Faith in despair
Hi you,
How are you feeling today?
Confused? Scared? Angry? Sad? Numb? Exhausted?
Since the election result, I find myself crying in random moments, at random places.
Staring at that mural on U-street, black activists: MLK, Angela Davis, James Baldwin, Audre Lorde.
— They are all gone, no one to lead and guide us.
Listening to the beautifully naive and innocent laughters: Latino immigrant kids, playground near Mt Pleasant.
— I fear for their futures, cages, families torn apart.
DC is so quiet, never this quiet since I moved here. This muted eeriness, is like the early days of the pandemic. The city, the nation, the whole world, is consumed by fear and anxieties.
This pain is very real.
My friend B had to give up a fellowship at Princeton he worked so hard towards, his devotion to help protect labor by policy research for the executive branch.
My friend Z is reconsidering his work which channels US aids towards people in most desperate needs.
I also see how limited and even reductive my own trainings and credentials are: data science, technology, and Econ. Considering repivoting.
This pain is very real.
A stranger told me at the park: his wife, a black woman, started to have severe nervous breakdowns and panic attacks. That she has locked herself in her room since Tuesday night.
I keep asking these days: how does one keep faith in despair?
In this desperate seeking for solidarity, I went to the screening and discussion about indigenous history and fight in DC.
I always believe that the primitive tribes, the natives, the indigenous, have so much deep wisdom that perhaps I can find some light in this dark darkness.
Here I met scholar, artists Dr Elizabeth Rule (Chickasaw Nation) who devoted her whole life to educating the public about indigenous history here in DC.
She told us.
“Every single US president, 47 of them, has been atrocious, to the native Americans.
So we fight, from the era of termination to assimilation, then to self determination, towards true liberation.
So we fight, our sovereignty from the very beginning when the colonists set foot on this land that is home”
Tears welled up, again, at the story she told. A native American man, she encountered at the Lincoln memorial (Lincoln approved the largest mass execution of indigenous people, and is completely blind to the Sand Creek Massacre).
An very old gentleman,
Rode his horse,
All the way,
From California to here,
days, days, days, lands, desserts, mountains.
To protest the pipelines to be built, not just for the displacement of his people, but
for nature, for earth.
He is protesting for all of us, for our mother!
Here is also when I met the organizer of the event, James.
James, and the local non-profit humanities DC, have dedicated their work to creating space, events, educational programs, and grants for marginalized communities across race, gender, socio-economic spectrum.
(Foucault has long argued “space making” is one critical path of liberation.)
“I am also exhausted, why do we, black, brown, yellow, us on the margin have to fight all the time?
I fought all my life, from the music making program I created to teach young Black girls to use Hip Hop to create liberation, to all the work I do at Humanities DC”
I asked James too: how he keeps faith in times of despair?
“It is evening like this, space as such, community like us”
“It is that letter I received recently from a girl who graduated from the music program and now on her way to become a musician. She talked about how black girls are not your ornaments, she talked about rejecting patriarchal misogyny in her songs.”
I decided, for now, and for a while,
to place my faith,
In my fellow warriors, their own way, their own weapons, their own horses.
Who continue to show up, despite of, and because of
despair…
hi you, and YOU,
I love you and YOU so much that I cannot bear the love sometimes,
but I choose to love anyway…
