For many, to complain is to become more visible and thus more vulnerable. To be under scrutiny can feel like those around you, who surround you, are waiting for you to trip up. And maybe it feels like that because it is that…..To stand out, to be seen, is to live under “the sign of trouble.” Given that complaining can make you stand out even more, complaining can heighten your sense of being targeted at the very moment you try to stop yourself from being targeted.
Month: March 2022
“Blank noise” is a non-profit organization and a community project, run solely by volunteers aiming to raise awareness about sexual and gender-based violence and encouraging people to take agency against it. The project has its roots in Bangalore where it was initiated by Jasmeen Patheja in the framework of a student project. The community around “Blank noise” has grown substantially within the last years and its initiatives have also reached other cities in India1.
The project has risen out of the struggle of not being heard: It has developed out of the issue of sexual harassment in India that was, as the name of the project implies, merely a noise from the background, hence something that was likely to be overheard. “Blank noise” wanted to change this and give a voice to the people that have suffered under gender based violence. Developed in 2003 it has been one of the first initiatives to bring attention to sexual and street harassment. At that time this issue did not even have a word to name it and was called “eve teasing” which was misleadingly implying a harmlessness to it. If as a victim of gender-based violence, you cannot even name what is happening to you, it will be very challenging for you to fight against it. “Blank noise” is about naming it, voicing it, showing it and hence fighting it.
1 Wikipedia: Blank Noise. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blank_Noise. Accessed Feb. 2022.
The work of “Blank Noise” includes performative actions and interventions in public space that draw attention to street harassment. Furthermore, it consists of building testimonials for those affected by it as well as creating a community that supports them. Herewith they don’t only raise awareness about the problem of “eve teasing” and animate people to tackle the issue but also build a safe space for victims of such incidents, by for example providing legal counselling for them. Through campaigns, workshops, discussions and the use of mainstream media their message is communicated, and people are involved. Hence a community of Action Sheroes/ Theyroes/ Heroes was established that fights for a life without fear:
“Blank Noise ignites the idea that every person has the ability and potential to eradicate sexual and gender based violence.”2
One of the biggest concerns of the initiative lies within ending victim blaming, to shift the responsibility of the act of sexual violence from the affected to the perpetrators and with it recognizing collective responsibility for this issue. One of their most known works is the “I Never Ask For It” project that has been going on since 2004. Victims of sexual and gender based violence are asked the question: “Do you remember the clothes you wore when you experienced the violence?” and are invited to share these garments with the project. The aim is to by 2023 have collected 10000 garment testimonials that will be installed collectively at sites of public significance. “Blank noise” uses the clothes symbolically to break with the assumption that the victim in some way by its appearance, behavior or by being too attractive, has provoked or requested the assault. Through different methods such as workshops, campaigns, public interventions, exhibitions or collaborative research, these testimonials are brought to the people. The performative actions consist of carrying the clothes through the streets and confronting the public with the truth. In addition to this they carry boards where affected people can give testimonial about the sexual violence they have experienced and what they now want to ask for. These walks of testimonials stand as an act of giving witness and showing solidarity with those assaulted: a walk towards a process of healing.
“To end sexual violence we need to end victim blame”3
Another project that caught my interest was the “Meet to sleep” project. Connecting to the idea of the right to live a life without fear, “Blank noise” motivated women to sleep anywhere in public. They want to fight for the possibility that even in this very intimate and vulnerable position of sleeping you would not have a reason to be worried to be attacked. It’s a step moving “Towards the right to live defenceless.”4 The initiative invites women to connect with each other and to gather to sleep together in the parc (or anywhere else) and to talk about their experience. You can either join an existing “Meet to sleep”-action or initiate one by yourself or you can even just decide to sleep anywhere. This activity, the moment of overcoming your fear, enables the participants to create a new narrative, detached from fear. Sometimes an activity as simple as the act of sleeping can become an act of resistance and of change for a life in which you can feel safe no matter your gender:
“I feel safe when I am heard.
I feel safe when I am not judged.
I feel safe when I don’t have to justify myself, over and over and over again.
I, Action Shero, am your safe space,
as you are mine.
I never ask for it.”5
2Blank Noise: About, Herstory. https://www.blanknoise.org/about/herstory. Accessed Feb. 2022.
3Blank Noise
4Blank Noise: Meet To Sleep, About Meet To Sleep. https://www.blanknoise.org/aboutmeettosleep. Accessed Feb. 2022.
5Blank Noise: Home. https://www.blanknoise.org/home. Accessed Feb. 2022.
Feeling safe means being heard, feeling safe means feeling believed – Connections to the book “Complaint!” by Sarah Ahmed
In both the book “Complaint!” (2021) as well as through the work of the “Blank noise”-collective the connection between feeling safe and being heard and believed is emphasized. In a lot of the narratives in the book of those who shared their experience with engaging in a process of complaining, the burden of having the impression of talking to a wall but also of not being believed strongly emerges. “Blank noise” attaches great importance to precisely this aspect, helping women to speak up, to be heard and fighting for being believed in order to live without fear.
In the book “Complaint!” Sarah Ahmed deepens her idea of the “feminist ear” which she has first introduced in her book “A Feminist Life”. To hear with a feminist ear does not only mean “to hear who is not heard” but also “how we are not heard”6 and it can also mean to hear silence: “what is not being said, what is not being done, what is not being dealt with”7. “Blank noise” has emerged out of hearing the silence of sexual harassment that was not being addressed, and the initiative has turned this silence into noise. Through the collective a lot of women found the courage to express what they have experienced. This provokes those with no feminist ear to sill hear and to hopefully become more sensitive to their own and someone else’s actions regarding sexual assault.
“Blank Noise and its #INeverAskForIt mission are committed and invested in building our collective capacity to be listeners.
It isn’t enough to ask or ‘encourage’ survivors of violence to speak, when the capacity to listen has not been taught.”8
While the book focusses most of its attention to the barriers you face while complaining within the institutional context, the work of “Blank noise” is not about formally filing a complaint and it reaches out to many areas outside institutions, such as the private life. Nevertheless, a part of their work lies withing supporting women as they engage in official processes of reporting the sexual violence they have experienced.
Both initiatives9 base their intention on working with testimonies. The process of sharing personal testimonies can be experienced as very difficult because “to speak about a past trauma can be to make that trauma present”10. However this might be an important step into finding peace with what has happened as “Blank Noise” states: “We want the building of this mission to be a process of healing; where survivors of violence feel heard and believed.”11
Unfortunately, it is not self-evident that one is believed when one speaks up about the fact that one’s own boundaries have been severely crossed. Reading the book “Complaint!” might at times be a bit disillusioning; hearing about all the complaints that don’t go through, all the people that are ignored and all the institutional barriers that manifest themselves as soon as you want to criticize anything. A lot of testimonies in the book are about how the complainers struggled with not knowing if it was justified for them to complain. They either nearly did not speak up at all because they did not fully have the trust that they would have the right to do so or if they did, they would be told that they had misunderstood the situation that has caused them to complain. If you are not believed to have experienced sexual violence or harassment or are even blamed as the victim for the sexual assault, then the one that has caused the violence is not taking any responsibility. It’s the victim’s fault, either for having “caused” the incident (“she asked for it”) or for having misjudged the situation (“it was nothing”). „The opposite of feeling blamed is being believed.“12 Ending victim blaming, recognizing the individual boundaries and sensibilities of each person is the step we need to take to achieve a society where everyone takes responsibility for their actions.
However discouraging failed complaints might be, one essential message of the book “Complaint!” is how as a collective you can get further. “Collectivity was a way to share the cost of complaint. Rather than each of us being on her own, we would stand together.”13 “Blank noise” is providing this collective power for the women who stood alone. If you are not alone you can be heard and if testimonies add one to another change is possible. Until we have reached that change, we have to scream loud enough.
“To complain is to give support to life: you plant something in saying no, by saying no, the twists and turns of new growth.”14
6Ahmed, S. (2021): Complaint!. Durham: Duke University Press, p.4
7ebd., p.7
8Blank Noise: Home. https://www.blanknoise.org/home. Accessed Feb. 2022.
9I decided to speak of the book “Complaint!” as an initiative as I recognize Sarah Ahmed’s work of collecting testimonies as more than just documentation.
10Ahmed, S.: Complaint!. p.14.
11Blank Noise: I Never Ask For It, Vision / Origin. https://www.blanknoise.org/ineveraskforit/vision. Accessed Feb. 2022.
12Visible: Award 2019 – Shortlisted Blank Noise – Jasmeen Patheja. https://www.visibleproject.org/blog/project/blank-noise/. Accessed Jan. 2022.
13Ahmed, S.: Complaint!. p.266.
14ebd., p.309.
note: to simplify the formatting I have just simply put all the sources at the end of the text. For the detailed citation check out the file on Moodle or leave a comment.
Introducing the artist and the chosen artworks
“With my will, I have to be optimistic. If not, I would just kill myself.” says the Chilean-born and New York based architect, photographer, and filmmaker Alfredo Jaar during an interview with the Guardian, smiling playfully. It made me laugh out loud, not with joy, but relief. I joke about killing myself all the time – well, not all the time. But enough to make my friends uncomfortable – and I always have to explain that I won’t do it, I’m not planning to end my life. Not only because – Jaar quotes the Romanian philosopher Emil Cioran in that interview – “It is not worth the bother of killing yourself, since you always kill yourself too late.” but also because I, too, have this will of going on. A blessing and a curse.
Jaar thinks of himself as “an architect who makes art”, and rightly so, given that he graduated from his architecture with a poem. He aims to raise awareness and to create empathy, to make us look at what we do not want to see, don’t have the heart for it, maybe – but not at the cost of trivializing suffering or humiliating the victims, without relying on cheap thrills and easy provocations.
An example of this would be the project Lights in the City (1999) – a project designed to draw attention to the burgeoning issue of homelessness in Montreal.
The artist installed red light on the Copula of the Marche Bonsecours, a landmark monument in the center of Montreal. The lights were connected to homeless shelters located 500 yards from the building. When a homeless person entered one of the shelters, they could press the button that would make the top of the building glow red.
The historic landmark had burnt around five times before this project came to fruition. The glowing red light could therefore be interpreted as yet another fire, Jaar says. But the main message was far more important. Jaar wanted the building to become a “permanent monument of shame” We come to ignore photos and video reportages, at some point, eventually. As we are surrounded by too many of them. Too much suffering you’d become numb, and distracted by the next photo advertising the dream vacation.. He does not want to be a part of that.
You see an image of poverty here, you see another tragedy there. You see a couple of headlines and then see you see advertisements for a vacation for Hawaii. And so these images of pain, of suffering, are drowning in a sea of consumption.
For this reason, and also because he did not want to expose the homeless people through photography, the route was taken to make a historical building in one of the richest cities of the world the very symbol of the issue of homelessness. One might become indifferent to the images of pain, of suffering, it is, however, much harder to ignore that each time the building lights up with that bright, intimidating red, a homeless person has pressed the button. It was Jaar’s way to move the city by the sheer number of the people who did not have a place to call home – without humiliating and dehumanizing them.
The project was canceled six weeks later by the mayor. “With these projects you change so little” says Jaar. Speaking one of my dark thoughts every time I find myself admiring an installation, a performance, an artistic idea aiming to bring about positive change – They change so little.
Yet Jaar, as mentioned in the beginning, has to be optimistic. A message conveyed with his public artwork at Edinburgh art festival 2019, I Can’t Go On, I Go On. Taken from the ending words of Samuel Beckett’s The Unnameable. During the festival performers would wear sandwich boards with I Can’t Go On on their chests, I’ll Go On on their backs.
“It’s about our incapacity to change this reality, even though I keep going, I keep trying. Because this is the only thing I know,” Jaar says. His optimism also manifests itself in his decision to dedicate a third of his time to teaching. He believes in the younger generation. “Perhaps someone who sees his Edinburgh piece this week will be inspired to make their own work. Perhaps they will offer us a new vision that can help us navigate the darkness.”
Relevance to Sara Ahmed: Complaint!
A Complaint, Ahmed writes, “raises the blind.”, which parallels with how Jaar uses his art to draw the attention of the public to the matters left undiscussed or ignored. The homeless shelter next to the Capula in Montreal was “invisible, just like the homeless were invisible… They were overlooked, as a garbage can or a lamppost is ignored” The Lights in the City project gave them back the humanity, made people recognize their existence, even through a smile. The issue was also raised in the press. “We gave them a brief, hopeful moment when they regained their humanity,” says Jaar, adding to the statement that he and his team wanted the Capula to become a permanent monument of shame. “Other shelters wanted to join us and get connected” implying that originally, there was a long term plan. Each night, the historic building was to burn red, burning again and again and again, reminding the city how it has failed to protect its most vulnerable. The homeless were the living, breathing proof of this failure and their invisibility the result of the most simple coping mechanism known to man: Avoidance.
Violence is often dealt with by not being faced. It is then as if the complaint brings the violence into existence, forcing it to be faced. Perhaps this is why complaints are often heard as forceful. For those who received the complaint, who heard the sounds she made, it was the complaint that alerted them to violence. A complaint is how violence is revealed; a complaint raises the blind.
The mayor, I assume, dealt with the problem by dealing with what was raising the problem. “When you expose a problem you pose a problem.” The homeless went back to their state of invisibility, ignored as a garbage can or a lamppost, and people went back to ignoring them, living their day-to-day life, the burden of guilt upon seeing the Capula burning bright off their shoulders. I do not blame the people, of course. Dealing with the issue of homelessness is a problem beyond individual responsibility. Yet with the attention of the public and the press being withdrawn, there was so little left to impose a degree of moral pressure on the authorities. “I fail all the time.” Jaar told the Guardian. “You change so little.”
Having jaar’s intention in mind, one might argue that the project “failed” in ways more than one: he recalls running into some drunken men one night, wandering in the streets and cheering with joy as the red lights in the capula brightened. It’s hard to imagine someone reading Complaint! or listening to one of Ahmend’s speeches and missing her point, yet conveying a message through art always runs the risk of misinterpretation. Jaar’s Lights in the City was no expectation. “You cannot predict what will happen when your work is in the public space.” says Jaar.
Demonstrating a horrible truth through art might leave you with something that is, in the eye of the beholder, solely something beautiful to look at. However, I’d dare say that more people would be willing to visit a “cool performance art”, than reading a text book on sexual assault. But only one of them in guaranteed to convey the message the creator is intending to.
“Many of the stories I have collected in this book seem to be stories of working very hard not to get very far.” Ahmed admits this vague hopelessness near the end of the book Complaint! This cold fear that would turn your stomach. We’re changing so little. But she proceeds to add: “a complaint is a way of not being crushed” and not necessarily, going somewhere.
This way of thinking is reflected in how Jaar approaches art, and life, perfectly captured in Edinburgh’s art festival piece. This notion of going on – regardless of how you feel, not getting crushed.
Ahmed reminds us furthermore of all the things complaining could mean without getting through, without reaching justice. Without hoping to reach justice since you know well that the system is broken. Yet, “Complaints can stir things up. Complaints can stir up other complaints” Ahmed avoids using the verb “fail”. the complainer never fails. Whenever they give up, wherever they stop, wherever they are stopped, frustrated by scratching the surface, they have left something behind. Even leaving is a statement by itself. “An empty space is still a thing, even if it’s defined by absence.” *
You can’t fail when you are not seeking to win. Complaining could be about paving a path. Going on because “The more a path is used, the more a path is used.” Ahmed said in a lecture on Complaint as Diversity Work. Paving a path, gathering resources, creating a record, forming a collective, filling a cabinet, witnessing a burial. Watching complaints get buried, a piece of you, a part of your history, being buried. Ahmed mentions a student using the sinister metaphor of a complaint graveyard. A burial could be the end of it. Ahmed does come back to this metaphor as she closes the last chapter, this time, however, she reassures, something will rise from those graves.
The complaints that disappeared behind the doors, the ones that became a burden on our backs, the ones that were never made, they all might make it to the graveyard, make it less lonely. Make the ghosts less lonely. Make the graveyard much harder to manage. That’s the goal of forming a complaint collective, becoming harder to manage. And if, when, the ghosts come back to haunt the institutions, they won’t be stopped by doors and walls. Ahmed writes: “I think of little ghosts and I hear little birds, ‘little birds scratching away at something.’”
I Can’t Go On. I’ll Go On.
Alfredo Jaar, “Art provocateur Alfredo Jaar: ‘I want to change the world. I fail all the time’,” interview by Dominic Rushe, Guardian, August 1, 2019, accessed January 25, 2022, https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2019/aug/01/alfredo-jaar-artist-interview-change-the-world-pinochet-chile-edinburgh.
Alfredo Jaar, “Photo realism – an interview with Alfredo Jaar,” interview by Robert Barry, Apollo, July 26, 2020, accessed January 25, 2022, https://www.apollo-magazine.com/photo-realism-an-interview-with-alfredo-jaar.
Alfredo Jaar, “Alfredo Jaar – interview: ‘You can talk about violence without humiliating the victim’,” interview by Joe Lloyd, Studio International, December 19 2019, accessed January 25, 2022, https://www.studiointernational.com/index.php/alfredo-jaar-you-can-talk-about-violence-without-humiliating-the-victim.
“Book Review – Art & Activism in the Age of Globalization,” We Make Money Not Art, December 27, 2011, accessed January 25, 2022, https://we-make-money-not-art.com/art_activism_in_the_age_of_glo.
Alfredo Jaar, “THE AESTHETICS OF WITNESSING: A CONVERSATION WITH ALFREDO JAAR’,” interview by Patricia C Philips, Public Art, Fall 2015, accessed January 25, 2022, https://publicart.ie/en/main/thinking/writing/writing/view//a42117773b66aedacec0bba127955203/?tx_pawritings_uid=43.
Sara Ahmed, Complaint! (Durham: Duke University Press, 2021)
Sara Ahmed, “Complaint as Diversity Work,” uploaded March 2016, video, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JQ_1kFwkfVE&ab_channel=CRASSHCambridge.
* This one might feel like an out of place source to cite. The indie game developer Scott Benson worte the said line in a article about the video game Kentucky Route Zero. KR0 deals with matters such as capitalism, debt, loss, and death. Benson wrote in another section: “Kentucky Route Zero has, among other things, always been about what happens after disaster. Those who are gone aren’t restored, not bodily anyway. But they’re here.” Reading complaint! made me imagine a video game, with the protagonist running through an infinite collider with endless doors. I think it’s the presence of the topic of survival that makes me keep coming back to a video game idea when reading the book, and to connect the concept with video games. “Scott Benson’s Top 10 Games of 2020” Giant Bomb News, Giant Bomb, January 21, 2021, accessed January 25, 2022, https://www.giantbomb.com/articles/scott-bensons-top-10-games-of-2020/1100-6094.
KR0 is a beautiful text-heavy game, like playing rhrough a novel. Highly recommended.
When we started this seminar we were asked to write the expectations we had about it. I wrote I wanted to know what a complaint is. More than four months after this moment I think I still do not know what that is. In this post I share the path I have gone through to approach the definition of complain.
Going full cliché I check the definition online, it is a way to start:
So complain is the act and the state.
This is big and ambiguous and I like ambiguous things. On the other hand, I spent the time I read the book wanting to know the definition Sara had for us. There was not such a thing like a moment where a ultimate definition of complaint was presented and I did not like that, somehow.
We (“we” as referring to “me” but feeling less lonely in this journey) passed the barrier of only considering complaining the formal filling forms format. For a really long part of the reading process I thought that was the case and that got me annoyed. Even if the explanations never closed the definition almost in any way, I was bitter with the writer. I could not believe this. Even though I know in page four (page four!) it clearly explains “a complaint can be an expression of grief, pain, or dissatisfaction, something that is a cause of a protest or outcry, a bodily ailment, or a formal allegation”. This was not enough for me. I just could not stop thinking about the -other- types of complaining that involve maybe unorthodox/impulsive/childish/and-so-on kind of behavior.
Then at some point I realized the writing style she has, repeating some structures or emphasizing by rerunning the sentences maybe adding a little bit more at a time or making minor changes. This is the moment I had the idea of collecting sentences from the book that might clear up my hesitations about the definition presented. I am really thankful about the “searching” tool in texts available in digital books. I take this moment to appreciate the Ctrl + F.
So as we all know, we can get the words and sentences we want from a text, in this case a whole book. For your information, you can find the word “complain” 251 times and “complaint” a total of 1686 times.
I searched for combos like “to make a complaint is”, “to complain is” or the longest one by far “complaint can”. I think the most useful one was this one:
With this collection I satisfied a little bit my needs of definition, still as an ambiguous and big pool.
By the end of the book I finally was dazzled by what it seemed to be a strong statement who says:
(And it comes from a previous book from Sara in 2012: “On Being Included: Racism and Diversity in Institutional.”)
“If complaint can be understood as a phenomenology of the institution, complaint is a practical phenomenology“
While reading I also made many notes about what the institution/structure means to me and how I experience it. I might have been caressing the position of wanting to scape the structure but (sadly?) it is not that realistic. Complain ties us up with the institution. My initial aim was to avoid formal ways of complaining as I thought complaining the formal way would only show that I support the institution/structure. Why would I like to support such thing?
Complaining in non-formal ways ALSO knots us with structures. I wonder, could it be because structures are usually the thing to blame? So as we usually blame structures in formal and non-formal types of complaints that could be the link. Even if, for example, you are complaining about your grandpa having an old-fashioned way of thinking and him being intransigent, there is the structure of power+sexism to blame. Huh, how easy is this? If everything is a structure there is always a structure to blame.
I consider <<blame>> a really critical ingredient of complaining. I might talk about this in the future and how we can blame things that are bigger than us/our control.
So, yes, again in this ambiguous map I enjoy. The complaint is together with the institution/structure. But I was still thirsty for limits. I thought if I might not find the big limits of it, I could at least work with the content we know it is inside of it. Thats when I though of classifying the inside of complaint. The first approach was to make a diagram, a Venn one:
Obviously we have the big big circle that captures everything, called complaint, and inside of it the are two main types of complaint.
The most attractive part I find is the protest, and how it can be both at the same time (the joy of ambiguity strikes back!?). I would like to go deep about it in other post.
In future posts I will suggest as well a way of classifying complaints regarding their traits.
So yes, anyway, what is still the definition of complaint..?
One possible option: could everything be a complaint?
Is it like the definition of art by Dickie? He said something like “a work of art is an artifact upon which some person(s) acting on behalf of the artworld has conferred the status of candidate for appreciation“
yuhuuu then: “a complaint is an artifact upon which some person(s) acting on behalf of the complaintworld has conferred the status of candidate for appreciation”
Lets appreciate coomplaints in the complaintworld then!?
In this post I want to share my notes on the book Complaint!.
Here I attach the scans of the pages. My aim was to gather all the information that clicked with me and have it in a small format collection I could carry and look up easily. It is divided in the parts and chapters the book offers.
The information from the book is in black and my personal thoughts, additions and comments are on blue (sometimes pencil and pink). There are some small parts written in Spanish. There are also misspellings, mistakes and probably things I do not think anymore.
I hope it can help to have an overview of the content, even if it is my own objective one.
Feel free to rescue, comment and use the ideas I mark here. I have the feeling I have a considerable collection of headlines that can lead to good texts if they are cared, squeezed and loved.
The name of this post references an option in social media platforms, such as YouTube or Facebook. Usually is only a selection of comments that is shown beforehand and there is a button to click that says “show all comments”. When clicking this option, the comments can be read in chronological order (as I am showing here).
Categories
Complaint Language II // Complaint Grammar
These complaints often did not sound like us: we had such a narrow channel in which to describe what happened to us, what it meant, and what it did. This translation became a means by which we used the institutional language to resist the ways it sought to silence us.”
Sara Ahmed, Complaint! (2021)
When I looked for more information about complaint on the internet, one of the first things that pops up on my page is language teaching clips on how to make a complaint. I watched several clips and found the structure of the language is something interesting. You have to be polite yet firm on what you need, you should not state it directly but rather use specific form of sentences. It is almost like making a complaint has their own grammar!
Complain = to tell someone that something is wrong or not satisfactory, and that you are annoyed about it
Complaint = a statement that something is wrong or not satisfactory/report of a problem
Cambridge Dictionary
In the beginning of the class when I knew that we were dealing under the topic of “Complaintivism”, the first thing that came into my mind was rather the act of murmuring, expressing the unpleasant feeling which might fall into the meaning of “complain” than “complaint”.
I somehow had some difficulties distinct between these two English words, and couldn’t help but feel a negative vibe out of it. As I mentioned couple of times in the class that I have negative connotation from the word especially when translated from Thai word “บ่น (Bon)” and “ร้องทุกข์ (Rongtook)”
The word “บ่น” in Thai or complain, according to Thai Royal Academy dictionary means babbling or reprimanding over and over again. While “ร้องทุกข์” Complaint means stating suffering to ask for help which is pretty much the same as in English.
Maybe it was because of loss in translation, again when I heard the term “Complaintivism” one of the first feelings that came into my mind is the feeling of being oppressed. Being a Thai person, I grew up in such a hierarchical society. The young ones should not complain and follow what elders or people in higher positions suggest. To point out something, it might be taken as a mumbling sound. The definition, babbling or reprimanding over and over again definitely define the annoyance of the act right away.
To look at how the young protesters in Thailand that have been fighting with the political regime, they did state their problems, dissatisfaction, suffering and point out what is wrong, then it is supposed to be counted as a complaint. However; the right-wing supporters who mostly are in the older generation ridicule these young ones as those who only complain but never take action, acting like a child crying for their toys.
Complain/Complaint/บ่น Bon/ร้องทุกข์ Rongtook these words that share the same and totally different meanings. Until now I still cannot quite distinct it, or maybe I can say I see it entangled with each other and hard to define even before the class. Perhaps it might be worth seeing the uses of it instead, and in this way, we might find the route of being suppressed eventually.
Categories
To Complain or Not to Complain
One day, late evening around 17:00 almost 18:00, me and my friend, who is Vietnamese-German, headed to the new Taiwanese restaurant that just opened not so far from Herderplatz. We decided to take the route near Bauhaus University Library, where we had to walk down the stairs behind the library. With the design of the building, we couldn’t see right away that there was a group of probably 6-7 teenagers, all male and white, standing drinking and smoking nearby.
The moment we both noticed each other, my friend and I unintentionally stopped and looked at each other. Something made us feel insecure, and a short moment later, we continued our walk. Their eyes opened wide, their mouth turned its shape to smile…or more like smirk, looked like they saw their prey.
They started making noises mocking us, saying words in German that I don’t understand. We tried to pretend that we don’t hear a thing, and keep moving on, but the stairs are quite long. They shouted “Konnichiwa” repeatedly, and my friend decided to walk back and confront them. They didn’t seem to regret or realize what they did. They still made fun of my friend. We were too tired and outnumbered so we left with their voices shouting…woo…woo…behind.
When I went back home, I did not know what to do so I expressed my frustration via an info-graphic post about Asian racism and racial slur with an angry caption mentioning “I wish someone can educate those teenagers near Bauhaus Uni Library”. Another friend of mine contacted me, if I want to make a complaint feel free to do so. I told him I want to but I can’t see where it would lead to, I can’t see how the solution would come when I don’t even know those kids.
Then I just realized, do I just fall to another trap of institutional complaint? In this case, I am not scared of how it might affect my position since they are probably in the same social role as me (even though they definitely have white privileges as their weapons) like in some examples from Sara Ahmed. It is more of the red tape that hasn’t existed yet that threatened me indirectly and stopped me from making the complaint as well as unpromising result, so I rather make my own complaint through instagram story.
It is quite surprising for me how I thought I would be able to handle myself and get away with a proper complaint. I am still figuring it out, are there any more reasons behind it? Am I trying to avoid something?
Categories
THE LOCAL REPORT
This video work I intended to use the style of news scoop in Thai news shows from the 90’s-early 2000’s that they often have short time for a report on people’s problems.
Most of the time, there are problems with infrastructures such as road cracks, lights out, floods, etc. These problems cannot be solved by themselves. Therefore, before social media time they use TV to expose the troubles in hope of speeding up the process. And lots of time it works! So I experimented with the format to complain about the struggles I have faced in Weimar. Let’s see if it will work or not!