Let Our Angry Passion, Liberate! Chapter 1
The Advice of the Nobel Laureate Whose Thought, Word And Deed Is A Blessing For Children in Need
All my life, I’ve been told I should not get angry, or that my anger is too challenging, and renders me a ‘troublemaker’. The funny thing is, each occasion was always about me talking with passion about some sort of injustice. The response? Mostly it was rage-filled resentment, attempts at intimidation and passively aggressive actions like stonewalling and the silent treatment. Whether it was my mother, relatives visiting us, or boys at school calling me and my friend racist names, I generally answered back. I was, I believe, very fair-minded, as children usually are. From adults, I asked for reasons, for them to explain what they were doing or demanding from me. But from when I was eleven or so, to the present day, decades, on, my mother still drips her cold disapproval over me. “This one is like a volcano”, she would complain to my father.
The first big disagreement with my mother happened when she told me I could not read the Koran while having my monthly flow. Bad enough, that this monthly bleed was happening (which had come as a complete shock) but then to be told it made me unclean, impure, made no sense. I was kind of confused to be told this, but then began to feel deeply insulted. So I did my usual thing. I asked questions.
ME: “Why do you say I am impure? Is it my fault Allah made girls’ bodies to bleed every month? And what’s dirty about blood? Blood is the source of life”.
MOTHER: “Be quiet! How dare you answer back!
If my mother or father slapped me, they never gave a warning first. At school though, it became my practice to gave three warnings before I silenced the boys — it was always a white boy, being nasty and calling me racist stuff. (I was the only girl of colour in my year). I recall being in the lunch queue when I was around 12 or 13, and this Italian boy decided that calling me names would impress his friends. After three warnings telling him to stop didn’t work, I punched him smack on the nose, giving him a nose-bleed. I didn’t learn this anywhere, it just came naturally.
A few months later, there was similar scenario, this time on the school bus going home. So again, I gave three warnings before I got up and punched the white boy in my year, for making a younger girl cry by calling her racist names. I was happy to achieve the same success: a bleeding nose for the bully and a stop to the name-calling.
When I was fourteen, I ran across a field to put myself between my eldest sister and the three skinheads ( a man and two women) who were threatening her. I had a skipping rope with a wooden handle in my hand and I started to swing that as one of the Whites approached, while the other two egged her on. Suffice it to say that a few minutes later, they melted away when they saw a group of people approaching, but not before yelling that they would hang me fom the nearest tree.
I felt no fear, only a deep anger. It was my anger that made me stand up to them, swinging the handle of the skipping rope and protecting my oldest sister, who was twenty at the time. She had gone over to this field that was left a bit wild to pick a few wild flowers to press.
Later, in situations at work where students of colour were neglected/ financially exploited, and even as an activist on the streets, my independent thinking and speaking up against various kinds of wrong-doing, meant that a shame-fest was always being drummed up around me.
Generally speaking, not the bully, the racist at work or the man harassing me on the street faced repercussions but in tackling them, I have been constantly told to put a lid on my anger and not be so ‘confrontational.’
So coming across a Ted talk, ‘How to make peace? Get angry’, definitely caught my attention! The man who won the Nobel Prize in 2014. Kailash Satygraha gave his Ted talk a year later, in which he urges people to ‘Get Angry!” Of course, I was mesmerised.
It’s amazing to think of him as a five year old, gazing at another child his age, who was sitting by the school gates working with his father, as a cobbler. A five year old child, repairing shoes! At that tender age, Kailash began asking questions. “Why is that child who is my age, not going to school?”
As a teenager, he noticed some of his classmates having to abandon their studies as they had no money to buy books. In response, he and other of his friends from the high-caste, Brahmin families, began an initiative that led to thousands of books being donated. The headteachers of several schools joined in, cooperating to collect and donate books. Later in his life, how many thousands of children he saved from working in quarries, or carpetweaving, and the ugliness of sexual exploitation? Over 90,000 to date. This is absolutely the most beautiful thing I’ve heard of, in quite a long time!
What could the world be, if more of us got in touch with our compassion and sense of justice, what could be achieved if we too, joined up our intellect with empathy and the energy of anger, to propel us to think up solutions and take action?
It was back in 1980 that Kailash Satyarthi set up the ‘Save the Children Movement’ — in the Hindi language, ‘Bachpan Bacho Andolan.’
Under its umbrella, activists and volunteers of all kinds have taken direct action to free thousands of children from slave-like conditions of work all across India. Brother Satyarthi’s remarkable, long-sustained campaigning has had international repercussions and benefits in the following decades. It is most fitting that he won the Nobel prize in 2014 (jointly with The Pakistani schoolgirl Malalai, who was shot for her commitment to girl’s education.)
I’ve always had clarity and passion for justice but I do feel painful about how little I have achieved in comparison. The first thing I did when I left my parent’s home and started university was to go to a solicitor’s office and change my name by deed poll. I wanted to differentiate myself from my family of origin and their narrow identification with Islam, along with the compulsion to please ‘community leaders’ by complying with misogynistic traditions.
It was mostly my sense of responsibility for my parents (who depended on their children to read letters in English and negotiate the bureaucracy for their business) that made me go back to the parental home again and again.
But on reflection I see how this weakened me profoundly. Because, too many times when I went to my parents and family of origin, I was undermined, demeaned, mocked, ignored, rejected and isolated by my siblings and lately, even, their adult offspring. It’s been a continuously devastating monstrous ‘ thing’, leaving me often bewildered. If it wasn’t one of them, it was the other; and sometimes two or three of them, backed each other up standing together to shout at me.
Returning to the peace of solitude in my own home, it would take me a few days and even sometimes, weeks, to get my emotional balance and energy levels back.
Part of me kind of wishes now, that I’d had the clarity to leave them completely as this great man Kailash Satyarthi left his family of origin, when at the age of 15, he stood up against caste discrimination. He was threatened with being ostracised unless he went to the River Ganges, took a dip and then washed the feet of Brahmin priests and drank that water as penance for being around ‘untouchables’. He refused.
He dropped his family name, changing his surname to Satyarthi, meaning, ‘Seeker of Truth’. And then he steadfastly worked to protect the most vulnerable children, over all the following decades of his life, right to the present. After watching this video of his Ted talk, I sat still for quite a while, last night and asked myself many questions…
What sensibilities did I leave behind with my childhood? How deeply am I moulded into the conventions of my society, with its generationally- inherited patterns of hierarchy, abuse and exploitation, to prioritise my parent’s needs, far above my own?
My siblings realised that after our dad had his first heart ttack, I would not answer them back, for fear of upsetting him. The older and more frail he got, the more they took advantage to aggress against me, over the few days of my visit. My love for my parents, and sense of protectiveness, became the anvil upon which I was, one act of indifference, aggression or abandonment at a time, getting crushed by my siblings.
Was my sense of self and feeling of responsibility too enmeshed with my parents?
‘Parentification’, is the term I’m looking for, actually. I realise I was trying to protect my parents from the age of around 11, when they acquired a business and needed my skills in English to help them deal with the wider society, whether customers, legal stuff, the bank, police etc. When my needs clashed with theirs, I mostly abandoned myself.
In contrast, I think the sense of self as it typically develops in the West, focusses very strongly on the individual and that one’s rights and needs. However, the Western consciousness has become atomised and divorced from the sense connectedness to family, society and the nature that sustains all Life. The divorce is of almost schizophrenic proportions.
In the typical Western consciousness, what each person thinks, says and actually does,has become increasingly disconnected. People’s thoughts words and deeds have become as compartmentalised as their private and public selves. This sort of schizopherenia is enabling great harm to be perpetrated on the social and environmental landscape.
Just like the German citizens under the Nazis, too many of us say, “I’m just doing my job” as we pollute, create pesticides that poison our children slowly, we overconsume, and take part in systems of exploitation whose consequences we do not see immediately. For instance, I had one watch , at the age of 12… when that stopped working, I got another wone, when I was 21 or so. Forty years on, and my ten year old nephew was showing me his collection of ten watches. One given by grandparents, one he got at the airport on his way to a holiday, another, a birthday gift from Dad etc etc.
Our retied neighbours a couple, have got three cars. One is a fancy little classic sports car, another car is hers and the bigger one, his for everyday use.
Overconsumption defining ourseves by what we possess has become normalised in late stage capitalism here in the over-exploiting U.K.(I refuse to call this society, developed’.
But there is room for hope. While there is the mainstream movement towards overconsumptiom, more and more people are joining the dots between their inner experience and the outer world. More and more of us refuse to buy a rug made by the slave labour of children, or we are trying to buy goods without plastic packaging, and growing some of our vegetables in an effort to reduce our carbon footprint. Now is the time that we need to make much more drastic changes to our aims, goals, habits and lifestyles. I believe we need to return to the clarity we had as children, when we noticed the adults’ double standards and hypocrisies.
Are you willing to join hands with that innocence and use your passion to make a difference?
‘Rage against the dying of the Light’ I wrote on a placard protesting cruise missiles at Greenham Common. But then I did not manage to sustain that level of protest. My youngest sister told me when I got back from a demonstration against the invasion of Iraq, ‘It’s time you grew up’.
But is it ‘childish’ to refuse to accept the reality that demands child sacrifice?
But all these years later, as I saw Quakers packing their lunches like they were going on a picnic, and driving off in their well-heeled wellies to the protests that have become fixtures on the activists’ calendar, I’m feeling that street protests and petitions have in the West, become mere performative actions, that might make protestors feel better, but have they ever really achieved any meaningful change?
Endless talks and written analysis, along with attending protests, that are ‘managed’, by the most sophisticated state apparatus in the Western nations, nowadays seems to do little other than make the participants feel a bit better. But when all is said, but nothing effective done, what changes actually happen? None! It’s time we got in touch with our life-giving anger so that we are propelled into meaningful action — the creative loving ways which Kailash Satyarthi has demonstrated.
Thus. A better world is possible
