Get up, stand up, don't give up the fight

It's been a rough few weeks. The resurgence of racism in the UK, and the conversations this led to, where I found myself bewildered and frustrated when having to speak truth to ignorance and denial, drained me to the point of having no more words (or frankly, f-cks) to give. Hence the delay in having anything to share with you.

A lot of old wounds were triggered, and some unresolved rage and depression resurfaced while having to come to terms with the fact that this is the dissatisfactory nature of too much of humanity. During this time, I resourced myself with the words of teachers, activists and artists who helped me rise up out of the slump. As Bob Marley sang, we have to "get up, stand up, don't give up the fight."

Poorna Bell, as gratifyingly usual, articulated so much of what I, and I imagine other People of Colour in the UK, were feeling, especially as the majority of White folks were able to go about their business as usual while we were forced to sit in the midst of the hate-filled storm. She put words to my troubled thoughts when she wrote:

"I hate that I feel like this, that some button has been pressed and it will take a long while for our nervous systems to calm down. It begs the question: will there ever come a time when we are allowed to just exist? Without having to fight? To not live in fear? To not work twice as hard for half as much?"

I myself wrote about how I was sick and tired of the fact that People of Colour don’t get to not feel sick and tired of this torrent and terror:

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by Aliya Mughal (@aliya_mughal)

I always knew that moving to Devon would put me back in the place of being "the only Brown person in the village". But me and my partner always knew that we moved here for the place, for the land, for the peace (hah) and the space, not the people. The reality of what some people really think came horribly to light when a few deliberately antagonising conversations were kicked off by frankly, scared old white men fearing for the demise of their sad little empire-bound identity - morons, as I was glad to hear Akala describe such people when I returned to Bristol to hear him speak with David Olusoga.

Akala's 'Natives' is one book I picked off my bookshelf during this period, as well as Lama Rod Owens' 'Love and Rage', Ruby Hamad's 'White Tears, Brown Scars', Jamaica Kincaid's 'A Small Place', Claire Ratinon's 'Unearthed', and Pankaj Mishra's 'Bland Fanatics'.

I share their sense with you here, and in the act of sharing, with myself, because repeating and holding their words in my heart and mind has proved so necessarily re-empowering in reminding me, as Kate Johnson said in a conversation with Lama Rod in his book that, "This world and this life is mine", no amount of ignorance can change that fundamental truth. And also because it's so vital for People of Colour to feel seen and understood beyond the toxicity and half-truths of the mainstream narrative. As Hamad writes:

"Validation is a need almost all humans share. When broader society refuses to validate women of colour, it becomes vital for us to share our experiences with each other as a means of coping with these damaging stereotypes and archetypes, and to help us recognize the gaslighting techniques and stereotypes that keep us in a subordinate position."

On race and roots

I have written before about how choosing and making this life in the country is a practice of defiant joy and reclamation, a path that was laid down before me but cut off for my ancestors. I am so thankful to Claire Ratinon for writing 'Unearthed', and for the dear friend who recommended it, knowing that this is what I needed to read to know that I belong in places where I sometimes feel like I don't.

From beginning to end, I felt like Ratinon was putting words to my thoughts, to my experiences, of being a conspicuously present Person of Colour in rural England. She too writes about her nervous system being constantly "battle ready" when faced with suspicious stares and barely concealed bigotry. She juxtaposes this with the unbridled joy and satisfaction that comes from cultivating land, from making her space and her place in favour of relationships that have more meaning, namely with plants and animals.

These words on the legacy of colonialism and the importance of reparations cut particularly deep:

"Repairing our relationship with the land is the spiritual work of our lifetimes. Because there were other thefts, alongside the stealing of bodies and lands, of plants and soils, of agency and control, of governance and rule. A robbery of spirit took place, and still does. A robbery of history and hope, of culture and tradition, of imagination and dreaming up futures on our own terms... The limitations on our imaginings of what is possible still persist, as do the oppressive systems that create and enforced their parameters. I will never know who I might have been, outside its burdensome vision. And while I know there is plenty for me to be thankful for - an abundance of privilege and comfort, for starters - I am caught in grief over the possibilities lost because my understandings, my hopes and my thoughts are refracted through the prisms of whiteness, of the English language, of being on this land but not of this land."

We are not alone & we need each other

Ruby Hamad's book is one that has been on my wish list for a while. A dear friend and Dharma sibling encouraged me to read it when I was railing with my rage and loneliness. The stories that Hamad documents from Women of Colour speaking out against oppression, coupled with the more truthful account of the harms perpetrated by White supremacy and White feminism, were a balm to say the least, and a reminder that "the dead end of the colonial past" as she describes it, is making way for liberation. I cried and fist-pumped the air reading the book in many parts, especially this:

"Women of colour are refusing to keep walking on eggshells. We are forming collectives and creating our own platforms. We are forging new paths and finding new ways to resist. The scars inherited from our ancestors have fused with our own to make us stronger; it is through their true grit as well as our own that we will get louder and bolder as we transform this society that for so long has hinged its success on ensuring our failure."

As I like to say and it bears repeating, F-ck That Shit.

The danger of small mindedness

When I was a kid, my parents taught me the noble response to racism was to speak up for truth when standing up to bullies. I remember attempting this several times before realising that the bullies who abused me were too stupid and small minded to come close to understanding what I had to say. I was reminded of this as I read Jamaica Kincaid's 'A Small Place', the sentiment of which I tried to recently express to one of the aforesaid stupid old white men but again, whose eyes and ears were closed with fear and ignorance, in the face of which I quickly realised, correcting other people's confusion is not my work or my burden. Nonetheless, I will continue to tell the truth and speak up, and I'm forever glad for writers and thinkers who remind us how much this matters. Kincaid's is a truly excellent book, here's an extract:

"...all this fuss over empire - what went wrong here, what went wrong there - always makes me quite crazy, for I can say to them what went wrong; they should never have left their home, their precious England, a place they loved so much, a place they had to leave but could never forget. And so everywhere they went they turned into England; and everybody they met turned English. But no place could ever really be England, and nobody who did not look exactly like them would ever be English, so you can imagine the destruction of people and land that came from that. The English hate each other and they hate England, and the reason they are so miserable now is that they have no place to go and nobody to feel better than."

This brings to mind this skit from comedian Tez Ilyas about what it really means to be British.

Belligerent illogic

That's the term that Pankaj Mishra uses to perfectly capture the deranged and deluded rhetoric still pedalled by the proponents of imperialism as they continue to overlook the true Anglo-American legacy of civil war, brutal exploitation and genocide. In his collection of essays, 'Bland Fanatics'. Mishra includes this eloquent and scathing moral disapproval of Western missionaries, in the words of India's famous teacher Swami Vivekananda in 1903:

"Intoxicated by the heady wine of newly acquired power, fearsome like wild animals who see no difference between good and evil, slaves to women, insane in their lust, drenched in alcohol from head to foot, without any norms of ritual conduct, unclean... dependent on material things, grabbing other people's land and wealth by hook or by crook ... the body their self, its appetites their only concern - such is the image of the western demon in India's eyes."

Think on, read on

Akala's 'Natives: Race and Class in the Ruins of Empire' should be compulsory reading in schools. I refer to it often when I teach creative or contemplative writing to students of colour. Akala writes with such a depth of personal and well-researched insight that it's no wonder he rightly floors any racist argument, distorted as it so often is by people "blinded by Cold War hangovers [such] that they are entirely incapable of critical thought".

I appreciate how he reframes the despicable idea of the "white man's burden" - originally conceived of by the Empire as the white man's job to "civilise" the people of countries whose lands the colonisers destroyed and stole:

"White supremacists, as much as they don't want to admit it, make themselves slaves to black excellence when they allow its existence to unbalance their entire sense of self... We talk about white privilege but we rarely talk about the white burden, the burden of being tethered to a false identity, a parasitic self-definition that can only define itself in relation to blacks' or others' inferiority."

Moving on up

I've been especially grateful for the wisdom, the teachings and the practices offered by Lama Rod Owens lately. I aspire to embody his awakened mind, and to walk through the storm of this samsaric realm without being dragged entirely under by it:

"There's a high level of anger and animosity in the world today. Yet despite this, my primary activity is to actually just be myself .. I'm just showing up and expressing how I see things. I'm not trying to convince anyone else. I give the work back to them. That way, I don't get drained or depleted. I'm just pointing out truths; it's up to them to decide what to do. Afterward, I'm going to go do something to have fun, and I'm not going to think about it."

Thank you for reading. Now I'm off with the cat to see the chickens.