25 July 2020
Dearest Fazal,
You tell me this man (whose name I will keep to myself) changed his clothes for this portrait to protect his privacy for fear of “refoulement.”
Refoulement is a disembodied word. I say it out loud. What is another word for refoulement? Expulsion, deportation, banishment, exile, eviction, expatriation, displacement, exclusion, extradition. The list of synonyms can be extended: purging, handover, ejection, extrusion, excommunication, ostracism, relegation, proscription. The action of depriving someone, anyone, from relief and safety due to a life-threatening situation is an act of cruelty by a solipsistic society. Translation: “Go home. You are not like me. You are not one of us. You do not belong here. You are not wanted. Go back to where you came from.”
When I look at this photograph, I have double vision: with one eye I see a back turned on the needs of others; with the other eye I see a back turned so as not to be seen at all. These are two different individuals wearing the same black windbreaker for protection. Both individuals are dressed in fear: fear of feeling the pain of another, a different kind of exclusion or proscription; fear of being condemned, removed, returned to a place where you will die. “The simultaneous perception of two images, usually overlapping, of a single scene or object” is the definition of double vision. Maybe this is also a definition of empathy.
“He unzipped his hooded top and took it off, and wished emotions were like clothes, that he could remove them, fold them, set them somewhere,” writes the poet Nick Laird. If only it was that easy. If only we could shed what rarely leaves us—the gnawing feelings of insecurity. If only those delivering the body blows and assault of deportation, the rupture and separation of families, the cold-hearted refusal to acknowledge one’s humanity, if these deliverers of displacement could for one minute feel the anguish of that kind of physical and psychic pain, perhaps, these cruelties would stop.
I wonder what this man was thinking on March 27, 2019 in Cleveland, Ohio, with his back facing you. I wonder if he is here in America. Is he alive?
George Floyd is dead.
Ahmaud Arbery is dead.
Rayshard Brooks is dead.
Black men and women and children are shot every day—They are dead.
Protesters are alive on the streets as Trump’s private army is throwing smoke bombs to obscure what we are seeing, believing, feeling, fearing. Democracy is under fire. Systemic racism is real. Police brutality is real. The fact is, American citizens are shooting American citizens. Breonna Taylor’s ghost is haunting for justice.
I have a gun next to my bed to defend my dreams.
Yours in the questions,
Terry