Patricia Nguyen: Pushing Beyond Genocidal Logics

I’m deeply grateful to have shared space with my dear friend and comrade Patricia Ngyuen. Patricia is an artist, scholar, educator, and community organizer. She is founding executive director of Axis Lab, and an Assistant Professor in Asian American Studies at Northwestern University, where she received her Ph.D. in Performance Studies. Her research and performance work examines critical refugee studies, political economy, forced migration, oral histories, inherited trauma, torture, and nation building in the United States and Vietnam. I hope you enjoy our dual conversations from May 2020 and March 2021.

May 10th, 2020

Patricia: This is such a meaningful way to be on Zoom.

Irina: That was part of my motivation! Since most of us can’t really hang out with each other, what’s a nice way to spend time that doesn’t feel so corporate and transactional?

Patricia: Absolutely.

Irina: There’s no agenda, there’s no meeting notes, we get to just hang out. I get to paint you and marvel at your beauty!

Patricia: I feel the same, I’m just like wow, you’re so gorgeous! 

Irina: How are you feeling in your body today?

Patricia: I woke up and my body felt a little tight, but luckily, my friend wanted to do a workout so I worked out with her this morning… but I didn’t really work out, I was just stretching. I was like, how do I listen to what my body needs? 

Irina: Good for you! It’s so important to listen to what your body actually needs. 

Patricia: I’m learning how to do that more. I’m feeling a lot of tightness in my body for a lot of reasons and throughout my whole life, most of my processing happens while I’m walking and moving… things that I felt kind of stagnant in or caught in, I’m able to kind of move through my body a little more. That shifts with shelter in place, and I’m wondering if the tightness is because literally I’m not moving as much, but also how emotions, thoughts, and things stay stuck in the body because of that. How was your morning and waking up? How was your body feeling?

Irina: I caught up on sleep, which I’m so grateful for. I was going to ask you about your sleep.

Patricia: My sleep has been so wild. Remember when I couldn’t make our first meeting and then I was waking up really early, and now it’s just really weird. It’s hard to sleep sometimes. Has your sleep been regular in terms of how you’re  navigating this quarantine?

Irina: No, it’s like the residual anxiety manifests in sleeplessness… being up late, tossing and turning, and then I wake up way earlier than I actually need to. I think part of it is also just my relationship to Capitalism and work, like I have to get up and go to work, but I’m not going anywhere. So much is coming up around what are my motivations for things. What is driving me? How do I release this idea of having to be productive? And just allow for rest. It’s really hard. 

Patricia: It’s so hard when our bodies are wired that way and rewarded for that wiring. So then it’s just like, it really does feel like retraining our thoughts --  not just our bodies, but our muscular memory, in many ways because our muscles, for decades, even since we were children were told this is how you’re supposed to move in the world, this is how you succeed in the world, this is the pace you keep so you can keep up, so you can be ahead of the curve.

Irina: This makes me think about the census. At the same time this is happening, there’s this other kind of counting, right? Only like 40% of people participated in Illinois, or even the elections… thinking about these ways that we count people or count opinions. People need to self-enroll but there are these barriers and fears and repercussions. Now that the disease is being counted, who’s being counted and who’s not? Which communities are not necessarily self-reporting because of fear?

Patricia: Exactly, like even going to the hospital for fear of being deported. 

Irina: And of course, the racism and stigmatization… no one wants to be like, “Oh it’s in this neighborhood, it’s in this community and therefore, either these people are disposable or need to be harmed and policed.” 

Patricia: There are layers to it… who’s counted? Who’s visible? There was this Atlantic article that stated , “it was a pandemic before they realized who’s actually being affected by this.” 

Irina: Exactly. It makes me think of the opioid crisis versus crack, like now there’s this huge national crisis when it’s affecting white people… but there’s been all sorts of drug pandemics, and who brought those drugs in those communities in the first place? 

Patricia: Right, like who planted these drugs to create these larger national policies to further criminalize them?

Irina: And the same thing could be said of obesity, right, like who created these food deserts? Who subsidized these extremely harmful “food” products that are now making people sick?

Patricia: Did I ever send you my syllabus for “Race, Mental Health and Healing Justice”? I’ll send you my syllabus because there’s a resource list. I was thinking of how to better frame the class, because I think the first class went really well, but something that I want to forefront more is exactly what you said: how do we understand trauma when we’re talking about mental health and mental illness so that we have a structural analysis of how people and bodies are responding to that? Instead of, “Oh, these are symptoms” or “these are ways of addressing isolated symptoms/problems.” If we look at the history of colonization and the history of US Imperialism and the extraction of labor and war and all that shit, then trauma is literally caused by oppressive regimes; all of us are impacted by it.  

March 31st, 2020

Irina: So the last time we talked was May 10th, 2020 and today is March 31st 2021. It’s been almost a year and so much has happened, I don’t even know where to begin. Maybe with just a little grounding? Maybe we can both just take a breath?

Patricia: That sounds perfect and beautiful. Thank you for that. I’ve been jumping from meeting to meeting, so it’s nice to return to the breath to ground us and help me come back to the moment where in pre-COVID times, we get that chance to delineate space and time and various commitments.hey all kind of merge in these moments, so the breath really helps a moment for transitions. 

Irina: Absolutely. It reminds me of your work and how much work you do around breath, and I’m curious how breath is showing up for you right now.

Patricia: I initially wanted to explore breath because of my struggles with breathing -- for various reasons, and wanting to think about the power of breath and meditation, but also it’s just wild because the conversation we had last time was literally weeks before the George Floyd protest and Breonna Taylor and Tony McDade and now it’s the trial. There’s so much of that, and thinking about breath and relationship to -- and not to be universalist in any way -- but how do we think about people’s right to breathe? Right to live? To be in their body? To exist and move in the world in their body?

I’m going to answer the question in multiple different ways. Right now I’m thinking about breath in relationship to the “Breath, Form and Freedom” Chicago Torture Justice Memorial project that I’m working on and I’m working on this artist book through the Illinois Humanity of Envisioning Justice grant to work with survivors to do a breath meditation then translate that to the page in book form and meditate on different concepts of the memorial itself, to not only think about the torture techniques that were used -- not to focus solely on it because there is  so much more to policing, torture, and incarceration -- the violence of suffocation or taking breath away especially when we recall  Eric Garner and George Floyd -- but also, what does it mean for Black and Latinx survivors to say, “I’m still here and I’ll fight with every last breath in my body for other survivors.” 

That’s such a resonant energy and ethos and way of moving through the world. What does it mean to share knowledge like when they’re talking, they’re breathing, and their breathing happens at different rates based on what is being shared and said? I just kind of have been thinking about how that project might unfold, both in terms of being in community -- how do you share breath during COVID? In this time, that’s where transmission happens… but also, how do we build community and how do people come back to fortify their own breath and strengthen their breath in those ways? 

I’m exploring that and also figuring out how to logistically navigate it, and then second, how to translate that into a small book form that is an element of the memorial project with survivors. I’ve been thinking about breath in so many different ways -- it’s also allergy season! I’m jumping back and forth for different reasons, I think COVID makes my mind work very differently. I think back to Frantz Fanon’s work of “combat breathing” -- what does it mean to breathe under conditions of colonial duress -- but also, what he talks about muscular contraction, when colonized and racialized subjects are surveilled and policed -- there’s always an awaiting violence in some way that our bodies actually contract and constrict, so what does it mean to have muscular dreams to run, to jump, to leap? To have an expansive relationship to one’s own body. I’ve been thinking about muscular contraction in relation to lung capacity, too, and just thinking about how we build community in play and eating and gathering and hanging out. I know that was a roundabout way to share what I’ve been thinking about with breath, but that’s where I’m at.

Irina: Thank you for sharing all the layers of state violence and musculature and allergies and socialization. It is all interconnected; thinking about allergies and environmental racism and having the capacity to gather, to breathe, to move freely under state control, under white supremacy, yeah. 

Patricia: Yes, absolutely. It makes me think about Christina Sharpe’s work In The Wake: On Blackness and Being, her fourth chapter is on the weather and talking about how the weather is anti-Black and she also theorizes aspiration and what it means to breathe while Black. I’m also thinking about Ruth Wilson’s Gilmore’s work as an abolitionist and geographer and thinking about the environment -- exactly what you said -- environmental racism makes it that much harder to breathe, like the General Iron Strikes they’re having on the Southeast side of the city, literal pollutants, construction projects that overly burden Black and brown communities that make it so hard for us to just breathe.

Irina: So I’m going to ask you the same question I asked back in May, Grace Lee Boggs’ question of: What time is it on the clock of the world? 

Patricia: I love this question, and I actually completely forgot what I said back in the day -- 20 years ago! That’s just how it feels. 

I’ve been thinking about time a lot and working on Argyle and in Uptown, thinking about the linear notion of time and capitalist development -- late capitalist development,  neoliberal development and modes of gentrification, urban renewal -- and how mutual aid work, or artistic interventions that happen on the street actually fucks with time or plays with time in a different way. It creates these different pockets of time. To push against these genocidal white supremacist capitalist and patriarchal logics, this work creates other modalities of being and being together and being in community, so what time is it? 

Time is being forwarded by all these amazing Indigenous, Black, Latinx, Asian American communities, trans, queer, nonbinary, femme, folks in these wormholes, black holes, these other portals of time that bend time and play with time and flip and reconstruct time in these ways so that we can have more time together -- and make our futures more livable. 

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This conversation was lovingly transcribed and edited by my dear friend, writer, and cultural organizer Rivka Yeker. You can check out their work at @hooliganmagazine.