The Kaleidoscopic Trauma, Disclosure and Joy

Gemstones Blog submission by Diane Ford Dessables

I’m 63-years of age. My baby-boomer culture and African-American culture combined never offered me an opportunity to openly talk about my sexual identity with ease. Up until I was in my late thirty’s while in seminary, I never even dared to openly explore it, let alone proclaim my attraction to women. I found the courage to do that while keeping it a carefully guarded secret that bisexual-leanings were and are the part of my identity that I “comfortably” suppress. It is one of several aspects of the internalized oppression that I and many carry. Ironically, too, while entering into my ministerial vocation, I would be asked by several of my gay peers to choose between my advocating either on behalf of myself and other single black women rearing children, or for gay rights, as if my being of one accord for both advocacy positions stood in stark opposition to them. I had felt disappointed and hurt by that but I didn’t have the wherewithal then to tell them so.

It wasn’t until a few years later, while working in a national capacity as a cleric for mainstream Christian protestant institution’s social justice area in the 1990’s, that I became far more aware of how much internalized oppression had shaped a fair degree of my life experiences, perceptions, feelings and beliefs.

I learned more about internalized oppression’s impact in the faith community while I was privileged to have a bird’s eye glimpse of how deeply expansive and pervasive POC oppression in America has been.  I had become a team member of a department that advocated for 23 different social justice areas that required that I frequently travel throughout the United States. During what was a “don’t ask don’t tell” era, it became clear to me that POC were largely isolated from each other in terms of being aware of each other’s stories, aside from those that were highlighted in horrific headlines. Fewer households had cable TV then. Social media did not carry messages of POC commonality into public view because that communication medium had not yet become readily available to masses of people who would later popularize and use it to bring to light. Few had witnessed what I had seen with my own eyes. 
 

I was sent by a senior administrator of my church employer to New Orleans and moved throughout the Gulf Coast - in Houston, Biloxi, and Gulfport for several weeks to respond to the psycho-social and pastoral needs of survivors in the immediate aftermath of hurricane Katrina. As my lesbian cleric-colleague and I moved through underprivileged communities to offer emergency supplies and gather information from predominantly Black rain-drenched community members about what they needed, we listened to their stories. Menstruating women had endured the indignity of not having the personal care items that they needed to shield themselves from embarrassment as they bled through the single set of clothing that they had. An older woman asked me to pray with her elder husband who sat on a bucket near the ruins of a church. He had removed himself from the crowd of busy people who had begun to salvage, collect, organize and pile-up muddied canned goods. After I sat next to him for a while, he told me that he thought it was his time to die. I asked him why he felt that way? He responded by sharing with me that he was a cancer survivor. He only had one lung. The medication that he needed to breathe comfortably was lost in the storm as was the house that had taken him a lifetime of meager earnings to build. He didn’t feel that he had the strength to go on. Many had been lost in the storm. But for some reason, he was still alive. He and I prayed that he might use whatever strength he had left to explore why he was spared so that he might live into whatever he felt called to do as best he could, for as long as he could. I never saw the women who had bled on themselves or the man with whom I had spoken with that day again. Yet, I have never forgotten how much their thin reserves of human will and resourcefulness were adjoined in the face of utterly lacking material resources. I was awestruck by their ability to press onward.

On an entirely different occasion, early one morning I was asked to respond to the emergency pastoral needs of the mother of thirteen-year-old Shakera Johnson near the scene where her daughter had been lethally violated and dismembered in Cleveland, Ohio. Those of us who arrived there had felt completely ill-equipped to bring some meaningful degree of solace during what was clearly an inconsolable time of unspeakable agony for her and for all who were shocked by the horror of what was a senseless end of Shakera’s life. Nothing I or anyone else could offer was seemingly sufficient to the task of helping this mother move through that morning of mourning. But she would later say that being accompanied by people who wept with her had helped ease her despair. Unbeknownst to us at that time, our just being silently present had sufficed.

Suicide had prompted a coordinated emergency response by our national staff to work with local clergy through a rash of child and early adolescent hangings in Lakota communities on reservation-confined land in South Dakota. While we cleric-adults met in a small community center conference room there to brainstorm about what to do, pagers and flip-top cell phones began to ping as alerts about yet another group of 9, 10 and 11-year-old kids had carried out their private pact to end their lives together because internalized oppression and externalized racism had led them to believe that their futures were hopeless.

While I sat in a Sunday morning worship service at City of Refuge Church in San Francisco, which was among the first (if not the first) of what became many congregations of openly Queer people of color in the nation, a bloodied and severely battered transvestite women’s guttural moans could be heard as she entered and walked down its center aisle. I had never heard a human-being sound so deeply wounded before.  As she slowly moved forward the pastor’s sermon stopped. People in the pews, who had up to that point been animating celebratory shouts of “amen” and “hallelujah” in response to the preacher’s liberatory message, fell “pin-drop-silent.”  Without saying a single word, as if being compelled by Spirit, little by little, I and all congregants quietly moved to join the pastor who had left her pulpit. The pastor had joined those who had moved from their seats to the front of the church where the wounded-women had stood. And while the deacons of the church called for emergency medical assistance, those of us who had gathered together at the altar then laid hands on the women during what was a profoundly moving moment of prayer which had not had an organized beginning nor end. As her sobs gradually subsided, in much the same fashion that the tide rolls back from the shoreline into the sea, each person returned to their seats in the pews. Sunday services resumed. Medical care was rendered. Spirit had spoken.

POC often empathize and direct the usages of their energy like this when troubled waters rise. We also may not have a reflexive tendency to dump mounds of debilitating pity on each other. My pity is held in reserve for people I believe don’t have the capacity to use their own agency in community. Measured “tough love” supplements its place. Strengthening rather than weakening one another ensures our survival when threats of injury occur or danger lurks. 

Powerful instances of plights, acts of resolve, periods of defiance, “gnashing of teeth” in times of crisis, instances of traumatic stress, periods of repression, aggression, and depression have never been “post,” for POC. To some the notion of trauma being “post” for POC is more often than not claimed by people of privilege who dismiss their own pain to some degree or another, a claim that may or may not be true. But what I know to be true is this: POC Trauma had occurred prior to these aforementioned instances and many more instances of trauma have occurred since then, albeit while children and parents are ripped from each other’s arms by immigration officials on the US/Mexican border, Asians are slain in cosmetic nail salons and corner community stores,  Haitians are rounded up from broken vessels drifting off the coastline by coast guard officials, Muslim’s, Sheikh’s and others are stripped of their head-coverings and spat upon, Queer people are drug through dirt roads and pinned to lamp posts, black men are slain, droves of First Nation women are sexually trafficked and slain, Puerto Ricans are denied hurricane aide and die… .  The list of trauma-inducing events for POC is long. During the course of my life, I have come to understand that there is no shortage of pain in POC communities. Correspondingly, there is no shortage of internalized oppression which is often secretly held in the body’s of POC who reside in POC communities that endure racism complied with all of the other vile “isms” and phobias.  While there are times when (often to the sociocultural and political benefit of those who exploit POC), some vilification and terrorization instances of POC are given more attention and justified creance than to others, the pain, anxiety and fear that is experienced by those who fall victim to being exposed to the searing spotlight of hatred is very real.  And so, is the pain, anxiety, suffering and fear of those who find themselves feeling as if they are standing in the shadow of isolated despair while being denied full awareness of themselves in relation to other POC. Truth be told, no hierarchy of any one subset of POC over another who are experiencing trauma exists on this earth.  Metaphorically, “don’t’ ask, don’t tell” has reeked its own special-brand of havoc on POC in more ways than one. 

As POC experiences come more fully into my view, I see us as one would a kaleidoscope. We are dynamic rather than linear. And our collective bits-and-pieces reveal our unity all the more.  These days people are more aware of the concept of “intersectionality.” I wonder to the degree that we POC and others are yet fully aware of the breadth of it? The remarkable miracle that is being afforded to POC now is that we are sharing our stories abundantly in unprecedented ways during what is an unprecedented era of time. Our voluntarily shared disclosures hold unpreceded promise for our individual healing, communal transformation and collective survival.

As the vast horizon of our experiences comes with the dawning of the sun, hope, laughter and an abundance of joy become our destiny.