How Sharp is a Word, How Firm is a Fist

[yeloson]

A good friend suggested some time ago I create a comm for POC in martial arts. As I've been thinking hard about structure for a training syllabus, and having some good and seeing some wack discussions online re: martial arts, I figured it's about time: My Fist Stays Free

I've sent some invites to folks whom I know have done, or currently study martial arts, if you haven't been invited, and are interested, let me know.

Comments

[sanguinity]

May I join? I spent the better part of a decade studying Poekoelan Tjimindie Tulen; I'm no longer affiliated with the school, but I have been trying to sort out the appropriation issues that were in play during my time there. Additionally, I'm trying to sort out how appropriation issues should affect my future decisions with respect to training martial arts. My last martial art was boxing, which I chose partly because it seemed free of issues of cultural appropriation. (Which isn't to say that boxing doesn't have its own issues around race, nor that those issues don't include appropriation.)

As to my racial identity, I'm biracial (white/Native). I have been generally uneasy about claiming the term POC for myself because I have found that doing so has a tendency to play into white culture's drive to appropriate Native identity. I'm not sure where that places me with respect to this comm; if you prefer to restrict membership to people who are comfortable using the term POC for themselves, I respect that and withdraw the request.

[yeloson.livejournal.com]

I think a lot of us cut off from cultural bits find ourselves swimming back through the appropriation just trying to find pieces of ourselves, so I totally get it.

I'm also half white and spent a lot of my younger years wrestling with the in-between status, though, the fact that I don't pass really made the issue clear for me (your experience is, of course, different than mine).

I'd love to hear about your experiences. I study Silat via the William Sanders school, and it's always interesting to me:

a) the amount of beef in US silat which I can't trace an orgin to
b) the fact that it's almost exclusively white folks keeping schools here that we hear about.

I did study with an Indonesian guru in Vancouver for a bit as well, but that was private, and it makes me wonder how much silat is kept under wraps in the US.

[sanguinity]

Thanks. :-)

a) beef? As in interpersonal disputes? Or something else?

b) Ours was a white-run set of schools. As mentioned in the Wikipedia article about the style, there is controversy over who is the Goeroe's proper heir: his son (who, the school rumor mill said, had murdered his father), or the white woman who ran the lineage I trained in. Asking questions about any of that that was very much forbidden around the school, and we were similarly forbidden from talking to anyone from a different lineage.

A cruise or two around the internet nowadays shows that critical parts of what I heard around the school was false (the fight that killed the father was with a different son than the one who is currently running schools; the son in the fight was acquitted on self-defense), the lineage dispute appears to still be very much alive and has a LOT more claimants than just Goeroe's son and the leader of my own set of schools (in fact, there's at least one org that exists for no other reason other than to try to de-fracture the style), and that the schools run by the (white-led) lineage I trained with are doing very well.

[yeloson.livejournal.com]

Ah, that helps. Our school has influence from Wetzel, and John Malter, but then the head teacher sought out folks in Java to get more background on it:

http://www.cimande.com/lineage.htm

Still silat lineages in the US have way more drama than what I'd expect for a fairly recently imported style - most of the Chinese kung fu rivalries date back from the 1900s and came over with the people- the silat ones seem much more recent 70s - 80s and weird at that.

[sanguinity]

Hm. I never associated the drama with the style; I very much attributed the drama to the personalities of the head teachers in our lineage. (Our version of the drama included things like who students could and couldn't date, or which ex-students we were forbidden from talking to, and skeeviness about the drama was the reason I eventually left the school.) There's a part of me that always wondered if Wetzel himself selected for those particular personality traits in his students (after all, our head-teacher was obviously selecting for those traits in her students, and her students were selecting for the same traits in theirs), or if the drama-personality originated with our head teacher and/or was a side-effect of her still being a teenager when he died.

*browsing links and videos at your school*

Wow, so much freer with information, your school is. The videos make me miss the animals.

The stuff about going back to Indonesia is particularly interesting, but that's probably better saved for your post about that over at the comm.

[yeloson.livejournal.com]

Well, our school has it's fair bit of internal drama as well. The teacher I was studying under pulled a ton of shade and lost his school, then suddenly he's teaching kali "the real art" etc. He pulled a lot of that kind of drama with students as well.

Part of why I built the comm was me thinking about how much (at least in the US) martial arts get caught up in white male privilege and how that drastically affects our interactions with these arts. Or how it becomes a cultural aspect, with a community around it for the POC involved, and how -that- affects our interactions with the arts.