The power and poison of testimony

At the most inconvenient time, I began questioning everything.

I had just launched a project I’d poured every part of me into (this one). It felt like the culmination of a lifetime’s journey and search. I was prepared. I unveiled so much of what I had held back in me and delivered art I would have kept hidden just last year.

For the first time I can remember, my life began to take on a shape: I knew what I was waking up to, where I was heading, what I was planning. My writing expanded beyond the familiar pain; it seemed to be trying to say something important in the delivery of its grief. The writing carried a collective gaze, which meant the pain grew wider, but so did the desire for a haven that could hold more than my own body.

My art began to extend past its solitude, rather than deepen it.

This certainty became the water I drank from each morning. After a lifetime of questioning where I was going to sleep and what I was going to do with my life, I felt I was waking up in the house of a woman who had landed between the steady walls of her answers. I wanted to be her — but perhaps life has always wanted me to be something else..

For some of us, maybe our destiny is to live the question, to build our home above the impermanent ground of a river bank that is forever re-shaping itself. I was running from the evidence that my writing had changed. The more it moved towards a theme, the more it shed the personal for the veil of the collective. The more it felt it could carry, the more damage the quality sustained. The confessional ink of my writing became diluted with a water that wasn’t my own.

For years my writing pursued the woman I had lost to the crowd in the mosque. But in wanting to include the pain of many other women who too had lost their bodies to the same crowd, I lost the singular, selfish, and necessary I.

I repainted the portrait of pursuit — it would now took place within the mosque, not in the open roads as it once did.

The difference was more than I wanted to confess to. It carried the distance between a soft, soul-sentence whispered into the ear of a lover, and a scripted message tossed to the crowd. When I opened my eyes, I counted miles between what I spoke and what I meant to say. I had replaced the center of my writing. It was no longer the woman I orbited around, but the mosque that muted her. My writing became a circular motion around a temple that had once been my prison. This pen, once my way out of that confinement, was precisely what was walking me back.

This is the complexity of art — it is supposed to be both the vessel that takes us away and the one we use to return to what we ran from.

This is where we often land: in the impossible question of have I gone too far back?

And were I to return to the intimately personal, would I be running away?

There is a story that has haunted me for years. A prisoner is released and is given asylum in the Netherlands. He has the chance to begin again. To retrieve the possibility that life could be something other than the nightmare it it had long been for him. But in his attempt to make sense of the horror, he kept revisiting his pain. He spoke often and to many journalists about it. It tore him. And because of his story, I’ve begun to deeply question testimonial work and how potentially destructive it can be. When you invite someone to open their raw history before you, and then you return them quickly and recklessly into their solitary silence, how much harm is being done?

I used to see this often at the refugee camps where western psychologists and volunteers would carelessly ask children to open horrors from their memory they had no business asking them to open — especially while they didn’t plan to stay long enough to sit with them through the aftershocks.

I am also just as frustrated with the ones who understand nothing of the trauma, those who are more keen to observe our rage than its contents. They let us know that we are ‘stuck’ — as if their observation will heal us, as if we were in need of them to let us know. They tell the victim that it is best to move on, not understanding at all what it is they are urging them to move on from.

Eventually, our rescued prisoner begins to unravel. He is kicked out of the Netherlands. This time, they take him back into prison — and it is permanent.

This is where his life ends. It is deeply unfair, deeply madenning. How does the rare chance of escape land you back where you begun?

Last year began with the question of: who am I outside of my family’s story? It was a question that ruptured more than I wanted it too. Our prayers and questions could be dangerous, no? When we ask to see, to understand, do we know, truly, what we are asking for? Are we prepared for the way it may — and often does — flip our life over onto itself right before our eyes? Are we prepared to receive the inconvenient instructions it comes with?

Who are the ones inviting us to revisit our trauma? Have they lived the intensity of ours? And is it these visits that eventually land us back into those spaces permanently?

In centering the pain I endured in religious spaces, have I been slowly rewriting a permanent migration back into what I dreamt of leaving?

I have an incredible teacher who reminds us often that the past does not need to be spoken about to be healed from — and I had to experience this personally within her space to understand what she meant. In fact, as she says, the speaking extends the thread of the past beyond its time.

What, then, are we meant to do with our gift of freedom?

Every artist I admire has used their freedom to return, artistically, physically or through speech, to the source of pain they’ve lived through. Prison. A punishing God. Child Abuse. Homelessness.

I am lost.

I’ve always been lost — but the brevity of this new certainty made me forget how to handle confusion delicately.

Last year began with the question of: who am I outside of my family’s story? It was a question that ruptured more than I wanted it too. Our prayers and questions could be dangerous, no? When we ask to see, to understand, do we know, truly, what we are asking for? Are we prepared for the way it may — and often does — flip our life over onto itself right before our eyes? Are we prepared to receive the inconvenient instructions it comes with?

I thought I had passed the hurricane of that question. I thought I’ve lived the storms of pain and arrived in the calm of its answers. But who am I outside the mosque I’ve written myself back into?

Will any amount of writing ever be enough to feel satiated, or does every journal widen the rage and the time I need with it? What odd revenge lives in choosing the bed of that cruel teacher, of all the beds in the world?

Of all the roads, why do I take the one back? And why do I set my traveler’s bag down in the same house I set fire to in writing?

Do we know ourselves outside the territory of pain we lived through?

Outside the citizenship of wounded women, who am I? On the other side of this bordered definition, what other worlds lie unwritten?