Re-Visioning #5: A Conversation with Udit Thakre
This is the fifth in a roving and open-ended series of conversations in the context of the interruption of everything by COVID-19. For me, in March 2020, I was about to set out on a 220 mile walk on foot, collecting and sharing acts towards and visions of a positive future society. In the deep uncertainty of the present moment, I find myself, like many others, embarking on different trajectories of unlearning, destabilizing and re-visioning. These conversations are part of that process. They begin through some convergence of ideas or space. Transcribing them is not making art but a way of temporarily living inside the ideas they contain, an act of deep listening. Publishing them is not exhibiting them but extending the invitation.
Udit Thakre is an Indian citizen on a Tier-4 student visa in the UK, currently on an MSc Psychology program in Sheffield. He has multiple specific learning differences (ADHD, Autism, Dyslexia and Dyspraxia) and is currently fundraising to support his studies. In his words: “I have been rendered dysfunctional and unemployable due to multiple racist and disability-based institutional discriminations inflicted on me. This discriminatory abuse has rendered me dysfunctional to study and work while inflicting a significant toll on my health. I am currently very ill, physically and psychologically, and can barely study productively. Pursuing gainful employment is impossible. I am currently at risk of facing eviction from my student accommodation. I have no recourse to UK public funds. Clearing my rent debt will help me stay safe and complete my degree. If you can comfortably spare 1p, I request you to help me with paying off the rent debt I’ve accumulated.” Link for direct donations: https://paypal.me/pools/c/8wMwzp0q6j
IN: Udit, we first met when you came to our regular meet-up group for socially engaged artists based in Sheffield. I know that you’re not an artist yourself, but I also know that you feel an affinity with socially engaged art practice. Given that it’s how we met, I wonder if that’s as good a place to start as any.
UT: Yes. I am training to be a psychologist and psychology is an echo chamber that I am forever trying to break out of. I am interested in asking social questions and I am interested in art. Socially engaged artistic practice roots itself in the everyday, in personal visions of and intercourses with the world. In doing so, it is having conversations that psychology has barely begun to address. It allows multi-faceted approaches to a problem, and the problem that interests me deeply is that of inequality.
IN: It’s good to sometimes have positive aspects of ones’ own field beamed back from another discipline. It’s also good to be reminded that the fight is against inequality, that there is always inequality, and that it always needs fighting.
UT: I don’t remember any time since I moved to England when I was not questioning the establishment. What has been most clear over the last year is that for the establishment in this country, capital outweighs humanity completely, and that has been very disturbing for me. Constantly having to put myself through the cognitive effort of opposing what the institutions of power are asking of me and everyone is so tiring. I cannot tell you how tiring and weathering it is. I have had to switch off many times for my sanity. As a result, I have a very amorphous relationship with time. Over the last year, the already fragile architecture of time around me has contorted itself even more. I have spent large portions of this last year as one of very few people living in my halls of residence. It is very strange. Those who had the luxury to go home went home. For me, returning to India was not an option because it would have jeopardized my academic and professional prospects, and it was not financially viable.
IN: Are there any spaces that have opened up or become closed for you as a result of the pandemic?
UT: The first lockdown for me was very difficult, by sheer force of physical isolation. I have dyslexia, dyspraxia, ADHD and autism. It was hell for anybody with specific learning differences, anybody in a toxic relationship, anybody who is dependent on the establishment or any external systems for support, they are all jeopardized. The saving grace has been reading. That and telephone calls. Not video calls. Telephone conversations. Video calls reinforce the presence of absence. As social beings, humans are best in the presence of others, even if a person is socially anxious. We are also eventually able to deal with complete absence of others. But the presence of absence is very damaging. Even with my family in India I keep video calls to an absolute minimum. The presence of absence is a very strange metaphysical space for us to inhabit. But reading and the coming together of the reading groups has been very important for me.
IN: Can we talk about that a bit? I’m also interested in the notion of domestic activism that you talk about, which I believe is a concept connected to the formation of the reading groups.
UT: I am personally not interested in changing the world. It’s too big. For me the biggest arena of activism is everyday conversation. I’m interested in how I can have a good conversation, and how I can have a better conversation tomorrow than I had today, which means I am constantly trying to address my own ignorance. I wanted to make space for people to sit around and talk about what pisses them off because I think that activism first requires an acknowledgement of anger. I wanted to create the conditions for having difficult conversations as a way of learning how to have difficult conversations. This is how the reading groups came about, which I call Intersectional Feminist Anti-Racist Readings Together or I.F.A.R.R.T for short. Yes I know, very funny. More than the technical aspects of a text I am most interested in how the texts affect people so, as well as the reading, everyone has a responsibility to bring everyday conversations to the group and think about how the reading is affecting those conversations. It’s important that nobody is shamed but that doesn’t mean nobody is held accountable. I find it deeply satisfying when I hear from members that these processes are genuinely helping them, that they are able to have other conversations as a direct result of our conversations.
IN: So I can see how helpful the process might be for those who attend but is there a way in which it’s a part of your growing?
UT: I am getting better at communicating with white people about race, gender, ableism and patriarchy. The more I read the more enraged I am at how much whiteness has damaged the world. It was phenomenal to witness the tremors of George Floyd’s horrific death — to see what that does, to finally begin to see how whiteness has had its knee on the necks of every other ideology, to see how every other ideology is now screaming ‘I can’t breathe!’, to see how transformative it can be to voice that cry of pain, and to respond to it. It’s phenomenal what that has done. It is enormously exciting that English, and I mean English not British, society is finally beginning to voice its dissent over how the establishment functions. Finally people are starting to bury the establishment in its own blood.
IN: It was a transformative moment for me too. I used to think of myself as an active anti-racist simply because I devote some of my life to working with and alongside refugees, asylum seekers and migrants, but I now know that isn’t the case. I realized that I didn’t have enough of the basic principles and understandings in place. For example it took a grievance being brought to me — a micro-aggression — to really help me understand what a micro-aggression is and to try and mediate between the two parties. As a person of colour who has relatively recently come to this country, do you see these kinds of transformations happening? What do you see unfolding here, in terms of the people around you, their communities, and wider society?
UT: I experience in this country a pathological avoidance of conflict; a toxic positivism and a reckless pacifism. England is in complete denial of it’ past, and fails to recognize that it invented, benefited from and continues to perpetuate Capitalist White Supremacist Heteropatriarchy. In some ways, it’s worse here than in the States because it is more covert. This Capitalist White Supremacist Heteropatriarchy is completely entrenched and codified into cultural, political and even geographical identity in this country.
IN: And has any of that changed over the course of the year in the wake of George Floyd’s death? What do you see happening now?
UT: As I mentioned, this country is finally beginning to find a place to have very, very tough conversations about its racialized past, about its denial and ignorance, which are almost like national sports with artistic status in England. It’s devastating that it has taken so long but it is happening. If you want to carry feminist and anti-racist conversations forward, you have to do it bi-laterally. You have to account for the trauma of generations and centuries. You have to come to the reckoning that people in my position, people of colour are going to be very angry. The anger is a part of the conversation, just as much as current and future corrective measures.
IN: I find this particular point an interesting one because the entirety of my practice as an artist has been founded on a sense of togetherness, on establishing commonality. The steps that I take towards doing that with groups ,and within communities of many different backgrounds, does not include conflict, although it may include conflict resolution, if that makes any sense. Is it fair to say, then, that it’s my privilege as a white person which allows me to be able to say, in that space, that it isn’t a space for anger or conflict? To ultimately be saying that it is in fact my space, contrary to the fantasies of collaboration and co-authorship that are so prevalent in socially engaged art practices?
UT: You are not deriving value in the conflict itself, but from de-escalation and resolution. As I see it, you wish to re-establish control and order. Exactly. My position is best stated by Afua Hirsch when she says “We do not want to de-escalate”. You will not project-manage this. Commonality is a very dangerous thing when it nears sameness. This idea of togetherness that you mention has a lot of heart, but basing togetherness on commonality is actually very oppressive, because it pushes people to conform to a mould. That leads to distortion of personal ideology and personal identity.
IN: I agree, but that’s not exactly what I mean. Let’s say that I conceive of the work that I do as a search for modes of togetherness, and that I believe these are places that can be reached by going deeper into ourselves to find collective commonality or deeper levels of humanity. So if we take this example, that we might transcend or bypass conflict in this way in a group scenario, could we apply this to racial difference or am I only able to from a position of privilege?
UT: Yes, most definitely. It is your privilege to seek that. Your thought processes are not incorrect, but anybody who is already disadvantaged remains at a disadvantage in a space such as the one that you are talking about. My approach is always to lean into the pain and accept the conflict that comes.
IN: I know, because you’ve told me, how damaging this can be to yourself, how these interactions accumulate and overwhelm. I just heard your phrase “lean into the pain” as another iteration of Donna Haraway’s urge to “stay with the trouble”, but actually I think that you go one step further than that and invite the trouble in order to have the conflict and bring about the transformation.
UT: I demand to be heard. My pain is a part of my conversation, a part of my truth. To not respect that would be to deny the sanctity and autonomy of my truth, and that is completely unacceptable to me. I want to say that in any of these conflict interactions I am not berating someone’s being, I am simply questioning their behaviour. In the commonality hypothesis of interaction, people move 50% and meet in the middle, which basically means that they are only giving 50% of who they are. I would like to propose being 100% of who you are. Collide, keep colliding, and begin to understand how you are colliding.
Postscript:
UT: Its weird seeing my words in print because my ways of understanding the world is anything but written, and my understanding of the world is complex and forever shapeshifting. Writing, for me, does not accommodate that complexity. I find the dignity of my thoughts to be most respected by speech.
