London, December 2024
Dear Lizzie,
I noticed that last year Rory Pilgrim wrote this very same letter to a loved one, and so I write to you.
Do you remember that afternoon in the park? You were telling us about the work you were doing in the prison with Rory. We had just been to see their show “pink & green” at Chisenhale Gallery. It was warm, the old east London trees felt big, Rai ate overpriced ice cream, and I tried to keep up with the conversation about the workshops you’d been holding while caring for the kids. I kept tripping over my words while trying to get a question out. You said something like, “Just say it, however it is for you right now,” but in a permissive kind of way, not how it reads here. So I blurted it out, still without ease: “You know, I don’t know how to care for someone when you’ve been harmed by them. I’m not saying I believe in carceral punishment.” I can’t remember your exact reply, but my memory tells me it goes like this: “People who harm need love too.”
People who harm need love too.
I think it was through family that I first felt the need for justice. From a young age, I learned to mediate dysfunctional relationships between different family members. Actually, it was more like keeping some kind of semblance of peace. Harm reduction. I still do it. Something about the formula of immigrant “can do” attitude and turbulent family life resulted in me wanting to build solutions, especially when I witnessed terrible communication and even worse attempts at repair. I want to believe there’s a way to live after harm has been done, where everyone gets what they need. You’ll chuckle at this. Tonight when I was putting Rai to bed, we role-played what he might say to G, who was being mean to Y in school. He tried out different language and tones of voice and compared which might get the desired result — no more rudeness. He already has such a strong sense of justice at five years old.
What would a wider ecology of people caring for one another look like? The memory of a dance turns up in my head – paired bodies, all rotating in a wider circle, like this particular dance at the school ceilidh where they introduce a partner swap. It’s a total shit show unless well-rehearsed and folks know what they are doing. Inevitably, someone loses their partner and stumbles around, arms outstretched waiting for someone else to latch on. In the end, it turns out well and the pairs can keep dancing. Everybody is held by somebody.
I listened to that podcast again today,the one where Shania Twain speaks with Louis Theroux. I was a bit embarrassed to reveal my listening habits to you when I messaged, but I was so moved by it. And you replied, saying, “I always say Shania Twain is a grief worker.” She spoke about being abused by her stepfather, yet still holding love for him. She said something like, “I see it for what it is. He did his best to care for us. He was an Indian Canadian and it was hard to get or keep work. No matter what he did to me, I don’t hate him. He was sick. And I do think there is a difference. Some people go to mental institutions and some people go to jail.” To which Louis says, “Why didn’t you hate him for that?”
I don’t mean to minimize sexual violence by concretizing Shania’s spoken words into print, and I don’t think that’s what she does in saying it, either. You need to hear her say it, her cadence. My ears pricked up; I listened to that part several times. What struck me was how uncommon it isto hear a survivor negotiate these relationships with such honesty. It complicated the narrative — like the first time I read about transformative justice. There are other ways.
Did you know she lost her voice for seven years?
I witnessed conflict growing up, but never resolution. I guess that’s why I’ve been interested in conflict transformation over the past few years. I want to learn some new tools to do it better. How not to flight, which is what seems to happen to me. It’s one of the hard truths of this decade of my life — accepting that I just can’t fix some relationships.
It’s impossible to not turn my heart from personal struggles to political ones, to Palestine and Lebanon. And how we’ve failed. And the utter inability of Israel, the United States, and the United Kingdom to feel anything at all, believing their own maddening need to kill, kill, kill. Ita Segev wrote that “the State has manipulated grief to such a vile extent… like allowing death to teach you something holy about living.” Trauma has been made into a weapon of war. Victims are capable of harm too.
This time last year, I grew so angry towards people in my neighborhood, also struck down with the same numbness. I was on maternity leave; my world was more local than usual. Why were they not breaking down? Why were they not losing sleep? And what about the summer pogroms? Did they even happen? My rage swelled again.
I want to believe that we can live together differently, even when it feels impossible to imagine how we will get there. I think about the ten-year-old boy who lost his sight when he was hit by a soldier’s rubber bullet in Derry in 1972. “I meant to fire the bullet, but I never meant to cause the damage,” the soldier said. And yet that wee boy forgave him. He went on to spend his life working in peace and reconciliation projects. I need to be shown that this kind of humanity is possible to conjure. But today, I am grief-stricken. When a relationship,—whether intimate or global–is so full of hurt, how do we repair?
HEY
C’MON
COME OUT
WHEREVER YOU ARE
WE NEED TO HAVE THIS MEETING
AT THIS TREE
AIN’ EVEN BEEN
PLANTED
YET1
Love you,
Jasleen
