Born to Belong

Copyright (c) 2002 by Mab Segrest. All rights reserved.
Excerpted with permission from the prologue of her book, Born To Belonging: Writings on Spirit and Justice (Rutgers University Press, 2002). We heartily recommend the full book to our readers!

I was born into segregation in Birmingham, Alabama on a late afternoon in February, 1949, four years after the end of World War II, when my father had returned home from a German prison camp, and five years before the U.S. Supreme Court would issue Brown vs. Board of Education, declaring segregated schools unconstitutional. I was born into a culture in which race colored everything, into a town saturated with anxiety and anger, with fear and hope of Jim Crow dying. Nor did that culture yet have public language for my deepest impulses, which twenty years later I would recognize in the word lesbian. At fifty-something, I am writing this book of travels, on the track of capitalism and white supremacy and heterosexism and misogyny. I am trying to get them in my sights from multiple locations to a point of convergence as yet beyond our ken, while a rampant and unchecked "free market" brutally reshapes the globe. To put it differently, I am trying to peel the onion: to find beneath the political, the economic, and the psychological, the spiritual questions that open into emptiness.

I began the travels recorded [in the book] in 1995, heading out to Beijing to the largest gathering of women in the history of the world, then to Atlanta to write an article on gentrification and the 1996 Olympics, to Memphis for the twentieth anniversary of Elvis' death, to Honolulu for a gathering on linking queer and sovereignty struggles, to Johannesburg and Harare for the General Assembly of the World Council of Churches, and back and forth to visit my brother Tim, who was dying of colon cancer. It was a serendipitous assortment of destinations, to which I set off on a variety of missions, to attend conferences, on contract to write stories, to remain faithful and say goodbye.

My meditations on these journeys involving memory at a moment of danger are quirky and tentative efforts at a hard-won and fluctuating faith: that neither I, nor you, are born to segregation, separation, domination, subordination, alienation, isolation, ownership, competition, or narrow self-interest. The phrase that most resonates for me in this enterprise is the translation of a South African term, ubuntu, which I came upon like a revelation in a Delta Airlines magazine article on Nelson Mandela. Ubuntu translates as "born to belonging." It's a simple notion: we are all born to belonging, and we know ourselves as humans in just and mutual relationship to one another. It makes more sense to me as a political self-description than the term queer. It also offers a perspective from which to examine other concepts and practices, such as democracy or the free market. And what might our economic and political systems be like if they were based on an assumption of belonging?

At the center of my inquiry is the question of soul, or spirit, and justice.

Everyone should have the luxury, the time and space, to think about what they do. And everyone should realize that their ideas have effects that can be tested in concrete situations. What we have more often now is a truncated process. We have on the one hand academics theorizing in universities and think tanks, theories that breed more theories; and on the other community organizers and advocates acting in non-profit organizations, often without resources for adequate reflection. Freire points the way to an engaged action, acting and reflecting as an integral, an essential component, not only of what we do, but of who we are (our ontology), how we know (our epistemology) and of how we act from within and also to shift our reality (our metaphysics). This praxis engages us at the deepest, spiritual level of meaning in our lives, of how we constitute our humanity, of what my friend Marta calls our "I AM-ness." Then there emerges what I am calling a praxis of belonging that is both a political and a spiritual practice.

This is the biblical mandate to do justice, to love mercy, and to walk humbly. It is the tradition from the Torah of tikkun olam, the completion of a just world or by other translations repair of a tattered world. It is what Jesus meant when he said "love your neighbor." Indians brought down the British empire with the soul-power of satyagraha. It is the freedom to which the philosopher Sartre, also part of the French resistance to German fascism, said we are condemned. It is the "creative will" of Martin Luther King Jr., that enables people to hew from a mountain of despair a stone of hope. It is Audre Lorde's recalling for us the erotic power of our work when it engages our deepest desires. It is what Adrienne Rich meant when she said we must find an end to suffering. It is Alice Walker's reminder that anything we love can be saved. It is the engaged Buddhism of monks and nuns who challenged French then U.S. imperialist wars, some of them maintaining their zazen postures even as they burned themselves to death in protest. "Once there is seeing there must be acting," Thich Nhat Hahn explains. "Otherwise, what's the use of seeing?"

What's at stake? Let me put it another way. Do you, dear reader, ever feel alienated? Scared? Anxious? Mistrustful? That you don't really belong? Do you have such a profound distaste for that to which you belong that you prefer exile? Have you gone into some form of internal exile already? Do you ever find yourself reenacting those very behaviors that you deplore, that you have set your life to change? Do you ever despair that you have internalized stereotypes about yourself so deeply that they seem to have infected your very soul? Did you ever think that those feelings might be an effect of living in a racist system, a misogynist system, a heterosexist system, a class system, a colonial system shaped for centuries by domination, by masters looking for slaves?

Deep questions. I think many times we are so lost that we don't even know it.

From my thirteenth year, there are two moments that return. I was coming home for lunch. We had been studying atoms, neutrons, protons, electrons, matter as maya, an illusion of solidity when all is space and energy. My foot on the top step, my hand on the screen door's handle. I turned my head to the right, Mrs. Fort's yard beyond the bamboo, oak leaves still lush from summer, azalea bushes, shades and depths of green. Suddenly none of it was familiar but as if in motion. I saw all the whirring molecules, heard a low oohhmmm. My eyes widened, I breathed in. It was gone. I turned my head back, opened the door, and went inside.

That moment's vision of molecules in grass and leaves came to me after and because I had recently also finally seen white supremacy as a structure that had shaped me. I saw it because I was looking past its limits to black children moving freely in my segregated school. Alabama, 1963. Integration, it was rightly called. How many times have I circled back to that moment lying on my stomach in the grass, looking out through the legs of policemen to the black children integrating "my" school. That moment something shifted: the crack in the cosmic egg, sensation equally delight and terror. I saw that I saw it, the violent limitations of my white culture, and knew that I knew. With that knowledge came a sudden surge: what else was possible?

Here at the beginning of a new century, we are compelled, as Gramsci was, to re-envision transformative work for justice out of any narrow determinisms into which it has been cast. Those of us who know ourselves perhaps do not yet have language to explain clearly that what we call justice is the door to wider realities, fuller modes of being. Marx was wrong. All politics, ultimately, is also metaphysics, matter and energy constantly shifting forms.

What does it mean to be a materialist, anyway, after twentieth-century science has shown matter and energy are interchangeable and matter itself in its subatomic forms is either waves or empty space or both? "The arc of a moral universe is long," said Martin Luther King, drawing on Einstein, "but it bends towards justice."