Time and Again

I'll be using the title of this entry to continue musings on earlier entries.This time I want to return to my musings on the fact that Bin Laden harmed people whose beliefs did not match his own thinking. But then I thought that we all have moments of clashing with folks whose beliefs differ from our own. I suppose in a certain way we are no different from the Bin Ladens of the world.

Currently I'm reading Obama's autobiographical book Dream of My Father. I've not finished it but have reached the section where he has grappled with his sense of being an outsider. He mentioned some of the books on post colonialism which I discovered long after he'd read them. However, I am older than the President. So the impact of studying post-colonialism and contemporary feminism "hurt" more than I imagine it would have had I learned these things at a younger age. Today there is no way of testing this idea. But like him I had to go through the anger that "consciousness raising" can lead to when we must deal with the facts of our lives within the USA.

The US is my country but being a woman in it hasn't been a cake walk. Study "awakened" me to many factors of the political and personal injustices that had occurred while I was in the sleep state of not understanding how systems work to control people. So I nodded my head in agreement with the angst the young Barack grappled with as he comes to a way to live in his own skin.

Living in one's own skin requires much self-knowledge as well as an understanding of the systems in which we live. When I read, Location of Culture I could almost see the margins or structures which many of us have to navigate and do so without that "otherness" that Homi Bhabha, Simone De Beauvoir, and others have theorized.   However, being comfortable in my skin has been a different and longer journey for me.

More to come later.

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