Time to take off the blinders

While the intensity of COVID cases spreads across regions amid a massive health-care and governmental crisis, most lives saved owe their gratitude to civilian generosities, ordinary people stepping in to fill the gaping holes. Pic/AFP

What is the weight of grief? The volume of tears both shed and held back? The velocity of wind that bears traces of ash? The depth of excavated earth? Prayer-filled recitations? Holding it together in the face of falling apart? Wondering how much was in our hands? What could we have done better? How do we live together now, those of us who survive? Living in another continent, removed from the urgency of what's unfolding back home as the intensity of cases spreads across regions amid a health-care and governmental crisis, where most lives saved owe their gratitude to civilian generosities, ordinary people stepping in to fill the gaping holes. On the one hand, grave-diggers, crematorium assistants, nurses, doctors, people of various religious denominations assembling to provide relief, oxygen, supplies, hope, kindness... on the other, Brahmanical men peddling in pseudo-science, perpetuating falsehoods, threatening violence, behaving like the thugs they are.

As a marginalised woman from a postcolonial region within India, I have never felt compelled by the sway of patriotism. In this moment I think primarily of my kinship ties with everyone back home, all victims, in some way or the other, of oppressive state-based bureaucratic and administrative violence. In moments when I feel most alienated from my worlds in Delhi, Mumbai and Goa, I start to recite the names of all the people whose lives matter to me, as if my thinking of them is enough to send a wave of healing energy. This week I managed to pick myself up and re-assemble my body so I could focus better on work I was excited to do. After ten years of ceaseless struggle I finally feel like I am being held professionally. I apply for residencies and actually get considered and/or even accepted. I feel relief because for the last few years I had begun to feel like I'd hit a wall in India. It was becoming difficult to find work that remunerated me decently enough for the time I was investing in it. I was always having to stand up to exploitative systems that insisted on offering only the bare minimum as payment while making you feel like they were doing you a favour. I remember a gallery director once telling me on the phone that despite my being a good writer, I would not be considered for most high-paying writing work because I was ghar ki murgi. The words smarted in my head. Now that I've flown the coop, I'm finding what I have to peddle by way of my third-world feminist perspective is crucial. I feel part of larger discourses. I feel heard.

Entangled within grief is not anger so much as rage. Colossal. Loud. Embittered. Yes, the government has failed its people. But again, the biggest losers have been women, the trans community and those in the bottom rung of the caste hierarchy. Their voices, their resistance, their robust intellectual critique... all of it continues to go unheeded and unheard. What is disseminated, instead, are the blood lust gospels of lunatics. Their hate-mongering gets air-time, not the vital discourses of Dalit and Bahujan scholars and trans activists and feminists all campaigning tirelessly for a less-broken, more reparative world.

The arts of prophecy reason in a tautological circle, I once wrote, citing a line from Anne Carson, who was talking about Cassandra. The female seer prophesies the doom that lies ahead under patriarchal systems. But no one listens to her because she is female and therefore merely alarmist or hysterical. Until the catastrophe she predicted comes to pass by virtue of her not being listened to. This is what it has meant for many of us who have been critical of Hindutva ideology not only for its fascist mindset but for its blatant disregard of the environment, its peddling of development without being clear of the cost of these advances, the human and climatic toll it would take. I mention prophecy to remind us that it doesn't demand always any cosmic divination, often. It involves, in fact, taking off the blinders, making a conscious decision not to live in denial but to confront reality in all its bitterness, its nakedness, its horrific core because only by performing that labour can we hope for a better future.

This most catastrophic thing that is happening as we speak, that is leaving us gasping for air, that is wrecking our lungs, that is taking away our loved ones is not the fault of a virus. The scale of this disaster is man-made. We must acknowledge that the greatest casualties, the most grievously injured parties are those voices that could have been. We owe it to them to demand better. We need to be exhaustingly critical about who gets to speak and why. And when it comes to the job of re-building, we must consider who we give agency to in order for our world to be repaired. The future must belong to those who have been historically negated.

Deliberating on the life and times of Everywoman, Rosalyn D'Mello is a reputable art critic and the author of A Handbook For My Lover. She tweets @RosaParx
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