I have always found it strange that we use certain phrases when we talk about imagination, particularly in the English language. For instance, we often hear someone or something “captured their imagination!” or that something was “beyond my imagination!”
What does one even mean by “capturing one’s imagination”? It might sound perfectly normal because we have heard it so many times, but at a closer glance, it is actually quite odd. Violent, even. Like predators capture prey, or armies capture territory, it sounds almost as though we can make one's imagination surrender to another’s reality. Perhaps, this is how imagination can also be controlled, policed, and even colonized.
Controlled? Policed? Colonized?!
Why on earth would we think about imagination in this way? Isn’t imagination about colors, creativity, stars, joy and fun? Ruha Benjamin, in her fantastic book, Imagination: A Manifesto reminds us: “Most of us tend to associate “imagination” with a joyful awakening of the mind — which it can be. But look closer, and you’ll see imagination is not a wholesale good. It is easy to lose sight of the array of oppressive imaginaries that more casually govern our lives.” She offers the example of how various nationalist imaginations (The American Dream, for instance), have produced “imagined communities” where one aspires for specific things to satisfy the concocted allure of exceptionalism, righteousness, and superiority. Anything that strays from that dream, would perhaps be shrugged off as unrealistic, unimportant, or even unimaginable.
This brings up the other “normal” phrase: What does it mean for something to be beyond one’s imagination? Does it indicate that there happens to be a limit to imagination? A liminal space between reality and dreams where certain things are plausible? Often, imagination is evoked when something transpires which challenges the norm. Maybe it’s something so strange and unprecedented that its aberration from normalcy in itself makes it surreal. Almost laughable. And hence, imaginary.
For example, In Begum Rokeya’s iconic piece of feminist literature, Sultana's Dream, there's an interesting conversation between two characters, Sultana and someone she believes to be her friend, Sister Sara. The short story begins with Sultana waking up to a fantastic imaginary world ‘Ladyland’, with Sara guiding her through it. In a time where the “real” world had veiled (Purdanashin) women who were kept away from male-dominated public spaces irrespective of their free choice, Sultana finds herself walking unveiled in a public street. Severely self-conscious, she feels that passers-by, all women, have been joking about her. She asks Sara why, to which her friend replies, “The women say that, you look very mannish...They mean that you are shy and timid like, man.”
The sheer thought of ascribing shyness or timidity to masculinity indicates that we are truly in an imaginary world. Begum Rokeya wrote Sultana's Dream in 1905, but odds are, using the term “mannish” would still be a strange way to depict something “shy and timid”, while the term “like a girl” would not. It's fascinating, and incredibly disappointing that we find ourselves in the same position as Sultana, over a century later.
What could it be about imagination that makes it so difficult to transform? How do we re-mould it? And, reclaim it? At Our Collective Practice (OCP), this challenged us to strategize in ways that center our power to imagine — to envision the world. We know that the systems currently in place were part of the imaginary constructed on oppression and extraction. But it doesn't have to be this way. .
David Graeber, in his book The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity and the Sacred Joys of Bureaucracy, says, “The ultimate hidden truth of the world is that it is something that we make, and could just as easily make differently.” So while Sultana’s dream was made up in her head, Sultana’s reality was made during and long before Begum Rokeya’s time — by society, and particularly by society’s power structures. By dreaming up a character that dreamed of an alternative reality, Begum took the first step of remaking the world she lived in.
In Amiri Baraka's essay Technology and Ethos written in 1969, he argues, “Nothing has to look or function the way it does. The west man's freedom unscientifically got at the expense of the rest of the world's people has allowed him to [e]xpand his mind, spread his sensibility, wherever it go[es]. And so shaped the world and its powerful artifact engines.” In saying this, Baraka, like Graeber, indicates that the world is something that is made. Only he specifies the root cause of why the world operates in the “normal” way we know: white men. So, if we agree that the world has been made, and largely been made by white men, where do we go from here? Taking inspiration from Graeber, do we take the necessary and aspirational step towards making the world differently? Or do we choose to proceed in the same direction the western man has led us? If we choose the former, braver step, who do we center when it comes to creating a new world?
At Our Collective Practice, we firmly believe that we must center girls, and their dreams. Girls’ dreams are expansive and lofty when they are young — before the socially imposed goals of western ideals of success, or patriarchal gender norms are imposed on them (us!). But these dreams are not lost or forgotten. They are hidden and dormant, yet waiting to joyously explode.
In the coming months, we will be rethinking ways to make space, recreating strategies, and revisiting what we know of the world, by asking girls and young women to step out of their present realities. And simply dream. Girls’ hopes and their dreams for the future are often co-opted, shrunk, erased, and ignored. Across the world, girls are told to dream smaller, take up less space, and fit into the mold that reality permits them. We believe it is now time to let their imaginations run free. As Anisie in Our Resistance grounds us, “I have a dream that one day we will all have access to opportunities regardless of disability, regardless of ethnicity, race, religion, sexual orientation, regardless of anything. Inequalities are the source of every struggle.”
However, it's important to note that imagination alone isn't everything. As Ruha Benjamin warns us, “when we work to cultivate a collective vision for transforming the world, we must be careful not to fetishize imagination as somehow operating magically and independently from other powerful ingredients like strategizing and organizing to make our vision a reality.” We deeply believe this, and base our work on this premise. At the same time, we also believe that no new world can be birthed without the first creative step of dreaming it. As artist Niki de Saint Phalle once said, (or doodled, rather,) “what is now known was once only imagined.”
We want to offer space to girls for this first step, and then regroup to see how we can strategize together to move collectively in the direction that they point us to.
Our hope is to create room for girls to explore dreaming of worlds that don’t exist, worlds that might never exist, and those that girls may already be creating through their activism without even knowing it. We don’t want to limit their dreams merely to the future of their movement-building or advocacy.
We want girls to feel free to even concoct worlds where there is no need for such a thing as resistance. Or perhaps worlds we cannot even fathom. We want them to be as silly, outlandish, surreal and unrealistic as possible. Clearly, what’s “real” is not working. We want their imaginations to run wild. Unlike the regular phrases of the English language that indicate limits to imagination, we want to reassure them that their dreams can be infinite and unreal.
For maybe imagination isn’t meant to be captured, after all. Maybe it is to be fed, watered, and nourished.
And maybe, just maybe, it is meant to be freed.
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