A Meditation On Care

     We all play the sport. When I went to England to study, I carried within me an entire geography of displacement—feeling unknown and invisible in my own skin, family, culture, in my own country—and it placed me in a position of Defence, a position that guaranteed rough play and a rough time in the First World Home Ground. I’d known the rules for a very long time. I’d grown up on it. It was in my bones and blood: the worldview of the immigrant. My grandparents had left Ceylon in the early 20th century to live new, more prosperous lives in Malaya, and spent a bulk of their energy acclimatising, befriending the strange and the new, as is the path of people who migrate. So much dancing between Here and There had to happen for the younger folk to feel like they knew the smell of Malayan soil. But the personal and the communal are never happy bubbles—circles widen into larger circles and into even larger circles. Existence is forever rippling onward and on; the individual into the family into the ethnic culture into the national culture into the global culture.   

     Recently, while rereading Conrad and colonial writings on Malaya, I was struck by how much metaphysical speculation flows through the terrifying and baffling negotiation of the Other. That, first and foremost, in order to register the Malay, the Chinese, the African, and the new lands, an otherworldly dimension had to be introduced as a means to project, blame, and cultivate the stretched space so that it would make sense to go mad in this supernatural rabbit-hole, to lead the wretched of the earth (with thanks to Fanon) through paternal saintliness out of their tough time on this planet for which they are not made and to which they do not really belong.  

     In his Malay Sketches, the Resident General Frank Swettenham describes the expression in the ‘wonderful eyes’ of Malay boys (note how Malay boys are brought into a singular entity, divested of particularity) as one of sadness and solemnity, ‘as though he had left some better place for a compulsory exile on earth.’ Forced to descend from heaven, the poor boys are unfit for this earthly existence. Elsewhere, the colonial turns messianic. In Tom Stacey’s The Hostile Sun, the white photographer is dazzled by the fairlyland village he chances upon, ‘a haven, quite unearthly,’ that turns him quite naturally into feeling like a messiah with children who worship him like ‘his thousand disciples,’ to whom, alas, he is unable to preach because he doesn’t speak their language. 

     Otherworldliness conveniently intensifies and justifies the separation.       

     The earth is unearthly in Conrad’s Congo too, but Conrad tells us something more. He tells us that the horror and the shock lie in seeing Home in the Alien, in seeing Self in the Othered. Here is a stunning, pained passage from Heart of Darkness: 

     “The earth seemed unearthly. We are accustomed to look upon the shackled form of a conquered monster, but there—there you could look at a thing monstrous and free. It was unearthly, and the men were—No, they were not inhuman. Well, you know, that was the worst of it—this suspicion of their not being inhuman...what thrilled you was just the thought of their humanity—like yours—the thought of your remote kinship with this wild and passionate uproar.”

     What Kurtz saw, loathed, and died of terror from was the realisation that all he had reviled in himself had been externalised in the Congo. Egocentricity, lust, incontinence, hatred. To see his banished mad sister come alive in the river, in the jungle, in the strange dark faces was an escalation too unbearable. To see that I exist in that which I hate. 

     What a trip!    

     The power of this kind of writing lies in how the literature was touched, who spoke about it, how it was spoken about, who listened, how it was received. It had to do with stance, influence, empathy (or the lack of it).  

Where are you coming from and do you care about me?  

     It had to do with ‘diversity’, a word that’s thrown around a lot these days, as is ‘inclusion’: Take me in as I take you in so you may be seen and see yourself in the world and I may be seen and see myself in the world. 

     Food, water, shelter and clothing are the physical, biological needs of our species, but we are so much more than walking bodies. What comes next in our list of needs is where we fail: the need to be validated as human. 

     Denying perceived inferiority does not mean supreme time in the light either. We only need to listen to the 18th century American slave Frederick Douglass tell us in his Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass of his mistress’s drinking of the “fatal poison of irresponsible power” and her subsequent transformation to see that the “powerful” lose their humanity too, that in dehumanising, rejecting and neglecting Others, dehumanisation also occurs in the dehumaniser. So, Sophia Auld, Douglass’s mistress, who when he first sees her greets him with a face he had never seen before, “a white face beaming with the most kindly emotions”, soon learns the rules and decorum of slavery and thus, rapidly enough because no one can live in the system and not drink its poison of “irresponsible power”, turns devilish, sub-human: “That cheerful eye, under the influence of slavery, soon became red with rage; that voice, made all of sweet accord, changed to one of harsh and horrid discord; and that angelic face gave place to that of a demon.” 

     The blast happens both ways. Both are injured—just in different ways. It may seem that one is winning, but how is it winning if a face has to change from angelic to demonic in order to “win”? Douglass was aware. “Slavery,” he writes, heartbroken by Sophia’s brutal metamorphosis, “proved injurious to her as it did to me...Slavery soon proved its ability to divest her of heavenly qualities.” As she stopped crying for the poor, the suffering, and the marginalised, and as she stopped feeding the hungry, clothing the naked, comforting the mourning, she robbed herself of herself, stripped away her wellbeing and wholesomeness, started living a life of scarcity and stinginess, and subsequently drained happiness out of her life and the lives of others. Slavery did this, yes, and slavery is The System but The System is not an abstract, non-human Entity. It’s constituted of living-breathing people and maintained by living-breathing people with digestive systems, blustery nocturnal dreams, desires for career upgrades, new shiny clothes and a sweetheart to grow old with. Systems change when enough beating hearts do.