» Editor’s note: Feminist joy is an editorial column in which we celebrate our victories, joys and acts of love, big or small, for ourselves and as a collective resistance. You can email your entries to shahinda@feminisminindia.com
In recent years, the collective psyche of advocates of justice and freedom has been one of sheer hopelessness. David Graeber, the renowned anthropologist and activist and one of the main organizers of the Occupy Wall Street movement in 2011, argues that this hopelessness is artificially created. The world system of property, patriarchy, and border colonialism employs vast amounts of military and police forces, foments inter-ethnic conflict through chauvinistic rhetoric, and employs highly sophisticated surveillance technologies to colonize our bodies. They aim to suppress our creativity and ability to organize our lives according to emancipatory principles.
But there is something stubborn about hope. It simply refuses to give in. The commitment of several people to the liberation of man can transform any moment of decline into kairos, the moment of transition of creation. And the creation in such times, both elegant in its beauty and firm in its willingness to break all barriers, is music.
Our values of solidarity, resistance and hope are best expressed through art, especially music, because music in its vocal, instrumental and performative aspects gives our bodies the opportunity to refuse biopolitical Control by military, capital and organized religion. The composition of dissident music has and continues to enable the oppressed to overcome the semiotic prisons of the oppressor.
Music has historically been the unifying cultural element of moral and political society; The Oppressed substrate of all societies based on concentration of power and exploitation of labor. In these moral and political societies, alternative and radical forms of sociality are created and recreated. It allows marginalized groups to create their signs, symbols and values that are independent of the value system of the systems of oppression. The performance of such music enables “otherized” groups to heal physically, psychologically and spiritually in the face of severe violence from power structures and to strengthen their collective solidarity.
Source: Photos.com/Getty Images
In the United States, the first generation of slaves were forbidden from speaking their native language. Due to the large number of native African dialects, the slaves found it extremely difficult to communicate. Gradually They took words and phrases from English, reinvented them in ways that were more relevant to their lived experiences, and modified them. The English they produced was therefore lexically different from standard English and contained novel word and phrase configurations. This is the English heard in African American jazz and spiritual. In doing so, they reclaimed English as a language of resistance and community.
The Dalit community creates his practice of resistance through music. Dalit music is closely linked to the land, to physical labor and the exploitation of Dalit minds and bodies. Relations with land and production are the central theme of Dalit music, as it tells the story of a people whose manual labor has been exploited for centuries, but from whom Brahminism has denied land and other means of production. Landscape is an essential part of Dalit music, in which entities such as forests and rivers are visualized as elements that have a life of their own and can move, speak and be part of the larger human community.
Dalit demigods such as Chuhadmal and Dina, Bhadri Baba and many spirits also form a significant part of the content of Dalit music. This enormous vitalism embodied in the lyrics and notations highlights the sophisticated systems of meaning that subaltern people can create to give them hope to continue their lives. The aesthetic structure of Dalit music does not rely on the binary between physical and mental work. One such form that emerged from the experience of physical labor is Bidesiya art from Bihar. It was founded by Bhikhari Thakur, a former migrant worker from Bihar, whose art performances combined many local traditions and the experiences of migrant workers.
The music of Dalits and African Americans is a testament to people’s ability to create and recreate diverse forms of alternative sociality in the midst of severe oppression. The production of this music took centuries, even before the formal structures of democracy existed. Today’s struggles must draw effective lessons from these registers of disagreement.
Source: Wikimedia Commons
On February 21, 2012, Russian police in Moscow arrested Yekaterina Samutsevich, Nadezhda Tolokonnikova and Maria Alyokhina, members of the anarcho-feminist punk band Pussy Riot. Their crimes? They openly exposed the corrupt ties between the Russian Orthodox Church and the autocratic President Vladimir Putin. Her criticism of Putin was not her only crime; rather, the visual aspect of her performance threatened Russia’s patriarchal oligarchy. These women performed the song “Punk Prayer” in front of the Cathedral of Christ the Savior in Moscow. They wore so-called “immodest clothes” in which their arms and legs were visible and used profanity in their song. The horrified establishment demanded severe sexual violence against these women as punishment.
Pussy Riot is one of several feminist punk bands such as King Kong Meuf, Killing Pixties and Ternura around the world that are emerging amid the violent onslaught of capitalist patriarchy, in which the market increasingly commodifies women’s bodies and right-wing populist groups refuse to define the essence of femininity access to reproductive justice and religious fundamentalists are cracking down on queer-friendly curricula in schools. These are groups connected not only to art but also to community building, caring for each other and fighting the system through the open visualization of nonconformity in clothing, language and texts. These groups are inventing new forms of agitation and belonging within their organizations.
It is perhaps best to conclude with Faiz Ahmed Faiz’s verse:
“The evening is long, but the evening is long.”
The night of despair seems too long, but it is only night.
