Thursday night I went to and open-mic event in Philly. It was raw, it was profound, it was alive. Just the way I love my art.
And it was a lot more than that, too.
It was a space of ancestral healing. Two poets did more than recite poems: they channeled on stage the physical, emotional, and psychological effects of slavery for the enslaved: the challenges of living love and romantic relationships while enslaved. I’ve seen the channeling happen before. I’ve come to expect it. I’ve seen poets enact on stage the scorching heat of the fields, the ripping through the flesh of the lash, and the disgusting stench of the white rapist. Art is one of the many ways African Americans have survived and healed: by retelling their stories through art, in community.
The hmmms, hums, and uh-huhs make it possible–a choir of quiet grunts of people who surrender to a painful history: wherever the poet takes them. A community of people who listen and remember together, for a few minutes, or hours…who clap to release the tension when it’s over.
Yet I’ve never seen anyone perform, embody, the white oppressor. As I sat in the audience enchanted by the atmosphere of compassion and shared grief, I wondered: what would it look like for whites to create spaces like this?
What would it be like to perform what it felt like to give those lashes? to rape? to kidnap? to starve those we lived side-by-side with? To perform it, We would have to feel it all.
In Restoring Sanctuary, Dr. Sandra Bloom highlights how there is a trauma triangle between the victim, the perpetrator, and the savior. Often, people attempt to escape one role by enacting another. As such, often the victim becomes perpetrator while attempting to escape victimhood: s/he attacks in the attempt at escaping attack. Often the attack is in one’s own mind–a triggering of some past hurt disconnected from the present.
What would it be like to tell the stories of the oppressors? What did we feel? What turned us into oppressor? Did it happen in our lifetime? Or was instilled over centuries–leaving us numb to feeling anything at all? How do we feel the numbness again? How do we reclaim our feelings in the midst of routine violence? How do we tell these stories? How do we heal?
What would Art Sanctuaries to heal whiteness look like?