Amalgam Melee – A Landscape of the Emotional Body

- the programme text of this piece talks about hierarchies of violence and power in relation to the bodily experience and contradictions stemming from your ethnic background. Could you elaborate on this topic?

I reflect on questions of power in relation to the structures of whiteness and brownness, examining what kinds of hierarchies of power and violence operate in Finnish society and within me. When I consider violence, I think about who has the agency to define what constitutes violence, what is seen as violence in different situations and by whom; how context and the perpetrator’s identity play into it. The question of violence is intricately tied to structures of white supremacy. 

I’m an Eurasian Finn. I was born and raised in Finland and I have been socialised to see the world through the Finnish nationalistic identity project. My father is a white Finn and my mother is a Brown Filipina. Complex structures of racism, patriarchy, power and Finnish immigration politics interact within my cultural inheritance. My Brown mother has lost part of her cultural inheritance due to the demands of Finnish assimilation politics. I do not speak my mother's language, and I have experienced that I haven't had the chance to experience, cherish, or celebrate her culture, customs, and traditions in my upbringing. There is, in a way, a right to something or a sense of belonging that I have not received. I feel like I am not part of, or do not have access to the community to which I belong diasporically. Being Filipina is still a part of me and ingrained into me in complex ways, they just don’t manifest in ways that are generally understood as identity markers. This has made it difficult for me to recognise those aspects within myself and strengthen them.

Power structures and power hierarchies interact with internalised racism; intergenerational internalised racism is deeply rooted in my bodily experience. With people of Asian descent these structures manifest in many ways, such as overpowering aspirations of belonging, attraction towards the dominant (power-holding) group, reinforcing notions of white supremacy, a fragmented sense of ethnic and racial identity and the development of a false psychological consciousness. These factors operate without awareness, intention or control and manifest as low personal and collective self-esteem, increased psychological stress, lower inculturation, negative evaluations of personal and group characteristics, a lower sense of belonging to one’s own ethnic group, unhealed pain, rage, ‘violence’ and other mental health issues. 

The formation of my Eurasian identity has gone through a process that is, of course, still ongoing; I’ve lived in a type of false/misguided understanding of my own ethnicity and socio-political position. Tools of intersectional feminism and class awareness (or class analysis) have opened the door for a more truthful and politically conscious understanding of my own ‘whiteness’ or ‘brownness’. 

I witness how racism, patriarchy, and class structures affect and permeate the life of my Brown parent. I observe it almost from the perspective of the oppressor, but not entirely. Having been born in Finland, I have privileges that shield (or protect) me from those factors in ways that do not protect her. There’s a clear hierarchy between me and my Brown parent. Simultaneously, that’s the same intersection where ‘inherited’ internalised racism steps into the picture. The internal contradiction of my experience is that I have many privileges and I have access to structures provided by white privilege. In other words, I have a seat at the table in the Global North/West, which benefits and feasts from a system where 90% of the ‘cake’ is produced through the oppression of the Global South. Yet at the same time, I’m affected by structures of Finnish racism and intergenerational internalised racism. I’m both the oppressor and the oppressed.  

- I remember you talking about a specific experience of anger that you recognise. It’s an interesting theme that doesn’t get raised that often when experiences of people with bicultural backgrounds are portrayed. I’m just bringing it up to give more background to my previous question, it was perhaps not that well formed.

In my case, oppressive structures, points of contention related to them, and their ‘complex’, ‘silent’ and ‘invisible’ mechanisms have given rise to a specific bodily experience of anger and rage. I use these words in brackets because they’re not actually invisible or complex, but very real, physically experienced, and felt in the body. For example, in Finland, internalised racism is very poorly understood. These contradicting hierarchies embedded in my cultural heritage have led to a type of guilt within me that manifests also as anger and rage. I’m not talking about the type of guilt associated with white fragility, I’m talking about the type of guilt that grows into a heavy weight in your body from childhood as you sense and witness the power structures and live within them. And it's only through the political tools I mentioned that I’ve been able to start navigating this. But as I’m writing this I’m noticing it feels somehow dismissive and reductive to talk about anger and rage. I become aware of how being labelled ‘angry’ is often part of the othering perception of the world that surrounds me. Anger and its different shades are just one part of a larger landscape of complex emotions. 

Amalgam Melee seeks to embody on stage this bodily experience rooted in these hierarchies and points of contention. It depicts the experience of existing on different sides of these issues – under them, in between them, and pressured by them. It aims to make visible a tension that has grown deep into and intertwined with the body. That feel and weight of it that’s difficult to grasp, hard to explain with words but nevertheless very real and very heavy. It’s not just anger, rage, quilt, shame, sadness, pain or depression. Is it all of those things entangled, overlapping, intermingled, and maybe something completely different?

Amalgam Melee is about finding ways to give space to this body and its emotional landscape; anger contains sadness and mourning but also a form of resistance and an energy of change. These emotions are part of the process of building political consciousness; recognizing that my socio-political position includes all these friction points, privileges, power dynamics, and oppressive structures, while at the same time, it holds the strength and potential to define for myself what identity and community can be. 

For me, questions of power and violence arise when I think about whether there’s space for the expression of racialized bodies. I feel like the white, Finnish code of norms defines all ways of being that deviate from whiteness as either being ‘too much’ or being ‘too aggressive’ or through whatever type of exoticising or dehumanising lens fits the context. Racism plays into how we understand, read, interpret and attempt to control how Brown people are allowed to exist. This is controlled through power and violence. It can be hard to express experiences of racism when you don’t have access to a type of ‘neutral’ position of ‘here’s a person expressing their emotions’. Instead, when expressing frustration or anger, one might be perceived or stereotyped as noncooperative, and rather as aggressive, violent, threatening, or a threat. This by itself creates a safety threat for a Brown person. These racist stereotypes take different forms and weightings in persons with different ethnicities and intersections. 

How to disentangle the bodily experience, or articulate the emotions whose existence is 'not recognized' or 'acknowledged,' which accumulate from situations and structures that whiteness does not recognize, meaning that it is 'unaware' of these structures? For example, in various everyday situations where the emotionality of one’s body starts to bubble up, such as in the face of white solipsism. White solipsism refers to displays of moral, societal and intellectual superiority. It feels like something that’s impossible to penetrate. You feel like you have to just give in or submit, or that you have to be sharp and energised to be able to call it out the right way. You also have to assess whether you have the energy to deal with the situation that arises. Amalgam Melee is a piece where I process these questions and this multidimensional bodily experience. 

 - the text refers to the body as the third space. Could you elaborate on your thoughts behind this and what the two other spaces are?

I think that Amalgam Melee, as a performance or as my embodiment, represents a kind of third space. By this I refer to the question of having a dual cultural heritage, where, as a child of a third culture, I am neither just Finnish nor Filipino, nor a 50-50, but rather both-and, and  furthermore-and so on. In the preface of Third Culture Kids by Eid, Hubara, Suinner ja Beilinson, they articulate how ‘Third cultures created by third culture kids are creative spaces that do not rely on the exoticing of multiculturality or on binary oppositions, but are spaces where we see both ourselves and the other within ourselves in harmonious coexistence’. 

I see Amalgam Melee as a third space, where the frictions and hierarchies I mentioned earlier are simultaneously present, in contact, in conflict, in chaos, side by side, and in process. In this space I have the agency to define my own ethnic identity. This identity does not need to be clear, straightforward, or 'correctly' consistent; rather, it is cohesive as an amalgamation melee, with all its frictions, and is continuously evolving. And it’s not just about suffering, but also about all the other dimensions of life—joy, delight, and pleasure—that come with the experience of being a third culture kid. In the context of Amalgam Melee, I also view this third space as a place for the growth of my own political agency and awareness. 

Hmm could the two other spaces then be Finnish and Filipinx? I’m not sure how I feel about that. When it comes to myself, I feel like being Finnish and Filipina at the same time, inseparably, are part of that third space.

- how does your inner conflict show on stage in this piece? What are we going to see other than your body?

I’m interested in approaching the choreographic material from the perspective of bodily experience and emotionality. I’m also interested in the friction between the bodily experientiality and the realms of performance and performativity. It feels exciting, intriguing and challenging to allow myself to enter these vulnerable places within myself and see what kind of ‘bodily poetry’ emerges. 

On stage I have objects that connect to or symbolise different aspects of my cultural heritage. I’ll work with these objects in relation to my body, it’s experientiality, emotionality, and expressiveness, in connection with the societal questions of power and violence I here talk about. The choreographic construction is the place where the choreographic and bodily materials of the performance generate and come into dialogue; revealing the 'internal contradictions' or frictions of this amalgam melee. Layer by layer, unravelling this choreography.

Amalgam Melee by Marika Peura and working group at Zodiak Stage on September 5–19. 

(Translation: Carmen Baltzar, Marika Peura)