3 August 2020

Dearest Fazal,

If I saw Muradi as your self-portrait, Labhuben, child bride, outskirts of Chandigarh, 2008, would be mine. Not because, I, too, in your caustic words was a child bride in my teens, which you endlessly chide me about, but because I feel a kinship with her spirit—in wildness and fate—and see in her downward gaze an internal acceptance to find strength in a perpetual state of melancholia. This can be another form of resistance.

In Mormon culture, we are raised to marry young. We are raised to be obedient wives. We are raised to be mothers. I was married before I knew who I was, but I knew myself well enough that I was not obedient. Brooke and I knew together we would not have children. But later in our thirtieth year, we adopted a son from Rwanda. I became a mother at fifty. This was my choice. I chose to be married to Brooke. I chose to be a mother. And it remains so, after forty-five years of marriage.

When I read that, worldwide, twelve million girls are married before they are eighteen years of age, I am sickened. Forty-seven per cent of girls in India are taken as child brides before they are eighteen. Odds of furthering their education plummet, sexual abuse and sexually transmitted diseases are heightened, unwanted pregnancies are the norm, and the loss of self-confidence is its own epidemic, creating an uncertain future of economic dependence and poverty. A child bride made to serve her husband not only loses her childhood but loses herself and her own sovereignty as a human being. This is another form of enslavement.

I see Labhuben’s eyes about to look up and catch yours, mine, or someone in passing. She may know or not know the depth of her feelings of entrapment by what has been planned for her—the predetermined path of a child marriage to a man she does not know, let alone love, at a time not of her own choosing. This forced union is a crime and a sin. To be wed to a man decided by another because they see you as a burden, or because they can exact a price for your body, or because of the myriad reasons you are deemed unwanted and unworthy of ­being kept with no voice but the one being voiced on your behalf is a social evil.

But Labhuben is more than her captors can know. She is also a wild child, willful, and untamed with her hair of dreadlocks. One way or another, she will escape and for the rest of her life be led by the illumined path of the moon, full like tonight. She will not get lost in darkness because this is where she lives. Her night vision will only become clearer. She will get stronger, smarter, more agile. Her ability to look inward, as she is in this photograph, will become her power. Even though her gold nose ring is an homage to Parvati, the goddess of marriage, it also is a symbol of the beauty she will grow into. The necklace she wears is a talisman to protect her. Her embroidered shirt is her armor made by her mother, say it is red. Go, says the woman who was once where she is now. Go—and this wild child bride will hide herself in the Rock Garden on the outskirts of her city, where a particular artist reimagined a world where the outsider can exist until she finds her way home. The fact that in Chandigarh, India’s first planned city designed by the Swiss-French architect Le Corbusier, the outsider artist Nek Chand’s recycled creatures, both human and wild, made out of the discarded and broken, can live side by side, in my unruly mind means the planned and the unplanned can coexist.

Fazal, we were on our way to the city of Chandigarh in December 2007 when you made this portrait. Would we have met? Would I have met Labhuben?

What is determined? What is chance? What is made? What is chosen?

Tonight is the thirtieth day of being with your thirty photographs. I am here in Utah. You are across the Atlantic in Zurich. Thirty moons later. These letters are for you.

I have had my grandmother’s magnifying glass with its mother-of-pearl handle throughout this journey bringing me closer to where you have been and the people you met. It has allowed me to see your photographs with a more exacting eye. I see now that the necklace Labhuben wears could be her third eye focused on the place between her voice and her heart where truth is spoken and felt. If she was ten in this portrait, she would be twenty-three years old today. I wonder where she is.

We have the life we are given as children, and if we are lucky, the life we choose as adults. Call it a soul-following, conscious or unconscious, alive in our dreams. Perhaps, what makes us human is being in conversation with our soul which helps us navigate how we will proceed if we have the will and the desperation to listen.

I have chosen to proceed on foot, trusting the ground beneath my feet. My path is shown to me in moonlight. This is my ongoing cycle of discovery between darkness and light, the waxing and waning of our desires that change over time, not so different from your black-and-white portraits that you make through a vision intuited but not seen until you watch the unfolding photographs before you develop.

Here is my unfolding vision that has emerged by paying attention to yours, day by day.

The Full Face of the Moon became my Mother’s face on the night she died on January 16, 1987. That was the night I was born.

In truth, I am now 33 years old—this is my revelation today, Fazal—I spent thirty-two years with my mother when she was alive; and thirty-two years without my mother since her death. It is in this year of 2020 on this August Moon, through your gift of “30 Moons” that I have been made aware that I am now a sovereign. Just as I have been imagining freedom for Labhuben through her past self, she has given me the freedom of my future self—free here in the desert—at home.

Freedom, Fazal. What does that pathway look like for you now—side by side, present with your past and future self?

As artists, we have the freedom to create, disturb, and bear witness to the world we encounter. This is our privilege and our calling. You have been called to focus on people and place, often not their own place. Each of your portraits is an encounter. Your gift is in building relationships so that our humanity is illuminated even in darkness. And it is not without its pain.

Thank you for the invitation to look more closely at a world much larger than my own but intimate enough to see myself in the semblances of what it means to be human. I feel I have met powerful men and women and children by looking into their eyes, studying their gestures, being touched by the placement of their hands.

In collaboration, we can reimagine a different way of being in this world through our corresponding souls. This month contemplating 30 Moons in 30 days has broken me open, Fazal. Where we find ourselves now and how we make peace with our demons and dreams in this global pandemic and planetary pause is bringing us to our knees. Your portraits have become my daily prayer and practice.

Who knows what is coming in this country of ours we call America? Who knows how this world with temperatures rising will come together or split apart? I pray we might find the path of equity and justice for all. I pray that what feels like a reckoning and an awakening will bring forth revolutionary changes in consciousness desperately needed if we are to survive and flourish as a people where the health of the planet becomes our own.

The portrait of Labhuben is a child in pain. In her, I see all of us. What are we wedded to at our own peril?

Each of us are looking inward alone and outward together as the moon is beginning to rise in its fullness once again above the La Sal Mountains in Castle Valley, Utah.

My eyes look upward mindful that today is your father’s birthday. You tell me Abdul Majied Sheikh would be eighty years old. I honor him this evening. I love the snapshot you sent me of him holding you on his crossed leg in front of the fireplace at home on 89th Street, between York and 1st Avenue. He is a handsome man, dark hair, strong profile like yours, wearing a well-pressed white shirt with his sleeves rolled up, his slacks have inched up past his ankle and he is barefoot. You are in a diaper. Your little hands are clenched. What moves me most is how you are staring at each other. Your gaze! Your eyes, always your focused attention on whomever you are with—clearly, a gift you possessed from birth. He must be talking to you as his mouth is open as is yours. A father and son engaged. He would be so proud of you, Fazal, so moved by the dignity you have exposed in the faces of those you have met and know by name who are the displaced and discarded, even from the countries of where your father was born and his father’s origins and his father’s father’s home ground from Kenya to Pakistan to India.

With the Full Moon as our witness, dear Fazal, my deepest bows to you, as we share these unexpected gifts from afar of 30 Moons met with 30 letters in this time of a global pandemic.

Across the distances, may these letters fly into your hands as wild birds.

Love,
Terry