(Or, Personal Grief, Collective Despair, and Finding the Will to Survive)
(CW: Depression, grief, anxiety, and loss – Please take care of yourself, and only engage if you have the emotional capacity to do so)
Can I be honest? I mean, can I be brutally – if not painfully – transparent? I am not okay, and I haven’t been for a long, long time. At what felt like the height of my professional achievements, my mom was diagnosed with Stage IV endometrial cancer. She died less than a year later. Her sister, my aunt, died six months after that. All of this happened less than a year after my Nana’s passing and only four years after my grandfather’s death.
I’ve been suffering in silence, isolating, struggling to grapple with loss, grief, fear, loneliness, and even shame. The past four years have been the hardest of my life to date. I’ve felt unbalanced, untethered, and, at times, completely broken. I cannot count the number of mornings I struggled to pull myself from bed, nor can I specify the number of nights I cried for the elusive relief of sleep. I’ve been sinking into a depressive spiral – overwhelmed with the burdens of living and paralyzed by the eternal challenges of just being.
something has tried to kill me
Lucille Clifton, “won’t you celebrate with me”
Lucille Clifton writes about surviving the thing that has tried to kill her, but there have been days where I have felt like death is winning its war with me. With every phone call, text, email, private message, and letter to which I struggle to respond; with every bright, clear day that feels shrouded in darkness; with every ruminating thought that pulls me from the present and traps me in the sadness of the past or uncertainties of the future; with each of these things, I have wondered if this is what it feels like, to stop living before your death.
I warned that I would be brutally honest, but I didn’t expect to divulge the ugliest bits in the way I have. It’s clear that my mind and heart were begging for relief.
I’m writing, in part, because I need to. I have to. Writing, for me, was once (and, I think, still is) a part of my survival. It was – is – as vital as breathing. But writing also requires an honesty and openness that I haven’t been brave or bold enough to bear. That is, I think, why I haven’t written in so long. I’ve been drowning, struggling to articulate just how I’m feeling and why. I’m writing this, primarily, to save my own life. But I’m thinking about our collective survival too.
The outcome of the recent U.S. election is heavy on the minds of many, myself included. Knowing what can trigger my own anxiety- and depression-fueled spirals, I try to keep myself away from post-mortem analyses. I cannot afford to sacrifice any more of myself to despair. But, I think – hope – that this is a moment where we will dwell upon our relationships to one another and be intentional about caring for ourselves and others too.
….
How do you survive a war? How do you armor yourself for ongoing catastrophe, crisis, and disaster? To be sure — there are those of us who don’t survive, those of us who don’t make it to the other side. And then, there are those of us who survive, barely.
I think of my loved ones who have lived under dictatorial regimes. Their bodies carry the build up of so much pain. Some live with the physical manifestations of decades of psychological and emotional terror: constant illness, constant sickness, and premature death. Others are scarily silent. They refuse to speak about “those times,” bottling away all their memories and whatever emotions that may surface. I think of my loved ones who are emotionally distant — never sentimental, rarely loving. Dissociated and detached. So death — be it physical, spiritual, or emotional — is always a possibility in times of authoritarian rule, but it is not the only possible future.
For over a century, the United States has deliberately prevented revolutionary activism from transforming nations across the globe. In no region is this more true than the Americas. Examples abound, but Haiti immediately comes to mind. Whenever the Haitian people have asserted their freedom and attempted to build a state for and by the people, the U.S. has used its military and diplomatic powers to thwart Haitian self-determination and advance U.S. economic objectives. This was true in the aftermath of the Haitian Revolution, in the years that followed the creation of the world’s first Black republic. This was true during the U.S. Occupation of Haiti in the early 20th century. This was true during the reign of the Duvalier regime when the Tontons Macoutes terrorized the Haitian public. This was true every time liberation theologist Jean-Bertrand Aristide was democratically elected Haiti’s president, ousted in U.S.-backed coups, and forced to live in exile. This was true in the aftermath of the devastating 2010 earthquake, and it continues to ring true in the midst of Haiti’s current political and economic crisis. A few years ago, when there were fierce protests against then Haitian president Jovenel Moïse, I remember watching a U.S. journalist interview Haitian activist David Oxygène in Port-au-Prince. Oxygène castigated U.S. intervention in Haiti:
“It’s American policy that has a problem with Haiti. Jovenel Moïse is in power, under the control and direction of American imperialism. They’ve attacked our culture. They’ve attacked Vodou. They’ve attacked the spirit of our ancestors. They spit on the memory of Jean-Jaques Dessalines.”
The journalist asked Oxygène if there was anything he believed that U.S. president Joe Biden should know, if there was anything Biden could “do for Haiti.” Oxygène responded, “I have no message for Joe Biden. He is not superior to Dessalines.” He went on to explain that Biden and Trump’s policy agendas towards Haiti were identical despite the politicians’ ostensible ideological differences.
I think of that interview often, particularly Oxygène’s proclamation that Biden was not and could never be as consequential as Dessalines. For this activist who had spent decades living under the political and economic brutalism facilitated by American politicians, corporations, and even non-profits (the Clinton Foundation is especially deserving of scrutiny), revolutionary leader Jean-Jacques Dessalines constituted a guiding light. American intervention in Haiti has wrought a great deal of pain. But it has not killed Haitians’ critical engagement with the island’s history or isolated them from the beauty of their inheritance. Although centuries apart, in Dessalines, Oxygène found a model of possibility, an ancestral guide in the continued struggle and resistance against imperial rule.
….
There’s a question floating around many Left and progressive spaces across the U.S.: Where do we go from here?
I most certainly do not have any special insight or clarity, let alone answers. But I keep thinking of how much knowledge there is to be gleaned from people who have lived under authoritarian repression and still organized, still gathered, still written, still hoped, still dreamed, and still fought. I think of folks like David Oxygène.
One dominant narrative of political transformation positions the U.S. as the “leader of the free world.” In this false narrative, the U.S. instructs so-called less sophisticated nations on how to create an enduring constitutional democracy. After all, the U.S. has the world’s oldest and — supposedly — most stable constitution.
To be clearer than clear — I do not believe this narrative. It’s as fictional as the United States’ Founding Fathers’ hypocritical declaration, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men were created equal” while creating a government that protected slavery at all costs. No, the U.S. has never been a true democracy, and many of us who have lived under its authority — both within its borders and beyond — have never been fully free. And, while some legal scholars still refuse to acknowledge this, the U.S. is in the midst of a constitutional crisis. What have historically been described as bedrock, foundational constitutional principles are and have long been under assault. This has been a long and steady decline, one that has occurred over the past forty plus years with numerous shifts in both the make-up of the judiciary and the forms of interpretative enterprises deemed acceptable. The depoliticization of legal education has further reversed the modest gains of the mid-twentieth century. The incoming presidential administration will only quicken what has been in motion for some time.
Nonetheless — I share this dominant narrative because, for too long, U.S. education has wrongfully espoused the notion that the nation has a great deal to teach the world. Now is the time for us to follow in the tradition of writers, thinkers, and activists who have long rejected such a proposition. We who live in the U.S. have so much to learn from revolutionary struggles. And, like the Black liberation activists of the early and mid-twentieth century who understood the relationship between the kinds of violence the U.S. government inflicted upon both domestic and global populations, I hope we see our oppression and liberation as bound up with the plights of many others in this world.
There’s much to be said about the lessons we can learn from history, from past struggle. And I hope that, over the coming months and years, we will find community with one another as we engage in that critical study. We must also consider the importance of shifting our own temporalities, of neither desiring nor expecting that we might live to see the labor of our work.
A few years ago, Angela Davis was supposed to receive the Fred Shuttlesworth Human Rights Award in her native Birmingham in honor of her activism, scholarship, and advocacy. However, the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute rescinded Davis’s award due to criticism of her long-standing support of Palestinian liberation. Eventually, the award was reinstated, but a group of Birmingham natives, grassroots activists, decided to host an alternative event in Davis’s honor. In that event, Davis engaged in an hour long discussion with the writer and scholar Imani Perry. I’d like to share the end of Davis’s talk from that night because I’ve thought of it often in the years since:
“Oftentimes, we assume that when we work for justice and equality and freedom, that we’re going to see immediate results. And capitalism teaches us to want to see the immediate…So we have a relationship to our history that is very much modeled after capital’s market.
And we don’t necessarily recognize that the work we do today, while we may not see immediate consequences tomorrow, or even next year — or even ten years from now — but maybe down the line, maybe twenty years, or fifty years — or one hundred years from now — the work that we have done, at this particular moment, will have made a difference. I think it’s so important to try to develop that different temporality…
I always point out that hundreds of years ago, there were people who were standing up against the institution of slavery, and they were imagining. They were imagining a different world. They knew that a different world was possible. They never got to experience that world, but, that world is the world we’re inhabiting today. They made it possible for us to be where we are, and so we have to begin to think broadly in that way and imagine how consequential our work can be…
Let’s see if we can gauge the value of the work we do now by its possible future consequences. And perhaps fifty years from now or one hundred years from now, there will be some people gathered in the way we are gathered here this evening, who will be thankful, who will give thanks to those who came before them, who will be thankful for the work we did when we were called upon to do it.”
….
I don’t know where we go from here or what comes next. I am, as I have shared, trying to figure out how not to die under the weight of my own depression, anxiety, and personal journey with grief. What this journey has taught me, however, is that survival is not and cannot be an isolated endeavor. To the extent that we are able to survive, we cannot survive without each other. We are moving into an uncertain future, living in an unsettled time. But we cannot make it through this thing called life alone.
I hope this note finds you, and I hope we find each other. I hope that we will be intentional about caring for ourselves and those we love in days, months, and years to come. We must create the world we seek to live in, even if we will never be able to inhabit that world ourselves.
A luta continua. The struggle continues.
On Becoming 