In this blog post, I plan to write about an event that I went to at the residence that I live at on campus, my discomfort at the event, and my musings on why this was so. I will bring in aspects of Du Bois (1903/2012) to help with my understandings.
I have had the opportunity to live on campus for the duration of my undergraduate degree—well for eight months at a time anyway since I live at my family’s home in Surrey during the summers. In my first year, I lived at a UBC first year residence in a double room with a close friend from high school. In my second year, I applied for UBC residence and did not get in, so I looked into other options for housing and resigned myself to finding somewhere to live off-campus if nothing panned out. I ended up applying to another residence at St. Andrew’s Hall. St. Andrew’s is where the College of the Presbyterian Church is located at UBC as well as residences for students of the college in addition to UBC students.
I lived at St. Andrew’s during my second, third, and now in my fourth year. On their website, St. Andrew’s writes:
The sense of community is important at St. Andrew’s Hall. Not only students studying for ministry within The Presbyterian Church in Canada but all residents are encouraged to bring their gifts to the community and to make use of opportunities for intellectual, physical, social, and spiritual growth.
In my (going-on) three years living at St. Andrew’s, I have received email upon email of events hosted by St. Andrew’s for its residents and community members to attend. It was only this year that I actually went to one of them—in part because I have a roommate who is a Community Coordinator at St. Andrew’s (similar to the role of a Residence Advisor at UBC residences) and so she is very vocal to encourage all of us in our apartment to attend upcoming events. This particular event was a Soup Night. Every Wednesday, St. Andrew’s hosts a Soup Night in their chapel, followed by an “Open Table” discussion on a different religious or spiritual topic of the week, led by one of St. Andrew’s chaplains. I get an email about Soup Night and the Open Table discussion every week to remind me that there is yet another one to be hosted, telling me what kind of soup will be given out and what the topic will be. This time around, there was organic red lentil soup to be had and “world salvation” to be discussed.
I had never been in the chapel at St. Andrew’s before, but I have walked past it many times, so I knew where to go. When I entered the chapel with my bowl and a spoon, I noticed that there were some differences between it and the churches that I had been in before. It was basically a big room with really high ceiling, there was a big cross on the wall, a wooden podium at the front and some regular chairs (not pews) as well as some couches. It looked as though the room functioned for many uses so the chairs and couches being mobile helped to re-organize easily. There were also some small tables and on them sat some pots. I figured that since the objective of the Soup Night was soup, I should head towards that. The pots seemed promising, so I gravitated towards them. I was greeted by a couple people who were standing by the pots. They told me to help myself to some soup. I did. Then I stayed for a little while and made small talk with them. They asked me whereabouts in St. Andrew’s I was living, what I was studying, etc. They also asked me if I would be staying for the Open Table discussion. At this point, I made a snap decision not to go to the discussion and told them that I couldn’t stay because I had something for class due the next day that I needed to get done. That part… was a lie. I didn’t have anything due the next day.
I had decided that I had become too uncomfortable being in the chapel and would not be comfortable going to the Open Table discussion within this setting. Although the Soup Night and the Open Table discussion was advertised as being open to everyone to attend, no matter their cultural, ethnic, or religious background, I was very intimidated to partake in it. I left the chapel soon after and went back to my apartment thinking about my discomfort.
Why did I feel uncomfortable? I had been to church before, especially when I was younger. My mom is Anglican and, when I was younger, she would send my sisters and I to Sunday school while she went to Sunday mass. My sisters and I stopped going to church regularly when we got older, but my mom still went by herself or with my aunts on occasion. For the most part, I only go now if my mom wants some company on special occasions such as Christmas Eve mass. However, our family still celebrates Christian holidays (Christmas and Easter) at home. Thinking back to my familiarity in my childhood with the church, I didn’t fully understand why I felt so uncomfortable in the chapel at Soup Night until I thought on it further.
Du Bois (1903/2012) speaks about the veil, double consciousness, and two-ness in The Souls of Black Folk. He writes on the veil as a metaphor for oneself being “wrapped in”. So long as one is wrapped in the veil, they will always see the image of themselves reflected back at them as how others believe them to be, allowing others to erase their two identities. The veil affects a person when the person internalizes this erasure of their two identities. When one transcends the veil, they can begin the process of juggling their two identities and their double consciousness. This two-ness of identification is something that I struggle with.
While my mom’s influence in my life meant that I was familiar with the church in my childhood, my dad’s influence in my life meant that I was also familiar with Islam. My family on my mom’s side are European, Caucasian, and Christian and my family on my dad’s side are North African, Berber, and Muslim. The two sides of my family have contributed to my sense of two identities, two cultures, two ethnicities, and two heritages. Growing up in a mixed household and with a mixed family, I embody a two-ness and a type of double consciousness. Although Du Bois writes specifically about his own double identity being American and African in a specific context—during the late 1800s/early 1900s, a time of social and political turmoil for African Americans, the beginnings of the Reconstruction Era of the American Constitution, and the emancipation of African American slaves in the South—my two-ness identification is markedly different from his.
Now, I don’t exactly identify as Christian myself, nor do I identify as Muslim, but these religious backgrounds cannot be isolated as purely religious identifications—in my mind, there is a distinctive cultural and ethnic component to claiming either. That is to say, there are different cultural and ethnic interpretations of Christianity and Islam (e.g. Muslims in Pakistan are influenced by a different set of cultural/ethnic backgrounds than Muslims in North Africa) and that both religiosity and culture/ethnicity feed into each other. So, as I thought about why I was uncomfortable at the Soup Night and wondered why I was uncomfortable since I had been in a Christian chapel many times in my life before, I realized that it was not just the religious aspect that I spurred my discomfort. It was also the cultural/ethnic aspects that had me uncomfortable and the idea that my two-ness might be erased by the other Soup Night-goers.
Those instances in which I had experienced the church had previously been with my mom and/or my sisters, who understood my two-ness. Previously, it had been enough to have someone at my side who knew my two-ness and, at Soup Night, no one knew of my two-ness and it would require that I attempt to explain it. Perhaps at this point you’re thinking to yourself, “You shouldn’t feel required to explain your two-ness to anyone, Krystal. That’s a personal thing and so divulging it is not a requirement if you don’t want to.” But that simply isn’t true. If you gave me a nickel every time someone asked me “what are you?” or “what’s your ethnic background?” or “where is your last name from?” I would be a decently wealthy person. These sorts of questions and speculations on my identity from others in the past, in a way, have coloured how I have internalized an obligation to let others know, since those questions have always framed to me that they are obligated an answer. For this, I feel that Du Bois falls a little short on the topic of two-ness. For me, my two-ness is largely framed by how I feel the obligation to communicate it to others because, if I don’t, they will understand me as one identity and I would feel almost like a fraud to go along with it because it is not the whole picture of who I am. Yes, Du Bois hits on some really important points regarding how a person internalizes their two-ness, but his understanding of this internalization as a linear progression (being wrapped in the veil → transcending the veil → having a double conscious/internalizing two-ness) is a short-falling of his piece. Two-ness is not static and I find myself negotiating (and re-negotiating) my two-ness differently depending on the setting and those around me.
References
Du Bois, W.E.B. (2012). The Souls of Black Folk. In S. Appelrouth & L. Desfor Edles (Eds.), Classical and Contemporary Sociological Theory (2nd ed., pp. 271-283). Thousand Oaks, California, USA: Pine Forge Press. (Original work published in 1903)