Convulsions, Premonitions

I feel like I have had a certain conversation on repeat for the past few weeks, but I can’t stop myself. The words are there right under my skin.

“it is this time
 that matters

 it is this history
 I care about

 the one we make together
 awkward
 inconsistent
 as a lame cat on the loose
 or quick as kids freed by the bell
 or else as strictly
 once
 as only life must mean
 a once upon a time”
        -- June Jordan, “On A New Year’s Eve”

I have sunk deep into this text. There is an awful but necessary type of witnessing that happens there. In June Jordan’s poetry, we hear clearly the continuity of violence and the preciousness of human life. In Melissa Harris Perry’s note, we read raw grief. I’ve curated myself away from Facebook posts, away from mainstream news, and have instead immersed myself in artistic responses and music. I have been reading aloud poetry by friends and strangers to my empty room, finding myself too often in tears. I want to have the energy to organize and make meaning but the part of me on loop keeps circling around and asking the same unanswerable questions. Why? What is the point of continuing forward?

The majority of my work is intangible. It’s about making connections between people and resources, people and ideas, people and other people. Even my writing work, the most concrete and visible part of the process, requires so much connective energy that I often feel overwhelmed by its weight. It’s very easy for me to feel too much – whatever that means – and yet at the same time desire to compress it all into a short period of time and space.

I took great time for myself last year to process burnout. I took great time for myself to travel and make space for my writing practices. I took great time, and now I feel like it has disappeared. Dried up. Just a few weeks ago, visibility took prime focus in my life. Now there is an impulse to fold in on myself and hibernate till the long winter is over. But really, when is it ever over?

Outside there are new plants reaching towards the sun. My immediate safety is not under threat -- a significant privilege. I’ve come off a month of extra shifts and moving at high speeds; what once felt productive now feels unsustainable. So I have been hardcore nesting and making my space as comfortable as possible, being selfish with the ways I use my time outside of work. I am consoled by my own gratitude for this life, for the reminder that we return to Allah’s light at the end of the journey, whenever that may be. It is our time to bear witness to those who have died and not turn away from the reality and the ritual of it. Orlando, Istanbul, Dhaka, Baghdad, Medina, and further. Philando Castile and Alton Sterling and…

The Dramatic Everyday

Project As[I]Am has a call for submissions out right now! The topic is "Our Greatest Resource," on emotional labor, care, and love letters to yourself and others united for a more socially just world. Get your submissions in by June 4th -- we'd love to see your work!
 
These past few weeks have been a marriage of opposites. I’ve been trying to climb into a steady routine, but each time it’s been interrupted. Some things were expected, like feeling too tired to move after a full 8 days of work. Others were needlessly difficult, like my recent apartment search which ate up all the time I would have used playing with creative energy. And then along came loss.

 
I saw the closing of the old Hugo House, where I got my start as a 14-year-old writer. My own emotionality caught me off guard. During the last event, I wandered the halls and took pictures of the messages folks had put up. Tearful ones and frustrated ones, silly nonsense rhymes in the mix with professional artists sending the place off. I was reminded of all the years that I spent volunteering and taking classes there. Taking down the track lighting in the ceiling while standing on a wobbly ladder; being too timid to approach the mic during a performance class; people chuckling as my phone went off during a quiet writing exercise (at the time, the ring tone was my friend screaming “JORDAN, PICK UP THE PHONEEE!”). So, so many memories wrapped up in that space.

Then the last of my family’s cats died. Abby, the one whose kitten face is immortalized in a dusty photo on our fridge. Compared to the prognosis given a little over a year ago – that she would live only 3 more months with this kidney blockage, and in pain at that – she’s hung on for a good long time. She made a cross-state move to California, where my dad held her paws as she took her last breaths. The last cat that died is buried out in the backyard; though this cat's body is not here, the house feels even more full of ghosts.

It’s the mundane that unites it all. The dishes that must be washed, the laundry put away. The car driven, the apartment seen, the phone calls made – the spreadsheets too. The schedules updated and the to-do lists lengthened. This weekend, my best friend and I went through boxes of my old journals and got wrapped up in the nostalgia of letters sent as small children. What started out as a requisite task of moving turned into something more like a commemoration of the places and people who have been meaningful in my life.

It’s been therapeutic to shed what needs to be shed and to mourn what deserves to be mourned. I’m still losing a lot of sleep worrying about projects and next steps - but that, I suppose, is the complex blessing of being alive.

Grieving for Mandela: The Mess of Loss

 

I will carry with me the memory of when I first found out that Nelson Mandela died. I was in the lobby of a hotel in midtown when my best friend put her hand on my shoulder, pointing to the TV. I didn’t register at first what they were saying, but she repeated: “Nelson Mandela just died.”

There is something about death that makes my teeth ache. It brings me back to other losses. I started Googling the name of my drama teacher from high school who passed away last winter to find her acting profile, and although it was a year ago, I again felt that absence pressing down in my stomach like a stone. I wrote about my naiveté during that time, how I believed “you couldn’t possibly lose someone whom you loved enough.”

I am sure that it is a similar feeling with Mandela for many people. While I can only relate to him as a public figure, someone we talked about in history classes and when I was first getting into radical activism, I am still reminded of the profundity of loss. It can be all-encompassing and make your joints ache like you are old before your time. We are pleased to note that he lived a full life and died at an old age, but the loss still weighs heavy on us.

A member of my community recently died at a rather young age, and though I personally didn’t know them well, their death tipped a whole community into action. It made personal the issues that they was battling with and brought us all out of a collective sleep about things we often think abstractly about. Lack of care, lack of knowledge, slipping through the cracks… Contrary to Mandela’s passing, it felt like their life went unfinished. And many were left raw with their emotions, blowing up at one another because of it.

So, as I am consuming more and more media about Mandela’s life – in the glowing idolized way that we talk about it or in the down-to-earth representations of his life, about the fake sign language interpreter and presidential selfies at the funeral – I am also seeing visions of other grieving periods and other deaths. There is anger there, mixed in with sadness. For those who live on, grieving lets us become liberated with our own emotions.

I don’t want to idolize Mandela’s legacy any further than it already has been. I want to acknowledge that his life was messy, just as messy as the aftermath. I want to hold on to the idea that we are all works in progress, and that death is yet another moment of transition. But I want to go back to my somewhat naïve notion that you cannot lose someone who you have loved enough. I still believe this, though now I think of it as a different kind of process. Sometimes it can be clean. We shave off the excesses, the complications of their life and make them a symbol to play a part in our continued struggle. And sometimes it can be messy. We generate more and more ways to deal with our anger, with our sadness. We do not sit with those emotions unless we are using them to act. And it takes immense effort to cut through all of that to get back to what our main goal was: to love that person enough so that their memory is not lost.

I hope that as we use the stories of our losses in the future as ways to motivate our actions that we may also reflect on these people not only as symbols, but as the same messy individuals that hold us accountable every time we invoke their memory.

Jessica Goldstein: In Memoriam

Though it may be a little gratuitous, with the recent passing of my esteemed mentor and teacher, Jessica Goldstein, I have been thinking a lot about high school and some of those lost memories. So, here's a short introspective.

High school sometimes seems like a blur - ugly smells from the cafeteria, consistently awkward schedule changes, and the occasional detention with Ms. Lee (which didn't really seem like a punishment). I remember that many classes made me scream; even if I was with friends, even if I liked the teacher, even if I thought the material was easy. Theater class, however, was not like that. I never dreaded going into that strange octagonal room that Goldstein fondly named her "bat cave." It had a special brand of crazy that I knew how to handle.

I was a quiet girl who didn't speak up in French class and who wore baggy black clothing outside of theater class. There I was loud. In charge. Encouraged to take risks, even if that meant doing something as wacky as putting a plastic chicken on my head and running about as a spirit from the dead. For all the years that I did high school theater, Goldstein was the woman who gave us a rueful "you kids" smile and let us press on.

A lot of us flocked to theater as an elective that was easy or we knew how to do; there was the standard motley crew of acting kids and techies, overconfident jocks, and nerdy people who needed another class to add on. Some of us wrote papers for the International Baccalaureate and some of us were goofballs that never did the reading. Sometimes the same kid did both. But as much as we would skip class or fight with the teacher, when a sub came in, we were all on the same side. We knew that they had no power over us - and we had a mighty loyalty to Goldstein. Which is not to say that she didn't get played sometimes, but there was definitely an air of respect for her that was not otherwise present. Some of us, I among them, adored her to the fighting end even when she got on our nerves with inconsistencies.

She refused to conform with school policies that would stifle us and administration that would snark at us for being unchaperoned. She let us have run of the theater with our creative expression, let us handle the backstage, taught us to value or waste our time according to our own goals. While these privileges were used and abused, they were always there, a show of measurable respect and honor that she had for us as young adults just as we had respect for her as a wacky adult that gave us more of herself than I ever imagined.

I honestly thought that Goldstein would live forever.

She graduated with my class of 2009, moving back to NY during that summer. While there were cries of "thank God!" and the theater got on a more traditional 2-plays-a-year track, I was glad not to have to be a part of Interlake theater without Goldstein. I can't imagine it would have been much fun. In my freshman year of college, Goldstein sat with me on the Columbia steps and told me how to love the city was to get away from it once in a while and that I could visit her when I needed that break. Now I'll never get the chance.

I know it seems small, to love a high school teacher. After all, aren't we individuals and shouldn't we leave the past to the past? But Goldstein was more than just a teacher for me. I attribute so much of my ability to stand up for myself and to voice my opinions to her guidance. She encouraged me to write, to speak, and most importantly to not be afraid. She herself was never afraid to be silly, to feel her emotions, and to bring her full self into our lives. I will never forget it.

Interlake theater kids and anyone else who wants to share a memory of Goldstein, please send me a message or comment here. I want to cultivate the memories that we have of her in a safe place.

Remembering Jessica Goldstein

"We are not idealized wild things. We are imperfect mortal beings, aware of that mortality even as we push it away, failed by our very complication, so wired that when we mourn our losses we also mourn, for better or for worse, ourselves. As we were. As we are no longer. As we will one day not be at all.” ― Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking

This quote was with me all day yesterday, after I learned that my acting teacher in high school, Jessica Goldstein had passed away from brain cancer early that morning. She had been a great friend and mentor to me - one of those teachers that you talk about in your memoirs as someone who touched your life and made you really believe in yourself. One of those mythical people who, while they were all-too-human, still came through for you in every possible way and encouraged you to be the best person you could be.

Many of my high school memories are peppered with memories of Goldstein. I remember her in her amazing laugh. I remember her telling us stories about Nepal and Russia and New York - places we suburban kids could only dream were much better than the city we'd grown up in. She was accomplished in so many ways, and yet she never condescended to us. She treated us like mini-adults and gave us much more sway than many of our other teachers. She fought for us, especially when we wanted to do something radical.

She allowed me to put on one of my most glowing accomplishments: a stage-adapted version of Speak, a novel by Laurie Halse Anderson about rape and its affect on a high school girl's psyche. She pushed me to be courageous, to press hard, and to speak with my loudest and clearest voice.

I will miss her dearly.

 Lovely Goldstein, smiling amidst all our crazy high school antics.

Immigrant Mourning

How does one feel sadness properly?

This week opens for me with a very recent death and a very raw period of mourning. As much as I believe that death is a natural inevitable process, it still shakes you to the core when it comes close. It's almost enough to make me want to write clichéd sentences moralizing about those who have passed on and those who remain here with us. Almost.

But more than that, I feel very strongly that I must talk about the experience of being in mourning as an immigrant. I am part of the satellite family that lives several time zones away, and I am apart not only from our larger family, but from my own small family as well. Though it is never easy to drop everything and deal with a family emergency, we don't even have the option to return home. We can only orbit around, waiting for a time to return to them. We grieve alone.

I find it odd that this aspect of the immigrant experience is understated. Intellectually, I know that it is overshadowed by the rhetoric of the American dream and the opportunities of entering a new life, forging an individual path, and participating in capitalism, but my heart is focused elsewhere. It shows me the profound loss that is involved in moving halfway across the globe for so-called opportunities. The inevitable missing of births and deaths, the broken families, and the hard edge of being alone - my heart takes in these feelings and tries to blunt them so that I can be sad in a proper manner. So that I don't tie in my individual sadness with the infrastructure that contributes to it. So that I can still feel good about the place that I live in, have been adopted into, even as I yearn to be with my family and take rest.

Months back, during Thanksgiving, I wrote a piece on gratitude for Dear Sugar and I talked about returning to Bangladesh for the first time last year. I wrote:

"I am grateful for that empty place at the table. I am thankful that sometimes people need not know each other to care for them. We are contributing to the stockpile of love in the universe – whether that’s through writing advice columns or finding gratitude in the hardest moments. What we manifest is who we ultimately become."

I am caring and I am loving from afar. I cannot reach that empty place at the table, and neither can many of my family members. But it is there.

How does one feel sadness properly? I want to address this question in my posts this week. Look out for some more writing on sadness and mourning in the next few days. And thank you, as always, for reading.

Prayers for Troy Davis

Image via Feministing

I got a news alert at 12:30am telling me that Georgia executed Troy Davis. I should have just rolled over and went back to sleep, but I lay awake, staring out of windows and wondering what could have prevented this.

I was not personally affected by this case - heck, I only really got involved after hearing the stir around his upcoming execution. But there is something about Troy Davis that hits me right in my core. It is those words that have oft been repeated after his death: "We are all Troy Davis." We are all subject to the same unchecked corruption that our government puts forth. We are all guilty until proven innocent. We are all affected by forces that we cannot directly influence nor change - everything from systems of oppression to judicial realities that prevent us from hearing the full story. We don't want to hear it sometimes; sometimes it shocks us. Like this case, like the DSK rape case, like the woman who got pulled off a plane for being brown on 9/11. This is the world that we live in. So what do we do?

Stand up for your voice in this system. Fight the oppressive forces that push us down and silence us. And offer up prayers/good energy towards those who are affected by such tragedies which occur not far away, not in a distant land, but right here in our country. Right now.

RIP Troy Davis. May you teach us so much.

Read more about the case at Colorlines and the New York Times.

Mid-week Observations: Near Death

I recently heard from my father about a death of someone close to him. I did not know this man well, but I knew him in passing. He was in poor health and there were a lot of complications; we knew that he was going to die at some point, though it was still a shock when it happened.
This death made me very emotional - not because I knew the man well, but just because I knew him. I started thinking about the reality of death, the fact that we don't know when it comes, but it will come. I have always thought that I will not be scared of my own death, and I ascribe to that, but the death of others is different.
I believe that on the first day I heard the news, I described it like this: the saddening thing about death is that we no longer get to cross paths with that person again.
This is perhaps a simple cognitive piece. You can understand this intellectually without much effort. But the emotional impact is much less straightforward. In my heart, I cannot reconcile the passing of any person I know.
Their bodies do not vanish, this we know. They are put into the ground or they are burnt into ash, but they do not physically leave. Instead it is the mindset that they are unable to rise from that place and come back. They are stagnant, while we move.
So this brings me back to my earliest musing on death. I feel the loss of this man, even if I do not know this man so well as my father or his family. Because I can no longer experience the awkward moments of saying "hello" to this man, I can no longer spend time with my father and him at the movies, I can no longer wave goodbye after dropping him off at his home.
And that means that someday I will not be able to do any of those things with people that are close to me. I will not be able to cross paths in any capacity with those people again.
Being near death is much scarier than being dead.

Read some more lessons I've learned in this life.