In answering the question on the last thing I repaired, I hope also to be able to configure the different kinds of metaphorical repair that play out in the readings of Odell (2019), Jackson (2014), Han (2022), Hayles (2007), and Rivers (2020). To achieve this, I hope to analyze and story repair as a rhetoric of survivance – survival and resistance (Powell 2002), characterized by such concepts as recontextualizing repair (context repair), repair as resilience or resistance, repair as acquiescence, metaphorization and pragmatic repair, and repair as new knowledge.
In storying the last thing I repaired, I think of myself both as a thing and a non-thing (Han, 2022). As a thing, I see myself as a stable, definite form (matter) that has limitations. I exist in a bounded, discrete way that distinguishes me from other entities (people/identity). I am tangible. A few days ago, I saw a video of a heart being pumped and ready to be transplanted into another. I could not help but think of the stillness of the body that once housed that heart, the vital organ that makes humans feel so important compared to a table. Hence, while it is a common anthropomorphic practice to not refer to humans as things with the “it” reference, I recontextualize Han’s analysis of things to include we humans. To invoke Nietzsche’s (1896) “On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense,” how do we know if the birds actually think of us as things—chaotic things, for that matter?
On the other hand, Han conceptualizes non-things as lacking defined boundaries, permanence, and tangibility. Non-things are fluid, intangible, and ever-changing entities that cannot be completely pinned down. He bemoans the massive flood of data in contemporary times and how dataistc prominence continues to run human activities. In the context of this analysis of repair, I think of the prevalence of individual and distinct identities that Han captures as “inherent heterogeneity” (p. 3) as the fluid data that are significant to critical positionalities in contemporary discourse of repair.
As a thing, therefore, who is constantly moved by the need to define her identity, I see myself tasked with the constant need to repair myself. To echo Jackson, it is the synergism of two worlds: my presence/body and the identity I need it to imbibe. Back in Nigeria, this world used to be quite calm, sure of the identity it portrays. As an international student in the United States, this world functions as a “fractal world, a centrifugal world, an always almost falling apart world” that constantly needs to process “fixing and reinvention, reconfiguring, and reassembling into new combinations and new possibilities”. This world is constantly concerned and survives on hope (p. 222). In other words, to keep the hope alive, the world of the third space of hybridity that I currently live in (Bhabha, 1994), characterized by racial profiling, situational binaries, hypersensitivity, masking and unmasking, hyper[in]visibility (Rankine, 2014), intersectionalities, etc., is one that is hinged on ongoing repair. Meanwhile, continuous repair toward survivance can be exhausting.
Similarly, Odell (2019), as she argues about humanity and the attention economy of technological spaces, advocates paying closer attention to oneself. She writes, “What I’m suggesting is that we take a protective stance toward ourselves, each other, and whatever is left of what makes us human” (pdf p. 44). As critically analyzed by Odell, we find ourselves in spaces that use technological data and narrative to trivialize our identities for economic gains. One of the issues I hope to develop in my dissertation is DEI policies as attractive advertisement tools in institutions vis-à-vis what plays outside the technological spaces where this agenda is pushed. For Odell, surviving this manipulation involves consciously defending one’s spaces for reflection, meaning, and empathy. It means reclaiming agency over how we portray ourselves online and resisting simplistic reductions and essentialist judgments of who we are.
Early this week, my husband was sharing the news he saw online about how a prominent YouTuber, Mr. Beast, is being reported by online news outlets to have provided water for Africans. CNN’s headline reads, “Mr. Beast builds 100 wells in Africa, attracting praise – and some criticism” (Ronald and Busari, 2023). This is one of the disrespectful and single-storying practices I find myself constantly contending against as I do identity repair. This man had obviously only gone to a village in Kenya, one of the 54 countries in Africa, to provide water for 1% of the population in that country as a way of gaining some PR (an integral tool that reinforces attention economy), but the news reports it as though half of the populations in Africa have been saved by this act of propagandistic benevolence. In the United States, I constantly encounter people who think I am hungry and in need, whose first reaction towards me is to think I need to be saved from poverty because of the false narratives that continue to force a singular, inhumane identity on Africans. Nobody even uses a well in urban African cities! Repair in this sense, for me, is through the acts of constant rejection and reeducation.
One social aspect that is also integral to my identity is being the mom of two Black boys. I find myself responsible for my own repairs, just as I am also responsible for my kids’. Repair in this situation functions partly as an ethics of care, defense, and reassurance. My older kid has been involved in disturbing situations at school influenced by racist inclinations that broke him, and as a mom, I was tasked with reassuring him of his humanness and how he deserves to be in certain spaces just as every other kid. I had done pragmatic repair by going to his school to make complaints and offer new knowledge of how things ought to be done. The issue of “context repair” played out in this situation, where I advocated that rather than doing repair through certain punishments, some situations require cultural re-education. While Odell explores the concept of bioregionalism as our consciousness of being intricately connected to nature, I see bioregionalism also functioning as creating safe and inclusive environments for people. I am invested in this kind of repair not only for myself or my family but also for others whose identities are similar to ours and who go through similar struggles.
In another vein, recent articles studied in class (Hayles, 2007; Rivers, 2020) make me think about another kind of context repair: repair as acquiescence. As a mom to two Gen Alphas susceptible to hyperattention, I am constantly worried about the way my kids have access to and use technology and the dilemma of blocking that access. When I restrict my older son, a mid-schooler, from access to technology and the video games played by his peers, I wonder if I am not imposing certain expectations and depriving him of his childhood and his ability to participate in his own publics. I find myself giving in, not as an act of indulgence but as enabling him to live his childhood, though driven by technology (unfortunately?).
In conclusion, gathering the various metaphoric ways of using repair through the readings and discussions in class is itself reparative epistemology, an important concept that is relevant to my field of research. One of the kinds of repair I hope to analyze at another time is repair as journeying backwards towards rootedness.
[Odell, 2019; Jackson, 2014, Han, 2022; Hayles, 2007; Rivers, 2020; Powell, 2002; Nietzsche, 1896; Bhabha, 1994; Rankine, 2014; Ronald and Busari, 2023]
