and discourses.

I wondered what might we do if we think beyond opposition, beyond the struggle of resisting and being complicit in my own resistance and oppression. I started to accept all forms of opposition, moving into what AnaLouise Keating (2013) describes a state of post-opposition. Post-oppositional theorizing carves a space beyond opposition, beyond binary discourses, even if these oppositions and discourses are against dominant, socially oppressive structures. Keating explains how she understands post-oppositional theorizing:

I interrogate some of the diverse forms that binary-oppositional thought can take while resisting the (very strong) temptation to react oppositionally. I aspire to offer viable additions and alternatives to the oppositional forms of consciousness and politics that currently drive social-justice theorizing, activism, and academic disciplines. (p. 5)

Adding to the discussion of post-oppositional consciousness, Keating (2013) introduces the idea of theorizing liminality with the notion of thresholds. She states,

Threshold theories inspire us to be bold, to dream big, to affirm the possibility of transformation, to envision radical change. Thresholds mark crisis points, spaces where conflicting values, ideas, and beliefs converge, unsettling fixed categories of meaning. These theoretical thresholds open up dangerous, uncomfortable locations—for both readers and writers. (pp. 10-11)

In this state of mind, I began to think of suffering: first of self, and then of the manifested suffering around me, and the suffering I have chosen to study in my career. How do we understand suffering and healing from this state of non-oppositional ontology, informed by the intersecting understandings of threshold theories, transnational feminism, de/colonizing epistemologies, and spirituality? I evoke the term spirituality here to denote the understanding of human spirit with a sense of interconnectedness between the living and the non-living. Keating (2013) links interconnectedness to threshold theories to identify possibilities toward healing.

Threshold theories are premised on a shared commonality (not sameness)—a complex commonality so spacious that it embraces difference—even apparently mutually exclusive differences. By positing complex, contradictory commonalities, threshold theories—and the relational thinking that they produce and on which they rely—enable us to redefine and reconceive conflicts and fragmentation. When we view conflicts from these relational perspectives, we simultaneously acknowledge and look beneath surface judgments, rigid labels, and other divisive ways of thinking. We don’t reject these divisions, but we don’t become trapped in them, either. We seek commonalities and move toward healing. (p. 12)

In this article, I explore these ideas specifically, and invite readers to identify their own relational spaces, allowing contradictions to co-exist, and explore healing possibilities from fragmentations. I begin with a journey that navigates the ways in which I understand key concepts used in this article. Next, I write a love letter to my 6-year-old self to demonstrate suffering, healing, and transformation existing in complexity and contradiction, informed by de/colonizing epistemologies, non-oppositional approaches, and transnational feminism. Finally, I close with an invitation to reflect on the new alliances that can be forged by building on the bridge work accomplished by those who came before me (Anzaldúa & Keating, 2002; Moraga & Anzaldúa, 1984).

Navigating Border Crossings

I am not good with labels. I offer situated understandings so as not to endow the concepts listed below with any notions of permanency. From the space of liminality, of threshold theories, of in/visible worlds, I offer a temporary framing of concepts that will inevitably cross the boundaries within which I frame them. Indeed I stand with Anzaldúa as she reminds me to accept the states of shuttling between multiple worlds, transcending beyond the restrictive boundaries of being labeled. She states,

You say my name is ambivalence? Think of me as Shiva, a many-armed and legged body with one foot on brown soil, one on white, one in straight society, one in the gay world, the man’s world, the women’s, one limb in the literary world, another in the working class, the socialist, and the occult worlds. A sort of spider woman hanging by one thin strand of web.

Who, me confused? Ambivalent ? Not so. Only your labels split me. (Anzaldúa, 1981, pp. 45-46)

I imagine my work to lie in web of consciousness, entangled in multiple discourses, social movements, and acts of accommodations and resistances. From such a space, I posit that there are no pure colonizing or decolonizing epistemologies or ontologies—only intersecting and relational ones. I write de/colonizing discourses with a slash to indicate the interdependence of the two discourses and reflect their entangled relationship, much like Lokaloka and nepantla represent contradictory concepts that are held in transition, in a state of permanent shuttling, in in-between spaces, with blurred boundaries that are often crossed (Bhattacharya, 2009).

However, I am aware that these terms (colonizing and decolonizing) are taken up differently by scholars invested in the critique of colonialism. Recently, a journal editor asked me to explain how my understanding of decolonization is not a metaphor and how I would respond to Tuck and Wang’s (2012) critique², through which my use of decolonization might be viewed as a metaphor by some. As I read the editor’s comments, my stomach began to knot up. I felt anxiety building up in my being, and I even felt anger. Non-opposition and contemplative practices have taught me to step back in such a moment and observe myself, as if I am a character in my own story. As I began to do so, I realized I wanted to resist taking refuge in an oppositional discourse. I did not want to discuss how separate, different, or misunderstood my work was in relation to someone else’s work. I wanted to talk about how spaces could be created for multiple ways of understanding de/colonizing epistemologies and engaging in de/colonizing projects. For me to do this, I did not need to negate, critique, or separate my work from someone else’s. Rather than constructing my work in opposition to the existing body of work, my work can be seen as an addition or contribution to it.

I honor the work of Tuck and Wang. I understand that they are fighting for a pragmatic, materialistic understanding of decolonization and advocating projects grounded in the repatriation of indigenous life and land. My work aligns with the views of decolonizing methodologies and epistemologies proposed by Linda Tuhiwai Smith (1999/2012) and Gloria Anzaldúa. Smith reminds us of the powerful excesses of colonizing approaches to research when she states,

The word itself, “research,” is probably one of the dirtiest words in the indigenous world’s vocabulary. When mentioned in many indigenous contexts, it stirs up silence, it conjures up bad memories, it raises a smile that is knowing and distrustful. It is so powerful that indigenous people even write poetry about research. The ways in which scientific research is implicated in the worst excesses of colonialism remains a powerful remembered history for many of the world’s colonized peoples. It is a history that still offends the deepest sense of our humanity. Just knowing that someone measured our “faculties” by filling the skulls of our ancestors with millet seeds and compared the amount of millet seed to the capacity for mental thought offends our sense of who and what we are. (p. 1)

There is palpable anger, disgust, and pain in Smith’s description of the colonizers’ practice of research and their justification for mistreating colonized people under the auspices of research. The notion that Western positivism can be the instrument for obtaining knowledge of non-Western people, and that brief, abbreviated, often inaccurate knowledge can be commodified and suppress the agendas of the colonized people themselves, reflects the ways in which colonizing structures of research become pervasive. Such agendas include the colonized people’s “claims to existence, to land and territories, to the right of self-determination, to the survival of our languages and forms of cultural knowledge” (Smith, 1999/2012, p. 1).

Such rejection of people and their self-determination is documented in the histories of those who lost their lands to colonizing invaders. The people of India experienced such rejection from the British for 300 years, to the extent that subservience to our colonial masters became part of our psyches and remains infused into our ontology and epistemology even after the British have left, now that we have “our” land to ourselves (well, mostly). Project colonization has succeeded, in that the value of our land has decreased from what it was when the British deemed India the land of riches and opportunities. Our tribal population suffers from a colonial infrastructure, a leftover excess of the British Raj. In our daily lives, we privilege the colonizers’ ways more than our native ways of being, in relating to each other, disciplining each other, and normalizing such ways of being and relating.

For example, despite the existence of over 33 distinct languages in India, English is still one of India’s national languages, and among educated people, the language of communication is often English. Native language learning is seen as far less valuable than learning English. Therefore, de/colonization projects look different than perhaps the agenda of regaining land or repatriation. For me, speaking from postcolonial spaces, de/colonizing epistemologies and ontologies pervade my being. Having been born in India and having lived in Canada and the United States, I can no longer deny my complicity in enacting my colonizing masters’ agendas toward myself and others, even while I try to resist these agendas.

When writing my dissertation almost a decade ago, I worked with women who came to the United States from India for their graduate education. These women taught me that the de/colonization agenda for transnational participants like them should take into consideration that there is no pure utopian space of decolonization and that colonizing and decolonizing desires intersect their very being, such that the process of decolonizing is always a work in progress. For example, they took pride in speaking English well and resisted when White people in the United States tried to place the participants within their understanding of India as a backward state. One of the ways in which they did so was by demonstrating how Westernized they already were and how, at times, they communicated better in English than did native speakers in the United States. This complexity of the colonized people’s desire to be seen as a good colonized citizens—perhaps just as good as the master—by cultural outsiders demonstrates how deeply we have internalized the colonizers’ discourses of what constitutes a civilized person. While, however, resisting being cast into the subject position of “backwards” by cultural outsiders might be seen as a decolonizing move, the legitimization of the colonizers’ view of the “civilized” person is entangled in multiple de/colonizing discourses.

This state of shuttling, this need for the colonizers’ legitimization to be seen as civilized, reflects a deep pain in the consciousness of the colonized. This is where I lean on Anzaldúa to help me understand and process the pain. I find the following quote of Anzaldúa so powerful that I am repeatedly drawn to it, to resonate ontologically, and to re-turn to it for deeper understanding of threshold worlds, belongingness, and multiplicity of being. Anzaldúa (1987/1999) reflects on a day of affirmation for her people:

On that day I say, “Yes all you people wound us when you reject us. Rejection strips us of self-worth; our vulnerability exposes us to shame. It is our innate identity you find wanting. We are ashamed that we need your good opinion, that we need your acceptance. We can no longer camouflage our needs, can no longer let defenses and fences sprout around us. We can no longer withdraw. To rage and look upon you with contempt is to rage and be contemptuous of ourselves. We can no longer blame you, nor disown the white parts, the male parts, the pathological parts, the queer parts, these vulnerable parts. Here we are weaponless with open arms, with only our magic. Let’s try it our way, the mestiza way, the Chicana way, the woman way.” (p. 110)

As I read this excerpt, I feel an invitation to dissolve dualities. The external separation of colonized and colonizer reflects the internal division in my being. I think of how I have internalized dismissal of that which is native to myself, the ways in which I seek legitimization from someone outside of myself, and the ways in which I rage upon myself when I do not receive such legitimization. And in that moment, the de/colonization project unfolds to me in the form of healing and transformation. First, through self-healing: an understanding of suffering of self, an understanding of what oppositional discourses reside within, how they are nurtured and sustained, and how they can be used to reflect on individual and collective pain. Transformation, then, becomes an activity that starts within, an agenda that compels a deep dive into one’s own consciousness. It involves looking through various painful parts of self, the belief systems that sustain those painful parts, and the discourses that support those belief systems. It requires, finally, making peace with the pain to understand our own suffering and transformation. Such “home work” is critically necessary before any “field work” can be accomplished for any social justice agenda; without it, we will only feed and amplify our pain, defeating our transformative desires.

In working with graduate students from India in their first year of study in the United States, I juxtapose de/colonizing epistemologies with transnational discourses. I do so because the migration from India to the United States (read Third World to First World) carries within it the explicit promise of better opportunities and enhanced quality of life. While it is true that the direction of movement of human capital is greater from India to the United States than vice versa, this uni-directionality is a site of analysis for several systems of inequality. Globalization is not yet a cause for celebration for many people currently residing in liminal spaces. As Edward Said (1993) states, “Imperialism did not end, did not suddenly become ‘past’ in the face of globalization” (p. 282). Consequently, imperialism continues to be manifested and maintained through globalization in the complex realities of female Indian transnationals who are thrust onto the wrong side of binary-driven discourses.

Migration of a female Indian transnational³ from her exotic location (there) to the United States (here) situates her in a complex and inseparable web of spaces, discourses, and subject positions. Shuttling through multiple cultures, a female transnational has to accommodate to and negotiate multiple social structures while maintaining, dismissing, and reconstructing various relationships with the world around her. While working with the participants, one realization becomes apparent: As I am working on my understanding of these discourses, how they play out in my own life, how I relate them to the participants’ lives, and how entangled we are in each others’ lives, I cannot separate the participants’ voices from mine. Yet we are not monolithic, or a single category of transnational woman, easy to reduce into sameness. Instead, through our similarities and differences, I begin to understand how transnational and de/colonizing discourses shape our lives in a globalized world.

Transnational discourses have evolved from recognizing globalization as the flow of people, trades, and economies across nations to investigating the volume, intensity, characteristics, focus, and direction of such exchanges (Jameson & Miyoshi, 1998; Wilson & Dissanayake, 1996). Frederic Jameson (1998) describes globalization as an untotalizable reality because on one hand, it comes with the promise of crossing multiple national borders, but on the other hand, these border crossings produce binary relations between nations, their people, and their cultures. The feminist, postcolonial, and transnational feminist concerns about globalization result from its production of imperialistic discourses, creating binary relations that define various forms of racialized, eroticized, colonized people from various “Us Versus Them” perspectives (Alexander & Mohanty, 1997; Basu, 2001; Bhabha, 1994; Grewal & Kaplan, 1994; Handa, 2003; Mohanty, 1991; Visweswaran, 1993).

Mohanty (2004) critiques the imperialistic aspect of globalization, asserting that globalization is “the primary economic and cultural practice to capture and hold hostage the material resources and economic and political choices of vast numbers of the world’s population” (p. 124). In other words, if the promise of border crossings comes with unbalanced privileges, then established localized and globalized social systems of inequality continue to favor people situated on one side of the binary-driven discourses while creating scattered hegemonies (Grewal & Kaplan, 1994) for groups on the other side—namely women, colonized, non-Western, exotic, backward, and traditional groups.

Thus, globalization defined by cultural exchanges does not always blur cultural borders in ways that benefit those on the wrong side of the binary. Stone-Mediatore (2003) provides a useful understanding of transnational feminism as a discourse that

offers a particularly useful analytical framework to investigate the role of stories in struggles of resistance against exploitative and oppressive relations. In addition, transnational feminist theory allows us to identify experiencing subjects in terms of specific social, political, and cultural hierarchies without naturalizing identities. (p. 127)

What appeals to me about Stone-Mediatore’s (2003) conceptualization of transnational feminism is its resistance to naturalizing identities. This resistance keeps the notion of multiplicities in play as we trace the scattered hegemonies (Grewal & Kaplan, 1994) in local, social, political, and global discourses. Furthermore, juxtaposing transnational feminism with de/colonizing epistemologies eliminates the possibility of returning transnational women to some pure, pre-colonial, hegemony-free past or, conversely, situating us in a utopian, decolonized future. However, neither vision is attainable, or even desirable. A pre-colonial India would not be free of hegemony, as women were still oppressed. Imagining a utopian future denies the hybridity of transnationals, for whom de/colonizing discourses exist in our beings and are always already informing our actions and contemplations.

In reflecting on the hybridized states of our border crossings, Chaudhury (2000) discusses the problem of identifying a fixed place in time to which we should return:

How far back in time and space should I go when talking about the hybridization of meaning systems and identities? How do I date the rupturing of my own ethnic identity? Could I just trace that rupturing to when my village-born father became the first person in his family to attend the school that was set up by the British government, or did it all begin more recently just before I was born when my father received the award for a Ph.D. in the United States? Or did my hybrid state come into being when my paternal great-grandfather, who was born a Sikh, converted to Islam because a voice in the fields told him to go to Makkah? Or was it more significant that my maternal Hindu great-grandfather chose to migrate to Punjab from Persia and became a Muslim to avoid going to trial after being accused of murder? What about my great-grand-mother and their stories? Why does no one talk about them? (p. 105)

The questions Chaudhury (2000) raises complicate our understandings of hybridity, transnationalism, globalization, and border crossings. Women who migrate from India to the United States for higher education are often from middle- to upper-middle-class families. They receive an education and are exposed to media and technology that allow them a global connectivity. Thus, in some sense, they can be transnational without ever leaving their home country. Home, then, may become a place of imagination, desire, memory, and connection even if one’s physical location is fixed. Therefore, transnational feminism offers possibilities based not only on how we identify with various nation states, shuttle in our multiple subject positions, or remain permanently unsettled, but also on how we build connections of imagination and desire, and how we honor and reframe our pain, from which we can gain strength and discover peace.

In the next section, I present a love letter to my 6-year-old self. Using the concept of interrelatedness and threshold theories, I explore sites of discomfort that inform my transnational existence within a global patriarchal structure. I highlight critical incidents of pain and discomfort to demonstrate a constant state of displacement, to mark crisis points, and to demonstrate relational thinking that connect the personal and the professional. The fragments in our lives are always already relational. I use vulnerability as a catalyst to connect fragments, explore my in/visible existences, and imagine post-oppositional possibilities.

Love Letter to My 6-Year-Old Self

In This Bridge We Call Home: Radical Visions for Transformation, Swan (2002) and Rodriguez and Vasquez (2002) wrote letters in their respective chapters. Their letters not only offered pathways for their healing but also illuminated their understandings of feminism and their relationships with other feminists. Inspired by their work, I write a love letter to myself when I was 6 years old from my present-day adult self. The letter represents a healing and transformative effort as a nepantlera, one who, according to Anzaldúa (2009), “use[s] visioning and the imaginal on behalf of the self and community” (p. 293). Anzaldúa explains further that nepantleras “act as intermediaries between cultures and their various versions of reality. Las nepantleras, like the ancient chamanas, move between worlds” (p. 293). It is in that spirit of border crossing and moving between the worlds that I write this letter to my child-self.

Dear Mamoni,⁴

I want you to go to a safe place before you read this letter. Maybe somewhere you can be alone for some time without anyone discovering you. Perhaps you can go to the private alley beside the house. Sit down in the corner stool, and begin reading the rest of the letter.

I come to you from the future. I am not separate from you. I am you, just in a different consciousness, different awareness, different time and space. I know right now you are scared. I know that you cringe every time you see Baba⁵ act violently towards Maa. I know that you want to save her and when you try you get hurt in the process. I know you are not big enough to protect her the way you would like to. I want you to know that one day you will not be afraid of this pain anymore. One day you will learn to protect yourself and you will nurture people around you and hold a sacred space so that they can learn to heal from their own pain. And one day, you will be able to do the same for your mother, where she will draw from your strength to find her peace.

You will not be able to have a relationship with your father. Eventually, your Maa and you will move to a faraway land called Canada where he will not be able to hurt either of you anymore. But I do not want you to feel sad about this at all. Instead, I want you to know that there will be many people in your life who will support you and carry you through difficult periods, who will protect you when you feel unsafe, and you will be fine.

I know that you do not understand what divorce means. And that is quite all right. I know you feel anxious about not having Maa in the house anymore after this divorce thing happens. You have had secret conversations with Maa who told you that she will not live with you and your father because she will divorce your Baba. You do not need to feel separated from anyone at any point. When you feel separated, close your eyes, think of the person in your mind, see them in front of you, and talk to them like they were right there. The more you will do this, the less you will feel separated.

In another four years, you will be taken to the Ramakrishna Mission. You will be tested there for spiritual initiation. You will pass with flying colors. You will be given a divine mantra to chant and you will be taught meditation. I want you to keep practicing it every day. Some days it will feel extremely difficult and you will not want to sit down for meditation. But you have to trust me on this one, even if it does not make sense to you now. This practice will become the best thing you could ever do for yourself. This practice will help you with everything in your life.

When you go to school, do not be embarrassed for learning Bangla⁶ with a passion. Learn everything you can. Read all the novels, poems, and dramas. Sing songs and learn to dance to them with all your heart and soul. People will come to hear your Bangla poems and stories. People will ask you to plan Bangla cultural events with dramas, dances, songs, recitations, and skits. You will make people laugh and they will find joy in your creation. Do not ever be ashamed of any of that, no matter what.

When you are in class four or five years from now, one of your classmates, Sarbari, will become jealous of your strong understanding of Bangla. She will challenge you in front of your classmates and ask you to spell the English word archipelago. You will not be able to spell the word. Confess with pride that you are unfamiliar with the spelling. Years later, when you and Sarbari are both grown up, you will reconnect and recall old stories. She will apologize to you for this incident, and you will forgive her without any darkness in your heart. Sarbari will know how it feels to be seen as inferior, because she will be living in Germany as a foreigner, where she will be treated badly for being an Indian.

Both of you will talk about living in foreign countries as Indian women. You will share stories about how you are different from the White people around you and also from the Indian people around you. Both of you will talk about home. But it will not be a home that you actually lived in when you were in India. It will be a dream home, something you imagine. It will be a home that perhaps does not even exist, perhaps never existed, except in your mind. Both of you will talk about how, after living away from India for such a long time, when you come back to India you feel like a stranger. Both of you will find it strange, despite being foreigners in other lands, that sometimes returning from India to those very foreign lands feels right—like you are going home—even if they are not really home.

Much later in life, you will become a researcher. You will learn to listen to yourself. You will learn to listen to other people. You will always remain adventurous and curious. You will play with research in many ways: through pictures, poems, dramas, just like you did in school when you were younger. You will be able to use English and Bangla in your research. You will be able to tell when things do not fit well. You will be able to show how things do not fit. First it will make you upset and angry when you cannot make things fit. But later, you will learn to accept what doesn’t fit, and find other ways to make things work that are fun and creative and come from your heart. You will offer love. You will find the passion you knew as a child, and you will bring it back in all aspects of your life.

No matter what happens, I do not want you to lose your magic. You will be able to see through things quickly, to know what you need to walk away from and what you should spend time on. You will be able to use your meditation practice to see more than what you can see with your eyes. You will see with your heart. You will see how everything is connected and nothing is isolated on its own. You will know that you are not separate, that you are being held in sacred spaces by many around you. You will tell stories that will touch people’s hearts. Your stories will be more than yours alone, and one day you will become part of a group of healers.

Some parts of this letter will not make sense to you now. And that is okay. Come back and read this letter as many times as you like. And remember you will always have support, even when things seem most challenging.

Love always,

Invitation to Engage

I began this article by discussing various understandings of liminality and how they frame my epistemology and ontology. I navigated through multiple border crossings that situated my understanding of de/colonizing and transnational feminist discourses. I called for self-work to understand suffering and pain, to forge paths for healing and transformation, and to create shifts in how we address social justice projects. I extended an invitation to others to look within for oppositional discourses, to seek a sense of peace despite existing within contradictions, and to dive deep into one’s own consciousness in search of belief systems that sustain pain. This will not be easy work, but it is necessary work to integrate the fragments of our pain. If we had not experienced this pain and suffering, we would not have the passion for the work that we do. If we learn to walk the middle path between pain and pleasure, challenge and support, then perhaps we will be less swayed by either extreme and more able to move forward steadfastly with peace and resolve in our beings.

Reflecting on the concept of Lokaloka, I think of the ways in which I have been invisible in visible worlds or the ways in which I made my pain invisible and made the need to be accepted in my transnational surroundings more visible. I think of the ways in which I have been a witness to other people’s invisibility as an educator, researcher, friend, daughter, and a fellow human being.

And I think of the ways in which I have made in/visibility work for me. I have especially made my position at the margins strategic in relation to the center. See, when the center does not know what the margin is doing or the margin is too faraway from the center, the margin is not concerned about disciplining the center. I have stopped opposing invisibility. I embrace the threshold advantages of moving between visibility and invisibility. This displacement could potentially be unsettling, but it is so familiar that it feels like home to me. I am walking a middle path, not an imagined utopia in the future, but bringing utopia in this current moment, where I find balance in shuttlings, displacement, discomfort, pain, and suffering. I let go of the need to pretend that I lead separate personal and professional lives, and accept that I exist in relation to both. I carry with me my wounds, my accomplishments, my efforts, and my struggles that are all intertwined culminating in the current moment. Attending to this entanglement in a non-fragmented way is transformative, because it allows me to see the consequences of social structures of oppression as similarly entangled in personal and professional spaces affecting lives of people.

Thus, for me, the threshold of transnational feminist, de/colonizing, and post-oppositional theories and practice in the 21st century is one of contemplation, of a critical meditative journey into the self. It requires seeing the ways in which binary discourses function within us, deeply internalized in our beings, and sitting with such realizations with non-judgment and non-opposition. If we are less prone to dividing and separating ourselves, we are more likely to form alliances across multiple types of ontologies and epistemologies, and to come together for the purposes of healing and transforming. The colonizer, the master, and all those who benefit from oppressive discourses are not obligated to listen to us, to legitimize us, to make us matter. Our desires to heal, to transform, to disrupt, to explode, to find peace, to engage in non-violence toward self, and, by extension, toward the world have the potential for multiple border crossings. This is the invitation I extend.

Footnotes

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Notes

Author Biography

Kakali Bhattacharya is an associate professor at Kansas State University. Her research interests include de/colonizing epistemologies and methodologies; contemplative pedagogies and practices; race, class, and gender issues in higher education; arts-based approaches to qualitative research; and technology-integrated learning and social spaces.

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