I came so far for beauty, I left so much behind, my patience and my family, my masterpiece unsigned. (Leonard Cohen, 1993)
These are lyrics from Cohen's song, ‘I came so far for beauty’. It is unwise to try to explain a poem as any explanation falls short of what actually lies in it. Poetry is a beautiful way to scream, a means to simultaneously hide and reveal, an alchemical process through which anger, frustration, feelings of brutalisation, marginalisation, of being unheard may be expressed, through which essence finds form. It asks for alchemists, individuals who can experience all the aforementioned traumas and yet engage with society, apparently free of any semblance of their effect. This is the alchemy asked of any marginalised group or individual, and it is a real jihad (struggle). Maxine Greene, in an article entitled ‘In search of a critical pedagogy’ (1986, p 428), writes that poets ‘remind us of absence, ambiguity, embodiments of existential possibility’. She goes on to suggest that poets will not give us answers but can awaken us to a greater reflectiveness and give play to our imaginations, and maybe broaden the scope of what is possible for us in our lives. Hoping against hope, maybe this chapter may find words for what I feel about Cohen's lines – ‘I came so far for beauty, I left so much behind’ – in relation to trying to make sense of/express the exchanges between British Muslim democratic idealism/naivety (Khan, 2013), and the Muslim experience of being researched in the post-9/11 context. The title of this chapter is taken from three notions all expressing something of the feeling and experience of being researched: anthros – Floyd Red Crow Westerman (1982); the God trick by Donna Haraway (1991); and research as pimping by M.G. Khan (2013).
‘Theyification’
Academic knowledge generated out of research on any marginalised community rarely finds itself in verse, careful as it is about the validity of its methods to secure the expertise of the researcher and the factualness/correctness of its data for potential generalisability.
The following examples of texts aim to express the feeling and impact of being researched.