Yesterday was a bit of a heavy day. You know when you come down from a high and feel slightly lost and useless? Post-dissertation me, writing about Partition and bodies and violence, with grey skies outside felt a bit like that. Working was slow, and draining when you realise that articulating trauma has so many rules and restrictions and faults. Part of me wants to applaud writers for even approaching trauma, even though they don't do a just representation of the full extent of trauma. Because how can words do that, when trauma is so physical, so tied to touch, memory and all the senses. And should you replicate trauma or just aim at mediating it? Is the replication of it a violence in itself?
I was particularly struck by an extract from Veena Das, who wrote about her interactions with women who had witnessed Partition:
"When women’s bodies were made the passive witnesses of the disorder of the Partition in this manner, how did women mourn the loss of self and the world? It is considering this question that we find startling reversals in the transaction between body and language. In the normal process of mourning, grievous harm is inflicted by women on their own bodies, while the acoustic and linguistic codes make the loss public by the mourning laments. When asking women to narrate their experiences of the Partition I found a zone of silence around the event. This silence was achieved either by the use of language that was general and metaphor but that evaded specific descriptions of any events so as to capture the particularity of their experience, or by describing the surrounding events but leaving the actual experience of abduction and rape unstated. It was common to describe the violence of Partition in such terms as rivers of blood flowing and the earth covered with white shrouds right unto the horizon. Sometimes a woman would remember images of fleeing, but as one woman warned me, it was dangerous to remember. These memories were sometimes compared to poison that makes the inside of the woman dissolve, as a solid is dissolved in a powerful liquid. At other times a woman would say that she is like a discarded exercise book, in which the accounts of past relationships were kept—the body, a parchment of losses. At any rate, none of the metaphors used to describe the self that had become the repository of poisonous knowledge emphasized the need to give expression to this hidden knowledge"
I read this alongside Cracking India, and couldn't help but see (as I read later in a brilliant article by Ambreen Hai) just how silenced Ayah's voice is, during and after her abduction. ‘Can the soul be extracted from its living body? Her vacant eyes are bigger than ever’. I suppose from the start of the novel it is more her body that speaks that her mouth since she's presented as a highly physically desirable character, but she's still intensely spirited and controls her body to articulate her power. After her abduction she basically becomes a shell and her body doesn't say anything except I am hurt, I am lost, I am sad. and, most crushingly 'I am not alive'. A parchment of losses indeed. Should I expect the body to say anything differently after so much suffering? But we need those bodies to say 'This is what happened to me, let me tell you what happened so you can't pretend it didn't' --- so that some justice is done, some measure of learning gained and pain is not made meaningless.
On top of all these questions, my heart just ached, in the same way it ached when I saw John Akomfrah's Unfinished Conversation last year, at the violence people do to each other and the injustice that we all perpetuate.
Even practicing handstands in my room didn't help shake the feeling that the world was all wrong.
After I'd planned the essay I cycled down to Focus, hoping for some nice 'God loves you and God keeps you safe' type of reassurance or something. But I got there and we went straight into Romans 9, that tricky passage about God's sovereignty.
'As it is written, “Jacob I loved, but Esau I hated.”
What shall we say then? Is there injustice on God's part? By no means! For he says to Moses, “I will have mercy on whom I have mercy, and I will have compassion on whom I have compassion.” So then it depends not on human will or exertion, but on God, who has mercy. [...] You will say to me then, “Why does he still find fault? For who can resist his will?” But who are you, O man, to answer back to God? Will what is molded say to its molder, “Why have you made me like this?” [...] What if God, desiring to show his wrath and to make known his power, has endured with much patience vessels of wrath prepared for destruction, in order to make known the riches of his glory for vessels of mercy, which he has prepared beforehand for glory— even us whom he has called, not from the Jews only but also from the Gentiles?'
It's such a hard passage to think about, especially when I think of the people I love who haven't yet accepted Christ. I've received the mercy of Christ but so many haven't because they haven't accepted it. Which is just in a way but also -- Oh God, what about Tim? What about Ama? What about Zenia? What about Alex? What about...? Countless names come to mind. I realise it is mercy itself that we are living in a time of God's patience as He waits and calls for people to receive the love and grace He freely gives, but I suppose my human stubborn self constantly worries that it won't be enough.
But at the close of the day I went to Jacob's room. I had a window of time sitting on his bed before he got back, where I wrote down some of the things that troubled me. Mid-sentence, the door opened and Jacob came in with the biggest smile on his face which lit me up inside to see his joy.
'Why are you so happy?'
'I'm happy to see you!'
Very smooth, and it made me laugh. We had a little bit of this gorgeous cake which we'd made on Monday, which (as I wrote on the pot I put them in) is only the BEST CHOCOLATE CAKE IN THE WORLD. As I discovered on Monday, there is apparently a difference between cake and pudding (I'd previously thought cake just came under the umbrella term 'pudding', which I thought was a synonym for 'dessert' but that is apparently not the case) but this is definitely cake, and such good cake that I'd have it for pudding and for every single birthday until I'm diabetic. Afterwards we prayed together, about bad days and good days, present days and future days. I am thankful I have a good God who listens, who is just and who is sovereign and in control. Things like Partition and Romans 9 sometimes shake me and make me wonder 'why?', 'how?', but those very questions that desire justice in me, the molded one, surely reflect the desire for justice in the molder. And the good thing is that he does rule with justice, so that pain is not forgotten or shamed, and so that the story written on his parchment is not one of infinite loss but infinite mercy, love and grace.
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