There Was No Bridge Across

2017

Through the foot washing I became aware of my own agency, the agency of touch and its potential to establish a deeper connection. I also became aware of people’s resistance to physical contact, the shame attached to body and the negative associations given to a woman who is asking to touch.

I read an essay: Politics of Admittance, Female Sexuality, Miscegenation and the formation of community by R. Chow (Alessandrini. A (1999), Frantz Fanon: Critical Perspectives, Rutledge: London/New York) which gave a critical frame to what I was feeling. The one who ‘admits’ into any community sets up a hierarchy and dependency, those ‘admitted’ refer to this outside agent to determine worth, value, reality, and meaning. The birth of patriarchal community saw female sexuality, insofar as it is the embodiment of “touching” and the physical intimacy that leads to reproduction, as a locus of potential danger – of dangerous possibilities. A form of physical power that could break down all boundaries and thus disrupt social order. Therefore, the person who embodies ‘touching’ and ‘physical contact’ must be looked upon as ‘taboo’. The continual incorporation of the narrative of the father and the exportation of the ‘touch’ of sexual difference represented by women underpin the patriarchal paradigm of community building.

What was interesting in this encounter was the range of intense emotions I felt whilst approaching and touching this clay man. I felt a mix of hurt, anger, ruthlessness, love, need, longing, and grief – it felt personal and transpersonal, as though dipping into a collective unconscious. At times these emotions acted like a fog around my sense of agency, and my touch was driven by a reactive force which was not simply a ‘real time’ response to the encounter but a residue from the past. This made me question what inhibits or motivates agency - and whether there is an unavoidable legacy of repression that informs it?

I was aware of a sense of indigenous agency which arose spontaneously from the inside, an instinctual response to the clay in the here and now.

Then there was an agency that had to maneuver and express itself through a colonised body - an expression propelled by past experiences of powerlessness thus creating a uni-directional disposition that wanted to exert power.

Agency of the 'colonised body' abides to Society, which has determined what it can or can’t be, what it should look like, how it should behave, what’s appropriate or socially acceptable.

Although it looks like a murder has taken place, actually what it felt like, in the process was a deep desire to make contact. The clay man was sometimes passive, an object, and maybe this objectification heightened the sense of disconnection. But sometimes the vitality of interacting with the clay opened a subjective dialogue in which I felt a reciprocity and a quality of listening and responding.There was a question of ‘otherness’, and I realised in this encounter that if one is made an object and the other wields all the power there seems to be only two possible outcomes - a process of dissolution of ‘other’ or a reinforcement of ‘other’.

This idea is somehow confirmed by a quote by R. Chow:

‘The most painful sting of patriarchy is the solidarity against the ‘other’. Chow, R (1999), ‘The Politics of Admittance’ in Alessandrini, A (1999), Frantz Fannon: Critical Persepctives, Routledge: London / New York.