What a beautiful thing that could be
In an exploration about the ordinary and the world it generates, Christina Sharpe says, “the work of imagination can be put to brutality and it can be put to brutality’s opposite.” Everywhere, it seems, we can see the work of a brutal imagination. And the speed at which we are leveled by this brutality feels insurmountable. The numbers rise so exponentially, how do we conceptualize the magnitude of loss?
If you have been awake to the world, the rational response to *gestures wildly* is anger. A justifiable, understandable, with-your-whole-chest type of anger. bell hooks wrote, honestly and with conviction, about this swelling anger that can consume a person. And I will admit, I find myself often sinking into the feelings she described. But so often that anger can metastasize into cruelty. I think cruelty is easy. And rarely moves us toward a future that is sustainable or loving (as hooks reminds us in another piece, all about love). It can feel good, at times, that cruelty, because it may mask itself as vindication, retribution, or pride. But the corrosive nature of cruelty will clog the arteries of community and deceive us into believing we can build a future on burial grounds.
And so I work. And practice. Try every day to move from a different place. Despite all my blunders.
Recently, when I read the news I find myself thinking about how my aunt disappeared before I was born. When my mother was young, the story goes, one night her older sister didn’t come home. No note, no phone call. Her body simply evaporated. The length of time of her absence varies depending on who’s telling the story and how recently it has been repeated. As suddenly as she vanished, she reappeared. Her elsewhereness is always treated as a non-event. A passing detail, minor in both significance and impact. This story, as I’ve grown older, has been repeated less and less such that it almost feels as if it couldn’t possibly have been real at all.
I think about my aunt because I am thinking about survival; what it means to live through the unimaginable. There are mutual aid efforts, places to send money, of course. Things that are concrete, things that matter, communal things to continue to seek out and participate in. And perhaps it is a function of humanness to see a personal relationship to what we encounter, but when I read any given headline about the wanton violence leveled against a people, against communities who have certain zip codes or those who had the incalculable strength to refuse to die or be fully displaced, I see my aunt.
Perhaps it is also because these reports by brave journalists targeted by a violent regime are telling a story that calls forth the vague outline of this story about my aunt which time, and this country, have tried to erase. Her story, like many missing and murdered Indigenous women, rushes into the present again and again. Her story reminds me of the inheritances of genocide and the consequence of a history rewritten by empire. How even those that survive it cannot reveal the whole of truth because it might return them to pieces. How we, the generations after, grow up in silence and we stitch together the figments of memories in a last ditch effort at hope. How we claw through a dark that we are certain has hidden a truth that once brought to light and recognized might heal our futures and calm our bodies and minds; might allow us to return or rebuild home.
“Every buffalo dead is an Indian gone.” This is what US army Colonel Richard Irving Dodge said in 1867. The linkage between buffalo and Indian was as visual as it was material. In this period of American mania and the hyperfixation on “the west”, the colonizing power desired one thing: the disappearance of Native people. With less food, Native people would have to go elsewhere. Starvation was, and continues to be, a tried and true method of the powerful.
But Pennsylvania does not have buffalo. Neither does New Jersey or Delaware or New York, where I and my family have lived since the beginning. By 1867 I’d imagine one would be hard pressed to even locate a map that has not already defined this region, as anything other than part of the former thirteen colonies. Even more rare would be a map of this region stamped with the word Lenape, our traditional name in our traditional homelands. This too is its own kind of violence. An outline. A vacancy. An unmarked detonation. Disappearance is the manner of empire; we, its ghosts.
The primary thing I’ve learned from my PhD is that every history is an approximation of a truth. Here are a few: The truth is this country failed in its attempts to exterminate a people. The truth is my aunt returned and some of us never left. The truth is death is still everywhere around us. The truth is memory can never be taken from us and the powerful do not have a monopoly on fact, reality, or the future.
These truths can sometimes send me spiraling into anger. And it compounds and festers in my chest beside a depth of sorrow I still have trouble naming.
I have been working then, on building parameters for myself such that I am less bowled over by these feelings and the world we currently live in. Those parameters include the usual screen time limits, journaling, therapy, loving people in my life. All this to refuse the artificial urgency that defines our present, which devices us into thinking that if we cannot keep pace we don’t deserve life. (You can sub “life” for any manner of things including money, jobs, knowledge, and love). But I try not to let those protective barriers for my psyche allow me to become asleep to the world or to disengage. Touching grass does not mean ignorance. It is, in the true sense of the term, self-care, which is the set of things and experiences that regulate our nervous systems enough such that we can make decisions with conviction, honesty, and on purpose; to not allow our bodies to remain in autopilot and thus destructive to ourselves, others, and/or our communities.
In these moments when I am consumed by anger, like the present, I look to practices that allow me to return to something other than cruelty. To live in the world differently. To remain awake to the world as a practice of finding a way to love it.
The other thing I learned from my PhD is that the only future of an empire is its end. Every single one, large and small. May those of us who live in those aftertimes find a lifetime of tenderness in spite. Perhaps then, when this violence has been atoned for, memory will come to light and a true healing can occur. What a beautiful thing that could be.
As always, links below and thank you for being here.
M. Carmen Lane (two:spirit African-American and Haudenosaunee [Mohawk/Tuscarora])
All Monuments Must Fall: A Collaborate Syllabus
Cornum, Lou. “The Space NDN’s Star Map.” The New Inquiry, 26 Jan. 2015.
Tompkins, Kyla Wazana. “We Aren’t Here to Learn What We Already Know.” Avidly, 13 Sept. 2016
Nesterak, Max. “Uprooted: The 1950s plan to erase Indian country.” APM Reports, 1 Nov. 2019 (has an audio version at the top)
