Podcast Coming Soon!

February 16, 17, 19th, 2023

 

Welcome to the reading of stories, bodies, archives, a collectively written script that reflects on un-mastery, home, embodiment, pedagogy, hauntology, remembering, forgetting, and re/centring. But none of these conversations would mean anything unless we also have the capacity to reflect upon the locations we are in, its history, our relations to it and its relation to us.

 

We have gathered in Ohron:wakon today, ravine it means in Kanien:Keha language, this lands since time immemorial has been, is and continues to be the territories of the Erie, Neutral, Huron-Wendat, Haudenosaunee and Mississaugas. This land is covered by the Dish With One Spoon Wampum Belt Covenant, which was an agreement between the Haudenosaunee and Anishinabek to share and care for the resources around the Great Lakes.

 

My name is Aytak Dibavar, I am a postcolonial feminist educator at McMaster University, I am also an Iranian lawyer in Exile; but when I arrived to Turtle Island, 14 years ago, the permission for me to stay, live, and work on this land did not come from the people to whom these lands belonged to; in contrast the permission came from the settler colonial institutions, complicit in stealing the land and genocide against its original inhabitants. And that is my unlearning journey to do… it is my belief that as long we are on turtle island, we cannot have any conversations pertaining to social justice without reflecting on our own ties and complicity in the settler colonial project.

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This past fall, I had a pleasure of journeying with 12 amazing students/co-travelers in a course called Stories, Bodies, Archives: Un/Learning in Movements. During our course journey we made a commitment to ethically remember, forget, and retell in order to do justice to the stories, histories, and struggles of bodies who occupy marginal spaces in dominant institutionalized memories, imaginations, languages, and modes of narrations. We aimed to create a community that listens and shares concomitantly: a polyvocal community.

 

This collectively written script, came out as the outcome of such efforts, striving to do justice to the journeys and commitments of each voice that has contributed to the making of the larger moving whole, it is an outcome of a process in which multiple bodies laboured together to remember, listen, trust, explore, retell, write, move, and perform.

 

So here we are with our script, entangled, committed, and responsible for ourselves, for our communities and for one another as co-traveler and inspired by Sara Ahmad who reminds us that; "in queer, feminist, and antiracist work, self-care is about the creation of community, fragile communities… assembled out of the experiences of being shattered. We reassemble ourselves through the ordinary, everyday, and often painstaking work of looking after ourselves; looking after each other."