A Love Letter to Valarie Kaur
Sat Sri Akaal.
I do not know if you will see this, but I have to reach you, for you are a part of me I do not yet know.
I’ve read your works. I’ve watched your films. I’ve followed your success and shared your words like gospel. I am in awe of your vibrancy, your humility, but mostly your courage to find love in a time of abject hate.
But as you say…
“No one should be asked to feel empathy or compassion for their oppressors. I have learned that we do not need to feel anything for our opponents at all in order to practice love. Love is labor that returns us to wonder — it is seeing another person’s humanity, even if they deny their own. We just have to choose to wonder about them.” — Valarie Kaur, See No Stranger A Memoir and Manifesto of Revolutionary Love
As a Punjabi Hindu, I do not know all your struggles, but we share a desh, a motherland, a place that is in our bones, our blood, and our love. Like our trauma lives within us, carried from our ancestors, so does our love. You make me proud to wear my cultural heritage, and I am in wonder of Sikhism. It rescued me when I lost my brother. Seva gave me action, and langar gave me hope. The ghazals gave me comfort, and the community gave me untethered, unencumbered, unconditional love. A Warrior’s love, for now at my most alone, I didn’t feel scared.
Love is dangerous business…If you see no stranger, then you must love people, even when they do not love you. You must wonder about them even when they refuse to wonder about you.” — Valarie Kaur, See No Stranger A Memoir and Manifesto of Revolutionary Love
I devoured your book See No Stranger A Memoir and Manifesto of Revolutionary Love, like the way moms devour sweets on Karvachauth upon seeing the moon. I absorbed all your words, your calls to action, your radical choice to love those who hurt you so deeply, like I’d been starving and just received water. And truth be told I have been starving. Intellectually, mentally and academically utterly malnourished; I’ve been living like a shell of a human. There is so much I didn’t learn, and I’ve pursued higher education! The unlearning, re-learning, and growth are exponential right now, and your book is helping me reach my doctorate in what it truly means to be human, a citizen, a woman, a doer of the right thing. Simply put — it’s been what I’ve needed for my broken heart. At first, I listened to it, mostly out of impatience, too excited to await the delivery, but once it arrived, I read it, too.
I’d quote all your words here, but that would be illogical, so I’ll share but one section that stood out to me and moved me to reach out to you. After all, I have the same reverence to another’s story as you and a very active imagination too.
“Deep listening is an act of surrender. We risk being changed by what we hear. When I really want to hear another person’s story, I try to leave my preconceptions at the door and draw close to their telling. I am always partially listening to the thoughts in my own head when others are speaking, so I consciously quiet my thoughts and begin to listen with my senses. Empathy is cognitive and emotional — to inhabit another person’s view of the world is to feel the world with them. But I also know that it’s okay if I don’t feel very much for them at all. I just need to feel safe enough to stay curious. The most critical part of listening is asking what is at stake for the other person. I try to understand what matters to them, not what I think matters. Sometimes I start to lose myself in their story. As soon as I notice feeling unmoored, I try to pull myself back into my body, like returning home. As Hannah Arendt says, ‘One trains one’s imagination to go visiting.’ When the story is done, we must return to our skin, our own worldview, and notice how we have been changed by our visit. So I ask myself, What is this story demanding of me? What will I do now that I know this?”- Valarie Kaur, See No Stranger A Memoir and Manifesto of Revolutionary Love
You write with eloquence and urgency, words that rattle in my mind and keep me up at night, eager to usher in lasting change, too. To understand my enemy and wish them healing, too, for, in that act, I am truly healing myself. In my small way, I’ve discovered how to institute change like that, too.
Thrust into grief bereft of any sense of direction or connection, I navigated my healing, taking a very bumpy, calamitous route. I attended support groups where I was the only brown person, sat with people who could not get past the question, “how?” and searched to find another voice that could grieve with me, in a way that truly felt my pain, too. My grief was mocked, and my expression of it was critiqued. When in therapy, (and thank goodness for the empathetic souls who devote their lives to grief counseling), I found myself spending as much time explaining the cultural precedence for the exhausting inability to truly communicate as I did when sharing my sorrow. Thankfully I have wonderful friends who helped a lot and continue to do so.
Your book gave me hope that our culture could change, not just for women, but for all of us bearing the weight of antiquated expectations and traditions. You spoke of your grandmother and she may as well have been my Nani. You spoke of your cousin, his actions, ultimately his humanity and found empathy and healing for yourself, as monumental of a task as it was to do. You didn’t just tell, you did. Even Yoda applauds you.
So, I worried for others who would have to navigate without a compass, as I did, or experience the same compounded trauma. After all, a loss is hard enough, support shouldn’t have to be, too. So, I started where I was, just like you say, and created a podcast about grief, specifically focusing on sibling loss. So little is written, spoken, or acknowledged about this type of loss, as though at some point your siblings stop being yours and instead belong to the families they create and the ones who created them.
“There are no bystanders. In this time of astonishing moral crisis, silence is complicity. Because in the palm of our hand we have the ability to respond — to speak, to post, to organize, to act, online and on the ground, and in the voting booth. Speak, even if your voice trembles.” — Valarie Kaur
Pulling from my marketing experience, I started a blog, shared on social media and I’ve now built a worldwide community of bereaved siblings. None of us are the same, yet we are united in pain and we find a way in our sorrow to wonder about each other — barring religion, race, gender, grief levels all of us the same way and so we support each other by simply saying, “I see you. I hear you. I’m here for you.”
Through my own small example, through your healing, I know your discussion of Revolutionary Love is possible and it is an incredible source of healing.
Through my podcast, I’ve learned so much and grown in ways I couldn’t have if I allowed grief to overcome me. Using my journalism skills, I’ve interviewed therapists, authors, humor theorists, and just talked my heart out until it was empty of pain long enough to let me get some sleep. I’d love to interview you too, if possible, to discuss the lessons from your prodigious manifesto and the application to our daily lives — from moments of rage to moments of cultural silence, for choosing to love doesn’t stop.
My efforts to heal continue. You talk about a calling:
“You are meant for more than a life of comfort. You are meant for a life of meaning. Staying within the walls that others build for you may make you feel safe, but its emptiness will breed despair. In the meantime, the fires of life will never stop calling for you.” — Valarie Kaur
So I’ve signed up and been admitted to a program to pursue clinical psychology because, well, representation matters. And, just like when I made a podcast to hear a voice that felt my pain, a community grew. So, I know there are other South Asians that need someone who looks like them and can sit with them through the toughest times, to commiserate, to elucidate and to just say, “it’s okay.” No one should have to learn how to swim while their drowning and if I can in any way prevent that, help them learn the strokes before a wave hits, I will have fulfilled my purpose.
It’s the only way I know how to be a part of the change.
My brother told me when I’d get so frustrated and beaten down by the world to focus on “being the change.” I didn’t know how or what that really meant, but after reading your book I now have a script.
Thank you for writing your manifesto and sharing with painstaking detail the parts we hide, even if your voice trembled.
If you are a part of me I do not yet know, let’s change that.
Despite signing up for school I will still be working and am available as your assistant, marketing manager, UX writer, event coordinator…anything!
I would revel at the chance to connect with you in any way and I will continue to watch in awe as you forge a new world for all us, full of love, hope, and equality.
Your biggest fan,
Sabina
Sabina@SabinaWrites.com
