healing

Yesterday on my local CBC radio morning show, regular guest on pop culture Jesse Wente, opened up about an issue that has caught fire in the Canadian media within the past two weeks: cultural appropriation.

The issue was originally sparked by a poorly timed, badly thought-through editorial in the journal for the Writers Union of Canada that argued for the benefits and almost necessity of cultural appropriation in writing good fiction. While the argument itself has some flaws on its own, what made it strikingly tone-deaf was that it was written by the white editor to kick off a special issue devoted to First Nations writers. There was criticism of the piece, debate, further voices adding support or denouncement of the article, a resignation and even more debate. The issue isn’t done.

Which brings me to Jesse Wente’s commentary on Metro Morning. Jesse was part of the debate and, as a cultural critic and Obijwa, has a legitimate and well-informed opinion on this matter of cultural appropriation. Appearing on the show (which I listened to first and then sought out the video feed later, see below), Jesse went beyond rhetoric in the debate and spoke to the heart of the matter about why cultural appropriation is such an important issue for him, his people, and his ancestors in a way that is beyond my ability to comment with much value. His words speak for themselves.

https://www.facebook.com/metromorning/videos/1218732138231338/

It’s real, honest, and visceral in how he points to the hard truth that those from our First Nations live with. Those of us from other lands are here on theirs and have been, often by force, oppression, lies, and deceit. This is about having hard conversations.

I didn’t do any of this to First Nations peoples, yet I am a beneficiary of those injustices. I have and continue to reap benefits from the systemic oppression, genocidal efforts, and tacit (and overt) racism that the government of the country I call home — and was legitimized by its citizens — has done to Jesse’s people for more than 150 years.

Reconciliation

This is really what it comes down to. Hard conversations are hard, so why not just not have them? That’s really the big issue. We are amazing at deflecting, denying, rationalizing, distracting or otherwise simply refusing to have hard conversations because they mean getting really deep about who we are as humans, who we are as ourselves, and accepting or at least confronting certain truths that we don’t want to face up to.

The reconciliation movement in Canada has provided a great point for this kind of discussion to happen and also brings into bear some very tricky things. Reconciliation is not about making non-First Nations people feel guilty, it’s not about making things “all better” and saying that the past is the past, nor is it about finding reparations. It’s something bigger, bolder and more aligned with real healing than any of these ideas. I was introduced into the reconciliation movement by Paul Lacerte, a policy maker, activist and member of the Nadleh Whut’en First Nation in northern BC when he spoke at a conference I attended not too long ago. He spoke eloquently about what reconciliation means and, above all, it means having hard conversations and having them often.

But it means having conversations that are about love, too. And love, when you think about it, can be as hard of a conversation as any when you mean what you say and say what you mean. That moment when you tell someone you love them for the first time, from the heart, is a game changer in a romantic union or a friendship. What reconciliation does is take that sentiment of love and initiate conversations about what that means today. If someone we love deeply has been hurt, violated, denied or neglected because of something we were a part of — historically, what does that mean?

The parallel is apt, for me. It’s easier to relate to the idea of speaking to past wrongs on a personal level than on a societal level. Yet, the conversation is still similar.

To heal is not just to repair, it’s to develop and grow. It’s about designing a future from the present building on the raw materials from the past, now and finding what’s missing in the days ahead. It’s also about being conscious and aware of what it means to hurt and live in the present. That’s what Jesse Wente did for me: he made his present far more visceral and real to me in a way that I’d not experienced. I’m still not sure what to do with it all, but I know there will be some hard conversations for me in the days and weeks ahead as a result.

If there is anything that I’ve learned about the healing process is that it requires creating something from what remains and going beyond. Healing is a creative act and creating is a part of healing.

It might be for that reason that the stories of creators of various stripes, particularly artists, touch on the process of recovery and transformation that they go through in producing their work, in part as a reaction to trauma of some sort.

I’ve seen, experienced and deeply believe that our traumas and confusions are often fixed by creation. Sing in the choir. Paint pictures. Write poetry or a blog. This is a space for healing, it allows me to write freely and discuss things that I might not elsewhere to the same extent. For me, writing is a healing act.

When I get into one of those spaces for rumination on something not particularly enjoyable, perhaps painful such as a memory and all it elicits or a present conflict that I’m dealing with, I find it rather circular. I think, I worry or fret, and re-think and repeat. Creating is the pathway outside of that.

Putting things out there

Writing is also a way of putting some of those thoughts and feeling down on paper. However, as I’ve learned, there is a difference between writing as a journal and creating something. Journaling is something I’ve done since I was a teen, something not that common for a man. Journaling helps honour what has happened, what I am feeling and allow me to give form to what is going on inside me. However, it’s not the same type of creating as something like writing for an audience, even if I am creating the audience through the writing.

Writing and art allows me to find new ways of engaging the world. It makes my world a little bigger. When I’m in my darker moments, that bigger space allows me to see light and let it in. When I am in moments of great light, it allows me to shine it more on those spaces that are dark. It’s always a win-win.

It’s partly because creating is also about putting something into the world. My journal never gets into the world, much. A website post, an Instagram picture, a tweet, a video, or a painting shared with a friend or even just intended for a friend can all get us to summon courage and marshall us to create coherence in our story. It’s not about having us style the story for the world (it’s our story after all), but it means making coherent sense of what it is we want to say for others, whatever the medium.

Creations usually have some rules of form, which create the boundaries that focus the creative process. These boundaries like the border of a canvas, the margin of a page, the three-line form of a haiku and so on all are vehicles for coherence. That’s probably why creating is so healing: it allows for us to bring coherence to things that we are experiencing as incoherent. We add structure to the mess.

This all reminds me of just how important that dialogue between the creator and the audience becomes, which is why healing is always partly social.

When writing about the rules of creation for the new, non-print media (which was, at the time of his writing, not even digital), Edmund Snow Carpenter stated the following ‘rules’ about how the creator deals with their audiences:

“1. Know your audience and address yourself directly to it

2. Know what you want to say and say it clearly and fully

3. Reach the maximum audience by using existing channels

Whatever sense this may have made in world of print, it makes no sense today. In fact, the reverse of each rule applies.

If you address yourself to an audience, you accept at the outset the basic premises that unite the audience. You put on the audience, repeating cliches familiar to it. But artists don’t address themselves to audiences; they create audiences. The artist talks to himself out loud. If what he has to say is significant, others hear and are affected.” (Carpenter, 1970, p. i (forward))

Talking to ourselves in public

There is a lot of evidence to suggest that talking to ourselves is highly therapeutic and healthy. What creating does is present you with an audience — even if that audience is you. But mostly, that audience is others.

I once had a moment of intense heartache and disappointment as a wonderful relationship that had started ended suddenly without warning or much sense. Suddenly, all this energy I had that was devoted to someone else, our relationship, the worlds that we shared and were building, was left unfocused. One of the tools I used was social media.

I have a very uneasy relationship with social media. There is an increasing body of evidence that time spent on Facebook is detrimental to your mental health — and the same may be true for social media overall. This obviously plays out differently among people, but I know that I almost always — probably 9 times out of 10 visits — feel worse about the world and life after a visit to Facebook, which is why I barely use it. However, social media can be a source of creative energy, too.

I used to use Instagram as a means of focusing my gaze on the world around me. My posts got me to thinking about what I was seeing and capturing that in some creative manner. I really enjoyed it, but stopped posting much as I got busy and found that social media was distracting me from the world.

When my relationship ended, I renewed my focus on Instagram again, focusing a lot on the creative potential within the various media — photography. Since then, it’s got me out and thinking about what kind of things I want to capture, how and in what means do I wish to present these ideas. But it was also a way of speaking to myself out loud. It’s about healthy self-presentation in this case. I don’t have many followers and don’t really care how many people see my pictures, but it gets me creating.

Don’t wait for inspiration to hit — just write, paint, sing, photograph, record — whatever. Create.