QUINTAN ANA WIKSWO: Mona and I met in a conflagration of strongly held opinions at the artist residency Ragdale in 2009, when she was a seasoned playwright and activist…

MONA WASHINGTON: Hhm. I don’t really think of myself as an activist. I think of myself as someone who sometimes gets so pissed off or apathetic, that I feel compelled to do something besides complain.

WIKSWO: Well, your complaining is an art form, and that’s high praise. But I’ve loved that you never stop there – you haul yourself out of the abyss and take action. You were and are a tremendous inspiration – when we met I was first transitioning from civil- and human-rights work into a newfound artist means of expression. You were instrumental as a mentor for how to combine sociopolitical ethics with artmaking, and later – as I endured seemingly limitless bigotry and harassment in Europe – you really were my primary support mechanism both validating the racism I encountered in Russia, Germany, and other European countries, and urging me onwards to continue my work undistracted by opposition and criticism.

WASHINGTON: And I remember you engaged in serious conversations with everyone there: poets, novelists, …everyone. Loved those dinners. I don’t remember any BS small talk with you. Straight ahead to big ideas and searching for solutions.

WIKSWO: Those were some of the most astonishingly loving, demanding dinners I’ve ever experienced. We were blessed. You don’t trifle with small talk, and you raised the bar for all of us. It just takes one! I’ve long admired you for you tenacity, perseverance, and unique vision of identity and belonging, activism and voiceful participation in the global conversation about respect, dignity, and necessity for human rights. In particular, your commitment to both humanism and African-American civil rights place you at an invaluable nexus for where we go from here.

For those of you who haven’t met her until now, Mona is a  committed Non-Essentialist, a global thinker and activist, and also deeply rooted in the American legacies and their roots to colonialism, to Europe, and to the entrenched pathways of silencing, repressing, unsilencing, and liberation.

WASHINGTON: You are kind Quintan. I don’t think I do all that, but I do love change, and those bits of Serendipity that lead me to you. That was a great residency.

WIKSWO: It was lucky for me. It is safe to say that a few months later I would have locked myself into my room in Prague and starved to death had you not persistently reached out to me and checked on my physical and emotional well-being, urged me onwards, believing in me at a time when really, honestly, nobody else did – the nitty gritty, outspoken, and often gruesome, hurtful, and personally demanding work that is the pursuit of universal human rights and simply walking down the street in placed where you’re hated.

WASHINGTON: Now is not the place or time, but believe when me when I say I am simply paying It forward. No one gets anything done in this world without other people.

WIKSWO: Mona is a graduate of Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service and Harvard Law School. Mona is a proud member of Voices of Our Nations Arts (VONA). Her plays have been performed in New York, Philadelphia, Rome, and Paris. She’s been awarded fellowships at The Djerassi Foundation, The Dora Maar House (Provence, France), The Ucross Foundation, and The Jack Kerouac House, amongst others.

And with that preamble, which does not begin to convey the sheer potency of her energetic, spiritual, artistic, intellectual, and existential force, we begin our murmuration with the icon known as Mona.

WASHINGTON:  Icon? Girl….OK, so where should we start? I think we were discussing ideas that inform our writing and artistic practices. Some days I’m conscious of writing about one issue, and then after I feel like everything is jumbled. Maybe that’s why I write plays. One of the ways I can begin to deal with clashing values is through different characters. When I revise, I usually end up refining one of the three themes below in my writing. A friend pointed that out to me. I had no idea. I constantly think about these questions in one form or another.

WIKSWO: That’s the irritating beauty of a preoccupation – the way they have of inserting themselves into daily life. I’m impressed that you can hone them down to three. What’s the first one?

WASHINGTON: I rail against Essentialism, but I always have to confront the tension between ideas, values, and the physical and find some way to resolve the tension so that I can make the moment or situation intelligible. The way we move through space, and I suppose arguably time, is the via the physical.  After all, regardless of my intentions, I’m not a disembodied spirit. We all have different containers, or earth suits, as my cousin says, but the physical so often gets in the way of  my acquiring knowledge.

WIKSWO: My understanding is that Essentialism is part of Ontology – the study of anything that is “real,” that relates to “being” and “reality.” Just those terms themselves are problematic, because they require definition and subsequent policing. In a somewhat homogeneous society where there is a hegemonic belief system, doubtless that was easier. But we have a new era where we can’t simply erase all realities or definition of being except for one set forth in ancient Greece.

Essentialism demands a definition, or a container, of “realness.” And all definitions are created by humans, and all containers are policed by humans. So again, we have a problem of hegemonic human control over the very definition of life.

WASHINGTON: I agree.

WIKSWO: You say that you are not a disembodied spirit. Yet my experience of you is quite frequently as a disembodied spirit. You live as a memory – I recall our time together at the Ragdale artist residency, as well as a lunch or two in the East Village. You also live as a moral value to me – when I was being threatened by Nazis in Bavaria in 2010-2014, your commitment to resistance and self-value and fighting back, your habits of seeing others being persecuted and your sense of shared responsibility that we all unite against perpetrators of bigotry – that was, to me, a disembodied Mona. If you were not contained in an earth suit, your ideas would still be alive to me.

WASHINGTON: But the container, the vessel, the skin and bones, are only that and not values in and of themselves.

WIKSWO: Your container is extremely kinetic. You have tremendous charisma even without saying a word. Ok – end of interruption. Your presence has presence. Ok now I’m really done interrupting.

WASHINGTON: How do I balance common sense –  i.e., I am walking in the sun with my blonde godson. Do I lather him with SPF? Of course I put heavy duty block on him. I am addressing the physical condition and the need to take care of his skin. I’m not assuming he holds certain values.

WIKSWO: I don’t see any particular connection between earth suit and what inhabits it. There is care and maintenance involved, and we all come with different earthsuits, which also change over time and space. I used to have feeling in my chin, but nerve damage means I can no longer feel it. My earth suit has areas of numbness, my earthsuit does not require sunscreen, my earthsuit influences how others perceive me, and so those factors have an impact on my spirit.

WASHINGTON: But I think your earthsuit does need sunscreen. Doesn’t it? I wear sunscreen.

WIKSWO: I do not and have never worn sunscreen, your honor.  Due to my ongoing weird genetic and neurological makeup I dump vitamin D and I have a lot of melanin that starves without sunshine, so it’s actually unhealthy when I get pale or when the UVA or UVB is blocked. I’ll probably die of cancer but it’s probably better than a neurological seizure.

WASHINGTON: I’m not anti-sunshine. I’m just anti-wrinkles and anti-cancer.

WIKSWO: I was born wrinkled. I was like a misfit pink origami. I don’t sunburn but I do windburn. Quite horribly. Absolutely. I became extremely ill after living in the north of Europe for some time, and the bloodwork they did said all sorts of strange things about melanin and D and I basically don’t burn and there is apparently a medical answer for that.

But I think earth suits contain far more mysteries than we can imagine. For example, my earth suit has several large non-pigmented places on it – they are entirely symmetrical, so in once instance I have two large white patches on both forearms, both in the exact same spot. They burn, but the rest of my skin does not.

But you are speaking about presumption surrounding the physical, the earth suit, and how much we are defined by its fundamental biological needs, and how much it fails to represent who we are as spirits, I think. This to me is really the recurring problem because we live in a physical form that is almost always coded by others in ways that permeate everything. They are complex clothing, and there are obvious things we know about them – women who live with men who do not do housework is a direct result of earthsuit conditioning, arguably – and so much we don’t.

I have never liked my earthsuit. I wish I did. I always felt Janelle Monae archandroid or something, not especially or entirely human. Maybe it will take me longer to get used to being inside the body glove, as. But that may be sociocultural freedoms, and not the actual chromosomes that I covet. (And I have a ferocious braincrush on Janelle Monae. Janelle, are you reading?) But see, I’m interrupting again. Back to your point –

WASHINGTON: But the physical can bring so much pleasure. Our valuation of  the physical is what gets jacked up.  If we skipped around the world and dropped in on many communities and homes, the division of labor would be different–performed by different physical bodies.

WIKSWO: But I do believe that we have the ability to cultivate the spirit, the consciousness in a way that completely shortcircuits the suit we are in.

For one thing, we can cultivate tactics like bilocation that give us a bit of a holiday, depending upon where we bi-locate.

Shamans can often change earth suits.

Various life forms can radically modify their ability to be seen or unseen. Ghosts and souls can find garments that make them visible.

Especially today, when earthsuits are very modifiable. We can come close to changing skin color, we can change hair texture, we can supplement our bodies with implants and devices, we can change our gender, and so forth. These options were not available to previous eras. I think it has become far less simple to say that earthsuit and consciousness cannot be separated.

WASHINGTON: I do think that we are all in some way biologically predisposed to certain behaviors, and I can never avoid the nature versus nurture debate. (BTW, The Bad Seed is one of my favorite films.)

And to be clear, for me there are times when there is nothing to do but grab onto the collective physical, and try to use it to fight for rights and values.

WIKSWO: Amen.

WASHINGTON: But that’s different. When I do that, I am doing it as a self-aware choice. I am standing with certain people, outwardly defined and self defined, but/and embraced by me, nonetheless. At least in part so that I can survive collectively. I can work with others.

We can initiate and share a response to the ways in which society projects values onto and abstracts from our bodies.

I am always interested in nomenclature and identity. Whether some words can be changed from a negative to a positive connotation, and for whom. I don’t think I will ever be able to accept certain words as positive. Not the N word or the C word or the F word, for example. I know that others may be capable of subverting the meaning and making a new meaning using the same word, and I accept that they do. But there is too big a gap for me to bridge, to change the meaning enough so I can send it out of me with a positive intention.

I just can’t, or feel that I can’t.

WIKSWO: Nomenclature is an apt word for it. I don’t think words can lose their legacy, their fate, their destiny – we can add to it, or shift it slightly, but those words were born containing a certain intent.

In upcoming murmurations on SCRY, we’ll be conversing a good bit about translations and multiplicities of language, hybrid languages, and non translatable languages and how I think that does give us some cause for excitement about expanding beyond the cultural limits of a sole language. Learning smatterings of Navajo, Tohono O’odham, German, French, and so forth were explosive to my neurology and my concept of meaning.

There are aspects, like first languages, that come to define us, but we do have freedom of choice (like not being the Ugly American who screams loudly at people who do not speak English hoping that verbal intimidation will help get the point across because..well, you know the rest.) Anyway, I have a Sikh teacher who says we are each a product of (a) our earthsuit (b) our dna/ancestry (c) our consciousness on this planet. And that fate is what happens when you don’t intervene with any of them, and destiny is what can be achieved when you learn to exercise agency over your own consciousness. I am sympathetic to that philosophy.

W: Me too.

WIKSWO: Two factors that are relatively – and definitely relatively – fixed, and one factor, our consciousness, that I believe we have ample opportunities over and over and over and over again throughout our lives to direct. For better or worse, some folx have more or less agency in society than others, but our individual consciousnesses, arguably, can be liberated by our own selves. It’s just more complicated for those at the far ends of the spectrum.

An example: I interacted with a Bavarian woman who made the conscious choice to take a topless selfie in front of the Arbeit Macht Frei gates at Dachau. Her friends encouraged her, thus influencing her choice. I reminded her of the value of respect at a place of death, and she replied that she was proud of what her family had done to establish and operate the death camp. But there was a decisive moment where she had two options for her conscious behavior of what she would do in her earthsuit, and she chose to take a nude photo by a gas chamber.

Another example: I interacted with a Bavarian man whose father was the SS officer who murdered the inhabitants of my ancestors’ village. When he learned that some of my family lived in that village, he asked permission to discuss the moral complexities. His wife came over and said, this is not an appropriate conversation. I said nothing. He said to me, I would hope that there is some way that my remorse can make healing possible for you.

WASHINGTON: That silence must have been deafening.

WIKSWO: There is as much power in silence, when used with firm intention, as there is in speech. I’m glad I have the ability now to choose strategically.

These two people were both German, they were both Bavarian, they were both from upper class Munich families, from multigenerational Nazi families, their DNA, their ancestry, their culture, their skin color, their religion, their ethnicity, and their earthsuits were nearly indistinguishable apart from gender. However, their consciousness made them absolutely different people, with very little in common in terms of consciousness. And that was revealed in the moment where they paused, exerted self-agency, and made a decision.

WASHINGTON: Yes.

WIKSWO: I arrived in Germany with animosity towards the descendants of Nazis, and realized repeatedly that this was absurd because the earthsuit does not equal the consciousness.

WASHINGTON: My second point: who speaks for whom? I am so tired of folks conflating themselves or allowing 3^rd parties  to do so with others in a group, especially those groups defined and put upon by others.

I don’t mean elected spokespeople from within a group. I mean self appointed spokespeople, or people receptive when someone else describes them and treats them as such.

I feel this dilemma daily. Sometimes, I think that we are most afraid of  the differences among ourselves within groups that are facing societal hostility and hate. To fight together and to resist, we first have to know and trust each other. But how do we do that?

There’s not always time to sit around and discuss our views and opinions. It’s easy to fall into some normative vision of what a real X is, or what a true Y should do in the face of this, that, or the other. I don’t find paradigms like those useful, especially when you have a multifactor reality in play.

I am more concerned about eradicating the hate and its consequences, and then letting everyone do and be what they want. To even be able to imagine what they want without the hate confining them.

I don’t want to replace one ideological straight jacket with another.

WIKSWO: I think intersectionality as a concept is being tragically misapplied.

WASHINGTON: Me too….and ‘me too’.

WIKSWO: Did I mention that strategic repetition is another effective tactic, along with tactical silence and tactic speech?

To me, intersectionality means that we all have a possibly infinite series of identity descriptors, but it’s misapplied as a police state. Intersectionality means we each have the agency to exercise the many components that comprise us, we finally have the capacity for self-definition, and we can reject the boxes and categories that define membership in a group.

It also means that we are not obligated to be policed by anyone standing around that box. And yet especially in the last year, I have never been harassed by so many alleged allies and colleagues questioning my right to be myself.

I delivered a public lecture recently and an audience member complained that I was white. The curator replied that I was actually mixed race white and black. We were seconds away from the “one drop” conversation when I asked the attendee, would it have changed the situation if you had asked me my race? And she said yes, but that would have been rude.

These situations are impossible. After the curator defined me as part Black, I watched the audience member examine my earthsuit for racial indicators, and focused on my manicure (two inch acrylic nails in gold glitter), my hair (dark brown, extremely curly, extremely large), and my jewelry (a lot of it, all gold and large) and saw her decide that the nails and the hair and gold jewelry were proof of her conception of what a mixed race black-white woman might be. It was horrifying and continues to distress me.

WASHINGTON: I’ve run into similar situations. Not a pleasant experience, but understandable. What’s a fix? You should have told them you were passing. Kidding…sort of.

WIKSWO: Sort of, indeed. I have found, quite recently, a large online family tree that includes photos of my family from the 1930s, and a brother stands next to a brother and one is very dark and the other could definitely pass. The passing brother died of an STD in a brothel, but the visibly African-American brother went on to help found a major university and became a civil rights leader in D.C. so there is complexity there.

The universal assumption by all races who hear my story is that the passing side of the family was successful, had college educations, and were wealthy. However, I have yet to find one of my passing relatives who is any of those three, but the dark-skinned relatives all earned college degrees and were community leaders.

That assumption – and its universality – drives me crazy, even though I understand the horrors and complexities of racial passing legacies, and gender passing legacies, but I do feel it on a personal this-is-me-this-is-now level, especially when I get policed around passing.

For decades I never even mentioned being mixed race because I was sick of the grossness that came my way. I didn’t want to lose my respect for people I cared about. And now that I’m open about it, I am accustomed to losing respect for a wide range of people. And I get persistently frustrated when people ask me, almost on a daily basis, what is your race? what are you? 

And then rarely believe me no matter what answer I give.

WASHINGTON: It’s good to have rehearsed answers when someone asks you an offensive question. I often reply with ‘Why do you ask?’

WIKSWO: But then they respond with something even more offensive. Maybe it’s because I don’t look like most of the things I am, for instance I’m part Sikh by choice, and so people say the most hateful things thinking that a Sikh person isn’t around to hear.

Most often, what happens to me is that people from within and without my multiple identity categories confront me on being a “bad” example of whatever they think I am, or whatever I say I am. I am told by feminists and by misogynists that I am not the right kind of woman. I am told by queer communities and heteronormative communities that my sexuality is incorrect. I am told by Jewish and non-Jewish, African-American and non-African-American, disabled and non-disabled people that BOTH my consciousness and how I wear my earthsuit does not conform to the accepted definitions.

WASHINGTON: I hear you. I’ve had some Black folks tell me that they don’t think James Baldwin is a good example for young Black boys because he’s gay. Why am I ‘always posting his quotes’, or Audre Lorde’s. Then, what do I do? I try to consciously choose how much energy I am going to spend interacting with someone who says something like that, but I feel that if nothing else, I have to let them know I think their homophobia is jacked and why.

I won’t get into my many disagreements with white women who are ‘feminists’, but suffice it to say that there are some women who consider Lady MacBeth a role model. No joke.

WIKSWO: I think it’s impossible to have much of any substantive interaction with white feminists until there has been substantial reparations made for the legacy of bigotry within white feminism. I was fortunate that my introduction to feminism was black and Latinx feminism, and that I didn’t encounter “white” feminism until college, and I found it shocking. I don’t think most white feminists have any awareness of the legacy they invoke and the betrayals their predecessors committed – I hope it’s ignorance, anyway. But there is a need for reparations by white feminists, and part of that is not getting into arguments before they have done their homework on some of the more hateful roots of the movement. Women and men of color paid a high price for the successes of white feminism, in my humble opinion, and that is an injustice that has to be openly admitted. Either way, I’ve always been a heretic feminist in most settings, even though I am a feminist.

WASHINGTON: I recently had someone write to tell me that I was the “wrong” kind of Black person to run a certain Facebook page because I’m not  ‘Afrocentric’ enough. I asked for an explanation of the term ‘Afrocentric’ and they became angry.

WIKSWO: Right – because they don’t want to take the time to stop and pull apart the prism of Afrocentricity and deal with the complexity. It’s easier to reduce everything to a buzzword, and then refuse to define it. Or define it by what it’s not: Mona is NOT Afrocentric. And then derail the conversation by making it about you, and not about their concept of the ideology. Confronted with you saying, “yes I am,” or “what makes you say that?” then real effort and work is required of them to think instead of repeat or regurgitate or exclude.

And that is why humanity disappoints me, because we run away from the puzzle, the conundrum, the mystery.

In terms of the identity police, it happens very rapidly that one can be rejected by everyone, and then there is literally no place to exist, no community to inhabit, except on one’s own terms. Which requires a preternatural level of confidence and tenacity. Unless one is willing to radically alter one’s consciousness and one’s earthsuit to obey our own internal police, who come not only from the XYPD but also from within our alleged allies. I have lost patience with internal policing beyond what I thought was possible.

WASHINGTON: Preach.  You know, the white mainstream media thinks that certain people speak for all Blacks. Same with gay folks. Why? Convenience. And some self-appointed folks accept the label and claim to speak for everyone. I am talking now about individuals. I’d appreciate people qualifying their positions and being honest about the fact that they do not speak for all members in a group.

But, we both know that some people don’t seem like they are able to speak at all. No one listening. No one is helping their narratives to gain attention. Muslim voices are being blocked, and twisted when people do “get” the opportunity to speak. I was really impressed with the Parkland antiviolence/gun group young people who connected with students from Chicago. Letting and helping the Chicago students get their voices out there. That is such an important bridge.

WIKSWO: Convenience. That is such a defining feature of our culture. Our use of imprecise language also fails us completely. The adjectives, adverbs, nouns that describe (or attempt to contain) us are falsely defined. The very linguistics of identity is rotten to the core. “Black” or “Jewish” or “Afrocentric” or “Muslim” or “White” is not something that can be contained in a hegemonic definition. And I know this because I’m always told that I’ve come incorrect.

WASHINGTON: Right.

WIKSWO: Which means there is a “correct” _______ : woman, queer, jew, epileptic, activist, feminist, human rights worker, wife, mutt, mixed race, white, black…

Whoever it is someone wants to represent them – I’m not her. Who is she? Not me. Who gets to say who she is? Nobody I want to spend time with. Who approves her adjective? Can she get a verification permit to use that adjective? Where is the locus of this police force?

Everybody hates the police, but lots of folks want to wear the badge and carry the gun if it means they get to be the autocratic boss who makes up laws to enforce and hurts others with impunity.

Public announcement: anyone who expects me to be their symbol for anything will be tragically disappointed. I will let that person down. Because I, like the rest of us, am not an object. And trying to make us into objects is a very vicious experiment.

WASHINGTON: Which  leads me to……my third point. What is my responsibility? I know it is not enough to just plead a case of cultural sensitivity because I can’t put down someone else’s culture. That amounts to not doing anything and not even trying to analyze power and position in other paradigms.  I find that unacceptable for me.

Even after a good faith attempt to study other cultures, I’m left with acknowledging my ignorance. But still, when I’m an “Outsider,” and I choose to listen to someone in an oppressed group and I know it is one person, or a group—I am always thinking that maybe I am missing hearing from others in the group.

So, am I really listening for an echo of my own thoughts? My own values?

WIKSWO: That’s a potent image – listening for an echo of one’s own thoughts. Is it important that the person being listened to is oppressed? Or do we listen for echoes of ourselves in every aspect of our lives, from the humans we meet to the style of toilet bowl brush we choose?

To me, it comes down to whether an individual needs reassurance of who they are from others – yes or no. And does an individual need their values to be supported by others – yes or no. However we answer those questions determines how we choose to act. With resistance, with tolerance, with eyes closed, with violence, with shame, aggression, guilt, sympathy, pride….

WASHINGTON: If I interact with a Somali woman and she tells me she chooses female circumcision and is aware (or even not) of what I see as health risks and I’m aware that what she sees as social benefits, then I think I should respect that—with some qualification.

At the very least, I think I should question why I think it is appropriate to think of her in this way, apart from the totality of who she is within her culture.

WIKSWO: Human as object, object as ideology, and then we can no longer be alive. We are reduced to being one inert object to be acted upon.

WASHINGTON: A one factor or one action analysis is weak.

I do not think that my obligation as a human being stops at my discomfort in knowing that my Western, Christian values are part of who I am and that I disagree with someone from another culture.

Basically, because someone is from one culture or group, I do not automatically elevate them to being an expert on anything other than their own, individual life, as we all are.

WIKSWO: That’s a very important consideration, to neither elevate nor denigrate. Romanticize nor ostracize. Fetishize nor excoriate. It’s a tightrope walk.

WASHINGTON: I have to become more comfortable with the fact that I have, and do, and will make mistakes. I don’t accept that my avoiding my discomfort in confronting conflicting values is more important than trying to help people, even if we have stepped into long narratives of privileged or not.

I may not like it, but many of my encounters where I do have people pushing my values back at me because I am not sufficiently ‘authentic’, are fruitful. I don’t want to ignore suffering, very real suffering that I probably can’t imagine, because I am afraid of being criticized. My gender views have changed for the better because I have been and I am being constantly challenged.

WIKSWO: I find the call-out, call-in culture very painful but there is no question that it yields fruit, if at the very least to hold a mirror, even a warped mirror, up to my face and say, this is how you are being perceived. Then I can decide, is that accurate? do I care? Should I change? Can I change? And the answer is different each time. I feel a lot of anger, a lot of it. But I’m also learning to not react to my own anger without a great deal of deliberation and intention. I will say, I would always rather be asked a question, even intrusive, than for someone to just assume anything about who I am.

WASHINGTON: But, how personal is too personal for me to ask, question? And, perhaps more importantly, how is it not? What an arrogant Western vibe to think that I know more about another culture. Doesn’t [the Somali woman]  know her own mind?  Yes, she does.

So, where is the line between my respect for another’s culture, my (perhaps?) Western idea of health and safety, and plain old arrogance?  I am starting to think I simply need a little more courage. The courage to ensure that I am not trying to promote change based on false equivalencies. And that happens. Way too much.

I don’t think I am excused from trying to unravel my interaction and value differences with someone from another country. That’s not acceptable for me. And part of the unacceptability comes from my knowledge that some voices are amplified and some muffled.

I’m not trying to interact with other folks on a Johnny One Note level. Outsiders whose values are the same as Insiders can create wonderful, ameliorative change.

International pressure helped African Americans gain civil rights, and international pressure helped Black South Africans gain their freedom.

WIKSWO: This is a topic worthy of further murmuration for sure. There is a passage from Paul Celan – I’m not sure whether it was originally in German, French, or English – that he wrote in 1948.

“Though I had known the journey would be strenuous, I worried when I had to enter one of the roads alone, without a guide. One of the roads! There were innumerable, all inviting, all offering me different new eyes to look at the beautiful wilderness on the other, deeper side of existence. No wonder that, in this moment when I still had my own stubborn old eyes, I tried to make comparisons in order to be able to choose. My mouth, however, placed higher than my eyes and bolder for having often spoken in my sleep, had moved ahead and mocked me: ‘Well, old identity­ monger, what did you see and recognize, you brave doctor of tautology? What could you recognize, tell me, along this unfamiliar road? An also­-tree or almost-tree, right? You had better haul up a pair of eyes from the bottom of your soul and put them on your chest: then you’ll find out what is happening here.’

I think this passage is so self-critical and also so self-forgiving, and a kind of profoundly compassionate but unrelentingly disciplinary message to himself about how to navigate existence.  To me that’s very much what you are talking about.

WASHINGTON: So, yes Quintan. I try to own my Western, African-American values.  I’ve disagreed with many feminists concerning their approach to FGM which erases agency and culture. I have also disagreed with feminists who say nothing because they are afraid of  being accused of racism and Western domination. Yes, what some Western folks see as ‘mutilation’ is what others see as their normal, and/or normative selves, and the reverse is true.  I don’t always need to get into an extended who speaks for whom conversation with myself or others. But none of that demands my silence or inaction. I need to listen more, if anything.

Finding out what voices might be suppressed from within that group? Or what voices are amplified by forces I can’t imagine. I am horrified at what some of the western ersatz Christians are doing in African countries, stirring up hate. Really disgusting.  And yet, they are obviously acceptable to some part of the population in respective countries, for various reasons.

And that fact that I am criticizing a practice in a different culture doesn’t mean that I shouldn’t criticize at all. For example, I don’t agree with the death penalty anywhere, and that includes killing gay people because of homophobia. Period. And I will tell anyone anywhere that, and I have.

I can acknowledge the fact that in some ways I am a Double Outsider (cisgender and American), but then what? Acknowledging my blind points and faults yes, but conceding my ignorance isn’t mutually exclusive with my doing something to stop others’ pain. For me, it can’t be. Change can be so sloppy.

And I have immediately been put into the but-you’re not a part of the culture, you can’t have this view, your opinion doesn’t count situations. But it does. I am also against Bride burning. I don’t have to be Indian or Pakistani to be against Bride burning.

I did a student internship in Somalia, and I realized that I often steer conversation away from international relations and East Africa, because people want to discuss that film…”Captain Phillips”. And that’s fine on some level,  but invariably, people seem slow to listen to my experience and discount my high regard for so many people I met there.  Many people do not want to hear anything even slightly ‘positive’ about Muslim cultures.

I have seen Conservatives uphold Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s view of Somalia. Yes, of course. She has her views and is entitled to them, but I was there for six months and I–an Outsider—came away with a much different description and narrative. And, when I’ve talked to Somalis in Rome and here in the U.S., they too think that her description is skewed. I would not ever ask her or anyone else to stifle their narrative. But I also will not overlook the fact that she and her story is being championed by Conservatives. Here we go. Could it be that the Somalis I met there, and outside of Somalia are my self-selected people so we are just echoing each other?    

The Islamophobia in the West is outrageous. I have tried to become more vocal against Christianism.

WIKSWO: Islamophobia and anti-Semitism are two persistent beasts that have hunted down Muslims and Jews since the formation of the Roman Catholic Church. After the Crusades, the Inquisitions, and complicity in the Holocaust, there is an incumbent responsibility in the Catholic Church to admit that much of the hate was stirred up by their teachings, their writings, and their laws. And, without question, their evangelical colonization that brought hatred of Islam and Judaism to every square inch of the earth. Protestants of course share in this, but the scars  and consequences of the Crusades and the Inquisition are abundant in our daily headlines. They travelled the world, and they condemned and murdered.

And yes, I know that calling out the Roman Catholic Church is complex. But I don’t think centuries of crimes against humanity and genocide can go without reparations, any more than white feminism can.

WASHINGTON: Would I listen to a woman from another country who comes to my town, and tells me that I am damaging myself as a woman, and not a real woman, because I have not given birth? Heck. I get that here. People telling other folks how to use their body parts and for what purposes.

I have a friend here who is an ardent Intactivist, and he is very strongly against forced male circumcision. He feels it is genital mutilation and should be outlawed on babies. I’ve learned so much from my discussions and  interaction with him.

WIKSWO: Living in Africa presented me with similar conundrums. But so does my trip to the local grocery store. I rarely find myself like-minded with other humans. As for moral responsibility, I will return again to my Chabad Jewish tendencies and say, we must be a people of questions, not a people of answers. And answers are best left to the individual – although even that is a western ideal. It can be considered quite selfish and arrogant to put the individual above the community.

I’ve chewed over my relationship with the Bavarian man whose father murdered my family – traumatizing things like him showing me photographs from the village after his father arrived, things like him buying me dinner and complimenting my textured hair, things like riding in his mercedes on the autobahn and drinking his family’s schnapps late at night when neither of us could sleep for the pain of ancestry. And all I keep thinking was, he ASKED me if it was okay to talk about it. I could have said no. Or he could have just decided to talk about it regardless of my consent. I do respect him for asking, and in general I think asking someone if they are open to a conversation is perhaps the only ethical place to begin.

WASHINGTON:  Yep. I went to an Orthodox brit milha (bris) a few years ago. The Rabbi used his mouth to finish the circumcision. Did it cross my mind that the procedure was less than hygienic? Hell yes. Did I object? Hell no. Do I take communion from the same cup as other folks in church? Yes. Do I think it’s hygienic? Hell no.

WIKSWO: I don’t want to assume why you made that decision, but were I to hypothesize, I’d suggest that you said nothing because you chose to attend an Orthodox bris, and by so doing you chose to respect the stated rules of their community. However, you also chose to go to Somalia as far as I know, and yet it sounds that there was more of a moral conflict.

WASHINGTON: I did.

WIKSWO: Why? I could be misunderstanding you, but both are ethnic practices that alter the earthsuit for religious reasons, yet come into conflict with Western ideas of health – or the integrity of the earthsuit – and its primacy over the integrity of the consciousness.

WASHINGTON: Yes. It’s  easy to be a pain in the as*  Western person with Western values without taking a step back to try to untangle where the conflicting values are created and where they reside.

For me, the effort and the discomfort are necessary. It can’t mean I do nothing. It can’t.

WIKSWO: From your mouth to G-d’s ear, and may neither you nor HaShem contract herpes from the encounter. Yes, yes, yaaaaaaas.  I learned – through being confronted time and again – to shut up when I’m out of my range of experience, because I know I’ll be ignorant.  Muslim North Africa, Germany, Russia, South America, the Tohono O’Odham Nation…all these places forced me to see with spider eyes. Meaning, the two I had were not sufficient. My vision was too limited to presume anything.

The work visa process is interesting, because I had to be invited in all these cases. I could not impose myself on those Nations without their permission to enter.

WASHINGTON: Which isn’t necessarily bad.

WIKSWO: Agreed. Borders are, as we know, another snarl in human society, but boundaries are interesting things when they prompt humility. And borders can be barriers, but they can also present refuge. A boundary, in and of itself, is not “bad.” It’s how the boundary is applied, and to whom, and to what purpose and effect, and with what short- and long-term consequences.

This is the significance of context, and knowledge, and that to me requires time, it requires space, and it requires questions. An investment of time in learning and self-educating before opinionating, and the effort to have a sincere encounter with the space of another person or culture.

WASHINGTON: You wouldn’t believe the people who only wanted to talk about FGM (female genital mutilation) when I returned from Somalia, but knew nothing else about the country. They were reluctant to believe that I had such a wonderful experience in a Muslim country. I told them I felt safer in Somalia, than I do here. Same thing in Morocco.

WIKSWO: Absolutely no doubt that I felt safest in Muslim North Africa in many ways, although I was in a strange predicament: at the time, I had been in the sun quite a bit and was very dark, with dark long curly hair – I was also observing certain Jewish and Muslim customs and thus wore long skirts, long shirts, and wore a shawl over my hair, and I drove a car and travelled alone.

WASHINGTON: I’m sure to them, you looked and acted like a mixed symbol in those places. Wait–you ARE a mixed symbol!

WIKSWO: Right! And some people found that thrilling, and others found it abhorrent. I spoke French, I spoke a little Arabic, but had learned French from Africans who did not speak elite Parisian French so my accent sounded a bit local. All this added up to the conclusion by the Muslim men I met that I must be half-Tunisian, half-white, and concurrently a bad Muslim and a bad White European. I was scolded much more than the European blonde women, white, who wore short shorts and bikini tops in public or went bare-breasted on the beach.

WASHINGTON: Tell me about it. I think in some cultures white women, especially those wearing bikinis are simply dismissed as outside of cultural redemption.

WIKSWO: Yes.

WASHINGTON: Not much is expected of them morally, but all are aware that men of color yelling at and putting hands on a white woman anywhere might bring Missy Anne consequences to themselves and their communities.

WIKSWO: It’s rather hideous to watch, especially when you are mixed or hybrid enough culturally to fully take in the larger context and see the inherent conflict between two cultures. Here’s an example. When I lived in Brooklyn, I got into many confrontations with white feminists who were upset when men didn’t move out of their way on the sidewalk. Totally understandable. Sidewalks should be shared. But then I’d have to ask, are you talking about white men, or black men? Because where I grew up, African-American men (and women) were expected to step completely off the sidewalk when a white woman walked past. So a white woman in Clinton Hill, Brooklyn, who thinks she is asserting her feminism by refusing to make way for a Black man is at the same time inflicting a legacy of lynch-culture privilege because she hasn’t stopped to decode the looks she’s getting.  And then she buys her $14 latte and wonders why the locals are so rude. And maybe nobody is talking about it to her. I see signals being given. Is that because I’m mixed?

I’d see all the South Carolina license plates in Bed Stuy and Clinton Hill (because it costs a fortune to register NY plates, so why not do it at grandma’s?) and think, every time that white woman thinks she’s exercising sidewalk liberation freedom she is also perpetuating sidewalk persecution. It’s jaw dropping.

WASHINGTON: I remember during my internship, camping with some white, European expats on Somalia’s lovely beaches. Among the women, I was wore the most modest swimsuit: one piece. Once, a policeman saw us from a distance and came over and started gesturing to me and yelling.

There were about ten other people there, all white. We all ended up being held in a local administrative court until someone from the police bureau went into Mogadishu and confirmed that we were who we said we were. After I started talking back to him, I’m pretty sure the policeman knew what I wasn’t—Somalian, but he wasn’t sure of who I was–African-American.

I think he didn’t like the idea that he couldn’t readily place me in a context familiar to him, as a Black woman. I didn’t appreciate being accused of prostitution, but Quintan I was flattered that the policeman, at least at a distance thought, I looked Somali. Somalians are some beautiful people.  Wish I had a longish graceful neck…I could go on and on.

I encountered some identification and assessment issues in Jerusalem too. I was walking along near a museum, and an Israeli soldier stopped me. I’m pretty sure he thought I was an African Muslim pilgrim. Then I opened my mouth. Travel has been so important to my development. Assumptions about identity and societal placement.

WIKSWO: Growing up mixed, queer, Jewish in the South was like traveling every time I left the house. I was a foreigner everywhere. I think traveling outside the U.S. has been vital to me because I don’t feel that same pain of being rejected by my homeland.

Because they were presumed to be disrespectful and/or following their own cultural mores, whereas I was presumed to be intentionally sabotaging a way of life that I partially belonged to.

The major benefit of living in North Africa is that while I attracted the censure of certain traditionalists, I also attracted the attention of other North Africans who were mixed race, who didn’t quite fit in for a variety of reasons, who were queer, or Tuareg, or Bedoin, or Berber, or this or that that wasn’t quite “right” and the love and solidarity they extended towards me was like no other.

WASHINGTON: That’s great.

WIKSWO: I made very candid, intimately friendly relationships with people who wanted very much to talk about identity, and self-presentation, and these outcasts made my time living there enormously rich. I was approached by many Tunisian Muslim feminists who were working underground on issues of domestic violence, and that was powerful. But when I left to go back to the United States, I will never forget how frightened everyone was for me. It’s so unsafe! You’ll be killed! Something terrible will happen to you! We watch American TV – you have Special Victims Unit and CSI and the way women are treated there is horrible.

WASHINGTON: Exactly!

WIKSWO: Meanwhile, many Americans were counting the days until my return, convinced that I was in horrible danger. And as you say, unwilling to believe that I felt very comfortable there. And then these are also queer liberals who advocate for a Palestinian State without demanding that queerness be legalized – isn’t that a betrayal of one part of the self to empower a different part of the self? Isn’t that throwing one’s own legs under the bus? Is there any self-awareness around this? I helped set up safe houses in Texas for queer Muslims who were running for their lives because they’d been caught in a homosexual act and all Muslims were condemned, and then worked in Arizona setting up safe houses for queer white kids who were running for their lives for the same reasons and yet all Christians weren’t condemned…my mind is exploding right now, still.

WASHINGTON: I have had people tell me I’m “brainwashed”, and that I must not have met ‘real Muslims’. Doesn’t matter that I repeatedly tell them about my wonderful Muslim friends and their families, and ask them to address their Islamophobia.

WIKSWO: I do not understand Islamophobia but it’s rampant and slippery to confront. Islamophobia and anti-semitism are both so similar – this series of assumptions about an entire global community of people who span a thousand different belief systems within Islam or Judaism, and yet there is this rabid, very hurtful, very hate-based need to make us all the same.

WASHINGTON: I think both are rooted in Christianism and I use the label pejoratively.

WIKSWO: And asking folx to talk about their prejudices or bigotries against Jews and Muslims invokes this absolute rage. People expect their bigotry to be greeted with a nod and agreement? That’s scary.

WASHINGTON: Right. Tell me this, what does ‘I don’t mean to be politically incorrect’ mean? The phrase usually prefaces a jacked up comment. Why do folks say that?

I think it’s a way to say ‘I want to say something that is jacked and I can’t defend my bad values, so don’t yell at me because I am prefacing my ___ism, with an acknowledgement that I know how hurtful my views are.’

WIKSWO: It’s code. Like it’s your opportunity to say, ok, you’re safe here to be hateful.

WASHINGTON: Like getting brownie points or a pass for admitting culpability. Like my Mom says, “the diagnosis isn’t the cure.” A guy said to me once, “I don’t mean to be politically incorrect but she really is a C.” I will never ever forget that.

WIKSWO: I can understand people who say something quite specific, and experiential, such as “I find many Quaker Christian communities very troubling because their nonviolent ethos often means they allow perpetrators in their midst.” Or, “Much of the KKK activity has always been based out of certain North Alabama fundamentalist Christian churches,” There is a specificity there, ideally based on facts. That can be supported. But it’s not even rational to say, “All Christians are racist fanatics.” And yet we hear “Jew” or “Muslim” and some cartoon image infects people’s minds and the worst things come out of their mouths in the most innocent way, as though it’s perfectly fine to hold all Jewish or Israeli people personally, collectively, and individually responsible for the policies of Netanyahu, or equate all Muslim people or Afghan Muslims with the tactics of Isil.

WASHINGTON: Another example, I hate it when people say, “I’m not anti-Semitic. I agree with the rabbis in Brooklyn who think Israel is an abomination.” You know on the surface it may seem like they agree, but you also know that some of them are anti-Semitic and full of BS and hiding behind the views of  .001% in an oppressed group and that is precisely why they play up the few.

So, what is that about? Someone saying that they can’t be racist because they like Clarence Thomas is silly.  “I don’t hate Black people. I like Clarence Thomas. He’s Black… and so on…” You know how that goes.

WIKSWO: The greatest luxury is when someone has the patience to actually educate us in a complex, comprehensive way – whether that’s about the enormous diversity of belief, ancestry, experience, ethnicity in Jewish communities, or the coded language and dissection of microaggressions against African-Americans. I use the word luxury because anytime someone stops to educate me, I am taking up their time. I choose very carefully who I bother to explain aspects of my cultures to – mostly, to people who seriously, actually, want to expand and evolve and grow. And what is mainstream Jewish thought? Or mainstream Black thought? or mainstream feminist thought? Or Queer thought? I really don’t have any idea. I suppose I get very nervous when I hear echoes. You know me enough from our colleagueship over the years that I can be an abrasive, bombastic, sanctimonious pain in the butt.

WASHINGTON: Tenacity combined with energy is a virtue.

WIKSWO: I’m painfully aware of that, yet once I go to the trouble to form an opinion I tend to hold to it very closely. It takes me a long, long time to make a decision. I think that in general, we don’t say “I don’t know” often enough. Or, “I’m still trying to figure that one out,” or “I can see various sides and can’t reduce my opinions to a single ideology.” This is the timespace issue – is there a way that we can insert more timespace into our ignorances? My Catholic girlfriend growing up had a t-shirt that said “please be patience. God isn’t finished with me yet.” I think about that shirt all the time. And the idea that a sacred being can present itself to us at any moment, disguised as a mere mortal, but presenting us with a test of character.

WASHINGTON: Absolutely.

WIKSWO: I almost strangled someone at the gas station this morning and had to pretend that they were an angel in disguise. I’m not proud of myself. I made a million assumptions about him, and he made a million about me, and we were nearly yelling at each other because we heard no echo of ourselves. But if he had agreed with me, I would have been suspicious because I don’t think I come to most of my beliefs by any way that could be shared by another person.

I’m not sure I’m being coherent.

WASHINGTON: No, you are. And if you had unlimited amounts of time and energy, you both might have some genuine respect for one another.

WIKSWO: I am trying to express my consternation that I do not want to be a fixed entity, I want life and time and place and experience to change me for the better, to make me a more ethically impeccable person. “A petty consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds,” wrote Emerson. It’s always troubled me.

Sometimes as an activist, I see myself unchanged from who I was when I worked for MLK’s protégées at SCLC at fifteen, and these were battle scarred people who had lost folks at Selma and Birmingham and everywhere else. And I thought yes, you risk your life to fight for respect.

And sometimes I think, when I sit in therapy for PTSD and work on my own battle wounds, who was that child who thought it would be so easy? It’s not easy. It’s seering. And what I admired in the veterans what that they had walked through fire, and I didn’t even know it yet. I must have seemed so…vulnerable? Like they knew folks would try to kill me at some point, but I thought I was this invincible kid, and they didn’t want to destroy that idealism.

WASHINGTON: [My fourth point]: I hear you, but we change. We must, even reluctantly. I am so proud of these young folks fighting against this crazy gun violence. They are guiding this country toward sanity. They’re reaching across income and race and all kinds of barriers that could stop them. I am impressed and energized. I’m not sure of where this change came from, but I’m glad? Adults always seem to ignore young folks.

Our national dialogue is being refreshed by students. I always joke with a friend of mine that when the Revolution comes, I hope I’ll be wearing nice lipstick. And regardless of my lipstick, when change comes, and it will, what will I want to preserve?

How do I know what to do to make sure that my efforts go toward some lovely teleological end that I share with others?

WIKSWO: I’m trying to spend time away from the usual suspects. I have always lived in megacities – Los Angeles, Berlin, New York, San Francisco, Dallas – and comforted myself that I was immersed in diversity. But my last decade in New York City made me suspicious that it was a place where I would have the freedom to change. I couldn’t. I was roped in because someone wants to judge you on the G train in two seconds.

The density of other humans felt like a cage – their judgements, their everythings. So I ran off to the desert to hear myself, and try to sort out my voice from the voices of others, while not shutting out either party. And I wear lipstick every morning, and I never leave the house. Just in case the revolution arrives. I’m into purple and blue-violet right now.

WASHINGTON: Yes!

WIKSWO: I keep coming back to the hypothesis that maybe the only way we can grow is to get outside of our crack in the pavement. I have to be around people who are unfamiliar to me in their values and thinking. I was surrounded too long by the other members of a choir I no longer trust. Not when I’m called out by an ally for being the wrong kind of me.

WASHINGTON: So, in the immediacy of  now, where and how does my discernment begin? And what is the balance between theory and reality. I think I’m a forgiving person, but certainly not as much as I think I am.  So, what’s the gap between my normative professed goals and reality, and what can I do to fix it? All I know for certain is that I need to expect some discomfort.  I find some changes painful. That’s not going to stop.

WIKSWO: I hear you on the forgiveness. I don’t think it’s a very valuable virtue. I’d rather say, “I understand.” But I won’t forgive. Some things are unforgivable. That doesn’t mean I need to curse or damn someone, but the best I can hope for is to arrive at a place where I understand why they did what they did, even though I despise it.

I also dislike the virtue of hope. Hope without action is a crime against humanity. Being told to hope is a con game, a deception.

Similarly, I have lost faith in simplicity. I simply don’t think it exists – I think something very similar to an infinitely-sided prism exists, and if we are fortunate, and we work hard, we gain access to more of the refracted information. But there is always going to be most of the spectrum shooting right past me. So I’m assuming that in the void or abyss where simplicity once was, all I have left is personal ethics.

And those had better work in a void, because I am ready for a revolution that entails the end of predators. And that’s all I care about. Moving this species beyond predators and prey. It’s been a couple thousand million years (I don’t know, I didn’t learn about evolution until I was 20) and I think we can make a leap now.

WASHINGTON: Go Quintan. Go, go, go Quintan.

WIKSWO: I love you. We will create Norfolk Vortex. Countdown beginning, Major Mona.

 

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May your umbilical cord be the root of a life of substance and meaning, may you scry fruitfully, and may you  find comfort in looking up at the sky for the birds that are watching you reach reach reach, the stars who have sent their light to you from long ago, and the dark matter that reminds us of the beauty of what mysteries we cannot see.

HÁÁDĘ́Ę́ʼÍSH ÍIYISÍÍ NANINÁ?

háádą̀ą̀, hádą́ą́’ ałkʼidą́ą́ʼ

ੴ ਸਤਿ ਨਾਮੁ ਕਰਤਾ ਪੁਰਖੁ ਨਿਰਭਉ ਨਿਰਵੈਰੁ ਅਕਾਲ ਮੂਰਤਿ ਅਜੂਨੀ ਸੈਭੰ ਗੁਰ ਪ੍ਰਸਾਦਿ ॥

॥ ਜਪੁ ॥

ਆਦਿ ਸਚੁ ਜੁਗਾਦਿ ਸਚੁ ॥

ਹੈ ਭੀ ਸਚੁ ਨਾਨਕ ਹੋਸੀ ਭੀ ਸਚੁ ॥੧॥

קָדוֹשׁ קָדוֹשׁ קָדוֹש