Ordinary Violence
Content Warning: Violence, exploitation, oppression, inequity, suffering
contrary to popular belief, in all of the ways that one could be, i am ordinary. what follows on these pages is not a heroic narrative of superhuman resilience or experiences that only i have endured. i do not make such claims. rather, it is precisely because i am ordinary that i am compelled to write about the things that follow on these pages. these moments i share are moments of ordinary people. moments within moments are our ordinary lives, pressing against each other, weighted contradictions, simultaneous ordinary tragedy. daily violence normalized under the guise that violence is not ordinary, this air we breathe is toxic. demanding ordinary resistance, ordinary violence in ordinary moments first must be seen as such. the glorification of the narrative that violence is horrific, to be overcome by resilient, extra-ordinary people, sustains violence itself in at least three ways.
one, this glorification paints the overcoming of hardships as a return to a desired a priori state nostalgically referred to by many as normality, a settling of the dust, a return to a time exactly as it was before, a place for everything and everything in its place. a return to an a priori without resistance is deemed a successful recovery. resilience becomes a willingness to accept violence and ordinary resistance by ordinary people manifests as being out of place. it is here that the extraordinary violence ensues.
two, the glorification positions suffering or hardship as something other than ordinary life among ordinary people. overcoming violence becomes something extraordinary not worth the wasted risk (why speak out, protest, strike, take up arms?). so many of some of us in the West/Global North who have access to whitestream public narratives have no idea what suffering feels like. not because we have not experienced it, but because we have been convinced that we should not have to feel it and thus, are reluctant at best and violent at worst when confronted with difficulty and so we do not learn from suffering, failing to garner the wisdom of its teachings.
three, glorifying the pornography of human suffering obscures ordinary violence that degrees of comfort shield many of us from. we are convinced that unless we are suffering like that, we are not suffering enough for our pain to matter, to be deserving of love and care, and our ordinary disconnect from ourselves leads to symptoms interpreted and labeled as markers of madness.
View art by ivan beck in this issue of Wordgathering.
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About the Author
ivan beck (no pronouns) is a trans, agender, mentally ill, chronically pained, atypical, killjoy (queer) feminist. At the time of submission, they are a PhD candidate in the Faculty of Health at Dalhousie University engaging in a research-creation exploring often complex relations between embodied knowing, trauma, health, and dominating logics of settler-colonialism. ivan lives on Turtle Island, in unceded Mi’kmawki with their trusband, 5 cats, and 2 dogs.