Talking Gently About Heart-Pounding Topics: An Interview with Dr. Anu Taranath

You can read her essay, “The TIPS Letters,” here.

UNDOMESTICATED: In the essay you wrote for us, you say that it feels riskier to write than to read, and before I started recording our interview, you mentioned that writing that essay was really difficult. The TIPS letter exercise you used is a hallmark of your teaching and consulting, so at first blush, I was surprised that it didn’t come easy for you.

DR. ANU TARANATH: I enjoyed writing my piece, but it was really hard, really challenging. I was writing about some slippery themes and topics that have been circling around in my mind for some time. I know that I wouldn't have written any of this if I hadn't had a deadline and a commitment to you. I thought several times, Let me pull out. And then I thought, No, no, I think the universe is saying it's about time that you spend a little bit of time reflecting, and not just offer spaces for other people to reflect.

That’s something that also struck me while reading your book Beyond Guilt Trips: Mindful Travel in an Unequal World. Even when diversity and equity are what you live and breathe all the time, it can still be difficult to think about such weighty topics and especially to commit your thoughts to paper or bring them into conversation.

Absolutely. I’m more comfortable in these conversations than perhaps many of us given my familiarity and expertise. It doesn't necessarily mean, however, that I’ve figured everything out. I'm just more comfortable knowing that I'm not figured out. That doesn't flummox me in the ways that it did earlier. Now I know that being uncomfortable or not knowing is part of what it means to be human.

Your work centers on helping people talk about big, uncomfortable questions. Why is it important to have these conversations, even if we aren't going to get answers?

I think there are some questions for which we really need answers: What time are you coming home? I'm coming home around nine. What do you want for dinner? I’d like some lentils and rice. We expect to be able to articulate some information and there's little discomfort in that. On the other hand, if we're trying to talk about why persistent harm is so entrenched in our institutions, and how has that fundamentally structured the way that I think about myself and others, that's on a very different register. It feels egregiously open and raw. It's pulsing with our heartbeats from the past and the present. Understanding that we operate on different registers has helped me step into those big beating heartbeat kind of conversations and not expecting the regularity, or the ease that I might have if you and I are deciding on our lunch choices, right? With lunch choices, my anxiety is probably not so high. But with this other stuff, there are different stakes involved. It’s harder, more fraught.

If we don't have the conversation? If we decide “Let's just stay safe and try to ignore this”?

Then nothing changes. I think we're all tangled in this larger history. It lands on us really differently based on who we are, but we're all tangled in it. And if we stay silent, perhaps we're safe, sort of, for a few moments. But we're also not as awake as we could be. To the vibrancy, the pain, the struggle, the resilience of ourselves and each other.

But if you don't feel the pain, and know how to navigate it and sit with it and feel what it's like, your joy is probably not so high as well. You can’t tamp down the pain and expect that it won’t affect our other emotions. When I sit with this history of race and oppression that we're trying to unpack now– it feels so big,so big and brutal. I'm just humbled at how big and brutal it is. There are connections between the joy and grief, pain and happiness we feel, especially in those moments that we try not to think about or feel because they’re challenging or uncomfortable. If we had some support and skills along the way to navigate our painful and uncomfortable feelings, and not just feel as if we’ve been dropped in the deep end,, I think we'd be able to also feel our joys more authentically.

It reminds me of what Brené Brown talks about where you can't selectively numb one thing. If you try to numb out pain, you end up numbing all your other emotions.

Yeah, that’s nicely said.

I think what you’re also saying is that it’s not just our own emotions that we close off, but by shutting out certain topics, we’re losing connection and humanity and we’re not really being part of this world.

Absolutely.

So how did you get more used to being uncomfortable and learn to accept that as necessary?

I've always been a cultural in-between; living in the United States, with close family in India, not being white, not being black, but living in the black/white binary all around me. Not fitting in really shaped much of my thinking as a young person. I had no language for any of this, though. I didn't know that’s what I was experiencing.

I started to find community with people who were speaking about issues of identity and power, and history, and who we are. I started to realize that the sense of otherness that had threaded much of my youth wasn't just about me. It was a shared story, andhere was a reason that people feel disconnected and othered. It's not because of our own deficiency. The larger process of racialization in this country gave meaning to who we were and who we weren't. Understanding that slowly excited me. It made me feel seen and heard.

I went to graduate school to learn more about these kinds of ideas, not only as they play out in the U.S., but from a wider global lens. And I didn't actually know that I wanted to be a teacher until I started teaching. I was a terrible teacher for the first several years, and I'm sure I did all kinds of harm to some students on account of my own insecurities!

Why were you teaching? Because it was part of your graduate program?

“I didn't always know the answer, but I started to understand that good learning is about sitting in those big questions.”

Yes. My very first day in graduate school, I had never been in front of a classroom and was told to teach African American literature. I had never taken an African American literature class before. I had never had any kind of training on how to talk about history, identity, who we are now, and how this all connects to literary representations in a mixed classroom. It was really challenging. It sucked! And then a couple of years in, toward the end of my PhD, I started realizing—wait, I don't have to be an expert in everything. I realized that good teaching is about creating space for people to be able to plug in whoever they are, and wherever they're at. I was beginning to ask good questions in class. I didn't always know the answers to them, but I started to understand that good learning is about sitting in those big questions. Teaching then became exciting and useful. And dramatic for its small moments of insight.

As we touched on earlier, your piece for us was written in the form of an exercise you created for your students that asks you to write a letter to each part of the acronym TIPS: T for Thing, I for Idea, P for person and S for self. How and why do folks benefit from writing these letters?

I use the TIPS letters in a variety of the classes, whether I'm teaching about, say, literature from Kenya or Zimbabwe, or I'm teaching about migration and feminism.My students tell me the TIPS Letters are somewhat of a game changer for them to be able to relate to texts, ideas, things, characters and themselves differently.

Once you begin writing to that Thing or Idea that you’ve identified, you begin to have a different relationship with it. You're now communicating with it in a very different way.

Writing to yourself takes a level of introspection that I think our culture has tried to beat out of us in so many ways. Writing to somebody who you might not know and who you might never send this letter to is also challenging, for there's a level of abstraction in that. But there's also a level of closeness. By addressing them, I'm bringing something abstract and pulling that Person or Thing or Idea into my orbit.

One of the most fascinating aspects of Beyond Guilt Trips was seeing how your identity was perceived—by yourself and by others—in dramatically different ways from place to place. How does travel force us to see ourselves differently and why does that matter?

Travel absolutely forces us to see ourselves differently because the context in which we are being seen has also shifted. The people by whom we are being seen has also shifted.

When I was in China, the fact that I was American had little bearing on the ways that people were responding to me. It was my brownness and what that meant to local people in that context. When I was in Ghana, for example, Mr. Hassan from my letter felt that too., My Americanness mattered little to him besides the fact that I spoke such good English as he said. It was my cultural proximity to him and African-ness that created our bond and connection.

So even though I'm still me whether I'm in Seattle or Beijing or in Accra, how people see me shifts. Travel can knock us upside the head with this kind of difference.

Speaking of Mr. Hassan. You said just now and also in your essay that part of why you were able to become friends was your brownness, that he didn’t see you the same way he saw other Western travelers. But from my perspective, speaking with you and having read your book, I also sense that it's not just that. It’s also that you've cultivated this very open and accepting way about you. How can other travelers show their willingness to sit down and listen?

“I'm wondering if it's less about traveling off the beaten path and more traveling off the beaten agenda.”

You know, I've read a lot about traveling off the beaten path to get to know locals. I'm wondering if mindful travel is less about traveling off the beaten path and more traveling off the beaten agenda. If we are traveling with a packed itinerary to check boxes or to shoot that perfect social media photo, then no matter what your heart is open for, you don't have time for tea in a tailor’s shop.

You will miss that lovely nod that Mr. Hassan and I offered each other those first few days. That nod became an invitation for us to speak more. There are so many metaphorical nods when we are traveling. It might be a doubletake that somebody makes, it might be a small comment. And if I am holding so tightly to an agenda or to a fixed notion of what a traveler does, I don’t have time and space to enjoy that small connection.

Agendas remind me of another challenge for writers in particular. If you have an assignment to write a specific story, you may not make those serendipitous connections with people. Maybe just because you’re in a hurry but also because you're looking for the things that fit that story. It’s hard to strike a balance between the pressure to report a tight story but also just taking the time to see what comes.

Yes, for sure. This isn't just about when we are on assignment, though, this is very much about when we are in our so-called everyday regular life. Let’s practice how we can be in place and see our context a bit differently, and be more open to that nod for a tea in the tailor’s shop.

We are often scared to move outside of our own bubbles. The stakes are high these days, and we’re nerve-wracked about making errors. We think we're being safe by being silent or muted, but collectively we're being quite myopic. We're not accessing our full humanity, which means acknowledging that we're a little raw in some ways, that everything is not fully formed and answerable, that we're in process, we're not perfect, and well, here we are together.

Yes, people are very wary of making errors. I noticed that when we've been talking to people for this anthology, there's concern about, for want of a better term, call-out culture . Writers can be afraid to take chances in their writing, or maybe even in their teaching, because people are worried about how every word is going to be received. Have you encountered that concern as well? And if so, what do you tell people about that?

I think we are in a really challenging moment around voice and representation now. On the one hand, it seems a little foolhardy to imagine that creativity has no responsibility, or that we can push ourselves out there regardless of how our work might land on others.

On the other hand, reducing us into boxes and saying, you can only write about what you know, and what you know well, or what you know perfectly– that also doesn't seem right. It doesn't seem like we're actually learning how to be allies to one another.

Practicing allyship is clumsy. It's imperfect. It is fraught. And it's political. It's all of that. And we practice allyship in a variety of ways—through speaking up for somebody at work when their idea wasn't really listened to, or lending our voice to a larger movement. We share our wealth, if we have extra, and we support organizations that are doing great work. I think we can also practice allyship by deeply imagining who we are not. That's allyship in practice right there.

We're in a moment right now in our culture where the politics of representation have a lot of weight and history. And we're looking at these issues through a lens of woundedness.

And of course, that makes these issues all the more fraught, right? Understanding the larger context helps me realize that the call out around that book, or that author, or that representation isn't only about that book, or author or passage. It is because we're looking at it through a lens of wounds. The other side is…isn't it good for us to have to stretch outside of who we are? Shouldn’t we try to figure out our empathy through words and language and imperfect paragraphs? Isn't that where society gets better?

When it comes to these questions that don't have answers, you also reminded me of something inherent in the modern Western essay structure that doesn’t lend itself well to these big unanswerable topics. We’re pushed toward a structure where you have a question, and then you kind of have that answer by the end. It’s actually one of the hardest things as a personal essayist or memoirist or travel writer because you rarely have that clean answer. How can we encourage storytelling that asks more questions without providing answers?

I guess, like anything, we have to be introduced to newness in ways that keep us curious. I read somewhere that for a child to decide if they like or dislike a vegetable, for example, they need to try it 17 times. I don't know if that's true or not. I do like the idea of saying, I don’t know that I like broccoli, but let me keep going for it. It makes me think that there's something akin to that in creating different ways of writing to expand our expectations. Right now so much of writing has to be a particular formula. That's what our readers expect. Where's the 17 times of trying broccoli in that? How do we create some opportunities for that third broccoli, that ninth broccoli, you know?

That is such a great point and I love that. Whether it’s as editors, writers, or readers, we can gradually get used to something new and different, even if at first taste, it’s uncomfortable. Though as a mom of a seven and 10-year-old, I want to know how to get my kids to try something new 17 times!

One the things I find so refreshing in your book and in talking to you is that while so much of our culture is people talking at each other and giving opinions and answers, you make it clear that even though you’ve been thinking about issues of identity and difference for decades, you still have uncomfortable moments where you don’t know what to do. By saying that, I think you’re giving people permission to start where they are, even though it’s far from perfect. It makes me think of something you say on your consulting website: “I believe in pushing the conversation—without pushing folks away.” Why is that important, and how do you do that?

You might have heard this phrase “You can be right or you can be in a relationship.” And in the very noisy moment that we're in, where we are looking at things through the lens of woundedness, the stakes are so high. Of course we are nervous. Of course we are anxious. Of course no one wants to be called out. And so rather than think of this as white fragility, or male fragility, or whatever fragility, I have been thinking of this more as something that is very human and endemic to us all. Sensitive conversations make us sensitive, all of us.

It's not like the people of color that I know are less fragile than the white folks. We are all fragile, and we are all fragile in really different ways because of how we've been socialized, the conversations that we've had to have, or the conversations that we've been privileged to never have.

“We are trying to expand our sense of self, and expand our empathy, and ability to hold stories that are not ours. And pushing conversations without pushing folks away, is central to that. ”

Fragility is a concept that works differently in all of us. And so over the last many years, I have been thinking about that. I'm in the glorious position of bringing people into these conversations, sometimes by choice, sometimes because it's required by their supervisor or whomever. I actually love required sessions, where participants might not be self selecting. I'm not trying to solve everything in a one-and-a-half hour workshop. I'm not trying to solve everything in even a 10-week University of Washington class, or on a two-month study abroad experience. I’m not solving anything big and intractable. I simply can’t.

I am, however, trying to expand our sense of self and empathy for others, and to stretch our ability to hold stories that are not ours. That's for me what my work is about. And pushing conversations forward without pushing folks away is central to that.

I want to be able to talk about hard things that make us have heart palpitations. And I want to be able to support people through it gently. Not eggshell our way through it. I’d love for us to bravely say: I don't understand, or I feel differently, or I don't see what you see.

We sometimes need to have hard conversations. They’re sensitive, so I bring a lot of gentleness to this work. I don't have gentle convictions. I have very passionate, very strong convictions. As I think through the lens of teaching and learning, I know that we don't learn well when we are shamed and blamed. Nobody does. White folks don't, folks of color don't, black folks don't, queer folks don't. Nobody learns well when we are shamed and blamed.

We all have more opportunities to learn better if we are invited into the conversation with honor and dignity, grace, and sometimes a stern talking-to. That also is there. It's not about not holding people accountable. But how you talk about things matters in getting people into the conversation and keeping them there.

Yes, if you only do the stern talking to, it's not a conversation. Only one person is talking.

You know, some of the most beautiful comments I've received in my career are things like, “I didn't think that I could be uncomfortable and also be okay. I am realizing that I was so scared that you would blame me for being white. I didn't know that I was, like, waiting for that shoe to drop. And when it didn't come, you actually helped me think about what it means to be white or male or this or that. I actually had some space to consider how my life might look different than yours.”

I've also heard from BIPOC folks that they too appreciate being able to talk about race and power and identity and history and harm with a sense of breath and ease. Our conversation might still be filled with conviction and passion, but it is also gentle because I know there's a lot of different wounds in the room. Usually in conversations about race and harm in history, we're fired up. We're so jacked up, because how could we not be with all that is going on?

My work is not about catering to a particular person’s fragility, it is, rather, about better understanding how humans work. We are fragile and sensitive creatures by nature. Of course, we are. All of us. And most of us are trying to do the best we can with the very crusty and rusty tools that we've been given. So if I am in this glorious position of being able to bring people together about sensitive topics, how I do that matters immensely.

I love to leave people with a little bit more curiosity than they came in with. That's good work to me.