Fr. Victor Ferrao
There are structural road blocks to human development in any society. Goa too has its share of these that are also called social sins. Often these are first in our thought universe and then are incarnated in systems and processes that animate Goanising in our society. Thoughts that inhibit human development may be viewed as potentially restrictive essences.
The reign of these socially constructed restrictive essences like caste, patriarchy and biases about migrants, minorities etc, has a disciplinary effect on our society and serve to maintain the power equations within it.
The social hierarchies and power imbalances and discriminatory attitudes and practices are also cemented and fuelled by some of our religious beliefs. It is difficult to use the strict either or logic of oppressor / oppressed dichotomy as we shift our roles depending on the context. This does not mean that there are no oppressed/ victims.
It only means we have to account for the complexities and not succumb to the simplistic demands of totalizing binary logic that controls our thought. This means we remain sensitive to the fact that everyone is an oppressor/ oppressed to some degree and all oppressors are not equal.
Often our covert or passive support to forces of domination through our silence or ignorance can be construed as cooperation in the subjugation of our people.
Here, we are challenged to perceive power not as coercion or force but as a productive force. We are subjected subjects to these powerful discourses that give us subject positions in our society.
All of us have liminal as well as transgressive identities. But we see through the lens of purity/pollution the caste, migrants, minorities, and patriarchy and derive our privileged locations by deeming the victims as other and transgressive.
The restrictive essences that float in our knowledge/power discourses and beliefs construct our innocence and the victim’s villain-hood and thus legitimate oppression. It is true that we play the game of musical chairs that lead us to reproduce the oppressor/ oppressed chain in our society.
Often a caste victim in one context plays an oppressor in the context of women, migrant or minorities. This means no one among us has his/ her hands clean. What afflicts us is a kind of narcissism that enjoys being an oppressor when we get our chance.
Thus, in several ways we continuously reproduce oppressor and oppressed relations that constrain human development in our society. We have to deal with this peculiar narcissism that afflicts our society.
We seem to employ strategic essentialisation as a form of resistance to an acute sense of being a oppressed self that seem to be afflicting us.
Unfortunately, a dislocated self mimics the desire of the dislocating self of the oppressor and hence, we seem to look for our opportunity to indulge into our beats of oppressions.
As a society deeply influenced by colonization, modernization, Indianization as well as casteism and other ills, we seem to have become a society of dislocated selves that enjoy and reproduce dislocation when imposed on our inferior others.
Our story is tale of a marginalised self enjoying the marginalisation of the other. These dislocating technologies need to be replaced by technologies of care. (dis)locating Goanising needs to be replaced by Goanising of care. It would not be easy to make care as the main stay of a society that is struggling to heal its wounds of the past.
The fragmenting, (dis)locating Goanising is an inner defense mechanism of having to cope with a wounded past that continues to haunt us even today.
In an effort to exorcise a sense of marginalization, we seem to be riding a splurge of marginalization of the weak amidst us and the chain continues.
This dynamism that surrogates margizalisation appears to be a cry for therapy. This means we are trapped in a cycle where we seem to seek healing for our wounds to by wounding our subordinate people.
The cycle is like the samara of Indian traditions that repeats in the series of birth until one is said to have attained complete redemption or mukti.
A society that is trapped in a cycle of wounding down the line is very low on human development indices. Hence, we need therapeutic awareness to understand the vulnerabilities of our societies. Such awareness will seek ways that will heal our society.
Otherwise there is nothing that might set us free from the human chains that we will bind to each other.
