Heartwork

Heartbeats

Our heart is as big as our entanglements.

—Unknown

In Jorge Luis Borges’s short story “The Circular Ruins,” the protagonist attempts to dream a man into existence. He imagines an audience and selects one member to focus on, but he fails to generate a full individual. He then tries something else: starting with the beating heart and working his way outward. Only then he is successful.¹¹

The heart plays a central role in Muslim traditions. Prophet Mohammed (peace be upon him) is reported to have said: “The heart is like a feather in a desolate field, which the winds keep turning over and over.”¹² The heart is conceived as the mirror in which the meanings of the unseen are reflected, after which wisdom descends.¹³ The heart is the “sum of all human potential,”¹⁴ a person’s “inner world,”¹⁵ a “site of knowing and perception.”¹⁶ It is where the ultimate form of knowledge, that is, the recognition and awareness of the Divine, resides.¹⁷ Mehmet Yavuz Seker traces the multiple ways the heart is positioned within Muslim traditions.¹⁸ In his reading, the heart is a shelter, a vehicle, and a source of knowledge, a site of contemplation and remembrance, insight and perception, understanding and discernment. According to Seker, the inability to use the heart’s innate faculty of insight and perception is synonymous with the inability to reason. Seyyed Hossein Nasr contends that the heart is where cognition, perception, and comprehension meld with emotion.¹⁹ Imam Ghazali went as far as to say that the human is composed entirely of the heart, that we are only as human as our hearts.²⁰

In her essay “Gut Feminism,” Elizabeth Wilson talks about thinking innovatively and organically.²¹ She alerts us to the neurological system that extends well beyond the brain, such as in the gut. Wilson positions the gut as a source of insight and “thinking from the gut” as generative possibility. Anne Pollock makes a similar case for the heart and “thinking from the heart.” She writes: “The domain of the heart is thus much larger than that instantly recognizable organ: the circulatory system makes the heart’s work necessarily dispersed.”²²

Early feminist debates contested why conceptual and scientific thinking (“thinking with the brain”) was considered a “masculine” project, whereas thinking emotively (“thinking from the heart”) was labeled as a “feminine” endeavor.²³ They argued that this binary is based on the premise that the brain can maintain disconnections from the wider demands on the subject, whereas the heart cannot. Pollock calls such intuitive attention to oneself and others the knowledge of heartbeats.²⁴ She writes: “Because we can feel our own heartbeat, and that of others with whom we are intimate, the heartbeat has been and will remain powerful as a way for laypeople to answer the question of who is alive.”²⁵

Attentiveness to heartbeats is a careful and caring orientation of listening, thinking, and writing.²⁶ A devotion to heartbeats can mean directing attention to those stories and knowledges that otherwise remain ignored, perhaps superfluous to most grand theoretical projects. An attention to heartbeats can be burdensome and exhausting. The “hydraulic heart”²⁷ may be loaded with all sorts of pressures and injustices, which demand a far more thoughtful and radical engagement with the world.²⁸ The heart is obligated to respond to wide-intersecting demands; its job is to respond to load. Pollock continues that heart failure is not a result of any intrinsic injury of the heart but rather of the excessive burden placed on it by the body (everything around it).²⁹ She asks: “What if the heart and its failure can become ways of thinking about objects in the world? What does a model of an object that is intrinsically burdened and thus doomed do … for feminist theory?”³⁰

In her book Speaking from the Heart, Rita Manning argues that caring and personal experience provide a far more rewarding ethical life than principle-based ethics.³¹ Feminist scholars have long argued that feminist epistemology should be grounded in the heart, situated in activism and caring labor.³² Emotion is considered central and integral to the construction of knowledge³³ and learning.³⁴ The heart is a crucial adjudicator of knowledge,³⁵ offering a form of knowing and analysis that is invested in creating a more “accurate, complex, multi-dimensioned, truthful perception of the world.”³⁶ This book has been an exercise in opening myself to others and being receptive despite wounding. It is writing born from chaos and ruin. The book is an attempt at dwelling in the markings of others through playfulness, reenchantment, and attunement to heartbeats.

Knowledge as Gift

Please don’t colonize my hearts …

—Katherine McKittrick³⁷

People often gifted me their choicest produce, such as a cucumber or squash plucked from the garden to take home. Disciplines are not designed to honor our obligations to the places we inhabit or the people we meet. Zoe Todd calls out “supranthropology” as an anthropology that loses sight of whose stories are being told.³⁸ It is anthropology that arises when we “forget the consequences of speaking of/for/about people rather than focusing on our responsibilities, always and everywhere, to build relationships with time, place, stories, people.”³⁹ Todd warns: “Every anthropologist is at risk of becoming a supranthropologist.”⁴⁰

During my time in the pahars, I made provisions to compensate my interlocutors. I offered payments that I assembled through a patchwork of research grants. Most people accepted these—some with reservation, some with a feigned smile, others with a frown. One day, Niaz, whom we met in an earlier scene, could not contain himself: “You keep saying that you are giving me this money in exchange for the time I have spent with you. The truth is, this isn’t an equal exchange [my time is far more valuable than your monetary compensation]. I am making room for you in my life; I am inviting you into my home, I am giving you my time. Take it as a gift, not as some object of transaction and exchange.” To claim my citizenship within academic discourse, I have sometimes relied on the language of collaborative, community-based, and participatory research. The abrupt exchange with Niaz is a reminder of how the language of “giving back,” as framed within these approaches, positions research as a transaction, an observation shared by Indigenous scholars. Leanne Simpson teaches us that all these approaches assume that the academic always has a role. As I, too, have learned, the role of the researcher who is tethered to the academic-industrial-military complex is rather modest. It should not be conflated with that of the knowledge producer.⁴¹ The knowledge producers are the people, the land, the community, the more-than-human.

Kim TallBear reminds us that research is, in fact, a process of entering into relation, where one is in conversation with knowledge producers, where knowledge is generously shared (not extracted), and consistency and loyalty in relationships are valued.⁴² Anja Kanngieser and Zoe Todd describe this as “kin study,” an exercise of building relations with people, place, and thought, “knowing from being, and place from story.”⁴³ Compensating for time was an easy way to absolve myself from all future responsibility, permitting me to walk away and disentangle at will. Responsibility to others is continuing and unending. By binding our research projects, as I was attempting to do, we make them “finite in space and time,” limiting what it means to be held responsible.⁴⁴ I still provide honorariums, but I do so with an understanding that research payments are only one step in a much longer process of cultivating relational knowledge, less a final ethical solution or smug permission to discontinue feeling.

Returning to my exchange with Niaz: What does it then mean to acknowledge knowledge as gift? A gift is an invitation to form kin. It is an invitation for reciprocity and entanglement, and in that sense, danger and ruin, not a reprieve for safety and detachment. Alain Testart argues that there are distinctions between an “exchange” and a “gift.”⁴⁵ According to him, a gift does not demand reciprocity; it is given without the expectation of reciprocity. He defines a gift as “a transfer which implies the renunciation of any right over this good as well as of any right that might arise from this transfer, in particular, that of requiring anything by way of counterpart; and that is not itself required.”⁴⁶ Testart’s understanding of gift, perhaps a colonial one, implies an unrequited giving with no pull, no honor to uphold, no limits to usage.

I invite the reader to form a different relation with gift. The scenes show that the gift of encounter is not self-contained but an ethical relation that is accrued through how we live and relate. I have treated the gift of heartbeats as a sustained invitation to one’s world that certainly warrants reciprocity but carries no expectations of equivalence. This is a kind of freedom—to determine the best way to fulfill obligation. Deborah McGregor reminds us: “Knowledge is something one does, rather than simply something one knows.”⁴⁷ At the least, I request the reader to open themselves to the stories contained in this book, even when no destination is forthcoming.

Genevieve Vaughan understands reciprocity in gift-giving outside of a contractual, exchange-based interaction.⁴⁸ Vaughan proposes word-gifts as tools for creating convivial experiences that transcend the dichotomy between the social and the material. She writes: “It is useful also to consider the materiality of words as somewhere between goods and services because the gifts on the nonverbal plane which they re-present, may also be of varying degrees of materiality.”⁴⁹ She touches upon the idea of “evil gifts,” which may result in an adverse or antagonistic relationship. Nigel Clark notes that gifting is often considered in a finite economic system in which the objects in circulation are limited and stoic.⁵⁰ In such a “parsimonious relation to the world,” he writes, the gift can only be a calculated exchange to maximize benefit.⁵¹ An offering can be a gift only if there is “an element of impetuousness, recklessness in it.”⁵²

Rosalyn Diprose approaches gift-giving as an openness to others that exceeds the bounds of an exchange-based contract.⁵³ She reminds us that everyday life is contingent on opening up to others. Diprose believes that the gift can never remain unrecognized on a corporeal level. Gifts are objects of “intercorporeal generosity,” which create politically generative relationalities where the self is given to others.⁵⁴ While a gift may or may not be material, resultant relationships are. And, therefore, gifts are materially and affectively generative, producing unknowable and immeasurable outcomes. Receiving a gift is opening oneself to the unknown. It is a debt that can never be quite fully reciprocated.⁵⁵

Iris Marion Young states that the only proper response to a gift is acceptance.⁵⁶ She argues that the relations of offering and acceptance embedded in a gift are intrinsically asymmetrical. Young explains: “I don’t return, I accept. If later I give you a gift, it is a new offering, with its own asymmetry.”⁵⁷ The asymmetry in reciprocity is further compounded by time, which separates each relation of giving and receiving. She believes that while an exchange of gifts reaffirms reciprocity, “there is no measure of equivalence”; each gesture is qualitatively unique.⁵⁸ Young elaborates further: “The temporal interval makes each act of giving, moreover, an opening rather than the closing of a deal. The equality that our relation of giving creates between us is produced by the substantive and temporal difference, which I here call asymmetry.”⁵⁹

A gift can make us joyous, happy, or even sad (if it is a terrible or nostalgic gift). It possesses an affective trace. Its properties exceed its containment by virtue of the open relationalities its asymmetries offer. The scenes encourage us to invent a different relationship with the world, not rooted in parsimony. They invite us to dwell in the residues of encounter. The scenes show that knowledge is our heartbeat, as well as that of others; it is the effort we make—big or small—to check each other’s pulse that we are still alive. I suggest through the scenes that knowledge is affective entanglement that weighs us down or that, conversely, recharges and reinvigorates.

In “There Are No Honest Poems About Dead Women,” Audre Lorde poses a haunting question: “What do we want from each other after we have told our stories?”⁶⁰ The challenges of reciprocity feel overwhelming, even impossible. For this reason, some feminist researchers have abandoned ethnography altogether to focus on textual analysis, also noted by Richa Nagar.⁶¹ My position at this moment is to work harder to alleviate the harms of ethnography and counter its extractivist tendencies, not disengage completely. My stance might change in the future. Ethnography holds all-too-real possibilities of mistake, failure, betrayal. A generous reading of the terrain suggests that these are opportunities needed for shaping one’s ethical intelligence and finding ways of “living our lives in relation to one another and our surroundings in a respectful, nondominating and nonexploitative way.”⁶² This is put to the test when academic adjudication processes get in the way. A more critical reading disagrees: Who then pays the price for legibility? Should ethnographers, such as myself, “learn” to do ethical research at the expense of those who do the living? Why should communities bear the burden of possible risks and harms of the fumbling researcher? I sit with these questions; I do not have clear answers. I have tried to take these considerations seriously while writing the book; this effort has not been perfect. Nonetheless, I have gained a few insights: To walk away from the certitude of knowing. And that knowledge cannot be disentangled from the means of its production.

Heartwork Is Hard Work

You need to do the digging. Learn other languages. Do more research. Read. Keep doing the work that will take you back to see where this will lead you. No one likes to speak like this. Just keep reading and then tell them everything.

—Gina Athena Ulysse⁶³

Throughout my time in the pahars, I kept a journal of feelings. I have sought to recreate some of these feelings in the scenes. The journals enabled percolation—a circulation and recirculation—to achieve what Manulani Aluli Meyer calls a triangulation of the body, mind, and spirit.⁶⁴ I add to this the heart. By percolation, I am referring to the necessary gesture of waiting to allow knowledge to mark us. I am referring to a “slow ontology” of being differently productive⁶⁵ to avoid the traps of theoretical foreclosure that accompany the pressures of productivity. Much like working with one’s hands, such as knitting and weaving, percolating in the intensities of others—and keeping in check the automatic impulse to write immediately and diagnostically—is an affective praxis through which ideas can be woven into the fabric of human existence.⁶⁶

Taking a sharp point of departure from the burgeoning literature on self-care, I wonder: Why is there an expectation that our encounters with others should be safe and pleasing? Why are we expected to walk away, only slightly unhinged, to be put back together by therapeutic interventions? Instead of overly focusing on burnout, healing, and trauma, as often done in the literature on researcher safety, I find it necessary to be attentive to the very heartaches we are so keen to ameliorate. This is urgent if we truly consider the gifts of knowledge as offerings of corporeal generosity. What is enabled by an attentiveness to heartaches? Perhaps a different relation to knowledge altogether, not only one that is geared to “fill gaps” in the literature or come up with “new theory.” But one that is rooted in a relation of ethical wounding that compels us to take the risks of engaging with what already exists, what we have been missing all along, and learning new terms of engagement in the meanwhile. Receiving deeply and sharing vulnerability are necessary to learn the world anew. Why dampen the researcher’s most significant strength—that is, the propensity for ethical and ontological wounding?

Opening oneself to others is a relation of vulnerability—to affect and be affected—an aliveness to the incommensurability of politics and the breakdown of conviction, certainty, and theory. These uncomfortable places, if willed, can develop a certain thoughtfulness and dedication within one’s engagement with the world. Donna Haraway suggests staying with the trouble to affirm our interdependence as a negotiated process of living (and dying) together.⁶⁷ Affective solidarities and emerging dissonance may help us move beyond idealized notions of empathy as the only way of connecting with others and toward witnessing in an ethical, lived, and embodied sense.⁶⁸ This is heartwork—which alludes to a constant relation of discomfort with settled and inherited forms of knowledge.

Rachelle Chadwick argues that ontological discomfort is a “ ‘sweaty concept’ that opens space for transformative praxis and the emergence of feminist forms of knowing, being, and resisting.”⁶⁹ She presents ontological discomfort as an affective intensity that prompts us to think with the gut (and I add the heart) to embrace interpretive hesitancy. Just as the “gut has its own intelligence,”⁷⁰ the heart, too, can help us form different relationships with the world. In heartwork, the “wonder that resides and radiates in data”⁷¹ melds with the hard work we must do to enter into ethical relation. This includes not only permitting oneself to step aside from the comforts of a coding scheme but also opening oneself to the shocks, offenses, and intensities of others. It also includes undertaking those difficult and fraught pathways (those arduous mountain trails) to other worlds, words, and hearts, embracing the gifts of what Brian Massumi terms headaches,⁷² and to which I add heartaches. Implicit in heartwork is the feeling beyond the pride and pressures of “getting it right.”⁷³ Maggie MacLure writes: “The value of theory lies in its power to get in the way.”⁷⁴ Judith Butler reminds us: “Let’s face it. We’re undone by each other. And if we’re not, we’re missing something.”⁷⁵ In my other writings, I have likewise reflected on the impossibility of symmetrical reciprocity—how we are bound to fail in its pursuit and that failure should be the energy to do more, rather than stop doing altogether.⁷⁶ Atmospheric Violence is an attempt at doing more—falling, stumbling, tripping—but still doing. It is an experiment with forms of life that may appear as concepts in heartbeats and heartaches.

Kamala Visweswaran writes that by openly confronting failure, feminist ethnography discovers both limits and possibilities.⁷⁷ She argues that while full comprehension and representation are impossible, ethnographic failure can be understood as a “means of pointing up the difficulties in our own epistemological assumptions and representational strategies.”⁷⁸ Ruth Behar believes that only by sharing emotions and developing deep entanglements can we enter the radical space needed for such unlearning and learning.⁷⁹ In their separate works, Ann Cvetkovich and Ulrika Dahl suggest that vulnerability opens us up for change since to be vulnerable is also to be potentially transgressive.⁸⁰

What is the “correct” way of doing heartwork? Instead of slavish devotion to a set of principles,⁸¹ Veena Das advocates for an ethical stance of receptivity (how we sense, perceive, and acknowledge the other) that cannot be reduced to any singular methodological framework.⁸² Patti Lather calls for “situated methodologies,” to formulate our practice from the situational specificities that cannot be prescribed ahead of time but must be negotiated in real time.⁸³ There is no manual for heartwork. Heartwork is hard work.

What forms of vulnerable writing may emerge from the hard work of heartwork? Tiffany Page believes vulnerable writing not only reflects how the researcher is impacted during research but also reveals the fragility of knowledge assembly as a form of receptivity and wounding.⁸⁴ She writes:

A vulnerable method doesn’t attempt to resolve discomfort immediately through problem-solving or by forms of sense-making that utilize particular relational elements of cause and effect. Instead, what is at the heart of vulnerable methods and vulnerable writing are ongoing questions about what unsettles, about relations to the unfamiliar and strange, and about the erasure of the complexities of subjectivity when individuals and bodies and their actions don’t fit or adhere to coherent themes of knowledge. This unsettled uncertainty of the research process, rather than foreclosing on further understandings, provides space for new forms of unknowing and continued attempts at understanding the stories of others.⁸⁵

Heartwork is rarely beautiful, pleasing, pleasant. You might have your manuscript rejected, be denied tenure, or end up at the shrink’s office.⁸⁶ Heartwork is ontological permission, a political condition, and a particular kind of relation to the world. I am not presenting a “better way” to conduct ethnography or arguing that working from the heart is ethically superior. Rather, through this book, I am interested in exploring the dazzling possibilities—when the heart is centered, what else is possible? What more can we do from the heart?

Sara Ahmed describes becoming a feminist as a bumpy process: “You bump into a world as you begin to realize that it doesn’t accommodate you.”⁸⁷ Ahmed urges us to believe that feminism is not a sudden escape from structures of domination but a lifelong project of chipping away at those same regimes—a state of constant dissatisfaction and disapproval—“the bringer of discord to family dinners and professional meetings alike.”⁸⁸ Tiffany Page asks: “What are the consequences of acknowledging forms of vulnerable wounding in research?”⁸⁹ Ruth Behar offers: “To write vulnerably is to open a Pandora’s box. Who can say what will come out?”⁹⁰

Baba, Abrar’s father (whom we met in an earlier scene), died from a head injury and a broken heart. Each time I departed from the pahars, he reminded me: “Don’t just remember us on paper.” I often wonder what he meant by this. I think it was a gentle reminder to give myself permission to sit with the stories I received in the pahars, some of which I have shared in this book. Sitting with stories is a daunting task. Heartwork is hard work.

Heartache

Heart/////Break.

—Katherine McKittrick⁹¹

Kirin Narayan has important advice: “Forgive yourself in advance, knowing that whatever you write will never be complete or perfect.”⁹² Lauren Berlant adds: “When you plan social change, you have to imagine the world that you could promise, the world that could be seductive, the world you could induce people to want to leap into. But leaps are awkward, they’re not actually that beautiful. When you land, you’re probably going to fall or hurt your ankle or hit someone.”⁹³ Heartwork entails never fully coming to terms with the betrayals implicit in working with others yet learning to live with that ontological insecurity. It is allowing oneself to become decentered by heartbeats. It is a “demand to feel outside of one’s individuated self.”⁹⁴ In the awkwardness of heartaches, heartwork is ultimately a relation of accountability. It is the hard work needed to engage with others. It is self-work that must be done on top of fieldwork. It is commitment of another kind.

While most of the pressures of accountability are placed on the author (and rightfully so), what about the reader? Should more also be demanded from the reader? Like the author, the reader, too, poses obstacles to life’s flourishing. The reader may accept the gifts of heartbeats, or they may reject them. Upon receiving the gifts of heartbeats, they may or may not say, But what should I do with this mess of heartaches? By posing this question, the reader returns the responsibility of receiving deeply back to the author, who is now cornered to clearly s-p-e-l-l o-u-t the contributions of heartwork, so the offerings can be safely consumed without frustration, injury, or wounding. This is not to say that you are such a reader, but that we all have likely encountered such a joyless reader, and sometimes, we are that impatient reader.

How can we overcome the obstacles that may prevent us from engaging with heartbeats and heartaches? Heartwork is inconvenient, gritty, and uncomfortable; it is work on top of work.⁹⁵ It presses upon us forcefully to push our modes of being in the world further and farther, but this involves pushing against and receiving pushback. Heartwork affords possibilities of relating in ways that do not seek to conform to the unjust expectations of the adjudicators of knowledge. It provides avenues for devotion to our interlocutors, even if it is to our detriment. While there are at least some mechanisms for holding the author accountable, how can we also hold the reader accountable? How can we keep them both accountable to each other and to the stories they are entrusted with?

I am reminded of Toni Morrison’s Nobel Prize acceptance speech.⁹⁶ Morrison narrates the story of a blind elderly Black woman who lives on the outskirts of town. Among her peers, the woman is reputed to be very wise. One day, she is visited by a group of young people who are bent on exposing her as a fraud. They decide to play a trick on her. Knowing that she cannot see and focusing solely on her difference from them (her blindness), one of them asks: “I hold in my hand a bird. Tell me, is it dead or alive?” The woman does not answer, and the question is repeated: “Tell me, old woman, is the bird dead or alive?” She again does not answer; her silence is long enough for the young people to start laughing. Finally, she responds gently, but in a firm tone: “I don’t know whether the bird you are holding is dead or alive, but what I do know is that it is in your hands. It is in your hands.”

Within the story lies a lesson about the relationship between the dominant narrative (whether the bird is dead or alive) and stories that are witnessed quietly. If the bird is dead, you either found it that way or you killed it. If it is alive, you hold the power to end its life. It is then your decision whether the bird will stay alive; it is your responsibility. The young people are reprimanded that they are responsible not only for the mockery but also for the life sacrificed to enable it. As Morrison explains: “The blind woman shifts attention away from assertions of power to the instrument through which that power is exercised.”⁹⁷

The story offers a gentle reminder about the task at hand—that by holding ourselves accountable to the lives of others and accepting precarity as the only stable sensibility, we can begin to appreciate the multitude of ways people flourish, despite the violence life bestows. But this can be possible only if we let stories “do their work” and if we genuinely accept their gifts, that which is “in our hands.” If allowed, stories can continuously inform our imprints of the world, offering multiple “heart-openings[s]”⁹⁸ and heart paths. In a sense, the work will always be ongoing; this is the gift of heartbeats—“a mixing of head and heart.”⁹⁹ As the elderly Black woman in Morrison’s story suggests: “The bird is in your hands.” We have to figure out how to be in this world, what to do with this mess of heartaches—that is on us. We have to do the work.

Are You Doing the Work?

Each of us must find our work and do it.

—Audre Lorde¹⁰⁰

What are the words you do not yet have? What do you need to say? What are the tyrannies you swallow day by day and attempt to make your own, until you will sicken and die of them, still in silence? Perhaps for some of you here today, I am the face of one of your fears. Because I am woman, because I am Black, because I am lesbian, because I am myself—a Black woman warrior poet doing my work—come to ask you, are you doing yours?

—Audre Lorde¹⁰¹

The personal is structural.¹⁰² The personal is theoretical.¹⁰³ Foregrounding an embodied intersectionality, Audre Lorde routinely asked: “Are you doing your work?” She refers to the introspection and deeper conversations that still need to be had.

Reflecting on the erasure of Indigenous life, Leanne Simpson writes, “Our most important work is internal, and the kinds of transformations we are compelled to make, the kinds of alternatives we are compelled to embody are profoundly systemic.”¹⁰⁴ I link this with the challenge posed by Alexis Pauline Gumbs: “What if we created forms [of knowledge] that prioritized being with each other, being with the work, being with the possibilities, more than they prioritize the gymnastics of trying to get it right in a structure built on our wrongness?”¹⁰⁵

Keguro Macharia wonders: “What is the work?” Sometimes we are so sure of what the work is, that we forget to ask: “What is the work?”¹⁰⁶

For me, the work is opening myself to the intensity of others—a welcoming. Staying with the dissonance. Percolating. Refusing knowledge as “a definable object of study.”¹⁰⁷ Accepting theory and story as survival.¹⁰⁸

What is the work to you? And is the institution the place to do it?