On Recovery
I begin at the wound. Mapping the threads of this corporeal coloniality requires dexterous movement as I trace the origins of the scar. I know this gnarled tissue comes from years of forced assimilation, having to check the "Other" box, silence, and subjugation. Learned through curriculum, familial tradition, social networks, and cultural rhythms - it is familiar, the way my body bends to appeal to Whiteness.
I woke up today and could not stop thinking about what it means to be in recovery. My fingers followed the outlines of the wound as I scrolled past image after image and panicked. I saw George Floyd's face, I mouthed the syllables of Breonna Taylor's name, and held on to the radiance of Ahmad Arbery's smile... but I could not remember all of their names. Sean Bell, Trayvon Martin, Amadou Diallo, Rekiya Boyd, Nina Pop, Sarah Circle Bear, Dana Martin, Mike Brown, Sandra Bland, John Crawford III, Eric Garner, Tony McDade, Oscar Grant, Kalief Browder....Each murder of Black and Brown people at the hands of modern day slave catchers raises the death toll with every passing day - how can we say their names when so many unnamed people of color are scattered like strangefruit across this country? I struggle to memorize every name, to hold on to the richness of their lives so that they are not replaced by faceless statistics.
Thinking about what seems like the impossible- recovering from a wound reopened daily as agents of white supremacy drag their heels across my carefully laced sutures - overwhelms me. I brace my body against the dull ache of pain, of fear, of disappointment, and loss. I have tried to hold on to my body - wrapped its cinnamon limbs in feminist scholarship and held steadfast to the certainty that I belonged to myself in these entropic times and tried to say their names.
These agents are not always dressed in blue, adorned with the same copper wielded by slave catchers, in white pointed hats, or wrapped in camouflage and nationalism. Sometimes, they look like you.
They look like the White women who sat across from me in committee meetings, preached the need for global leadership and diversity - all while whispering between smiles about the angry and impossible Black women down the hall. They look like my classmates from high school who wielded homophobic slurs and racial epithets over cafeteria tables, and evaded the law until they became it; the people who transformed thinly veiled threats into the PD badges nestled across their hearts. They look like my peers from three different college campuses. They are my white and non-Black friends who scoffed as I fervently yelled “yes we can” and marched in celebration of the 2008 election, the suite mates who complained of the lingering scent of coconut oil and saffron in our bathroom, the lab partner who casually wondered aloud if I was an affirmative action student, and the cohort members who excitedly told me they looked at me and did not see color. They are the storekeepers who followed me as a teenager, the TSA agents who held me for five hours, and the people who comment "what about [insert non-Black identity]?" or decide to play devil's advocate under my posts.
They are sometimes dressed in the elitism of PhDs, tell me my writing is not academic enough, my research seems personal, and sit across from me in office hours and ask if I'm really a Black women if my mixed race face does not look like one. They look like the welcoming smiles of White Latinx, Asian, and fellow mixed race people of color who enunciate the consonants of anti-Blackness with the same confidence as the pledge of allegiance. They look like cousins, uncles, aunts, neighbors, in laws, mentors, former friends, coworkers, self-proclaimed allies, grandparents, play cousins, classmates, and everyone in between. Sometimes, they look like you.
The bodies are indistinguishable among the entropy; buffered by police shields and federally sanctioned weapons, I see Black and Brown limbs stretching out among the flames, desperately grasping for justice. The stitches in my chest strain as I fight my hiccuping tears, and try to fill my lungs...and I think again of George Floyd. I remember Ramsey Orta's shaky footage of Eric Garner's murder and Diamond Reynold's cries as she and her daughter watched Philando Castile die. Watching a seemingly child-led militia in the parking lot of Lenox Mall, I remember Aiyana Stanley-Jones, Tamir Rice, Kendrick Johnson, Nia Wilson, and Jordan Davis. Their faces appears in my memory, alongside Layleen Polanco, Ismael Lopez, and Anthony Hill - whose deaths remind me that the complexities of gender, ability, mental health, class, sexuality, and citizenship status complicate what it means to mourn them.
The genealogy of this wound spills across generations, oceans, and continents; I see these complex linkages mirrored in my reflection. As I struggle to hold onto hope, I feel the quick unraveling of the sutures I haphazardly sewed across my chest - I am still struggling to make sense of my own mixed-race body and the erased histories embedded in my fingertips. What can healing look like when the world feels as segmented as your identity? Can the work of recovery finally help me feel whole? This wound is both the impetus for the unbridled rage once restrained by the weight of otherness and a marker for the genesis of my recovery.
Debates on the validity of looting and rioting feel sacrilegious as my feet touch down on the stolen land of Turtle Island. It is as if I can taste the rage emanating from the throats of protestors and my fingertips brush the veins around my own. How often have I quelled my own fury when confronted by the smiling face of white supremacy? How often have we been gaslit when naming the very real agents of our intersecting oppressions? What does justice look like when our pain is outmatched by the white rage that fuels/ed colonialism, imperialism, and the violence we are seeing across our screens? These murders of people who look like my loved ones are fueled by a rage much deeper than ours. What can healing look like in a country that hates who we are? Where our murder(s) aren't even framed as murder?
Recovery makes sense when the injury ceases to exist- when the harm is done and the body can weave its own bandage; it forms a scar, leaving behind both a memory and warning. As I trace the contours of this proverbial wound, I wonder...what does it mean to be in a perpetual state of recovery? To believe in the work of healing when each instance of violence refuses to let the wound close? To chose ourselves when this world fights against the possibility of such an option?
Perhaps recovery is less a reclamation of a wounded body and moreso a battlecry for the lives we've lost and those we've yet to live. Perhaps, it can be something more.
