Before the operation goes any further, and it has quite a way to run, I should probably explain why I have my knife in UCD’s EDI tomfoolery. The fact is that questions of diversity and the pathological history surrounding them fall right within my own surgical specialism. Most of my work, my thinking, my writing has at its very heart this dizzying question: how important is human diversity? How important are the differences between people? Mostly, I work on stories rather than theories. And most of the stories that I seek out concern racial, ethnic, cultural, and linguistic diversity. I don’t actively ‘research’ sexual/gender diversity but it’s always there, always intersecting and ‘cross-secting’ with the other kinds of difference or variation. However, as it involves only three variables – woman, man, in-between – it’s relatively easy to keep an eye on it.
From the time I was writing my doctorate in France on a Caribbean-born poet (1960 Nobel) right up to today, I’ve never not been actively working on some project or on some story that has human diversity at its heart. Right from the beginning, I’ve been helped by two angel thinkers, one on each shoulder. Both of them did their thinking in French. One was Jewish, one was Christian. One was Lithuanian-born, one was born in Martinique. One was white, one was black. One was a philosopher, one was an essayist, novelist, poet and dramatist. Both of my angels knew that most of the world’s man-made pain, certainly mass-pain, arises because of pathological approaches to human diversity. Levinas tells me that any time I label a human being, myself or another, any time I reduce them to any category other than human, I commit an act of violence. Profiling or stereotyping always violates the infinite within each person. Anytime I say what somebody is, I reduce that person in my mind. In no time, they are just a number, a unit. A Caucasian. An Arab. However, Levinas says something more radical still. He says that any time I think about somebody in the third person, any time I say ‘he’ or ‘she’ or ‘they’, I am reducing them to my own limited understanding or image of them. And, for Levinas, this act of violent reduction then enables me to do what I want, to or with that person. I can count them. I can hate them. I can manage them. Or own them, or destroy them, and I can even make them destroy others. Glissant tells me almost the opposite. He says that human diversity is a value in itself. He says that the more differentiated, the more multiple, the more internally diverse or hyphenated human beings become, the less likely it is that we will want to destroy one another. He’s referring to persons or indeed peoples with complex, multiple, differentiated, ‘trans’, crossed identities. For example, individuals like Bob Marley or Phil Lynott, or Barack Obama or Leo Varadkar, and mixed populations like African-Americans. Glissant thinks that this intersecting plurality itself defeats definition. That it obstructs cognitive reduction and thereby defeats domination. I wish either or both of my optimistic angels had answers to all my questions … but of course they don’t. Neither separately nor taken together. They do help me to think, though, and almost every situation or story that I encounter undergoes the double angel test. UCD’s EDI buffoonery has a life-time exemption of course …
In a Strange Land 