The story of THAT NIGHT…
by Michaela de Cruz
This is the story of how the We Are Monster network was born.
We chuckle at the private joke that it happened on that night – a night ripe with promise, a night made for communion and healing. It was the final night of the European Music Therapy Conference in Edinburgh in June 2022. The theme of the conference had been “Let’s Disturb”. After a couple of days of separately rolling our eyes at the insincerity of this assertion – i.e. the status quo was very much alive and well – those same eyes collectively met and we organically wandered in to a space together late into the evening to debrief and shake off the weekend as a group of People of Colour.
Tears were shed, hands were held, rage was voiced, wisdom was shared. Our grief, individual and collective, was witnessed and given space. Our joy, that we’re always told is “too much” for white spaces, was released. We knew then that this active practice of being in community with one another needed a bigger platform. It needed to encompass all Music Therapists of Colour who had before now felt relegated to our corners. It needed to be intentional and bold, cross borders and have its arms open wide.
During the conference, one of our members, Alphie Archer, turned us all on to a quote by Junot Diaz, a Dominican-American writer:
“You guys know about vampires? ...You, know, vampires have no reflections in a mirror? There’s this idea that monsters don’t have reflections in a mirror. And what I’ve always thought isn’t that monsters don’t have reflections in a mirror. It’s that if you want to make a human into a monster, deny them, at the cultural level, any reflections of themselves.”
That night, we thought about what it meant for us to have spent most of our lives believing that we are monsters; believing the lie that we are less-than-human and not deserving of the right to see ourselves reflected in the narrative. We talked about how becoming those monsters doesn’t necessarily have to mean turning ourselves into grotesque variations of how the dominant minority conceives of us, but that it can mean coming into the beauty they will never see and never know because of the ancient wisdoms we hold in our bodies of colour. In that moment we committed to reclaiming the monster in all of us and letting it cry out with pride. We saw each other in all of our diverse glory. We knew we could no longer be the "monster" we've been made into by the dominant race/culture when we are seen by each other and when we can see ourselves in each other. This was the beginning of the We Are Monster network.
Of course, a WhatsApp group was created as a digital rite of passage. A core group of us went on to organise and make moves and build the network into what it is today.
No looking back now: WE ARE MONSTER, AND WE ARE HERE.
If you are a Music Therapist of Colour, wherever in the world you may be, please join us here. You are welcome.
Footnote: There happened to be 3 white people in that room as well, that night. 2 of them are close friends of mine, people I trained as a music therapist with. They stayed, listened, witnessed, and the beginnings of an ally antiracist group within music therapy blossomed at the same time as our network, underlining the importance of allyship and reminding us that the work must be done by EVERYONE. Let us know if you are a white ally and we will direct you to the network.
Diaz, Junot. (2009). Pulitzer Prize-winning author Junot Diaz tells students his story. Accessed at https://www.nj.com/ledgerlive/2009/10/junot_diazs_new_jersey.html on 24 November 2024.
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