#23/ ON HOLDING SPACE

Welcome to issue twenty-three of The Attention Span Newsletter by me, Canan “Ja’anan” Marasligil. I’m a writer, a literary translator and an artist based in Amsterdam. Every other week, I take the time to reflect and offer a glimpse of how I see and feel the world through the lens of culture, art, translation, poetry and literature.

🎙️ an audio version of the attention span newsletter is available on your favourite podcast app: Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Overcast…or to listen on the attention span website.

A CONVERSATION ON HOLDING SPACE WITH AMINATA CAIRO

In 2021, I had interviewed writer and academic Aminata Cairo for Rekto Verso magazine. My piece was published in Dutch in Aleksandra Hrkic’s translation. I thought about Aminata Cairo’s work on Holding Space a lot these past two weeks, so I thought I would share the never published original English version with you all.

Aminata Cairo is an anthropologist, psychologist, scholar, storyteller, and Love-worker based in the United States. Cairo holds a PhD in Medical Anthropology and uses her academic and research skills to impact communities. Just like her biography, her recently published book Holding Space (2021) is a multi-hyphenated work: academic, literary, analytic, fictional, and non-fictional, a guide and soon to be a workbook too. It is an example of how storytelling can be brought to readers through many forms to touch our minds, hearts, and bodies – all equally important in this necessary journey towards Holding Space.

Aminata Cairo shows that only through “holding space” can we truly connect in a world where she believes everyone is affected by systems that promote inequality. “Together we are part of that system: the dominant and the other,” Cairo writes. She doesn’t only hold space for the “other”, most of the time alienated into suffering by a dominant system, but also for the “dominant”. She never justifies excluding or violent acts from the “dominant”; Cairo’s discourse is more complex than any binary narrative. Her voice is nuanced – throughout the book and the podcast – she always tells her stories and those of the people she encounters, respecting and honouring the complexity of them all. She never points fingers and reminds us that the human experience is complex and very much shaped by the contexts we live in.

“When we hold space,” she writes in the book, “we don’t know what kind of stories are present in the space. We do not know the kinds of sacrifices people have made or are making to be in the space”. A very powerful stance that illustrates the level of emotional intelligence Cairo brings into a conversation that tends to be reduced to an “us vs them” narrative within current discourses on “diversity and inclusion”. What has been missing in this overall conversation is the role of “healing”, which Cairo holds in the heart of her practice.

Holding Space is Healing

Cairo starts the book mentioning the healing power of stories, quoting author and doctor Lewis Mehl-Madrona who aims to bring the wisdom of indigenous peoples about healing back into mainstream medicine. She uses the verb “soothing” when referring to other people’s work that helped nurturing and inspiring her own voice.

Why and how can we heal? Especially in a world that puts profit-based economy first (as the coronavirus pandemic has shown us all, and we have experienced a process of “returning to normal” – whatever that normal is – without even going through a collective healing period). How do we heal? Well, we start with recognizing that we need it as part of our humaneness. It is how we are built; Cairo tells me, we are not machines and so these disruptions we encounter do something to you. You can keep going until you drop all of a sudden. You drop unless you take the time to realize what has happened, how it has changed you and that you must heal from that and be restored in some form, so that you can go on in a better, an improved way. If you don’t, you will just keep chipping away, and you can keep going until you are burned out. She stops at the word “burnout”, reflecting on how astounding it is that the word has now become part of our vocabulary, how easily we hear people say, ‘oh yeah, I’m burned out’. The term has been so normalized we think this is part of our basic fabric. We can go through a lot, and we learn from our experiences, we process it, and we have to heal in order to continue in a better way. And healing never ends, we keep healing all the time. You have to bring change eventually, and there is no change without healing.

This process enables us to hold space for each other. The holding space is also the healing space. Cairo adds that healing takes time and space, and we often don't take the time as we believe we are doing fine and can get back up immediately without healing. We rarely realize we need to work on what happened to us, how it affected our relationships to each other. Once we see that we can do something with that, we can move forward in a different way together. There’s the individual work, but my individual is always also inherently about the collective and about my relationship to other people. You can focus on yourself, but in the end, because you are connected to those others, disharmony remains when you don’t heal.

Many times, in the book, Cairo reminds us not to forget how connected we are and how connected our stories are. She creates a rich vocabulary for “care”, yet the word itself only appears at the very end. The specific word is used as the title of one of the chapters: “Care”, next to others such as “Courage”, “Humility”, “Patience” …, and it is also at the very end that Cairo talks about “self-care”, which the reader can no longer mistake for the capitalist view of self-care which pushes us to consume in an individualist manner, because she has built up the whole narrative towards her definition of care and self-care. The word “care” has been thrown everywhere, without care really, especially during the pandemic, and it was important for Cairo to find other words, create another vocabulary around care. It is such an established concept already, even ‘self-care’ has been about ‘me, myself and I’. I say no, no, no! First, you have to understand that self is about us. Then understand that care can take so many different forms. I needed to sprinkle it and at the end say: yes, that was what I was talking about. I didn’t want to limit myself, as I showed there are a lot of ways that we can care for each other and care for ourselves.

Cairo lists those different ways throughout the book. This choice of not overusing the word “care” strengthens her point at the end of the book when she writes: “You must consciously choose to come from a place of care and compassion when trying to hold space.” Another important place she also mentions we should come from in the book – which she learned from sound healing performer Mama Walks on Water, is love. Especially when we talk about societies and systems where, as she explains in the book, everything revolves around “the dominant and the other”, and where “the other” experiences immense levels of pain. Love is work! Her voice vibrates like a powerful cry from a Blues song. The Blues aesthetic is central to the narrative Cairo weaves throughout her book, the beauty of the blues is that it’s about suffering and pain, but it's also beautiful, and the whole idea is that in order to get to the beauty you have to go through the pain, you have to stick with it, feel it. And when you come out of it, there's beauty right there so that those two – pain and beauty – are always the flip side of the same coin. A lot of times we want to avoid the pain and get rid of it, but to dive in and to trust the process and to heal in order to get to the beauty, is part of the love.

Even when writing the book, Cairo says, always when I do the work, I need the time to just feel and to not run from it even when it is uncomfortable and painful, then you also get to trust that I am going to be okay when I get through this. It is the “love-work” that she elaborates on in the book, it is self-love because loving myself means all of myself with all my mistakes and all my struggles, to embrace myself. She says it’s a gift; while you’re in it, it is of course painful but once you get through and look back you realize, wow! I went through all that. This has led Cairo to write the book without experiencing pain. When I was writing the book, it felt like I was possessed! I just had to write, and although I had to revisit the stories, I had arrived at the point that I could share it. I already went through it all.

Holding Space for Your Body

While language matters when we hold space, we must not forget the body. For centuries, we have been forced – especially in many Western cultures – to separate the mind from the body, emotions from pragmatic discourses, beliefs and spirituality from the so-called rational. Holding Space challenges these divides on many levels. Cairo writes: “I wasn’t trained as an anthropologist to include my bodily senses as part of my personal radar system or guidance mechanism.”

Story after story in the book, she shows how important her body and listening to her body has been. When you don't listen to your body, you feel the repercussions. And this is not out of fear, you don't listen to your body because you have unlearned how to do it. I think children do it naturally. If you want to be educated, we’re told, you better leave that childhood stuff alone. When your gut tells you to do something you don't, you always regret it later.

Dance and spirituality are key in Cairo’s practice, in my family tradition, possession is a normal thing, but I'm trained as a clinical psychologist so when I started feeling it, I thought if people notice that about me, they will lock me away! A woman once told me it's just energy passing through you, and it will not stay, it is just there at that moment to pass through, so just let the energy pass through. When I am most open to receiving, when I don't question, and I don't immediately analyze, I'm just free. That's when I dance. That's how I dance. So, I try to put myself in the state of how I feel when I dance. The whole separation of the body and the mind is because anything physical is seen as more primitive, or about binaries: men versus women, we have received these messages about our body, that it is sinful, and so we prefer the mind. It is a message spread widely, in some places more than others maybe, but it's there.

Cairo has been able to reconcile the connection between mind and body in her teaching and academic work, where it is usually expected to separate the two. This has been proven very useful and most welcomed in her experience, when I include the body in my work with people, usually their reaction is ‘I really needed this’, every single one of them. Every single one, because it is so oppressive to not allow your body into this work. It is denying our natural state of being. We're so busy denying that part of ourselves, so we can belong, have status, are validated, whatever. But when we allow ourselves to laugh, to move, to include our bodies, we realize we need this.

The body is also linked to our emotions, another thing we don’t want in the way of our minds. Cairo agrees and tells me about a new piece she has been writing about the difference between fragility and vulnerability. Even fragility has got such a bad rap. We all have to be vulnerable, and it requires courage. We put up the front, we put up the armour, but can you be open and say, you know what; I was wrong, I don't know, or I don't get it. Many of us will make something up before we admit that. To be vulnerable is also to show your humaneness, as opposed to fragility that asks for others to fix you. Stick with your vulnerability, learn from it, embrace it. This is your gift. It is scary to feel the vulnerability. It’s easier to say, ‘Please fix it for me, please make it alright.’

Cairo circles back to another key vocabulary from the book: humility. Which is another reason how holding space becomes possible. Next to this is a constant care for balance and nuance, even when Cairo experiences anger and calm – taking out the symbolic machete and holding onto kindness. A balance that cannot be achieved without the body, she says. You breathe, you walk. Because I know, there's a part of me that can go to anger for example, so I have to be very purposeful. And that doesn't mean I'm going to allow people to abuse me. Cairo always seeks that balance to treat people with humanity while remaining very clear about her boundaries. Holding space for herself allows her to find that balance, which in turns leads to a nuanced discourse and practice, one that unites rather than polarizes.

I recently wrote a poem for an event on motherhood, in which I talked about how as black mothers, we come across as harsh sometimes, but that's because a lot of times we come out of fear for our children who walk in a world that does not see their brilliance, but I do, so I have to hold them up. So, we have to hold our children up and one of the things I said after I read the poem, even my neo-Nazi children because they are my children, too. And I understand that they are hurting, I understand that the rug has been pulled from underneath them because for all these years, they've been told that they were on top and all of a sudden, they found out that they’re just like anybody else, I get that. Now, we're not going to go back. But I get that, and so I have compassion for my right-wing children too. They're still human beings, and there's a reason why they express their pain in that way. Now I wish they would express it differently. But they still are human beings, you know, and again, it doesn't mean that I'm going to allow them to hurt me. This way you keep the focus on the humanity of people, and this whole thing about neutral space allows me as a first reaction to say, ‘that's interesting’ and not jump into ‘how could you’ or ‘how dare you’. I've noted it without judgment on it, and I can take it from there. And that gives me some room to be allowed to hold them, you know, in that space of humanity.

Creating an Unapologetic Space

Cairo brings us back to the power of stories, and how a storytelling approach to tackling “diversity and inclusion” allows us to see the complexity of the human experience. The format of the book, which includes a mixture between literature, academia, storytelling… helps the reader building that understanding which should include complex narratives. That’s why I had to self-publish, says Cairo, to keep that freedom. I knew upfront that the writing had to be unapologetic. As I said earlier, it was like I was possessed. All that was very purposeful about this unapologetic space. This also links to inclusion: I appreciate your way, you can make room for my way, and I don't have to write like you.

Cairo doesn't reject academia either. And with the podcast, she opens a space to receive discussion and criticism of her work, which is generous and shows vulnerability. When she put the book and the podcast together, her dream was that people will get together and discuss what “holding space” means to them. She put a call on social media for people to respond and be on the podcast. Some of them she knew but some she didn’t, which was wonderful, she says. We had a blast; it was such a joy to do. Some young women of colour have said about the book that they felt seen, understood, which was very sweet and nice to hear, and I also love the fact that white men appreciate the book and can get on board too. In the end, I have written it for everybody. I am not interested in approval but in engagement with the work. Hearing people say that I have given them something beyond theory with steps to actually do something with it, means a lot to me.

Cairo doesn’t only talk; she lives by the discourse she creates. She ends every chapter of her book with ‘gran tangi’, meaning ‘thank you’ in Sranan tongo. It was only natural for me to end our conversation by repeating gran tangi to her, in one of my languages, Turkish: ‘teşekkürler’, and to be soothed by what I learned from her, so that I in turn, can hold space.

WATCH
This is a great interview with filmmaker Ava DuVernay on how film changes the way we see the world, part of the TEDx talk series. And I am not abandoning the idea of writing about her latest film Origin. I went to see it again, and I am still reflecting on it. I want to write a reflection worthy of all the care and love DuVernay has put it, so I am taking my time.

LISTEN
The following episode of Free Thinking on BBC radio 3 was very interesting: Free speech, censorship and modern China, especially the part about Private Revolutions: Coming of Age in a New China by Yuan Yang. I cannot wait to read this book when it will be out in May.

READ
Work Won’t Love you Back by Sarah Jaffe is a book exploring how devotion to our jobs keeps us exploited, exhausted, and alone. Don’t expect a handbook on how to separate your emotions from your job, this is not a self-help book, it’s much better and deeper. It is very well researched, offering a historical, sociological, cultural and political perspective on definitions of love related to work. It’s an excellent criticism of our capitalist systems that have been using the idea of “love” to exploit us in the workspace.

SKETCHBOOK PAGES

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ABOUT

Canan “Ja’anan” Marasligil (she/they) is a writer, literary translator and artist based in Amsterdam. They established The Attention Span website and its newsletter to publish their work independently: making the time to reflect, analyse and imagine.

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