Going Low
My mom found me early this morning, crying on the kitchen floor, trying to eat a bowl of soup while too drunk to stand or safely carry the bowl anywhere. Sobbing, shaking. I just said, Trump won. So many people are going to suffer and die.
I'm a trans woman. I've been focusing on the election for months because I'm all too aware of how much I and people like me stand to lose under a second Trump presidency, are already losing under Trump's supreme court and the emboldened republican governments across the country. I've been saying I expect him to win for a while, but it still came as a shock.
Thinking about Michelle Obama's "When they go low, we go high." The implication is, while they break rules and act indecently and lie and spread hate, we remain dignified and do what's right. It's appealing as a slogan, because it's appealing to put the threat beneath you. But fascists conceptualize themselves the same way: raising themselves high above their enemies. I think the metaphor ultimately fails because it's built around the same hierarchical value system it pretends to oppose. It says, "they are low and we are high; they are lesser and we are greater." We need better ways to think about our political conflict.
For the last two years, I've been learning toki pona, a conlang (constructed language) originally designed by Sonja Lang. It's a very simple language, it uses 14 letters and around 130 words. The word 'pona' itself means good, simple, friendly. In sitelen pona (writing system for the language), it's written as the lower half of a circle, like a smile perhaps, or like a bowl or a basket. The opposite of 'pona' is 'ike', written as the top half of a circle, so more like a frown. The two are complimentary, not mutually exclusive, and they form parts of a whole, 'ijo', a circle. But the "good" side, the side valued by the language itself, is the "low" part.
What is "low" to the world? The body, for one thing ('sijelo' in toki pona). We stand vertically, so the body is physically below the head ('lawa'). The spacial metaphor is made literal here, and the head conceptualized as both the locus of the mind and the governor over the body. The head, therefore, is greater than and superior to the body. lawa li lawa e sona e sijelo li suli tawa sijelo. The body is "lower" the less it submits to the command of the head, which is to say whenever it is tired or weak or injured or disabled, or even just when it feels things too strongly. The thoughts, feelings, and emotions ('pilin') of the body thus are also "low." Crying on the floor, trembling with fear, is "low." The world's hierarchical value system, which is in me even as I try to think differently, looks at me in that position as, in some sense, worthless. mi pilin ike li pana e telo oko li lon anpa la, jan li wile ala e mi.
A connection is almost immediately drawn between anything "low" and many other things in the category. A show of emotions is "low" and of the body, so it is also weak. Women are "low" so it is womanly. Children are "low" so it's childish. Foreigners are "low," so perhaps it's even unpatriotic, unamerican. And sex is "low" so anything and everything "low" is sexualized. Reactionaries, for years now, often describe displays of strong emotional reactions to political events (such as the opening of this post) as someone being "triggered," a term originally describing the activation of symptoms of PTSD. War and military service is "high," but what it does to you is "low."
There's a split where, divided into high and low, values are themselves divided. In order to gain the higher position, something must be lost, or given up. White women and children are valorized by white supremacy, and benefit from it (look at the way white women voted for Trump, for example). But in doing so, perhaps they lose something of their womanhood, their childhood. When you gain power over something, you lose a part of yourself to it forever. Something is even lost in the power of the head over the body, the higher parts of the body over the lower parts.
In March 1973, the French journal Recherches, edited by Félix Guattari, published a special issue entitled "Three Billion Perverts." The contents were anonymous writings about homosexuality, and copies of it were seized by the French government and destroyed. There's a piece from it that I like, I've seen it attributed to both Guy Hocquenghem and to Guattari and published in translation under two corresponding titles: To Destroy Sexuality and To Have Done with the Massacre of the Body. The latter is the version I have, in the collection Chaosophy. Here's an excerpt:
We can no longer sit idly by as others steal our mouths, our anuses, our genitals, our nerves, our guts, our arteries, in order to fashion parts and works in an ignoble mechanism of production which links capital, exploitation, and the family.
We can no longer allow others to turn our mucous membranes, our skin, all our sensitive areas into occupied territory—territory controlled and regimented by others, to which we are forbidden access.
We can no longer permit our nervous system to serve as a communications network for the system of capitalist exploitation, for the patriarchal state; nor can we permit our brains to be used as instruments of torture programmed by the powers that surround us.
We can no longer allow others to repress our fucking, control our shit, our saliva, our energies, all in conformity with the prescriptions of the law and its carefully-defined little transgressions. We want to see frigid, imprisoned, mortified bodies explode to bits, even if capitalism continues to demand that they be kept in check at the expense of our living bodies.
Power resides even within the self, and it is the body, the "lowest" of all things, that is most oppressed. "'I' oppress myself inasmuch as that 'I' is the product of a system of oppression that extends to all aspects of living." Fascism glorifies that "I" at the expense of the body, raises it above everything. When they go high, we go low, to the "body-that-desires."
Their 'ike,' like an upside-down horseshoe, spills something out. Our 'pona' must capture it, that which they surrender through their victory. That 'pona' will always look, to them, like weakness and derangement. They won't even notice what they're giving up in their denial of it. But we're going to need it.
pona tawa sina!
Recommended viewing from Zoe Bee: Politics is a Language War