Haunted
I am dizzy in the aftermath – the wide wake that trails every tragedy, pulsing and throbbing. I feel hungover as I rise each morning. My sleep is not long or deep enough to digest from one day to the next. How could it be?
We are not meant to survive constant massacres. To live amidst so much preventable death. To walk amongst hastily dug graves meant to hush humanity and keep the machine humming. To shiver while walking into a grocery store or dropping our children at school. To ferry ghosts through our bodies across generations of un-grieved loss. This is today’s, and yesterday’s, and tomorrow’s tragedy, and we are haunted by perpetual violence.
Haunted, as Tiffany Lethabo King describes in The Black Shoals: Offshore Formations of Black and Native Studies:
"Slavery and genocide linger in places we do not expect and cannot yet see or define. Their touch can arrive in an illness, a 'not feeling right,' or not wanting to rest your feet on the ground. Their presence can feel like not being able to fully expand your lungs. In a more profound sense, it and they are a haunt.
In the words of Eve Tuck and Christine Ree, 'The United States is permanently haunted by the slavery, genocide and violence entwined in its first, present and future days. Haunting does not hope to change people’s perceptions, nor does it hope for reconciliation. Haunting lies precisely in its refusal to stop.'"
Haunting lies precisely in its refusal to stop. If we stopped, if we mourned, if we apologized, if we forgave, if we felt, if we knelt to the ground and soaked the parched soil with rivers of our tears too long dammed inside ourselves, if we were held in our pain... we may not be haunted.
A few weeks ago I asked: how is grief even accessible in the grind? There is no time to be with it, to weep with it, to breathe with it. The United States is not designed to stop. It is designed to haunt. It is orchestrated to consume life and turn it into cash for the greedy few. Ame-rica. "The love of riches."
On a call with one of my dearest friends this week, she asked: "what does accountability even look like with this much violence everywhere? Is it the boy with the gun, the politicians, the NRA, the cops... or is it the culture, the country itself?"
I don't see a distinction between the boy with the gun and the boy with the gun and the boy with the gun. The boy with the AR-15 is no different to me than the boys that waited and waited and waited outside the school holding AR-15s, wearing cowboy hats and bullet proof vests, doing nothing to save innocent children. The boys with the guns do their nation’s biddings in classrooms, with badges on their chests, on battlefields in foreign countries, and at desks in DC taking $13.6 Million from the NRA while asking for prayers... They are all the same boy. They have abandoned whatever tender, sensitive, dynamic, complex human boys they once were and traded them in for disassociated monsters, disembodied machines, gripping metal and machismo instead of their own broken hearts. The boy with the gun is a boy in so much pain he chooses weapons over tears.
We are haunted and hunted by the boys with the guns.
We are haunted and hunted by the crushing constraints imposed by a minority of white elite males, propagated continuously for centuries. Since the founding of this nation, the vast majority has been held captive by the desperate minority who constructed an extremely dangerous governance framework and codified it into the system over and over again: the white supremacist patriarchy. A small group of boys lied, cheated, and stole their way into control, and this ancient residue is now the rotting core. This group of white boys architected countless technologies to wrench control from the masses, including the filibuster, which creates a small-state bias in the Senate, literally holding us hostage with their guns:
“As with gun control, polls consistently show that a majority of Americans support acting on climate change, oppose overturning Roe v. Wade, and back comprehensive immigration reform, including offering legal status to undocumented immigrants.
The Senate’s inaction on these issues again reflects the outsize influence of those states with the highest gun-ownership rates—which also tend to be those enmeshed in the fossil-fuel economy, with high shares of culturally conservative white Christians and low shares of immigrants.”
- Ronald Brownstein, The Real Reason America Doesn’t Have Gun Control
These are “the worms eating at the rind.” James Baldwin called this “the death of the heart.” This is a death cult.
“The most democratic government may exist, and yet the mass murderers walk around freely, have their little houses and grow flowers.”
–Joseph Wulf
a Jewish resistance fighter who escaped an Auschwitz death march and became a respected historian after the war, speaking of Germany, which imported America’s death cult protocols in its labor camps, gas chambers, and white nationalist genocide
Remember and reclaim
This helpless feeling Dee describes is intentional – another tool of oppression. To be deprived and denied by the state and then too devastated and disempowered to build outside of it keeps us dependent on the bare minimum survivability the state provides on purpose. Violence persists by isolating, fracturing, and disempowering us.
And Dee is right. We need help. This is why it is one of the greatest tasks of our time to see this plainly: the vast majority of us agree, as we always have. We are far less divided than we are made to believe. These systems can be undone, they can be dismantled by reclaiming not only our sovereignty, but remembering our solidarity with each other. We are called to build the safety we seek together. We are called to be the community we need for each other and live our way into the freedom we all want and deserve. Freedom from violence, freedom for life. We cannot model our freedom off of anything we've seen in the past. We are called toward a total cultural revolution.
Grieve
Violence is an outcome of suppression, of shaming healthy human expression.
As an example, as of March 2022, grief is now an official "disorder" in the latest version of the DSM (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders). Grief is now confined to one year. If your grief exceeds theses terms, if it goes fugitive, surges and circulates through the length of your life through memories and meaning, meets you in your dreams in a decade or more, the experts say you now have a medical diagnosis: prolonged grief disorder. Pain is abstracted from context. Individual responsibility is reinforced. Medical treatment is prescribed. Antidepressant medications are supplied. Your feelings are not to be trusted. Better suppressed, ignored, muted. If you can’t keep up, move on, get straight… well then here’s a pill.
But what is grief, if not love? And what is love without our bonds to one another, to place, to life? Grief is not an isolated nor individual experience, it is a collective and communal one.
It is more important than ever to understand, as Bayo Akomolafe says, “the way we respond to crisis is the crisis.” Violence is the crisis. Pathologizing grief perpetuates the violence that causes it.
In order to compost this culture of violence, we must grieve. If we are to become un-haunted, we must stop and feel. This is where the world we seek gets seeded: in living counter to fascism by slowing down, getting weird, oozing out, sliding through, rejecting the machine, becoming human again, rebuilding the village.
The brilliant elder, writer, and scholar Martín Prechtel is someone I turn to constantly for guidance in grief.
“Grief doesn’t go away. It can change into many things and will, but as a substance and presence it never leaves. To have caused and witnessed suffering and loss of life means grief is eagerly awaiting your decision as to what direction it will take in your destiny: to make more life or to make more death and violence, internally or externally.
The best decision is that all grief be turned into life-promoting grief-based beauty and usefulness. The willingness for violence-shattered soldiers to heal others makes their malady into medicine. If a society is alive and aware in this way, then those who have suffered loss will have a chance to heal, and those who have caused loss will be socially supported to sprout a new type of life-making person out of the death they have caused."
― Martin Prechtel, The Smell of Rain on Dust: Grief and Praise
In this way, the full human experience is embraced, not shunned nor exiled, and the medicine is found right here within us, when we are held in community to direct our destiny toward healing and “life-promoting grief-based beauty and usefulness”.
Embrace mature conflict
Sovereignty, community, grief, conflict, love and life are all interconnected. Prechtel famously says: “Violence is an absence of conflict.” A dear friend expanded on this beautifully: “Conflict is the part of the relationship asking to deepen.” Healthy relationships, healthy communities are not free from conflict. A misunderstood text. A moment of neglect. A contraction of fear that wants to be worked through. Conflict is part of the human experience. It is mismanaged conflict that escalates to violence.
Chronic conflict avoidance is chronic human experience avoidance... all of this creates violence. When a parent tells a child to "toughen up and get over it", when a culture says "emotions are a sign weakness" and tells boys not to cry, we collectively learn to avoid. And then we don't know why we're anxious and depressed. A lifetime of denying one's humanity, of closing one's heart, makes pain explosive.
Conflict is not always pretty. Our systems get flooded, trauma responses get activated, injury occurs. But relational ruptures and repairs are quite possibly one of the most therapeutic experiences available to us as humans. Especially for those of us for whom healthy conflict was not modeled. If you can break and recover with a friend, loved one, parent, or colleague, your bond is only further forged. But if you fracture and hide, your bond is fragmented under the facade of denial, silently rotting with resentment and wounding.
We hold the key
What I know for sure is we don't want to live like this anymore. We don't have to. We are held hostage in an insane world. We need not beg the wicked for mercy. We hold the key: it is the intelligence of your own body, it is the wisdom of your community. And if you feel far from both, then you are not alone, but we can rebuild together. To fully feel, to grieve, to mourn, to love ourselves, each other… this is the antithesis of the cruel systems running us all to collapse. We won't go down with them.
Let America, the love of riches, crumble. Let the love of life bloom in its place.
We are called to reject the culture that bred us and actively choose the culture that can dream us into being. It is a radical and liberatory act to be in your body, to feel, to fume, to fury and to remember you are not alone. It is time to find each other and not let go. To walk with each other side by side into our freedom. To leave no one out. To stay disciplined and committed to this process of transformation.
I want to know: how are you really feeling?
Could we say to each other: I am in mourning, do you join me in this heavy grief? Might we share it together?
I want you to know: we have each other, and that matters.
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Being held hostage feels accurate right now, but this piece drives home the power we all hold as individuals to change the trajectory of the collective through the relationships we build and space we make for them. Thank you for this beautiful piece.