Dear Sarah, and Hello All,
Thank you for the timely reminder of my scarifying writing.
To be deeply shamed and scorned publicly feels like an appropriate form of
degradation and humiliation of my hubris. I accept it in that sense of
what goes round, comes round.
To answer your question.
Yes, I am now much more aware of how over the years my 'attacks' against
racism and colonialism in the abstract, propositional sense have spilled
over into personally scarifying writing (in the first and second person
sense with colleagues.
Some colleagues have experienced my scarifying writing as bullying,
abusive and excluding. I have come to deeply regret how I have severed
certain relationships without due care for the other persons's point of
view. Oh, if I could put that clock back....I have lost much in terms of
friendship and exchange with thoe colleagues.
Had I known beforehand how my journey of performative identity would have
troubled, and disturbed me. I didn't. I learned about this only as it
emerged. With no reherasals, and no guide book I often got it badly wrong
on the night. And then wnet out and did it all over again, badly.
I am also thoroughly ashamed of that period in my life that led to such
appallingly scarifying writing. Regret, sorrow, contrition. But they don't
turn the clock back do they....?
To have abandoned my values is a shameful, hopelessly weak and impotent
thing to do as a person, as an educator, as a postcolonial practitioner.
You are quite right, Sarah, in publicly pinpointing my human frailty as a
colleague-educator.
As an educator concerned to ask the question, 'How can I improve my
practice....?' in the context of my Self-study practice I have instead
worked on a salvation through 'deeds'.
I continue to transform my life affirming energies into the kind
of 'deeds' I'd rather be remembered for than my past scarifying writing.
Evidence of my deeds include James and Debbie's dissertations this year,
along with Felicity's on Harry Potter and Organizational Studies, a really
brave attempt. And Konstantina's thesis of Loving Practice (Action
Masters), and the three forthcoming Action Masters theses from Andrew, Nic
and James Edgerton.
No, I'm not yet ready to unlearn my hatred for the hatefulness of slavery,
colonialism, neo-colonialism, whiteness and contemporary racism, global
capitalism, and the new world order and its new and incipient
imperialisms.
And I will continue to use my 'violent eloquence' to 'verb/-alize' the
deconstruction, dismantling, and destruction of whiteness because this is
key to my project of postcolonial critical pedagogy.
Unalloyed hate, projected by me onto others through my anxiety about my
own hatefulness has in the past corroded the soul of some of my
relationships. I strive not to repeat the terror of that error, nor to
travel in the land of scarification again.
Instead I strive to practice a critical pedagogy that enhances my
compassion, justice, care, respect, and educational love; and to produce
a theoretical construction to explain my practice, as Mohamed put it.
Yaqub
|