What does history look like in the mind’s eye - the imaginations and visions - of the people who participated in the great anti-racist, anti-colonial, and anti-fascist movements of our recent past?
What we find are stories of outernationalism.
Outer. Nationalism.
Inter-nationalism is the world of national leaders, diplomats, and other elites working together within institutional structures of power.
Outernationalism is the flow of dub between nations.
It is the critical dialogue, the creative collaboration, the friendships and the solidarities that develop between people from different nations and in defiance of the borders that divide them.
By “people”, I mean the poets, the sound systems, the protesters, the prophets, the underground club scenes, the street demonstrations, and other forms of collective resistance.
By “people”, I also mean
Frantz Fanon as a participant in the Algerian Revolution.
Malcolm X’s dialogues with Japanese internment-survivor Yuri Kochiyama.
Jamaica’s Canute Frankson and the unknown Black anarchist of Bakunin Barracks fighting fascism in Franco’s Spain.
And Ho Chi Minh attending Marcus Garvey’s lectures in Harlem, New York.
These are the outernationalist stories of people who were never exclusively tied to the nations that claimed them. They were connected and committed to a multitude of struggles.
[PAUSE]
I travelled to the northern part of Vietnam where the Vietnamese leader Ho Chi Minh spent a lot of time. In a forested area, there was a small area with a stream running through it. It was tucked away in a corner and was surrounded by lush, green vegetation and river rocks. It exuded a tangible feeling of peacefulness and tranquility.
I was told that Ho Chi Minh used to come here to engage in inner self-reflection.
Deeper into the forest, I was taken inside a small, simple cave. In one part of the cave, I saw a bare slab of rock that roughly seemed to resemble a rectangular bed. It was explained to me that “Uncle Ho” (as Ho Chi Minh is popularly called in Vietnam) would come to this cave to write, read, and reflect in solitude. He would actually sleep on the bare rock I saw in one part of the cave. He was doing this also in the latter part of his life when he had political power and prestige.
I struggled to think of how many current world leaders would actually engage in such a practice under such austere conditions.
Then later on, while visiting the Chon Nhu monastery in southern Vietnam, I was shown a picture of a young Ho Chi Minh, dressed in the attire of a young Buddhist practitioner and holding what is described as a begging or alms bowl. The begging bowl or alms bowl (called patta in Pali, patra in Sanskrit) is one of the simplest, but most important, objects used in the everyday life of Buddhist monks. It is primarily a practical object, used as a bowl to collect alms (either money or food) from lay supporters. This is how they sustain themselves for the day.
The monks at the monastery explained to me that Ho Chi Minh had originally intended to become a monk, but he realised that he had to put that aside in order to fight for the preservation, integrity, and independence of Vietnam.
[PAUSE]
Our struggles and resistance movements require tools. Science, technology and logical reasoning can provide some of those tools, but so can dreams, meditations, and visions - not to mention the knowledge and insights that come from our bodies and our emotions.
Each tool enables a different mode of knowledge with different benefits and limitations, but they are equally legitimate as tools for understanding the world in order to change the world.
These are also tools for healing from the world.
They are also tools for finding joy, creativity, individual self-expression, collective bonding and more while in the world.
Because there is no limit to the dub.
[PAUSE]
I too have heard friends say “I am spiritual, not political.” I cannot lie - I have made those pronouncements too, so I understand the reasoning.
Sometimes, being “spiritual, but not political” comes from a desire to escape our social responsibilities. It can also come from a place of exhaustion with the politics, the conflict, the oppression, and the violence of the outer dub world.
But that’s when we know we need to take care of our inner dub - our spirit, our bodies, our emotional well-being.
But I have realized that I cannot stay in the inner dub world forever. The outer dub work of struggle, resistance, and change calls me - and it calls you.
So we turn to the dub world within, in order to rise and make the world around us as beautiful as the world we envision and feel in our dreams, our meditations, our asanas, our medicinal experiences, our duas and more.
credits
from IR 62 Inner Dub ,Outer Dub.,
released December 12, 2022
Music composed and recorded by Ukweli at The Funky Militant in Toronto,Canada.
Vocals by Ukweli also recorded at The Funky Militant in Toronto ,Canada.
The German artist's so-called "digital psychedelic journey" infuses sterling classical and jazz forms with trippy, tuneful synth melodies. Bandcamp New & Notable May 5, 2024
