Weaving Homes

By: Lucia Sarmiento Verano

^{Featured photo credit: Stephane Gagnon}

Trap doors

If you have ever praised my writing or the content I create, I might have responded with “thank you, I actually try very very hard”. I know this can be a puzzling answer but let me give you a helpful illustration:

I am sitting here with one new blog post half written and another 80% complete, wondering why I can’t just finish them already. Most of the reflections and knowledge they contain might be helpful to share, but stay firmly locked within. Words do not form around them in an intelligible way. I believe I will be understood by most Autistic people when I say I often feel trapped inside my mind. This feeling, and its very tangible effects, quickly intensify when overwhelm and stress increase to levels difficult to manage. This has been the case for me this past couple of months.

These are the moments when the big questions are also louder: “What are you even doing?” “Why aren’t you doing more?” “Why aren’t you doing something else?”. Today, the power of these questions is intensified by the horrendous events unfolding globally, violence, war, genocide. Everyday life and work quickly lose meaning. In moments like these, wishing to stop, to let everything go constitutes a daily barrier to life. One I need to battle at all times only to function. My mind becomes a space full of trap doors and booby traps. Sometimes I can’t believe I am fighting like this with my own brain.

I am now finding myself writing about what keeps me going in the hopes of unlocking my words. I will have to make you wait for the other two pieces that might be more interesting to you, but I thought I could share some of my reflections today.

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Deep rivers

I remember the day my maternal grandfather died. We lived in a multigenerational home. The house was very big and despite this, it was difficult to walk into it due to the sheer amount of people present at his wake. An ocean made by all the people he had known or helped, people that appreciated him. He almost obsessively devoted his life and medical skills to the service of his community, besides his paid job. He was a doctor who dedicated a big part of his week to pro-bono work, both at a local hospital and in his private consulting room. He also acted as a godfather or guide to many who crossed his path, and a safe and supportive patriarch in our very large extended family. He did not benefit financially from this, nor did he acquire power; only the quiet assurance of living the way he wanted, by doing the right thing.

He is my guiding light. I have never forgotten the fullness of our house that day, an illustration of the impact he had in life.

My grandfather was a child of the plantation. Although he was not born in it, both his parents were. His ancestors worked the land under extreme conditions. He was a child of the Peruvian coast, colonial strip of desert interrupted by green valleys where many survived working the land, snuggly enclosed by the imposing Andes on one side, and the unending expanse of the Pacific Ocean on the other. That strip of land was also the birth place of both my paternal grandparents, both my parents, and myself. Home, as one would call it.

My ancestry, to put it as simply as possible, is multiply mixed on the sides of both my grandfathers, and white on the sides of both my grandmothers. Many readers of this blog will imagine what that can mean, in a land such as Peru. My blood carries the spectres of both sides of servitude and colonial violence. On different sides, I can trace lineage to both, plantation servitude and work, and plantation ownership. Two realities that shared the same space, but are nonetheless opposed and irreconcilable. Nevertheless, here I am, and my ancestry is only one example of what is actually very commonly found in families of the Peruvian coast.

Be it recognised or not, our bodies have become the sites where the meandering rivers of history, having clashed in violence, now intertwine and weave our lives’ tapestries. Fabrics made by torn threads, interrupted by interference, repression, prohibition, violence, or redirected away from the roots which often remain unspoken and unnamed. As Rita Segato writes, our mestizo (mixed) bodies are crossed by many different historical vectors, carrying multiple subjectivities and, have mostly been uprooted from connection to land and ancestry during their historical and transgenerational journeys towards whiteness.

At first, I had no idea what to do with that. Even now, when I think too much about it, I become undone.

After more than a decade of continuous therapy, having explored the question of identity and its contradictions in many different ways: cognitive, embodied, or symbolic… I now realise no therapeutic practice as we know it in the West is ever going to help. There is no cure to being the product of centuries of colonial violence. There is no fixing a disjointed sense of being, no integrating these contradictions into a coherent harmonious “authentic self”. And that is fine. I now know I do not need to be an integrated self in order to be well. Western notions of mental health do not apply to this body-mind.

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Guiding lights

So, having accepted this and let go of the hope for simplicity, I come back to my own experience to look for what holds those threads together. Rooting me to myself, is the will, the love and the example of the ones that have woven the same disjointed tapestries and have navigated the currents of history on Peruvian lands. My grandfathers, each of them devoting their lives to service. My grandmothers, breaking the most rigid codes of whiteness in their choice of disruptive intimacies. All of them, and my parents, also full of complexities and contradictions. Infinite source of love and life for me.

When things get difficult, and my brain begins playing tricks on me, I turn to the most fundamental reasons I have for continuing. My grandfather always considered that with privilege and skill comes the responsibility of applying those same privileges and skills to the service of others. He lived by what he preached. I have little physical strength, little social skills, and not that much courage. I do have intellectual and emotional strengths that, at times, through the trap doors of my mind, may help me bring something of value to others.

Most of my energy has shifted from trying to find my roots, towards understanding uprootedness, oppression and lived experience. To trying to figure out how bodies marked by colonial interruptions and multiplicity may stop their journey towards whiteness, seemingly unstoppable, without reproducing colonial appropriation or extractivism onto others. After all, we cannot recover most of what’s been lost, it is not ours anymore. We also need to learn to work with the whiteness we carry instead of denying its existence. Thus, I am not forcing anything anymore, I am staying put to do this work.

There is no figuring everything out, but I believe this is the place where I am building my home and where I’ll grow roots. I’ll lay down my tapestry next to the ones my ancestors weaved, full of contradictions and unanswered questions. And I will invite others to continue weaving with me, slowly. There is much pain in this place, but also reasons for joy and hope.

I keep these guiding lights near me. There are no certainties here, only clarity.

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In loving memory of my grandparents who have given me, each in their own way, the richest examples of what it is to live life according to one's own principles, and the purest form of love.

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