#43 – November 5th 2007

Pornographying poverty…

While perusing a friend’s blog yesterday, www.headdownfistup.blogspot.com, - a witty, intelligent, subversive discourse tackling the issues of global ‘development’ - a certain entry had the effect of a slap in the face. My breath caught. I was stung by the words on the page. His accuracy was so crisp, almost tangible. He reached into my mind, extracted my unarticulated thoughts and put them to print in a way I couldn’t conceive of. And it made me cringe, standing on stage, splayed naked for everyone to see, so acutely did he describe a situation I’ve been passing through.

Awkward, uncomfortable; like airing dirty laundry or revealing a salacious secret. Compare it to your best friend finding out you’ve been bad-mouthing her for months or accidentally forwarding a gossipy e-mail to the entire contents of your address book. Revealing one’s innermost thoughts is difficult in the most intimate of settings; perhaps enlightening a secret crush to your true feelings or exposing your dislike of a certain co-worker, but on an entirely different plane altogether is admitting to incomprehension, incompetency, inferiority. The words spoken in the blog had me admitting to all three.

My friend, who is currently doing a Masters degree in global development recently traveled to Nicaragua where his experiences led to said blog entry. As he articulated the point so well, with his permission I have reprinted a selection of his entry below.

“It's difficult to write about traveling without sounding either contrived, clichéd or exploitative. I don't know if it is because most of us have shared different versions of the same experiences, or if it is because we have a tendency to plagiarize expectations and thus mold our encounters into those premeditated designs, but I do know that the standard formula usually begins (and ends) with some variation of the profoundly tired “I found myself” narrative. There are two problems with that claim. The first is sounding sincere. The second has to do with the idea of finding your self in the first place.

I think it's fair to say that most of us want others to understand our travel experiences as somehow being exceptional, if not simply particular from anybody else's. This in itself is hardly a bad thing. However it can lead to the pursuit of exploitative traveling, wherein we feel that in order to stand apart – or to really get it – we must pretend to understand what certain things feel like (living in poverty, with TB or HIV, political violence); or to use that trendy anthropological saying, we must claim to know what it feels like to be the other. This is not exploitation in the typical sense, but it is exploitation no less. When we see tragedy, especially tragedy that is so distant from the kind we are familiar with inside our cozy borders, it stokes a need for many to try and identify with it, and to share in the pain of others. For many it is not enough to just see it. People want to say they tasted it too.

Individuals that have traveled to AIDS orphanages in Soweto, through the shacks of Kibera or the landfill communities that border Managua, often come away with a sense of overwhelming confusion that is ironically (and unfortunately) articulated as a sense of understanding. Rarely will you meet a backpacker that has been to one of these places, or others like it, that does not have an easily accessible explanation or account of what it’s really like there. It is not acceptable to admit that such places bring about feelings of sickness, confusion and alienation, because that is to sound crass and separated. However to describe these places as “beautiful”, where “so many people with so little” are “as happy as us” if you just “get to know them” is the garden variety answer. It is stories of these sorts that I have found (pun not intended) inevitably lead to ultimate conclusions of self discovery, and they are too often founded upon an unconscious glorification of other people’s tragedies.”

Slap. My cheek is still stinging. And unfortunately he’s so right, and even worse, I know better. I am fairly certain you could search back through my previous journal entries and discover almost word for word his quoted material above. What do I have to say? We’re beyond apologies here. Excuses are just that, excuses. I could tell you that it is true, that that I have found my ‘self’, whatever that is, that people here are happy, that even the slums radiate a certain beauty, but as my friend so accurately puts it, “it’s hard to write about the beauty of a slum without pornographying it.” Its hard to describe anything here without coming across as having a superiority complex, without skating across the issue of race, without glorifying or exploiting.

There is a trap set. A malicious alliance waiting for new recruits. It’s a group of self-professing do-gooders and I’ve been pissed off at most of them one time or another. I was quite certain I hadn’t fallen into their tangled web and quite certain I never would but my friend illuminated my actual proximity.

“It forces us to question the degree to which the validation of our own self is contingent upon the suffering of others. This is especially crucial for people that choose to make issues of oppression and poverty the crux of their career – be they HRW field researchers or resident development economists for the World Bank. There is quite often a unique type of arrogance amongst these NGO people “in the field”, as if their willingness to live a comfortable life in these countries is more admirable and profound than the perseverance displayed by the real victims of predatory globalization. The self-congratulating tone of many NGO workers can be nauseating, and can completely undermine whatever good work they may in fact be doing….I have been told by some people in my family that I've been “brave” to travel to certain places, and for wanting to make my career revolve around being in those places, addressing those issues. But there is nothing brave or admirable in any of it, because it is as much about self-interest and personal preference as making money is a necessary preference for an investment banker. To rely on the fact that traveling to or working in these places sounds exotic, and to use it as a tool for self-discovery is to use the victims of poverty and oppression as peripheral beings, as if minor actors in the play of your life.”

Let me make something perfectly clear. Maybe you think I am brave. Maybe you think I’m altruistic and munificent. Maybe I’ve implied that life is somehow ‘difficult’ for me here, that I am ‘becoming one’ with the Ugandans and suffer along with their sufferings. If I have at all implied this I am guilty of, perhaps sub-consciously, deceiving you and now is the time for my confession. It is too late for redemption, the damage is done, and perhaps even in this diatribe I dig myself deeper into the pit. Nonetheless. As much as I rabble on about becoming Ugandan, I am not and will never be. The idea entices me but that enticement is contingent on my position of privilege. Few if any beings on this planet would prefer the constant fear of hunger to the security of a full stomach. None would trade dollars in the bank for the anxiety of an empty pocket. My comfortable bed, my cold bottled water, three meals a day, these are not things I would willingly give up. I do not want the stigma of HIV. I do not want to walk barefoot through red mud because I can’t afford shoes. I cannot live where chickens run beneath chairs and rats climb in through broken glass. Although I could handle 80% of Ugandan life, 50% of it would make me miserable. I live like a Canadian in Uganda, not a Ugandan.

Anyone can come here, anyone can do this. The difference being how you do it. No neo-imperialism, no white man’s burden. Ditch the superiority complex and do not pretend that walking a mile in someone’s shoes compares to wearing them for a lifetime. I’ll walk out the door today aware of my position while continuing my search to bring others closer to it.

~Nicole

Please don’t hesitate to check out my friend’s blog: www.headdownfistup.blogspot.com.