Lernen aus dem Lockdown?. Группа авторов

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. We have all been invited, implored and compelled to engage, donate, self-isolate and see, both virtually and literally. The wound is now tangible, the witnesses – both willingly and unwillingly – present.

      Somewhere in between these moments I would fall in love with a man from Israel. We would deeply want to bring our worlds together. Our inner worlds were dancing from that first moment: the duet was rich and beautiful. The separation, however, was written. He would tire of my desperate commitment to immersing myself in the landscape of collective wounding. He would lose hope. The hope that allowed him to dream of a future with me. He would remember instead the song of his tribe and nation, one strengthened by their collective wounding. “Remember, remember”, they would be told, and remember they would. Many years ago history had been unkind to them. This wound would assure loyalty and allegiance. Two days before he left for his country, I asked him what he would say of a future son’s love for a non-Jewish woman. His answer made me see what my friends had been telling me from the beginning. Some wounds cannot be healed by one or two people. They need a circle – a large, determined, resilient circle.

      Now I think of the two German sisters running away from home to find respite from a daunting historical shadow and my love appears beside them – running back home to stay true to that very same wound inflicted three generations ago: grandchildren of the opposite camps of that generation, fleeing from love, fleeing from home. I have observed how a wound inflicted on a people in a land far away from me, years before I was conceived could travel into the depths of my own heart today. No wound is then an “other’s”. Again: in the country of the wounding, no borders exist. Our borders have never been able to protect us from the fractures within.

      We are now in 2020, it is April and Covid has taken over our world. I check on the Africans and the Europeans from the train. I check on my Swiss friends and with trepidation even on the Israeli man. I have recently recovered from Covid and am in my rented apartment for the duration of the lockdown. All my friends are in lockdown, everywhere. It occurs to me that for the first time ever, we are all conscious of being in the wound as a race. Every single one impacted by it and aware of each other’s suffering in real time. I am on a zoom meeting. This is an effort at solidarity and surviving this loaded moment in time. This is a Circle of Resilience – simply put: ten artists and a therapist, checking in – holding hands in a virtual circle. We decide to meet as humans who happen to be in the artistic way of life. Here we are trying to deal with the world steeped in pandemic. Almost everybody in the virtual room is sensitive, acknowledging the loss and grief being carried – both personal and collective. Our therapist reminds us to give ourselves permission to feel what is coming up. To make “I”statements so that we can separate, for the sake of witnessing clearly, our own experience and the stories we take on. It is clear that people here are possessed by the character of this zxeitgeist and overwhelmed by the collective wound that has opened like a gaping gate to hell. If wounds can travel across space, time, communities and generations, the part of me that emerged from three weeks in hospital seems to believe in circles more than ever before. I witnessed two kinds of circles, both drawn from love, one tightly tied around ‘me and mine’, like the kind my landlord drew around himself and his family. “Please don’t come back to live here”, he said.