A week ago, when the effects of racist riots were felt all over Britain, I had an online  conversation with Mohamud Mumin, a co-founder and artistic director at Soomaal House of Art, who is also an artist working in photography. We had been introduced virtually by an old friend of mine, Prof. Christine Baeumler at the University of Minnesota, who had suggested that Mohamud get in touch with me to talk about our shared interests in place-based initiatives and deep mapping as positive forms of place-making. Forms that have the potential to strengthen links between communities, rather than generate the kinds of division that were all over the media – here and in relation to the presidential elections in the USA.

I remember noticing a large number of Somalis when I visited Minneapolis St. Pauls some fifteen years ago, but did not know then that the city has the largest Somali diaspora population outside Africa. I learned from taking with Mohamud a little about the ways in which he and others at Soomaal House which, as an organisation, has been built up from scratch, are fostering creative expression and cultural understanding within the Minnesotan East African community. 

I find the degree to which various crude and reductive nationalisms allied to racism have been used to generate a rhetoric of hatred in across Europe, in the USA, the Middle East, India and elsewhere using lies and distortions to feed prejudice, deeply depressing. So it was very cheering to find positive common ground and shared values with Mohamud, who is dedicating his time and energy to encourage, support and educate for a broader, deeper perspective on the world, one that unites rather than divides.  

One of the things that cultural work at its best provides is ways of “translating” thoughts and feelings grounded in very different mentalities. This in turn can help us address what Paul Ricoeur calls: ‘the danger of incommunicability through … protective withdrawal’. A withdrawal that results from refusing to look beyond internalised and fixed attitudes embedded in a given mentality. Shared cultural work and enquiry can give us the ability and willingness to translate and mediate, through creative conversations, between distinct mentalities that are deeply entangled with heritages, both our own and those of others. This relates to the first of Paul Ricoeur’s three models ‘for the integration of identity and alterity’, namely ‘the model of translation’. Also to George Steiner’s observation that translation is central to both culture and consciousness. A view that leads him to argue that, without translation, ‘we would live in arrogant parishes bordered by silence’. This is one significant reason why we need to see the activities we categorise as “the arts” not as the “product” of a “culture industry”, but rather as one vital way in which we can help to cultivate what Ricoeur calls ‘a translational ethos’. An ethos that is central to any society that aspires to being a genuine democracy and one that we need to do all we can to promote.