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      CIRCLES OF RESILIENCE AN OBSERVATION ON WOUND TOPOGRAPHY AND POSSIBILITY

      Diya Naidu

      She asks me to accompany her onto the balcony for a smoke. I go along, bracing myself for the chill outdoors. It is August 2015 and almost the end of my three month artist’s residency in Zurich. She and her sister had come to my studio presentation a few days before. The work was about violence against women. For the entire forty minutes of the performance, both were engaged, emotional and deeply connected. Both were wounded or, as I would later discover, triggered by a former hurt. One that was ancient and carried by the entire tribe. I would also discover this essential fact about wound topography – all wounds lead to each other, they are connected. This is something a certain microbe we now know as Covid-19 would ruthlessly demonstrate: the wound of racism (disproportionate infections among Black Americans), classism (millions of labourers walking home across thousands of kilometres in India), capitalism (the havoc caused to food supplies by the global supply chain) and patriarchy (whole nations and environments suffering at the hands of old male leadership, the rise in domestic abuse of women and children during lockdown) and how these bodies of pain all flowed into each other.

      After my performance, the sisters had approached and invited me to lunch. Now here we were on their balcony, the gloom of an approaching autumn after a glorious Swiss summer. Nature was heaving and threatening and there was a stillness in the air that announced her impending confession. She handed it over to me to carry forever – the thing she had been aching to say: “I hate being white”. There was venom and pain in her eyes. In my imaginal realm, she morphed into a cobra with fangs turned inwards, gutting its own bleeding heart. I may have taken an abrupt step back. Being handed ancestral wounds and witnessing them is not easy work. She didn’t ask explicitly for a bandage. I don’t think she credited me with that kind of power but she knew I would listen, aware from my work that I was embracing the wound too, though seemingly a different one. “White people are the cause of all the bad things that have ever happened on this planet”, she vomited out. I wanted to say, “No, no… It’s not your fault that you are white …” or anything that would stop the wound from spewing. It wasn’t working. I could feel my eyes darting around unconvincingly while my mind processed images of British officers on horseback whipping starving Indians, of conquistadors and cowboys culling whole indigenous American populations, of European men raping African women, of chained slaves on ships, of Nazis and their genocidal camps, of refugees in rubber boats being unwelcome on European shores… I worked hard to stop this historical download of images. She saw it in my eyes. She knew that I pitied her in that moment. We were like two people standing on either side of the same wound, clearly seeing it but forgetting it existed inside us. The only way to resolve this was to begin the long walk towards each other through the space in between. In the landscape of the psyche and the soul, this space was the wound itself. We would have to enter it in order to heal it and ourselves.

      “It is the honour of the murdered that he is not the murderer”, Khalil Gibran’s words flitted across my mind. I had done the classic act of separating from her in my non-guilty developing world brown-ness. In that moment of victim’s hubris and racial ethical superiority, the wound expanded and I saw it as clear as the sunlight we so badly missed on that cold balcony: here was the wounding, we both carried it. It did not matter whose descendants we were – the wielders of the sword or the slayed. In any case I come from a tradition where the soul or Aatma’s trajectory is as important as the genetic inheritance. In another life, I could have easily been a Nazi, a coloniser or a rapist.

      Their grandparents on both sides had been Nazis. Their parents had predictably tried to heal the historical wrong. As a result, these German sisters with Hebrew names spent much of their childhoods missing vacation time, in camps working for peace between Palestinian and Israeli communities around Jerusalem. As adults they had both left home for Germanspeaking Switzerland where they were close to their culture but free of their nation. Both had debilitating psychological challenges and were under medication. They were kind, had enormous hearts and were drowning in guilt. In their wounding they were reaching out egolessly, inviting others to see and examine their vulnerability. I would later thank them for this. There are few things more powerful than offering up the broken parts of one’s self to be witnessed.

      This is where artists become potent. Often our work needs us to inhabit the landscape of pain, to develop courage and candour and the warmth to invite the community into this place. As we move into an era where limited resources may tempt us to posit competing wounds – environmental crisis versus unemployment or feminism over queer presence and culture, for example – or even use political awareness to declare one fracture a bigger emergency than another, we will increasingly need empathy to avoid separating our histories with walls of self-righteousness. Why, for example, did I not offer her my wounds?! I was English-speaking and from a liberal and educated middle class family in a country where people still die of malnutrition and water-borne disease. I had spent those very months in a bikini in Lake Zurich whilst simultaneously working on a piece about violence against women in a country where the streets are unsafe and brutal gang rapes occur. This schizophrenia was staggering, the privilege devastating.

      By the time we had finished our cigarette, I could only manage a weak recovery from the dark history lesson. Perhaps I should have simply offered presence and my own state of overwhelm, my wound.

      Four years later, in 2019, I would be on a train from Mwanza to Dar es Salaam with a group of artists from Rwanda, Uganda, Kenya, Tanzania, England and Germany. We would travel on train tracks laid in Africa by Indian labourers to make it easier for the colonisers from Europe to extract the continent’s resources. The potency of us coming together in the context of this past and trying to meet through our artistic processes gave us purpose even in our independent and nonfunded contexts. We would walk into Bagamayo’s slave trade market together – descendants of those who had perpetrated and those who had borne the brunt for generations to come. We would try to talk back to a problematic past and transform the hurt in the present. The whole town would watch us perform and perhaps some unconscious healing would ripple outwards. We would never be able to measure this empirically. We would be working in landscape that is invisible to most.

      The poetry of Covid times, however, is now upon us – where social media, global news media and statistics illustrate these wound landscapes upon both metaphorical and material map surfaces. СКАЧАТЬ