multitudes

by Amardeep Kaur Gill, in Arthur - 24 March 2008 (Edited Version)

Building Psychiatric Survivors Movement Alongside Anti-Poverty and Prison Abolition Activism

When we think of mental asylums, prisons for the mad, psychiatric confinement, and shock medicine, we think of the past that do not pose a problem today.Today, we imagine that we live in a world of humane treatment - where patients have rights, choices and freedom, where there are community support agencies such as the CMHA (Canadian Mental Health Association) helping consumers to integrate into society, and where doctors prescribe approved and effective drugs to treat chemical imbalances or brain dysfunctions that cause psychosis or schizophrenia. Most of us believe that we have a legal act governing the protection of mental patients and that psychiatrists and nurses have to operate within a human rights code.

Little do we know about the deep picture of our psychiatric system or these governing institutions of poverty, racism, mental and social deviance and their involution. It is perhaps for this reason that the psychiatric system today is perhaps the most dangerous one – precisely because we think we have reformed in the same way many think we have improved women’s conditions in penitentiaries and reformed the criminal justice system.

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by Amardeep Kaur Gill, in Arthur - 11 Februrary 2008 (Edited Version)

Perhaps the largest problem in activists’ struggles in empowerment and creating safe spaces is forgetting about one’s own normativity and privilege. Of course, one may ask - Who is privileged? Who is oppressed? And who is an ally? These questions are certainly not answerable, as if there is some sort of a definite individual subject - there certainly isn’t one.

We too often create new dichotomies while challenging existing binaries. We have become more and more accustomed to believing that somehow, some of us are outside of the mainstream community and therefore are outside of oppressive politics and free from all such flaws and injustices.
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by Amardeep Kaur Gill, in Multitudes - 26 December 2006

Is there such a thing?

This bizarre phenomenon of activists who aren’t really fighting for their rights, but are fighting against the rights of others. The funny thing is they are often called activists. But then again…What or Who is an activist? The truth is that this word or identity itself is to a certain extent a fairly privileged notion. It is made apparent when you communicate with many different marginalized groups around the world, they will tell you they are farmers, migrant women, workers, fisherfolks, sex workers. Most of marginalized communities would never use the word “activist” to describe themseleves even in the moment of action. It doesn’t solve the problem either if one says one fights for people’s rights. “Rights” and specifically the ideology and humanitarian idea, or shall I say enlightment idea, of “Human Rights” deserve its own deconstructive chapter or book.

Leaving behind all these terms them, lets just take concrete examples of what I am talking about in the spirit that activists are simply people working for social change or maintain rights for the better. In Hong Kong, I witnessed pregnant women taking to the streets and marching to Central Government Offices to fight against mainland Chinese mothers who come to Hong Kong to give birth. Their action did not really state that they want HK government to spend more money on health services. Rather their stand was strangely clear, they want mainland mothers prevented from giving birth at public hospitals in HK. Another example of such reverse activism are the family-church groups in Canada, holding rallies and throwing Christian heternormative chauvinist propaganda to fight against same-sex marriages in the name of God.

Are such people activists? In progressive politics, one could hardly see how banning same-sex marriages or disallowing Mainland mothers to deliver in Hong Kong is activism. Perhaps this trend shall be better identified as “Reverse Activism”, because the act of activism is present, however, the nature of it is reverse namely as at the center of its quest is to exert its power and privilege rather than to destablize power.

by Amardeep Kaur Gill, in Arthur - 27 November, 2006

Does this man ever have nightmares? Apparently not.

Recently, Bush emerged in the Vietnamese capital with an arrogant and fearless agenda at the Asia Pacific Cooperation (APEC) Summit. APEC is the second-largest economic and trade bloc in the world, after the World Trade Organization.

So, please for a minute, picture this: As leaders gather in Hanoi, Bush makes his debut by commenting that the unsuccessful Vietnam War decades before has given him vital lessons on the war in Iraq. One would hope or wish so, until he says that his lesson is: “We’ll succeed unless we quit.”
But of course, as we know, there is even more. The most pressing agenda at the APEC summit was neither the past of Vietnam nor the present of Iraq, but rather the future of North Korea.

Perhaps when Bush was small and read Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, he learned that he would be faced with the ghosts of past, present and future one day and had already planned how he was going to shrug the ghosts away. Perhaps the moral story by Dickens was always just a Christmas, or shall I say a Christian, fairytale, rather than a moral story. Or perhaps the moral of the story only applies if the people you are helping are white Christians. Surely that must be it.

This Christmas, then, Vietnam certainly does not need any apology for America’s violence and rape of its land, a social and psychological devastation that continues up to today. Iraq can continue being occupied with civilians being shot and killed every day because they live on a land where oil lives below. And North Korea can get ready to be invaded on the eve of the New Year because this poor, famine-struck country’s only defense against American invasion is having nuclear weapons, and even then, it is still a target of war.

by Amardeep Kaur Gill, in Multitudes – 26 October 2006

When we think of a pilgrimage, we often think of a path, of a journey. But the path I am on is a non-path. When I went to India this summer, I knew not of its purpose. People asked me what was the occasion. I said I did not know and I genuinely did not know. And yet it was a significant prilgirimage. For me, there is always this undecidability that traces the trail of wisdom and puzzlement. The uncertainty that follows you is largely part of any healing. This is because the structural and metaphysical undecidability of the (non)journey itself subverts the standard and the conventional. That is what provides the rupture towards an ecstatic moment of healing.

About a week before I was to depart to India, the time when such a (non)journey was never in sight but another (non)path, my friend Wai Yee and I were communicating on the phone. It was about 3 in the night and I was asked to leave my apartment and join about twenty people in a meeting to have a discussion on a significant matter – the matter of life and death. She said that she believes there is more to a person then a living body. What such a statement of wisdom presents is the aporia of life and death.

As per my the theme of my previous Deep Voices, life and death always go together. The poem I wrote, Eternal Light, was meant for when such an occasion presents itself. The truth is, though, that such an occasion is really always around, and yet never around. It is an aporia – a literary term used in poetry and philosophy meaning the Impassable.

When I refer to pathless pilgrimages, thus, I am referring to such matters of uncertainty and undecidability that follows but paradoxically make the pilgrimage complete and whole. I am referring to occasions in which life is experienced through death and the other way around. I am referring to the (non)way in which anarchic attitudes are experienced and practiced. In fact in any political setting, resistance and creation follow the (non)principals of pathless pilgrimages. Unfortunately, the standard of Western-oriented uni-lateral movements has taken over this wisdom of uncertainty and the (non)path of anarchic attitudes

CLICK HERE: Deep Voices Newletter: Pathless Pilgrimages, Octobober 2006, Issue#3)

by Amardeep Kaur Gill, in Multitudes - 25 October 2006

Why is it that privilege plays out more in life than recognizing privilege? Why is it so hard to act out on the ethical terms many want or claim to uphold? Very often, people pretend to be somebody else, somebody of high values, principals and ethics. In reality though, such principals are far from being exercised.

I am not talking about situations where advocates for fair trade who sit down for a drink at Starbucks or the anti-globalization activist having a cheap unhealthy lunch at McDonalds after a protest against the WTO. I am talking about benign circumstances - what people just don’t see. Sometimes its not what people do but what people just don’t do and pretend everything is fine. Is something wrong with the people, or is it the false nature of the ethical community that poses the problem?

The problem is that our community of ethics and values is often built against the mainstream world. When people act to recognize privilege, they do so against the popular notion. People only recognize their privilege when it involves a notion/event/incident that is or occurs outside of our environment. Its how people have a good conscience - isolate themselves from the guilt by building a community against the oppressive attitudes in popular surroundings and by denying such a thing could happen in our utopia. What people fail to do is recognize the power dynamics and the privilege they exercise in their own communities. What people fail to do is practice their own values and principals within their own surroundings amongst themselves.

There is a level of uneasiness and anxiety if such issues are addressed. Privilege is just too good to lose, so people continue to exercise it amongst themselves and go to large extent to deny the reality of such a privilege. Instead, there is a tendency to build a false identity of values and principals that just aren’t practiced the way they should be.

by Amardeep Kaur Gill, in Multitudes - 23 October, 2005

I was going through my journals and found a piece that was particularly capturing. I wonder, if only I had like 100 pages of such writing, perhaps I could write a short novel. This piece is taken from my journal Silent Water dated 28th of July of this year. It is based in my mother’s home village of Lopoke in India where I spent about a month this summer.

An Excerpt from my Journal
Silent Water - 28th July, 2006

The sky is like a picture - so still and near. Yet one moment, the clouds are of this shape and style and the next, a shocking difference. I am amazed at its stillness in its movement or shall I say at its movement in its stillness.
Sometimes, I feel the sky is a painting and a wallpaper. That I can reach out and touch it in its simplicity just above my head.
Perhaps if my stillness and immobility was like the sky, deceiving to the eye and yet absolutely in an enchanting movement, perhaps then I could be the flying statue, the mystical inexplainable figure of paradox and unreason.
The night as fallen and the clouds have hidden. I shall wrap myself too in a think blanket beneath the enchanting skyscapes and hope I am part of its still and yet motion picture.
The stars of night evolve from nothingness, appearing so bright. I look down for a second and up again, and countless more stars fill the now luminous black sky.
The days before, the storm was loud. Grey and heaviness burst into pours of rainwater. In the dusk of coolness, the orange horizon is magnificient and in the rice paddy fields in which Basmati is grown, the setting leaves its trace in a water of effervescences. I sit on the roof of the home, admiring the glamorous beauty of orange sunset. And in the field of my sight, young birds fly to their nests. I only see their shadows but their shadows are often more beautiful because what you see is movement. The Movement of shadows reflected in the sleeping sun and in the pond of ripples.
Yesterday, I caught a glimpse of a parrot greener than the surrounding trees and leaves. As it flew back and forth, I caught the sight of its wings and nature’s evergreen. Like the grasshopper, the parrot mingled with its natural habitat and nest, where it belonged. Its beauty is meant to be seen only momentarily, when it breaks from its stilness. For when it sits with its green leaves, its nature is too be unseen.
Am I then a green parrot that has built a nest within the branches of nature’s solitude? Is my solemn melancholic that of natural colours of protection, calm and pace from this world of beasts and preys.
But for every peaceful animal, there comes a moment of intensity, of mania, of flight, of movement. Movement not that of nature’s beauty but that of struggle for peace, for calm. It is this melancholia of stillness in nature’s own home that if successfully conquered, like the parrot, or the grasshopper, or the frog that I barely notice, creates and sustains natural tranquility.

by Amardeep Kaur Gill, in Arthur - 5 October 2006

Until Debt Do Us Part

Nobody would have thought that Hong Kong would have been able to put on a spectacular display of resistance against the policies of the World Trade Organization (WTO) at its Ministerial Conference last December. But what happened in Hong Kong achieved more than just an exhibition of cultural art or protest. The complete collapse of the negotiations at the General Council in Geneva this year confirms the dream and success of the protesters in Hong Kong during the intense struggle and escalation of outrage at the WTO.

The Doha Round has been burnt to ashes. The World Trade Organization is in crisis. And its neighboring pillars of Bretton Woods are likewise struggling to hide their meltdown. This time, though, Singapore gets to be the ugly face hosting the annual meeting of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. Underneath the talks and future plans of the institutions, the IMF and World Bank are facing a uphill battle to save their neoliberal agendas as people of developing countries reject their illegitimate and odious debt. As Singapore shuts out our civil society and the voice of people in the talks, neighboring Indonesia becomes the major hub of resistance.
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by Amardeep Kaur Gill, in Multitudes - 23 September 2006
Imagine being strapped onto a special wooden chair, locked in a chamber, and then having a professional canner give you lashes on your bare buttocks all in the name of law. This place isn’t in China or North Korea. It isn’t in Iraq or Iran. It isn’t Palestine or Syria. Nor is it America or Columbia or Serbia.

If your ask me which country is the most dangerous place in East Asia, I would say Singapore - the under-representated authoritarian axis of evil alongside the United States. This is precisely why I did not dare step foot in this city of death as IMF and World Bank gets together to make elite decisions and shut out the voices of civil society and protesters.

Singapore promotes terror and fear on its civilians. Yet, it is no surprise that Singapore was the venue of this global meeting. Under the name of democracy, freedom and development, to have a meeting in the region where no one is allowed to freely express themseleves was exactly the interest of IMF and World Bank.
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by Amardeep Kaur Gill, in Multitudes - 1 September 2006

So just when we got our moments of joy in collasping the WTO Doha Round, the US is trying to resurrect the talks via South East Asia. The Association of South East Asian Nations (ASEAN) and US declared a trade and investment pack just last week. The declaration opens up American hopes for pushing its FTAs in the region along with a resurrection of WTO talks. Is the United States going to be successful in its American dominated policies or will the upcoming movments in the region ensure WTO stays buried and FTAs continue to be rejected?
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by Amardeep Kaur Gill, in Multitudes - August 16, 2006

I am not here to discuss whether we should accept Prime Minister Juniricho Koisumi’s visit to Yakasuni or whether we should wage a protest against his visits to the war shrine. I really don’t care, to be honest. Not because it is an issue of the past, or because World War II is over, or because I was never alive at that time and never experienced its immediate hardships. But rather, because there really are more important current issues we should pay attention to with regards to war and peace.

The Chinese and South Korean government shocks me more than the Japanese government. They act as if they are the innocent peaceful governing bodies that have never practiced any military aggression. If there is a nation-state that has never oppressed people or used military violence, then perhaps it has a right to condemn Japan’s Prime Minister Koisumi and the Japanese administration. The governments of China and South Korea certainly do not belong to this category.
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by Amardeep Kaur Gill, in Multitudes - July 18, 2006

I sleep under the tree of berries
Ripe fruits fall on the bed of death and hope
the moon lights up the sky,
shining bright - in the dark night
Infinite stars blink high up above

Underneath, -
I sleep. Blueberries! Blueberries!
The wind is fast
I brought the storm with me.
The rain is touching.