October 18th
The past two weeks have been some of the most challenging in my life. My heart is broken open, my bones pulverized, the air around me thick with grief.
What do you do when years of pain and tension build to the point of inevitable rupture? How does one hold space for all of the questions, all of the hurt, and all of the rage? Where is the possibility for hope when all seems lost?
I am not here to comment on politics, to make any claims, or to attempt to convince you of anything. All I can say is that I am so deeply sad for humanity.
October 22nd
I have been trying to find the right words, but they keep getting caught in my throat. There is nothing that I can say that will not feel hurtful to someone, and I know that it’s not my fault. We are caught up in the webs of so much pain, each person begging to be heard, all of our aches intertwined, but somehow everyone continues to feel unseen, silenced, muted.
Today my friend Iman wrote a piece that gave voice to words that have continued to slip through my fingers. Right now fireworks blast on the street below, ringing fear into my heart, a PTSD that I never imagined I would have. Right now, I seek refuge in the tenderness of loved ones, in the few folks who are able to hold a multiplicity of truth without judgment. I’m not angry at anyone. I’m angry at systems. I’m angry at patterns. My anger has made me silent, aside from songs and soft conversations with people who are patient.
And this week Audre Lorde reminded me in a pink book that I picked up at a dark cafe “Your Silence Will Not Protect You”. She reaches into the past and speaks to me, offering warmth, refuge, and guidance.
I turn to a page of an essay called The Transformation of Silence and hear her voice:
AL—“What are the words you do not yet have? What do you need to say? What are the tyrannies you swallow day by day and attempt to make your own, until you will sicken and die of them in silence?”
What I need to say is that I’m disappointed and afraid. I imagine my body at the center of a crossroads, missiles shooting over my head exploding the world around me. My ears are numb and I am weeping. If I am the pathway between worlds what can I possibly say about what I see? & who will even listen?
My throat is caught and I feel silenced. Everyone is speaking on things that they don’t know. Everyone is triggered and angry and self-righteous. Everyone has something to say and nobody wants to listen.
I am biding my time- navigating layers and layers of ancestral grief. I sit with my grandmother’s memories and wonder how the hell we got here. I try to listen to the land.
AL—”And of course I am afraid, because the transformation of silence into language and action is an act of self-revelation, and that always seems fraught with danger. But my daughter, when I told her of our topic and my difficulty with it, said, ‘Tell them about how you’re never really a whole person if you remain silent, because there’s always that one little piece inside you that wants to be spoken out, and if you keep ignoring it, it gets madder and madder and hotter and hotter, and if you don’t speak it out one day it will just up and punch you in the mouth from the inside’ “
It would be so much easier if things were simple. It would be so much easier if there was no reason or rhyme to why people choose to cause harm or incite violence. But cycles only continue when we don’t dig deeper. We will flip-flop in and out of oppressor and oppressed across generations, feeling self-righteous and self-pitying along the way. I’m tired of watching people face off and not recognize their own reflections before them. So I will take your pain, and his pain, and her pain, and their pain and line it up in a row beside my own. I will look at it carefully and tenderly. I will allow myself to weep for all of it, be enraged for all of it, and I will pray that my tears will nurture fertile soil for new growth. I’ve never felt so afraid to have a compassionate heart, but I won’t allow my empathy to be silenced.
No matter who you are, I want to tell you that your pain is true, and I’m so sorry that no one listened.
I write this with a heart cracked open, and a body that has become shell-shocked from crossfire. My pores are soaked with the tears of ancestors across the land feeling silenced and unheard. Ancestors who are directly mine and ancestors who are cousins, but very much still mine. Ancestors who became ancestors too soon, and ancestors who are dismayed to witness the mess we have made. Poison seeps out of my skin and into the earth. The earth who has seen it all, bared it all, and listened. The earth who has held all of our rage and sadness, and somehow always made space for alchemy.
I would like to be more and more like the earth, to be more and more like the River, the ocean, the clouds, the thunder.
AL— “The fact that we are here and that I speak these words is an attempt to break the silence and bridge some of those differences between us, for it is not difference which immobilises us, but silence. And there are so many silences to be broken”
We are children of the land whose suffering quickly turns us sour. Our desire for control or vengeance will never protect us. Unstable foundations will always fall. And we are falling. We are burning. We are becoming ash.
I feel as though liberation only exists where we are able to meet one another. Meeting one another is one of the hardest things to do. Especially when we are in pain, and when our pain is justified, and when that pain overlaps with more pain and seems to deny the truth of our own pain. But the truth is we are all in pain.
I pray that I will continue to have the courage to speak my truth. I pray that my truth and open heart will pull you closer, not push you away. I pray that any tension between us will be melted by Osun’s sweetness and that any misunderstanding will be clarified by Obatala’s wisdom.
I pray for humility and pathways. I pray for justice. I pray that we lay down our arms, and stop turning our cousins into enemies. I pray I pray I pray I pray I pray.