Journal of Narrative Politics

Behl, Natasha

Téllez, Michelle

Stancliff, Michael

Fuse, Montye

English

Writing the Intersection: Feminist Autoethnography as Narrative Collaboration

Maria Popova

My grandfather said “Screw the Communists, but we all have to vote for them"

Cory Brown

A Body in Time

Shambhawi Tripathi

Vol. 8 (2), 2022, pp. 31-36  31   Leaving home? Don’t forget to pack your trees Shambhawi Tripathi1   when grief weights you down like your own flesh only more of it, an obesity of grief, you think, How can a body withstand this?                                                                                                        Ellen Bass, The Thing Is (2017)   There is an imli tree that has been standing guard to my home for twenty some years now. When I first laid eyes on her, she was taller than everything else in view. Over the years, changing surroundings have tried really hard to outflank her, but the addition of even taller buildings and other concretes… a school, a sprawling mansion owned by a renowned ophthalmologist, and my gated colony…has not really diminished her. Ironically, she seems taller than ever now, a proud skein of green holding all surrounding strays of grey in place. Given that the average lives of imlis is at least two hundred years, I’d say she’s rounding up her first fifty. Or seventy maybe? It’s hard to know whether the age of trees should be marked by how many years they’ve been around, or how many they have left. This is true for us humans too, the unresolved ethics of measuring life by death. As a temporary resolution, let me say that she was there before the bricks and mortar of my housing colony were. She probably oversaw the construction work; watching, as men in hard hats looked at the plot of soft green before them and drew up architectural plans. She probably smiled to herself, musing about the modern human ability to look at open spaces and instinctively think of ways to close them up- with walls, rooms, doors and gated colonies. Maybe trees and humans are not so similar after all…  The sprawling imli tree was also witness to a young, tentative couple that packed up their life- which comprised of two trunks of clothes (neatly separated by the woman into winter and summer seasons, only to be jumbled up by the man who didn’t believe in such sorting), bank accounts which they had traded in as down-payments for their new home, and and a brick red office file filled with love letters and salary payslips, in equal measure. They also had two daughters – seven and nine – who were unaware of it then, but would later come to see how they had been the catalyst for this young, hard-working couple to move away from their joint family in the old rustic part of the town, to enable a more modern life for their girls, in the school district. The nineties in semi-urban India were a time where nostalgia wasn’t the strongest performing currency, and my parents, the young couple, were but one of many, trying to grow up fast enough to raise their own children, while still meandering changing relationships with their own parents and  1 Shambhawi Tripathi is a PhD candidate in the Department of International Relations, University of St Andrews. Her doctoral work seeks to engage emotional lives in magical realist fiction as a transformative “magical” way of doing global politics. She tweets @shambhawi_t and her website is shambhawitripathi.com; st253@st-andrews.ac.uk.                                                                                                                        Shambhawi Tripathi                                           32  reluctantly adjusting to being the kind of adults that did not go to other adults when things got hard.  My mother and one important half of the couple had transitioned from being a dutiful MBA student to being a wife-daughter in law-mother-working professional and other intangible hyphenations in what must have felt like the blink of an eye, and was still coming to terms with her uncharacteristically rebellious decision to get married without her parents’ blessings. For my father, the other half, an MBA itself had signalled a rebellion against social expectations of joining the family busines and settling down, and he was still balancing his deep love for independence with a new, and even greater love that demanded from him a specific brand of responsibility which he had not yet come to terms with. Their love letters successfully hid their fears in professions of love and freshly minted terms of endearment, and as far as I can remember, they played each hand they were dealt with love.  The move was especially difficult for my father, having grown up and around an extremely interconnected family that lived under one roof, which seemed to magically expand itself as more members joined in, much like a tree that retained the past in its bark and welcomed the future with new leaves. Of course, he now had a beautiful new family and a shiny newly built flat, and the promise of all the new memories they were yet to make. He must have known however, that this new concrete, modern roof would not be as malleable as the previous one and life would have to be; for the foreseeable future, about fitting in, rather than branching out. Maybe that’s why, he cried in his mother’s arms when she was leaving that first night…maybe the housewarming was simultaneously a cold ending of his childhood. When flooded by post-facto empathy for their struggles, I like to believe that the imli tree sheltered my parents, not just from the molten scorch of mid-April in the Gangetic plains, but also from the equally sweltering heat of grief that comes from leaving behind the familiar, in full knowledge that the magically expanding roof would not stretch out wide enough to overcome the reality of leaving. I find myself hoping that the imli tree watched over them; her lowest hanging branches brushing the top of their tiny but proud white hatchback, bought under a five year loan, each time they drove it out of the garage. She probably caressed their young hearts and filled them up with sweet, moist smells of her fruit, encouraging them towards a future they had no way of anticipating.  ***  Between 2020 and 2021, I lost a total of five people who I knew personally, two of them intimately, one of whom was my only remaining grandfather. Never before have I felt the pressure to qualify my grief, pack it neatly into containers, marked with affiliation and arranged by proximity, so that it can find a place on the shelves of the library of collective grief, the invisible but undeniable monument built in the COVID world. I also lost more people, more lives, which did not find appropriate containers, for reasons of either being claimed by someone else with more suitable vessels than I could have arranged for them, or simply slipping through my hands because there was already an “obesity of grief” I was documenting, labelling and shelving constantly. While I keep hoping that the former reason is the real one, the rivers of grief still Vol. 8 (2), 2022, pp. 31-36  33  coursing through my bones and body, would defy the absolution I am trying to find in it. Maybe there just aren’t enough shelves, ones within my reach anyway…  I was reaching for the top shelf of my kitchen cabinets, when my grandfather died. Or at least when news of his passing in India, reached me in the UK. It was over a phone call, as I was scoring chicken thighs and soaking dried tamarind pulp in warm water to cook myself a curry, that my mother spoke – clearly and regrettably – about my grandfather’s passing. It has always confounded me how the delivery of all difficult news in the family falls squarely on my mother’s shoulders. She does it so well: a crack in her voice that enjoins her to the defeat contained in the message and the timbre of her voice offering a branch to hold on to as the news seeks to drown the listener, all while maintaining the kind of composure needed so that the finality of the news cannot be questioned. I wanted to raise doubts and concerns; make her reconsider, but her composure made it impossible. How did she get so good at it… how does anyone get good at speaking out and confirming the end of a life? Devastatingly true as it might be, in that moment of realising that I would never see my grandfather again, the only things I was grateful for was my mother’s self-assured tone and the equally confident unspooling of the tamarind in a shallow pool of its own warm, brown liquid, oblivious to the fact that the curry it was coming undone for, would not come for it tonight. As I also came undone, in my kitchen, the only part of my new world that still smelt and felt like home, I wanted to ask my mother how my father-her husband-my grandfather’s oldest son was doing; how he was dealing with the loss of my grandfather-his father-his only alive parent. But how does one do that – inquire about the loss of hyphenated existences and the quantum shattering they leave in their wake. In the absence of the right words, I was also grateful for such chaotic and coexisting ownership-claims of relations, which allowed me to claim my grief as mine, while reminding me how it is also not just mine. How could it be, with all the hyphens grammar just couldn’t cope. Neither could I. Nor could the unrelentingly rehydrating imli.  Grief, at its simplest, is a beckoning to come undone. At its most, however, grief is a burning of the heart. What entails this burning, how long does it last, and what does it leave in its wake? Canonically, we tend to make peace with the severing of the self that comes with distancing ourselves from home, by believing that distance makes the heart grow fonder. What distance does to grief however, is a rupture so internal, so immediate, that it is impossible to “go on”. How does one, traverse a loss that never quite happened where we are but was communicated because technology makes it possible to transmit experiences we cannot and probably ought not to have? While I was no stranger to grief that comes from losing a loved one, doing so from across a few time-zones, without the safety of ritual and community that usually surrounds such grieving back home, felt like having to take appear for an exam for a module I hadn’t signed up for. The irony of returning to an academic metaphor to make sense of and grapple with my heartbreak is not lost on me, but every unfurling is also a turning into one’s self, and the only way I could exist with grief that I could not experience in real time, was to return to the bits and pieces of my identity that did not follow Scottish time or temperature.  I could not even fully comprehend the timeline of my grandfather’s passing, because there was a four and half hour lag between every second of his dying and my living (thankfully he didn’t pass                                                                                                                      Shambhawi Tripathi                                           34  away in the winters which would have added another hour to an already unbearable lag). I struggled to make sense of those hours, and tried to think about how far I had come, to have spent four and a half hours living without knowing that somewhere, my grandfather was dying. The appeal to the laws of physics and maths to understand how time-zones work and how we exist comfortable in the knowledge that our loved ones are existing before or after us, frustrated me, and left me feeling powerless. Grief came not in waves as promised, but in jolts; pushing me into my Scottish present where my grandfather had never existed, while ricocheting me into my Indian past, where I had not been able to exist. Struggling to find a metaphor in nature for the severing of an old substantial bough from my family tree, how was I to substitute the enveloping arms of the wide-spreading crowns of the leguminous imli, with the Scottish conifer pine; its arms drawn tightly behind its back making it tall but also withdrawn?   Split right down the middle, like the imli’s pinnate leaf, each half mirroring and opposing the other, I found it difficult to occupy my own body which had not witnessed this close familial loss but was tasked with remembering it. The burning was intense and seemed determined to leave in its wake a shadow of someone I knew to be myself, but not my whole self. How could I be whole, when COVID denied me the claim to exclusivity of my pain by offering me daily reminder in statistics, phone calls and governmental insensitivities, that my loss was in no way unique, and distance denied me the balm of community where healing from death occurs through reiterations and recitals of a life well lived? Anguish and anxiety outlined my existence as I felt my heart drop each time my phone rang with an annihilating prospect amidst the celebration that the onset of summer and easing of COVID restrictions brought about in the UK. Government reports showed their belated triumph and Indian defeat in the same breadth, as if the only way to feel better about the over hundred thousand lives lost here was to compare it to the millions of lives being lost in another, distant place. I marvelled at how the distance which exacerbated and made acute my own loss, making it impossible for me to grieve, could somehow be engineered into ameliorating the loss of others who felt respite about being away from India. More importantly, I didn’t know how to feel about that; should there be an ethics of grief: apologies for how we choose to repair what the world has caused to break within us? I knew somewhere, my parents along with others from my family, were sipping their morning tea and smiling wistfully when one of them reminded the others of my grandfather’s child-like particularity about food, his generally skeptical nature which made it impossible for him to trust even his own children with his finances and made for some funny stories, and his quirky side which was always just two glasses of moderately priced whiskey away. Strangely enough, the knowledge that his passing was doing more than sitting on the COVID library shelf, by living through stories told by those he was succeeded by, involved a kind of emotional splintering which also made our grief coherent. Who was I then, to deny that splintering to others?   ***  There are several similarities between my hometown of Allahabad, and the quaint little Scottish town of St. Andrews where I now live. They’re both old, historical, and happily trapped in a simpler, softer time, even though the modern city life engulfs them from all sides. There are however, no imli trees in Scotland. There are majestic pines and birches, but the simple, non-Vol. 8 (2), 2022, pp. 31-36  35  showy, sweet-savoury pods of the imli could not follow me here. Nor could the home that my now not-so-young parents built around me. At twenty-eight, living by myself, working towards a doctorate and trying to build some kind of home in an alien land, I’m still attempting to be that kind of adult: the kind who doesn’t search for other adults when things get rough, and am often in audible awe of how my parents did it. How do they continue to endure a world where their fathers are not a phone call away, when that confidence is what gets me through the darker, lightless days in this much colder part of the world.  I like to believe the imli tree continues to watch over my parents as they apprehend the loss of my grandfather and that she held his spirit before it reached for the heavens, extending to them the grace of having a loved one linger on for some extra borrowed moments, even after their earthly time has run out. The imli tree bears its flowers and pods in peak spring, but its life-giving insistence exceeds its fruit-bearing capacity. The insistence on life in the face of death, the choice to measure life by (re)living, and the remoulding of grief from something that takes loved ones away to something that allows us to hold them, is what makes it possible, even imperative, to live and love. The grieving that circulates among and refuses to desert us, becomes a metaphor for the fight that our loved ones put up, to remain alive and go on living within us, from beyond the grave. I have unresolved questions about how in times of grief, distance does not always bring with it the possibility of distancing. How time zones do not factor in felt experiences which slip through, splinter and reattach themselves as shards that pierce us. How the experience of unfamiliar grief is compounded by the absence of familiar/familial surroundings…But right now, I wish to return to the woven tapestry of the imli tree that has been standing guard to my home, and to the dreams, hopes and disappointments of the young couple that once left family, for family.  ***  The airline’s website had said nothing about how to pack a tree, so I didn’t. Maybe I should’ve insisted. Would it have worked? I was already carrying more than their baggage allowance...surely they would’ve noticed if there were bright green, alternately arranged, tart and sweet smelling imli leaves peeping out of my suitcases. Maybe if they were tucked away…if I had wrapped them in cellophane…but how...There’s a curry that needs me now.  ***                                                                                                                       Shambhawi Tripathi                                           36    Picture by Shambhawi Tripathi                                                  

Leaving home? Don’t forget to pack your trees

Maria Thereza Dumas Neto

Fragments: on learning and teaching and learning again

Runa Hestad Jenssen

A different high soprano laughter

Eda Gunaydin

Vol. 8 (2), 2022, pp. 37-41 37   The writers’ room Eda Gunaydin1   Sally’s so fucking mad at Chelsea she can barely breathe. The cigarette helps regulate her breathing – she inhales deeply and then breathes out for too long, until she feels light-headed, unable to distinguish the exhaled smoke from her breath fogging on the winter air. When she discards the stub, letting it fall to the wet ground outside the HiddenLight Productions office, a middle-aged man passing her by on his bicycle bares his teeth in disapproval, looking at her like she is a bad person, which is exactly what she already feels she is. She would have liked to have been a reformed granola-type by the time she was forty, like the gentleman in the spandex who had passed her by, but she was working within certain confines, like that she has never made more than 25,000 pounds a year in her life – impossible to live on in London, especially with the amount her colleagues spend on coke and expect her to spend on coke – and that she thinks that, of late, her therapist has been screening her calls.  Chelsea had made the position of script advisor sound glamorous but it really appeared not to be amounting to much more than extensively tabbing her copy of Lilith Rose’s Girls Who Fight Evil Men, determining into which chapters they could write scenes that feature the studio’s male lead. The book had been a New York Times bestseller, and Rose had spent enough time embedded with Kurdish militants that it made Sally jealous, but not so much that her life had ever been in any real danger. Sally wants to profile her, and name the piece something like, From Battle Tank to Think-Tank: Lilith Rose Does It All, but she’s aware she’s just being catty, ungenerous. Unfeminist. It’s a good book: the female fighters whose journeys Rose has traced seem to like it, anyway; or they seem to think it will help shape American foreign policy on Syria.  Sally isn’t sure that it will help shape anything other than Jonathan Romano’s career. The contract struck with Netflix requires that they cast the sod, who his gaggle of teenage fans dub JoRo, in a lead role, and Sally is stuck working out something for him to do. Lilith Rose hates her guts – she has written that exact phrase in the last email she sent to Sally, I hate your guts – for it, but Sally’s arms are tied. She is struck, suddenly, by the knowledge that she has become the type of person who reminds others about how, contractually, Lilith has signed away her IP and that Girls Who Fight Evil Men needs to be a hit if it is going to launch the Clintons’ banner in the way that they want it to be launched. This means that Jonathan Romano needs to rail or at least stare steamily into the eyes of one or two fighter chicks, most of whom have, in reality, sworn celibacy. Sally is also responsible for liaising with their contact at the Department of State, who are requiring that certain details documented in the book now be censored: the specifics about  1 Eda Gunaydin is a graduate student in the Department of Government and International Relations at the University of Sydney. Her key research interests are in the areas of identity, and post -colonial and post-structuralist discourse theory in international relations. Her research can be found in International Studies Quarterly and The International Feminist Journal of Politics; eda.gunaydin@sydney.edu.au.                                                                                                                                  Eda Gunaydin 38  weapons the Kurds had been able to get their hands on, the locations and exact numbers of US troop support, details like whose insignia the men had worn on their uniforms during particularly fierce battles. Netflix is on board with these changes too – after all, they want to see the show released in Turkey, in order to maximise their market share in the Middle East. Good luck, thinks Sally. She has spoken to the Middle East communications director for Netflix – he hates her guts too. She had read Arendt at Oxford; she thinks about the banality of evil, now, as she steps into the elevator and takes it up to the fourth floor.   By the time Sally has taken off her coat and stepped into the office, she notices that the other screenwriters and script assistants having already assembled around the desk for the morning – they appear even to have had breakfast together, if the empty plastic containers and used coffee cups from Pret are anything to judge by. Sally had missed the memo on the pre-meeting, which tanks her mood further. Why don’t they want to spend time with me? she wonders. She rarely ever mentions Oxford. Her breath smells pretty normal, as far as she is aware. Smarmy American arseholes. Sally can tell that they’re excited today: they’re dressed more nicely than usual – not in their typical screenwriters’ uniforms of tracksuit bottoms and jumpers with ironic slogans on the front. Emma has brushed her hair for once, and she has neatly laid out in front of her pages of printed text with passages highlighted in yellow. Leaning closer, Sally can see that they are Bruce Billings’ Rolling Stone profile, alongside transcripts from Billings’ podcast, one of those dirtbag left ventures that Sally is too old to pretend to find funny, or too English not to find vulgar, maybe. He is coming in today, she knows, to consult; he’d volunteered with the YPG in 2016, working as a machine gunner on a makeshift tank, helping to recapture Tal Salman. She found him so annoying that she thought it was a wonder his own side hadn’t killed him, blown off his head. He reminds her of a younger Bernie Sanders, namely because he is loud and nasal and a socialist, but really she thinks he’s just doing it for attention, given the number of interviews he has given in the wake of his time in Syria, and that he has accepted this consulting gig. She opts not to reflect on the fact she has accepted a similar role herself, for a similar fee, choosing instead to stew about feeling duped by Chelsea: in no way is Sally using her Master’s degree in International Relations in this job. Not that she is one to bring up Oxford. She grimaces to herself, just as Bruce steps into the room. He’s in a leather jacket, a cigarette slotted behind his ear, wearing one of those tiny beanies that leftists and male comedians seem to favour, rolled up on the apex of his head. Emma instantly throws up a raised fist, which he does not reciprocate, so she adds, “It’s so cool to finally meet you. We have so much respect for what you did.”   He shrugs, slotting into the chair next to Sally and placing his elbows on the desk, then smiles, revealing his off-white and stained teeth – a sort of welcome relief compared to the overly-white smiles of her colleagues, the norm in California and totally garish in any other region of the world.  “Great,” he says. “Well, if you respect it so much, then let’s make sure we don’t fuck this up, huh?” * Vol. 8 (2), 2022, pp. 37-41 39  They fuck it up nearly instantly. Emma begins by saying, “So, Bruce, is it pronounced anti-fa or anteefa?” and no one can tell if she is joking. Bruce answers, Sally thinks, somewhat generously. He’s lucky he wasn’t looked into more, really – she knows of men like him in his position who have copped prison sentences more recently, or detained for months at the border upon their return. A little wire-tap is nothing by comparison. She decides to intervene – they’re not allowed to use either the word anarchist or communist (which she knows Bruce is about to bring up, any second), anywhere – but Emma cuts her off.  “What I’m most curious to know is,” she says, leaning forward and lowering her voice, conspiratorially, or as if she is conscious – Sally had thought she had no self-awareness to speak of – that she is asking something a little off-bounds, “do the women shave their legs?” Bruce furrows his brow, so she goes on. “Well, see, I’m just trying to write this scene at the moment where Azadi, the character Azadi, she’s run away from her family because they want her to get married and she doesn’t want to just be a house wife, you know? And I want to write this scene where she – she whips off her headscarf, and she looks in the mirror, and she just says, ‘I’m free’,” Emma pauses to look around meaningfully, “and I guess what I’m wondering is, at the end of this scene, this bathroom scene, does she shave her legs?”  “Um,” says Bruce. “I guess I would say that most of the time we didn’t have consistent plumbing.”  “Okay,” responds Emma, drawing it out as if she doesn’t quite believe his statement. “But in all the pictures, they look so good!” She rifles through the documents in front of her, finally pulling out a few sheafs – clearly having abused her access to free colour printing. “Look at the lips on this one,” she says. “I mean, look at the teeth. You’re telling me she’s not brushing and flossing twice a day? And the eyebrows. My waxing girl can’t even get my eyebrows to look like that.” Bruce just says, carefully, “I don’t know what to tell you,” but Sally knows that some of these photos that Emma has found were obviously staged, and that there is nothing wrong with this fact, from the perspective of political strategy. Hell, if Billings had experienced any truly life-threatening danger at any point during his stint in Syria, she’d eat her hat. Good PR was good PR. It had worked on Bruce, at any rate, and other volunteers like him. Even Sally can appreciate that there is a kind of romance to imagining life in the mountains, leaving the constraints of her life behind, singing songs and staring through the sight of a rifle with an enemy clearly defined. But instead she’s trapped here. God – she can feel a headache forming behind her eyes, but Chelsea has informed her that if she yells at the writers again she will lose this gig, so she decides to intervene another way.  “Bruce,” she says. “Bruce. I suppose what I’m most curious to know, what I most need to see us getting right here, with this project, is motivation. What motivated you, what motivates them? You hear it said so often that the Middle East cannot seem to find a way to democratise, that its people uniquely resist democracy. Would you say that resonates with your experiences? Were you indeed motivated by a desire to bring democracy to even the darkest reaches of the earth?”                                                                                                                                 Eda Gunaydin 40  Sally thinks she has done a good job – diverted the discussion to something more serious, but Bruce rounds on her with a similar facial expression to the one he had given Emma. She wonders if his face just is that way. Charmless man. She can’t see JoRo in Bruce at all, not one bit.   “Sally, right?” Bruce says. “Yeah, nice to meet you in person finally. What you just said is pretty dogshit, actually.” She opens her mouth and then closes it again. “I’m more interested in the fight against imperialism than spreading liberal democracy, actually. And so are the Kurds.”  She doesn’t understand what he means, but she’s sick of hearing that word, imperialism. It’s over-used, that word, and overly pejoratively. Her father always said that the Brits brought education and railways to India, and had abolished slavery to boot. His own father had been a Sergeant of the Imperial Police – Dad was born in Calcutta. He always said he wanted to take her and show her around. But she’d never had the time. And then he had passed.  Emma chimes in again, trying a different tack. “Did you ever have a thing with any of the women?” she says. “I’ll bet you were the first white guy they ever met. Someone must have had a crush on you.”  Sally can’t believe that would be true, but then again, she’s no reliable judge of male beauty.  Bruce just says, “No, no,” and laughs uncomfortably, which only causes Emma to lean in further, practically bisecting herself on the edge of the desk. “I can’t stress enough just how much sex everyone was not having, dude. You’re pretty much on alert all the time, because you think you might get blown up, you know? That, and most of the women have sworn off intimate relationships.”  “Bummer,” says Emma. “You could have cleaned up.”   Sally jumps in again. “Not with the threat of sexual violence lingering in the air,” she speculates. “That must have spurred your protective instinct, Bruce.” She’s picturing a scene they could write, JoRo’s character saving Azadi from a jihadi, pulling him up by his beard and overcome by a feeling of such rage and vengeance that he slits his throat, failing to take him as a prisoner, his first kill, spurring contemplation as to whether or not he is just as morally bankrupt as his enemies the jihadis.  “No, no,” says Bruce, and she thinks, Well, fuck you, we’re writing it anyway. “I can’t stress enough just how little military training I had. Some of the guys, the vets, they knew what they were doing – but me, no,” he shakes his head. “It was really the women, the female commanders, who were protecting me.”   “With all due respect, then,” Sally snaps, running out of patience, “and in the absence of any useful skill to contribute, what the fuck, may I ask, were you doing there?”  In response, Bruce Billings pulls the cigarette out from behind his ear and slots it into the corner of his mouth. He looks her in the eye, and says, slowly, “Well, gee, I don’t know. What would you say it is that you,” he looks around the room, “are doing here? At least I talk to the people that I talk about.”  Vol. 8 (2), 2022, pp. 37-41 41  Sally makes to choke out a snatch of a response, along the lines of, We’re raising awareness, or this story must be told, or art changes hearts and minds, or something, but Billings has gone, headlong out the door, no doubt to smoke in the exact same spot that Sally had been occupying earlier.  

The writers’ room

Koomen, Jonneke

Introduction

Tavares de Oliveira, Vinicius

Vol. 8 (1), 2021, pp. 22-25   In the End It’s All Ismália: a Story of Three Stories Vinicius Tavares de Oliveira1   In Mid-July I was invited by graduating students to be the paranymph of the class. Here in Brazil, the paranymph has a mission to give one last piece of advice, one last lecture, before the students graduate. This speech takes place at the graduation ceremony and generally has an optimistic tone, after all the students are achieving a very important accomplishment, especially in Brazil, where university education has always been an option for just a few people. The invitation, sent by the University's ceremonial staff, included the information that the paranymphs would have to attend the event in-person at the university and follow safety protocols, such as masks and social distancing.  From the moment I received this invitation, the contradiction and the dilemma became evident: how would I offer an optimistic speech, talking about the various possibilities that opened from that moment, in a country where more than 570 thousand people have died from COVID-19, with a fascist government that is literally setting fire to everything it sees? How would I talk about opportunities in a country with more than 14 million unemployed people and with 125 million people experiencing food insecurity? This difference between the tone that is usually adopted on this type of occasion and the stark reality of our conditions had a great impact on me. After all, for the last year and a half we've had to reconcile the two. While we entered the (virtual) classroom to talk about the canon of International Relations about balance of power, polarity or the benefits of international cooperation, there were people dying without oxygen in Manaus, rich countries were throwing away vaccines, and Abya Yala and African countries are unable to advance their national vaccination programs due to lack of vaccines.  After reflecting on these dilemmas, I had this feeling that the best I could do was to highlight for graduating students the kind of world they were entering as “professionals” and the responsibility that they have as people with college education. This approach would be the most I could do. So, I urged the graduates that they had “a responsibility to be agents of true, just and revolutionary change. Change that is urgent, because the forest out here is on fire, and the fire is destroying everything it finds. Saving this forest is fundamental, because as Denilson Baniwa, indigenous activist and artist of Baniwa ethnic group, says: standing forest, fascism on the ground”.  1 Vinicius teaches international relations at PUC Minas University, Poços de Caldas campus, Brazil. He also holds a PhD in International Relations from PUC Minas, Belo Horizonte campus, Brazil. His main research interests are on decolonial and anti-colonial pedagogy, anti-racism, and mass incarceration in Brazil. He can be reached at oliveiravt@gmail.com  Vinicius Tavares de Oliveira  23   Standing Forest, Fascism on the Ground by Denilson Baniwa  I felt happy about the speech, but I think that the ceremony itself had a big impact on me. While I was in the auditorium, I sent a message to a colleague, Rafael Bittencourt, about the atmosphere of the graduation. Unlike what you expect in these moments, this ceremony had a different dynamic. Very few people were present, just a few graduates, honored professors and University broadcast and IT staff. We couldn’t see the students’ smiles. The atmosphere was one of sepulchral silence, interrupted only by the voices of the master of ceremonies and the students and professors who were giving speeches. It seemed that no one there was sure what we were doing or why we were there. As soon as the ceremony was over, everyone left, without greetings, hugging, or talking. The most normal graduation thing that I did at the ceremony was to take a photo with two graduates, the only students I had taught who lived in or near the city and who were able to attend the ceremony in person. The other students watched via YouTube transmission.   Graduates in International Relations and myself, 2021 Vol. 8 (1), 2021, pp. 22-25  24   I teach in the International Relations course at PUC Minas, Poços de Caldas campus. In 2018 I proposed a course entitled “Descolonizando as Relações Internacionais: violência epistêmica e emancipação no Sul Global”.2 This course is now offered in the last semester before students graduate, a time when they are already thinking about what to do after earning a diploma and sometimes have a pragmatic approach to the classes they attend. I call to everyone’s attention that this will be one of the last moments they have to reflect deeply on what it means to graduate in Brazil and the various structures of marginalization and oppression in the country. In this sense, the course is extremely pragmatic, as it is in this racist, sexist, homophobic and classist world that students will join a labor market that simply does not have any vacancies.  After I teach this class, a class where we try to dialogue, widen our view, and perhaps resist westernized episteme, I go into the next classroom to discuss Defensive and Offensive Realism, Neoliberalism and Complex Interdependence – mainstream approaches in IR – on Tuesdays and, on Wednesday, positivism, causality, and rationalism in “true” scientific research in International Relations. At the end of the day it’s like Ismália3, a poem by the Brazilian author Alphonsus de Guimaraens called “Pastoral to believers of love and death” and a song adapted by Emicida that inspires this text: I want to touch the sky but end up on the ground. I enter the first classroom to discuss how to build relational alternatives, pluriversal futures and safe spaces with my students, and then I’m reminded in the next classroom that the field is still more interested in discussing a projectile's trajectory than who it hits and why. Emicida, a great Brazilian rapper, reminds us: we still have “white skin and target skin". He also reflects on racism in Brazil, stating that there is a manual on how the inferiorization of Brazilian Blacks occurred and still occurs today: “First you kidnap them, steal them, lie about them; Deny their god, offend, separate them; If any dream dares to run, you stop them; And send them to debate with the bullet that goes through them”.  I think Ismália perhaps represents the effort of creating a course that tries to engage with non-mainstream approaches to International Relations in an essentially westernized structure. And this is not a specific problem at the university I teach, which has several professors who dialogue in different ways with many plural, critical dimensions of International Relations, but a problem in the field. And this is why, for me, this project is so important.  Since Jonneke Koomen proposed this theme as a roundtable for ISA 2020, several ideas and possibilities have crossed my mind, but I have never been able to come up with a consistent proposal. From the moment the idea of transforming the ISA roundtable into a publication for this journal came up, this difficulty appeared again in my thoughts. Life went by, those moments were happening and in the back of my head I had a text, but  2 The class is taught in Portuguese and might be translated as “Decolonizing International Relations: Epistemic Violence and Emancipation in the Global South” 3 The official Ismália music video can be viewed here: www.youtube.com/watch?v=EtN1jBk0ZQg  Vinicius Tavares de Oliveira  25  never on the page. Always on the verge of getting it written. I began to think about Criolo’s Plano de Voo: “And as much as I try to explain; I can’t make the abstract that only I feel concrete to you; it’s like I stayed here in this corner; seeing the world turn into an abusive error”.  And it was during this time that this text appeared, which I honestly do not know if it will be considered adequate to enter the issue4. As any young academic, or any academic at all, impostor syndrome affects me big time. Anyway, I think this difficulty of writing came perhaps because it has been too difficult to do International Relations as if people matter. And I think that to realize this, to write about it, to publish this, means to formalize a pessimism that academia is, again according to Criolo, fermenting dreams with tears. For a long, long time. Too much time.  And now, after telling you these three stories, I’m not sure how this text should end. My Monday class will start in 23 minutes and the text editor says I have 1468 words in the Portuguese version. I must write at least 32 more to send to others. Returning to Ismália, I remember that she went mad and only then began to dream. She saw a moon in the sky and a moon in the sea. It was in a dream that Ismália got lost and started to possess the moon in the sky and the moon in the sea. When trying to get the two, “her soul went up to heaven, her body went down to the sea”. Dreaming was never Ismália’s problem but rather trying to reach for the moon in the sky and the moon in the sea at the same time. And I think that the difficulty I had in writing this text has to do with this goal of trying to make International Relations as if people mattered when the “International Relations” that I have learned and teach daily is indifferent to people, most of the time.   Transcending this dichotomy requires things that I don't even know, but I know that for now, we're trying to look for the moon in the sky and the moon in the sea. And meanwhile, according to Emicida, Larissa Luz and Fernanda Montenegro, everything will be Ismália: we want to touch the sky, but we end up on the ground.  Class starts soon. Today we will discuss the English School... again.  4 If you are reading this text in the JNP page, it means that it worked! 

In the End It’s All Ismália: a Story of Three Stories

Manion, Megan

Vol. 8 (1), 2021, pp. 18-21     On Becoming an Expert Megan Manion1   I have a close and intimate relationship with pain—the kind of pain that takes your breath away and makes you sick to your stomach. When I was young, I lost my footing on the steps of a school bus and fell—hard. I came back to consciousness with a deeply bruised ego and a nearly broken ankle. I was irreparably different. In the many years since, I have begun and ended each day in unimaginable pain. Learning to live with it has been a profoundly unsettling experience. I have grown to be grateful for the humility that my body teaches me daily, learned to feel both known and liberated in that disquiet, but I have not yet learned how to put up with the experts.    When you have chronic pain and illness, everyone imagines themself to be an expert. Strangers will ask if you struggle to sleep so they can wax poetic about a supplement their nutritionist recommended for stress; well-meaning friends will tell you that “[insert-any-fitness-regimen-here]” helped them recover after they pulled a muscle skiing; an opinionated family member will be sure that a strict change in your diet and exercise would help you get back to normal. But these everyday experts are much more manageable than the ones who lead title first. While regular folks hear that I am in pain and want to help, doctors—of medicine and philosophy alike—hear I am in pain and want to understand what, when, how, and why. I cease to exist to them as a person and instead become a puzzle to be solved. Questions are posed, theorizing ensues, and eventually some authority determines that knowledge is produced, but never by me. Even as the embodied site of that knowledge, my experience belongs to someone else.  International relations—the whole academy really—is full of experts. Those experts. The ones who don’t think with you but through you (usually without understanding the difference between those positions).  I think that I am being taught to become one of those experts.   The training for a Ph.D. at a U.S. university feels starkly different from my M.Sc. in the U.K. It has a different tone and rhythm to it. It demands that my voice matches its cadence, but the words taste bitter on my tongue. This training notices different problems and finds different solutions. It  1 Megan Manion is a PhD student in Political Science at the University of Minnesota, where she holds fellowships at the Interdisciplinary Center for the Study of Global Change and the UMN Law School’s Human Rights Center. She also holds an MSc from the Center for Conflict, Rights and Justice at SOAS. Her research interests include trauma-informed approaches to political violence, transitional justice and reconciliation, and critical, feminist, and decolonial International Relations. She can be reached at manio054@umn.edu or via Twitter @megan_manion.   Megan Manion  19  requires that I prove myself as a dispassionate observer, but it makes my skin crawl to have to wear this version of expert as if it is a uniform. It discourages the questions that have animated my curiosity and previous education, but pain (and the trauma that comes with it) has taught me these questions and, how I ask them, are relevant and necessary precisely because it is deeply discomforting to do so. But this training tells me that I can find an intellectual “home” in (American) international relations if only I learn the right way to perform what it calls objectivity.   If you don’t know how it feels to be made into a puzzle, you won’t be able to recognize what it looks like in practice to take something that someone isn’t willing to give. We are taught not to notice this work of worldmaking, to borrow from Getachew,2 that allows for a very prescriptive relationship between the scholar and their subject. We take without intending, we don’t know how or that we should also give, and so create a relationship of extraction and exploitation. When you do know how it feels, it is like all you can notice is all of the ways that you are seen in theory but then discarded empirically. The heaviest thing about the discipline of IR becomes how you are read out, written out, and taught out of mattering.   When I was invited to participate in this conversation about why people ought to matter in IR, I spent months waiting for the words for what I was feeling to come. It seems so innately true that people matter in IR, I am not sure what I can say that is not already known. I still don’t have the words. Maybe it is because this version of IR I am being taught now is one that I don’t recognize, but this version of an expert is one that is all too familiar.   But I am furiously typing into the notes app on my phone as I sit in the recovery room of a pain specialist’s office after a particularly bad procedure because I think I finally have figured out the words that only seem to appear when I am most in pain. What is usually chaotic nothing-ness and everything-ness sharpens into something—I like to believe is insight but who can say?—when I am most annoyed with being misunderstood. The theory gets in the way of understanding, the knowing eclipses empathizing, and the expert believes they aren’t accountable to the one they study or the effect of their theorizing.   Months ago, I sat in on a Zoom panel discussion on co-authorship. I tried to imagine how to practice recognizing that people are experts on their own experience. I asked the panelists what it might look like to include participants in our research as co-authors (not as ignored footnotes or unread acknowledgments) of the ideas they are integral to developing. The panelists were visibly confused by the question. The moments of silence that followed were incredibly loud. Their brows furrowed and eyes narrowed, their expressions speaking without needing words. When they did speak, they dismissed the idea. “This isn’t relevant to my work; it simply isn’t done.” Like the purpose of the question was not to imagine how we could do things differently. “That is not what co-authoring means in political science, you wouldn’t be able to publish that, especially as a grad  2 Adom Getachew, Worldmaking after Empire. Princeton University Press, 2019. Vol. 8 (1), 2021, pp. 18-21  20  student.” Like faculty, institutions, and journals are doing us a favor by working with us and publishing our work. Like the work we do of questioning is not precisely the labor that institutions use to authorize closure and refusal as the performance of expertise. “I think what you are asking is when do I allow grad students to be co-authors on my work.” Like I am the one who is confused, as if I have made it to a Ph.D. without knowing how to string words together to form a question as I mean to ask it.   It is not the question that was asked, but it is a question that they can answer and therefore the one that is worth their our attention. To reframe the question into the one we are comfortable with does more, I think, than to avoid the question that we don’t know how to answer; it is to teach grad students not to ask questions that are unsettling or difficult or that the real experts don’t already know how to answer. It tells us we are better off not recognizing ourselves in the disorderliness, the ambiguity, the contradiction, and the entanglement of the human experience. So, I stared at the wall behind my computer and breathed in a bit too deeply to avoid dealing with that feeling, the one I first learned in pain specialists’ exam rooms. It enervates and enlivens at once. I want to scream and also take a nap; I want to leave the room and I want to interrupt. But how do you explain something to someone committed to misunderstanding you or (less generously) the point? How is it possible that the people you are thinking through don’t count as co-producers of that thought? What knowledge can we claim to be producing without them? What scholarship—what of anything actually—happens alone?  Pain. Pain is what happens alone. It produces a unique kind of loneliness. By nature of chronic pain, my way of entering the world is most often felt as what I cannot do, what is unavailable and impermissible to me. All you want is for people to notice and recognize the pain before you have to name it and explain, right up until the moment that their concern starts to feel like gravity, it defines how you are allowed to move and be. Then it starts to feel unbearable to have someone watch you so closely to see when you are affected. It feels like they are waiting for you to be incapable and insufficient, so they get to have a place in it. They are waiting for your pain to belong to them. To know you are seen first and perhaps only as a list of symptoms is to always wonder if you exist at all outside of them.   I think pain is a curse. I hold my body in permanent tension. I am afraid to show pain and to teach people how to notice unless I name it. Eventually they forget that I will flinch when they touch me and then things that should feel like belonging are a reminder that I don’t. I avoid sharing this loneliness for fear that the only time I register as my whole being is when I feel like I am the least of myself. I want the privacy to decide when and with whom I share my worst moments. I want the protection of knowing what I know and that it is mine. I want the safety of surviving alone so I don’t have to use the spoons I have left to comfort people who witness the pain and the state of constant, perpetual grieving where I live. If they cannot make my pain belong to them, it ceases to exist to them.  Megan Manion  21   For some, it seems to mean something different, and invariably something more, to think of lived experience as a means to knowing, rather than knowledge itself. It is not enough to see the pain; in order to know, they have to make the experience make sense. It is not in the being, but in the becoming that things matter. I don’t explain what it means in the “right” way. They change the words until they resonate with them, so that they can explain it to me. Like I am the one who is confused, as if I have not had to invent new vocabularies to explain sensations they have never felt. “Everything happens for a reason.” What is the reason? The silence while we wait for them to tell us is very loud again. In this sense, IR is perhaps not best or most wholly understood as a discipline, but rather as a disciplining. We are actively disciplined into thinking it is up to the expert, who is disciplined into thinking it is their right and responsibility, to decide the boundaries of who is allowed to know, how they should discover it, and what knowledge actually looks like and matters. What if the expert I become is one that sees only what I am looking for, only what I already know how to see and explain, and not what is really there?  I think pain is a gift. I seek ways to be with people even when I cannot stand them. When pain is at its worst and it cuts deepest, I have taught myself to manage it by telling myself that I am carrying it for someone who cannot bear it anymore. I imagine that there is someone who needs me to hold their pain for a little while so they can rest. It is a strange and lovely way to feel pain differently. It makes it easier to think that I am strong enough to carry someone else’s burden, to help them hold it, than for it to belong to me alone. Then pain can become a way to belong. I think about how this kind of imagining might make IR more hospitable—if we are carrying what is heavy for and with each other, to create space for us to rest, to communicate, to live and love and think in new ways unburdened by the pain that has come before? What would it mean to exist in IR, to matter to IR, by holding this at our center and as our purpose? How can we be a different kind of expert? 

On Becoming an Expert

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