“How could migrants themselves per/form the narrative of their lived experiences?”  “How could it be done in the most authentic and sincere ways?”

I conceived this durational performance with these questions in mind. I’m asking them to contend with the seminal question, ``Can the subaltern speak?,” because I do not think this is the question we should be asking. We should be asking instead,  “Are we listening?,” because the subaltern is always speaking?

Gramsci introduced us to the notion of the “subaltern”; displaced specific people from the socio-economic institutions of society who are socially, politically, and geographically excluded from the hegemonic structure of power. Jones (1967). Chakravorty Spivak (1999), following this line of thinking, asked us in her original essay, “Can the subaltern speak?,” which is still an ongoing intellectual and political debate to date. Using these as provocations, my performance attempts to respond to the question of Chakravorty Spivak because it understands that people we call voiceless are oftentimes not actually voiceless. They are in fact talking all the time if you only listen to them intently.

This performance also heeds to the call of Said (1979) to not only recognize “the socio-political dislocations and configurations (migrations) of our time but to situate (migrant) identities in geography of higher identities, peoples, cultures, and then to study how despite of their differences, they have always overlapped each other… which is the only way we could free ourselves from (post colonial) imperial attitude towards it.” It is the aim of this performance to precisely do that: to raise critical consciousness; counter discourses to the single narrative of who is and what is a migrant by surfacing subjectivities of migrants, front and center, and situating them into a higher geography where they could overlap with each other.

Through the conception of this performance, I discovered my practice to be the practice of non-practice. I realized this through my encounter with the words of Thich Nhat Hanh , a Buddhist monk, who introduced us to the thinking of aimlessness; that to not have a preconceived arrival point is actually an act of arrival. Hanh (1999) said,

“Calming allows us to rest, and resting is a precondition for healing. When animals in the forest get wounded, they find a place to lie down, and they rest completely for many days. They don't think about food or anything else. They just rest, and they get the healing they need. When we humans get sick, we just worry! We look for doctors and medicine, but we don't stop. Even when we go to the beach or the mountains for a vacation, we don't rest, and we come back more tired than before. We have to learn to rest. Lying down is not the only position for resting. During sitting or walking meditation, we can rest very well. Meditation does not have to be hard labor. Just allow your body and mind to rest like an animal in the forest. Don't struggle. There is no need to attain anything. I am writing a book, but I am not struggling. I am resting also. Please read in a joyful, yet restful way. The Buddha said, "My Dharma is the practice of non-practice." Practice in a way that does not tire you out, but gives your body, emotions, and consciousness a chance to rest. Our body and mind have the capacity to heal themselves if we allow them to rest. Stopping, calming, and resting are preconditions for healing. If we cannot stop, the course of our destruction will just continue. The world needs healing. Individuals, communities, and nations need healing.”

For this performance, I used autobiography and autoethnography as my methods to foreground and recenter my migrant voice within the ambit of political and social discourses on globalization and global mobilities and for me to emerge from the work reoriented more towards transformative healing which is tied to social justice.

This performance also employs the Kyoto School of Thought, a school of philosophy that looks at transforming the way we view ourselves, others, and the world; that looks at philosophy not as a cerebral exercise in logic or the analysis of words or propositions. The Kyoto School of Thought, as a philosophy, doubts “the adequacy of the intellect and its concept formation to deliver a true picture of the complexity of everyday human experience. It embraces “pure experience;” “that to experience means to know facts just as they are; to know in accordance with facts by completely relinquishing one’s own fabrications; not adulterating experience with some sort of thought; to experience the state of experience just as it is without the least addition of deliberative discrimination.” Carter (2013). 

It is through this thinking that, From Mentation to Lamentation to Meditation: A Migrant Story was formed to speak and demand listening.

I hope that through this performance, we go to places that hurt and come out of them transformed and more alive. Nguyen (2018), in his book “The Displaced,” talked about the artist’s task. How “artists are supposed to go to where it hurts, to know what it feels like to be another. They should be able to conjure up the lives of others, and only through such acts of memory, imagination, and empathy can they grow our capacity to feel for others. Artists, being people who do not always feel at home; who are out of place, who are emotionally or psychically or socially displaced to one degree or another, at one time or another, are in the best position to create works that reminds us that it is only through our ability to welcome others that we achieve the best of ourselves.” 

Join me in this performance to pause, to listen, to rest, to be aimless, to return, to forgive, to remember, to think, to forget, to lament, to care, to meditate, to arrive, to heal, to be.