(In)direct speech

The day before I went home for Reading Week, I found this under my door.



It didn't make much sense to me, so I left it on my desk and looked at it again after I came back.

It still didn't make any sense to me. And I was annoyed at the circumlocutory language which clearly was meant to say something to me but obviously didn't get the point across.

Can you see the point?

Didn't think so. I found the phrasing so passive-aggressive that I was almost offended and put the thing in the recycling bin. Please DON'T EVER try to write to a Finn like that. I don't think they'd like it.

A follow-up email a few days later acknowledged the confusion and controversy that the letters initiated (everybody got a similar letter), but still didn't really state just what the issue was. I won't bother quoting from that email here.

So we had council meeting tonight and as usual, I just really really didn't want to go since I've long given up on dealing with the idealistic ideas being thrown around along with all the politics there. But this whole thing about "Food fair multiculturalism" that's been bothering me since the summer really needed to be said in this context, I think. Sarah told me to "pick my battles" and although I'm moving back to HUB next year (for a variety of reasons, these only being some of them), I didn't want to just abandon and run away without making my issues heard. And honestly, I have 200 pages to read for tomorrow afternoon, so it's not like I have a lot of time on my hands.

So I quickly wrote up a little statement:

[...]
When we have "cultural" events such as feasts, I think that there is a divide between people of the represented cultures who are really eager to share (who come) and those who are not (who don't come). And I think that one of the reasons some are not so eager to attend is because they may feel a sense of inauthenticity, not in themselves and their identity, but in the way they feel that their culture is being represented at those events.

e.g. Thanksgiving or Chinese New Year felt more to me like an excuse to get together and eat rather than really sharing culture, despite the presentations. It's not that people didn't do a good job with presentations, but I feel that if we just talk about WHAT we do and not about WHY we do those things (and this includes what those reasons mean in the bigger picture of whatever culture it is), we are presenting those cultural rituals and traditions as independent of the character and values of the cultures that created them. And in its worst incarnation, that's exoticism.
[...]

The discussion at the meeting tonight was quite heated. Since the letters were "intended to spark discussion" [quote from the email], they sure did. The whole meeting felt like a vent-box for anyone who had anything to vent. I also pointed out my issues with the compulsion and implicit guilt-tripping I've noticed in people trying to get people to attend events. A lot of interesting ideas and a lot of interesting "flaws in the system" were pointed out. But from the writers of the letter (and accompanying email), I felt that all it came down to was that, for each person, the form letter was slightly different based on feedback from an anonymous panel of residents on how "active" each of us are in the "community"; and that the whole point of the letter was that they wanted people to take more initiative in proposing and running events that suit what one wants to bring to the community.

I don't know about you, but instead of that confusing letter, we could have just gotten a note containing that last point.

Would it have been too blunt? Maybe for some.