Being isolated somehow invites us into a strange global awareness.
We are alone.
We are not alone.
It is over 5 months now since my beloved died after a six-year journey with cancer.
I am alone.
I am not alone.
For the last 5 months, three have been spent in inglorious isolation... trying to figure out who I am. For years, he gave me positive identity: friend, companion, beloved, lover, wife, mother, grandmother, carer. While the maternal aspects remain, they are also changed, as I seek not just to be mother and grandmother, but parent and grandparent - subtle, but important.
He also reinforced for me a sense of colour. The colours did not fade with age, rather they became more pronounced, more vibrant, more exotic and blended with delightful nuance. At times, his hair was fire engine red - a tribute to Arsenal football club, as a Gooner. Mostly, his hair became vibrant blue - in support of Beyond Blue, as someone who confronted mental health stresses by insisting on living positively and proclaiming good news with every fibre of his being.
It was infectious. I continue to wear blue and pink hair. I don't just do it for his memory and I don't just do it for others. Otherwise, why would I have maintained it during three months of isolation? No. There is something about my own hyphenated identity in the mixing of colours and choosing how I present myself to myself. A Professional Superviser once asked my how I could be so many different things - why wasn't I more clearly definable? I struggled to explain I was a child of pluralism, but it was too much for him, so I had to find another Superviser.
Thus began decades of wrestling with concepts of identity. I was greatly assisted by the work of Myong-Duk Yang and Clive Pearson in naming why I could not be an identity. I am, after all, not of a single cultural identity. I am 'mixed blood'. Once upon a time, I was labelled a 'mongrel'. They would more kindly have named me as 'hyphenated'. As you can see from the title of my blog, the attitude stuck!
Today I read a heartbreaking piece by
Iyabo Onipede: For white people only. It was written in the context of [yet another] race-related death in the USA. In Australia, the timing is relevant - it is the end of our 'Reconciliation Week' - a time when we recommit ourselves to learning and speaking truth about genocidal history and actively seeking to redress wrongs perpetrated on First Peoples across this country.
In my setting - the Uniting Church in Australia - we have rewritten our denominational constitution document to include a Preamble, which reminds us all of the context of being a largely migrant-led church in an Ancient Land with Ancient Peoples. God was here before the arrival of Euro-versions of the Gospel. God was already in the business of creating and blessing. The Church does not get to define God. God gets to define the Church.
When we were working on the Preamble, some migrants asked: [paraphrasing...] Shouldn't we also have some statements there about migrants and multiculturalism and the diversity of colours. It is wrong to label the issues as simply black and white!
This was, of course true, but we also recognised how easy it would be to distract or dilute the importance of what needed to be said if we hijacked the agenda. The priority at that moment in time was to name the need for truth-telling and commit to reconciliation. We therefore made the commitment, not to accept a label of third peoples, but to be counted as Second Peoples, agitating to reimagine how colour-influenced behaviours might play out. We took upon ourselves the shame of white privilege and entered into a greyness of identity, sacrificing much of our celebratory vivid. People of colour cannot choose to be black or white, but we can fade.
In reading the Onipede piece, I was reminded:
I do not carry the pain-body of Aboriginal experience.
I do carry the pain-body experience of Mixed-ethnicity Migrant Mongrels.
The experiences are different.
And they are not simply binary - they are not just black and white.
So, I do not write about lived experiences of Australian Aboriginal black-deaths-in-custody or violent vilification of African-Americans. I hear the stories and join my hot tears with others. My tears carry a reminder that as someone who is neither black nor white, I have a calling to live another story.
Grief has made so much of my life grey. As much as I colour my hair, I cannot dismiss the absence of colour. So much colour departed last December that the sky and blossoms seem almost offensive in their vibrancy. The sepia of the bushfire skies and black-grey ash on every surface seemed appropriate for weeks on end. Then came the isolation: rare sightings of family, occasional online chats with friends, a full life of meetings with no social coffees to balance the business relationships.
I tell the proud story of mongrelism. We are adaptable. We are survivors. We move between worlds and eat whatever is set in front of us. We are used to being attacked, so we have default defensive settings that allow us to continue strong when others stumble. We redefine existence, rejecting the stories presented to us and the conformity of regulated injustices. We are dangerous.
Let me be clear. I do not want to hurt you. I do not want to dismiss you or your identity - whether you identify as white or black or cisgendered or transgendered or religious or atheist. I appreciate your difference and I do not want to be you. I just don't want you to try to abuse me by trying to control the definition of me.
You see, I have experienced racism, from black and white and Chinese.
Racism simply diminishes us all. Stop it. Get over it.
You can eat hummus and noodles in the same meal.
I have experienced misogyny, both from men and ingrained in the behaviours of women.
Misogyny simply diminishes us all. Stop it. Get over it.
Stop talking over the top of women or not hearing what they say or recognising their areas of expertise.
So, today I am making a plea...
In the binary-thinking of blackness and whiteness, don't force the rest of us to be grey.
Those in the in-between may naturally be in the middle - able to adapt and negotiate between you. We may be able to empathise with you both. We are not necessarily 'other' (unless you make us so), but we are. Do not contribute to invisibility by dismissing us. Perhaps we bring what black and white might benefit from.
Grey skies may or may not permit rainbows. We look to the sky, seeking light. Fleetingly, I long for transfiguration and ascension stories to re-image themselves as I look to the Heavens... is this why those stories have a place?
Then we look to the depths. In the grey of oceans, we are astounded by the miracle of a coral reef, and horrified by the crime of decay and destruction perpetuated even on life in the deep.
What can I do to bring more colour into the world?
In seeking colour, I planted bulbs.
I am expecting colour to emerge from the depths.
I am waiting.
