In the reading "Performance Studies:
Interventions and Radical Research", Dwight Conquerwood cited Raymond
Williams who talks about class-based arrogance of scriptocentrism, pointing to
the error and delusion of highly-educated people who are so driven in on their
reading (sic) that they fail to notice that there are other forms of skilled,
intelligent, creative activity, such as theatre and active politics. This error
resembles that of the narrow reformer who supposes that farm labourers and
village craftsmen were once uneducated, merely because they could not read. He
argued that the contempt for performance and practical activity, which is
always latent in the highly-literate, is a mark of the observer's limits, not
those of the activities themselves.
I was at once moved and excited reading
this as this has always been a lingering thread in my mind. Over the last two
decades, I have had many encounters, deep and extended, with farmers, labourers
and villagers - or rural folk. To be honest, I had substituted "simple"
with "rural" in the sentence that came immediately before this one as
I became suddenly conscious about the use of the term "simple". Would
it reflect derogatorily on myself? Would it reveal a horrible classist haughtiness
in me that I at times suspected but would quickly shake away every time this
thought entered my mind?
But I shall be perfectly honest in this
post and revert to the use of the term "simple folk" to mean people
from rural parts and who are defined by having little or no exposure to city
life and who would generally have limited or no education.
Here I shall relate a particular friendship
I developed with a Chinese farmer not too long ago, whose young adult son was
involved in a bad accident that left him permanently brain-damaged. When I saw
the son, his mental age was around four or five, and he could not recognise his
parents or sister. In one meeting with me, the father, a peasant, said
matter-of-factly: "He is damaged. He needs his mother for
everything."
As I probed deeper into the story for my
journalistic work, I came to know the father better. He was around 50 and had
had elementary education. In his determination to seek redress for his son, he
abandoned his farm, spent the family's entire savings. He sought the help of
countless government departments and hospitals. To make a convincing argument,
he studied all of China's labour protection laws as well as insurance
provisions for work-related accidents. In one meeting we had, he produced a
well-thumbed copy of China's compendium of labour laws. I remember taking the
copy from him and marvelling at how a peasant, with only elementary education,
could have so much grit and temerity to have gone through what he did, and to
have achieved so much for his son.
Within the framework of the CCA, one would
probably label this to be agency, the farmer's extraordinary agentic capacity.
But what exactly do we find inside? Could this be what de Certeau calls
"the elocutionary experience of a fugitive communication"?
Conquergood goes on to describe this as a situation where "subordinate
people do not have the privilege of explicitness, the luxury of transparency,
the presumptive norm of clear and direct communication, free and open debate on
a level playing field that the privileged classes take for granted."
I disagree with that description, I believe
it to be a generalisation. In my dealings with people, my method has always
been to put myself out of the picture and be an observer. I have always
endeavoured to be an observer or a facilitator to help draw out the person's spontaneous
expression of himself or herself. In other words, my method is to be a friend,
an accepting ally who makes no judgements or assumptions. I let the person tell
his or her story.
In fact, what I have observed is that rural
folk are unusually forthcoming. In them I have witnessed extraordinary
explicitness, transparency and clarity in communication. They are always able
to say exactly what they mean in far fewer words than any city folk I have known.
Why I am struck by this is because their economy with words is unique. It is a
feature that has struck me time and time again, and when it happens, I always
make a mental note. Their communication is clear, direct and they have always
sparred with me as an intellectual equal even as we discuss topics that anyone
would deem as sophisticated, for example, complex points in the law, circuitous
judicial provisions and judgements, or whatever the subject happened to be at
the time. Oftentimes, they would be enmeshed in a difficult situation which
they need to find their way out of and to do this requires not only physical
agency such as going from place to place, but working out problems, pointing
out inconsistencies and laying out arguments that require mental dexterity.
Here I will relate another incident where I
met a factory worker who was trying to launch a legal challenge against her
factory who refused to give her what was due to her in accordance to labour
laws in China. She told of how she went from place to place to find a lawyer
who would be willing to help her. What she needed was for somebody to help her
document, or textualise, her case - ie. to write down the facts of her case and
appeal. As she explained, she told me how she could very well tell her story to
the courts and that all she needed was somebody to put it in the language of
the courts, or legalese. She eventually found a person who helped her and she
won her appeal.
So in spite of the widely varying cultures
between us – due to factors such as place and circumstances of origin, life
encounters and experiences – I believe there must be some underlying, unifying,
natural commonality which makes us understand the other immediately, allowing even
the limited words we both share to cut across cultures. Of course, I am not
arrogant to think that all that transpires is crystal clear all the time. All
so often, something is lost in the exchange, but with patience and diligent
checks that a researcher should always make, these blanks would be filled. In
fact, such a situation can occur in any conversation with just about anybody.
If I were to put my finger on this “natural
commonality”, I will choose to think it is our humanity. Our empathy,
humanness, and the desire to reach out and to understand. It is the emptying of
oneself in the process of the wanting to understand the other.
To revert now back to theory, I will think
that this is what goes on in the co-construction process that CCA stresses.
This is the part where a CCA researcher opens up spaces for subalterns to vent
their voices and raise their issues. Here, assumptions such as subalterns not
having the knowledge, the language, the communicative facility to help
themselves are just plain false, and to continue to hold such a view is rather
laughable. How then do you open up these spaces? To me, it is a willingness to
be silent for once and to listen, to let the other person speak.