You cannot make the good bad, and you cannot make the bad good. The truth of things must be confronted by the infinite mercy of true justice. However, every one of us can remember that what we perceive as ‘good’ and ‘bad’ all take place in the same dance of forgetfulness of our oneness and interbeing in which we all somehow participate - and from which we all seek one day to awaken into remembrance of our true nature.
And as we start to remember our true nature, each as an integral part of a single field of being, compassion effortlessly arises in us for all of those – including ourselves – who were lost in the mad dance that somehow turned into a frenzy of suffering. We learned to be victors and vanquished, oppressor and oppressed, perpetrator and victim, superior and inferior. Now we emerge from the shadow of this violence and learn to be whole.
We are now finally – and again – in a time when wakefulness in us begins to stir. And the first things we feel are despair, rage, exhaustion, terror, indignation and the urge to shout it loud, express it in a thousand different forms of protest and creativity, activism and destruction, or try and protect ourselves deep in the recesses of shame – depending upon our location in the fray and the state of our courage and consciousness. This is only the beginning of awakening. As if, beginning to come round from a nightmare of tortured and brutal events, psychological and cultural warfare and desolation, in the zone just before full waking we begin to understand how the narrative of the dream came about and the power we now have to tear it up or transform it conclusively. Of course we have to shout aloud, hang our heads in shame – we have to feel the fullness of the pain and the humiliation, and cry the un-cried tears; speak the unspoken words of protest which in the dream we swallowed like a poison which resided deep in our gut and flavoured everything so completely we did not know the full extent of it; tell the untold terror of revenge which lurks within those of us whose privilege has been gained at the price of the lives and labour of others.
This is the time to cleanse the great wound in the body of humanity wrought by colonialism and its legacy. And salt water always stings. But it is a good sting. If you retreat from it, you choose to keep the infection. And it will drive deeper into the unconscious places of the body and heart. We must not retreat; we must face all of our histories with courage, honesty and gratitude. Then comes the turning of the tide.
For once we have cleansed the wound we go forward to the time of healing and recovery, purged of the microbial threat of the racialised mind. Bright and glistening and weeping our wounds will then need dressing with a gentle, soft clean dressing that allows us to go down into our inner knowing and there find our salvation; allows us to treat each other’s wounds with tenderness and care. Some wounds will no doubt become re-infected and will need to be cleansed again. And again. But ultimately we are on a trajectory toward healing as the skin of the body of humanity is allowed to work its magic and knits itself back to wholeness, though bearing the scars of what passed before – if not physically, then as an imprint on the memory. And we enter the period of recovery to wholeness and are open to who we truly are rather than what we thought we were.
Let us not try and hold back the tide. For however formidable the defences we use to hold it back, and for however long we manage to do this, it will one day overcome them and bring them crashing down on us less kindly. Let it break and roar and stretch inland to its greatest extent. Let it turn and recede in the manner that is its nature.
Let us make holy spaces to speak our bitterness, our anguish. Let them shake the walls and even the earth but let us hold the space undaunted. Let those who were loud before come now into a respectful listening silence, and find safe spaces of their own away from the limelight in which to share their fears and anxieties. Let those who were silent before take the floor. And let it be understood that they spill not a few days’ not years’ not decades’, but centuries’ worth of tears and telling. Let this pour forth in a great torrent, while we in our determination and love remain standing in their honour. Let them be acknowledged for having the courage to speak, and to speak until they find beneath the rage the deeper injury – terror, horror, fear, pain, amputation from the body of common humanity, for which anger has seemed to be the safest and most empowering shield. And let them be held as they grieve. And when all that bitterness and wisdom and experience and suffering has been spoken and the truth of the reality and complexity of suffering has been heard, let more, quieter voices be heard – the in-between voices of those still more silent whose plight has not yet been addressed. Let them be honoured and heard out and held too.
And finally, when all this is done, let us hear speak the voices of the victors, the vanquishers, the writers of history, the privileged and the oppressors – not from podiums of superiority, nor the heights of moral ascendancy, but from the level ground of humility which places them correctly among fellow humans in the greater order of things. Those who defiled the altar of compassion, who have crossed the margins of integrity and decency, into the bad lands of moral degradation and hypocrisy and the territories of ignominy, let them speak now they have understood the part they have played in the unfolding of our shared story. Let them be heard devoid of excuses, devoid of defences – the voices, at last, of responsibility. Let them be re-admitted to the ranks of shared humanity and held among us, stripped of all pretensions. And finally let us hear the voices of all those whose comfort and privilege has been buoyed up by the disgraced deeds of the oppressor, of those who have enjoyed unmindfully the fruits of oppression - let them too speak from the same ground of humility and tell their anguish and shame, so that all the stories have been heard, all the songs have been sung, and no stone has remained unturned.
And when all this is done, and the body of humanity has been purged of the toxic vibrations of the colonial legacy, let us go forth to tend to our own and each others’ needs and walk together the road of recovery to wholeness.
Razia Aziz
10th June 2020
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