I take a one minute break from writing essays that have been tearing my heart open. Just one minute, I say to myself again, not long after I had taken one more minute, and before that another minute. Essays of trauma around race, colonisation, addiction: every morning, at the writing desk, my past gets purged. It is usually a horrendous two to three hours of offloading gunk and finding seeds of renewal in the muck. It tires me, refreshes me, places me in a daily growing paradox of being.
I take lots of breaks from writing while writing. It’s impossible not to stare at the pictures of Hanuman resting against a shelf, of Kali hanging on the wall in front of me, not to dwell with my pre-breakfast mug of warm water, not to close my eyes for two-three minutes to drop into some trivial memory that suddenly seems far more intriguing than asking questions about my grandmother’s moroseness (misandry? Suppressed rage? The grief of disempowerment?) These days, my mornings are hot and roiling before the day even properly begins with its breakfasts and good mornings and emails and Instagram posts and lesson planning for the new semester. My heart is in inquiry mode, and it’s shambolic as hell.
This morning, I am not more irked than other mornings. And as I stare at the pictures of Hanuman, then Kali, Kali, then Hanuman, I feel it is time to move on to another of my favourite escapist activities: parting the curtains. I know that behind my extra thick gingham curtains is a full morning with sunlight, flying birds, voyaging snails, sprinting squirrels, cars and motorcycles going to and fro to the shops or just for rides, but in my room, at my writing desk, with the curtains closed, it could very well be midnight. It astounds me each time I part the curtains that there is a world in light and movement outside. Somehow, in the cocoon of table, good supportive chair, gingham curtains, pictures of my chosen gods, 4 year old trusted computer, mug of slightly-above tepid water, I am sufficiently protected from data outside of this space purposefully fashioned for deep interior diving. Not that I believe protection is needed—there is nothing that has thus far threatened my sanity, security, stability, when the parting of the curtains happens on those far too frequent one-two-three minute breaks. Oh, perhaps titillating things, yes, like the tribe of eighty to a hundred monkeys (many more, my father claims) that often pass, boisterously, defiantly, at around eight in the morning, screeching, hissing, making their presence known even with my curtains closed. Sometimes, when I part the curtains, I spot a bright blue kingfisher, with mahogany-brown fur on its sides, perching proud on a telegraph wire, beak long and sturdy. A couple of times, I look outside just to get struck by the always morphing, evocatively lit sky.
I keep the curtains closed because, for these particular essays on trauma and the healing of it, I write best in the deepest state of interiority, without too much exciting sensory input dancing around my inner perception and inviting it to forget the pain of disconnection, displacement. I am able to keep the curtains partially open or fully open when I am writing a piece like this one, for example, which almost always depends on the flitting of my perception from thing to thing; somehow, the inspiration comes both from my memories, feelings, ideas and the burr of the helicopter that has bizarrely landed not far from where I sit (I do not know why it’s here, nor what special official function it’s serving, only that it’s polluting the morning with sounds), the pigeon that’s slowly and daily building its nest by my neighbour’s air-conditioning vent, the odd bark of the palm tree opposite my writing desk that has shot up well beyond the leaves and branches and looks like a spear reaching up to the heavens. All of this rich, arbitrary material fuels the writing of pieces that will only truly sparkle with so many glorious, in-the-now details, as though it’s streaming live. Parted curtains are compulsory.
But, when I am plumbing psychical depths to discover the root of separation between self and world, between self and self, between self and culture, the glimmering landscape outside and the voices of people and canaries and the neighbour’s grumpy orange cat are distractions rather than gems of inspiration. At least for me. I don’t know how other writers may feel about needing an external crutch to keep the words flowing, the thoughts and feelings buzzing if the subject being excavated and explored is trauma, trauma, which etymologically, means wound and which experts such as Gabor Mate and Peter Levine have also identified as profound disconnection. For me, reconnecting while writing takes place deep, deep inside, in interior spaces that have housed banished pieces of myself and that have been cold and unlit for a long, long time. As I write, these spaces and pieces get soaked in light and in the heat of understanding. The more I move inside, the more I touch regions that have felt spectral, now slowly re-birthed again and given a form to live on the planet.
Well, well, the route to wellness isn’t systematic, linear, capable of being theorised into tenets, as I’m discovering. Writing is kickass. Writing has power. Writing is capable of kissing wounds and making them all better.
But—the curtains part, and outside a big fat incandescent pigeon is cooing. I suddenly remember that for ten years between my early-20s and early-30s, I also preferred dark womb-like spaces and curtains firmly shut, veiled from others, the outside world, hiding myself out of shame, unhealed trauma; that as I drank my nights away, I could not bear to really look at the physical world around me, and it was much more soothing to dwell in a world I kept constructing in my mind; that as I drank the whatever-number glass of wine, still capable of bringing guilt to the surface of inebriation, I could not face what lay beyond the parted curtains: I lived deeply so deeply inside a shell of protection from what my nervous system, in tatters from years of isolation and disconnection, was simply not ready to process.
Isn’t this a different womb altogether? I ask myself now. The womb of hiding, and the womb of healing—aren’t they different? The womb of healing looks very similar to the womb of hiding but they’re made of different stuff. There are parallels, though, like for example, how in both, balms appear in the form of kindly eyes, a warm hand reaching out to keep your hand company, the permission to sigh, to sob, the embrace of a friend, the purr of a cat on your belly.
Writing is a funny business. Memory is also a funny business. As I’m writing this piece, curtains parted, a pair of lovebirds on the branch of a palm tree outside my window for company, pre-ten am sunlight streaming into my study, I am taken to another episode of me sitting at my writing desk, trying to bring forth more submerged pieces from the past:
Only a few weeks ago, in the sizzling thick of writing an essay on the wound of unworthiness passed down through generations—specifically female generations—down my family line, the pungency of self-negation soaring through my veins, spawning spontaneous tears that come not to concretise fate but to melt the denial of self-denial, I parted the curtains for relief. Even as I felt decades of grief evaporate into the air after I’d written lines that seemed to have been singed onto the page, and parts of my body had soothed back into a free state, I needed to see what else there was. Exactly. Here was a clue to some glorious epiphany: what else was there? The problem with pain is that it can lead a person down very narrow alleys, forgetting the broad sweeps of air around those alleys, forgetting also where those alleys lead and where the exit must eventually be taken.
I parted the curtains, and saw a young boy in our garden.
Faded frayed sports cap on his bent head, equally discoloured red T-shirt tucked into stonewashed blue jeans, he is sweeping leaves in the garden. My mother dashes into the garden, from around the corner by the wet kitchen opposite my room. She says something kind to the boy, gives him instructions on what to do next in the garden, offers him snacks. I cannot see much of the boy’s response. His head is still hung, his voice is too soft. He is not alone. I hear the sound of the grass-cutting machine wielded by an adult.
I don’t know anything about the boy or about the adult he is with, still beyond my eye range. All I know is that I am filled with feelings I do not have names for. If pushed, I could say they belonged to the regions of curiosity and despair.
Later, my mother tells me that the boy had come with his father. They are Rohingya refugees from Myanmar. Father and son move from house to house, cutting grass, shaping gardens, pruning leaves and weeds. The income is fair. It allows at least for the boy, eleven or twelve, to attend a boarding school in Kuala Lumpur. When he’s home in Port. Dickson for the holidays, he helps his father in gardens. Hisham, my mother announces, that’s his father’s name. The boy’s name, she doesn’t know. They’ve been in Malaysia for two years. How they got here, what boat, what condition, what panic, what they were leaving behind, what they found when they got here, who helped them, how they felt, how they continue to feel, none of this she knows. She’s a pragmatic reporter for now. So much of what is happening in silences, in glances, in gestures, in the movements of hands and heads, is unknown, a colossal dark space, it seems to me, bursting with so much that hasn’t been birthed.
I too can get the facts about the Rohingya community in Malaysia, that there are around 154,860 refugees from Myanmar, out of which 102, 960 are Rohingyas (unhcr.org). Christine H. Kim writes in her article, “Challenges to the Rohingya Population in Malaysia”, “On April 16 2020, the Malaysian Navy intercepted and pushed back two refugee boats of about 200 passengers in Langkawi. In the same month, Malaysia formed the National Task Force (NTF) to better combat the influx of foreigners. Since May, the NTF has denied entry to 22 boats and implemented at least four immigration clampdowns, resulting in the arrest of 2,000 people, including 98 children.”
The facts and figures are important. We need them. We need to know them so that work can be done. They simultaneously mean very little when it comes to telling me what I really wanted to know about the boy as he swept leaves outside my window. What happened to you, truly? Out of what eyes are you taking in what you see?
It only hits me now, through that memory, how pregnant those moments were, of parting the curtains, of watching the boy, of the sudden unknown feelings I began to feel; how as I was battling and purging dark traumas from my own communal and cultural history, Hisham and his son were just outside in the garden, bearing burdens and images and stories from moments in time still pulsating with strife and heartbreak. Not the past yet. Their escape from genocide in their homeland a fresh reality, a wound still forming, that painful severance from ancestral land which I had been processing as a third generation migrant, hot and new for them, the first generation, and also entirely different and unknown to me. They had come as refugees. We had not.
I close the curtains and return to my essay.
I cannot remember what kinds of words emerged after that. I can’t imagine they were all that different from what I had been writing before I parted the curtains. None of these ideas, feelings and realisations were conscious at that time. All I know now is that the parting of the curtains did something, and continues to do something while I write, even if I have to do most of my trauma-essay writing in a dark comforting womb, without too much sensory input from elsewhere. Even as I gestate, and get nourished by silence, simplicity, in a container that promotes self-understanding, I am only just preparing for what is to come.
Because, you see, I have to state the obvious: wombs are temporary homes. They’re not meant to host forever. They are only designed for a portion of growth. The rest of the rough-and-tumble happens outside. Without the womb, there’d be no world, but the world is not housed in the womb.
Parting the curtains has something to do with dancing. More than that, I do not know. Or maybe I do. I keep feeling the sensations of a dance inside of me. Yes, perhaps that’s it. There’s a dance within, and without. Dancing with dualities. Dancing between dualities like a pro. Trotting, no, swirling between self and others, closing and opening, self and world, dancing, waltzing between zones, and finding a place to land.
But—it slowly occurs to me—dancing is still only one portion of growth, different from hanging out in a womb, and different also from finding continuity, and community, in the human plight. Recognising and being with interior spaces is indispensible—there isn’t enough of this in an age of social media addiction—and meeting our own silence as well as psychological noise means inhabiting our raw inner power. But then, our interior spaces have to eventually meet other interior spaces (which I suppose happens most fluidly once we’ve learned how to dance). Then our suffering has to find a place to land in the suffering of others. Then the world behind the curtain and the world outside of parted curtains have to merge, melt, and be seen as a glimmering, complex web, hardly separate. Then, I may begin to see the invisible strings that connect me to the young boy in the garden, and find the space were we truly meet, in spite of everything that makes us distinct. And the opening and parting of curtains would no longer be the subject of an essay I’m writing.