What haunts us
Where to start?
Where I am. On day 3 of a writing retreat I created for myself in Beacon, NY. I am nervous to write that. How indulgent, how extravagant, especially now. I remember sitting on my bed in Karachi in July, laptop open in front of me, searching for residencies or retreats that I could use as a goalpost, anything that would afford me the opportunity to get out of Karachi.
The problem: I wasn’t in the best headspace to deal with applications and grants for residencies, they were all slated to begin next year, there was no guarantee I would even get in and the last thing I needed was more uncertainty. So fuck it, I thought, why not make my own retreat? Who said I couldn’t? If retreats and residencies offer you validation - someone believes in your talent enough to fund you, to give you time and space to think - why couldn’t I offer myself that? I would be the application committee, approve the funding and investment, and at a point when I only had two paragraphs of a proposal, I would say that I trusted me to come up with the rest. I settled on this place after speaking with some friends. It fit the bill: small enough that I would not get distracted, enough spots to wander if I got restless, woodsy without being murder-y. On Airbnb I found a blue house at the edge of a park.
Yes it was extravagant but I was also trying to prove a point to myself: that my work would allow me such opportunities. I have felt stuck in Pakistan many times, especially when things have boiled over, especially when it feels more stifling than ever. I needed to feel like - to know that - my work could give me a ticket out of here if I needed it. If my work wasn’t accepted here, it would thrive elsewhere, right? I know that the material, the subject of this book needs air, needs to breathe and take shape on its own terms and not to twist itself into a shape that would be ‘acceptable’/palatable. For two years, I was unable to fully start working because I am so nervous about how it will be received and any pushback or anger. Many days I wonder why I’m sticking my hand in the fire. I have written about people who did just that, and part of me wonders if I took on those stories because I was curious to see how these Pakistanis fared, how they overrode a fear that I could not seem to push past.
From August till the first week of October, I was interviewing (hence the silence on here). In this time, Beacon - I knew nothing about it - felt like the reward, the goal. If I made it here, I would have kept a promise to myself. A friend pointed out how apt this place’s name - ‘beacon’ - is in this instance.
I am very grateful to be here. I’ve been getting a lot of work done. It has been a generative break and affirming to see how my work is in conversation with others.
But this trip to the US has also been surreal because of the timing. I arrived in New York at the end of October. On every stoop, at every turn, Halloween decorations. Little tombstones, ghosts, skeletons and faces of death. I walked down the street on the 31st to get groceries and a man in a hooded black robe passed me, his face covered with a skull’s mask. In a restaurant a bloodied head gently sways above one table.
On Instagram, children with red-lipstick gashes painted on, their faces made up in the grey pallor of zombies. In the subway I see people’s phones out of the corner of my eye. They scroll past photos of these undead children, these little ghouls, and then the photos of the other children, the ones who are now counted every day in a way that children should never ever be, their numbers ratcheting up by the hour, their bodies in white shrouds or the grey dust of smashed concrete on their faces. The phone screens light up with muted videos of fiery orange mushroom clouds. On the walls and street corners above ground there are posters of people “kidnapped”. Many have pictures of these people hugging children, reminders of their full lives, of those who wait for them, that they are beloved. In many spots, the posters have been torn.
In the morning, I saw a video of a little boy cradled in a medic’s arms and he was unable to stop trembling, I couldn’t scroll past it. It would be a betrayal. I cried in the shower after. I pass a brownstone where a bloodied foot and a hand hang on chains from a tree. I thought of it for days. There is a frightening dissonance. There is a terrifying denial.
What fear are we able to accept? Which images of death thrill us? Which ones are terrifying? What detail festers in your mind before you sleep? What haunts us?
Can this be a part of our every day? How can we celebrate it? How can we say, “We need to move on and live our lives, enough already.”
People say “bearing witness”, they say “don’t turn away”. What are we bearing? In the news from Pakistan, I see Afghans being forcibly ‘returned’ to homes they fled. What cruelties do we accept? I don’t want to bear any of it.
This September I started teaching a writing workshop for young Afghan women. In the first class I acknowledged that while we could talk endlessly about the importance of having a voice, the truth was that they had seen first-hand that sometimes you won’t be heard. There were cold calculations about what would happen to them. No matter how many journalists, photographers, artists, authors or poets showed the world that these metrics were cruel, it did not matter. We had to acknowledge this difficult truth and, because I was speaking with women living in a place where they were not allowed to study or work or dress or speak in the way they wished to, I had no right to sugar-coat it or preach ‘resilience’ or ‘bearing witness’.
So why write? Why tell stories about our lives? Who gets to tell the stories and who is willing to listen? Do the stories matter? We are being given answers to these questions now. How can we not despair when we hear them?
I’ve been working on a chapter that deals in part with how women are contending with some of the harm that they endured as teenagers or young adults because of the culture they grew up in. I go through the interviews and in one after another, they say, “I don’t care if you use my real name”. “The worst happened, what would I fear now?” “Don’t anonymise me. I’m not scared or ashamed. I want people to know what happened.” I don’t have an answer to the questions I asked above. I read these transcripts and hear these women’s voices and try to remember that if we feel despair, confusion, loss, heartbreak, grief, perhaps with time, those feelings are the seeds for courage. Eventually you will have nothing left to lose. You can be the most fearsome when you survive. When you can tell what was done. Because then we can ask, “Who did this to you?” If we know anything, if I believe anything, if my faith reminds me of anything, its that there is always a reckoning. That answer will be heard.