Keeping the Peace
I have no desire to ‘keep the peace’, either in my work or in my everyday living. I have lived long enough to know there is always a price for remaining silent. I want to explore the dark even terrifying territory of our lives with imagination, candour and feeling. In plummeting the depths of feeling, we may find ourselves. I cannot begin my relationship with the living planet if I don’t have a relationship to myself. It is an oxymoron. Once we find trust in our bodily knowing there is a realm of knowledge that reveals itself to us. In learning to perceive we learn to perceive others and the living world.
I tried to ‘keep the peace’ for many years. First, as a girl child, then as a young wife. One day I woke up. Prince Charming did not kiss my lips. Prince Charming kept me sleeping, tiptoeing around me, to hold me ‘in place’, to maintain his hold, his position ‘in place’. No, it was a woman who woke me. Germaine’s words crept into my imagination and would not go away. They were uncomfortable. Waking up was painful. Dreaming is much nicer. It was as if the words etched into my brain began to fragment. New meanings were being revealed. I began to feel conned. I had been conned. And I didn’t like it. I felt the world of my construction turn on its axis and reveal another narrative, one that resonated with my experience. And I was complicit in this construction through an enculturated process of denial. I had not read Virginia Woolf. From this time I have not ‘kept the peace’. It is my role to provoke and question the roles we assign ourselves. Are they ours or have they been insidiously impressed upon us by repressive histories of thought, fear of difference and complexity?
I repeat I have no desire to ‘keep the peace’. I want to speak, write and dance what is disquietening, disturbing and unpalatable. My work provokes self-reflection and engagement with one’s life. I don’t set out to provoke. It is in my nature as they say. It is in the fibre of my body, which is filled with my lived life.
Keeping the peace is compliancy and compromise.