Deeper into Darkness: Ending Eurocentric Tropes of Neverending Tragedy: Decolonial Poetic Pathways Forward Through Trauma into Healing

by ahimsa timoteo bodhrán

Years ago, at readings thousands of miles apart, at Hetrick-Martin

Institute in Manhattan and City College of San Francisco, I received

the same response from fellow queer/trans youth of color: Was there

no joy in my work, nothing to look forward to as queer/trans people

of color? At each reading, I saw intense engagement in the eyes of

audience members, but could not identify the range of emotions

coursing through each person. Prior to the post-reading dialogue, I

was concerned people hated me and my work. Instead, I found it

spoke to them, deeply.

In my work, I shared joy, peace, and healing are right next to grief,

violence, and despair. The medicine right next to the poison. Bitter,

our sweets.

::

Grief permeates my work. The majority of my work is about loss.

That loss is tempered by continued, resistant, and affirmative

connection: the restorative power of intimacy, medicinal nature of

our lands and waters, salve of spirituality, curatives of creativity and

community to bear witness to and move through grief. Healing the

pains of ongoing, multigenerational historical trauma is as the heart

of my life/work, reversing the effects of colonization, dismantling

external and internalized oppression.

The grief is micro, macro, meso. Sets of interlocking, intersecting,

concentric circles. None of the pains are separate.

::

Surveying my poetic body for this gathering, I chose pieces

examining the nested narratives of larger and smaller interwoven

histories/herstories. Not just personal grief, but larger, emblematic,

inter/trans-national grief.

What I was looking for and found: a sense of the epic, of cataclysm,

apocalypse. The most devastating work, the pieces, unwhole, that

sought to do the greatest repair. The pieces that broke me. The

pieces I had to break again and again in order to make mosaic my

fractures; only jagged edges could convey some scopic sense of

wholeness, as the narrative itself was frayed, the narrators, too.

The pieces that seemed like too much, I thought of self-censoring,

for fear of repercussions— would this work end me, leave me

ostracized, for exploring the things I did, for going there?

Certain work of mine has been rejected over a 100 times before an

oppressed/marginalized community publication has chosen to

publish it. Editors have written back notes saying they really wanted

to publish it, but didn’t want to lose their readership. It took 7 years

to publish one piece, finally, in 2008. It has since been published in

multiple countries. The times changed. We, our movements and

courageous visibility and life-risk-taking, changed them. Now

everyone will want to retcon their previous histories, say they were

always accepting, but that was not so. We do not need to be

celebratorily gaslit.

::

Deeper into darkness we must go. We must move beyond

demonization of the dark, past/through the blinding whiteness of

racial blizzardhood that erases our narratives and the winterproofed

lives that produce them.

Shadows, clouds, deep soil, the womb, night skies, outer space, the

midnight zones of each ocean, our own and our lovers’ skins,

ancestral memories, the pan–people of color futures of which we

dream, these are all restorative sites of darkness for us.

That is what we seek to restore: the darkness, before and after the

blinding of the light.