CIIS Public Programs Podcast

Transcript

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This is the CIIS Public Programs Podcast, featuring talks and conversations recorded live by the Public Programs department of California Institute of Integral Studies, a non-profit university located in San Francisco on unceded Ramaytush Ohlone Land. 

Fariha Róisín is a multidisciplinary artist and author who was born in Ontario, Canada and raised in Sydney, Australia. She is now based in Los Angeles, CA. As a Muslim queer Bangladeshi, she is interested in the margins, liminality, otherness, and the mercurial nature of being. Fariha’s latest book Who Is Wellness For? explores the ways in which the progressive health industry has appropriated and commodified global healing traditions. She reveals how wellness culture has become a luxury good built on the wisdom of Black, brown, and Indigenous people while both ignoring and excluding them. In this episode, Fariha is joined by CIIS Associate Professor of Anthropology and Social Change Targol Mesbah in an engaging conversation that explores the commodification and appropriation of wellness through the lens of social justice and provides resources to help anyone participate in self-care regardless of race, identity, socioeconomic status, or able-bodiedness. 

This episode was recorded during a live online event on July 13th, 2022. A transcript is available at ciispod.com. To find out more about CIIS and public programs like this one, visit our website ciis.edu and connect with us on social media @ciispubprograms. 

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Targol Mesbah: Hi, good evening. It's nice to be here with you. Welcome, welcome everyone. I'm super excited to talk about this really, really powerful book, your latest book Who is Wellness for? and just wanted to invite you to do a reading to start it up, a soft reading from your book, to set the tone for us to get a sense of your beautiful prose, your powerful pros, and then to initiate the conversation between us.  

Fariha Róisín: I'm going to be reading ‘An Introduction to Radical Self Care’.  

“One of the best guides to how to be self-loving is to give ourselves the love we are often dreaming about receiving from others.” Bell Hooks  

Though I've been writing about self-care professionally for about seven years now. Diligently, methodically, tending to it like a spiritual study. At times I have felt I know nothing about how to truly care for myself.  

Initially, I turned to the concept of self-care for answers and found the work of the late, great Bell Hooks and the tender radicality of Audre Lorde. I too craved an anecdote to better understand who I was, and I longed to know how to aid myself in order to become that person. I knew that the reservoir of unresolved anger rooted in me like a deep prickly weed made it hard to know how to love myself and so I assumed rightly, the first step toward my higher evolved state was to learn myself intimately and to accept it all. I had to understand myself like a lover and appreciate everything I felt was unlovable, gaining a security I had never known in myself. And according to Hooks and Lord, there is an inherent radicality to caring for yourself when you come from a lineage of oppressed peoples.  

Taking on self-care as an active embrace has meant merging the needs of my mind and body, because in the act of self-care the mind and body are prioritized. That is the very self you're caring for. Nothing that I share is a one-size-fits-all theory. But instead, something I've gleaned from my personal studies, I have often felt like self-care should come with instructions, because I didn't quite know where to begin the process myself. 

The nature of self-care as commodification has meant that we've lost track of how personal this journey is. We all have our own traumas, fears, needs and therefore our own specifications, idiosyncrasies. With such an overwhelm of choice it can be difficult to know what we need as individuals. How to care for your own damn self. Capitalism has destroyed our sensors and instead we want it all or much of it, without understanding what is inherent or honest to ourselves.  

We take direction from websites, peer reviews and best ofs to determine the scope of what we like. This is of course those of us who have the luxury to afford and fathom caring for ourselves. Why does wealth, real or imagined, inherited or self-made, make us believe in our own entitlement? 

In the 2015, New York Times article ‘The Price of Nails’ Sarah Moslin Nir spoke to the labor conditions of nail salon workers across the boroughs of New York. Nail salons are governed by their own rituals and mores. A hidden world behind the glass exteriors and cute corner shops. In it, a rigid racial ethnic caste system reigns in modern-day New York City. Dictating not only pay but also how workers are treated. This is how they're treated internally. Then there's dealing with actual customers.  

I remember feeling immensely grateful for this piece when it was published, as I had witnessed in my own eyes enough women, always white women, bullying nail salon workers in a variety of different scenarios to realize that there was a context of entitlement of who gets to self-care that wasn't being acknowledged. So much of the rallying cry of white supremacy happens in these moments of ubiquity, when even the most virulent acts of entitlement are ignored, because we expect it of whiteness.  

I can't write about self-care without first pointing toward the obvious: your care cannot impede on the care of others. Just like the concept of freedom, ask yourself, is it really freedom if it is only for some? If we prioritize not just what we think we deserve but also how we are in relation to others and thus how we care for them as well, we might experience true liberation. Being unbound by fear, or hurt, or pain, simply by showing up as the best version of who we are. Sounds like liberatory behavior. 

Why has whiteness made the playing field so dirty with such high stakes and yet such low standards? Why isn't the measure of a successful society how well we care for each other and how can we possibly believe that programming people to think only for themselves could result in holistically positive results?  

I think of all these years I struggled with true unadulterated self-care because I was taking direction from others. Expecting them to have solutions that I could have easily just learned myself, by myself, for myself, but I believed that I would be cured by another’s' expertise. When that failed me too many times, I began to realize I could find the right acupuncturist for me. The therapist for me and that I could build my own routine around my life and my needs.  

Agency is an important and necessary part of self-care, because in the process of learning that you have it, you're forced to take ownership over your life. Caring for yourself means taking a giant leap toward yourself. You have to put yourself in your own driver's seat.  

Targol: Thank you so much and what a rich passage. You have all the elements that make this book so compelling for me are woven into this, these pages that you read and I think one of the first things I want to share is the way you are able to use your own personal experience…to sort of work within this genre of a memoir perhaps, but to then push it to a level that also engages with systematic analysis, or analysis of systems, and so to be able to connect your experience to these larger systems and structures that are affecting everybody, right? Specifically in terms of, obviously these systems of oppression that you get into: colonialism, capitalism, patriarchy.  

But to come at it from a very courageous and personal narrative, that's not…that does both, right? That's not solipsistic, but it's not about sort of, you know, just being “self-involved”. But that has such a deep connection to the experience of life under capitalism for all, essentially. And I find this to be really powerful and not an easy thing to do for writers. I think that one of the things I wanted to ask you is sort of for you to talk a little bit about your trajectory as a writer, because your first publication was a book of poetry and that's something that I see in your writing here, the ability to convey more than one meaning at once, you know, to hold complexity and multiplicity. It's like, it's something that a poem does. It's the form that does it, so well.  

So, I was curious, if you could talk a little bit, just also as a way of introduction, perhaps more to your own personal history. Your first publication was a book of poetry and then a novel and this is the third publication, that is a nonfiction format. So maybe if you could speak a little bit about that trajectory. 

Fariha: So, I've been writing online for a long time. I've been writing online for about 10 years, and I started writing…I mean, I started Like a Bird, my novel when I was 12. So, I was working on it for a long time. And then when I was in school, I was really invested in social justice. I was a really, really, really, committed kid. You know, I was going to detention centers and talking. I grew up in Australia so there was a lot of refugee crisis, like just a lot in the 90s and the 2000s, just a lot of focus on refugees. You know, there were many different wars that happened during that time and Australia just an abhorrent relationship with refugees. So, I was doing a lot of just organizing and I talk about this a lot in the book.  

I come from, you know, this pretty intense heritage and lineage of socialist, Marxist, Leninist, Maoist perspective from the global South. So, I have this, very intense, father and parenting on one hand that I think really helped shape my political languaging very young. Everything that I write about is like things that I was taught as a child. So, it's really beautiful to sort of- this is the first work, the first work where it felt very cohesive, where I was able to kind of like create that linearity between like my childhood and it's sort of evolution of who I am. 

But I began writing, outside of the novel. I began professionally writing as a film critic, so I've had many different lives and I worked as a film critic for many years. One of my first loves is film and so I think that has a lot to do with my abuse and my trauma. I think I've like, you know, I think I experienced my totality and reality in very extreme situations, you know, I like that was so much of, like, how I was raised. So, I like, like, cinema, I like to understand cinema. So that’s when you know, I started writing film criticism and was writing about like race in the early 2010’s and it was essentially being kind of erased because of the white supremacist, frankly, most publications are, especially back then. So, I was being silenced, a lot of the time editors were telling me like, ‘can you not make this about race?’, ‘Can you not make this movie about race?’ You know, like it's not always like a void of something and I think that sort of that pressure when I started to see society shift, I kind of felt like I was ready to shift into a different paradigm of writing. I don't think I was being taken seriously as a culture writer, as a film writer, and I was being silenced. So, I was like, fuck this.  

I started focusing on what the reality of books would look like for me. Again, you know, I had been writing Like a Bird for such a long time, so I knew that there was like, one thing that I definitely wanted to publish. Then How to Cure a Ghost. I think it came to me during the years of 2014 to about 2017. I think I finished it around 2017-18, really. Those years were really rough for me psychologically and poetry became a channel of truth, like the place where I could say everything I needed to say about myself and begin to untether myself from my childhood and sort of see more objectively what I had been through. But yeah, I sold How to Cure a Ghost and Like a Bird at once and then they came out one year after another and now I'm here, it's very exciting.  

Targol: Thank you. It is very exciting, I think. Well, you know there's such a range of scholarship and experiences that you weave into this book, and I think you really make a lot of otherwise inaccessible material accessible in a very useful way to a wider audience. I think that's really important work of translation, like, cultural translation and yeah, I'm very curious also to see how this really much-needed critique of the wellness industry and its sort of fetishization of sort of individual sort of the neoliberal individual right, is completely cut off from the larger context and histories that inform illnesses and also, their medicine.  

One of the central arguments that you make is about this paradox, of how the sort of colonial and capitalist systems that do create the conditions of harm and displace people and harm them, is also the same system that appropriates medicine from those very cultures and repackages it and makes it available for, you know, a price to people in the West who can afford it. That's one of the central contradictions of the book and there are many others actually, that I find really compelling also that I'd like us to talk about, but I wonder how specifically in relationship to your own experience, how you came up against that in your own life? That in the context of being South Asian, queer, Muslim, South Asian living in different places, in Australia, and then the US. 

Fariha: You mean the contradiction or…um? 

Targol: Yeah, like how you came up against this- or like how the critique of the wellness industry sort of sprang up from your own very concrete experiences, right?  

Fariha: Yeah, yeah. For sure. I mean, I think that like having the reflection of my parents and beginning to really fully understand, how much they had been denied, like how ruthless and imposing colonization was to them. How that was very much, I mean it took me a very long time to figure this out, but it- that was very much impeding on how they could be parents to me and good, good parents. You know, I didn't receive good parenting. Unfortunately, I have a very inspiring situation for many different reasons and obviously a very tumultuous situation, but I wasn't given sort of the formative foundation. I think that's when I started to see the holes and cracks and because I was so invested in justice from a very young age and had a father, had a lineage that supported sort of the importance of revolution, I've never questioned my responsibility, and I’ve never- uh, that's not true. I have questioned my responsibility, but I guess I feel like all of this sort of analysis and synthetization and really sort of the life that I was given both of, like, having the father, like, I did, who was like, very learned and political and I think this is the most important part of my dad. He was willing to fight for justice and I think seeing that across my family and seeing how there are people that are willing to speak up, really encouraged me to do the same. Then I also had the mother, motherhood that I had and the extreme violence that I experienced under her hand.  

So, I think all of it was really, really, useful. That's a weird word to use but it was. It was very useful for me to start to be like okay, why is it that like yoga, when I started practicing yoga at 13 in Australia, going to a yoga class seeing no brown people there, seeing no other South Asian person there, I can't- I got like, yeah, I got [sighs] I think just an awareness and like this sort of, like, ripeness of anger and frustration. But even then, I didn't obviously know how to talk about white supremacy, like that white supremacy was the core issue. I was just sort of like, okay, like I guess like this isn’t affordable to other South Asians, I don't know. I started yoga almost 20 years ago, so I've been having this like real life analysis, like taking it in and observing for almost 20 years.  

So, it's not like you know and I think any South Asian person can tell you the sort of isolation and sadness that you feel when you first start to encounter that and you're like hang on a second. Why is it that, you know, Indians themselves, South Asians themselves, can’t actually afford this necessary tool for healing? So, I think a lot of things in my life kind of led me down this path and gave me the specification of why I needed to write this book. I think I definitely feel like I gathered all of the knowledge and life experience and transmuted it into the page, onto the page.  

Targol: I think one of my favorite lines is “I'm really good at making magic out of shit.”  

Fariha: Yeah, yeah. It's really you know, it's one of my favorite things to say to people.  

[both laugh] 

Targol: Yeah, the sort of the observation around yoga, and also meditation like meditation culture and how that's co-opted and used as a way to just…how it's corporatized you know? I think that the contradiction of, yes, you can use meditation and mindfulness to ease the harm that the system is inflicting upon you every day so that you can continue to work for the system, that is reproducing this in your everyday life and it's actually not even that is not accessible to everybody.  

So those contradictions come through really strongly in your book and I don't know how much you feel like talking about this at this moment, but you address the really complex history of yoga that I just was stunned to read and the really interesting approach of inviting us to look at the complex histories of the worlds that we inhabit, you know, and yeah, I don't know if you feel like speaking to that a little bit.  

Fariha: Yeah, I mean nobody talks about caste supremacy when they talk about India and you know literally like this esteemed caste, the Brahmins are the priests and the most religious, you know, venerated, people close to God. Brahma and obviously the idea of Brahman is a very integral part of Hinduism and you know, I have so much love for Hinduism and I hope that it comes out on the page, you know. Just like how much respect I have for the faith and the construction of that faith and like what that identity has helped and supported and like reflected India back into itself. You know, like Hinduism is so synonymous with India and yet it's also not, you know, there's so many different faiths and there's so many different people. There's so many different realities of being an Indian. 

So now of course like India if we don't know, and I talk about this several in different places in the book, it's being sort of run by a fascistic right. The BJP party and they are you know, very, very anti-Muslim. They're very anti-Dalit, the lowest caste known as the lowest caste, which was formerly called, ‘The Untouchables.’ So, in relation to other identities, there is sort of this like, one identity of India that's being bred and Narendra Modi who is the prime minister of India, has also co-opted a lot of the wellness and also yoga. He's a huge proponent of yoga and allows the West to acknowledge that it's an Indian art form. So, there's even in the rhetoric of the current state of India, there's like so much desire to kind of remind people that..not even remind people, it's like sort of deny the totality of what yoga is and what it has been, and the caste politics that unfortunately do temper and color so much of what comes out of India, meditation included, but meditation is interesting because Buddhism is anit-castist. So, Buddhism was a response, much like Islam was too later in India, but Buddhism was very much, you know, created and Buddha was very openly anti caste. He was an Indian man and he really sort of denied that and denied that like you know, there can be like hierarchy to enlightenment, and I think that's really sort of the integral part of this conversation that I bring up in the book, and what I really encourage other people to think about.  

I mean, we have to when we understand context, we have to understand the entire context because I think that's the responsibility that we owe each other in our cultures and especially the cultures that have been demolished by colonization. There is a responsibility and I say this for myself as well. I need to get better at this so I'm not like the be-all-end-all expert of everything. So, I get it, that it's an evolution even in of itself, you know, you're constantly learning. But it's just something that I think that we need to talk about and address at the very least, just the ways in which fascism unfortunately does really also like wield itself with wellness and health and how we're seeing that as well, like the co-opting of like, ‘what does it mean to be perfect?’ And yeah…there's a lot to say.  

Targol: Thank you so much. There is and you have given a lovely summary and there's more in the book on the topic, but I think that you made the connections really well for us right now. I want to slightly shift to talk a little bit more about this idea of healing, wellness in general, and the relationship to healing traumas. One might even say our responsibility to heal. There's a lot in there that I want to unpack, but the first thing is, I want to make sure that I address the way you define, at least in the book, and the ways that I've read it, the idea of healing and wellness as a process. Not as something that, you know, a fixed thing that you arrive at, and you're healed. But as a journey, there's a little passage [pages turning] on 153 that I wanted to quickly read if that's okay, or do you want to read it?  

Fariha: No, no please read it.  

Targol: It says “In my life healing has been about integrating the fragments of mind, body, and spirit that were shattered by trauma. As I nurtured and braided all these disparate parts of myself together, a more honest version of me began to form. The more I thought about this on a micro level as an individual, the more I began to see a parallel between the Earth and humans. If I could heal myself, and what I mean by this is largely about acceptance, it's healing to accept a failing body and tell that body I love you unconditionally. Maybe we would have more proof for a way to collectively heal the Earth too, because the Earth, like our own bodies needs so much love, nurturance, and gentleness from us.” 

So beautiful. I really appreciate this passage specifically for just reminding again, what you mean by healing, I personally used to be really resistant to the very nomenclature of healing, right? Just even the vocabulary because for me, it represented a denial of the conditions that cause harm, like, how can you heal if the system that's causing harm is continuing, right? It can only be temporary and for some. [sirens in the background] But you know, the beauty of language is that words, have multiple meanings and ideas move through, sorry for the sirens. [sirens in foreground] I’ll mute myself for a second! [laughs] 

Fariha: It's disappearing.  

Targol: [sirens fading in background] It’s actually one of my favorite cultural theorists Stuart Hall used to say you know language and meaning is always fluid. It's always power that wants to fix the meaning right. [Fariha: Mm, yeah, Stuart! Fucking go off, yes!] [both laugh] So, I just, I love that just the very activity of reclaiming terms and reedefining terms and ideas and concepts and activating and motivating them in a different direction. I think it is really powerful and I also see in this passage you connect the healing to our relationship to Mother Earth.  

That's sort of where there's a place in the book where you say, I forget where it is, but you say something like, well, ‘we have to change everything, we need to reset it all.’ You know, for me that's how I think about different land rematriation projects, like you mentioned Sogorea Te, which is actually located where I live in the Bay Area, or Huichin, which is the term for Oakland in the Chochenyo or Lisjan language of the Lisjan peoples, the Ohlone people, the Lisjan-Ohlone. And Sogorea Te is an urban Indigenous women led land trust organization, that's involved in different rematriation projects. And this idea of rematriating the land, you know, is not so much the idea of shifting ownership but it shifts our idea of ownership because nobody owns the Earth. But that is an invitation to engage in a very different relationship with the Earth and all its beings, right.  

This reciprocal, elemental, relational set of ideas is something that you also animate, you know, in your work and how you connect this idea of healing yourself from trauma, traumatic experiences and in your definition of healing and the ongoing journey of that work is necessarily tied to this wider, interconnection to others, to everybody, wellness and that's your conclusion. It has to be for everybody, if it's to be for anybody. That includes our Earth which is what gives us life every day. That was a long comment and not a question in there! [laughs] 

Fariha: No, I mean, but it’s true. I agree with everything that you said.  

Targol: But I want to sort of continue this to get back to this idea of the responsibility of healing from trauma. It's where you talk about…I just have to bring my notes. You talk about in Iroquois law, there's this idea of Seven Generations and it's a foundation of a code for more responsibility to heal, so that we don't reproduce abusive, we don't reproduce the same lessons, right? I found this really, really compelling as a way to think about- as part of this different way of defining wellness and healing. That is a responsibility for future generations, right? 

Because what we also learn from you and your history with your mum is that she was also traumatized, right? That there is this kind of cyclical process that you know, we know more about it in the context of the 1971 war, we get some glimpses, there's not you don't go too much into it but it's there, right? This idea that there is a, you know, much like a generational process and to think that in so many different contexts, “perpetrators and victims” and I say quote, unquote, not because I don't think there are perpetrators and victims. I just think that they are the perpetrators and victims, and other things also. Usually folks who cause harm, were harmed themselves at some point, right? So, if we push that logic through, we understand the responsibility and the importance of needing to heal from those experiences right.  

So, I would love to hear a little bit more from you about your relationship with sort of coming to terms with that very difficult realization and perhaps liberating realization that the person who caused you harm was also harmed and sort of what that understanding is. Probably something that you come to again and again, I imagine it's not a static position, right? [Fariha: Yeah.] Some of the experience of that for you and strategies for you to move through that experience.  

Fariha: What are some of the strategies or-? [Targol: Yeah.] Um, I am an abolitionist and that has really changed my life because I was already thinking about this sort of. In 2018, I wrote an essay about M.I.A the rapper and it was an essay called “In the Defensive Nuance” and the whole article sort of grappled with, what do we do with people, especially in the public eye that fail us and are just inevitably going to be messy and do things that are harmful and they're going to harm people. It's just this natural reality of us as humans. We are messy.  

[not comprehensible] also talks about this a lot. Sort of kind of like chaos of the world, you know. Like how actually other spiritual ontology is outside of these very like specific kind of you know, monotheistic ones don't make a lot of space for…I mean and one could argue that every sort of like you know, I think Islam has this, Christianity probably has this, I think Judaism has this as well, sort of conversations that talk about liminality. But by and large the kind of like what we get taught, the kind of like dogmatic version of these faiths, denies us the reality of chaos and my life was really chaotic.  

My mother abused me, my mother molested me, my mother harmed me, my mother tried to kill me. My mother tried to- you know she's just…that's why I don't want to talk to her ever again. I have no interest in having a relationship. At the same time, I am working on forgiving her every day and loving her every day because I understand. Maybe not every day, I don't, I don't really- but, you know, sometimes she's really present and like, you know, for years I was really angry and it wasn't getting me anywhere. It didn't get me anywhere to be so rageful. Also really, like, not even knowing what to do with the rage. I was just turning it on, turning it against myself, turning inward. So, I think like, when I realized that you know, abolitionist practice, praxis and practice is all about understanding that chaos, understanding that humans are inherently messy. 

So, what's next? How do we create spaces of transformative justice or spaces of true reflection and true rehabilitation? How do we create that for people that harm us and fail us because rapists are always going to exist in society. Probably, sadly, you know, and like there's always going to be people that are going to harm other people. You know, what my mom did is very inevitable, given her life. It was, there was an inevitability attached to it, and I just happened to be the person that was harmed. I think that I, for myself, for my ancestry, for the lineage of sexual abuse that I carry in my body and the lineage of sexual abuse that I carry just in my own life, that reality, the reality that no other woman or femme person in my life, in my family, probably could have said or talked about. I get to end that with myself and that goes back to the Iroquois law, you know. The idea of Seven Generations, it is this concept of grappling with your humanity as a larger interconnected part of something that's greater and grander, a tapestry of people that you are energetically connected to, that you have a responsibility to. 

I think that is also what comes back to: responsibility. I don’t think we want to like discard people and be like ‘well that's your issue now, good luck’ and I think the criminal justice system here and the prison industrial complex here and the denial of, like, understanding the ways in which slavery is absolutely being perpetuated in, you know, the prison system and the ways in which that dehumanization needs to occur for there to be the status quo in the hierarchy that exists in the US where for the entire existence of this country, they've relied on stolen labor and stolen land. That is the reality of the United States of America, that hasn't changed in the last 400 years.  

So, whether it's you're taking it from an outpost, you know, going into the Middle East and you're creating havoc in order to get oil and resources, whether you're doing it that way, or you're doing it actually to your own people. In every way shape or form, the US is depleting other people and other resources for its own gain. For me, that is…it's really, really important to talk about. I totally lost my train of thought, but I am like, where am I taking this again? What was your question again?  

Targol: It doesn't matter, you answered. It was a perfect answer. No, you connected the responsibilities, and yeah. I wanted to see if you could talk a little bit about the degrowth movement and how you came to it and you've sort of been involved for over a year, I think at the time in New York you had mentioned, I'm not sure.  

Fariha: Yeah so, well I'm still a part of Degrowth New York City, and shout out to my comrades, we are a Marxist-Leninist organization that is dedicated to essentially educating and investing in degrowing from capitalism. So, what that means and how I explain that to people is generally it’s about consumption, going back to just how you consume and why you consume it. So, who do you shop from? Who do you buy from? And why? And looking at those spending habits, looking at how sort of you engage with need and want, I think, in the era of fast fashion, I talked about this, this is something that I'm going to continue to talk about. I like nice things, you know? I love beautiful objects and I’m very invested in my home. I like fashion.  

And through time, I’ve really thought about, you know, the reality is because we are at trading peoples, you know, we have traded for a millennia, it's not capitalism's fault, like it's not, you know, I think often people think about Socialism and this is how I was very much taught as a kid too. But now I'm an adult and I have my own ideas about things. But Socialism or you know, anti-capitalist rhetoric is not about like, don't consume, never have anything nice, you can’t have nice things. It's essentially about consumption. How are you consuming? Where are you consuming from? And why are you consuming it?  

So, if you're buying less and not buying from fast fashion, I think fast fashion is one of those things, you know, like Zara, like your Forever 21's, we really need to contend with it societally. How much do we need fashion at this rate? Nobody needs this many things and the landfills in Ghana will tell you that there's enough clothes to go around. So yeah, thinking about the sort of ripple effects in how you buy and how you contend with your own need essentially for things and really, I think re-examining that core issue and that foundational issue. Especially I think people like me who grew up on the Internet.  

There's so much access to so much and I think even with the elite you see this like how much money is too much money? Why do we have billionaires? Why did people have yachts? All of that is like, sure we can we can we can say a lot. Yes. I want to, you know, a temple in the sky. Like, you know, we can want a lot of things, but do we need them? I think that especially with regards to, you know, facing the climate when thinking about what the everyday individual can do, there has been such an emphasis from corporations to be like, well it's the individual's responsibility, however, that's not the case. If a family is barely getting by, we can't think about how much, you know, petrol usage or like, you know, they get to do whatever the fuck they want. Like it's if you are barely getting by, you don't have a responsibility.  

I don't think so. I mean of course you do, but collectively we all do but it is really sort of I think, re-examining who really, what is the cost here? It's like 1% of the richest in the world are using 50% of what the poorest nations in the world consume, it’s consumption issue. So, I'm really, you know, really trying to talk to rich people here and talk about things like why do you need money and why are you hoarding it? If we believe in utopic and visioning, which I very much believe. I'm very much invested in, there is enough to go around. We know that there is enough to end poverty. Elon Musk knows that. There's like a lot of things that we could do. 

This idea that power corrupts absolutely, absolute power corrupts absolutely is so boring and basic to me. I'm not interested in that kind of human weakness anymore. I think that we are really looking at our last days on such a majestic and beautiful planet and I really, really hope that, I really don't actually think we have a choice, that we begin to change rapidly. I think degrowth is really the solution.  

Targol: Thank you so much. Yeah, the connection between tackling consumption at the level of the system and structure so that we have an economy that's based on the idea of growth, like everything, like you do the growing economy. That's like if it's not growing 5% there's something wrong, right? And this idea of having a different conception like degrowth.  

Fariha: You can't keep growing, where it's not sustainable. We actually, we're hanging for a point where we actually can’t continue to grow. I don't think like the average American understands that. There's not exponential growth like the planet can't support us. She actually can’t support us. She does, she's showing us, she can't support it. 

Targol: Exactly, and I think that sort of your way of talking about degrowth in the book and also sort of the emphasis on organizing is so important because it's not about individual consumer choice like today. Should I buy this, or should I buy that, right? Which is what the corporate world wants you to think, right? No, you can make life-changing decisions by what you buy. But nonetheless choice and responsibility are there, but at a collective level and in a way that we need to work together, right?  

Fariha: We really have to reward one another, to really sort of keep each other in mind. I think, like, understand that different people have different needs, but it's really, really engaging with the fact that like mutual aid, if you have more, you have a bigger responsibility to give back. Yeah, we can't just hoard millions of dollars anymore. What are you going to do with billions of dollars on a planet that's burning? It doesn't make any sense. Does it make any sense?  

Targol: No, it does not. [inhalation] Who do you wish to read this book? And do you hope they take from it?  

Fariha: White rich people, for sure. I would love white rich people to read this book and be like, ‘whoa, I can change so much, I can do so much’ and feel energized about that. Yeah, this book is really, really like, I'm really trying to get it to, to the people that are responsible.  

Then, of course, that's one group of people. I want child sexual abuse survivors to read this book. I want people in prisons to read this book. I want people that have suffered intergenerational trauma to read this book. I want anybody that feels like they have something to heal to read this book. So, I really want it to get as far as I possibly can. I want this book to get into as many hands as that will have them and I feel very grateful that people read my work but yes anyway that you can encourage others to read if you're watching, thank you so much. I need your support. Give it to everyone and talk about it. Thank you for having me here. It's just like such a gift to share this work with people.  

Targol: I will say maybe just one, there's so many things I want to touch on about the book more, but we don't have time. I encourage folks to read it. It's a beautiful offering, and one of the things that you say, maybe I'll close us out with this is…it’s actually towards the beginning of the book. I think it's through this idea, Hartman's work that you talk about sort of how domination works through the policing of our imaginations. You know and I just, I appreciate so much that reminder and again another invitation for us to imagine, imagine the world we want. Imagine the connections. Imagine the Earth that's flourishing. That is not being desecrated by you know extractavist capitalism and greet and profit-driven structures and systems. We have each other.  

Fariha: We do, and that's an extraordinary thing worth our time, and our energy to protect.  

Targol: Thank you. 

Fariha: Thank you. Thank you so much. 

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Thank you for listening to the CIIS Public Programs Podcast. Our talks and conversations are presented live in San Francisco, California. We recognize that our university’s building in San Francisco occupies traditional, unceded Ramaytush Ohlone lands. If you are interested in learning more about native lands, languages, and territories, the website native-land.ca is a helpful resource for you to learn about and acknowledge the Indigenous land where you live. 
 
Podcast production is supervised by Kirstin Van Cleef at CIIS Public Programs. Audio production is supervised by Lyle Barrere at Desired Effect. The CIIS Public Programs team includes Izzy Angus, Kyle DeMedio, Alex Elliott, Emlyn Guiney, Patty Pforte, and Nikki Roda. If you liked what you heard, please subscribe wherever you find podcasts, visit our website, and connect with us on social media @ciispubprograms. 
 
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