In “Grounding Conversations, Part 4: Joy as Resistance,” Dev anchors themselves in the past as they take to the ocean—one place that they always find joy—to immerse themselves in the ripples of that emerge from the experiences that have taught them how to find it.
In “Grounding Conversations, Part 4: Joy as Resistance,” Dev anchors themselves in the past as they take to the ocean—one place that they always find joy—to immerse themselves in the ripples of that emerge from the experiences that have taught them how to find it.
Dev Ramsawakh:
This is grounding conversations with Dev Ramsawakh for Radio LUMI. This six part segment series will lay the groundwork for the conversations that'll be happening on our broadcast during Luminato 2023 and provide a background on the frameworks with which our audio experiences attempt to engage.
Many performance shows and arts festivals begin their programming with your typical land acknowledgement. However, many indigenous peoples have criticized the practice for relegating their relationship with the land to the past, which does more to alleviate settler guilt and discomfort than to demonstrate real solidarity and progressive action.
In my relationship to Radio LUMI, I want to acknowledge these criticisms as a way to use my platform responsibly. I don't want to just acknowledge the trauma indigenous peoples from all over have had inflicted on them, but to address how our society collectively is hurt by the mechanics of colonialism. I want to try to offer a demonstration of ways to actively engage with decolonial concepts and a practice to move forward on an interconnected journey towards collective liberation.
In grounding conversations, I reveal myself as a time traveler, as I embark on a journey that weaves in and out of the past presence and futures that are rooted in the festival's programming and our city's arts culture. Tying them to the themes that the host here at Radio LUMI will be addressing from their own perspectives. This journey will be created using excerpts from my body of work to address the ongoing impacts of colonialism on our collective society and the underlying principles of disability justice that the San Francisco based disabled arts collective Sins Invalid imbued into the term when they coined it in 2005 in order to teach us how to resist our interlocking systems of oppression. It's now time to embark on the fourth part of our journey, joy as resistance.
I've been transported once more, having fallen asleep swaddled in the comforter in my present day Toronto apartment and woken swaddled in the soothing rock of the waves of a Lake Ontario that exists outside of time. I stare up at a clear blue sky, my ears filled with the sounds of lapping water as the waves submerge and recede from them in a slow rhythmic pattern. It's peaceful.
I've always loved the water. It's where I felt most at home, both literally and figuratively. In water, I'm buoyant instead of feeling gravity grind my bones together at their joints. And the creatures that live there exist in a vibrant and liminal world that's always made more sense to me in all of its mystery than the on land world I lived in.
I envy dolphins and whales, mammals that defied scientific categorization, so determined to escape the sea, their bodies transformed until they couldn't return to the land if they wanted to. Water, one of the most valuable resources that Canada boasts, covers most of Earth, and we've barely explored and understood a fraction of it. And denied access to it for many of its original stewards. That's why I wrote a poem in early 2020 called Shark Skin, which I turned into a short film through a filmmaking program with the Toronto Queer Film Festival in 2021.
Speaker 1:
Before quarantine, I was going to get a shark tattoo right on my neck. They've actually got the skin, these scales called dermal denticles. It's the same stuff their teeth are made of. It's basically teeth skin. Supposedly if you run your hands along them from head to tail, they feel smooth, almost silky to the touch. But if you rub them the wrong way, those scales bite back, ripping ribbons of your flesh. And I think of this when you run your hands along me in just the right way, and I'm smooth and easy, but my skin is made of teeth and they're always ready to bite, ready to draw blood, and I'm always just waiting for you to give me a reason.
Dev Ramsawakh:
I first wrote it after leaving my first domestically abusive relationship about a new budding connection that I was cautiously making. Ironically, that relationship turned into another domestically abusive one, but I did eventually get my shark tattoo right on my neck. But coming back to that poem reminded me of a conversation that Radio LUMI host Ramya Amuthan had with Andrea Nann, a producer of the All In Good Time program that was a part of Luminato 2022.
Andrea Nann:
Water, of course, for healing, for ceremony, to cleanse, for that constant reminder of change and that we are ourselves bodies of water, that 60% of us is water and that 90% of the fluids that move within us are water. And water just felt like the element that we needed to call upon to help us to find that courage and that strength and that support to begin to release and to let go and to let things be carried away by our great mother Earth. We're not just here alone as humans on this planet. We have so much around us.
And if we were to open our awareness to the richness of all that is here for us, that the planet itself can feel whole and well. We are in it together with other than humans, with all beings of creation. I'm hoping that the aspects of the ceremony that bring our awarenesses and open our awarenesses to other than humans will also remind us that we have so much support around us and that we are part of things greater that are also experiencing need for our attention, our awareness, our time.
It really is a literal activation of different systems of our bodies, but an activation of the realms of our existence, which are mental, physical, emotional, and spiritual. And so the whole ceremony is designed to reactivate and to notice that even breath is movement and that we can start there. And when we start to notice that breath is movement, we actually realize that we've been holding our breath. And so I have been saying to myself through the pandemic, this expression, "All in good time."
And to allow for myself to soften back away from that feeling of just the urgency and the frustration and all of the energy that was charging towards things that were then [inaudible 00:07:05] or that had to be canceled or where there was a physical or emotional or spiritual or mental loss. So all in good time just reminds us all that things will happen. We will be able to bring closure to the things that need to be brought back to the ground. We will be able to ascend and celebrate the things that need to go upwards and we will feel whole again.
Dev Ramsawakh:
Water is healing and a source of life. Its fluidity is in constant motion. Shifting states, replenishing itself, it may fit the shape of its container, but its state can always be transformed with the right conditions and systems. Like plants that consume carbon dioxide in the water they soak up from the soil to produce oxygen and releasing moisture into the air, which can become rain or snow or hail or just the humidity we feel on a hot summer day.
It reminds me of myself, Toronto, the arts, how I understand the world. Likely why I called my first short film, Fluid, created with the Revision Center for Arts and Social Justice in 2019. I wonder, is there a link between Toronto in its role as the meeting place, a place of constant movement and shifting? All of these entities exist in multiplicities. There's no one definable Dev, Toronto or art, which reminds me again of Justin Manyfingers and our conversation from 2019 for representation.
Justin Manyfingers:
When I was looking at Western forms of performing arts, it was hard for me to understand why is acting a separate thing than dance, than music? When all of those are continuously in motion in a cultural sense, and especially in a ceremonial sense, and they're not broken up. And again, that's western think, trying to categorize everything. But it doesn't make sense because I've trained in all of these, and the root thing of all of this is trying to make it feel as real as possible.
But how can you be as real of a person if you completely chop yourself up in bits and pieces and then try to feel normal? Of course, that's not going to feel normal. And so these techniques are very, very strange. When you have sex, there's certain noises you're able to identify that, you're able to identify the certain physicalities that come with that.
If you put it in a language or text form those stories, you're able to identify what that is. When someone's happy, you're able to identify that sound and what that is a part of. Those stories that are about that and the physicality with the human body when someone laughs. When you're dancing, depending on what that is. So all of these human experiences include all three of those things that make an individual. So it was hard for me to say, "I want to be an actor. I want to be a dancer. I want to get into music or be a singer or musician or write music or compose music." I'm not primarily an actor or a singer or anything in the music world. I just know enough to be able to create art as a human being in a human form.
Dev Ramsawakh:
This is why Sins Invalid also urges us to recognize wholeness as a principle of disability justice. Our value as human beings can't be defined by a single metric. We are more than just roles or functions or productivity. Our existences can't be complete if we sacrifice all the parts that make us whole in order to justify it. What we do is valuable, but so is what we love, when inspires us, what we care for and what we desire. This is why Adrienne Maree Brown refers to the framework she uses for activism as "pleasure activism," which she describes as "a politics of healing and happiness that explodes the dour myth that changing the world is just another form of work."
This framework draws on the work of black feminists like Audre Lorde, Joan Morgan, Cara Page, Sonya Renee Taylor, Alexis Pauline Gumbs, and other activists whose work engages with theirs. She explains that oppression convinces us that our pleasure and comfort are detrimental to society, which is why centering the pleasure of the most oppressed is a radical practice.
Both Brown and Sins Invalid emphasize developing an erotic practice, expanding the definition of the erotic beyond intercourse, to encompass all the ways we can seek and experience pleasure radically. That doesn't mean to separate it from sex, which Sins Invalid reminds us that society tries with disabled people to refuse them agency as sexual beings through infantilization and dehumanization.
As Brown explains in her book, Pleasure Activism, "the erotic is a measure between the beginnings of our sense of self and the chaos of our strongest feelings. It is an internal sense of satisfaction to which once we have experienced it, we know we can aspire. For having experienced the fullness of this depth of feeling and recognizing its power in honor and self-respect, we can require no less of ourselves." This was something that Ryan Persaude touched on in my interview with him. He was explaining to me the word "coolie", a derogatory word used to describe Indo Caribbean indentured laborers and their descendants.
Ryan Persaude:
I find the word is really important in the diaspora for thinking about again, this juxtaposition of pain and pleasure, but also reclamation and power and agency that's particularly rooted in Caribbean feminist knowledges, where Caribbean feminist women, whether they identify that way or not, have always been at the forefront of teaching us what it means to reclaim your body, to mash up the space, to free up yourself. But all of these ideas around free up are also loaded in pain. In enacting pleasure, we have to also think through what pain has been caused to allow that pleasure to happen.
Dev Ramsawakh:
Thinking about the Caribbean women I grew up with, his words rang with a familiar clarity. My mother, grandmother, and aunts are incredibly strong, hardworking women. They take care of their homes, their careers, their families, and their communities, the toll of which they bear stoically. A lot of pain is exchanged between them, but they still find ways to come together to indulge in unrestrained celebration.
For me, holidays and birthdays aren't dignified family affairs, they're boisterous, to borrow a word from Persaude, [inaudible 00:12:55]. We cram our houses with as many loved ones as we can herd together, rousing a din of music, laughter, and passionate conversation into the early morning hours. My family dances for hours letting go of their airs of respectability to wine and rum, gyrating to soca and calypso, music that spins cultural collective trauma into rhythmic tempos and misleadingly nonchalant lyrics.
I'm grateful for these memories as I think about how I always find ways to release the pressurized static of stress, oppression, and struggle constantly building inside of me, despite disability, poverty, and trauma isolating me long before the pandemic erupted.
Whether it's wildly dancing alone to nostalgic playlists, writing poetry or stories, or having long intimate conversations with people who are willing collaborators in cultivating joy. This is why disability justice activists and artists have developed accessibility frameworks like creative and responsive access. These concepts ask us not only to be creative in implementing access, but also to consider who gets to access creativity and who faces nearly insurmountable barriers to it.
It means being open and curious. It means not deferring joy and pleasure and desire in a futile pursuit of perfection. In a world of ever-growing crisis and conflict, fear and anxiety make it easy to succumb to hopelessness and complacency. Perpetually dismissing our own liberation is unrealistic. The most oppressed of us need creativity alongside having our basic needs met to express ourselves, but also to connect and imagine new worlds where we flourish together.
As I drift lazily in this body of timelessness, immersing myself in the swells of creativity and possibility and joy, it's easy to suspend myself here forever where it's weightless and buoyant and free, but dreams aren't actions and all the fantasizing in the world won't make them into reality.
That was part four of the six part segment series, Grounding Conversations, Joy as Resistance. This segment was produced by Dev Ramsawakh for Radio LUMI as part of Luminato 2023. This segment included audio excerpts from interviews with Andrea Nann in conversation with Ramya Amuthan for Radio LUMI and Luminato Festival Toronto, recorded in 2022, Justin Manyfingers recorded in 2019 and originally released in 2020 as part of the [inaudible 00:15:10] podcast made in production with Extra Magazine. And Ryan Persaude, recorded in 2021 and re-released in 2023 as part of the remaster podcast, Jumbie: Colonized Monsters.
The music used in the segment is by GR Grip. Sound effects were either from freesound.org or fully produced by Dev Ramsawakh.