It’s time to stretch, and darken.

The unfortunate consequence of coming to know love is feeling, more precisely than before, its absence. Whole years that were unremarkable before now bruise and punish.

I am the last of my siblings to take this step to procreate, and our conversations have entered a new territory, even with my brother, who is stoic to the point of being insensate, who professes not to remember, nor to want to remember – even he has enough memory to say, ‘How could they have treated us like that? I would never, I could never.’ Our punishments included being beaten, denied food, locked in our rooms, but worse than the abuse was the neglect that was the norm, the indifference to our schooling, our anything. My sister weeps, often, at the smallest infraction, the tiniest mistake made with her children and then rocks, afterward, with pain at the distance between her love for her children and the love, or lack, given to her from our own mother. Having fallen to the same urge, I can see that it comes not from love but ego, and damage.

The questions I have learned to ask are, ‘What must they have been going through? How much pain must they have been in to be able to hurt their children at all? How much pain were they dealt, that what was given to us they called ‘better’ than they ever had?’ They being my aunty and mother. Born in Lebanon, taken away from their country to a colony across the sea, abused daughters who became teenage mothers, single and struggling, I insist on giving them their context. I insist, too, on knowing and naming the harm done, on not excusing it. I do this in silence, I do this on a white page silken with quiet.

What can the throat, a few chords, achieve that the heart cannot? Sometimes I wonder if a refusal to say the words is a refusal to let go of the pain, which, after all, we formed a sense of self around. What would we be without it?¹ To lose the pain must we lose as well the self that endured? Is forgiveness anything more than an obliteration?

These are the questions I have learned to ask. These are the questions that face every country, and every colony too.