Author: yun

While the speaker made a complaint, there was another “I” who heard the complaint.

This “I” was, usually, or could be, a close friend or family.

However, the Emotional Worker or Counter Staff was the first person – who picked up the phone and answered or provided the basic requirements and guided the procedure and this could have been their first encounter.

This “I” is in charge and makes them fill the formula, asks them to wait till next week or next month, and delivers the papers to the committee.

 I (the counter staff, the emotional worker) had the duty of encoding or numbering the REAL COMPLAINT into JUST LETTERS and categorizing these complaints according to a given method.

In this numbered paper, there was no FACE, VOICE, EMOTION or indication that ‘I’ was heard.

I felt that they gasped for breath when they were angry and devastated. But when the complaints were delivered to the superiors, they could only see the well-ordered words. There was no reality. Thus, at some point, whenever I encountered THE SPEAKER, I pretended that I couldn’t hear-see-feel their complaints. 

This is my confession which I regret making rather late in time. I worked for many years as counter staff and I still remember passing the speaker by with an empty look. These memories struck me vividly while I read this book.

Unfortunately, the entire process of making the complaint is laid with privatizing the complaint. 

Compared with making criticism, during the procedure of making a complaint mostly have the I, or first person. 

So relevantly, the complaint itself involves – who struggles with making a complaint – I, the first person that is speaking.

This person is directly concerned as a complainer which is easily entailed to a label or document as Sara Ahmed said. 

And during the complaint work, I realized “Me and my complaint could not be separated.”

Internalizing the complaint naturally happens to I, but not to others. At the same time, I even experience that people equated me and my complaint.

“My complaint is not my whole, but still, this is affecting me” 

For approving the existing I, existing complaint, the first person has become a speaker again and again. 

Through enduring pain, their bodies [voice, face, tremble … ] represent testimony.

And It began to be a citation.

If bodies can end up in documents, and documents can end up in files, bodies can also be files or perhaps bodies can be filing cabinets, holders of multiple files. What is filed away by institutions can be stored in our bod- ies, experienced often as weight. The body of the complainer is a testimony to the work of complaint

Sara Ahmed “Complaints!” 2021