The Politics and Poetics of “Fieldnotes”: Decolonizing Ethnographic Knowing

Abstract

In this article, I present insurgent poetry as a way to decolonize ethnographic knowing. I argue that insurgent poetry tethered to grassroots struggles represents a critical site for decolonizing relationships in activist ethnography. My activist ethnographic work takes place alongside, and in solidarity with Miya communities in Northeast India, who have been disenfranchised and face persecution and statelessness. Presenting poems that effervesced in relation to “fieldwork,” I theorize poetry as a decolonial enactment: a form of witnessing that resists a disciplining colonial gaze and creates possibilities for decolonial onto-epistemic rupture/reorientation; in doing so, allowing for radical relationality and reciprocal knowing.

Keywords

poetry critical ethnography decoloniality fieldnotes relationality

Poetry is the way we help give name to the nameless so it can be thought. The farthest external horizons of our hopes and fears are cobbled by our poems, carved from the rock experiences of our daily lives.

—Audre Lorde, 1984, p. 38

I am writing in a political moment when colonial and carceral state logics are proliferating with unabated dehumanization and erasure of majority world peoples, who are often considered disposable and dispensable. In the Northeast Indian state of Assam, close to two million people—Bengali and Bengal-origin Muslim communities—were recently disenfranchised; communities that now face the threat of detention and statelessness (Raj & Gettleman, 2019). This was done by updating the National Register of Citizens (NRC), a list established in 1951 to detect “foreigners” and “illegal migrants,” distinguishing them from so-called “genuine Indian citizens” (Azad, 2018a). The NRC policy is itself a colonial derivate with roots in a British imperial act—the Foreigners Act of 1946, which legitimized discourses of “detecting, deleting, and deporting” so-called foreigners (deemed so by arbitrarily placed borders) as well as actions to accomplish the same. The central question for me is not what constitutes authentic or inclusive Indian identity/citizenship but how, where, and with whom we stand in relation to justice (see Atallah, in press). I come to this paper, standing in decolonial solidarity and building communities of resistance with grassroots activists from Bengal-origin Muslim communities or Miya communities in Assam—people who are encumbered by the label of “illegal immigrants.”

Miya communities are descendants of Muslim peasants from undivided Bengal who were brought in to Assam as agricultural workers during the early 19th century—one of the many instances of colonial population transfers or forced migration during British colonial rule in India. They have borne the legacy of anti-immigrant sentiments and policies for more than a century, systematically subjected to detention, deportation, social segregation, violence, and displacement (Murshid, 2016). There is a willful forgetting, a determined unwillingness to name, let alone grasp the historical contingencies of colonialism, violence of nation-making, (post)coloniality, and internal displacement that complicate questions of migration and belonging in Northeast India, especially Assam. This is, what liberation psychologist Martín-Baró (1996) called a social lie: the distortion of reality and memory to restrain collective consciousness and maintain an oppressive status quo.

The term Miya means gentleman in Urdu. However, in Assam (Northeast India), the term is employed as an ethnoreligious slur, a slight, an insult that is meant to invoke otherness. The use of the term Miya remains inextricably intertwined with such terms as foreigners (“Bangladeshi”) and “illegal.” It is systematically deployed against Bengal-origin Muslim communities to question/delegitimize their political and cultural citizenship and belonging in Assam (Azad, 2018b, 2020). Defying such official narratives and justifications of power, Bengal-origin Muslim communities are increasingly owning their Miya identity, using their historical and cultural experiences to unmask alternative visions.

The vast majority of those labeled “illegal immigrants” are dispossessed Miya farmers and migrant workers who lead a precarious existence as they struggle with flood-induced displacement, gender injustice, poor infrastructure, low literacy, and deep poverty. Yet these communities are labeled the “problem” (e.g., “illegal,” “termites,” “outsiders”). That is the power of structural violence: it erases the sociopolitical roots of problems, instead placing the blame on vulnerable and socially excluded communities, communities who are then criminalized and viewed as a threat to “indigenous Assamese people”¹ or “genuine citizens.” These systematic assaults on their dignity also act to justify or mute recurrent violence against them (Dutta et al., 2016). At times, the state acts as agents of violence; at other times, such violence is carried out with extraordinary impunity (Dutta, 2020). Grassroots activists and community organizers from disenfranchised Miya communities have been fighting relentlessly for years—listening, supporting, advocating for their communities. In doing so, they have not only incurred the wrath of the state, but also of powerful civil society actors who undermine their struggles by weaponizing liberal progressive rhetoric. These repercussions take the form of criminalization, negative media campaigns, organized trolling, death threats, and rape threats. Concerted efforts are made to block access to livelihood and to impede their activism.

As someone born and raised in Northeast India, the politics of belonging are deeply etched in my own history and have informed my activist scholarship in critical and meaningful ways (see Dutta, 2015). I trace my ancestral history to Bangladesh, formerly East Pakistan (1947–1971), and undivided Bengal in British-occupied India. My grandparents fled East Pakistan soon after Indian independence in 1947 to escape ethnoreligious persecution. I grew up listening to stories of sacrifice, family separation, and communality. I am immensely grateful to my grandmothers for imparting this historical knowledge that is integral to seeing the continuities of violence and repression—unlike many in my generation who were shielded from the histories of violence that our families survived, witnessed, and/or were complicit in. My Didun (maternal grandmother) and Thamma (paternal grandmother) are no more. But it is their compassionate storytelling—as keepers of historical memory and healers of collective pain—that bring me here today as I work alongside, in solidarity with Miya community activists in Assam, India. Together, we seek to document social suffering, attempt narrative interventions, and explore arts-based and culturally meaningful pathways for resistance and healing.

The Turn to Insurgent Poetry

I did not set out to write poems, rather it arrived in the midst of my field/home travels. The poems came to me as I struggled to hold space for Manju’s unrelenting grief at losing her sister and infant nephew. It came to me in jolts during the bumpy ride back to the village from Majidbhita char (riverine island). It came to me after the interview with feminist Miya poet Rehna Sultana. But it was not just the interview, it was sharing stories and meals over the course of our travels through rural Assam; it was her reading of her poem Ango Ma (Our Mother), the bonds formed through our silent tears and righteous anger for the injustices borne by our mothers in unremitting patriarchy. The collection of poems in this article are expressions of what I felt in the flesh, that which felt impossible to convey, capture, or represent in narrative prose. It was a way of coping with and holding space for experience that could not be contained in the linearity and syntax of ethnographic fieldnotes. Born and raised in the global South, at the borders of the nation state—both material and imagined—my entry into research was driven by the desire to tell our stories, to participate in knowledge production as opposed to being a passive entity that is objectified in public and scholarly representations (see Dutta, 2015, 2017). Like many others (e.g., Reyes Cruz, 2008; Russel y Rodríguez, 1998; Villenas, 1996), there has never been any straightforward reflexivity for me, any easy articulation or announcement of positionality; my identities/identification and sense of (non)belonging cannot be captured by discrete categories or insider–outsider binaries. For me, it was poetry that both created and served as cracks through colonial, imperialist, neoliberal, and patriarchal ways of being.

The arrival at poetry was not incidental. Resistance poetry has been an integral part of Miya communities’ resistance as they strive to unsettle hegemonic sociopolitical formations and disrupt dehumanizing master discourses. Miya poetry is a genre of resistance poetry that emerged as a means of turning the gaze to the absent present—to the pain, indignities, defiance, resilience, and desire of Miya communities and to the indifference and pernicious silence that preclude signification of collective harm (Badhwar, 2019). Miya poetry has emerged as a form of resistance with poets and activists from Miya communities using poetry to reclaim the term Miya, rescuing it from disparaging master narratives (Karwan-e-Mohabbat, 2019). Reclaiming denigrated native dialects as well as claiming their right of expression in dominant languages (such as Assamese), Miya poetry centers the experiences of those at the frontlines of struggles for the right to exist and to belong. In recent times, Miya poetry has become a critical site of protest and resistance against the mass-scale disenfranchisement of Bengal-origin Muslim communities in Assam, especially articulating social suffering that could not be expressed through op-eds, scientific articles, or human rights reports. When I first stumbled upon Miya poetry, I found myself deeply drawn to it as a way of “knowing” that shattered colonial hierarchies and systems of domination embedded in research relationships. Miya poetry, as I read it, was as much about decolonizing relationships. As Shalim M. Hussain (2018), Miya poet and translator writes,

Poetry will be dadi’ ² s cracked hands

Poetry will be turmeric caught in the cracks

And the old key she used to scoop it out

Poetry will be Mobil, poetry will be grease . . .

Poetry will learn its aukaat ³

Ma kasam⁴, poetry will belong.

Along with Miya poetry, my turn toward insurgent poetics was facilitated by the work of decolonial, Indigenous, Third World, and Adivasi feminists, for whom writing is necessarily political and must engage our bodies and affect, not just the mind (Anzaldúa, 2002; Kerketta, 2018; Lorde, 2003; Lugones, 2010; Moraga, 2011; Morales, 1998; Pérez, 1999; Tuck & McKenzie, 2015). For them, poetry and other arts-based praxes have represented critical sites for decolonial resistance that not only disrupt the colonial, imperialist, patriarchal, heteronormative gaze but as importantly commit to lived struggles anchored in mutuality, solidarity, reciprocity, and justice. As Audre Lorde (1984, p. 37) wrote,

. . . poetry is not a luxury. It is a vital necessity of our existence. It forms the quality of the light within which we predicate our hopes and dreams toward survival and change, first made into language, then into idea, then into more tangible action. (Emphasis added)

Poetry allows us to bring into research that which makes us whole. It was the poetic form that gave me a unique permission to narrate: the grounded imagery of the South, the fluidity of relationships, the sensuality of home, the adoration of landscape, and the very somatic connection to the earth. (Bell, in personal communication)

“Fieldnotes”: Tales of Connecting and Being Wrenched

Part I: The Discrepancies and Ambiguities of Living Borders, of (Non)Belonging

The long way home

You are a Bangal! You are a refugee from Bangladesh.

you do not belong here

when this word reaches your ears, it shuts your mouth.

Automatically.

No one can say anything after that. ⁵

A jab, a pierce, a paper cut.

Sharp, incisive pain.

Fresh blood oozing from an old wound.

Miya: refugee, outsider, foreigner, Bangladeshi

It is always at the tip of their tongue

I feel the storm brewing in your hearts

Talking back to those would have you be

An outsider, to show gratitude

to earn your keep,

to live the problems,

and not name them;

to be called a traitor if you do.

I hear your (Miya) poetry

Piercing through the malaise of indifference

Moving with resounding clarity

through the airwaves of injustice

For Bangals and Miyas and other “Others”

Here, and everywhere.

Borders

exhaustion seeps under the skin and sinks into my bones

into the deep recesses of my being.

Cerulean blue waters of Lake Michigan,

gleaming skyscrapers piercing the summer sky.

My lanyard says Urmi Dutta, UMass Lowell; there is an official logo.

The lanyard gets me into spaces;

for the little hilly town of my birth, for my family, I have “arrived.”

We walk the streets like we belong

merge with the throngs of tourists, but not quite.

The lanyard makes us special

we are better than the tourists, we are responsible social scientists

we are trained to see, to theorize

the unhoused, gentrifying neighborhoods, racism, police brutality;

we make a silent pact not to talk about our avocado toasts and Starbucks coffee.

The lanyard validates my existence, my right to be here

I could delude myself into believing that I belong,

until someone looks through me, walks past me, talks as if I have not spoken.

Layers and layers of wounds—old and new

crisscrossing of scars, some storied, some unnamed and undesignated

a deep sigh, a breath caught in my throat, unshed tears, wracking sobs.

Inundated, choked by feelings, and yet so numb.

Somewhat present here and somewhat present there

removed and distant from both

a deep laceration.

Part II: Honoring Stories

Ode to a revolutionary heart

When the winds blew against you

When falsehood became the norm

When the tentacles of power tried to strangulate your spirit,

To drain your courage:

to wade through flood waters,

to fight the weaponization of documents,

to refuse to be anything less,

to be treated as anything less,

Your revolutionary heart stood guard.

As you nurtured the dialect of liberation.

Shackles of state violence and misogyny

surveilled you, bruised you

but they failed

to restrain your unfettered spirit.

I bow before your mother’s tears

The tears that smudged the henna in your palms

The henna that was a distraction

Maybe, just maybe your mother would worry less.

But did she, really?

I cry with you,

That day when you held on to the iron bars

And shed tears

From agony and rage birthed by injustice

Flowing as the oxygen that galvanizes your revolutionary heart

Penning down glimpses of possibility,

of freedom and rebellion.

And as you soar

Your courage plants seeds

Your lyrical poetry makes songs,

of anger and hope and defiant action.

I know not what despair is

my heart beats faster

In tandem with your revolutionary heart.

A mother’s war cry

(Translated from Bangla)

Deep anguish resides in the chest,

A deluge of pain

As blood tears gush through the veins,

As bleak desperation takes refuge in the char.⁶

When khaki, saffron, red-white⁷

Come bearing sticks, guns, and law,

Wrecking life and dignity,

Making Miya, women, farmer, worker into a-nagorik (non-citizens)

Into objects of revulsion;

Foreigners’ tribunals dispense injustice,

discharge galis (obsceneties, abuses):

Miya, geda, Bangladeshi, foreigner, abaidha (illegal).

Dignity shatters into a thousand shards

A chaotic morass of (non)citizenship and (in)humanity.

The anguish and agony in the mother’s heart

Trying to save one toddler,

only to lose the infant in her lap.

Laying a gentle kiss on her teenage son’s forehead,

as his lifeless bullet riddled body is laid before her.

The anguish petrified into impenetrable grief.

Spilling out as shuddering, gut wrenching cries,

Snatching the mother’s life.

Now the anguish is for Masi (mother’s sister) to bear

Lodged in her heart, flowing in her veins,

And through her tears.

Evicted, enervated, entangled –

in the language of a shackled past.

A flickering flame of the hope in today

But the fire of the future blazes in full glory,

As the sun goes down in the char.

Echoes of the mother’s war cry remain.

The char tells a story

Profound crevices in the earth

Telltale signs of Beki’s fury

A visceral memory,

the color and texture of fear

when the Beki flowed

with blood and tears of char dwellers.

A firm foothold in history,

we sit in circles

Under the starry sky

Eating rice and meat.

Lingering smoke from the wood fire

Brimming eyes, rambunctious laughter

irreverent, unrestrained and free.

stories of where they used to be

stories of how far we have come.

Fighting, loving, linking.

Hope effervescing

On the shimmering surface of Beki⁸

with the pending promise of tomorrow

Molecules shift, giving

the permission to feel

to liberate.

My blood quickens

Life pulses through my body,

New worlds are possible.

I return

Feeling more than when I left;

feelings that fracture thought.

I return

Knowing more than when I left;

Uncomfortable, embodied knowledge.

Not wise with answers,

But alive with questions.

And a promise to feel,

To never forget.

Leave-Takings/Continuities

An ode to home

Years of knowing the winding roads to (from) home

of feeling the ridges, potholes, rumble strips, and unpaved roads

Visceral memory of being swung from side to side,

as bus drivers negotiated treacherous curves and police barricades,

with a nonchalance borne of routine.

Fear of mudslides, flood waters, armed insurgency, army operations;

fear of thousand-hour bandhs.⁹

The fear and pain of being the other on roads that also felt like home.

Two decades of heart-rending leave-takings;

always leaving some part behind.

an urgency to commit to memory,

the sight, sound, smell, and taste of home,

to hold on to until I return.

Until the certitude of return fades away;

and the feeling of home becomes a memory.

But never too distant.

Always hovering underneath the skin

The longing, the fear, the unease,

and the refuge

that is home.

Radical love

the lessons are all here

to love

and to be embraced by love

with abundance and accountability.

In the munificence of the river and its rage.

In the labor of the itamugur¹⁰

as it renders fallow lands fecund.

In the mountains,

shielding existence,

preserving memory.

In the centuries of struggle,

of longing and sacrifice,

of liberation

and desire.

Awakening

I close my eyes

catch a glimpse of you through the mist,

knowing you are there.

the tenderness in your eyes,

the resilience of your spirit,

borne off centuries of struggle.

I hear you,

Telling me that we are in this together.

Molecules shift,

a new world is possible.

Coda: Poetry as Decolonial Enactments

In this section, I reflect on poetry as critical enactments of decolonial research praxis in relation to what is traditionally considered ethnographic “fieldwork” and “fieldnotes” that tend to perpetuate the taken-for-granted othering of majority world peoples.¹¹ Much like how Miya poetry defies the exclusionary grammar and aesthetic of categorization,¹² I see my poems as a way to resist domestication—methodological and otherwise. I experience insurgent poetry¹³ as a way of engaging otherness (including the other within) beyond hegemonic colonial binaries (e.g., Self–Other, subject–object, insider–outside, metropole–margin; Sandoval, 2000; Ureña, 2016). Insurgent poetry is a form of undisciplining—paying heed to the wisdom of Audre Lorde (1984) who warned us that “the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house” (p. 27). Insurgent poetry is rife with the possibility of radical, anti-hegemonic love “from below”—a form of healing intersubjective relations from the psychological, epistemic, and affective wounds of coloniality (Sandoval, 2000).

Poetry as Witnessing, Resisting the Disciplining Colonial Gaze

What does it mean to be in the “field” under conditions of state terror and institutionalized indifference? When the “field” is also sort of home, but not quite? To work alongside communities denied of the “right to have rights” as they are engaged in fights to reclaim their dignity, rights, land, their place in the world? What does it mean to accompany ¹⁴ those who are deeply impacted by and fighting back in the face of the resulting precarity?

These questions are excerpted from my notes prior to leaving for Assam, India, in June 2019. This would be the first time that I would meet the grassroots organizers in person. These questions, in essence, were about witnessing. Witnessing is imperative under circumstances where social exclusion and suffering are repressed or unrecognized by the wider culture (Oliver, 2001)—as is the case with the mass-scale disenfranchisement in Assam. Yet the slippage into courtroom metaphors is fraught with difficulties. It is important to note that the kind of witnessing here is not an “expert” witnessing focused on “objective” details but a form of “caring form of vigilance” (Malkki, 1997, p. 94), perhaps best captured by the notion of responsible witnessing (Hatley, 2012, p. 3):

. . . a mode of responding to the other’s plight that exceeds any epistemological determination and becomes an ethical involvement. One must not only utter a truth about the victim but also remain true to her or him. In this latter mode of response, one is summoned to attentiveness, which is to say, to a heartfelt concern for and acknowledge of the gravity of violence directed toward particular others. In this attentiveness, the wounding of the other is registered in the first place not as an objective fact but as a subjective blow, a persecution, a trauma. The witness refuses to forget the weight of this blow, or the depth of the wound it inflicts. (Enphasis added)

Poetry, for me, was precisely this mode of responding: registering the subjective blow, refusing to forget the depth of the wound it inflicts, trying to be true to people at the frontlines of struggle. It allowed for witnessing, not merely as a form of “knowing” the world, but also being, acting, and wrestling with it—often in ways that transgress the limits of academic institutions and disciplines (Bell, 2011; Felman & Laub, 1992).

The turn to poetry led me to both enact and represent what Angel-Ajani (2006, p. 87) calls “critical reception”—opening “our ears and hearts to experiences that might not fit with what we think we know.” To do that, we have to look toward expressive modalities that allow us to engage color, texture, and affect that may not be possible to access via narrative prose. Critical reception has been part of many indigenous and non-Western epistemes rooted in aural traditions where the emphasis is on listening and hearing rather than the more common understanding of it as oral tradition that focuses on speaking (Alfred, 2005; Khatun, 2018). In many South Asian indigenous traditions, for example, śruti (listening) and smriti (collective memory), rooted in lived experience have been critical intergenerational modes of knowledge transmission. Listening, then is an engaged, embodied, and affective process rather than a muted or passive activity; it is based on reciprocity. And poetry became an authentic striving to comprehend, to grasp, to feel, and to be moved by what I heard and saw, in ways that not only confront the consequences of histories of power and oppression, but also uphold desire. Poetry thus became a mode for establishing radically different parameters of engagement and accountability, an assemblage that honors people’s stories and brings those into the public arena to be acknowledged and witnessed.

Poetry as Onto-Epistemological Rupture and Reorientation

Epistemic colonization is intertwined with ontological colonization to establish tiers of humanity whereby subaltern and indigenous peoples are relegated to the lowest tiers, and at times outside the realm of being human (Bulhan, 1985; Connell, 2014; de Sousa Santos, 2015). Therefore, an epistemic rupture that interrogates asymmetries in knowledge relations/production and taken-for-granted othering of majority world people is critical to decolonial praxis. In the context of my work with/alongside grassroots activists from Miya communities in Assam, poetry has come to represent a powerful embodied and creative process of disrupting and reorienting colonial onto-epistemologies that tend to undergird research, specifically complicating normative categories and hegemonic binaries (e.g., Self–Other, subject–object, researcher–researched, insider–outsider, metropole–periphery/margin) that maintain coloniality. This kind of poetry is always created and birthed in the realm of the intersubjective, allowing for a radical unsettling of the subject–object binary that is central to the colonial project. And it is rooted in a framework of desire that honors complexity, contradiction, and the self-determination of lived lives (see Tuck, 2009, p. 431). Poetry allows me to be an alive presence in my research, to bring to research what makes me whole, rather than a truncated version of my personhood. Blurring and unsettling boundaries, it affords the kind of voice(s) and questions that Stacy Holman Jones (1998) writes about in re-envisioning (auto)ethnography:

. . . voices that do not question my positioning and accountability as an ethnographer and author, voices that do not speak to the gifts and contradictions wrought in blurring the lines between fact and fiction. These are questions of the flesh-questions of heart and soul, rather than mind. It is time to turn to these questions-time to leave the safe structure of awareness for the shared and contested, luminous and calloused skin of experience. (p. 423)

Insurgent poetry allows for political intimacies, for intertwined histories, for affective connectedness, and for solidarity—an onto-epistemological reorientation. It represents a stark that departure from colonist ideologies that hold the individual a priori to the collective and view research relationships as transactional or instrumental, such as “gaining entry” into communities or producing “accurate” analyses (Dutta, in press).

Poetics allows for nos-otras, a powerful form of decolonial onto-epistemic positioning centered on mutual implication (Torre & Ayala, 2009). Drawing upon Gloria Anzaldúa’s conceptualization of a Mestiza consciousness that rejects simple dualisms (e.g., insider/outsider), Torre and Ayala (2009) mobilize the notion of nos-otras to advocate for an alternate “in between” psychological and spiritual space. This space is not contingent on assumptions of sameness that flatten oppressive histories. Instead it is replete with possibilities for holding complexity, situatedness, and/or contradiction in all their reciprocity, ambiguity, and at times irreconcilability. As I started sharing the poems¹⁵ with Rehna, Abdul, and Manju—humbly, hesitantly, and with trepidation, poetry became a somewhat unexpected modality of connection and solidarity—my experiences (some shared), collective memories, their stories, and my words morphed and enmeshed into something that instantaneously made for collective and shared ownership. They were no longer my poems. The rapid ease with which the poems moved into the realm of the collective (“our/us”; e.g., when Rehna Sultana, who is a feminist Miya poet activist expressed her desire to translate the poems into Miya dialects) was astounding as it was humbling. In fact, it reiterated the fact that insurgent poetry is always rooted in intersubjectivity. It was a way for me to express mutuality and reciprocity; to let them know that I see and hear them, that I am moved by them. The poems—their roots, their genesis, and where they branch into—were never really mine alone. The modality of insurgent poetics thus represents a critical site for articulation of alternative horizons, experiences, and ways of knowing in ways that defy and transgress colonial rationalities and hierarchies, something that is central to the decolonial project. It is a way of approaching knowledge relations “from within collectivity,” with “a commitment to complex personhood, with a responsibility toward preparedness, listening, reflection, and reparation” (Tuck, 2009, p. 48).

Circling Back to “Fieldnotes”: Toward Decolonial Alternatives

Fieldnotes are considered vital to ethnographic research, often seen as connecting researchers and subjects in writing; the goal by and large one of arriving at a more “rigorous” understanding of the social world (Emerson et al., 2011; Wolfinger, 2002). In this article, I have troubled the hegemonic place of narrative prose in fieldnotes, especially its propensity for reifying hierarchies and binaries, which are rooted in and perpetuate coloniality. We need multiplicities in our modes of sense-making as well as our representational practices to avoid replicating colonist structures of research. Insurgent poetry constitutes one such critical site for decolonizing relationships and unmasking/(re)making alternative visions. Insurgent poetry, as I show, enlivened my “field” experiences, imbuing my representations with a materiality and affectivity that were not accessible though more traditional representational modes.

I share poems that surfaced and epidermalized in the course of my work with/alongside Miya activists and poets in Assam—using those to show the possibilities of insurgent poetry, its potential for resisting reductive forces that reduce complex, multifaceted social and psychic lives of people to their suffering, to their role as research participants. Rather, poetry can serve as a medium for establishing radically different forms of relationality and accountability than those in mainstream social science research; research based on colonial arrangements that differentially mark researchers such that researchers who identify with or have deep ties to so-called “subjects” are often racialized, while leaving Western, especially White researchers unmarked (Pillow, 2003; Rowe & Tuck, 2017; Wilson, 2001). Poetry opened up possibilities for non-essentialized, complex, and shifting nature of our identities/identifications. I certainly do not claim any kind of truth or transcendence with poetry. Rather, poetry allows for the kind of anti-hegemonic reflexivity conceptualized by Minh-ha (1989): as a “relationship that defines both the subject written and the writing subject” (p. 76), or it can be a way of enacting reflexivities of discomfort to contend with and represent difficult questions that tend to be forgotten or swept under the rug (Pillow, 2003). For those of us who do critical and activist ethnography, poetry that is tethered to lived experiences of communities-in-struggle, offers a powerful mechanism to engage suffering, decolonial struggles, and relationality—simultaneously tracing our dynamic knowing as our experiences transform us.

Insurgent poetry, as I have shown, generates an assemblage of stories, emotions, and politics, which open up affective, relational, and material possibilities for establishing radically different parameters of ethnographic knowing. It paves the way for what Cherríe Moraga (2015) calls theory in the flesh:

The very act of writing then, conjuring/ coming to “see,” what has yet to be recorded in history is to bring into consciousness what only the body knows to be true. The body—that site which uses the intuitive, the unspoken, the viscera of our being—this is the revolutionary promise of “theory in the flesh”: for it is both the expression of evolving political consciousness and the creator of consciousness, itself. Seldom recorded and hardly honored, our theory of incarnate provides the most reliable roadmap to liberation. (p. xxiv)

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

I thank Dr. Deanne Bell for reading/hearing my poems and for offering evocative commentaries on them. I am grateful to Rehna Sultana, Shalim M. Hussain, Abdul Kalam Azad, Manjuwara Mullah, and Ashraful Hussain for their resistance poetry and activism that unshackled my thought and being toward more decolonial possibilities.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD

Urmitapa Dutta

Notes

Author Biography

Urmitapa Dutta is an associate professor in the Department of Psychology at University of Massachusetts Lowell. A feminist scholar activist, her program of research focuses on everyday violence, that is, forms of direct, structural, and symbolic violence, that become endemic to the social fabric. She uses critical qualitative methodologies to denaturalize oppressive conditions and to articulate experiences that are silenced by officially sanctioned narratives. Working alongside grassroots activists in Northeast India, her current research interrogates contested ideas and lived experiences of citizenship, migration, and belonging, while also exploring pathways for collective resistance and healing.

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