from…

http://takingsteps.blogspot.com/2008/02/comfort.html

11 February 2008

comfort

“Again I saw all the oppressions that are practiced under the sun. Look, the tears of the oppressed–with no one to comfort them. And I thought the dead, who have already died, more fortunate than the living, who are still alive; but better than both is the one who has not yet been, and has not seen the evil deeds that are done under the sun.” –Ecclesiastes 4:1-3 (NRSV)

I woke up to bad news today. It didn’t stop coming.

It was a bad story, and badly told. But the point is straightforward: another sister murdered today. Another name for the Day of Remembrance. Another young trans woman of color, stabbed to death. Another voice we’re never going to hear again. Another world, another way, another life, stomped on and punctured and torn open ragged and wet and, in the end, missing.

And another set of jeering, contemptuous onlookers. Another bunch of cops whose first sympathy is with that poor, traumatized ex-convict who stabbed her to death and got her blood all over him, poor shaken guy, duped, tricked, threatened, violated even, though God no, it’s no reason to murder someone, it’s just, well, you can understand why he would. Another crew of reporters willing to sensationalize and abuse the story of another murder victim, to spin it and twist it until she brought it all on herself, until all the facts of her life and hopes and dreams and loves, her favorite foods, her warm breath, her days and nights and days again–until all of those are reduced down to nothing but a list of exploitable physical flaws, a flock of whispers and insults, a splashy, lurid headline. Until it’s all just her shoes and her measurements and a name and idea she worked so hard to leave behind, as though the past years of her own making, besides the snide references to her breasts, can be undone–chipped from the record of history like the name of a hated pharaoh or a long-since-disappeared political rival, scrubbed clean from anyone’s having to deal with the complexities of her situation.
Until the public can be satisfied that it’s finished the murderer’s job. He ripped her breath and blood out of her, after all, but her body remained, in an abandoned pile of meat and bone and contemptible breast implants. Her name remained. Her memory remained, even in neighbors who assumed she could only have so many callers because she must be a whore like all her kind, even in family far away, even in the simple things left behind in her Bronx apartment.

We couldn’t have that. We couldn’t allow that residue to stay on our daily concrete.
There’s nothing new under the sun, okay? But we erase what we cannot stand to remember was here, as best we can. We turn the hose on those sticky bloodstains and try desperately to fence the stolen goods, patch up the places where it’s obvious something is missing, make sense of the fact that a twenty-five-year-old woman was here just the other Saturday, laughing, a cheerful fixture of the neighborhood if anything’s to be believed in those reports, and now she’s not, she’s a statistic, she’s a corpse, and we can’t even afford her the dignity of having been complicated. Because it’s not enough that a man more than a decade her senior, with a criminal record, seems to think it was appropriate for him to commit brutal murder, or that for many onlookers, he’s the hero of the story. We need to make it make sense. We need to make her make sense. We need a reason that a person might do such a thing to another person, and the truth is just so hard to look at–the truth, and our whole society’s complicity in that truth–that we have to turn it inside-out and make it her fault, not his, not ours, just in order to preserve the fragile avoidance of the fact that this world can be terrifying, that it’s the people who respond to not seeing what they want to see with knives who often have those knives ready, that those on the bottom fighting for a chance to just scrape out a safe, warm place in this world more often than not do not get that place. The breaking is there, the breach in what ought to be, and we cannot look at it, so we have to sweep at the edges of it, put its weight on those who aren’t ourselves, and make them carry the burden of their own oppression so we don’t have to know that they are like us, and that we are like them, in how quickly our own breath can be torn out.

We all might die alone. But some of us have to be ground and ground and ground down into the ground so the rest of us can feel a little better about our own chances at avoiding it. We have to make them more alone, even in death. We have to take away their names and their dignity. We have to take away even the chance that they might be mourned as real human beings who are gone and never coming back, who are missed by loved ones somewhere, who meant something. A murder is incomplete, and we cannot stand ending on an unresolved chord. We all have to join together and finish it, so the eyes of the murdered cannot accuse us in our sleep.

We do this to each other.

We did this to Sanesha Stewart, who is dead.

We did this to so many. We could do it to me, tomorrow. How many of you would know, in another obituary about a deceitful boy with breasts who had it coming, that these words were mine, and that I was gone? But the dead are not, indeed, more fortunate than the living, though perhaps they are more comfortable. Oppression still weighs on those of us with breath, but we have a chance to look it in the eye. We have the chance to put our hands against it and push. And maybe this is not enough. Maybe it doesn’t make up for our hard days, and our hungry children, and our bruises from the business end of injustice after injustice. Maybe this is all vanity, and chasing after the wind.

The living don’t have the luxury to care, because we’re here, and most of us plan on going on living. And it wasn’t enough for Sanesha Stewart, but it might be enough for me. Or you. Or someone you never knew had it coming until they ended so senselessly that some stranger decided to tell you they deserved it, just to finish that job. In the end, it’s still better to light a candle than curse the darkness, even in the face of a darkness that viciously extinguishes candle after candle, light after light, because it has to be done. And we can do it together, we can stop this erasure, we can stop this sacrilege, we can stop losing more and more family, until maybe we can put down the nausea and see the dead waiting for us to pull it together and give them reason to rest.

It has been a long day, full of worry and sorrow and grief and fear. But I’m not alone, and I still have my name, and I still have breath to lend to this, and we can do this so long as we remember that we’re not alone, any of us.

I will hold my partner a little more tightly, tonight.
Keep safe, everyone.

“Two are better than one, because they have a good reward for their toil. For if they fall, one will lift up the other; but woe to one who is alone and falls and does not have another to help. Again, if two lie together, they keep warm; but how can one keep warm alone? And though one might prevail against another, two will withstand one. A threefold cord is not quickly broken.” –Ecc. 4:9-12

we’re still adding to this, but in the mean time, if you’ve read the
articles, post your thoughts below as comments, or post your own
spiritual snapshot as a comment.

keep checking back because by mid january we hope to have more articles,
snapshots and various thouights and discussion topics added!

thanks!

alexis, manju & isabell