Where do I stand?
Black lives; white eyes
It was the title that caught my eye. The first sentence said, ‘It feels like the USA is on fire right now’.
I’d seen that footage of flames and smoke on TV, people shouting, screaming. In this moment of recognition, even from where I live in Australia, author @Amanda Dalmas’s words speak to me.
This author, who writes poems about unrequited love and spiritual, angry self-reflections, tells me she feels isolated and overwhelmed. She is caught between George Floyd’s murder and the COVID pandemic. And I hear emptiness in her voice.
Her words alert me to how I feel right now. For George Floyd’s murder makes me face the facts of black deaths in America and Australia, where too many Afro-Americans and Indigenous Australians die. But her reference to fire also triggers my grief. My memories of Marysville burning tangle with the day by day hearings of Australia’s Bushfire Royal Commission that, right now, is investigating Australia’s mega-fires in January.
Through her words and that hollow voice, I glimpse parallels between angry love and fearful grief. I feel these disturbing moments echo through my uncertainty. And I sense my soul jacking up at the compromises, half-truths and white lies, the arrogant sleights of hand that I have made over and over again as I’ve lived life.
I’m not black, poor or disenfranchised, but my body feels the knee on my neck, the jackboot on my throat. I’m silent; yet, I want to scream ‘No’.
But I stay silent. I do not sob. There are no great shaking wails. I hesitate, unable to pour out all that my body has bottled up for ever. For I do not know how to deal with these feelings that now bubble and brew inside me.
So, I keep low. I watch like a tiger, worrying but keeping peace. I do what I’ve always done because I don’t know how else to act, to be. I fret but find myself paralysed within the corral that is my life. And I feel the fear that lies behind my respectability, my privilege — all those things that mean I don’t have to fight for life or livelihood.
Yet in this moment, I also sense a photograph I’ve seen. It shows a white crusader, a president holding a bible aloft outside the church nearest to the White House. It’s a president who smirks but has a heart of stone. And in my mind, I hear a chant, ‘In the beginning was the world and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.’
The silence of every church I’ve ever entered floods through me and I recognise that chill, in my heart, in my soul. Dead eyes and cold gold surround me in those places that belong to the Prince of Peace — the peace of silence, a deadening chill to the marrow, a lifelessness that admits only rule: men’s rule, white rule.
Seeing that white house, and the sneering sternness on the face of that sweaty, fleshy president — the leader of the free world who carries the Word aloft — I know in my body, and in my heart and soul that I stand with those outside that white house.
I stand with those who still have warmth: those who carry life, who live through acts of care cradled by Mother Earth. I stand with those who refuse the knee on the neck and the outrageous injustice of a jackboot on the throat.
Then I see that white crusader through a shiver of memory from my childhood Sunday school; it reminds me about blasphemy. And as my shock steels against this white man who uses a church to claim God as the medium for his own message, I choose.
I choose between system and soul, silence and social connection. I choose acts of support above acts of incarceration just because someone is different. I choose because the world is on fire right now — not just America but Australia, Hong Kong, Europe, our Earth.
And I say ‘No’. I say ‘No’ to those men who are white stones. I say ‘No’ to those people who use half-truths and lies. I say ‘No’ to those who claim to rule humanity, but with cold gold filling their eyes.
With this shock, which steels my uncertainties, I choose the world of life and giving. I choose acts of love over a white crusader’s empty taunt. I choose to stand with those so-called ‘anti-facists’ who, like me, are lovers of life.
