The power in saying, "I was wrong."

Recently, I was faced with a situation in which I was made to admit my blunder. I had mistakenly understood something that was said, and instead of clarifying whether what I had just thought I heard was true or not, I allowed my mind to take over, fill in the blanks, and react without caution, care, and foresight. I let reason and sound judgement slide, and took the lowest of the low road to make assumptions about someone. Well, my horrible behaviour slapped me straight in the face when I realized that my assertions about the situation were in fact so totally absolutely WRONG!

Omg! What do you do when you're faced with potentially huge ego destruction, and not in your own company, but in front of your equals? Well humxn nature is such that it can cause us to react in all sorts of ways. I had many choices before me: 1) hold my ground and emphatically state that I heard what I had heard, and there was no effin' way I was going to budge; 2) admit that I had actually misheard what was said, but place the onus on the other person and say that they should have said things more clearly;  or, 3) admit I had misheard, and put the onus to clarify squarely on my shoulders. Well, I did a little of 2 initially, but then after my conscience got a hold of me, and shook me up a bit to get me to see straight, I responded with a strong affirmation of my mistake, and that the other person did not deserve to be subjected to the indignities that resulted due to my shoddy processing of reality.

Because of the error, the other person might very well be forever scarred, and, in my taking full accountability in no way frees me from the remorse I justly deserve and need to, have to, must feel. I acted atrociously towards a fellow human being, and now it's a matter of integrity and respect for me to commit to seeking some help to restore my mind and spirit so I can nurture more patience, kindness, empathy, and respect for others, and also encourage in myself an acceptance of where they're at and where I'm at in our mental, emotional, physical, and spiritual journeys as we each try to find some peace among the chaos in our world. The chaos we ultimately cause.

I've observed that the times I've welcomed humility to influence my responses to conflict, things always had a way of working out, even if the relationship took a different form or even if the relationship had to end. In those times, I felt a much deeper sense of connection with those who, due to their own unique life experiences, stuggles, and personalities, played their roles in the collision of our tensions, traumas, and auras.

Well I've become more the wiser because these folks put me on the spot and challenged my stubborn and anxious ego. They held up a mirror to let me take stock, and face up to my very human incongruities. This is why the word hate is a word that has never existed in my vocabulary. Despite all the ways in which I've been scorned, betrayed, harassed, insulted, shunned, rejected, judged, abused, and shamed, hate could never mess with my dogged belief that everyone I have ever crossed paths with had and has some hard lessons up their sleeves to teach me, even if we only engage in a moment (like the other day when I was in a grocery store, and standing next to this older man, who, when he saw me eyeing something on the shelf in front of me, said something under his breath in discomfort, and then when I reached over and picked up that thing, he very lightly touched my hand, and said almost in a whisper, "Tsk, tsk, don't do that." I realized what had happened and I said, "Sorry" as he walked away). Each time it happens, I get to grow all over again, and discard some more of the arrogant and oppressive behaviours and thinking that limit the opportunity for me to genuinely connect with my fellow humans.

In short, taking accountability for every situation, circumstance and loss I've had a part in creating is an incredibly liberating and humxnizing experience, which unquestionably brings me, and maybe the other folks with me equally involved in the struggle for validation and empathy, back to love. Back to LOVE, yeah.

"I saw that." - Bearing Witness to & Holding Space for "Nirbhaya"

PHOTO BY S. ISLAM

This was powerful personal narrative theatre at its best. "Nirbhaya" written and directed by Yaël Farber, brought me to tears from beginning to end. I stand up and applaud all these stupendously brave performers - Priyanka Bose, Poorna Jagannathan, Sneha Jawale, Rukshar Kabir, Japjit Kaur, and Pamela Mala Sinha - who had the guts to speak their truth in soft, in raging, in tearful tones. And then there was the sole male actor - Ankur Vikal, who played the ultimate Jekyll and Hyde roles, sometimes a friend, other times a foe.

What impacted me the most was the realization of my role as a member of the audience. There were so many moments during the performance where I wanted to jump from my seat, run onto the stage and offer my arms to these women or beat their assailants off. I didn't want to be that person struggling with the bystander effect. I wanted to get in right in the middle of all of it and break it up, cast a protective veil over these women, and scare off these men who seemed so relentless in their pathological and sadistic lust for power over these women, some were girls at the time.

Perhaps this is what was so concerning about the depiction of men in the play. It is so easy for the mind to start raging against those who have benefited for centuries from patriarchy and misogyny; it is so easy to give in to that fear that the people in our lives can instantly turn from gentle-hearted, compassionate companions and commuters to people who want to hunt, harm, and destroy us if we try to assert our confidence, our knowledge, and/or our leadership in any way. The way the mind works, I understood all too well the seeds of stigma and hatred against certain groups of people when all are painted with the same brush. But I wasn't going to allow my mind to go that way because I don't think that's what the intent of the show was. "Nirbhaya" didn't want women leaving the space angry and ready to smash all men to pieces. They wanted women and men to leave with a clearer understanding of the system in which we are raising our children - a system that defines both masculinity and femininity in very narrow and oppressive ways - a system that allows for such violent acts against women and girls to continue as we, its spectators, look on in helpless fascination.

I loved the fiery tone of Priyanka Bose as she narrated much of Jyoti Singh Pandey's tragic death and her own suffering as a child through gritted teeth and uplifted arms in the postures of the mighty Kali and Durga.

I understood Poorna Jagannathan's profoundly shocking "confession" of the "poisonous" nature of the "pleasure" she felt when trauma entrapped her.

I saw through Sneha Jawale's tears on stage as she revisited the day when she nearly died after enduring a vicious attack by family who also took her child away from her.

I hung onto Rukhsar Kabir's every word as she recollected how she was forced to believe that the violence against her was just another way of life, and how she finally stood up and said no more.

Pamela Mala Sinha's story burned in my guts. She spoke to that fear in me that compels me to lie in bed in near catatonic rigidity most nights. I know of the hole she speaks of.

Ankur Vikal, the sole male actor, the one male who played a hundred males - a hundred males who were friends, rapists, brothers, abusers, uncles, killers, fathers. All at once, imperceptibly, Vikal would shift from this character to that. From light to darkness. I was terrified of and for him.

Finally, Japjit Kaur, with her haunting singing voice that began the show and ran as a soothing thread throughout, she kept my tears flowing from beginning to end, for it was in her character's story - the real "Nirbhaya" that I saw the unfathomable loss that the Earth has suffered from the violent deaths of its mothers, daughters, sisters...women. As "Nirbhaya" walked in slow, measured steps on stage, draped in an off-white salwar, I felt that the ghost of her real self was there, holding space for all of us who are survivors, who are on the path, on some path, to rediscover our voices, whether through art, music, and poetry, or through restoring community, or through advocacy, or through media, or through calling for a national inquiry into missing and murdered Indigenous women, or through supporting women living with HIV, or through living with hope and love every day.

Every day the world might change a little.

I realized that just by being there, in that packed theatre, I was bearing witness, I was joining their voices and repeating the words uttered, "I saw that." Three words, so powerful. I. Saw. That.

I saw the play that I thought I couldn't see, that I wouldn't get to see. I heard their stories. I held that space for these courageous women alongside everyone else who was there. Yes, I felt like running out at times, many times, but I knew I had to remain seated, to honour these stories, to share these stories, and to help make things change for all of us trapped within the confines of stereotypes, prejudice, racialization, gender-based violence, and all the other oppressive ways we have learned to control one another or keep people in their place. These systems are destroying us. But thanks to the raw, biting fury in the ART we create, there are always reminders that we, as a species, have the capacity - the strong, eternal heart capacity - to do better, to do right by one another. Our fearless Jyoti Singh Pandey deserves that. And all the fearless women and girls who died with her. Rest in peace, angels.

I quote here the artistic director of Nightwood Theatre company, Kelly Thornton's words as presented in the play's program:

"What does it mean to be fearless? Perhaps it is not to be without fear but rather, to act in spite of it. For those breaking their silence and for those here to witness, the first step is being here tonight...This is what theatre can do. Invite us together to confront ourselves. And in so doing, restore our world."

Yes. Confront myself. It's how I might make things change, a little. 

Convergence

The clock struck.

The guts got ready. At least theirs. 

Not mine. Cuz I have none.

So I listened. 

I heard their wounds. The sharp edges of deconstructed passages.

Passages in a book. I could read them over and over and over.

They expressed in forthright tones. In pain that had muscle. Their breathing apparatus intact.

They spoke with eloquence. 

Dazzling authenticities. 

These beauts of humanity launched their emancipatory prose into a universe, that however vast, felt so totally, radically like HOME.

I sat captivated in the glow of their commentaries and formulations on Life.

How to make it better. How to make it grow. How to love it into a kind of change that seems oh well.

Inconceivable? 

But no, not so impossible, dear heart.

For they had already been doing it long before this meeting of minds.

I was out of my mind. 

Trying to preserve the pretense of a "community role", 

I tensed knowing the release would come, awe-struck by the veracity of experience, I could not withhold the aching need to JUST BE.

The audacity of converging vernaculars! Oh, these precocious spirits were shining something monumental straight into my eyes!

They spoke of visionary, transformative, Indigenous ways of knowing.

And in/justices.

We all identified, a collective among so much nonconformity. 

We were all quite contra-rarities. 

And it soon became a celebration from within. 

This soul who walked the earth in rejected anguish.

To rediscover the lucid glow of a new familiarity, 

one that reminded this near-artifice of the forever-affinities of former companions.

And so it was to come again, today,

To remind me to tread closer to hope instead of the Edge.

Pay mind to the tribulations, my dear, but...

Colour your tainted vista with perspective.

They came. They found me. They pulled me out. 

Wet and weeping. 

But alive! Alive!

Convergence. 

Dear Justin...

Dear Justin,

Congratulations are in order.
A landslide victory for the virtuous red wave.
A collective spring of hope among the masses,
These discordant diversities untwisted and seemingly united within the folds of a thing called a ballot
Dear Justin, before we get too comfortable with each other, let me just say...

I'm guilty, for I've relinquished perspective
in the interests of "For he's a jolly good fellow"
a sad sad song; nevertheless, the band played on.
Justin, you're such a handsome man!
They now play for you, on the lands where "A Canada I can be proud of" echoes something profoundly reckless,
in the sepulchral sights, sounds,
and sighhhhhhhhs...
of our Native children,
coming forth in whispery wispy smudging,
through the cracks and crevices of hallowed grounds that mark these beauties' untimely expirations.

Though timely for you, Justin. Indeed.
And me too, for there is so much comfort and convenience in daily living,
So easy to forget all the misery of INconvenient truths

Your father left you with his legacy meticulously inscribed in grandiose form-latures as in...
"Whereas Canada is founded upon principles that recognize the supremacy of God and the rule of law"...
The words flowed like bubbly in the marbled and much marveled halls of colonial idolatry,
but all this time, the bubbly was blood...

of the thousands?

Multi-cultis like me, I remain hopelessly distracted by the illusory winds-of-change farce
And, Justin, your seemingly kind-looking face,
Canada knows comedy, eh

I smile. I feel the ebb and flow of something like tears - an instinct to cry in elation
But I do this because I'm reacting to tear-jerker manipulations and machinations...
at the sight of such deceitfully large gatherings of people,
cheering and lamenting TOGETHER AS ONE

such a..
such a bittersweet win, for political blood had to be spilled, too
Even though, really, really, we're one and the same man
But the ones in Orange, poor souls, skins not thick enough to weather the storms of social media dissatisfactions
Yet, what does it matter, Justin?
We're one and the same man,
something akin to a secret boy's club where not even the best and brightest boys are permitted to enter
because knowing any or many of its malevolence will unconscionably put the innocents in a bad way, and they too will become compost
like the disappearance and disintegration...

of the thousands?

Your angelic-wing-tipped feet walk on the earthy dust that was once full-bodied women with joys, sorrows, herstories, and other strange magical and mellow tellings,
Red dresses hanging in photoshopped shadows do no justice
And Justin, neither does your red wave tsunami
Because all I'll ever see is blood, on your hands, on my hands, on your hands, on my hands

Dear Justin, you now have the power to rip apart the shimmering shiny chimera you and I,
we've created,
You now can finally tell me,
"Ha ha, it was all a joke. A weensy experiment that went on for far too long."
You now can be the first ever leader of this palimpsest of worlds and words,
to uncover the stories and breathings...
annihilated.
exterminated.
invalidated.
massacred.
beyond recognition.

Beyond recognition...

of the thousands?

And of their lands. And of their dreams. And of their gifts to a humanity that might have evolved.
The thousands?
Who we will never get back.
Because they.
unlike you, and me, Justin.
They don't come, have never come, in waves.

Meta.Morph.O.Sees

The body. It has trans.de.ported this soul. 

Dis.figured in ana.comical and psycho.ill.logical ways.

Its brain, once with dormant potency, 

now functions accordingly with de.face.it character.

Nevermind the panic at witnessing the glossy tightness of skin, 

stretching trans.new.sin over the terrific swelling of extrem.i.tease.

It's the approaching ex.p.erasure. 

Beat. Beat. Goes the heart in triple time.

Vital fluids suffocating along narrowed pathways. 

Once sturdy internals mal.fluctuate, unresponsive to the toil of treatment.

Day by day, ex.her.shun augments the numerical results.

So the body ushers in the cons.e.questions. 

And the soul awaits its impending dis.missile.