Below the Radar Transcript
Episode 210: Critical Hope — with Kari Grain
Speakers: Sena Cleave, Am Johal, Kari Grain
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Sena Cleave 0:05
Hello listeners! I’m Sena with Below the Radar, a knowledge democracy podcast. Below the Radar is recorded on the territories of the Musqueam, Squamish, and Tsleil-Waututh peoples. On this episode of Below the Radar, our host, Am Johal, is joined by lecturer, researcher, and education specialist, Dr. Kari Grain. Kari reads from her new book, Critical Hope, and shares how the seemingly conflicting frameworks of criticality and hope are both vital to systemic change. She talks about her writing process, and how it draws from both academic research and personal stories. We hope you enjoy the episode!
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Am Johal 0:46
Hello, welcome to Below the Radar. Delighted that you could join us again this week. We're here with our special guest, Kari Grain. Welcome, Kari.
Kari Grain 0:54
Thank you. Great to be here.
Am Johal 0:56
Yeah. Kari has released a book earlier this year called Critical Hope. And I'm wondering if we can begin with you, Kari, introducing yourself a little bit first.
Kari Grain 1:06
Sure. Yeah. My name is Kari Grain. I work with Am actually at the Community Engaged Research Initiative at SFU. And I'm also a faculty member at UBC. So I straddle two universities here, wear a couple of hats. And yeah, I wrote this book Critical Hope, sort of during the era of the pandemic, and it came out in May. And it's been quite the journey. Writing your first book is quite an endeavor.
Am Johal 1:32
A big part of this research started out while you were doing your doctoral dissertation, and then turning it into a book that's really meant for a broader general audience as well. I'm wondering if you can speak a little bit about how the writing project started?
Kari Grain 1:47
Sure. I actually said no, when I was first approached with this book idea. Actually, the publisher, North Atlantic Books came to me, and to be honest, I just thought it was a scam, I didn't realize that it was a legitimate offer. Because this kind of thing happens in academia sometimes where people think like, oh, just give us $800, and we'll publish your book. So I didn't actually respond the first couple of times, but they had reached out because they read an article I had written. It was one of the chapters in my dissertation. And it was on critical hope and the role that critical hope can play in global engagement and education. And they just said, "I think that this could really be helpful for people in a broader sense and for a more popular audience. Would you be interested in writing a whole book about this concept?"
So once I realized it wasn't a legitimate offer, I said, yes, reluctantly. But I think part of the reason I was also reluctant was I had significant impostor syndrome. And I didn't feel like I knew how to write a book. Who am I to write a whole book on this concept of critical hope? So it did come from a place of significant self doubt, and insecurity and just wondering whether I have the ability to write a book. And then, I'm so glad that I had people along the way too, my editor, Shayna, and just some colleagues who really encouraged me along the way to keep going.
Am Johal 3:16
And this move from writing in an academic form, like a dissertation, takes so many years. It's a particular mode and frame of writing, and then to write in a mode such as this, which is meant for a general public, what did you find sort of challenging and also liberating in moving to writing this book?
Kari Grain 3:38
Oh, it was a surprisingly difficult transition. I remember when I first started writing during my PhD and feeling how unnatural the academic form of writing is. But then it started to be the only type of writing I was doing, where, you know, there are quite structured sections, where you have to write about methods and methodology and data. And I think that being freed from that felt a little bit scary at first.
So I began, I think I just started with writing poetry. And I thought, can I integrate poetry into this book, and it didn't end up happening. My poetry didn't go in the book in the end. But it really did help to set me on that path to freeing up the stories that I tell. And just really, when I thought of something inspirational or read something inspirational, I would just, I would kind of do stream of consciousness writing. And a lot of that early phase really didn't make it into the book. But it was a process for sure.
Am Johal 4:39
You know, what I really appreciated about the book, as well, was it's a deeply personal book. You shared a lot of personal things in it. And also you interview a number of people in the book as well. I'm wondering if you could speak a little bit to that part.
Kari Grain 4:53
Sure. Yeah. So when I signed the contract to write this book, I was actually experiencing a miscarriage. And it was, I think, day six or seven of my miscarriage and I remember thinking to myself as I signed the contract, like, this is one of those things that life throws at you that feels so bad, it's almost like a comical situation. Like I'm about to start writing a book on hope when I feel at my most hopeless. And when I felt really very empty and blank and really couldn't see a hopeful way forward in my own life.
In hindsight, I think it was really a gift to be able to start from that place and to, you know, share that experience. When I talk about the importance of positionality in this work, part of what I was trying to do was to be vulnerable with my own space. And I think academics or researchers like to espouse this idea that we create knowledge or we uncover knowledge from this objective place, and it's just not true. I think no matter who you are, you're still living through the experiences of your body and how your body is valued or not valued in society, how your how your body is protected or not protected in a given society.
So, for me, I think there was also a level of, I'm asking the people that I interview in the book to sometimes share their most difficult experiences, and it wouldn't feel right if I didn't also do that. I think it was very important to me that this be personal because I was asking others to be personal as well.
Am Johal 6:36
Kari, how do you define critical hope in the book?
Kari Grain 6:40
Well, I mean, it's a whole book about kind of explaining the concept. I think it helps to begin with the concept of just hope alone. Hope is kind of this future oriented emotion, that imagines or wants to have a positive outcome and wants to have this outcome that we envision for ourselves. And when I think of critical hope, what is included in critical hope is this element of action, understanding that we can't just sit back on our haunches and imagine this hopeful outcome unless we actually take action to ensure that that happens.
And the word critical has a lot of meanings. And I certainly orient myself in the critical pedagogy tradition, you know, written by Paulo Freire, for example. But this idea that we are also examining the power structures and the massive levels of inequality that exist in society when we examine a certain concept. So I really think that for hope to be critical, there has to be an analysis of those power relations present. You know, hope is not just this individual thing that you can have and, you know, just pull yourself up by your bootstraps and hope for the best and it will arrive. It's really something that is more entrenched, it's connected to our bodies, it's connected to the land that we live on, and the society. The societal structures that we are subjected to.
I also talk a little bit in the book about the notion of grappling. And hope is something that, you know, when it's framed in the critical hope sense, you are changing your relationship with hope at all times. And that relationship changes depending again, on your identity, but also, on the moment in time you're occupying current events, and luck, things that happen to you. And the etymology of the word grapple was that way back in the day, it was this naval term, and a grappling hook was this thing that you would, they would throw to another ship during naval battles, and then they could be sort of hooked up to that ship, you know, and there could be really stormy seas that but this would keep that relationship going with that other ship.
And then it kind of evolved to be used in wrestling or fighting where when you're grappling with somebody, you are sort of holding an opponent close trying to navigate your relationship to their body.
And I think it's really helpful when we think about grappling and critical hope because it just doesn't accept that hope is this static thing. It is really engaged with difficulty and grief and anger, and a lot of these emotions that people often position on the outside of hope, or as oppositional to hope, I think those emotions become part of the process or the practice of critical hope. And so yeah, there are a lot of metaphors that I write about throughout the book, but I would definitely consider it something that's messy and relational and takes up multiple truths at the same time.
Am Johal 9:50
Kari, wondering if you'd be willing to read a little bit from the book.
Kari Grain 9:53
Sure. Yeah. I think this excerpt I will open with is very close to the beginning. And I like to share it because it is sort of my metaphorical home in understanding what critical hope is.
“What you seek is seeking you. I carry with me these words by Sufi mystic poet, Jalal-al-Din Rumi, in my mind on handwritten cards and letters to friends, in my email signature. I have always been a seeker: a curious child who asked, “but why?” a lot, a teenager who dreamed of leaving my hometown as soon as possible, a traveler who wanted to understand a different lifeworld than the one I was born into. Other seekers will recognize this: A hunger for the beyondness. A pushing past the familiar, a commitment to the unknown, a thrill in the feeling of having your face smooshed up against the outer edges of your understanding and assumptions. An openness to be humbled. At some point in my twenties, when I was road-worn and struggling to find a career path (or any path or purpose at all), a book of Rumi poetry found its way to me, and something lit me up: “What you seek is seeking you.” Six words inside of quotation marks made me feel less alone, like my efforts weren't in isolation or in vain, because somewhere on the other side of my understanding, that object of my hopefulness was also working through the mud and muck to move toward me.
When I uphold Rumi's truth in my own life, I imagined that object of my hopefulness always moving in my direction so that wherever and whenever we meet, it will always be at the halfway mark. In this way, my efforts toward kindness or achievement or love are always doubled, and my moments of laziness, self-doubt, envy, or greed are doubled too. Paulo Freire, the late Brazilian educator-activist who coined “critical hope,” identified a spirit of seeking in his philosophy of hope: “Hope is rooted in men's incompleteness, from which they move out in constant search.” [He wrote.] More than this quote betrays, however, Freire’s conceptualization of hope (and, indeed, his entire life's work in education) was rooted in the quest for liberation from oppression. To experience liberation, one must develop their critical consciousness so that they can learn to read the world, understand systemic and structural reasons for inequality, and imagine–and then work toward–liberation for all. And given this critical consciousness that Freire so encouraged, he might also have been the first to question the power relations underlying this act of seeking.
Seeking itself can be problematic in its romanticization; it can be a colonial endeavor, wherein the beyondness that one seeks might already be long occupied by somebody else–somebody who would like to preserve the sanctity of that beyondness from outsider influence. To search for “knowledge” – as Western ways of knowing have come to understand the term–can be an act of epistemic violence, if the knowledge is not the seeker’s to behold. More than that, though, the very idea of knowledge can be too rigid and finite to align with ways of understanding that are situated in being rather than knowing. So, when I reflect on “what you seek is seeking you,” I think of it as a call for mutual agency, mutual respect, mutual generosity. It reminds me to critically analyze my own identity and my own motivations and desires that draw me to whatever it is that I am drawn to. I aspire to a mutuality in my actions and my seeking; I imagine that the beyondness I seek is also reciprocally hoping for a relationship with me. And where that mutuality does not exist, or in places that would prefer to be free of seekers, I do not venture–and not because I feel personally rejected from that space, but because I have sacred respect for the agency and choice of that beyondness and the communities of people and more-than-people who embody it. Not every place is for seekers. Seeking, if it is your path, must be done with humility. And that means no seeker is entitled to anything that is not reciprocally offered up and gifted in return.
I think of critical hope as a meeting place of two seekers who didn't realize they were looking for one another. The critical seeker is guided by justice and urgently driven to beyondness by the anger, frustration, and grief of all that is wrong in the world: climate emergencies, global inequalities, systemic racism, mass gun violence. The purely critical seeker reads papers, watches documentaries, and has firsthand experiences that illustrate a world in decay, and in turn works toward a space beyond now in which systemic changes and individual efforts bring about justice, equity, flourishing and sustainability. And the purely hopeful seeker: they are driven by sunlight on a spider web, the ineffable connection that washes over a group of people at a live music performance, and the warm feeling in the center of their chest when their dog or lover snuggles in close and breathes quietly into their ear. The purely hopeful seeker watches their child show kindness to a stranger and sees not a world in decay but one that is already perfect in its chaos. The beyondness that a purely hopeful seeker moves toward is a cornucopia of more joy, purpose, music, generosity, color, sensuality and vibrancy. Critical hope is the meadow where these two unlikely seekers (lovers?) meet and become one–the place where two conflicting but equally true stories about the world are somehow made more truthful in their uneasy unification. Inside of that unification is born a plethora of alternative possibilities that eliminate false dichotomies and welcome complex pluralism as a way of knowing and being. For me, critical hope is a conceptual space that has given my fragmented selves a place to lovingly coexist.
Am Johal 16:36
Kari, thank you so much for sharing that. Wondering if you could speak a little bit to how the book has been received since its come out?
Kari Grain 16:45
Sure, yeah. I really had no idea how people would read it. I mean, when you have your friends and colleagues read something, they generally are quite generous in their praise. And so I was curious how strangers, who didn't know me, were going to actually respond. And it has, you know, it has popped up. It's really interesting to see messages that I receive on LinkedIn or on Twitter, or people posting excerpts that really struck them on social media and spaces where it has arisen, have been in educational leadership. So a lot of people who are on school boards or have taken hold, and a lot of principals have been reading this book, interestingly. And then I think, for example, University of Toronto reached out to me, and they have a community of practice on sustainability. And it's interesting, because I don't focus on the work of sustainability. But I think this is an area where people desperately need some kind of hopefulness to keep doing the work, but something that is grounded in reality, and some of the really critical moments that we're experiencing. So I would also say that folks doing work on the climate crisis have been reading it and, and thinking about ways that it applies to their own goals in whatever area that they're working on.
I would say that, you know, because I share a couple of vulnerable stories in there, alongside other folk's stories, people like to come to me and say, like, "wow, I had no idea." You know, I have neighbors who have read and said, "I had no idea." I don't want to give too much away. But I did fracture my jaw during my fieldwork in Uganda. And I talked about that kind of at length in the book. And she said, "I just had no idea, like you just lived down the hallway from me, but I really didn't know any of any of this about you." And I think had, you know, random women email me thanking me for writing openly about my miscarriage because it is something that is treated with a lot of shame and secrecy, and maybe popular writing doesn't necessarily take it up too much. So I feel like I've been surprised at how many of my academic colleagues have been interested in this book. I know that I still interweave a lot of research, and it's quite rigorously researched, so I wanted to display some creativity, but also make sure that I brought some of that academic training that I had to it.
Am Johal 19:12
And I remember being at your book launch, which was a lovely evening. A little bit of a super spreader.
Kari Grain 19:17
Yes, it was.
Am Johal 19:19
Wondering, in terms of your friends who are outside of the academy, who saw you do your PhD, the book came out, what was the reception amongst your sort of wider circle of friends that read it?
Kari Grain 19:31
I would say that one of the things that surprised me, I'll give the example, I have a few elderly aunts, and they, you know, excitedly read my book, and they liked to report back to me that they had to have their dictionary on hand for every page, and that they were always looking up words, but I think that's a good thing. I did try to keep in mind that it was for a popular press, but it is certainly again, it does take up some words that, something like the word pedagogy, which is like this idea of teaching, the practice of teaching. I use it kind of freely in the book once I explain what it is. So I think that it's also a fairly friendly entry point because it integrates so much story. Yes, I include rigorous research, but there's also a lot of storytelling in this book and not just my own stories, but also a lot of stories from people across different fields and disciplines who are living the principles of critical hope in really diverse ways, in their own work life and their own family life. So I do think it's a friendly entry point as well.
Am Johal 20:36
And now that the book has been out and getting a kind of reception and you're in conversations with others, what are questions that come up for you now related to critical hope or are there things that are coming up in, new things you'd write about in terms of where this book wasn't able to get to?
Kari Grain 20:56
I think somewhere secretly embedded in that question was, what's your next book? I don't know, one of the concepts that has really stuck with me that I have continued to think a lot about is the notion of brokenness and fracture. I have a section in this book where I talk about the idea of grappling with hope. And I bring up four different metaphors for types of transformative struggles which occur in everybody's lives at some point, that bring us into a really difficult relationship or a tense relationship with hope or hopefulness. And fracture is the first one that I talk about. And fracture is both a metaphor and in the case of my story, quite literal. And fracture conceptually, in this book, is this event that happens to your life, like in your life that is abrupt, and very personalized, often, that kind of blows apart everything that you knew to be true or blows apart what your life was, and you are suddenly left with broken pieces to pick up and rearrange, or try to put back together and find a way to move on from there.
And I think in speaking with people about this book, they really resonated with this section, because they were thinking through some of the most difficult points in their lives, and what type of a metaphor that might have been aligned with in the book. And for me, this idea of fracture is really fascinating, because there are across every discipline, and every so many cultures, there are different metaphors for how we make something new out of broken pieces.
And one of the concepts I drawn in the book is the Coyolxauhqui imperative, which was, if you've read Gloria Anzaldúa, she was a Chicana feminist and she talked about the Coyolxauhqui imperative and Coyolxauhqui was the goddess of the moon in the stars in Aztec mythology. And the way that Coyolxauhqui came to be was, she had this quite violent encounter with her brother, and her brother chopped her body into a million pieces, and then took her head and threw it up into the sky, and her head became the moon. And the pieces of her body became the stars. And this is, of course, a horrible and terribly violent story. But I think that often when we encounter these moments of fracture in our life, in whatever arena they occur, it does feel like the world has done us dirty, it feels like there is a violence that has been done against us in many cases. And so what I also love about the Coyolxauhqui imperative is Anzaldúa talks about re-membering, so not remembering but re-dash-membering and this way that we pull ourselves back together by the light of the moon. And sometimes that work is done in a conscious way. And sometimes it happens just when you're resting and when you're asleep. And the beautiful thing about all these broken pieces is that you have the opportunity to rearrange them, to make them work for the moment, this new moment, in a better way. And I think fracture often does the part of the work for us that we're usually not willing to do ourselves. It's usually quite an unwilling encounter that creates it.
And I also like to think about fracture and brokenness, because when you think of the example of Coyolxauhqui, not only is she now in all these pieces, but she has through this event that was so difficult and violent, she is now so much bigger. The span of our understanding of Coyolxauhqui is so much larger, and there's air and space and movement between those pieces. And I think that a lot of people that you speak to in life, when they talk about this moment where their life was shattered. They also talk about it as a moment of incredible growth and that they learned the most from the aftermath of that, out of anything that they've encountered. So and, you know, I was just talking to a good friend of mine who's doing her PhD in biology, and she said, “Oh, there's this concept. I think it's called ‘De Novo’”. Oh, no, I can't remember what it is. Scientists out there will know what it is. But basically, it's a process of breaking down proteins into the amino acid components and then creating a new protein that works better for what you're trying to achieve. And I just think there are so many you know, in Japanese culture, there is this practice of taking broken vases or things that have been broken and then repairing them with gold in the cracks in between. So I do think that would be a really fun exploration to look at. How, what are the opportunities for hopefulness and rebuilding after everything has been broken.
Am Johal 25:48
Wondering if you'd be willing to read another part?
Kari Grain 25:52
Sure, I just need a moment to find it.
It all works out.
Let's examine a mantra that I have often seen and heard (and one that I have certainly said before): “It all works out in the end.” I won't lie: I feel attracted to this idea because with it comes a sense of comfort and an absolution from making decisions or taking action. This relaxed approach to hope might be a result of having experiences that have again and again taught you that it does, indeed, end quite well, whether or not you try to control the outcome. Our own experiences with outcomes comprise a vast database of evidence to support our approaches to hope. But those outcomes are drastically impacted by the positionality and identity of the person involved, and the society in which they live. Does that society have supports in place when things go wrong? Who built that society, and historically, for whom did they build the policies and structures in that society? If an individual is not in that group for whom the society was built, then it is less likely that the structures and policies and supports will cushion that person in such a way that it works out in the end.
For example, maybe it works itself out in the end because after a young woman lost that job, her mother had a connection to another, even better, employer at a bank who gave her a job opportunity.
Maybe it works itself out in the end, because a boy’s high school had enough resources to give him the one-on-one educational or counseling support he needed to get through a phase of rebellion and misbehavior in adolescence.
Maybe it works itself out in the end because someone had the healthcare coverage they needed when they got malaria and broke their jaw in Uganda (this is one I can personally attest to and will speak about later in the book).
But maybe it just works itself out in the end because a person has an amazing community of friends and family who support them through difficult times (and communities come together for people and array of contexts).
Each set of lived experiences comprises hard-earned evidence–experiential data–that can offer up hope and faith in the face of future mishaps or can contribute to a sense of despair, rage, or grief that things are unlikely to turn out well in the end.
This book wishes to question and complexify the narrative that “it all works itself out in the end” and (my favorite) “you just have to manifest the life you want to live”. These ideas perpetuate privileged hope–the type of hope that is the privilege of a fortunate few who have indeed developed an understanding that society and systems and institutions and social relations are there to support and benefit them, and that they will not fall through the cracks. Of course, envisioning and imagining a positive outcome is essential to the active development of that outcome (what some call manifestation), but manifestation is never untethered from the highly political systems and structures that benefit some communities and oppress others. Do some people manage to overcome those structural biases? Absolutely, every day. But if they are swimming upstream, they are working twice as hard to manifest their positive outcome.
If we apply this idea to the earlier examples, what is the relationship to hope for the person whose mother was working two jobs as a cleaner and a cashier and she didn't know anyone at a bank who would give her daughter an opportunity? Or maybe the employers she did know offered her daughter a job as a cleaner or a cashier, and she continued to earn less than she might have in other higher-paying occupations? What is that young worker likely to envision for her own future when her parents have always been precariously employed in seasonal labor jobs? Does she see people like herself represented in the leadership positions at her school, at her workplace? Diverse representation has direct implications for diverse young people's ability to envision themselves in leadership positions.
What about the teenager who made some short sighted decisions in high school (as many teenagers do), but instead of calling in an educator or a counselor for one-on-one support, the school principal called the cops? Maybe this decision was simply because there were no more teachers or staff who could possibly find the time to support the student. Maybe the principal was just following the school policy, which is to call law enforcement instead of first offering educational support. Maybe this school was drastically underfunded because of its geographical location, or maybe teachers and staff at the school experienced high burnout rates because they were overworked and underpaid, so there were few teachers who stuck around for the long term. Does this teenager grow up to be someone who says, “It all works itself out in the end” or “I just manifested the life I wanted to live”?
And what about the person who has a traumatic accident and is not insured to get reconstructive surgery? What happens to that person if, on top of a massive hospital bill for a lifesaving procedure, they are left with the economic fallout from missing work for two or three months, and as a result, they are evicted from their home? Does that person believe in manifestation, and did they simply do a bad job of manifestation if this was their outcome?
Despite the situations that many people are born into by some divine coincidence or existence lottery, one’s positionality and identity do not necessarily determine one's capacity to have hope. Although these things have a strong influence on one's hopefulness and one's ability to envision a positive outcome, this idea of hope as a function of inequality does not explain why some of the most hopeful people I have encountered have been those who experienced the most adversity and the most suffering. It also does not explain why people from positions of tremendous privilege can experience terrible suffering and situations of despair.
Hope and hopelessness are not merely outcomes of an individual's personality, their stubborn commitment to positivity or negativity, nor are they purely outcomes of problematic societal structures. One's capacity to be hopeful or to succumb to hopelessness is tightly bound up in both the individual and in society, but it is also related to mental health, education, opportunities for coping, imagination, spirituality, leadership, luck, and so much more. There is much about a person's current circumstances that make positive outcomes more or less likely, and therefore, there are people for whom hope is more easily summoned.
But hope is a future-oriented emotion, so the joy we derive from it is not in its attainment (because in the present, the attainment of hope, then becomes joy or satisfaction or satiation). The future-orientation of hope–its place as an imagined bridge from the now to the not-yet–means that hope can serve two purposes: it can enhance the current moment, and it can indeed improve the outcome of one's future. We shift now to an exploration of the principles of critical hope, which are bound up in the idea that critical hope can and must be used to impact the future.
Am Johal 33:45
Kari, in the book, to illustrate and punctuate some of your points, you interview a number of people. I'm wondering if you could speak to a few of those interviews?
Kari Grain 33:53
Sure. Well, I think one of the first interviews that comes to mind is the one that I did with Khari Wendell McClelland, who is, I know recently did a podcast with you for this, and he is, for those who don't know him, he's an incredibly gifted musician, and songwriter and facilitator. And I was so struck by how he is able to cultivate change in the community and through the arts. And when I sat down to talk to him, I was just really taken by his ability to hold the contradiction between working for a more hopeful outcome and, you know, sitting with and grappling with and facing head on a lot of the injustices that are happening in the world, and specifically for him, he talks about black liberation movements.
What I liked about our interview was that he suggested this idea of the beautiful struggle, and that was a concept I think, by Ta-Nehisi Coates. And, he talked about the beautiful struggle as not being contingent on a positive outcome, but that we love each other no matter what, and that we have the responsibility to take action and sit in that love with one another, no matter whether it's likely that there will be a positive outcome. And again, for him, he talked about, it's a lot less likely for black communities that they will have a positive outcome. So I think what we did together was really talk through some of the tensions that are embedded in this idea of hopefulness. And that's what critical hope is. It's really bringing together these contradictory ideas and figuring out how they live and breathe in the same space.
Am Johal 35:37
Kari, there's seven principles. We won't have time to go through each of them. I'm just gonna read a few out just as an example. Critical hope requires bearing witness to social and historical trauma. Critical hope requires interruptions and invitations. Anger and grief have a seat at the table. I'm wondering if you could speak to one of these aspects of critical hope?
Kari Grain 36:01
Sure. I think the one that gets the most attention is around anger and grief. I often hear people, it's easy to read a book about hope or see a title that wants to speak about the concept of hope and to think that again, it stands in opposition, or it is the opposite of when we are living in despair or being angry. And to say that anger and grief have a seat at the table is not only about treating those emotions with a sense of welcome, but also treating them with a sense of hospitality and recognizing that we have something to learn from those emotions if we sit down and kind of talk and converse with them. I really see anger and grief, not as oppositional but as a part of the process and a part of the practice of critical hope, because, as I mentioned before, this idea of grappling, we're always changing our relationship to hope. And when we encounter something like terrible grief, or intense anger, hope feels like the furthest thing from, you know, for me anyways, it feels like the furthest thing from my mind, I don't care about hopefulness in that moment, I care about justice. Or I don't care about hopefulness in that moment, I care about wallowing in my own sadness.
And when we consider those intense emotions, I think back to the interview I did with Dr. Peter Wood in this book, who is a climate activist and has his PhD and has been working on this campaign to get the right to a healthy environment recognized in the Canadian Constitution. He, you know, in our interview he talked about, he just doesn't align with this idea of climate grief, because that's not what drives him. He doesn't feel grief or sadness, he feels anger. He looks around and he sees these policies that do not support a more positive trajectory. And all he can feel is just red hot anger. And he said that it's that anger that helps him wake up in the morning and feel motivated, it gives him the fire in his belly to achieve change. And in that way, I think anger can really offer us this, you know, Lama Rod Owens wrote a book called Love and Rage. And he explores this concept in great depth throughout that entire book. But yeah, anger is a very active emotion. It's a motivating emotion.
And I think, you know, something like grief as well. It has its own gifts as well. Grief is the kind of thing that I think helps us to commiserate with the communities we're closest to, to the people who are in solidarity with us. And it can help us to build boundaries. Grief can allow us the rest that we need, the hibernation sometimes that we need to step away from something. So they have a seat at the table in considering how we sometimes just rest and rejuvenate in order to get back to it again and generate change.
Am Johal 38:59
Yeah, it's interesting. I'm working on project with a friend of mine around friendship and community and you know, anger and rage in as much as they may have negative qualities, at least in a psychoanalytic sense, there's a whole other body of work in Nietzsche, other people, who are talking about anger as a place of catharsis, as the place of working through. There's others like Deleuze, where in relation to friendship, he talks about the capacity to be with others in a way that has a kind of unhingedness to it. And the capacity to be kind of crazy and out there with your friends. And especially when we think about artistic practice, some of the people that you interview, the kind of risk-taking that's inherent to take something to another place, and in some sense that there is a kind of, perhaps a kind of critical hope that can be built in that type of risk-taking together through the labour of a kind of kind of work. We call it a kind of practice. Yeah, I'm wondering if there is anything else you'd like to add?
Kari Grain 40:03
I talk about this in the book as well. But in Buddhism, there's this concept called, I don't know if I'm pronouncing it correctly, but Ye Tang Che and it's the state of being totally fed up. And, you know, folks who have written about it, talked about it as similar to despair, where there's like, nothing left. It's the blank canvas, but it's also the beginning of the beginning. So a lot of people position this idea of despair or hopelessness as an endpoint. But in Ye Tang Che, it's positioned as the beginning of the beginning now that we don't have any expectations attached to the future, we can begin to open up to what is about to unfold. And I think there's a lot of wisdom to be gained through these difficult emotions, you know, again sometimes in psychology they termed them like negative emotions but it's just in how you frame it. I really do feel that they can be a part of the praxis and practice of critical hope.
Am Johal 41:01
Kari, wondering if you could read one one piece to take us home.
Kari Grain 41:06
Okay, can I have one moment to find the right one?
Am Johal 41:10
Course, course.
Kari Grain 41:12
So this excerpt is from the section where I talk about the principles of critical hope. And this principle is number four, which is that critical hope is intimately entangled with the body and the land.
The “cultivation” of critical hope is itself land-based imagery that depends upon the gifts of the earth to nourish new life and to allow for growth. Just as thought arises from an entanglement with the body, the body arises from an intimate relationship with the earth. It is from the earth that our flesh is created, and it is back to the earth that our flesh will return. The land, therefore, is not just central to an understanding of critical hope; within it lives a history that impresses itself upon the current moment. Thus, it is essential to critical hope that individuals and communities engage with the politics, emotions, and histories of the land on which they live, work, love, and learn. As part of that work, one can reflect on the processes by which borders are made and unmade, by whom, and at whose expense. Places that hold pain and suffering can be powerful sites of learning; a sense of home in a place can create feelings of safety and belonging; and land that has been stolen from its original people and stewards carries in it a living demand for justice–for decolonization and reconciliation. Therefore, the cultivation of critical hope requires an engagement with several questions related to land: How does the land inform and affect my own identity? How does my sense of home and belonging impact my ability to imagine the future and generate change? What are the histories that have unfolded on this land, and as the current occupant, steward, or settler here, how can my own actions in the present redress the injustice of the past?
Home Is Where the Snowdrops Bloom
So this is a section that was kind of an introduction to the section on the land. And then this is a little example that I offer up before an interview.
Places ground our hope in earth. They situate our memories and paint our futures into a landscape. I write this as I sit on a swinging bench at my childhood home. At some point last year, my parents decided that they needed to downsize to a home that was easier to look after. So this time, as I return for a visit to my childhood home, it is for the last time.
Cricket chirps decorate the soundscape with audio sparkles; crickets do to the nighttime soundscape what fairy lights and lightning bugs do to the night's dark canvas. In two weeks, my parents will hand over the keys to this family home of twenty-four years, and they will likely never walk back through the door again. They have cared for every inch of this home and the yard, and each nook holds a family memory. Whatever I visit, my mom leads me out to the backyard for a tour of her garden and an in-depth explanation of each tulip (the only survivors after the deer got the rest of them), each tomato plant (the tomatoes are late this year, you see, because it's been so cold), and each patch of grass (this area is yellow and dried out for some reason, even though we haven't done anything different there). For over a decade they kept a gaudy stepping-stone that my ex-boyfriend and I had bought my mom for her birthday, and it sits half buried in the vegetable garden. The low-lying tree line along the fence is where our family dog, Susie, would always lose the soccer balls that she pushed around with her nose. Even though she died nearly a decade ago, I can still look out at this yard and see in my mind's eye, joyfully fetching toys and maniacally chasing me when she had the zoomies.
My oldest brother got married in this yard and years later I first met and fell in love with my niece here when he brought her over. Hidden somewhere in the soil of the garden bed directly under our kitchen window. There is a cluster of snowdrops, small white flowers that poke their heads out of the snow each February or March, the first flowers of the year. They are not just snowdrops, though their snow drops that my high school librarian Mrs. Knox gave me because she found me tucked in a corner of the library one day reading Emily Dickinson poetry with a romantic light in my eye. She said “These flowers are just like that poem.” My favorite Dickinson poem to which she was is referring begins like this:
“Hope” is the thing with feathers -
That perches in the soul -
And sings the tune without the words -
And never stops - at all -
Mrs. Knox saw nature not just for the material reality it grows around us, but for the way it represents the passage of time and the metaphors it offers for our existence. Snowdrops are not just flowers. They are radical trailblazers. They are the first person holding a protest sign before the cause has caught on in social media. They are the friend who joyfully stampedes into a chilly ocean before everybody else does. They're the sign everybody was waiting for that the hardest part is over, changes afoot, and we can all start to show up to the life we want to live. Snowdrops are to hope what falling leaves are to sorrow, a poetic metaphor gifted to us by the natural world; a beautiful and simplistic way to explain the essence of something complex.
As I prepare to say goodbye to the home where I grew up, I'm not just leaving a roof structure and a patch of grass with a fence around it. I leave behind the ghosts of the past, who I can see embedded in the landscape, people and animals who I have lost but who remain a fixture here, I leave behind the tulip bulbs and iris tubers that lie hidden in the soil. And the hibernating snowdrops that will surprise a new family when next winter begins to ease its grip on the land. To me, the sorrow I associate with leaving my childhood home is a reminder about the power of land. It holds history. It weaves stories about one's developing identity, and it grounds a person's sense of home. If it holds this kind of meaning for me, when the land was only in our family for a generation, I can't imagine the sort of pain that people feel when they are forced to leave their homes because of war, or when they have been forced off their ancestral land because of colonization and greed. Buried in the land are familial connections, hidden roots of perennial truths, evidence of historical events, and tangled webs of relationships and intermingling forms of life.
Am Johal 47:58
Kari, thank you so much for sharing your book with us and being on Below the Radar. Wonderful to still be working with you after all these years after meeting you at a conference in New Orleans in 2015 or 16.
Kari Grain 48:13
Yeah, yeah, it's so great that we've been able to continue our collaborations. Thank you for having me.
Am Johal 48:18
Yeah. Thank you, Kari.
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Sena Cleave 48:24
Below the Radar is a knowledge democracy podcast created by SFU’s Vancity Office of Community Engagement. Thanks for listening to our conversation with Kari Grain. Head to the show notes to find Kari’s book, Critical Hope, and other resources mentioned in the episode. Don’t forget to subscribe to Below the Radar on your podcast listening app of choice. Thanks for listening, and we’ll catch you next time on Below the Radar.
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