A well intentioned barricade cautioned me against plunging into the abyss. Weeks later, when I read about the Italian man who fell into the same Anish Kapoor black hole, I wondered if he enacted what should have been my fate. I remember the temptation lucidly. In May 2018, at Napoli’s Madre Museum, I, too, had circumambulated the brink of the illusory void Kapoor had constructed, seduced by the alleged nothingness that confronted me. The Italian had been (un)luckier. He’d entered a room custom-built to accommodate Kapoor’s Descent into Limbo, without the barricade. When, from the distance deemed safe, I had surveyed the black hole in front of me, my limbs and brain had begun to connect the dots. Weeks ago, I’d registered the neon sign behind a bartender in a bar in central Berlin. ‘Disappear Here’, the cursive text casually instructed.

I had been sipping from a cocktail called ‘The Empathy Drink’ as I searched for the elusive portal. Perhaps if I stared at the sign long enough I might discover the secret threshold that would teleport me to a promised land, some temporary refuge from all the unexpected angst that had set in during my second trip to the German capital.

Or it could have been hormonal fluctuations. I’m conditioned to doubt the authenticity of any intuition that arises during menstruation. That evening, the usual dysmenhorria was exacerbated by exhaustion from the 12-hour drive from Bolzano to Berlin. Elif Erkan, my co-resident at Eau & Gaz, at Eppan/Appiano, told me to sit back and relax, she was happy to drive. The reason for the trip was her need to source material along with some of her older pieces that lay in her gallery’s storage in Berlin. I offered her nothing except my company. The thought of revisiting Berlin for even 24 hours excited me.

It was 11pm when we finally got in. Fatigued, we gloated over our decision to book an Air bnb instead of imposing on friends since we’d anticipated our desire for a hot, revitalizing shower. We arrived at the apartment of a kind Italian woman who was gracious about our presence but couldn’t stress enough that we mute our footsteps as she guided us up the staircase. Our room had three or four expansive leafy plants and windows overlooking the street. Our host introduced us to a list of dos and don’ts. One regulation stood out: guests couldn’t shower after 9 pm.

 

I was bleeding and desperate to wash up. Why not, if there was running water and a functional geyser? Our host explained that, given it was almost midnight, the neighbours might create a fuss about the errant gushing of water.

Having grown up in dense, populous cities like Delhi and Mumbai, I’d imagined only comfort in the sounds of other people’s existence. Ambient echoes signalled an assurance that one was not alone. What I had internalised as safe, the aural testimony of other lives existing in close, mundane proximity, could be construed as offensive in another environment. I couldn’t bathe because the cacophony of cleansing water in the closed bathroom of a private apartment might grate on the nerves of neighbours who would thereby be forced into a conception of my existence.

I began to feel like an intruder. I felt unwelcome. I began to internalize the rejection. I started to ‘see’ colour. As it is, I had spent the last two weeks in Bolzano, in the village of Eppan where I was often the darkest person around and therefore a source of curiousity and suspicion. In Berlin I started to think about different categories of corporeal existence. I jotted them down in my diary, my notations infused with something resembling rage: The Disobedient Body. The Inconvenient Body. The Entitled Body. The Unentitled Body. The Untitled Body. I began to recall a spectrum of lived experiences when I had felt like I inhabited each of these notional entities.

So, the evening I saw the sign that promised disappearance, I was seduced. What I wanted, in the moment of hormonal fragility was to find some shelter within which I could evade the gaze that had been cast over my body ever since my birth. Thirty-three years and counting. ‘Shadow of the gaze’, I retraced my pen along those words. I could argue that I had inadvertently constructed my identity in the spectre of other people’s conception of me. How could I now escape the reality of my post-colonial identity when I’d spent so much time constructing it?

 

Perhaps if I disappeared into the sign, I might find a cloak of invisibility. Would I then no longer feel the desire to continually dabble in eternal disguise? Were there spaces where my interiority could exist outside of language, could be untranslatable yet not inarticulate? As I wrote in the café of the Hamburger Bahnhof the next morning, tears streamed along my face and blotched the freshly inked pages. The dysmenorrhea was extreme and paracetamol had yet to work its magic. I suddenly felt the irresistible urge to re-read Ghanian author Ama Ata Aidoo’s debut novel published back in 1977, Our Sister Killjoy: or Reflections from a Black-eyed Squint.

This is the book that resurfaced in my imagination more than 10 years after I’d first read it, when it was part of my syllabus during my first monsoon semester in JNU, during which time I had elected to study African Literature. I didn’t bother to visit a bookstore to look because I was jaded enough to know how slim the chances were of finding on any German shelf a politically minded book written some decades ago by a woman of African descent.

I was forced to stalk Google search results for anything that could lead me to the original text, rummaging through a few academic papers and reviews (one in which a site gave the book a ‘B+’ rating). I found one compelling quote by the author in a paper by Gay Wilentz, an excerpt from a speech she once gave – ‘I am convinced that if Killjoy or anything like it had been written by a man, as we say in these parts, no one would have been able to sleep a wink these couple of years.’ Aidoo had been speaking of the resistance she’d faced from African male writers because she had been audacious enough to wear her politics on her sleeves and speak of the subject of self-exile. Wilentz supplements this quote with her own theory. ‘Clearly, the fact that Aidoo is a woman has made this novel unacceptable to the predominantly male and/or eurocentric critical community, but because she rejects male-oriented theories of exile and synthesizes feminist and afrocentric perspectives, Our Sister Killjoy could hardly have been written by a man.’

 

I needed to escape to the same space within which Aidoo must have chosen to exist in order to retain her protagonist’s self as an entity autonomous from other-ly gazes. Would I ever be free of the stigma of my dark complexion? Would it always mark me everywhere I went, even when I was home? Would I prefer to be lighter, though? I wasn’t sure. The density of melanin ensured that my skin would disguise the immediacy of my manifest emotions. It also guaranteed my status as a postcolonial subject. I found an excerpt where Aidoo’s Ghanian protagonist is contemplating the German woman, Marija who has made obvious her attraction towards her.

‘Sissie could see it all. In her uncertain eyes, on her restless eyes and on her lips, which she kept biting all the time. But oh, her skin. It seemed as if according to the motion of her emotions, Marija’s skin kept switching on and switching off like a two-colour neon sign. So that watching her against the light of the dying summer sun, Sissie could not help thinking that it must be a pretty dangerous matter, being white. It made one feel awfully exposed, rendered one terribly vulnerable. Like being born without ones skin or something. As though the Maker had fashioned the body of a human, stuffed it into a polythene bag instead of the regular protective covering, and turned it loose into the world. Lord, she wondered, is that why, on the whole, they have had to be extra ferocious? Is it so they could feel safe here on the earth, under the sun, the moon and the stars?’

 

The evening after the morning’s breakdown at Hamburger Bahnhof, before I arrived at the bar with the promising neon sign, I went to meet my Greek friend Byron, at a vernissage. As I stood on the street in Berlin, nursing my glass of wine, I met a man of Canadian origin who made me wonder what the world must be like for a white man who has never had to feel the ancestral pain of dispossession, who will never experience first-hand the shame of being a coloured person. He was an engineer. He was intoxicated. He was attempting to seem cogent with diminishing success. He was telling me about a project he had been working on funded by a Jewish family. An erstwhile women’s prison (during the Nazi regime) was being converted into a hotel. He couldn’t get his facts right about anything. He seemed well intentioned. He did mention several atrocities he was aware his ancestors had inflicted on indigenous people in Canada. He was mildly apologetic about being drunk.

While talking to me his glass simply slipped from his hand, causing wine to spill onto my cape. The goblet of the wine glass broke, but the stem remained intact. He was unmindful about the broken shards now lacing the tarmac of the footpath. He didn’t feign any penitence for the wine that bled onto my coat. He walked over the fragments to nullify their sting perhaps. ‘Mazeltov,’ I said. At the back of my head I was grateful it was he, a white man, who was responsible for the shattering, and not me, the dark-skinned Indian. In his place, I would have been wrecked by guilt. Later, when I realized everyone was leaving, I moved indoors to deposit my glass. A white German woman, also a guest, requested me to hand over my glass to her. She said it would be her pleasure to keep it inside for me. Her gesture surprised me. I returned to the conversation I was having with Byron’s warm and welcoming queer friends. They asked me why I wasn’t staying on in the city for the Berlin Biennale, or for Manifesta. ‘Because I can’t afford to’, I wanted to say but swallowed the words instead.

 

Before arriving at this venue, I had been to Elif’s gallery, Weiss Berlin, for the vernissage of a spectacular show of a selection of Faith Ringgold’s narrative quilts. I registered one in which she mentions the first time she was called the ‘n’ word. It was in the 1960s, when she was at the helm of several protests against the art world’s racism and sexism. The Whitney Museum had organized a show about 1930s American sculpture in 1968, including not a single black artist. During one of these protests, a man taking his daughter to the museum called her the ‘n’ word. I read an article later on Artnews by Andrew Russeth, published in 2016, and was intrigued by a quote from the critic Lucy Lippard about the flash-mob nature of the protests. ‘I remember Faith’s idea was to have these whistles. She gave us whistles. When you got in the stairwell [you would] blow the hell out of the whistles. They would come running to see what it was, and all you had to do was slip it in your pocket and wander off.’ This continued for several months, pissing off the museum authorities.

Russeth notes later in the article that despite phenomenal sales, Ringgold’s quilts have never quite been taken seriously by most major museums, perhaps because of their craft associations, whimsical range of subjects, or faux naïve painting style. Neither the Museum of Modern Art nor the Whitney Museum owns one – though the latter has a 1971 collage calling for the release of Angela Davis. The Guggenheim has owned her masterpiece Tar Beach since the year it was made, 1988, but has never put it on view in New York.

Months later, while interviewing Cameroonian curator Dr Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung over Skype I warn him I’m about to ask a possibly ‘lowbrow’ question. ‘I don’t believe in highbrow/lowbrow. It’s about sharing knowledge,’ he replies, encouragingly. I proceed – ‘My question is about my recent experience visiting museums in Europe. I wasn’t prepared, for example, for how discombobulated I would feel in Florence. I had this moment when I suddenly realized the history of Renaissance art, the history of museums is almost exclusively white and male. I couldn’t find my place in anything I saw. So, when Beyoncé and Jay-Z (The Carters) released Apeshit, I found it very validating to see black bodies in a white institution. I’m dying to know your thoughts.’

 

Ndikung asked if I had heard of the Guerilla Girls. ‘Yes, of course!’ I replied. He continued – So you know that if you’re looking at the museum collection in terms of representation of women or people from minority groups – the museums in the West were never meant to represent you and me, except in an ethnographic context. It was not meant to represent western women either. It was a construct. But if you go at the core of it, the museum has a responsibility to start to present and disseminate knowledge in societies. If you see how the societies in the West change, you claim a position. One of the possibilities is for you to become a curator, one is to become rich like Jay Z and Beyonce and take over that space.

Before getting into Jay Z, I want to mention the Nigerian artist, Emeka Ogboh. When he had a solo project in Baden Baden in Germany, he wanted to take over a space. He rented a casino for the whole day, and in that casino, the only people allowed in were black people. He made a recording, made a film. What was he trying to do? He was trying to deal with the way these spaces are constructed. Even though it’s not written on the entrance that it’s white only, it’s understood. Even until this day, in Berlin, there are small galleries where people look at me from head to toe, wondering, ‘Who is this guy and why is he coming to our gallery?’

In the case of Jay Z and Beyonce, the music is secondary; this is not the best piece of music they’ve ever done, but the idea of getting into the Louvre, not as an artefact, not as a visitor, but taking over the space and trying to create a relation to the space. And that is important, it’s one of the many ways of taking over and reconfiguring spaces, of claiming a position. I, for one believe more in creating new spaces. These old spaces that embody patriarchy, racial class and gender supremacy do not necessarily speak to me. That’s one of the reasons why we created SAVVY Contemporary rather than spending time just taking over. But once in a while we engage in reconfiguring and then back off. It’s guerrilla tactics.

 

My best friend, Mandakini (Mona), and I had decided to meet in Florence (Firenze) a week after my Berlin road trip. We booked an Air bnb in Sesto Fiorentino, a town 10 kilometers away from Firenze. Because it was significantly cheaper than the tiniest hole in the historical centre, we didn’t mind having to trudge back and forth between the two towns. She had come in from Paris. I had taken at least five trains from Bolzano. We had dinner and red wine and went to bed early. The next morning when we arrived in Firenze, I was notably in awe. However, we couldn’t get over the density of tourists. There were sinuous lines at the entrance of every significant architectural site, each and every museum.

Because my artist friend Desmond Lazaro had told me to re-read Vasari’s Lives of the Artists just as I was on my way to Firenze (‘not before, not after’), I was full of anecdotes about various masterpieces in the immediate vicinity (except most of them were either duplicates whose originals had been placed in museums for safekeeping while others, elements of architecture from the Duomo for instance, were no longer within it but had also been subtracted and kept inside museums). You had to pay to enter. Our press cards, which got us in elsewhere in Europe, had no value here. Given the length of the lines, and given we had slotted three days for Florence (we couldn’t afford to stay longer), we had to pick and choose the museums we wanted to enter. We found out that Uffizi would allow us in for free, but the line was a good two-hours long. Mona would rent the audio guides. I had a whole month left in Europe so I had to be fiscally more conservative. I relied on my memory of Vasari and Google search. To block out the static noise of the crowd, I chose to listen to music. It was my way of disrupting the whiteness of the visual narrative. At the Uffizi, for instance, I listened to a whole album by Charles Mingus and then some of Nina Simone’s greatest hits, including Four Women. I looked for any depictions I could find of women. There were all either virgins, whores or monsters; the most iconic among them – Medusa.

 

I slinked through the madding, maddening crowd, until I could get an unfettered glimpse of the bronze sculpture by Benvenuto Cellini standing over the headless corpse of a slaughtered Medusa at the Loggia dei Lanzi of the Piazza della Signoria just outside the Uffizi. Through my lens the composition seemed to embody the history of violence against irrepressible women. In Perseus’s warrior hand, Medusa’s head with her coiffure of snakes seemed so diminished, robbed of its fierceness. It struck me more powerfully than ever before how it was Medusa’s womanly gaze that most frightened men. The notion that if she so much as cast a glance in their direction they could be turned to stone.

Biblical characters like Judith represented more acceptable female virtues, because her heroism still fit within a patriarchal narrative. Even Mary Magdalene had been sterilized by Donatello so she was erased of any vestige of her allegedly over-sexed, whoring past. He imagined her as an emaciated hermit. I reminded myself of my encounter with the goddess Kali in her temple in Kalighat; how she exuded virility, her red tongue spilling out in an ‘oops’, bodies under her feet, how Shiva himself had to be summoned to seduce her into ceasing her bloodlust. I thought also of Akka Mahadevi who renounced all trace of clothing, choosing to live as a mendicant in service of her god, her feet governed by the plenitude of her devotion and no longer following in the footsteps of patriarchal constructs. How much have women struggled to steal back the agency that had been stolen from them by men in the first place? Had Caravaggio been able to time travel to 1975 AD, would he have researched Hélène Cixous’ essay, ‘The Laugh of the Medusa’, and would his crazed depiction of her on a shield have softened?

She wrote – If woman has always functioned ‘within’ the discourse of man, a signifier that has always referred back to the opposite signifier which annihilates its specific energy and diminishes or stifles its very different sounds, it is time for her to dislocate this ‘within’, to explode it, turn it around, and seize it; to make it hers, containing it, taking it in her own mouth, biting that tongue with her very own teeth to invent for herself a language to get inside of. And you’ll see with what ease she will spring forth from that ‘within’ – the ‘within’ where once she so drowsily crouched – to over-flow at the lips she will cover the foam.

 

Why were the exhibits at the Uffizi doggedly stripped of their context? Why was it a site of pilgrimage for art lovers who not only travelled to enter its hallowed ground, but came expressly to witness objects whose display made it clear they were meant to be revered instead of confronted? Where was the criticality? Surely in more contemporary times museums, even those housing Renaissance art, could create more spaces for engagement with the past, like Napoli’s Madre? Why was there no need felt for corrective gestures regarding inherited erasures? What was missing was more than just a revised, contemporary context that situated these works as having emerged from spaces of white, colonial, patriarchal privilege. What was absent in the non-controversial nature of the continued existence of museum spaces like Uffizi was the questioning of the status quo. Why, for example, is one of the largest collections of Egyptian objects located in Turin, Italy? What business does it have being there in the 21st century?

In her brilliant, well researched and considered essay, ‘Some Theoretical and Empirical Aspects on the Decolonization of Western Collections’, Marie-Laure Allain Bonilla summarizes many of the most legitimate viewpoints on the subject as well as the various recent attempts made by museums to address the institutional endorsement of the continuing colonial power equations. How can an art collection concretely be decolonized? Where to begin? What are the concrete issues that institutions are facing? These are some of the questions she poses.

Allain Bonilla contends that in the era of globalization, museums are caught in a paradox: on the one hand, the need to make their functions and policies evolve towards a geopolitical revisionism informed by postcolonial and decolonial perspectives; on the other, the risk of imposing a new geo-aesthetic expression of the western model and perpetuating a colonial cultural domination.

 

P, an ex-lover said to me a few days after we were reunited in Palermo, ‘I think you’re a lot more political than 10 years ago.’ Mona and I had parted ways at the airport in Rome. She went back to France, to finish work on her film on the forgotten history of Indian soldiers’ contribution to World War I. I took a flight to Palermo. P and I were lovers for a few months during my final semester at JNU. We’d kept in touch intermittently for almost a decade. He’d reached out when he was in Delhi. I couldn’t meet him since I was travelling, but I informed him that I’d be in Europe soon. He replied saying he’d rented an apartment in Palermo and I was welcome to visit.

He came to the bus stand to receive me. I stepped out of the bus and retrieved my luggage. He greeted me and we began to walk in the direction of his apartment building. We had to climb four flights of stairs. He didn’t once consider that I was lugging up one suitcase, along with my backpack containing my laptop and other equipment. At the final landing, it suddenly occurred to him to ask if I needed a hand. ‘Too late,’ I said. In the afternoon, when I asked for a towel, he found he had just one tiny more-napkin-than-towel to spare.

I was puzzled. He’d known for longer than three weeks that I was scheduled to visit. His neglect bordered on inconsideration. The next day, when we walk to the Orto Botanico to park ourselves at a café, I arrive at a realization that what moves me most to tears, what makes me feel most defeated, insecure, insignificant and dehumanized are acts of inhospitality; when I am not received with the warmth and consideration to which I am entitled by virtue of being an invited guest.

 

When he acknowledges I am more political than ten years ago, I wonder if the observation is meant to be insightful, or if it had the insinuation of a rebuke. Did he think that I ‘reduced’ everything to politics? Maybe it was because he initiated what he intended as an innocent conversation about purity that I decided to complicate. As a white, cisgender male travel writer of Swedish origin, he genuinely believed there were experiences to be had that could be considered ‘pure’. I told him the very notion of purity was contentious. What constitutes a pure experience and who gets to define its parameters, and can the pure be divorced from the political?

I recounted to him how, seated at the periphery of the Coliseum in Rome with Mona, slightly intoxicated on hash given to us by a generous Italian in Napoli upon noting our appreciation of its scent, I witnessed a young white girl attempting to walk with a stick, mimicking blindness, under the watchful gaze of her sighted companion. You could tell she wasn’t blind, because she seemed not to possess the other-sensory intuition of someone accustomed to not being able to see. She stumbled. She had difficulties trusting. She had the ability to voluntarily open her eyes, and yet was committed to seeing the experiment through. Only if she could experience total darkness and surrender nonetheless, could she know what it was like to walk in the shoes of the visually impaired.

 

Is empathy only possible if one has had an experience that resonates with the ‘other’ that one is to feel empathy towards? Or is the imagination capable of offering an approximation? Is it a pre-condition for the ‘other’ to always lie outside oneself?

To me it seemed that P had always had access to the luxury of being a white man with a Swedish passport. And while he chose to live in relative squalor, even this hipster choice felt disrespectful, repulsive even, as if he had sold in to the idealized image of an authentic, struggling writer, or like it was meant to disguise his white male privilege. I was surprised by his inability to see beyond himself. What I mistook for kindness in him 10 years ago, I recalibrated now as a form of cowardliness, incapacity towards action. This didn’t make him devious or manipulative, rather, his inconsideration seemed to stem from obliviousness. Because he didn’t fancy breakfast, for instance, he couldn’t fathom that someone else (me) might crave it, that someone (me) might be starving, and therefore, didn’t care to offer the option. It stood out for me, his inability to extend himself, as if he had never been cared for and so didn’t know what it meant to care for someone else, or as if he had tried it once or twice but was unimpressed by the results and decided against future attempts.

The island air of Palermo offered breathing room from Rome’s opulence. Not everything within gazing distance begged for your attention. It was here that I discovered the Sicilian Saint Rosalia, whose feast, celebrated mid-July, coincides with my birthday, just as her name coincides closely with mine. I was still recovering from the severe cognitive dissonance I had felt at St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome. I was affronted by disgust and repulsion towards the very Catholic Church that had raised me. ‘How do you calibrate a building’s sordid history of non-ethical material construction when its grandeur feels tainted by it?’ I wrote in my journal, fully recognizing how this same question remains valid if we consider the state of contemporary arts patronage. ‘Florence felt acceptable because it was bankers who funded so much of it, but then a Medici becomes a Pope, and, to finance and compensate for his own excesses initiates a financial transactional system whereby salvation could be purchased.

 

Centuries later, Pope Francis both critiques and upholds the concept of indulgences, except stating that salvation was free and available to anyone who walked through a door of mercy, making the project of self-emancipation as simple as an act of travel. The penitent sinner had only to walk through the door of a nearby church, follow the pope on Twitter, follow live telecasts of the World Youth Day at Rio de Janeiro or better yet, attend the proceedings in person in order to be ‘liberated’ from the tyranny of purgatory… And what has the church done for the sake of its own salvation? Do the unethical means justify the end – the artistic masterpieces that were commissioned? Or does the end become a means of justifying the illegitimacy of the structures that aided its constitution? Do the artists become complicit in the propaganda or were they mainly its beneficiaries?’

When I visited the Palazzo Chiaramonte, I witnessed first-hand how buildings have their own trajectories, and how their histories always find ways to resurface. I thought of the Big House in Goa, where the South Asian Inquisition was headquartered, and how it doesn’t exist any more, was carefully destroyed. The same could have been the fate at Palazzo Chiaramonte, except the graffiti done by the ‘heretics’ detained there between 1601 and 1782, under the oppressive mandate of the Spanish Inquisition resurfaced while it was being restored. I took a photograph of the 28 steps that led up to the Inquisition chambers from ground level, which had grooves running in the centre for the blood of tortured heretics to gravitate downwards.

 

Intriguingly, the Scala Sancta, the marble steps Jesus Christ allegedly stepped on while on his way to trial during his Passion that led to the praetorium of Pontius Pilate, are also 28 in number. Circa AD 326, St. Helena, the mother of Emperor Constantine the Great, brought the Holy Stairs from Jerusalem to Rome, where they have been located since. I encountered their significance in the final moments of Paolo Sorrentino’s 2013 film, La Grande Bellezza (The Great Beauty), when the old, wrinkled saint-like figure is seen climbing them on her bare knees as she seeks to make her way up to the altar. ‘What of the sins of the Catholic Church?’ I wondered. ‘Who must bear their weight?’

I returned to Simone Weil, who I’d have enjoyed having as my patron saint, who, it is said, could have been canonized, had she ever agreed to be baptized into the Catholic faith into which she had had an awakening. I decided that when I returned to Rome from Palermo, I would go to Assisi so I could visit the basilica of Santa Maria degli Angeli, the site of one of her three quasi-mystical moments that drew her towards the Catholic conception of God. Through an instance of great serendipity, I had received a copy of Mary G. Dietz’s Between the Human and the Divine: The Political Thought of Simone Weil. In Palermo, while P was busy traveloguing his ‘pure’ experiences, I began to note a description in Dietz’s introduction of Weil’s second spiritual encounter, when ‘the affliction of others’ entered into her flesh and her soul.

 

One evening in a Portuguese fishing village, she met the wives of the fishermen who were visiting the boats, carrying candles and singing poignantly sad hymns. Suddenly she felt that Christianity was the religion of slaves, and that she, like other slaves, could not help belonging to it.

Weil wrote also that the capacity to give one’s attention to a sufferer is a very rare and difficult thing; it is almost a miracle; it is a miracle. I hypothesized:

If love is a form of seeing.

If seeing is a form of attention.

If attention is a form of consideration.

If consideration is the premise of hospitality.

Is empathy a form of grace?

When I returned to the residency at Eau & Gaz, I began reading about Jacques Derrida’s notion of hostipitality, a reference to Kant’s concept of universal hospitality, die allgemeine Hospitalität. ‘I quote this title in German to indicate that the word for "hospitality" is a Latin word (Hospitalität, a word of Latin origin, of a troubled and troubling origin, a word which carries its own contradiction incorporated into it, a Latin word which allows itself to be parasitized by its opposite, "hostility", the undesirable guest [hôte] which it harbours as the self-contradiction in its own body…),’ Derrida prefaces before proceeding to lay out hospitality as the right of a stranger not to be treated with hostility when he arrives on someone else’s territory.

‘If we compare with this ultimate end the inhospitable conduct of the civilized states of our continent, especially the commercial states, the injustice which they display in visiting foreign countries and peoples (which in their case is the same as conquering them) seems appallingly great. America, the n**** countries, the Spice Islands, the Cape, etc, were looked upon at the time of their discovery as ownerless territories; for the native inhabitants were counted as nothing. In East India (Hindustan), foreign troops were brought in under the pretext of merely setting up trading posts. This led to the oppression of the natives, incitement of the various Indian states to widespread wars, famine, insurrection, treachery and the whole litany of evils which affect the human race.

‘… The peoples of the earth have thus entered into varying degrees into a universal community, and it has developed to the point where a violation of rights in one part of the world is felt everywhere. The idea of a cosmopolitan right is therefore not fantastic and overstrained; it is a necessary complement to the unwritten code of political and international right, transforming it into a universal right of humanity. Only under this condition can we flatter ourselves that we are continually advancing towards a perpetual peace.’

 

I regret not having noted down what constituted The Empathy Drink I was nursing as I surveyed the interior of that bar in central Berlin in search of the elusive portal. What if the concoction itself was a secret potion that could unlock the question of hostipitality? Through Derrida, I chanced upon the clear distinction Hannah Arendt proposes between empathy and enlarged mentality, qualifying that the latter is a form of ‘visiting’, of travel and inhabitation through the realm of the imagination.

‘Only imagination is capable of what we know as ‘putting things in their proper distance’ and which actually means that we should be strong enough to remove those which are too close until we can see and understand them, without bias and prejudice, strong enough to bridge the abysses of remoteness until we can see and understand those that are too far away as though they were our own affairs. This removing some things and bringing the abysses to others is part of the interminable dialogue for whose purposes direct experience establishes too immediate and too close a contact and mere knowledge erects an artificial barrier.

‘I form an opinion by considering a given issue from different viewpoints, by making present to my mind the standpoints of those who are absent; that is, represent them. This process of representation does not blindly adopt the actual views of those who stand somewhere else, and hence look upon the world from a different perspective; this is a question neither of empathy, as though I tried to be or to feel like somebody else, nor of counting noses and joining a majority but of being and thinking in my own identity, where actually I am not. The more people’s standpoints I have present in my mind while I am pondering a given issue, and the better I can imagine how I would feel and think if I were in their place, the stronger will be my capacity for representative thinking and the more valid my final conclusions, my opinion.’

 

Frustrated by my unabating desire to read Our Sister Killjoy, I joined a Facebook group called ‘Ask for PDFs from people with institutional access.’ Within hours, a stranger with a Bengali profile name responded to my request for the book’s PDF with the promised attachment. I devoured it instantly after thanking him profusely, excited to be reacquainted with the power of its metaphors and its existential, anti-colonial angst and its afro-centric questioning of the compulsions towards self-exile. On page 65, Sissie encounters a sombre Marija who is feeling the shame of her advances being rejected.

‘Marija was crying silently. There was a tear streaming out of one of her eyes. The tear was coming out of the left eye only. The right eye was completely dry. Sissie felt pain at the sight of that one tear. That forever tear out of one eye. Suddenly Sissie knew. She saw it once and was never to forget it. She saw against the background of the thick smoke that was like a rain cloud over the chimneys of Europe,

L

O

N

E

L

I

N

E

S

S

Forever falling like a tear out of a woman’s eye.

And so this was it?

Bullying slavers and slave-traders.

Solitary discoverers.

Swamp-crossers and lion hunters.

Missionaries who risked the cannibal’s pot to

bring the world to the heathen hordes.

 

Speculators in gold in diamond uranium and

Copper

Oil you do not even mention –

Preachers of apartheid and zealous educators.

Keepers of Imperial Peace and homicidal

plantation owners.

Monsieur Commandant and Madame the

Commandant’s wife.

Miserable rascals and wretched whores whose

Only distinction in life was that at least they were better

than the Natives.

As the room began to spin around her, Sissie knew that she had to stop herself from crying. Why weep for them? In fact, stronger in her was the desire to ask somebody why the entire world has had to pay so much and is still paying so much for some folks’ unhappiness. There it was. Still falling.’

 

She later asks a singular question: How then does one/ Comfort her/ Who weeps for /A collective loss? In the second-last section, in her love letter, she casts ‘a curse on all those who steal continents!...’ before engaging in a profound instance of self-examination of what universality implies for a postcolonial subject; inadvertently furthering my investigation into identities constructed in the shadow of the gaze, and complicating Arendt’s theory of enlarged mentality.

P asked me what I thought has changed about him in the last ten years. ‘Nothing, actually,’ I replied. ‘I don’t mean that as a compliment.’ We were standing outside a bar in Palermo that sold drinks for 1 euro. He was a regular there. He said he preferred to hold his gin and tonic and stand in a corner, talking to no one, despite his fluency in spoken Italian. ‘I like to be a fly on a wall,’ he said. I was amazed by the polarity of our approaches. Was it even possible to be a travel writer, which he claimed was an elemental part of his identity, if one decided furtively against embedding oneself in human or cultural interaction? Do you then impose onto/infuse into your narrative the cold ‘facts’ of ‘pure’ observation? Can that form of observation replace the insight that emerges from engaging with the muck of dialogue, the nuances of language? How do you arrive at any revelation without investing in the emotional labour implicit in confrontation, reconciliation or reparation?

 

In the end I chose to disappear into the welcoming embrace of a void of my own making; a galaxy composed on the foundations of linguistic abysses. Its blueprint was contained in a paragraph I encountered by Simone Weil where she urges that we love the country of here below, for it is real and offers resistance to love: ‘We feel ourselves to be outsiders, uprooted in exile here below. We are like Ulysses who had been carried away during his sleep by sailors and woke up in a strange land, longing for Ithaca with a longing that rent his soul. Suddenly Athena opened his eyes and he saw that he was in Ithaca. In the same way, every man who longs indefatigably for his country, who is distracted from his desire neither by Calypso nor by the Sirens, will one day suddenly find that he is there.’

 

* Rosalyn D’Mello is the author of A Handbook for My Lover (HarperCollins India, 2015). and was the editor-in-chief of Blouin Artinfo India.