Felicia Andryanti (黃厥新)
(Content warning: this piece involves birds, aunties, and the United Nations.)
Miss Universe
Beauty has come a long way since the days of tapeworm pills (now they misuse diabetic medications). It’s harder to win pageants since they decided women shouldn’t be judged by their appearance while donning kilograms of jewelry. Now, they’re judged by the empowering speeches they give while donning kilograms of jewelry. If you’re ever in this situation, there’s a safe topic to talk about that never fails – education.
The United Nations (UN), too, has come a long way since its inception. It’s harder to start a war since they decided it’s bad. Now, you fight with big words and, if it fails, nuclear threats. If you’re in this situation, there’s a safe topic that never fails – human rights. And since the UN is practically Miss Universe for countries, it loves nothing more than the human rights to education.
Today, “education” has become a catchphrase of political agreeability, and to some extent, “human rights” too. From runways to world leader forums, education is hailed as a route for youth betterment, the passing of the baton between generations. Through the vessel of human rights, the UN outlined the “right to education” in a landmark treaty, further reifying its significance. Countries must mandate and facilitate primary education for all, make secondary education generally available, etc.
Speaking of—human rights are an even more compelling phenomenon. Its reputation as intrinsic, kernel fruits of human existence is magic. Grounding its legitimacy in bio-essentialism (the belief in a “human nature” that predates and/or trumps social influences) gives it powers akin to Midas’ touch. It follows, then, that anything considered a “human right” must also be a natural, preordained condition inherent to humanity. That’s why violating them is blasphemy; it defies “human nature”.
But things weren’t always this way. We know there was a time before public schools, and certainly before the UN, before education and human rights. To grasp the present, we need to wander the beginning, and in the beginning, were birds.
Birds See Everything
Birds see everything; this we know. A 15-second video told me hummingbirds see millions more colors than humans can. What have they seen? What do they know that we don’t? This, we may never know.
We humans have an issue: our brains cannot comprehend what it’s like to have more colors. Our human understanding of “color” was built around what we can see. Olden humans named things “red” and others “blue” because those colors they could see and differentiate. It feels absurd to imagine “other colors” as it betrays the very lens and limits through which we perceive and define colors. Even if the hummingbird speaks human, what dialect and words should it use to paint its vision?
My Tionghoa grandfather won’t call the méihuā “pink”. In Indonesian, red is “merah”, and pink “merah muda” (light red). They are not categorically separate; pink is understood as another shade of red. Language – the spoken cultivation of cultural breaths—reflects the ways we conceptualize colors. Likewise, colorblind/synesthetic people experience colors differently. While they’re often pathologized as “exceptions” to the standard, what should the universal “standard” be? After all, compared to the hummingbirds, we’re virtually colorblind.
Now, what is color? The sea salts and the pine leaves, what are their innate hues? Scientists can say salt contains oxides, and leaves have pigments. But these things, too, will become 100 different colors to 100 different eyes. What are their “objective” colors? Colors that are true, whether viewed by a hummingbird, my grandfather, or a colorblind friend?
The Pines by the sea; the “color” we’ve always known them for, is it what The Pines have been trying to tell us about themselves, or is it just what we tell The Pines they are? It seems that what we’ve swallowed as “neutral truths” are really not; we are inhibited forever by our capacity as observers.
Having amped the existential angst, we can drop the STEM student act. At the heart of the hummingbird question is a childlike skepticism towards the objectivity of truth/knowledge. While this may sound like something a philosophy podcast guy would say to dismiss your emotional grievances, you can now tell him his “theory” is by no means radical (at least not to those familiar with Aunties).
Shamans and Soothsayers
“Oceania is hospitable and generous, Oceania is humanity rising from the
depths of brine and regions of fire deeper still, Oceania is us.
We are the sea, we are the ocean.”
Whitewashed kids of cultural households know to pay respect to the hands that keep us fed and full enough to keep arguing with our parents: the Aunties. See, the best family chefs don’t have recipes—they are the recipes. Those spices grew right by the house like the neighbors’ kids. So, they know their secrets, the sting of each and how much they bite; the knowledge our Aunties harbor is a kind that’s alive.
Aunties aren’t born; they become alive; those who read us stories taught us curse words. To Aunties, the world is a walk in the park barefoot, leaving dents on the soil. In tandem, each time they tread on dried leaves and branches, it presses against their feet and prints a unique pattern on their skin. They’re not one person trotting about—they’re fluid mosaics, anew with every step. Aunties change the world as much as it changes them, and it’s the origin of their wisdom.
In Waahi Paa, water (rivers, lakes) always had wairua (life; habitants). When life disappears, it’s no longer “water”; it’s become something foreign and poisoned. “Water” doesn’t exist in isolation; its relation to other things defines it. Nature is an everything-soup tossed on a spider web, and we know what-is-what when we all tug the strings, reeling and jolting each other in a ripple. Pines, seawater, birds, anti-matter; nothing stands alone. If we’re all someone to someone, then all things are something to something else.
Where I’m from, Aunties hold their cài dāo knives and part of them bleeds into the metal edges, slicing dǎng shēn by heart to perfectly fit the bowls. My Aunties know by conversing back-and-forth with the dynamic universe. In Kewa Pueblo, aunties and their community lived with sara (corn). Sara is a member of society, full of personality; when it dies, rots, ripens, it’s voicing information to Puebloans about the world around them.
These boundless methods of knowing bloomed rife among people. The Xhosa amagqirha diagnosed using intuition (umbilini). The Ngaju basir shamans were sacralized sexual beings and gender amalgams, as “gender” took on distinct meaning and variations, inextricably meshed with spirituality and culture. Aunties learned not by gazing into fishbowls but by running the meadows. Aunties change the world as much as it changes them, and that is their wisdom.
Toying with the Truth
It wasn’t until “Gold! Glory! Gospel!” rang throughout cathedrals that we saw knowledge treated as a product. A French man said: “I think, therefore I am,” and suddenly, the world froze like a rock and balled into his palms to be pondered on, quiet and still. Everything is a Victorian sculpture model waiting to be ceramics. From then, there’s always a subject (Sculptor) and an object (Model) in the room. The subject is the rational human, making sense of the world around them. “Knowing” is an unrequited act by subjects. Objects sit lifeless. Knowledge is dead-cold material forged by pure brainpower, floating lonely as detached matters in the silent, bleak vacuum. And this is Enlightenment.
Or so the great (Western) fathers of science told us. It’s no coincidence that this happened while the people gained a new name: the Global South. Ships sailed and anchored, people worked to wilt, forests gutted—there’s no evil under the sun the Europeans didn’t do. They set out with clear meanings: to know the world, to study the world, to master the world. Our world is a muse for their sculptures. We’re trinkets to collect in a glass jar and stepping stones in their dramatic conquest of discovery. And this is knowledge.
Or so the so-called great fathers told us. White men’s confidence is a phenomenon all too well-documented. Once they felt all-knowing, they took the initiative to enlighten and civilize the savages. Sara and dǎng shēn fossilized into variables, texts, and numbers. The human brain became a logic machine. Aunties who dared still run around barefoot became primitive barbarians or deviant witches. Threatening the industrial world order, they’re crucified, demonized—while their contributions were looted nameless.
As time marched on, the toxins of coloniality seeped into every crack and pore of life. Their truth is objective, quantifiable, and logically airtight, void of nuances and contexts. Outliers to this formula are emotional, irrational, stubborn stains halting the progress of humankind. This ideological behemoth strolled gleefully side-by-side, hand-in-hand, with the rise of modern capitalism.
Being Human or Being Right?
The Sculptors raised a dogmatic protege, “science”, a self-proclaimed paragon of truth. But it needed more than ideas to establish rules. It grew into concrete roofs and frail windows. It crept into classrooms and cubicles. Students are numbers; how much they can cram into their brains, how much trinkets their hands can hold. Knowledge is now a limited product, and the capacity to “produce” it – “intelligence” – is now a capital.
Those who own capital own the modern world—gatekeepers of markets, lands, and knowledge (hence why the references in this piece are locked behind paywalls). This concoction is what birthed the divide between intellects and bird brains. Between tech geniuses and “unskilled” sweatshop laborers. The Renaissance man is of reason, precise calculation, and consistent productivity. Something’s off, ill, queer, if you color outside the lines, can’t follow schedules, or pay attention.
It was around this advent of clean-shaven neoliberals that they declared colonialism dead. Everyone has equal chances in the free market and academic meritocracy! Just by thinking right, we can join them as the knowing subjects, the Sculptors; live better than our grandparents. Children of the soil were taught our conquerors’ ways, so headachingly habitual and militant. Soon enough, we learned to imitate. Renounce our hometowns, change our languages, bootstrap, and get in line. When we think like them, we’re an open book, the master’s tools, the master’s rules. And this is education.
Around this time too, the Sculptors began discussing “human rights”. As usual, they proclaimed objective, “universal” human rights/morals. To validate this, they invoked “human nature”. They swore there’s a primordial instinct lying deep in all humans by biology’s mandate, irrespective of culture and creed—and its competition.
The Sculptors have long incubated in the echo chamber of Western rationalism. Gold, pines, humans, all seen as isolated, individual items. Humans are naturally individualistic and competitive, they argue. The market, the bloodlust for conquest, the want to turn all things to ceramics and money—everyone has them!
This heavily swayed how “educational rights” were formulated. Since the earliest dialogues, the assumed standard of “education” was one that reaffirmed colonial knowledge structures. One built on individual “freedom” and wins at the cost of cultural erasure. The same system was then flaunted as a “tool of liberation” as a hero of the downtrodden who stands to remedy the horrors of capitalism instead of an accomplice. This hammers home the nail in the coffin, solidifying the romanticised image of Western “intelligence” as an objective ideal, a standard all “civilised” peoples should strive for.
The Aftermath
Colonialism made it so that our own Aunties’ ways no longer “make sense” to us. Like the hummingbird, we struggle to comprehend them as they contradict everything we’ve been taught about science: how to capture knowledge and cage it like a demonic witch. Aunties’ wisdom is fluid; they slip through when we try to clutch them like trinkets. We’re taught to commodify what we know and detest what we can’t understand.
Fairytales, myths, superstitions—we have a good laugh and return to the monotony of lecture halls. As we do, perhaps it’s time to question who’s steering this ship we’re in. Who made it, and who made us have to go—and convinced us it’s a blessing that we can? Above all, what do these tell us about where we’re heading?
Perhaps to be bird brains is not all that bad if it colors the world a little richer. Perhaps thinking and being is not all there is to our existence. Or maybe, as Audre Lorde said, we feel; therefore, we can be free.