Alok Vaid-Menon on Emancipatory Love, the Human Condition, and Radical Healing

Alok Vaid-Menon knows what radical love looks like. As a writer, artist, and activist, they have committed their life to liberation. No Borders met with Alok to talk about compassion, community, degendering fashion, and the possibility of a new world. 

NB: I want to start with a question relating to the goal of No Borders. We are a community of beings trying to embrace creativity, fluidity and liberation. And this way of being seems to be how we were meant to live, it seems like it is a part of our roots. I’m wondering if you could speak on how you strive to do the same, and how you think we can liberate ourselves and each other.

AVM: I think it's an ongoing journey and practice of self reflexivity, of meaningful dialogue. But at its core, is commitment to healing. I think a lot of the political issues in the world stem from a larger misalignment spiritually and emotionally, where people buy into belief systems that they have to betray themselves or deny or self medicate themselves in order to belong – compartmentalize themselves. And so I feel like many people don't feel like they're even worthy of love or liberation. And they defend the status of being unhealed. Because that's the most familiar place for them to be. So when people introduce more expensive ways of living or being, rather than embracing them, there's a kind of retaliation. A lot of times, people try to understand that using words like ‘counterintuitive’, but I actually feel like it's aligned with how we understand trauma to work. Trauma makes us mistake misery as reality. Trauma makes us defend what's familiar. And healing is profoundly unfamiliar.

NB: What does radical love mean to you? How do we embrace and encourage it? And how do you think we can move towards a feeling of collective belonging?

AVM: I feel like love is the most honest gravitational force. It's the criteria to which many people make decisions. We often hear that people are rational, but I actually understand people making decisions because they want to be loved. And I take a lot of inspiration from the foundational work of bell hooks around people defending a malnourished definition of love that is coexistent with abuse. So when they're presented a more inclusive, emancipatory definition of love, they refuse it. For me, love is a deep commitment to one another. A recognition that all distinctions between us are ultimately illusory, that all binaries and dichotomies are false. That we're fundamentally part of a kind of co-constitutive ecology.

When we operate from the awareness of being part of something greater than ourselves, that's aligned with love. When we operate from the mythology of individualism, that's not aligned with love. The mythology of ego – that’s not aligned with love. If there's also an embrace of everything, all parts of ourselves, rather than judgment or scorn, love seeks to include and incorporate a larger paradigm that fits everything in it. So, love is not a passive practice. It's an active, engaged, struggle of looking at everything that's framed as oppositional, contrarian, contradictory – and insisting on harmony.

NB: You speak often about truly human moments. About how being human means inconsistency and idiosyncrasy, it means unfurling. And there's joy in this. So when we move away from conformity, embrace healing and embrace ourselves, we find joy and ridiculousness and incandescence. Where and how do you find joy? And do you have any advice for how we can continue to fight for joy at this difficult time?

AVM: I feel like for me, joy is not synonymous with happiness. That closest word I have is lucidity – presence. Joy is presence. I feel like for so long, I was dissociated in my life, unable to feel. Joy is the opposite of that, like actually opening myself up to feel. Joy isn't just about the conventional suspects, like laughter. Joy is also often about crying, there's joy in being able to cry. Knowing that we're human. So much of what we've messaged joy to be is aspirational, like it has to exist outside of the conditions that we're in now. 

I find that the most incredible stories of joy are the ones that are profoundly situated. In my little practice of acknowledging despair alongside delight, grief alongside gratitude, heartbreak alongside humor. So joy, then, is the practice of searching and noticing for moments of beauty and rest and transcendence, despite and amidst all of the vitriol and noise. 

In terms of advice, I really believe in noticing. So much of our reality is constituted by what we choose to notice. And so much of our reality is populated by the stories we tell about what we've noticed. And I've tried to now revisit every single story that I tell about myself and the world, and notice what I'm aligning. And often what I'm aligning is moments of hope, or moments of dissent, or moments of rupture, that might feel insignificant, but they still happen. And they need to be part of the narrative. So to find joy, I have to restructure the way I was telling the story and witness places that it wasn't supposed to be, but it was anyway.

NB: In an interview, you said that learning is the most delightful thing about being alive. And that being alive is about messing up gloriously. I think learning and educating ourselves as we move through the world and make mistakes is undervalued right now. And I think it's done without compassion. So I want to ask you, how do you think we can use compassion as we continue to learn from each other and heal?

AVM: There's a very specific reason why that's the case. It's because technologies like social media are never really invested in community. They’re invested in the creation of competition. Teaching us that one person can get ahead at another person's expense. But unfortunately, algorithms actually rewrite behavior off of them. So what we're seeing is a complete warping of our social realities based off of the ways that we interact as digital avatars, including a reduction of complex people and systems into easily identifiable categories. 

And for me, compassion isn't contrary to human nature. It's actually the constitutive force of human nature. Because every single one of us would be dead unless we were shown compassion. Someone heeded our cry when we were young. Someone fed us, someone held us, and in those acts, helped us survive. And I feel, actually, that our bodies are predisposed towards empathy. It's the technologies and the systems that make us masquerade competition as human nature, it's not. So to become more compassionate, we have to actually unplug from the mythologies we've been taught about scarcity and competition and disposability. Reacquaint ourselves with the fundamental truth – that we are one another. Therefore, we need each other. So whereas social media accrues capital from differentiation, I'm not this, compassion actually makes us say, why do we need to exile? What if we actually say, we are this? So compassion is the move from I to We. To do that work actually begins intimately. It looks like the thoughts that we banish, the shadow parts of ourselves that we reject to repeat, and actually say, this is part of me, too. So it becomes less easy to hold contempt and resentment when we recognise that we're perfectly imperfect as well. 

I really respect the other question about love. All this makes sense when we remember that everyone's just trying to be loved. Unfortunately, people have been told that the only way that they can be loved is by being perfect. I think that's incredibly sad. I love people when they're imperfect, because they're people. And in a world that requires us to like to be in a filter and aspire to be something they’re not in order to be loved. They think there's something very threatening about saying who you are right now is worthy of love. There's also this misconception that love and compassion are defamed, like they're not actually forms of struggle, they’re just hapless and obsequious, but actually, I believe that loving can have proactive sites of doing, of engagement. People often dismiss these practices as naive and idealistic. I think what's naive and idealistic is responding to vitriol with vitriol, operating the same frequency of division and polarization and expecting different results.

NB: When you say you think we are predisposed towards empathy, does that go hand in hand with you saying we are all the same? Can you expand on that?

AVM: I believe it's harder to hate people up close. We see ourselves in one another – maybe we look different on the outside, but we have a profound connection with our ability to grieve, our ability to feel. And I believe that's why I'm engaged in the work of live art. Because live art reminds us that we're alive, and to be alive means meeting one another and being one another. And when I say we're all the same, there’s of course crucial differences that need to be interrogated. What I'm saying is that there's a possible way of acknowledging difference without having to use that as a marker of division. And I think if there is ever any utility to what people are trying to do is to imagine a sense of community that doesn't require homogeneity. Where it's our differences and our acknowledgement of them that enriches our capacity to be together, not detracts from them

NB: What does community mean to you?

AVM: For me, community is less about identity, and more about a deeper kinship of soul to soul connection. People who are strange in a way that you’re strange, are peculiar in ways that you’re peculiar, have similar doubts and hesitations. People who you don't have to play pretend with. I think so much of the world is playing pretend. And community is the place where I don't have to play pretend anymore.

NB: This actually leads me to my next question – you've spoken about style as sort of a way of playing pretend. And you've also described it as a way of returning back home to yourself. I was hoping you could speak on this and on the movement to degender fashion and how that relates to empowerment and returning home to yourself.

AVM: I was wearing a uniform growing up, as I think many people are, to not stand out, to fit in, to not draw attention to myself. It didn't really work. Because the ‘me’ kind of spilled out again. At first, I saw that as tragic, like I needed to work harder to fit in – to deepen my voice or change the way I was dressing. Then I started to actually view it as a blessing, like, who am I outside of who I think that I should be?

And so I became the embodied practice of figuring that out. I wore things that weren't [necessarily ‘me’]. I was like, why not try? And that's what I like about style, you can experiment. The commitment is so small, because you can change. Style is a metaphor for what I’m trying to say about humanity, it's just constant changing, constant experimentation, constant trial and error. 

So, whenever you talk about the degendering fashion people see this as just a minority of nonbinary people. That leads to this awkward phenomenon of men's clothes, women's clothes, and other. That’s not what this is. What degendering fashion is about is saying all articles of clothing are outside of gender. That means that it's not up to brands, it's up to individuals to determine what garments mean for them. The same garment can signify manhood and masculinity, womanhood and femininity, or no gender, to each individual person, and that's totally fine. That practice of degendering fashion is a continuation of hundreds of years of political struggle. In the early 1900s, a lot of women in the US were resisting cross dressing restrictions that made it illegal for them to wear pants. 

But more generally, it looked like indigenous peoples across the world rejecting the indoctrination of western gendered fashion aesthetics. And it continues on to this day, because clothing is one of the biggest sites of where the arbitrary and illusory construction on the gender binary is created. I think the reason why people are so hell bent on saying this skirt is feminine, is because without that, they would have to confront the fact that there is actually no stationary definition to these things. Gendering fashion is about the maintenance of the myth of the gender binary. It's important to remember that many colonial states instituted cross dressing laws that criminalized people for wearing clothing that they believed to be inconsistent with their assigned sex. And I think that should just show how ludicrous this whole gender project is. Because we're all coordinated. So how could you say that one body can wear pants and one cannot, when actually, physiologically, we all can.

NB: Something we’ve been thinking about at No Borders is how important it is for us to collectively maintain a commitment to a new world and a commitment to creating space for marginalized communities to be free and heard and seen. And also for new generations to grow up in a world where they know what true self love looks like. Do you think a radical paradigm shift is possible? 

AVM: Yeah. I think it's happening right now, if we take the time to notice it. I think cynicism often postures itself as realism, but it's not. There's so much motion, so much simultaneity, so much becoming, if we really slow down, recalibrate, and see. ✾

Alok-Vaid Menon styled by Kanika Karvinkop for No Borders. Interview by Diya Navlakha.