A Keening For Our Sterilised Lives
On student protests, the psychology of oppression and imagining a different world.
Keening, noun. An action of wailing in grief for a dead person. An eerie wailing sound. Prolonged and high-pitched sound, typically in a way that expresses grief or sorrow. From Irish caoinim, “I wail”.
Bealtaine in Ireland. A name shared between the month of May and the cross-quarter day that sits halfway between spring equinox and summer solstice; a time of awakening and deep changes in our environment, ostensibly the beginning of summer, even though it doesn't feel like it here on the north coast. A perfect opportunity to tell you of the rich and layered folklore that surrounds this time of the year; only old lore is not what my mind is brewing right now. I'll cheekily send you over to my dear friend
and her newsletter on Bealtaine, and I'll tell you of the dark clouds that loom over my head instead. It's not only my head, it's everyone's head. These ominous clouds, as black as the abyss, form a monstrous supercell that spans across countries, oceans, continents, its violent force spitting out endless storms; ravenous vortexes that swallow unsuspecting targets and leave a trail of misery. These dark, deadly clouds that know no bounds are the system of imperialism that exploited and extracted the very essence of our planet and its life. The trail of destruction that is left is so much more than the obvious genocides and bloodsheds of all descriptions; the trail of destruction includes often invisible, yet gaping wasteland left in the soul and mind of a common person.These clouds are unstoppable — or are they? Right now we're witnessing student encampments completely blocking hundreds of universities across the US1, with numbers increasing in other countries. These young people are not giving up no matter what, and the system answered with the predictable response you would expect from a deadly monstrosity: violence. We're witnessing snipers being sent to universities, among unarmed students, in a country that brands itself a democracy. We're witnessing access to universities being completely cut off in an attempt to break the students by starving them. This morning I watched the police, trained by the IOF, relentlessly beat a young woman on an American campus, her ribs undoubtedly cracked all over the place — the same brutalisation we've seen over and over again in the West Bank. A Zionist mob attacked students and beat them at UCLA, after breaking into their encampment in the middle of the night. I see many people shocked at what is happening and I shake my head in disbelief. What is happening is not shocking to me; what is shocking to me is the fact that so many people were oblivious to how this has been the reality of the so-called Western world for many centuries now. The West has been built on violence, silence and sanitising the picture delivered to us. I have no doubt many have forgotten that student protests against the Vietnam war resulted in several young people being killed (see video below), and now we're there once more because the violence never went away, it was just smart enough to hide itself behind titles of “peacetime”, “post-war” and “post-colonial” eras. I feel like counting minutes until the blood of the students is spilled once again in the falling empire's desperate attempt to lash out one last time.
While some sections of the society are upset about students protesting against genocide and not about the genocide itself, and some even openly cheer while Gaza is being bombed into oblivion, I can't help but ask myself how is the support for violence and supremacy so widespread and systemic? For a violent ideology (and ideological violence) to be this pervasive and comprehensive, I believe it must be present in every pore of the society, every aspect of life, from the bottom to the top. The dark clouds looming over me for the past six months brought a lot of reflection on how our everyday life is rigged to condition us to be nice, silent and obedient, carefully ensuring that we'll behave in a way that doesn't challenge the system from the earliest age. And I hear so, so many people wrestling with the same thoughts and tracing their colonial conditioning back to the very beginning of their life.
The polluted and the sanitised
Allow me to tell you a story. Growing up, I lived on a street by a river. It was flowing in a small ravine, with a road and a wooden pedestrian bridge next to it watching over the river. It was just a local river that ran through the village, not one of the main rivers that are constantly imposing and intimidating in their width and depth, but a river just big enough to carry the title of a river instead of a stream. It was dark, muddy and murky; the type of river most of us had in their childhoods in the 80s and 90s, in the era that came after decades of unrestricted industrial growth, but before there was much consideration for wastewater management and protecting the environment from pollution. I can't recall anyone ever saying anything positive about the river, it was widely regarded as a big sewer; a body of contaminated water not to be touched.
Occasionally, when significantly more rain would fall than what was the average for the season, the river would become unrecognisable in no time, often overnight, swelling until it was almost two meters deep, touching the bridge or even spilling out of its bed. I can recall several such instances during my childhood, when the dirty brown water laid on the road for days and completely flooded two or three houses closest to the river. In the following weeks, when the water retreated, the riverbank was slimy and unapproachable, its grass entrenched in mud. But when the river was its normal size, or when the season was dry and the river would reduce to a meagre stream, all the children who lived nearby played on the riverbank. It's simple when you're a child — you see an open space, you play there. Ball games, hide and seek, laughable attempts at raft building; the idea of the water being too dirty to play there doesn't really cross your mind. Parental control was severely lacking, and looking back at it from today's viewpoint, I can't help but shake my head in disbelief and neglect and letting small children roam around the village without any regards for their whereabouts and safety.
If I remember well, I was about six years old when I drank water from the river while playing. I can't tell you why I did it; the mind of an autistic child (or any child really) does its own thing, but perhaps it was the same reasoning - or lack thereof - kids employ when deciding where to play. You see an open space, you play there. You’re thirsty, you see a body of water, you drink, it's all very simple. Except it wasn't simple to my parents. The same parents that mostly had no idea where I was and what was happening to me were utterly shocked. Just shy of 30 years later, I can still remember the ugly brown tiles of the bathroom where I was sat, yelled at and smacked. What were you thinking?! We told you that the river is full of sewage! It's dirty and you will get sick! Why would you do something so stupid?!
Funny that, showing your concern for a child's health and wellbeing by using physical and emotional abuse… And yet, this was the standard I grew up with and, dare I say, most of the children from my generation shared this experience. The defining element of my childhood was this practice of sterilising everything without any mindful explanation tailored to my age and needs. It would almost trick you into believing you're being cared for, after all, if they want to keep you clean and safe, that means they care, doesn't it? You can't drink dirty water. Wash your hands with antibacterial soap (dozens of times a day)! Peeing in your bed is disgusting (I don't care about acknowledging your bed wetting is a trauma response, I just want you to stop being an inconvenience)! Do this and that because I said so (I won't give you any explanation for my reasons, you must shut up and listen because I'm the authority)! In a way, decades later, my mind still exists in this strange, hurtful dichotomy, trying to break away from sterilising and embrace speaking, feeling, acting and expressing myself freely. Occasionally, my mother reminds me of the sterilising when she gaslights me. What do you mean, I belittled your relationship with your now husband and said you can't last and will move on after a few months? I never said anything like that. You're misremembering what happened. You made that up. You've always been dramatic like this. I cut the phone call short. I remind myself that I live thousands of miles away for a reason. I can't fight someone who refuses to recognise they've been gaslighting for decades. I retreat and go lick my wounds. I tell my husband I'm hurt; the one that supposedly wouldn't last because my mother gave herself the right to express how she knows my mind better than I know it myself. My family home was the very first instance of being forcefully pulled into a whirlpool of sanitising behaviours that taught me to be quiet and fearful and know my place within the family, within the educational system, within the workplace, within relationships, within politics, within the wider system of imperial colonialism. And all the while I was fed the lie: Oh, look how strong you are. I raised you a feminist and a fighter. Repeat the lie enough times and it will become the truth. I believed in my girl boss attitude and independence. I believed in it so much I was unable to see the glass walls of my cell and the wounded shell of my spirit. I screamed and no one cared to hear my very normal reaction to an abnormal world. Instead, they handed out more gaslighting and more antidepressants. Pull yourself together and fix yourself, you have no reason to feel depressed and anxious. You've always been a bit out of control. You've always been dramatic. Have you tried walking more and hugging a tree?
Rebuilding and reparenting
In the last few years, we're witnessing a massive shift in parenting techniques. Gentle parenting is now being pushed to the forefront, while at the same time most of us, broken and subdued as we are, still can't find the strength to face our parents and tell them to their face — You had no idea what you were doing. You were shite parents. You didn't meet my needs. You pushed me into boxes and then closed the lid. You fucking broke me for life. In today's West, there’s hardly a person without a history and diagnosis of mental health issues, while antidepressants and other medicines are being handed out like candies, often by doctors who don't even listen to what you need and prescribe medicine as a convenience after a couple of minutes of conversation over the phone. With the rise of gentle parenting, one thing I'm noticing over and over is people (particularly women) constantly crying that they're failing at it and feeling deep guilt about it. They desperately cling onto the concept of gentle parenting, in a tumultuous effort to make it work and do things differently than what their parents have (and have not) done to them. In a frantic search for ways to break the generational, ancestral trauma, they're struggling to practice gentle parenting because their minds aren't equipped for it, bearing scars from their own upbringing. The upbringing filled with behaviours that, for centuries, shaped us into small and obedient minions of a system that can't stand being challenged.
If my child came to me with the news of drinking water from a polluted river, I'd like to think I'd react with grace. I know I wouldn't react with physical violence, but what would I say? I like to think I'd smile, roll my eyes a bit, calmly explain why we don't do that and why we need to drink clean water, and monitor them for upset stomach and diarrhea. But truth be told, I don't know. Chances are I wouldn't be calm, I'd lose it and raise my voice, because to be perfectly honest, I'm currently reparenting myself. I won't even try presenting myself as a gentle parenting saint here. I don't follow gentle parenting. I don't feel equipped to. I follow the “survive the day, wing it, pray you haven't caused a deep trauma” parenting. I'm overwhelmed; my own unmet needs of a child whose autism and ADHD weren't recognised and respected now catching up with me. I lose it and raise my voice on occasions. I'm also the gentlest mother there is on occasions. At any given time, I have no freaking idea what I'm doing, all I know is that I'm parenting myself while parenting my children. It's painful and I shouldn't be in that position. I shouldn't be forced to do what was the job of my parents and teachers, I shouldn't be remedying the wounds they caused. The wounds that made me small, quiet, obedient and unproblematic; all the behaviours that are necessary (on this mini, personal scale and on a macro scale) to uphold the status quo of this world. My generation was left to undertake reparenting and try to mend ourselves and the world. We're trying, and the process is brutal. The students who are protesting and being beaten for it, most of them around 15 years younger than me, are currently expediting their own process of mending and reparenting. The sad truth is that at 18 years old, I was thoroughly unequipped to stand up against tyranny and recognise the rotten roots of the system permeating every step I made, like the students at Columbia, UCLA and elsewhere are doing right now. For that, as I grieve my upbringing and the length of my own healing and awakening process, they have my respect and support. My grief is laced with a joy of resistance and a hopeful vision of its victory. Grief is transformative. We are not obliged to surrender our grief to sorrow, another thing we've been taught in our sanitised lives. Grief is shame. Stop bothering everyone with your wailing. You’re overreacting, others have it worse than you and don't complain. Come back when you’re feeling better. No, we don't have to boil our grief and sorrow in silence. We can feed the grief to a flame of revolution.
Unraveling the threads
I keep examining all the examples of how the system was ingrained in me. Like unraveling a thread off a spool, I pull them bit by bit, hold them in my hand, and every now and then I find myself surprised with how tremendously long the length of the thread I've pulled is. I can't see the end of it, I just keep unraveling more and more. The spool of conditioning is, I'm afraid, a perpetuum mobile.
My mind goes back to my childhood when my mother took me to a child psychologist to “solve” my bedwetting problem. I have no idea why this is happening. I want it to stop so I don't have to be bothered with washing the bedding every day. The behaviour that failed to acknowledge and address daily domestic abuse I was witnessing as a root of the problem, that bottled up the violence while expecting me to perform my duty of not being a nuisance, was the behaviour that upholds the systems of oppression.
What about all the times during my school years when I was accused of not paying attention, being brazen, disobedient and unruly on purpose, when I was just a child with a brain in a hyper mode no one cared to embrace? The system that strives to silence children and teenagers and bend them into conformity during years of education is the system that upholds colonial violence.
That time I announced to my family that I was going to uni to study archaeology — the first person in my lineage to ever achieve higher education — and I was scolded by my aunt (now revealed to be a Christian Zionist, now there's a surprise!), who argued that this family doesn't have the money for useless studies. Same as she attacked me a few years earlier when I was starting my high school and chose a grammar school with a vision of going to a uni. She lectured my mother on how I can't go to a grammar school because that would mean forking out the money for uni, and how I should be pushed to train for a hairdresser right away. Erasing me and ruling over my fate was the same behaviour that allows ruling over any person or resource for supremacist gains.
All the times my young self was in relationships with boyfriends who would belittle me and make derogatory comments about my appearance or my dreams and aspirations, pushing me to be silent and codependent, to know my place. The times I wasn't feeling safe or capable of leaving that situation, and all the while my mother would proclaim how she raised a strong and independent daughter. This was the silencing and gaslighting that makes us invisible and puts us into our place in the imperialist system.
That time I moved thousands of miles away to Scotland and it finally gave me the strength to break up with then boyfriend of seven years, only to have my mother shout at me for “being stupid and leaving a good guy who takes care of you.” Be small, shut up, how dare you think you know what you want in life? I tried explaining that relationship was nothing but a habit for many years. I tried explaining a spiritual awakening and a search for meaning, but the gaslighting went so far I was accused of being brainwashed and questioned whether I joined some cult because I was clearly out of control in a faraway land. This behaviour that endeavoured to take all agency away from me was the behaviour that keeps the world rolling into the jaws of colonialism.
I'm thinking of all the times I was ridiculed for wanting to pursue art as something more than a hobby. Art is not a job. Stop these fantasies and go get a real job. Even once I opened a small business and became self-employed, upon explaining what I did everyone around me would ask “Ah yes, but I meant what are you doing for a job? Obviously this is just something you do in the evening after you come home from work?” I doubted myself endlessly and had a neverending imposter syndrome. The system that puts every effort into preventing people from surrendering to art is the system that trembles thinking about being challenged. All art is a potential radical act of resistance, all art is a potential hammer that will smash the expectations and norms. We have to stop the artists, they're becoming too loud and bold.
Not to forget the time when I experienced obstetric violence, my body autonomy violated, my connection to my newborn child severed by a system that reduces women to an object. “Maternity care” technologically performed in the 2020s, ideologically left in Victorian times, followed by years of gaslighting from the entire medical system before someone graced me with some attention. When I told a GP my whole body hurts and I was waking up in the night, screaming and crying while reliving my trauma through nightmares, they told me it’s all in my head. Just a little bit of postpartum anxiety, here, take these pills. After almost three years, I was diagnosed with C-PTSD. A diagnosis that should have happened without my body and my life being desecrated and tossed around in an act of misogynistic obliteration that is so dear to all systems of oppression.
And then my mind goes back to the time I started my studies. In the whole of the society there was a palpable atmosphere of despising students of humanities and social sciences, endlessly presenting them as the lowest, least intelligent cohort incapable of pursuing studies in STEM, so they had to “settle” for useless fields. You could have the highest grades and honours, you could be the country's most cited scientist renowned all over the world (which was the case with one of my professors), but you are still a humanistics nobody, unimportant for society, at the bottom of the ladder where the top is occupied by real scientists. I couldn't quite put my finger on this narrative when I was 18 or 20, but now I can trace it to the empire's panic fear of people studying disciplines that are likely to give them critical thinking skills and expose them to a critique of the system and questioning what they've been sold as truth. History, anthropology, philosophy, sociology, political sciences, arts are all a danger to the status quo and the myth of progress.
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I could go on and on, but I’m not trying to make some deep dive into the psychology of oppression here. I want to share these stories because I know that whoever is reading this has experienced these same behaviours in one way or another. So many people who spent decades of their lives with this baggage that pinned them to the ground, yet they couldn't explain it, are now pulling these threads from their childhood, teenage years and early adulthood into a giant, tangled mess of deprogramming and regaining their independence. Make no mistake — the students protesting with their own bodies right now are unraveling these same threads. Just like the Palestinians have been doing for decades now. The students recognised what I was unable to when I was their age; the incredibly entrenched roots of conditioning that drove us into silence and inability to see and fight the evils of imperialism. That famous statement how it's easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism (variously contributed to Fredric Jameson and Slavoj Žižek) might just be coming to its end because we're now watching a generation that is imagining a different world and an end to the silent acceptance of atrocities. When Mark Fisher entertained the idea that there is no space to conceive alternative forms of social structures within a capitalist framework, he nihilistically concluded that younger generations aren't even concerned with recognising alternatives2. He wrote this not that long ago, in 2009, and in a beautiful display of how the tables turn, it isn't true anymore (and to be perfectly honest, I think it never was). Not only younger generations are concerned with recognising alternatives, but also ready to proactively work on them in a refusal to be fodder for the capitalist machinery.
I'm not quite sure how to handle this huge pile of unraveled threads from the spool of conditioning sitting next to me. Perhaps setting it on fire would be the best course of action. The fire of hope and revolution and relearning and rebuilding. Let it burn. Not with a fire that sterilises, but with a fire that illuminates. I can't turn back the time and make the 18 years old me understand the principles of oppression, but I can choose to never unsee what I understand now. Caoinim. I wail. Troidim. I fight.
For a comprehensive overview, see “A Student Rebellion Against the Hypocrisy of Their Elders” by the USC professor and Pulitzer Prize-winning author Viet Thanh Nguyen.
Fisher, Mark (2009). Capitalist Realism. Is There No Alternative? O Books. p. 8.
So much to unravel in this fiercely vulnerable piece, Ramona 🔥 I hear and feel everyone of your powerful words, but I particularly liked the distinction you make at the end between grief and its tame, acceptable twin, sorrow. It makes so much sense. Keep keening 🔥
Thank you for this beautiful and sincere essay; it gives me hope that I am not so alone in my thoughts.