Intervention

I have chosen the topic of Race because of personal experience. When being abroad and having a conversation in Bulgarian with a friend, I am immediately asked if I am not Russian. That happens because Eastern Europe is considered most of the times as Russia even though there are many more other countries. Moreover, I have chosen the topic because I wanted to broaden my knowledge. Since I do not have that deep understanding about the topic, I wanted to be more aware of the issues related and to know how to approach them.

In order to formulate our topic, we decided to make an anonymous survey asking people question about their ethnic background and, or race. From the answers we have gathered information about the “objects” which reminds them of their roots, which most of times was either food, or their culture. Thus, in our group we have divided each one of us to research our home countries traditional music and one more country of a choice in order at the end to make a mixture of some of the genres and create our own pieces of music. Even though we have not focused on what made me choose this topic of Race, I still have broaden my knowledge a lot about the different genres of music, their roots and the diversity we have. Furthermore, I enjoyed the group work we have done and all the discussions we had on the topic because they showed a different perspective, which in my opinion is exactly what we can benefit from the Practices.

My contribution for the project was to make and design the HotGlue page, since my major is Graphic Design, and as I mentioned to research. However, I was also organising the group to meet, work and was most of the times a representative of our ideas in front of the tutors. This thought me to be focused, organised and to know what is wanted, so that I can in a way lead the process. We have decided each one of us to make a mixture of their home country’s traditional music and the country of choice in order to experience it ourselves. I found it very difficult because I have not worked before with music and struggled a lot with mixing two different rhythms. However, the process was still beneficial because it thought me to not give up. I even understood new things for my own culture and that there is already a huge diversity within one country, being influenced by the colonies and events who have happened, not only during the formation of the country, but throughout its history.

Maraya Ivanova
St. Number: 1015648

(1) “My Father Writes From Prison” by Ocean Vuong

When seeing the poem, it made an impression on me how it is written, looking a one continuous text. However, when I started reading it, it turned out to be way deeper and complex, showing fragments of the fathers life and thoughts in prison. For me, this poem is very powerful as it is a monologue with himself showing the colourful palette of our emotions and how we begin to appreciate the small things in life. I relate to this because the COVID situation thought me exactly this and the fact that I faced the fear of being abroad completely alone with myself. One of the most strange things for me was to be alone in a room for more than a few hours, without talking with anyone or having a background noise. Moreover, I relate to the poem because I have experienced being this “trapped” person inside the room only with your thoughts and desires.

(2) “My Father Writes From Prison” by Ocean Vuong

After reading all the poems, I had a discussion with one of my classmates and she told me that the writer’s father has abandoned him and his family which made me re-read the poem with a more in depth understanding about it. It raised up a few question. Why would he write a letter if he had already disappeared from his life? Why did he start with another person’s name: “Lan oi” or “dear Lan”?
I researched myself because I was interested in the story behind the poem and I found out that "his [Vuong's] father really was in prison, [...] it was a Communist prison, and letters, if they came at all, were censored. In writing poems like this, Vuong seeks 'not necessarily to speak for anyone, but to offer a rendition—in a way a phantom—of what could have been... Every attempt to speak is also a grieving of the voice that never arrived.” Which made me realise that maybe that is why the poem was fragmented, so that either it was censored, or not to be censored. It made me also think if it possible it to an imaginary letter rather than a real one, since he was in a Communist prison.

(3) “Decolonization as Care” by Uzma Z. Rizvi; p. 87: “A simple example might be to consider my own childhood: as a person of South Asian heritage, I was often confounded while dealing with crayons that did not have any color to represent my skin tone. I was told by teachers to color in bodies as ‘peach’ because that was the norm in the 1970s, in the United States. But my body was not peach.”

This text made me realise a lot about our everyday life and made me question it further. Even though I have highlighted a lot of different fragments from it, I chose to comment this one. That is because I do understand her point of view and have not gone that far to think about such parts of my childhood. However, I do not completely agree because as children most of the times we were not that conscious to realise such topics and question them to the point that we focus on, as Uzma Rizvi mentions, the crayons. Which we all are aware that are not professional tools for drawing but exactly for children and most of the times do not have that much of a diversity in the colour palette. I understand that we all need to be able to represent ourselves completely in any way. However, do we really need the specific colour of our skin to be on a crayon in order to do so? Because I do not remember having a colour which is close to any of the skin types. We all have identified for ourselves that the skin colour was depending on how tanned the person was, so it was differing from the lightest (peachy colour) to the more chocolate-ish one. And this was okay with us because we were not racially thinking about it but rather relating it on our senses and intuition. In my opinion we should not go that far in our childhood and focus on each detail because we might end up ruining our happy memories. I am aware that most probably I have been privileged to not raise up those questions for myself while being a child, however it is also hard for me to believe that anyone is that conscious in the kindergarten.

(4) “Decolonization as Care” by Uzma Z. Rizvi; p. 91: “In setting up objectivity as criteria to uphold, western academia has distanced us from ourselves. For example, to provide an air of neutrality, we are taught not to write with ‘I’ in science, when in fact one of the ways in which we first understand the world is through the ‘I,’ and one of the ways in which we continue to understand the world and encounter nature, feel the breeze, look at green leaves, look at the sky, is through that ‘I.’”

It was very interesting for me this point of view because I have questioned it why do we always use “we” when we write academically. However as I have been thought throughout my whole school experience that this is the right way of writing, I already have programmed myself to think that way. I have always struggled to write about my own opinion because I am always not sure if it is the correct one or if I will be understood correctly. That is why I think the academic way of writing become comfortable for me because it sounded more as someone else’s opinion or facts which are not necessarily my discoveries. I think, I find it easier someone to blame you for an opinion if you use “I” instead of “we”. Maybe because when it is a “we” it is associated with a discussion already and that it is not only an opinion, but more a statement or a decision.

Maraya Ivanova
St. Number: 1015648

I am doing this project as a young north African woman. Born and raised in the Netherlands
but not being considered Dutch. I had no problems accepting my ethnicity growing up and
neither did face discrimination as a child. But now that I am an adult, I started to notice
more things. Like getting glares when speaking Arabic to my mother, getting stares when I’m
walking with my cousin who wears the hijab. Sending 130 mails to find an internship and still
not getting accepted despite my efforts. Getting told ‘’ Every muslim is a terrorist, but I’m
not talking about you. You guys are hardworking people.’’ as if that’s a compliment.

Even though younger I didn’t really face discrimination myself, I was aware of the concept
even from the age of 6. I went to a very multicultural grade school where the classmates
accepted each other. We were all aware of the different races and ethnicities and because
of this also aware of discrimination. My black classmates told us stories about the moments
they faced even as children or what they witnessed.

I have always spoken up about racism and discrimination, and shared my support to people
in struggle. Joined numerous discussions with ignorant people, including my parents. I
noticed that those discussions really change their view and helps raise awareness. So, this is
what I will keep on doing.

As I got to the age of 18, I started to struggle with understanding my identity.
Iraqis are obviously middle eastern. Ethiopians are obviously African. Koreans are obviously
Asian. But what about north Africans?
I was told by Africans, I’m not really African. I was told by Arabs, that I’m not really Arab.
Being told by some people of color. I’m not a person of color. But also, not being counted as
white, by white people. Who am I then?
For me I am white Tunisian, I am aware that I am privileged in some ways, but I also feel like
I’m a person of color. As I often share the struggles of other people of color but just not the
same with every person of color.

I chose the topic race as I was curious about everyone’s view on race and to see if anyone
else faced the same dilemma. I want to make a project based on race, but replacing the term
race in my mind with the term ethnicity. And to focus on the fun things about the different
ethnicities instead of only looking at the struggles.
We were contemplating what to do for the project. We split in two groups and we wanted to
have the groups be the contrast of each other. One group focused on a future scenario
where everyone will be mixed in some way. As it’s already a bit hard to find people who are
a 100 percent 1 race. And our group was supposed to focus on a future where for some
reason all of us must go back to our country of origin (the country where our ancestors are
from). This way everyone’s race will at some point reverse to our origins. Because of the
mixing and also evolution of the human. But as we were eventually at a dead end, we chose
to change it.

We had interviewed some people about race and asked them to write about or draw objects
that remind them of their home country. Most of those objects were either about food or
music. So, we focused on music. We want to mix different kinds of music of different
cultures to make a new genre or song.

Each of us are researching our home country and one more country. I researched Tunisia
and spain. As one of the most popular genres the ‘ma’luf’ originated from Andalusia and is
actually Andalusian classical music. Like I just did, we want to try to find a relation to the
countries we’re researching.

Rosalinda Fathallah
St. Number: 1008616

Prompt 1

To learn something from men differently as what you learn from women.
Is a concept that is comparable to learning from who is opposite of you or the same.
Like to learn from another race, another culture, another ethnicity, someone other than you. Maybe is this also a concept of ‘’othering’’ but is this maybe a positive type of ‘’othering’’? To acknowledge and learn from the ‘’other’’.

Prompt 2

Murder? Lynching? Fetishism or attraction?
Jeffrey Dahmer. Describing his way of thinking, stepping into the mind of a serial killer and sex offender. This is a man who for the majority targeted African Americans out of his known 17 victims. The lynching and killing of black people have been going on for decades. As Dahmer went as far as keeping body parts of his victims, an extreme case of fetishism.

Prompt 3

Prompt 4

Rosalinda Fathallah
St. Number: 1008616

The reason I chose race as a topic was because I’ve been really interested in Orientalism for a while. Identifying appearance wise as an Asian, I’ve experienced discrimination from others and have been stereotyped for my outward appearance. Choosing topics to do with race was hard as our group was full of different ethnicties and I realised that Orientalism would not be something that everyone can relate to directly. We decided to hold anonymous interviews with a set of questions which were to help see how people define who they are in a racial context. We ended up with a topic of music following that. Even though we ended up not following the path that initially lead me to the them race and this practice, I think I thouroughly enjoyed the topic we did choose. I still think my initial thoughts would have made a good archive, especially the treatment of Asian Americans during the initial outbreak of covid, so maybe I can explore that myself in the future.

I was also interested in understanding who I am as a Malaysian and how I can bring out my family’s culture and my own heritage, so the topic we settled on turned out to be really interesting and I was able to connect with my family and friends for advice and recommendations. It was interesting as it allowed me to learn a bit more into the history of my country. A lot of the music is tied to the influence of different colonisers and events in Malaysia like when we gained independence from the British. Being given this as an assignment allowed me to learn things that I would have never read up on or researched myself since I do not have a passion for making music or the deeper history into that niche of music.

Despite not being so passionnate on music, I ended up being the first to test out different softwares and make my song mashup. I had the support of a close friend of mine studying music who helped to review my composition. Finishing the song early allowed me to help out in the group more. I designed the albumn cover as my major is Illustration and I have made work on the video process. Being someone who likes and is fairly skilled at video editing and illustrating, I felt more as though I had contributed to the group work better and more efficiently. Overall, I think I participated quite actively in the group, having being one of the members present to all scheduled meetings and helped to set internal deadlines to ensure we have everything complete to be delivered on time.

Jasmine Fenwick
St. Number: 1000406

o1

How important is a father in a child’s development and significance in becoming who they are in later life? Vuong says he was raised by women, by his mother, grandmother and aunts, rather than his father who abandoned him at a young age. Unsure of how to treat male figures in life due to the lack of a father, did it influence ‘Into the Breach’? The quote ‘It’s simple: I just don’t know how to love a man’ could have been as a result of only being around women. He goes back to the familiarity of violence ‘tenderness, a thing to be beaten into’, a stark contrast to how you treat a lover. “always and forever” talks about absent fathers and how one can struggle to reconcile with the loss of a parent. This really resonated with me as I have an absent father and I still find it hard to let go of the what if’s and why’s.

o2

Desire. Desire lingers in all of Vuongs poems, or need. To feel whole. To feel complete in happiness. Vuong’s poem “Always & Forever” is a commentary about things our parents bequeath us. Portraying his parents through sex ‘His thumb, still damp from the shudder between mother’s thighs’ allows us to understand that Vuong is the result of their coupling and intimacy which may or may not have been wanted, but is still present. Again, the only comfort his father can feel from prison is the imagined coupling with a woman.

o3

My Father Writes from Prison is written in a way that reminds me of Dada. structured, yet chaotic. It reminds me of the song You’re Not Listening by Diving Station. The structure of the poem also interested me as it was laid out like a letter, but the text was separated into segments which created a jangles or broken text which could indicate the deterioration of the father’s relationship with his family or hoe detached from reality he was.

o4

The paradox of ‘defining’ something like identity, of course, is that it is not static.

As a third culture kid, I feel as though I can really relate to this as I can never find a culture, race or place to call home. Being brought up internationally made it so I could never fit in back in my home country but also not anywhere if I were to move anyplace new.