rwethereyet

Guest post: Marai Larasi - An open letter

We asked some folk to write for the rwethereyet blog. Marai Larasi had a resonse regarding a previous event Four Women – put together in partnership by KiS and Ajamu (for rukus!) and here is what she has to say about the work and rwethereyet…

Dear Jane,

I saw your ‘thank you’ message sometime ago, but knew I needed a bit of reflective space,  and some time, before I could actually reply. As you and Ajamu are navigating your path to Huddersfield and to a possibility of an equal world, this is perhaps the perfect time to reply ….

Sometimes when we are getting on with the thing that we are getting on with…we forget, don’t know, daren’t imagine…the impact that the 'thing’ has on the people we are sharing/creating with. Sometimes in being necessarily humble in our striving and pushing and transforming…we don’t trust even the affirmations of how much our work matters. I hope that YOU know (a core knowing), that what YOU do makes a difference. The thing that KiS does, makes a difference - a KiS experience is watching and participating in, interconnected acts of revolution.

I keep reflecting on my first experience of the Winter Warmer and how blown away I was. I smile at how my friends and I struggled to describe the KiS experience. Equality kept coming up time and time again. None of us could remember an experience like that one. We couldn’t put our finger on it…but used words like 'equality’, 'safety’, 'respect’, 'loving’, and 'being held’.  In truth much human narrative exists in the so called intangible,in domains we probably don’t often visit and therefore struggle to explore / describe. I know that in my mind, I often struggle to find the words to capture my range of KiS experiences. So imagine trying to describe a KiS-Ajamu/rukus!experience??!!! What’s this 'equality magic’ you and Ajamu somehow manage to create? Saturday and Four Women was such a special, loving, connected space-experience. I keep remembering how you and I both loved when one participant talked about curating / creating (our stories). Of course I thought about it more…and how curating often seems like collecting and cataloging for the sake of it, but like 'Heritage’, the way both KiS and Ajamu as an individual curate / create is alive and dynamic…it’s like taking equality out of the conceptual and locating not just in the practical but in the creative and the 'felt’ and lived experience.

I love that you and Ajamu are out there…walking from London to Huddersfield. rwethereyet has made me cry, laugh, reflect, nod my head, and more. It makes sense that it would be you two…engaged in a completely meaningful and yet absolutely bonkers process! It’s hard to describe what that means to me. But let me say this…

As time has passed, I’ve come to understand how layered and complex yet at the same time how simple and straightforward equality is. In my life and in my work which is of course my life, I experience how we push at the points of equality that resonate with us personally, and that is only if we dare. Often our engagement with equality is about what we think we know from policy etc. and what we have had direct experience of.  To reference Audre Lorde, we create 'hieararchies of oppression’ and therefore hierarchies of need, in which there is very little space to imagine a different world. The result is that we rarely push ourselves to create anything beyond our own perceptions of oppression; and when we do so, the thing that we create still too often excludes and marginalises others. We have over time, and perhaps understandably so, made equality purely about our fears, as opposed to our dreams. In short, we have made equality narrow, small and comfortable (for us). rwethereyet is a dream in action. It is defined by it’s expansiveness, its depth, its sense of something bigger, and by it’s absolute bonkerness!!!..and it is anything but comfortable. Jane and Ajamu, Ajamu and Jane…this is who YOU are, and this is what you do that is so wonderfully crafted and so important to someone like me. Thank you for always daring, curating, creating, crafting, questioning, pushing, reflecting, complicating the thing and simplifying the thing…thank you.

I’m sorry I’m not there with you…but trust that my heart is there.

With love and respect,

Marai