Over the past year or so I’ve really been sitting with the notion of “enough.” How could I not.
There are the exhortations and reminders I find bubbling up in social justice and community health and safety spaces to know that “I am enough.” The call is to prove less, to care for self, and in that way resist the basic message of lack and not mattering that fuels the engine of racial capitalism. The self-knowledge of sufficiency is supposed to be the drive of the “fight against” our oppression.
There is a promise in this “enough.” A promise that, somehow, I might experience dignity and completion in a world that offers none of it if I only proclaim, “I am somebody;” “I am beautiful;” “I am enough;” “I AM, damn it!” There’s something plaintiff in this “enough.” Like the childhood fantasy that this time it will be different. This time the abuser will not abuse, and the betrayal and its damage will be assuaged or forgotten, perhaps forgiven.
There is also the version of enough-ness that presents as a form of resistance against the unending call to be more. More efficient, more productive, more just in time, more just right. For me, this kind of enough-ness is about the sighing rest inherent in sufficiency. “Sufficiency”—a palm I hold out against the demands of profit or performance or identity. “Sufficiency” as a counternarrative to the market and the workplace and, even, the intimate social. Oh, how that sufficiency does feel like a release in the small of my back and a softening in my belly!
There is the enough that leaps from enduring. “I’ve had enough!” The boundary that stands firm though retaliation is certain. My experience knows the backlash will be painful. This “enough” calls me to brace. To be armored and, too often, to crank up a smile in reconciled anticipation, ready to take the hit. I numb and isolate inside to make this happen and can feel the distance from my own living vibrancy when I do.
All of these, then, require some kind of bargaining. As if I can have my dignity only if I give up agency; as if I can be enough only if I give up dignity; as if I can have my mattering only if I give up safety. I refuse to make these bargains anymore.
I feel, more and more, held in a kind of tension somewhere between all these injunctions of enough-ness—somewhere between absolute depletion and the amplification of what’s possible. This is the kind of enough-ness I am feeling lately. With a sigh and centering breath.
—Maurice Stevens
“Enough is enough.”
Consider the saying, “Enough is enough.” It can mean, “I have had it, and I am not taking it anymore!” It can also mean something else entirely. It could mean, “I am satisfied. What I have is enough.”
“Enough already!”
We usually say this phase in frustration. It is meant to communicate that we are at the end—ready to explode. But, couldn’t it also mean, “I have been given enough. I am satisfied with what I have and want to live my life accordingly”? Couldn’t it, in other words, express satisfaction and a praise of sufficiency?
“Nuff Said.”
Again, this might signal a warning: “This argument needs to end. Now!” Or, it could be said and felt in triumph as, “I just bested you in a verbal joust;” or as, “No more words are needed.” In each of these instances, the speaker is issuing a demand to the listener that what is behind the speech acts in question be attended to. It could be an invitation to everyone to consider the possibility of hearing the phrase as saying, “Each of us has said enough, and now it is time for me to start listening.”
“Fair Enough.”
A concession—as in, “I can see your point…I guess.” Or, it could be more hopeful: “I guess this is fair…enough.”
“Leave well enough alone.”
Usually this is said in defeat: “Just leave it alone. Only something bad can come from all this.” It could however mean, “Things as they are between us are OK. Let’s proceed to live according to that acknowledgment of mutuality.”
—Zine Magubane
The crime of which you discover slowly you are guilty is not so much that you are aware, which is bad enough, but that other people see that you are and cannot bear to watch it, because it testifies to the fact that they are not. You’re bearing witness helplessly to something which everybody knows and nobody wants to face.
—James Baldwin, “The Artist’s Struggle for Integrity”
What is enough? When is it enough? How is it enough? Enough of what? Enough of a good thing or a bad one? Is there a clear difference between the benefits from a sufficiency of either one?
The last couple of years of struggling though a global pandemic has allowed many of us to ponder on the wonder and power of this word: enough! And at an initial thought it seems that enough of so many things has disrupted our lives: disease, fear, danger, uncertainty, general malaise, death, war. The list is long and unrelenting. But these elements of crisis brought forth another level of enough—one not nearly so negative or one-sided: enough pretense to functioning positively within a false, fabricated normalcy; enough acquiescence to the lies of phantom realities of general well-being that do not exist; enough granting others permission to project their racist and homophobic fantasies and desires upon our brown and black bodies.
The toxic levels of such duplicity have become terrifyingly clear—even suicidally so—for me. “Suddenly, Last Summer” I realized that I am far from being the accomplished, complete, all-together self-fulfilled person I thought I was. Rather than using my ability to understand and accept the extremity of harms ranged against me (or myself as the occupier of such extreme grounds of terror and existential threat), I had and have “depended on the kindness of strangers” all my life. That, I know now, is way too long a time.
I don’t think that the fact that my spontaneous descriptive phrasing comes from Tennessee Williams is accidental or haphazard. On the contrary. I believe the same knowledge gained living out a non-normative sexuality that marked Williams’s insight into the human psyche now allows me to see the shortcoming of my gay racialized identity in the white academic world.
The last year has left an ugly taste in my mouth. That taste is the residue of coming to realize, more than ever, that just like Frantz Fanon who came to understand the costs of his feigned racial identity, I have come to understand my worth and value, contrary to my previous understanding, as having been provided by the racialized hegemonic and normative heterosexualized other.
I realize I have consistently shied away from standing by my own side believing what I know in my guts and heart to be true. I have shied away from allowing Gloria Anzaldua’s Coatlicue to have full range of expression through my emotions and body. The process of standing up for myself, believing in my sense of self and truth over the cacophony of the heterosexist white other is far from over. In all honesty, this part of the battle has only just begun. But enough is enough! Enough of letting myself down! Enough letting others fill me with fear! Enough of letting others pretend to know me better than I know I know myself!
Several months ago, if somebody had said that I was brave for coming out and living as a gay man, I would have denied it. I would have said to them that this is not so. In a petrified version of myself, I would have denied the daily anguish, fear, and danger that it is to live in my brown non-normative sexualized body, particularly in the white academic world. I would have denied the pain of two decades of being denied a nation and a biological family, or higher academic posts because of my choice of living an authentic self.
So, I say enough! It takes fucking courage to walk in my shoes on a daily basis. Now I know it is my duty, as it was Fanon’s, to re-order myself in a way less fearful, less over-determined, and less dependent on the racialized, sexist, and patriarchal neuroses of the West.
—Hugo Benavides