Episode 3:
Decolonizing Bodies and Worldviews

 

51 mins

 

Transcript

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[00:00] Open & welcome       

Seyo singing:  When no white grandpa got afraid to save us, we realized we needed to rewrite the questions: Who is God? What is my gender? What is sex? What is God-talk? For me, who is Perversions? Perversions! This is our theology. This is the way we move. Do you want to come for us?

 

Lis:      Welcome to Theological Perversions, a podcast offering different versions about God, gender, and politics. We are scholars of color, not born in the United States of America, who have studied religion and theology in the USA. Our purpose is to amplify our voices, the voices of scholars of color. In this episode, practical theologian Dr. Lis Valle-Ruiz facilitates a conversation about decolonizing bodies and worldviews.

This episode is possible thanks to support from the American Academy of Religion and the Luce Foundation. 

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Lis:      Hi, welcome to Theological Per/Versions. I am Lis. Right now I'm in Puerto Rico, although I live in Chicago. I am Puerto Rican, and I have been living in Chicago for the past seven years or so. And I am here with, to my right, Chrisida.

 

Chrisida:          Hi, everyone. I'm Chrisida Anandan. I am from India, the southern part of India, and I live in Chicago, Hyde Park, working at McCormick Theological Seminary.

 

Immanuel:       Hi, everyone. I'm Immanuel Karunakaran. I'm a PhD student, also in Chicago. I'm also from India, the southern part of India.

 

Seyo:   My turn? I'm Seyo. I'm living in Chicago, but I was born and raised in South Korea.

 

[02:20] The Taíno worldview: complementary dualities

 

Lis:      Thank you. Welcome, everybody. Thank you for joining me to have a conversation about decolonizing our bodies and our worldviews, if that is even possible. I did a little bit of research on the pre-Columbian religion of the Taínos. "Taínos" is what we call the people who inhabited the Antilles, the northern Caribbean islands, when Christopher Columbus arrived in this area of the world. But that's not what they called themselves. It seems they called themselves Taínos because they were afraid when they saw these white people wearing metal armor; they thought they were gods. They were afraid; they thought they were going to die. In part, they were right, but they didn't know that at the moment. And so, to assure these divine beings that they were good people, and to ask them not to kill them, they said, "Taíno, Taíno," right? And that meant "I'm a good person, I'm noble"—noble, good. So that's why, to this day, we call them Taínos, but they were descendants of the Arawaks from South America.

They migrated to the north and island-hopped. They hopped from island to island, and then they stayed in the Caribbean. And so, of course, they had a whole culture, a lot of cultural practices, and religion, and back then there was no distinction between culture, politics, and religion. It was all the same thing, right? I did some research about that, and part of what I found was that they didn't have binary thinking the way that we have it. That's important to me right now, especially because in these times we have been taught that male and female are two very distinct and opposite categories, right? But according to the anthropologist that I read, the worldview of the Taínos was more about opposites that coincided and complemented each other. Complementary dualities—that's what they called them. Complementary dualities. So gender is a duality that complements itself, and there's this place in between, right? It is not a clear line but muddy. They divided everything into big principles—the feminine and the masculine, the night and the day—and for them, wholeness was represented in four, right? Two pairs of opposites that complemented one another were wholeness. So that's one of the things that I would like for us to recover from the worldview of the Taínos: this complementary duality that is about complementing, and finding that porous line between things, and that one thing can be both, right? You are not whole unless you have the two things. Each god that they had held two opposites within the same god, and each person had the two things within them, and that's how you get to be whole. You don't get to be whole if you only have half. You get to be whole by having within you the two opposites that complement one another. So what are some things in your traditions that the colonizers tried to erase, and that you have discovered along the way, hidden, because they were impossible to erase? Or maybe—I don't know whether the anthropologists interpreted this right; maybe this is a misinterpretation by the anthropologist—but it's an attempt to recover what was lost through colonization. What do you think about these things, and what do you think about binary thinking?

 

[07:06] The both/and divine across traditions

Chrisida:          Oh, yeah. I would say that, yeah, this binary thinking has been so embedded in us—everything, even the vocabulary that we use, anything that we think about, even the examples that we provide are all about binaries. And also, when you speak about these complementary dualities, I was remembering, from Indian tradition, the Hindu tradition especially, a higher form where there is a concept called Ardhanarishvara. This is a Hindu deity representing the fusion of both the male and the female principle—the male component, Shiva, and the female, Shakti. They are inseparable; this god cannot exist when they are separated. It combines both male and female together, and balance happens when the two are together. So this is one thing I was remembering when we talk about this complementary duality, where there is both the male god and the female god. In India, many times in the Hindu tradition, there are many gods; it's polytheistic in nature. So we have many female gods, and even though the female gods are so powerful, women are often not attributed that power, because women are always put in second place. So I'm also thinking about how this complementary duality would help in imagining and re-imagining, to be beyond boundaries.

 

Lis:      Thank you. Yeah, you remind me of a theologian I once heard say that maybe that's what it means in Genesis when it says, "male and female God created them": that God places in each one of us the female and the male. When you were talking about this deity, I thought about how each human being has both estrogen and testosterone—oh my God, what are these chemicals that spike when we are in adolescence? Thank you. Each person has them both. Humans have them both, more or less, but we have them both, right? Yeah.

 

Chrisida:          I'm also thinking about Genesis, when you mentioned the creation story, where it says that God created the plants, each according to its kind. That is also something to think about: when God created each plant or animal according to its kind, we don't know what those species or kinds were. We also see many plants having both the male organ and the female organ together.

 

Immanuel:       And I would also like to bring in the colonial aspect of how this Hindu Ardhanarishvara, which comes from the Shaivite tradition, a very indigenous tradition, actually has so much contradiction with Vedic Hinduism, which is actually a colonial religious understanding, according to what is called the Aryan invasion theory. So I think that very much resonates with how these indigenous communities have these complementary dualities, right? In Hinduism, there is also Dvaita, which is duality; it's a religious belief that everybody has this duality. One of my artworks that I have presented on many platforms is the Ardhanari Jesus Christ, because Jesus has both the qualities, or dualities, of man and woman. You know, the only instance where we find Jesus's gender is when he was circumcised. Other than that, I have never seen him—or them—openly saying, "I am a man, and so I do things like that." I have not seen it in any of the narratives of the Gospels. That is very important for why God transcends the binaries, and for how coloniality actually came in to put us into a category called binary, which is actually good and bad, one powerful and one weak, that kind of thing, right? So I'm just thinking that this complementary duality actually makes everybody equal, and that also speaks to equity, to how we see society today.

 

Lis:      Hmm. Yeah. I want to ask Chrisida about the Christian God. Well, it really is not the Christian God; it's one of the deities of the Old Testament. Right now I don't remember which tradition, because the Old Testament—what we call the Old Testament, the Hebrew Bible—has more than one, right? I have heard that there was a moment in which there was a feminine, a divine feminine—some people call it Asherah—and that it was taken out of the Hebrew Bible. So the Bible we read today doesn't have it, but there are traces of it. I don't know where the traces are. What do you know about that? Have you heard about those things? What we have inherited as the Christian God—was there a time in history when it had a feminine consort, or a concept in which it was both the feminine and the masculine energy together in a single deity?

 

[14:02] The hidden feminine in the Hebrew Bible

Chrisida:          Yeah, definitely. When we think about God and colonization, and how we have been taught that God is white, that God has long hair, that God is a male with a beard—but in the Old Testament, the Hebrew Bible, we always see that God has both energies. In the very beginning, in Genesis, we see God hovering over the waters like a mother hovers over her baby. So in many concepts, I see that we can see God as a feminine energy, God as feminine, even in the metaphors that have been used—the metaphors of God as a mother, God exhibiting that motherly nature, God being like a woman.

 

Lis:      Mm, thank you. This idea of Shiva and Shakti, both male and female principles as inseparable aspects of the divine, made me wonder about that. And you are the Hebrew scholar among us, so I had to...

 

[Break] Lis (speaking in Spanish):    To be whole, you need a little bit of this and a little bit of that—which is why “Theological Per/Versions” offers you a refreshing drink to help you question whether what you see is truly whole. When you drink this, you must ask yourself, “Why am I thinking what I’m thinking?” You look at the beach and say, “The world is as real as the fact that the sea is made of water, and the sand is made of earth.” Really? You look at the people and say, “That must be a man because he has a beard.” Really? You look at that person and say, “That must be a woman because she has breasts.” Really? So drink this beverage called “Really?” and ask yourself how you view the world, because not everything is the way you’ve been taught it is.

 

[16:43] Batey: the ball game as sacred diplomacy

Lis:      So, another thing that I found in this research that we can recover from the religion of the Taínos, in addition to the complementary dualities, is their games. Well, the Spanish—what we have come to know as the Spanish people—thought they were playing games. From what I read, the conquistadores described it that way in their writings, but I think they were doing rituals that were sacred to them, and they used them for purposes that were not necessarily fun and entertainment. They might use the games for deliberation, or for conflict resolution between different villages, and they might also use them for discernment about what to do next, in a similar way that Christian people today pray, ask God what they should do, and ask for signs. According to the conquistadores, they were playing a game. According to me, they were doing a communal ritual. The specific ritual that I'm talking about was called the batey—that was the name of the place where they played it, or did it, and of the ball that they used. The ball was made out of roots with a gum-like substance from a tree; they would put all these roots together with this gum, and they had to hit the ball with certain parts of the body. As a matter of fact, Residente sings about it; his mom used to sing him a song so he would remember. It's very similar to what we call soccer today, but not the same. Very similar, but not exactly the same. Playing this game is how they decided whether or not to do something, or whether the gods would intervene on their behalf. When they started noticing that they were being abused, that their labor was being exploited for the benefit of the Spanish conquistadores, they played the game to find out whether the gods wanted them to know if the conquistadores were mortal or not. They played this game, and the outcome was in favor of yes: you can try to kill one of them to see if they are mortal. And that's how they found out that the Spanish people were mortal. Therefore, they were not gods, and therefore the Taínos could defend themselves and fight them to liberate themselves, right? And that's how the revolution started. Other things happened—I'm not going to go into the whole history of it—but that's how they decided to drown one of them: by playing this game called batey.

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[20:19] Areíto: singing the sacred stories together

Lis:      The other game that they had, the areíto, was clearly religious and political in nature. In it, people would interlock their arms and dance together in unison and sing the story of the village and all the great deeds that they had done. There was a group of people who wouldn't do that because they were playing—the musicians, playing mostly percussion. The cacique, the chief of the tribe, would be sitting, and he wouldn't sing either. And there were people who were in charge of pouring a beverage for those who were singing, and they would sing and dance until they passed out drunk, basically. They would do these things from a young age—you know, they would come of age very young, but old enough to be able to recite from memory these songs that told the great deeds of their village and their history, right? I found it fascinating that they didn't have one person who would interpret the sacred stories for them; rather, they would retell the sacred stories together, in unison, dancing and singing. So with that, I came up with a proposal for what I call a postcolonial liturgical preaching. I was also drawing on the work of Pablo Jiménez, a Puerto Rican homiletician who was himself drawing on the work of African American homileticians who talk about preaching as celebration. So, basically—you want to say something, Immanuel? Go ahead, say it.

 

Immanuel:       Yeah, the tribal people in India—in West Bengal, Chhattisgarh, Orissa, and Bihar—have a practice similar to the dance form you were explaining. There are groups called the Santals, which means the people of the land. They have a similar tradition: the women hold each other, interlocking their hands, and the men beat the percussion drums, and then these women sing in unison as well as dance, and the leader of the tribe sits and watches, the same as you were explaining. So I can make so many connections with that. They also drink liquor, which is made from their herbs. They live in the hills, so they bring their own stuff, and then they drink, and they dance. Yeah, especially the women.

 

Lis:      Nice!

 

Immanuel:       Yeah, I was typing that, but since you have asked, yeah, I have the videos. Yeah, well, I don't know that we have enough time now, but we could share them. Yeah, we could put links to them on the website.

 

Lis:      Yes. And, yeah, I could post the drawings that we have of what this areíto looked like. And the batey was played in different places, depending on how the village was organized. The batey was played kind of outside, on the outskirts. It wasn't that far away; don't think the villages were that big. So, kind of on the outskirts. And the areíto was in the middle of everything, what we would call today downtown, right? From everywhere in the village, you could see the areíto, the main plaza where the areíto was held. And so the areíto was where everybody came together, right? For them to come to the areíto, they would first go to the river and cleanse themselves by vomiting, after they had played or after the day's activities, if I remember correctly. But I found it fascinating in my research how much worldview matters when we interpret, because for the conquistadores, they were just playing games, or they were just having a party. They were just partying, wasting their time. But they never asked them. They never asked them what they thought. That is a problem with anthropology, right? When the anthropologists are part of the colonizing group. Now, I'm reading these so many years later, right? And some of the writings I'm reading are from the pens of the conquistadores themselves. One of the important writers was a clergyman who was instructed by Columbus to describe everything. But, of course, in the description, he's making some interpretations as well, and his biases are embedded. And my biases are embedded as I read them. But I can see that they had different purposes than what he—he's trying his best to do descriptive work, right, and to set his biases aside. And I can see, even through the lens of the conquistadores, who are the colonizers, that there are other purposes. They were not doing this for entertainment. They were not doing this for their mere pleasure. They were doing this for other purposes, like conflict resolution, like discernment. So you could call it prayer. Or you could call it what we call diplomacy today, or diplomatic action, right? When two states come together to figure out what to do. Now, in Rio 2, a movie for children, there is this game. In the movie, it looks like soccer; they're playing soccer. And Blu was very scared at the beginning, because he thought, "Oh, we're going to war." And, of course, he didn't grow up in the wild; he grew up in a house. And there's this distinction between the house bird and the wild birds, the birds from the wilderness. And when they explain to him that it's a game, he's like, "Oh, oh, it's just a game," right? But it's a game with life-and-death consequences. It is diplomatic action to the extent that whoever wins is going to keep the territory where the food is, and whoever loses is going to have to move away to where there are no resources to eat. So it's as deadly as war. When I saw it, I thought about how our Taínos came from the Arawaks, who came from South America, and this movie is about birds from the Amazon in South America. So these worldviews, these practices, these rituals are still hidden and alive in some places, showing us that there are other ways to go about it. Even in US movies, you can see, like, "Let's figure this out with a dance-off," and they dance to figure out who's going to be more powerful. Or think about how the states or the colleges play football—any sport that they play to see who's the most powerful among them, to determine superiority or whatever. You know, sports are not just for entertainment and pleasure, right? They have certain implications regarding power and resources.

 

[Break] Seyo: I'm a pastor. Korean. Cis. Straight. Progressive, kind of. Seminary-trained. Woke-ish. Critical. But… [in writing; R U sure?] even about that...

 

[29:50] A decolonial proposal: from batey to areíto

Lis:      One of the things I want to recover is play, because it is useful for many things, and the first of them is pedagogy, or education. Liturgy is formative. Liturgy is one way in which congregations, churches, educate the community every week, right? So what I did was draw on what I learned. I called this proposal "From Conflict to Unity," right? "From Batey to Areíto." It has three movements. The liturgy has the first movement of tension, which is the batey. And then you have to move, right? Physically go from the batey to the place of the areíto. I didn't have any information about that, so you have to use your imagination to fill in the blanks. So I used some scholars who talk about the postcolonial feminist imagination, like Kwok Pui-lan—I'm probably totally murdering the pronunciation of the name—and Walter Brueggemann, may he rest in peace; he departed recently. They talk about the imagination as a very important stage in decolonizing oneself, right? And Walter Brueggemann specifically speaks about preaching as an act of funding the imagination of people, rather than an act of telling them what to do and how to live. So I drew on those thoughts to fill in the blanks, to talk about a way of preaching that is decolonizing. And then the third movement of the liturgy is this unity, really this celebration—this celebration of the empowerment that comes through the Holy Spirit. And that's how this liturgy goes. It starts with the struggle that oppressed communities live in the world, which I parallel with the areíto—I'm sorry, the batey—which is the space of tension, where we figure things out, where we manage conflict and play it out to see who wins. Then we journey imaginatively. And then we have the areíto, where we celebrate. And that's my proposal for a postcolonial liturgical preaching.

 

Immanuel:       It sounds prophetic as well when you quote Walter Brueggemann. It's very beautiful, you know, how our imaginations come together, or how imagination brings us to both the pragmatic and the utopian.

 

Lis:      Right.

 

Immanuel:       Yeah, so I think that liturgy will definitely be beautiful. Yeah, it's the work of the people.

 

Lis:      Yes, exactly. That's what I was thinking. Well, that's something I would like to recover: if the Taínos did it all together, right, we can do it all together too, so that it is the work of the people. And in unison.

 

Immanuel:       That's the whole idea of liturgy. Liturgy literally means the work of the people. It's not somebody writing everything or performing everything; it is the whole, holy movement of the holy people, our sacred people.

 

Lis:      I love the idea of singing the sacred stories rather than having one person interpret them for the people.

 

Immanuel:       Yeah.

 

Lis:      But just singing them together and letting them fund the imagination. I love what you just said about the pragmatic and the imaginative. And I can see that working in this complementary duality: the pragmatic and the utopian.

 

Immanuel:       Yes, yes. And it is very queer to be utopian, or to be not known—like, fabulous. Being fabulous is the whole idea of the utopian. Like, don't think you know who I am; you cannot fix me into a box. Like, my imagination. And I think that also comes to pragmatism, which is very much part of the liturgy that speaks of the work of the people. So I think that is the complementary duality. Yeah, thanks for that connection. Yeah.

 

[35:09] Yin-yang and the textured world

Lis:      I want to invite Seyo in, because the very first time that I presented this research, somebody asked me—and maybe this is outside your realm of knowledge; that's fine—but if you know something about yin-yang: What is the difference, if any, between the concept of yin-yang and this concept of complementary dualities?

 

Seyo:   Oh, well, yeah. Actually, yeah, many of my seniors—meaning Korean theologians—they told that…, uh, yeah. Now I'm thinking that it's very hard to … It came from a word from geology. I mean, Korean theologians have said, "We are different from the Western dualistic theologians." However, for me, sometimes it sounds like it's also kind of dualistic: a dualistic Western culture and a dualistic Asian culture. However, it's also dualistic, like Eum-yang —in Korean, eum-yang is also kind of dualistic thinking, kabos and udder. But for me, for me, it's different from this. Eum-yang looks like this. It is entering...

 

Lis:      Mm-hmm.

 

Seyo:   ...both sides. So now I'm thinking that we are not finally living in a divided world; rather, everything is textured. We are living in a textured world, and we can imagine the border. We can imagine. The border is in our brain; however, there's no border in the real world. We can say, "I can see the border"; however, there's no border. There's no real border; it's just our imagination that is making the border.

 

Lis:      Mm-hmm.

 

Seyo:   Uh, yeah. This is what I am thinking about the dualistic world, or dualism, right now.

 

Lis:      Thank you!

 

Seyo:   Textured.

 

Lis:      Yeah. Yeah, I think it's powerful that it enters into the other, and that each also has a little drop of the other in it. Yeah. Yeah, I want to say this about complementary dualities. First of all, after re-reading the work that I wrote, and the research, over and over—there are rules in academia on how to write. The concept of complementary dualities was what the anthropologist used to describe what he was reading, what he was finding in the artifacts, and how the pantheon of the Taínos worked, and all of that. It was a concept that already existed. In fact, he used it with the Latin nomenclature, because the rules of the academy ask us to use something known to the academy to explain the new thing that we're bringing. We cannot just bring something completely new. We can only bring something this much new and this much that already exists, right? So there is a chance that they didn't really think in terms of complementary dualities.

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[40:03] Gender beyond the binary

Lis:      But I think it is powerful that they have, in a single duality, a benevolent and a malevolent energy combined. That is true, however we name it, right? We may call it binary, we may call it complementary duality, we may call it something else. And in this wholeness that they created by looking at the divine energy of feminine and masculine, day and night, there is also the reality that between day and night there's always dawn and dusk. We don't move from day to night, or from night to day, just like that. There is dawn, and there is dusk. And 4% of babies don't have clearly identifiable male or female genitals—4% of babies, at least, are intersex. At least 4% of babies are intersex. And we have a whole range of X chromosomes that doctors don't tell us about. We don't check babies for everything that they need to be checked for when it comes to gender. There's a way in which the “objective” sciences and medicine, which are supposed to be objective, are not so objective and are not telling us the whole truth, because they are not checking babies for anything but genitals. They don't even check the chromosomes unless something goes wrong, according to philosophical and ideological worldviews. So what is right or wrong is predetermined by other means, not scientific ones. So, to use science and biology to make moral arguments today it’s a little bit mmm…—let's start admitting that there's a whole ideology that came before the science, and that it is messing with the whole system of science itself and biology itself. And there's a whole range of combinations of X's and Y's that we are not even taught about until we reach college. And sometimes you have to be a science major to learn them. It's like, why? So we are taught lies at the beginning, and then we're corrected later on. So thank you for reminding us that borders are in our minds. When we walk around, there are no borders. Somebody just put them there, especially in the water. I mean, Puerto Rico—where's the border of Puerto Rico? You know, it's in the water. But somebody decided where. And then, you know, the borders of the beaches are changing everywhere in the world, not just in Puerto Rico, thanks to what we have done to the earth. And whoa!

 

[43:12] The rejected in-between

Immanuel:       I'm also thinking along the lines of how there is a place in between, right? The in-betweenness, for many brown and black bodies in the U.S., is a rejected space. It is not a liminal space anymore. We cannot go this way or that way. It's a rejected spot. It's very dangerous. I think that also matters when we talk about binaries and complementary dualities. Sometimes I think of it from the perspective of a person from a Dalit community: it's very rejected, because the outcast position is a nowhere place, right? So it is also the rejected space when we talk about liminal spaces. We cannot go this way or that way. That's the rejected spot.

 

Lis:      And that is the spot where decolonization happens.

 

Immanuel:       Exactly. That is where we can raise our voices.

 

Lis:      Yeah.

 

Immanuel:       Speak up, because if we take any side, then it is taking a side. But it is also the rejected space where our voices are being funded, as you say. That's the place where it's being funded.

 

Lis:      Yeah, yeah. In my proposal for a liturgical preaching drawing on the pre-Columbian religion of the Taínos, preaching is that space that is neither this nor that. It's not the batey; it's not the areíto. It's the journey between one and the other, where we can make things, whatever we want, where we can turn things around, where we can make drawings in which we are powerful. Yes. Yes, exactly. Go ahead, Chrisida.

 

Chrisida:          Even though it is the space that is rejected, it has a lot of possibilities to imagine and to re-imagine. I think so. When we talk about hybridity in postcolonial thought, it's also about having multiple identities, which make us not part of any one particular group, so you are completely rejected: you're not part of us, you're not part of us. But still, that space is something that we need to broaden. We are all in the space of in-between. So probably we have to come to the stage of everyone being open to being in this liminal space of in-between.

 

Immanuel:       Yeah, recently I have been reading a book called The Paradoxes of Indian-American Complicity, which actually talks about both ways. But in my work with Afro-pessimism and Dalit pessimism, I'm trying to get into the area of how the life of the world actually functions at the cost of brown and black bodies, right? It helps, as you say; it has a lot of potential to become a place of production, productivity. But again, telling the truth as it is, is what the movement calls us to do for now. I feel that is important, and then pragmatism and utopianism. Sometimes utopianism escapes the reality where we are given a voice, but in pragmatism we are subalterns sometimes. That's where the word comes from, right? When we talk about postcolonialism, we also get into that subaltern idea: "Can the subaltern speak?" is one way to look at things. The other way to look at it is, "Can you hear the subaltern speak?" So, yeah.

 

[47:53] Pentecost reframed & close

Lis:      Yeah, that's it, yeah. And recently we celebrated Pentecost. Whenever we think about Pentecost, it's like: was the miracle that they spoke different languages, or that the others were able to understand in their own languages?

 

Immanuel:       Yeah.

 

Lis:      Yes, because that is the miracle of...

 

Immanuel:       It's not only about speaking; it is about listening and understanding.

 

Lis:      ...that day.

 

Immanuel:       Yeah, Willie James Jennings's commentary on Acts actually begins with that, saying that it is about more than speaking. The real understanding—how we are able to understand each other even though we speak different languages—actually makes a total difference, so that we are able to listen to and hear what is happening with the other, the neighbor.

 

Lis:      Yeah, yeah. Well, thank you, everybody, for joining us. We are people who—I call us professional nerds; some people call us scholars. We get to study deeply the questions that matter to us, and then we get to share what we learn. Today we have been talking about decolonizing our bodies and our worldviews. Thank you for joining us. This has been Theological Per/Versions. Until next time.

 

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