Johannesburg 2

Today is the second day of the World Summit on Arts & Culture in Johannesburg. So far, I’ve heard speakers from South Africa, the United Kingdom, Jamaica, Spain, Nigeria, Palestine, Canada, Australia, Pakistan, Slovenia, Kenya, Singapore, and Germany. It’s been such a delight — not a single American has had the floor.

This is fun for me. I gravitate toward perspectives that are different from my own. I’m voraciously curious and a decent listener. I feel at home among a wide variety of people and a calm center inside diversity. I often feel more like myself there.

Comfort with the other has become the theme of the conference. It was first introduced by Njabulo Ndebele and has been echoed since. The work of cultural understanding, he says, is really about what human beings do when they encounter a person or an experience that they find strange. Do they shy away or ask a question? Do they engage or judge… or both? How do they deal with the feelings of disorientation — the sense that things are suddenly not what they expect or know?

The professor made the distinction that the idea of “strange” may be more helpful than “difference.” The latter tends to become a static category that masks a greater truth. Black people are different from white, for example. True in one way but also deeply false in another. It also tends to give a special pass to the one who is different, as though he or she must be accepted without question. Those moments when bad behavior is awkwardly accepted as culturally different, but ought to be challenged on its integrity.

Ndebele argued that approaching something as “strange” brings both people back into the moment. It returns us to the creative possibility of the encounter and reinforces the basic truth that all of us are strange to those we have not yet come to know. “When you arrive at the place that you don’t know,” said another speaker, “make theatre.”

As I said, it is the role of culture to give the cues. It’s our job to make the other visible, to give priority to the unknown, and to prepare in such a way that there is room to explore whatever one finds — including fear, doubt, and judgement as well as satisfaction and enchantment. Cultural spaces are designed to make this kind of interaction a norm.

It is never ours to control, but the hope is that this exposure strengthens our capacities when the strange appears in truly unexpected ways — on the street, as a loved one evolves, and in our own souls. The invitation, Ndebele says, is to ponder something at the very moment it unsettles us.