“Self-care is survival…”
This audio interview was recorded in Regents Park, London, U.K during the 2020 COVID-19 Lock Down.
Awa is of Ghanaian, Malian and Burkino Faso heritage based in London, U.K. The conversation covers Awa’s personal experiences of migration, mother-daughter relationships, her ancestry, and some of her daily practices. The recording is 01:50:21, conducted by Kakazi founder Nicole Nabisere. The items below were selected by Awa as object, text and images significant to Awa. Annotations give context and brief description of those items and how they were digitised.
“But difference itself can still contrive to reduce things to the transparent. If we examine the process of “understanding” people and ideas from the perspective of Western thought, we discover that its basis is the requirement for transparency. In order to understand and thus accept you, I have to measure your solidity with the ideal scale providing me with grounds to make comparisons and, perhaps, judgments. I have to reduce.
Accepting differences does, of course, upset the hierarchy of this scale. I understand your difference, or in other words, without creating a hierarchy, I relate it to my norm. I admit you to existence, within my system. I create you afresh. But perhaps we need to bring an end to the very notion of a scale. Displace all reduction. Agree not merely to the right of difference but, carrying this further, agree also to the right to opacity that is not enclosure within an impenetrable autarchy but subsistence within an irreducible singularity. Opacities can coexist and converge, weaving fabrics. To understand these truly one must focus on the textures of the weave and not on the nature of its components. For the time being perhaps give up on this old obsession with discovering what lies at the bottom of nature. There would be something great and noble about initiating such a movement, referring not to Humanity but to the exultant divergence of humanities. Thought of self and thought of other become obsolete in their duality. Every Other is a citizen and no longer a barbarian. What is here is open, as much as this there. I would be incapable of projecting from one to the other. This-here is the weave, and it weaves not boundaries The right to opacity would not establish autism; it would be the real foundation of Relation, in freedoms.”
― Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation, page 189-190.
