Allow me a more personal text today. In the emotion aroused by the whirlwind of current events, I feel like composing a kind of ode to my friends who are “at the end of their tether”.
I would first like to greet a colleague of Lebanese origin who started her Wednesday with a “no”. No, I will not be at the very important meeting scheduled for today, my concentration is affected by what just happened in Lebanon, I will instead prioritize communications with my family.
I wish I didn’t instinctively see this email as an act of courage. But if these types of messages are rare, it’s because we live in a society where people affected by a horror in their home country are expected to cope, function, and perform as usual. There is no sick leave provided for in our labor standards for a “ attack-which-leads-to-a-number-of-deaths-including-children-and-thousands-of-injured-and-it-gets-worse-by-the-hour-itis ». However, it is an illness that eats away at the nervous system.
The explosion of pagers and walkie-talkies, apparently controlled by Israel, does not come out of nowhere. It affects people who are already deeply “at the end of their rope” after nearly a year of violence in Gaza, the West Bank and southern Lebanon. It is important to understand that the conflict between Israel and Lebanon has been going on for decades, with periods of intensification and calm. The news affects people who came to Canada, in particular, to flee the war: the news awakens childhood memories, intergenerational trauma.
So I salute my friends who express their anger, their feeling of helplessness, their grief to their loved ones or on social networks. I also salute those who disconnect from their emotions, periodically, in this society that demands normal functioning from them. This strategy has the merit of making the pain more bearable, but it has a cost: you cannot disconnect from your sadness without also disconnecting from your joy. I see some loved ones who have somehow zombified and isolated themselves in the last year, who are moving away from a form of taste for life that I knew so well in them, in order to protect themselves from the abyss. I would like more of us, around you, to understand and recognize this type of inner transformation.
I also salute my Jewish friends who are dragging the news of the past year like a kind of moral ball and chain. What I am witnessing, through our bonds of trust, is a form of existential questioning that works in the gut. There is a foreign government that invokes a part of their identity to justify acts that attract the attention of the entire planet. The context creates a reaction to the news that could be described as… intimate — for each person, depending on the political education received and their family history.
I notice in many a form of modesty in the way of communicating this work of the guts. I hope it is useful to recall that the warlike logic should not make us lose sight of the fact that all the sufferings and all the emotions of all humans are valid: I wish you spaces where you can name, in a meaningful way, what is going through you. Wounds that are not cleansed by words are at risk of infection.
While I’m at it, I also salute my brothers and sisters of the Haitian diaspora. In addition to all the ills that weigh down our country of origin, there is a candidate for the American presidency who accused us, while the planet was listening, of eating our neighbors’ dogs and cats. It was so ridiculous that many of us used humor to put the matter at a distance. But businesses in Springfield, Ohio, are vandalized. And almost all of us have family in the United States. And we must admit that we laughed bitterly. The element of the history of the Montreal Haitian community that bears the greatest weight of taboo is the way we were stigmatized during the AIDS epidemic. We know very well how far things can go when the West gets carried away in a wind of madness. Humor alone cannot overcome all the tension.
I also salute my indigenous friends. Nine altercations with police have left nine indigenous people dead across Canada since August 29. A vigil for the victims was being organized in Montreal on Wednesday. I am sure that most of the people reading this were not informed of this wave of indigenous deaths at the hands of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and municipal police, even though Nunavut MP Lori Idlout requested an emergency debate in the House of Commons on Monday, the first day of Parliament. I do not know, in this country, at what rate indigenous people must lose their lives violently to distract us from our daily lives.
We live in a society that is culturally, politically, economically linked to the entire planet, but which has this way of hiding or at best presenting as distant the violence of the world. However, when we have both hands in the “diversity” of our social environment, this type of distancing becomes more difficult. On the one hand, it can be heavy, when we are not used to it. On the other hand, these links ensure our (re)connection with all of humanity – starting with our own.
We love the word “vivre-ensemble” in Quebec. I sincerely hope that people will understand that the expression reflects a way of sharing daily life that will remain superficial until we are more curious—and respectful—of what is happening internally among our neighbors, and in the world. I would like the implicit injunction to live one’s connection with the state of the world in a private and discreet manner to fall. It must stop being courageous to make it public, to let it disturb one’s colleagues.