“Sometimes you don’t survive whole, you
just survive in part. But the grandeur of life is that attempt. It’s not about that solution. It is about being as fearless as one can, and behaving as beautifully as one can.”–Toni Morrison
Welcome (back) to the pink room! Grab a seat, get comfortable… we might be here for a little while.
Let me first begin and tell you I am afraid.
I haven’t said much to you yet about the times we find ourselves in. I mean, in particular, us who find time moving in the belly of an American beast or empire. plantation? But also us who find time moving anywhere at all. Partly because it all felt cliche. and. partly because I wondered if perhaps the terrors of this violent Western, white, male and capital-driven human experiment that we like to call reality are not at all new.
I mean.
Terror comes daily for the mother at midnight nursing a bottle and an ache which began long before he or anyone else hit her. Terror too comes for the teenager who has learned exactly how many layers one should wear to a funeral. Terror comes for the child who has learned survival is more indestructible than they once told her. Survival can persist between the legs of a man who ought to be her father. Terror too has come for the boy who one unexpecting day became a man in the barrel of a policeman’s gun. And now this boy made man has become afraid of everything but the sounds of whistling gunshots at noon.
I guess what I am trying to say is that the worse has already come. And although I too was afraid, I did not then dare to ask the world to end.
The point is that yesterday I came out to my dad. I mean it wasn’t dramatic. very anticlimactic. And I wondered after I told him nonchalantly as if those words hadn’t been eating at my flesh for months like acid, if he had even heard me at all. I tried to tell him. How I was changing. How I became a pioneer of american english grammar as a wild attempt to survive if not whole but in part but with a beautiful ferocity. I wanted to say. I am not who you have known me to be. or perhaps I am. But dad don’t you remember I always wanted to be free. He did not understand I suppose the gravity of the words that I spoke to him on that sunny Friday at noon. Or I suppose he did. For only moments later he wielded a pronoun. she. And this time it felt different. Because this time I had given him a chance to see me.
And so I am afraid. because perhaps it is not the world, or whiteness, or men drenched in rage but him. Or her because she saw me but did not say a word. Or me when I let my face curl into something between a scowl and the wash of grief when that man approached me in all the vulnerability that comes from trying to survive in part at least while wearing your worse nightmare on your sleeves. And I quickly turned the corner wishing perhaps tonight he would not dare to survive any longer.
Again. Don’t let the poetry distract you. Yesterday the President of the country I reside in told me my existence was best to be avoided on paper from now until it or I was no longer needed. And today, I began the count down to the day when my survival will come at the cost of my dignity. I am afraid because I too know that survival is ignorant to the “how.” Yet demands it anyway. I mean too many ask, “if they will survive…” and not “how they will survive. And.
I fear this.
I fear this because I am still not sure I will be willing to see. the man. On the street corner. even after I have told you what evil persists in my intentional blindness.
So, I am terrified to tell you.
That. what scares me most is that survival is in fact the default. I am terrified to tell you that it was easier to grieve the ruthless and unrelenting destruction of a people whom I knew deserved if nothing else to breathe deep and laugh without choking than to accept that I might survive without health insurance. That I dream in red and yet scroll Linkedin everyday as a desperate attempt to avoid another encounter with the social security office.
I guess what I am trying to say is. I am not afraid that won’t survive. I am terrified that I will.
I am terrified because if there is to be a more beautiful and pleasurable and perhaps even just world I think I must be willing to survive long enough to encounter it. I must be willing I suppose. To attempt to live fearlessly and beautifully and freely in a world with fathers without ears and mothers without tongues and a face without eyes. I am terrified because the question. I mean the question that haunts me. is not. will I survive? But. who will I be in my surviving?
Alright. That’s all for now. See you again real soon back in the pink room!
From the Pink Room 