So we all realise that the whole reason the Titanic sank was because the compartments in the bottom of the ship weren’t adequately sealed? And that, effectively, a giant series of leaks killed the world’s greatest luxury cruiser? (If you’re in the mood for some morbid grisly reading, Wikipedia has a great article detailing the Sinking of the RMS Titanic.)
I may not be the world’s greatest luxury cruiser - but I kinda feel like that today. “Don’t Sweat The Small Stuff (And It’s All Small Stuff)” was never my motto, because really, it’s all the slow leaks, drip drip drip*, that build and build and eventually flood, and you discover too late that all the nice little walls you had erected around various parts of your life weren’t sufficient to stop the deluge. And on top of that, the swim back to the island is hella, hella long. (I don’t, actually, even know if that’s an appropriate metaphor. But I like it. So it’s here.)
And sometimes, you know, the things that happen in bloglandia just … leak over into your real life.
I’m probably not a very good anti-racist feminist in real life. I make bad jokes, I laugh at worse jokes, I don’t always speak up when I hear something problematic. In fact, my favourite tactic is to just shut up and try not to glare so much, because no matter how angry I am it’s probably not worth arguing with teh stoopid. Unless I’m at the head of my class, in which it’s expected that I’ll challenge racist/sexist/heterosexist statements, and in which I actually have the authority to do so (but not too much authority because then the poor conservative students will feel persecuted**) - I speak up then. Aside from having performed in last year’s Vagina Monologues, I don’t really participate in many forms of activism. I teach. I blog. It doesn’t feel like enough, somehow.
But then shit like this goes down, and I see all these other womyn I’ve been reading getting so frustrated and so upset - and rightly so - and the colour of my skin becomes something I can’t ever seem to look past, to look beneath, and I walk around in my daily life wondering if everything everyone says to me has some greater racial impact. I feel anger bristling just under that skin that seems a little too dark, a little too different, and I feel like I’ve reached the edge of a boundary I never had and that I am looking into - not an abyss, but an ocean, this mysterious massive body of water beneath whose crashing waves lurk things I’ve never even thought to think before. I feel the Pisces in me and I want to dive in, but I am afraid, and I cannot swim, and then I go and do things like abuse the hell out of ocean metaphors because I cannot write directly how I feel.
And maybe a lot of this is the pregnancy too, realising that this is the world my child will grow up in, a world where her grandparents can be proud that she’s “mostly white” while holding the opinion that mixed children are “beautiful(exotic),” a world where my own Pinay mother can say that “Well they had to cast white people in 21, because otherwise it would look like a foreign film” and recognise that her own country does not think she belongs here and accept that because there is nothing else she can do. A world where my child’s accomplishments will mean nothing if a white person does not recognise them, a world where she will be cited as the source of division and mutiny and a traitor to the cause if she doesn’t tow the right line with the right people, no matter how important her voice or how socially just her cause. It’s a pretty damn depressing thought. But I’m thinking it anyway.
And because there are still people talking about it - which please, by all means, keep talking, keep this ball rolling, because it is a damn fucking shame that we are still here and still no one is listening, because we’re obviously missing the bigger picture or out to ruin people’s careers, or something - but because there are people still talking, I still wade in and read those threads, and a little bit of me just keeps dying every time I do it. Because the truth of my skin is just so plainly written there that there is nothing left to do.
I am no longer sure I want to identify as a feminist, not if this is what the feminist movement looks like, not if this is how they act, and apparently I have a damn lot of history to catch up on as my woc sisters tell me that this shit is not new, and indeed endemic to the feminist movement, and where does that leave me? Where does that leave me, with my work as an educator and a non-activist mover and shaker of the little lives around her and the little life within her?
And so I sit here and face this ocean, and feel it creeping over my skin, into my skin, leaking its way in through metaphysical osmosis. I don’t know what’s on the other side of drowning, and sometimes I think that frightens me worse than not being able to breathe.
Blogging isn’t “real life,” the internets are not “serious business,” and yet, and yet, the overlap is too effective to be ignored and underwritten. What has happened here is real, and for all that we’re apparently sabotaging a book deal, there is still a lot of hurt and pain to go around, and I for one am fucking exhausted and think it might just be easier to succumb. To drown. And find out what’s on the other side of swimming with the fishes.
I’ll still be blogging, no matter what. I just … might be a little less political in the times to come.
In the meantime. Send floaties, and rubber duckies. Maybe I can make it back to the island after all.
