(NOTE: This is a special, out-of-sequence post in honor of the premier, on October 1, of my daughter Cellista’s new multi-media, multi-art production “Pariah,” for which visit this link: https://www.facebook.com/cellista.music/posts/717677665831882.)
Whenever we encounter a pariah, conscience calls us to embrace them. In turn, the more tightly we embrace the pariah, the more the call of our conscience to do just that is clarified, resounding ever more loudly.
What is more, pariahs themselves are like cold mountain air. Embracing them is just as bracing as climbing with Nietzsche three-thousand feet beyond humanity and time to breathe crystal-clear air. Embracing the pariah is just as rejuvenating, enlivening, and emboldening.
It is thus no less for our own good than for theirs that we must embrace the pariah. In demanding that we embrace the pariah, our conscience calls upon us to step up at last and become who we are.
Let us listen, hear, and obey that loud call of conscience.
* * *
A pariah is an outcast, someone who has been banished from the community into which they were once born or otherwise admitted as full-fledged participants. A pariah is someone who has been cast out of their community—cast out by the decree of who or whatever has succeeded in laying claim to the power to say who belongs to the community and who does not.
The reason we call someone who has been cast out by such decree a pariah should itself awaken the shame of all those of us who have not been cast out of our communities in such a way, all of us who have not (at least not yet) become pariahs ourselves.
We owe the word to the Portuguese imperialists who invaded the region of India known as Goa after Vasco de Gama first landed there in 1498. Pariah derives from Portuguese paria, itself coming from the Indian Tamil/Dravidian word paraiyar, the plural of paraiyan "drummer." At community festival celebrations, it was the hereditary duty of members of the largest of the lower castes of Tamil/Dravidian societies to do just that, play the drums. Parai meant a "large festival drum," and that once descriptive name stuck for the whole caste once simply known as “Untouchables” but now called “Dalits.”
How appropriate, even to this day! After all, musicians are hardly less valued today—at least by the standard standards of value in our contemporary globalized capitalist pseudo-world—than they were in the sixteenth century when the Portuguese and other European imperialists first invaded and occupied India. Why, drummers and other musicians are as worthless as poets and thinkers—pace Germany, which at least used to be known as “the land of poets and thinkers”—by today’s global-market, purely monetary standards of worth!
* * *
It is in the interests of coercive power to keep those of us who are not (yet) outcasts, not yet pariahs, in the dark about our own complicity in casting out all those “others” who are not part of “us.” The powers that be would have us always join them in casting some of us out of community with the rest of us.
If we would come out of the darkness into which we have all been hurled, we have no choice but to cast our own lot with those who are excluded, rather than with those who are doing—or blindly cheering on—the excluding. For the sake of us all, we must embrace the pariahs among us.
Only by embracing our own pariah can we be braced to become ourselves.