It's called: Freefall

Is watching a livestreamed genocide making me dumber?

Dear readers,

I think most of our us have images we return to, often, these last few months: maybe it’s a wide-eyed child trembling uncontrollably, or another child’s body strung up on a wall; maybe it’s a genocidal maniac casually licking an ice cream cone; maybe it’s another genocidal maniac’s dating profile picture where he is proudly surrounded by lingerie that he looted or the “rape bodysuit” on display at an Israeli fashion show. All of us watching the brutality and surreality of the last six months have certain moments burned in our brains that fill us with grief, or disbelief, or rage, or despair, or bewilderment, or all of the above.

I have many of these, of course: certain things I will never unsee or unfeel, intimate moments of grief or terror or death that have permanently changed me. Most of those are, in fact, sacred, despite their horrors.

There’s this one moment, though, that’s stuck in my brain that is decidedly not sacred, but that I find myself returning to and chewing on frequently, despite the fact that I don’t even want to give the particular person it concerns any of my precious brain space. It is of a freebirth “influencer” who casually, early on in the genocide, without naming Palestine or Gaza specifically, shared she would not “cave to pressure” to speak up about the “terrible things going on in the world” because those kinds of terrible things have always happened and it is simply a part of humanity to have to deal with that fact. I return to that moment not because I’m shocked by the caucasity of that approach, the absolute depravity of so blithely dismissing the loss of thousands upon thousands of singular, beautiful human lives, particularly as someone concerned about the way in which certain lives enter the world. I don’t return to it because I’m surprised someone could so breezily absolved herself of any responsibility to engage in that suffering, particularly when that someone consistently portrays herself as having escaped the tyranny of Canada for the “freedom” of Nicaragua. It’s hardly surprising someone like that would be on the wrong side of a decolonization struggle or a genocide of brown folks. It’s that her argument is wrong, and thinking about how her argument is wrong continues to help me name, or at least attempt to name, what my own brain is doing right now.

It seems to me that, despite her confidence, there is nothing universal or timeless about what we are witnessing or the speed and intensity of which we are witnessing it. I don’t agree that our nervous systems have evolved to cope with this kind of violence. Even if you make the argument that the world has always been violent, even if you argue people more frequently encountered and witnessed death at various points in our history (whether it be through genocide or war or “plagues” or natural “disasters” or whatever you want to argue), I don’t think any reasonable person can make a case that people have routinely encountered the kind of destruction and harm our 21st century technology makes possible for most of human history, nor can you argue that we have been able to access the images of that level of harm and destruction so easily, and in real time, in the palms of our hands. I also think there is something to be said for the fact that, even if you argue that people more frequently encountered and witnessed violence and death in various points in our history, you are mainly basing the argument on the idea that they themselves were interacting with death personally. There is nothing universal nor timeless about the state in which we find ourselves now, physically detached bystanders funding a genocide with no real means of interacting personally with the communities affected, impotently witnessing hundreds and hundreds of brutal images of babies starving to death, zip-tied men crushed with their insides spilled out, the last look of a father realizing his infant is dead before he himself dies, and so on. In what universe is it normal to watch the profound, earth-shattering grief of a mother holding her dead child and not be able to reach out for her?

The idea that anything about this can be normalized or universalized is so absurd I almost can’t believe I’ve thought about it for so long, and yet, for months upon months I keep thinking about it, and I think part of why it has stuck in my mind so intensely is exactly that lack. If you want to make the argument that for most of human history we had more personal experience with death and violence, and that we’ve evolved to deal with it, you’d have to also argue, de facto, that we also evolved to deal with it personally, as humans, not a bunch of individual consumers in our little houses who have been in fact raised and socialized in an illusion of “safety,” with no established ritual or outlet to process together, to grieve together, to fight together, to rebuild or heal together.

When I look back at the last three pieces I’ve shared here they all, at the outset, apologize. For being delayed, or for being not enough, or both. They all start with some version of “I haven’t been able to find the words.” I wanted to start this one exactly the same way. I don’t have the words. I don’t know what to say that is useful, at this time in history, in this climate I’m writing in. What words could possibly be meaningful? What words elucidate what needs to be elucidated? What words connect us? Are there even words that can stand in for not being able to wrap your arms around that grieving mother? I didn’t start a newsletter to write about genocide, or what it does to those of us witnessing one in real time. I started a newsletter to write about what I have the most to offer about — growing, birthing, and nurturing our children, the oppressive systems and institutions that surround those processes attempting to strangle them out of their liberatoratory potential, and all the ways we can reclaim it. But how can I write about anything other than the genocide that is ongoing? I know there are connections — so many of them, in fact — between birth work and what is happening in Palestine, and yet, when I try to travel those pathways in my brain it’s like staring down at my feet in the sand, trying to find one particular piece of a seashell — not even a whole shell, just a fragment of one — in the midst of waves rolling in and out. I see it, now and again, bobbing and tossing and turning, but every time I reach down to grab it, it rushes away.

Here’s the truth: I really wonder if watching a live-streamed genocide is ruining my brain. Because I feel…dumber.

Maybe that’s not really accurate, or fair. It would be ludicrous to say I believe the trauma of what we are seeing is making us less intelligent, per se. But I do believe this secondary trauma is affecting our brains. Impaired cognitive functioning is certainly one of the oft-cited symptoms of both primary and secondary trauma - if your brain is too aroused, too flooded with stress hormones, and too focused on survival (whether it’s because your actual existence is threatened or because you’re witnessing other people’s existence be threatened), it’s not going to prioritize, say, finding exactly the right words.

But I also think, the truth is, I don’t want to live in a world where I have to write about genocide. I want to live in a better one, where I don’t have to.

I’m not sure why I’m sharing all this, except that maybe because I think it’s important to normalize it. It is not a measure of health or wellness to be functioning well in a sick society. To “cope” normally is to be sick oneself, to have some part of your humanity rotted and lost. To be able to easily explain away violence is its own form of violence. I find myself saying this a lot to the new birthworkers I mentor, who sometimes ask me why they don’t feel like they can “handle” witnessing obstetric violence over and over again, who wonder if it reveals some particular weakness or failing, if it reflects some inherent flaw or unworthiness or lack of passion, to want to avoid serving clients who work with particular providers or settings the birthworker knows to be abusive, or who themselves will quit jobs or change settings because they cannot stomach participating in those violences. But there is nothing normal about normalizing harm. It is not normal to justify or explain away violence, be it obstetric or genocidal. It is not an acceptance of a timeless and universal part of human nature. It is a form of disassociation from one’s essential humanity, a severing of one’s heart. To turn away from violence, to normalize harm, is to, in fact, cause it by contributing to a culture that allows it to happen.

The powers that be understand this of course: part of the extreme cruelty is to make it feel impossible to watch, to make it impossible to stomach. The purpose of this brutality is brutality, of course — to foreclose, as I’ve said before, on the possibility of a future — but also to make what’s happening unbearable to witness, so that others will not bear to witness it. So that they will look away. The incessant, unending quality of the violence is to obliterate, but also to send us a narrative that violence is, in fact, unending and incessant: an immutable, unmovable force, just another “terrible thing” in the world that will never change. It serves certain structures for us to feel numb and exhausted, because to be numb and exhausted is to be powerless and less likely to hold those structures accountable or insist on another way.

Last winter, before I gave birth to Hanif I listened to a Paris Paloma cover of the song It’s Called: Freefall a lot. Like most Rainbow Kitten Surprise songs, the lyrics are quite nonsensical (much like the band’s name, let’s be real), but repeating the chorus

you can let it all go

you can let it all go

it’s called freefall

it’s called freefall

was a balm in a time when I personally felt out of control of everything (endlessly nauseated; attending too many long, challenging births one after the other without reprieve; my dog dying; my husband losing his tenured professorship; gestating and getting ready to birth an unplanned fourth child). I wasn’t trying to “let anything go” in the way Westerners usually make sense of such a phrase. I wasn’t interested in “releasing” or “getting past” any of it. To me, singing this little repetition of nine words was about, in fact, feeling all of it. If I was letting go of anything, it was the pressure to “feel better,” and to “cope,” to reframe some positive spin on what I was experiencing so that I could “function normally.” Letting it all go meant letting go of anything that tried to limit me from fully, wholeheartedly feeling these true experiences of humanity. I gave myself permission to freefall into everything it means to be alive and feeling: to be angry at the unfairness and grieve what I wanted and could not have. To be exhausted. To be scared. To be unknowing and without answers, and to let myself be unknowing and without answers.

But to freefall also meant to have faith that I would land on some other side. Not without those things I had felt or the difficulties I had endured or the uncertainties I suffered, mind you, but with them, integrated as part of me.

Andy still often plays this song when he’s putting Hanif to sleep. Listening to the song feels different now, because I feel different now. I grew through that time and came out someone new. I am not exhausted, or numb. I am someone who knows something new, and who can use that something I now know — whether it is to connect, or build something new, or for some purpose I don’t know yet. To breathe some light, as James Wright says in his poem “Yes, but:”

Even if it were true,
Even if I were dead and buried in Verona,
I believe I would come out and wash my face
In the chill spring.
I believe I would appear
Between noon and four, when nearly
Everybody else is asleep or making love,
And all the Germans turned down, the motorcycles
Muffled, chained, still.

Then the plump lizards along the Adige by San Giorgio
Come out and gaze,
Unpestered by temptation, across the water.
I would sit among them and join them in leaving
The golden mosquitoes alone.
Why should we sit by the Adige and destroy
Anything, even our enemies, even the prey
God caused to glitter for us
Defenseless in the sun?
We are not exhausted. We are not angry, or lonely,
Or sick at heart.
We are in love lightly, lightly. We know we are shining,
Though we cannot see one another.
The wind doesn’t scatter us,
Because our very lungs have fallen and drifted
Away like leaves down the Adige,
Long ago.

We breathe light.

Me, breathing light

Hanif has turned one since I last wrote you, my friends, and I can’t believe I am so far from that time I listened to that song over and over and freefalled. I listened to it in my birth, too. I can still feel the joy of that night in my bones, in my cells, pulsing and palpable. That feeling of going somewhere completely uncharted and completely new and, also, completely universal. There wasn’t anything that felt particularly individual about my births. It wasn’t a hero’s journey. In it, I inhabited a self that was wholly mine, and absolutely perfect in all its imperfections and inconsistencies — that was, in fact holy because it was mine in all its imperfections and inconsistencies — but in that, it also taught me about the holiness of everything and one outside of me, and how intwined we all are. How we are, in fact, made of one another. Birth didn’t belong to me. I didn’t own it, even as it was mine. It was mine precisely because it is everybody’s, and I was everybody. Birth imparts a feeling a promise that surpasses us, a feeling of potential that exists both within and without. So much lives in those moments of pain and surrender and triumph and joy.

I have to believe that our resistance lives there too.

Love,

Robina

PS - Readers, I want to thank you, with my whole heart, for staying with me as I search for those seashell fragments in the tides these long six months. I know I haven’t been “publishing” at anything like the reliability that I did when I started this newsletter. What I’ve gotten down, here, after weeks of trying and grasping to find some way to connect, is wholly insufficient, I know. But I have written with the faith that the attempt itself is enough. If there’s anything you’d like to see from me, or if you have any thoughts on how one writes about anything other than genocide in a time of genocide, I’d love to hear them.