Monsters

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Transcript

0:35

So here it is. I'm currently recording this from my iPhone because I'm away at a home that my fiancé and I have by the lake, which I love and always allows me to just transcend. And I forgot my microphone and you might be able to hear the birds and for a second I started to overthink but yemi the quality won't be as great and part of decolonizing trauma is saying fuck it. Fuck this notion that we must be perfect and everything must be in a certain order. It's okay to create a different narrative. So thank you for loving me and accepting me as I am and as I've shown up in this podcast. So what do I want to talk about today? I want to talk about monsters. as I go deep into my PhD, more so than I've ever done in the past three years, I need forms of relief. And relief for me is also forms of education. And so I like to think that I consciously choose what I'm going to watch. And my daughter told me about the story of these two brothers who killed their parents. But, They, the story that we've been told is that they've killed their parents for money to get the inheritance But in actual fact that they had experienced a lot of heinous crimes at the hands of their parents And I remember the story vaguely and I'm gonna be honest with you Judge Yemi existed. I remember hearing it obviously decades ago You know, I don't know whether, yeah, I would have been born, but I don't think I would have heard about it till I was a bit older. And I remember thinking, oh gosh, Americans, like, you know how we just put a whole group of people? You know, I'm fully aware that I am part of the problem I'm trying to solve in the world. If you don't acknowledge the role you hold, not necessarily in starting problems, but with holding the problems, then you're part of the problem. You might have to rewind and see if that made sense, but you know exactly what I mean. And this isn't a shame, it's not even a blame, it's an acknowledgement. And then a pause in long enough to say, well, what am I going to do about it? Which is why everything I watch, everything I listen to, everything I read, I decolonize it. And I decolonize it by saying, this is one story, what could another story look like? And how can I mesh them together? And what kind of resonance and comfort do I get in my body as a result of now holding these two, potentially three stories? I think the minute it gets past three, I actually think it starts to be very conflicting and potentially can really start to challenge me. and break your psyche, which literally almost happened to me while I was watching the Eric and Lyle Menendez story on Netflix. Now, I understand that there are a number of versions of their stories, but I watched the most recent one that was, um, released this year in 2024. You know, by all means, let's acknowledge the acting. The more I go into my research, my PhD research, where I'm trying to see the benefit, I'm trying to see the transformation process of making a documentary, especially when it relates to cultural trauma. So my lens on documentary or filmmaking is very different now. And maybe it's because I had to go through an ethics process. Maybe it's because I really did have to have, um, an uncomfortable, it wasn't even a conversation, an uncomfortable sitting of how I contributed to the exclusion of First Nations voices. in the first two stages of my research. And I don't know if I've spoken about this in my podcast, and if I haven't, I might come back and speak about this at a later stage. I contributed to excluding the original custodians of the lands in which I'm doing my PhD, Australia. And I think I've lost my train of thought, but I'm going to find it again. Um, but either way, I've sat with this comfort and In sitting with that discomfort and going back to the ethics process of making a documentary, I really look at things differently. So now when I watch either films, but mainly documentaries, and I wanna say mainly docu films, which I think I may have just named myself, but I'm sure I've seen there, a docu film is, uh, effectively a documentary where we're documenting. the story of someone's life. It's like Baby Reindeer, but that you actually have actors. What blew my mind in the Baby Reindeer, um, series was that you actually had the person who had been abused, um, in real life, acting out scenes. of that same abuse. Now, who am I to judge who does what? Put it this way. My little psyche couldn't handle that. And similarly, my psyche, as I found out, could not handle, um, Eric's telling of his story. Now, I appreciate that for those of you who have not watched it, maybe don't watch TV, and I am so jealous of you. You don't need to watch it, but what you probably do need to do is just lean into this part of the podcast where I start to give some different references. But this particular docufilm has given me the base, which is we need to understand the motives of the screenwriters, the directors. Now we know the actors are here to make us feel everything, but are we getting a source of truth from docufilms? Now, I hear there's another documentary coming out about them and I believe these are clips of real life footage. Because remember that as humans, we already make judgements. We make judgements based on people's names. We make judgements based on their skin colour, their culture, religion, facial expressions. We already do so many things. outside of here, what is truth for the person who is speaking. And so when you have a documentary or a docufilm where you've got actors acting out somebody else's life, we are creating new information and new truths on that. So the layer of complexity is And I just don't know, considering how much public opinion mattered back in the 80s and the 90s when it came to court cases, just think of OJ Simpson. I guess I'm questioning whether public opinion still matters now. So when we watch a show on Netflix or any other platform and the ratings are really popular and the algorithms on social media are showing us saying, yep, we watched this, this is what we think. And then AI is gathering information and forming opinion on our behalf based on what we've said or haven't said. And then for some reason, I don't know, let's just say that. All of that information then goes and supports the Eric and Lyle Menendez boys be released from prison. Because, not that it's a spoiler alert, these boys effectively, um, murdered their parents quite badly, if, if there's a range or a spectrum for how you can be murdered. They murdered their parents, and one line of the story is they murdered them because they wanted to inherit the millions that their parents had. And the other story, the story that they tell and they continue maintain, to maintain, is that they were badly, badly sexually abused. Um, raped, tortured by the hands of their father, and in some instances, their mother. And there've been some stories to corroborate that. But this is what this docu film does, and maybe other documentaries that have been done, is that it gives you these, at least two different stories. And then to make matters even more complicated for us as the viewer, is They have these actors reenact scenes of a third story, of a fourth story, of a fifth story. So I'm at a point that I'm thinking, I actually don't believe anything. And that is my question. Is that where we are? That there is so much misinformation, disinformation, retelling, and absolutely bastardizing of information. That we the audience, We the audience who sit here and are consuming information at a rate that, come on, we just know is unhealthy. That we just don't know what to believe. I mean, who said it? If you stand for nothing, you'll fall for anything. You'll fall for everything. Our ability to be critical, our ability to ask better questions, our ability to decolonize, And I'll tell you now, that the dominant narrative is no longer the dominant narrative that appears to be in the documentary, in the film, in the series you are watching. The dominant narrative for me now sits in the person who's telling the story and trying to understand what their intention was. Is there an intention for us to think what they want us to think? To think critically? What is right and what is wrong? Either way, these are the conversations we should be having. Not just, oh, the character that played Lyle was a brilliant actor. I mean, they bloody were. Because, many times, and I promise you, almost at each segment, almost every ten minutes, I had to tell myself, Yemi, this is not really Lyle, and this is not really Eric. And I need to do that, so that I can separate my realities. Because, how I go into the world after watching something like that, really, um, really has a big impact on decisions I make in my personal life and my business life. And this is something, um, I don't believe enough of us are talking about or at least thinking about. The other thing I want to bring, because, because, um, sorry, I have to pause and say this. I had someone come into my Instagram a couple of weeks ago and said, Yemi, you've just done a post where you've said everything and nothing. And I tell you, my ego was bruised and. You know, my mouth is fire. I mean, I've been told my gift is to lift people up, but The downside and the dark side is I can tear you down. Um, and I've always said it. I'm no Jesus, uh, definitely not Buddha. Uh, could be Mother Teresa every now and again, but yeah, nah, I'm a bit too savage for that. And, and so I, I schooled him and I can't remember what I said, but he came back with apologies of, Oh no, that's not what I meant. Well, so check yourself. And I guess I do. And I, I guess I'm beginning to check myself as well in that. In this podcast I've just recorded, you might be looking for an answer, you might be searching, and I think that's the problem. The problem is that we are always waiting for someone to tell us. We're waiting for mummy, we're waiting for daddy, we're waiting for whoever it is that is handling the purse strings, or giving us the content, or relieving the pain, or giving us the pleasure to give us something. Why can't that person be you? Why can't you critically analyse, not necessarily everything for the sake of it, but the things that are informing our world, the things that are creating new paradigms, for us to figure out what is the message. Can we trust ourselves? And yeah, you might think, yeah, but if we all think differently, isn't there going to be chaos? The world is built on difference. The biodiversity that allows us to breathe the air we breathe with the different trees. With the different weather cycles, which I know some people think can be controlled. With the different plants and animals. Let's not be scared of difference. And let's trust the process. Considering we trust our iPhones and our Samsungs. We don't know how the fuck they work. Yet we trust we can pick it up and make a phone call. Let's trust us. Let's trust that our own innate body, soul, wisdom. Will guide us in critically analysing the things that are put in front of us. Because the other thing I want to bring up, the very thing that apparently is the spine, the backbone to civilization, to communities, organizations, the world, countries, is our legal system. And as I watched the enactment of the law, The court case which was open, the first court case of the Menendez brothers was open and the public really had a lot of say in it and there was a mistrial and so they did another court case and my understanding is that the judge in that one did not have it open because of the influence of public opinion. This is the legal system people. So this was in America, but come on, we know America influences a lot of the rest of the world. But our legal system around the world, and someone tell me different, you know, I have some of you that come into my inboxes and Instagram, I love it, please tell me what's, tell me what's coming up for you. But our legal system tends to ride off of two arguments, the defendant and the prosecution, the person who we think has done wrong, and the person who is wronged. We have a legal system that in most instances, is wrong. depending on the caliber of the clients can really yield a lot of money. Yes, it also wastes a lot of money through our taxes, but can yield a lot of money for those who are, who are either, who are defending or the legal system. And we, we think we're meant to get truth from that. We have managed to convince us all that we can get truth from a system where someone has to argue. That A did this, but in actual fact, it wasn't A that did it. I mean, I know I've confused myself even in that. So let me bring it back. We have a legal system where effectively most of the time you have two parties trying to convince a jury, the judge, sometimes the public who is right and who is wrong. And in some parts of the world, as we saw recently, with Marcellus Williams, got the death penalty, even though there has been a lot of conversation around saying he was innocent and enough data had come out, i. e. his DNA was nowhere near the um, crime scene. We have a legal system that can kill people, yet we know, I don't know, that there's one truth and the other isn't the truth. If we've created a system where there's why are we surprised when during a pandemic we had people who weren't sure if the vaccine was gonna help or not. Our whole systems is based on the law which, come on now. We know many people abuse, especially those who hold the law and yet we are confused as to why people appear to be gullible. Deep breath, this has been on my mind and my heart for a long time. So without having gone into much detail about the Menendez story, but knowing that it is a really great platform to just see how the way our systems have been built are no longer working, they're not. And so we question it, and we do not underestimate the power we have to challenge paradigms and systems. Now you might think, okay, Yemi, but I'm not really going to help solve a murder case. Yes, agreed. But the macro is linked to the micro. What needs to change in your organization? What needs to change in your family? There will definitely be a part two to this as I continue to percolate. And hopefully you can hear these birds and hopefully they bring you joy as well. All right, let me come back into my body. Acknowledging that I am on Wabakol land. I'm forever grateful to the ancestors who give me the audacity to do the work I do. I appreciate you for listening to me and I look forward to co creating change with you all. Bye for now.