the mockingbird sings (but whose song is it singing?)
Posted on October 25, 2021It was a rite of passage into New York City, and I did what I had to do—stretched a solitary haul from a Trader Joe’s shopping trip into two weeks of home-cooked meals so I could afford this: the privilege of watching an incredible cast bring Aaron Sorkin’s Broadway adaptation of To Kill a Mockingbird to life. As I watched the play unfold over the next 2 hours and 35 minutes, my mind proceeded to circle around the idea of privilege, positionality, and the power and perspective that comes with it.
Perhaps it was the distance afforded by my seat in the nosebleed section that contributed to my involved and critical gaze, enriched by the dissection taking place on stage, where Harper Lee’s open-hearted evisceration of race and justice in the American South merged with Sorkin’s trial-by-dialogue of the “most honest and decent person in Maycomb”. For in this adaptation, Atticus Finch, that seemingly-impeachable moral hero, is being held accountable, challenged by his children (and through them, by the audience) about his framing of racism as “incivility”, and the empathy he is able to muster for his fellow (racist, and now anti- semitic!, white) man.
In 2021, a year that follows the murder of George Floyd and the Black Lives Matter movement, a story about racial injustice cannot be told exclusively by white voices, and in response to that, we hear the voices of Tom Robinson (the symbolic mockingbird: a Black man, falsely accused of the rape of a white woman) and Calpurnia (the Finch’s Black housekeeper) being amplified, with the latter serving as both, the voice of the oppressed and our collective conscience (of course, these voices are only heard within the confines of the Finch household, and Tom’s jail cell). But even with all of the literary repair and renovation that Sorkin is able to muster, for me at least, Atticus Finch stayed firmly within a fixed frame: a well-meaning, privileged white saviour who single-handedly and with great wisdom and benevolence does more than anyone else in Maycomb to ‘fix’ what is broken. Here’s another, larger frame: Poring over Sorkin’s filmography[1], I realise that Finch is a character I have seen often in Sorkin’s work. I am unable to find a single instance in Sorkin’s oeuvre in which a person of colour heralds the radical change that his chosen protagonists—overwhelmingly male, overwhelmingly white—are glorified for delivering. In essence, Sorkin[2], his characters, and Finch seemed to represent to me the same strain of pathological benevolence that falls deliberately short of structural reform that would render the need for such benevolence irrelevant.
I have been skidding across the slippery surfaces of negotiated power and privilege for sometime now. I am in America, and I am a person of colour, to whom not all doors are open or accessible. I shift to India, and I become the oppressor, the holder of immense privilege and its associated benevolence. But even in the country I call my own, I move along an axis and become the other—a member of a cultural and religious minority. Wedged within the contradictions of my class privilege and my religious marginalisation, is my identity as a woman, constantly worried for her safety. While trying to navigate these contradictions between privilege, power and perspective, specifically in my personal context, I keep coming back to the way the Irish poet Pádraig Ó Tuama reads poetry[3]:
when I read poetry, one of the questions that’s always in the mind is, who is the “I”? Who’s speaking here? And often, of course, when you’re reading a poem, you want to think, Oh, I’m being invited into the “I.” I’m being invited into the experience of the speaker and the outrage of the speaker. But often, these days, when I read poetry, I realize that I am not being invited into identifying with the “I,” the speaker of the poem; I’m being identified into being the “you,” the one who might be challenged, the one who’s being up for critique.
Taking cognisance of my complicated relationship with power and privilege and my identity as a designer (as the ‘you’ in this instance), I’ve been attempting to lean away from the universal problem-solving syndrome that seems to ail most of us in the profession (just as it ails advertisers, entrepreneurs, researchers, humanitarian aid volunteers, etc.). Staying with the metaphor of a character in a play, I attempt to situate myself within the systems I operate in through a self check-in/critique process that consists of three seemingly simple questions:
1. Whose is the story being told?
“Stories matter. Many stories matter.” – Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Should my voice be the one articulating the story, or am I appropriating someone else’s narrative? What are the biases, values, and lived experiences I bring to the table when I sit down with my collaborators? Who doesn’t have a seat at the table? What is the language I am using, and what is the violence that it carries? As a designer walking into communities that have been ‘staying with the trouble’ for decades, how do I stay true to my obligation of restoring and repositioning power? In the context of research, how do I examine critically, my choices in whom I deem as my subject for study?
In India for instance, I was privy to a conversation taking place between a group of journalists reporting on a story centred around caste-based violence. One of the journalists had a proposition: “what if,” she said, “instead of walking into a community and saying, ‘Look, there violence is happening here,’ we looked at where we’re situated, within our own upper-caste communities, and confront the systems that create the violence in the first place?”.
2. Who is writing the script?
“Oppression has always had great use for architects and designers and urban planners.” – Teju Cole
How do I resist the ‘false narrative of design practice without politics’[4]? Who is setting the goals that I am designing towards, and whom do they benefit? Can community needs be met more effectively by shifting away from dominant narratives at the centre? How can I re-focus design processes to meet and learn from members who have conventionally been pushed to the periphery, to value their voices, and to steer decision-making through their leadership? Instead of responding to a brief or pre-set goal, can I—like a physician—examine the ‘body’ to identify and alleviate the root causes of collective pain?
This is an admission of guilt, of being the wielder of violence: Over the course of my career, I have often witnessed and been part of creative planning— including a furious back-and-forth on email regarding a decision to release an ‘overly celebratory’ post on a brand’s social media page on the occasion of Eid—that at best, tip-toed around majoritarian ideas and religious fundamentalism, and at worst, reinforced them[5], thereby maintaining the status quo instead of disrupting it. Intertwined with this is my own experience of the lack of diversity in advertising & design agencies in India, where top and middle leadership often tend to be staffed by dominant-caste, Hindu men, and some women—which shows very much when it comes time for collective decision making.
3. What part am I playing?
“I frequently have to reorient myself to a text world in which the centre of academic knowledge is either in Britain, the United States or Western Europe; in which words such as ‘we‘ ’us‘ ’our‘ ’I’ actually exclude me.” – Linda Tuhiwai Smith
How can I ensure that my expertise is used as a supportive tool, rather than one used to oppress or exclude? How can I stop playing the part of the ‘doer’, and instead start listening to the rarely heard, so that I may co-create acts of design with communities that often hold centuries of historical knowledge and practices that can be used to heal the present? How can I shift away from instincts of top-down control and prediction, and instead dance with the system to nurture positive, bottom-up emergence?
A few years ago, I was part of a team tasked with improving customer centricity within a large conglomerate. Decision makers at the organisation had a game plan in place – a pitch contest, a portal to support the submission of ideas, and even a game that would boost ‘ideation’. Here’s what we quickly realised: true customer centricity was continuously emerging on ground—on factory floors, at retail checkout counters and amongst field agents. By collaborating with these employees, we were able to overcome hierarchy and create great impact by enabling them to submit customer-centric ideas through voice notes – eliminating barriers of language and technological literacy, while shifting from a mindset of delivering solutions, to sharing them.
Towards the end of To Kill a Mockingbird, as impassioned speeches are made and Tom Robinson is being declared guilty, the spotlight is directed firmly towards centerstage, where the white characters of Atticus Finch, Jem, Scout, the Sheriff and the Judge all take turns to talk about (and then enact) justice. Throughout these courtroom scenes, a group of Black characters sit along the periphery of the stage. In response to what is happening during the trial, they cower, gasp, and burst into tears. We never do learn who they are. They never speak. I wonder what they would have had to say.
– aa
Citations:
[1]“Aaron Sorkin.” IMDb. IMDb.com. Accessed October 21, 2021. https://www.imdb.com/name/ nm0815070/.
[2]Izadi, Elahe. “Aaron Sorkin, Reportedly Unaware of Hollywood’s Diversity Problem, Had Many Chances to Become Aware.” chicagotribune.com. Chicago Tribune, June 5, 2018. https://www.chicagotribune.com/entertainment/tv/ct-aaron-sorkin-diversity-problem-0170327-story.html.
[3]“Roshni Goyate – Coconut Oil.” The On Being Project, June 3, 2021. https://onbeing.org/programs/ roshni-goyate-coconut-oil/#transcript.
[4]“Design as Symbolic Violence: Reproducing the ‘Isms’ + a …” Accessed October 21, 2021. http:// decolonisingdesign.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/Boehnert_Onafuwa_Design-as-Symbolic- Violence.pdf.
[5]Staff, Scroll. “Fabindia Removes Diwali Ad after Online Outrage over Use of Urdu Phrase.” Scroll.in. Scroll.in, October 19, 2021. https://scroll.in/latest/1008025/fabindia-removes-diwali-collection-ad-after- outrage-over-use-of-urdu-phrase.
References:
Teju Cole, “The White Savior-Industrial Complex”
J. Boehnert and D. Onafuwa, “Design as Symbolic Violence”
Steven Johnson, “Emergence”
bell hooks, “Choosing the Margin as a Space of Radical Openness”