We Cannot Say We Are Not
“The rhetoric of nationalism works as a ‘moral vocabulary of self-exoneration’.”
There are things I cannot say I am not: I cannot say I am not the grieving parent of the teenage girl beheaded by Hamas. I cannot say I am not the Palestinian man from Gaza whose photograph appeared in the news last week as he sat beside his wife in the hospital after an attack by the Israeli army. She was unable to speak or even to move, except for her eyes, as she wept. He dared not tell her that they had lost nearly all their children, and most of the rest of their family - fourteen people in a single day. My people are responsible, therefore, I am responsible. I owe him a family and that makes us kin. The opposite is equally true: the attackers from Hamas whose atrocities triggered Israel's response share the same obligations.
This idea is not as far-fetched as it seems. The elder brother of a dear friend was killed in Liberia's civil war. He was tortured to death bit by bit, hacked to pieces by enemy soldiers who amputated his nose, ears, hands, arms, feet and legs, until he was dead. They buried his dismembered remains in a shallow grave and moved on, though not really: after doing what they did, they themselves were no longer intact. My friend and his family spent years searching for the primary killer, the one who commanded the others to do what they did. They found him. My friend told the man that, since he was responsible for their loss, he himself had to take the brother's place in the family. I still struggle to get my mind around this. In the midst of so many simultaneous wars, the practicalities of radical reconciliation seem elusive to the point of impossibility. It takes time to remove the shards of victimhood, and righteous entitlement, so we can let go of those identities.
We resist because vengeance and victimhood promise to protect us, and we want to believe in their power, though they have none. Blame does nothing to heal the chronic violence and its inevitable flare-ups that are the ongoing reality in Israel/Palestine and everywhere else, including the streets of America. Violence dismantles us, even if we ourselves have not killed, because the truth is, we have killed, we do kill, if only by proxy, attrition and indifference. The fragments of our splintered souls disburse like the particles of microplastic that fill every undersea trench, every umbilical cord. If our brother's killer is to become our brother, and we our victims' family, who do we become to Earth, in order to repair the relational and physical destruction we have caused? What is the link between those two expressions of expanded identity?
For years, I sang to the ocean and sometimes to wind and moon. It brought me comfort, and I hoped it comforted the world. One day, I realized that singing to is an offering intended to span distance; its premise is that ocean and I are of two separate realms. Hesitantly at first, I began to sing with. The first step was to listen, really listen, until I sensed as well as heard. To wait a little until a tone arose from somewhere inside, rising up to meet the hum that emerged from the waves. Softly at first, as the sound that came from me and not from me began to align with the water's chorus. A few minutes later, a tentative riff, a bit of harmony. It was a completely different experience because it tapped into the body’s capacity to align with intactness.
Erasing false divisions expands identity, and expanded identity brings respite in times of un-rest. Mennonite peacebuilders speak of accompaniment - the practice of being with those who are under duress, sharing droughts and floods, hunger and food, reassurance and fear. Accompaniment bridges the divide among humans; it remakes our relationship with the Natural World. Yet, if we widen our view beyond the personal to include restoration of society and Earth, we find few models of intactness to guide us. Those narratives remain hidden in the lacunae of memory. Luckily, what is lost to now may yet survive in the memory of other species.
Hannibal’s elephants cannot tell us what they witnessed as they trudged across the Alps on their way to war two hundred years before Christ, dying for humans in a fight not their own. Perhaps they told each other of their lives Before; maybe elephants today are repeating the stories even now. Elephants’ reputation for a long memory stems in part from trans-generational knowledge of whose bones are whose, where there is water during a drought, where to find a safe place to give birth. They communicate with each other and with other species, including whales, over hundreds and sometimes thousands of miles. It may be that there are elephants somewhere, or elephants everywhere, that carry the full account of the world. Maybe the same is true for whales, whose utterings are said to be so densely packed with information that a single hour of whalesong contains the equivalent of the entirety of human literature. Surely lions, insects, forests and weather also have their version of events. I imagine migrating birds, exiled from their nesting grounds, unable to sleep for thousands of miles. We cannot see what they see, hear what they hear, feel what they feel. We do not know what they know. But because the stories are not spoken, because we do not listen, does not mean they don’t exist. This matters because, in that case, the intact past is not lost, just obscured. Intactness is a state of being we can sense. Not only the cruelties remain, but innumerable kindnesses as well. Ancient forests continue to thrive; rivers continue to flow free. Harmony lives in our bodies, eager to reawaken. Connection sets us in motion. Kindness and inclusivity are bread for the journey of mending the world.
