Dear Comrade…
This is a creative piece of writing that invites folks into thinking about the ongoingness of the Covid-19 pandemic [and the denial of this ongoingness]. In my research and personal experience I have found a lot of movement spaces do not want to think about Covid, and want to go ‘back to normal’ as the rest of society has. This piece aims to encourage our movements in responding collectively to the pandemic as well as to centre disability justice in our work and to trouble what ‘normal’ means on the left.
I frame this as a conversation through a letter drawing on a transformative justice lens to resist polarisation, and understand that what I write is troubling, but that it has also been deeply troubling to see the ways our movements continue to marginalise disabled and clinically vulnerable folks. One of the strengths of our movements for liberation is in turning towards the trouble, not away. The writing isn’t perfect – it is tentative, sometimes perhaps too much so – there is no template for transformative justice. I’ve been motivated by the deep desire to invite folks into conversation and towards action – of the importance of collectivising our response to Covid. I hope this letter will enable this, and spark ways in which we can strengthen the capacity of our movements to respond to our current moment.
Dear Comrade,
How is your heart?
Mine is heavy, but hopeful, the times are difficult, discombobulating. I’m reaching out to you to ask if you will sit alongside me and listen with curiosity to some of the wonderings I’ve been having. Some of this might be difficult, but I deeply believe that our relationship can sustain that and also deepen through it.
| How can we get curious together? I’ve learned some practises to help me along the way that I find create more spaciousness within me to be in relationship and movement. From the Resilience Toolkit I draw on a bodyscan practice to ground me and arm sweeps to soothe and settle…maybe you’d like to try them too [please see the resource list at the end of this letter]? Maybe you have others you could share with me? |
As the polycrisis [a term to describe multiple, intersecting crises and disasters that impact on one another] escalates I have been reflecting on how adaptable we are as humans as our conditions change and worsen. However I wonder how we might adapt too well, and how this might be leveraged towards normalising and simply adapting to worsening conditions rather than challenging the systemic forces and structures which produce these conditions.
These are intensely difficult times, and I wonder how we are encouraged towards blocking out, numbing and denying what we know about the conditions we live under and their significance or impact. And what this means for our movements and futures.
Can we ‘back to normal’ our way through crisis when the crises keep coming?
Despite our deepest commitments to witness and end suffering, I am wondering how systemic denial of suffering shapes our movements. How might we stay attuned to the ways we are re-couped into the status quo and the parameters of the normative?
I have been sitting with some questions, maybe you’d like to reflect on them too?
- What is being kept on the margins of our awareness?
- What are we not attending to?
- What do we know but cannot currently acknowledge?
- What would it mean for us to turn towards what we don’t want to name?
- And if we do this, how do we tend to ourselves and each other?
Take some time here to think about the things that our movements have moved to the margins, or moved out of awareness. How might this denial have kept us safe? How has it helped us survive? How has it threatened our survival?
| I’m taking a moment to check in with myself – maybe you’d like to join me? |
I want to talk to you about our movements and Covid. We are in Year 6 of an ongoing pandemic. I’m wondering what you feel when I say that?
- What do you feel when I name Covid?
- Can you feel this in your body? If so, where? If not, what other sensations are arising for you?
- Whether you can feel this is in your body or not, what wisdom is your body sharing with you?
- Is there something here that is finding it difficult to hear me name Covid?
- What is it?
- And what is that taking care of within you?
- What does this part of you need?
| Again, I invite you to pause for a moment here, you don’t need to race ahead. Pace yourself. But stay with me. |
I want to welcome with compassion what you are feeling as I name Covid and the pandemic. These times are more than any one individual can bear and this is why I want to talk to you and invite us to be alongside each other. There may be grief, denial, numbness, overwhelm, a desire to turn away, detachment.
I think it is a deeply human response to experience these emotions in relation to the pandemic. However, it is also the deepest commitment of our movements to practice community safety, everyday accountability and be vigilant to the ways in which we might reproduce harm.
How can we collectively shift denial of the ongoing, significant impacts Covid has on our movements and communities? How can we be brave and look at the ways in which we have abandoned disabled folks, the clinically vulnerable, and ourselves, to go along with the ease of ‘normal’? A normal that most of us, in principle, thoroughly reject. How has this been shaped by the long histories of marginalising disabled folks in our movements?
| I’m taking a breath, maybe you’d like to as well |
We know that harm doesn’t exist in a vacuum, or that one person enacts harm out of nowhere. In our movements we understand we must collectively challenge structures of power which produce harm, and resist the ways we are collectively encouraged to collude in this harm. How could we collectivise responsibility and accountability for Covid? How can we collectivise responsibility for keeping folks in our communities and movements safe during an ongoing pandemic?
This might feel scary, confusing or burdensome, but what if we were transformed by this process? What if there is something more generative and expansive on the other side? Could this help our movements to build their capacity for responding to polycrisis and our changing world?
The world has been cripped – how can we centre this in our movements?
- Through centring disability justice and covid justice
- Embracing the inherent vulnerability of our own fleshy and finite bodyminds – whether we are currently abled or not.
- Be in solidarity with those who have been abandoned, discarded, designated as surplus AND learn from them with humility.
How might we honour the dignity of all of our lives, and build the capacity of our movements to respond to our changing contexts?
Will you join me? All we have is each other.
In deepest solidarity,
Xo
| Resource list Somatic exercises from The Resilience Toolkit Body scan – Scan your body for the most comfortable physical sensation you are experiencing right now. Focus your attention here. Try to attend to the different qualities of this sensation – location, the type of sensation, the texture, the temperature Arm sweeps – You can either do this physically or by using visualisation. Take your right hand and touch the very top of your left shoulder, by your neck, then slowly sweep your hand across the shoulder and down your arm onto your left hand. You could try different levels of pressure, or you could squeeze your arm as you sweep. Then try this with your left hand on your right side. For further information about our movements and Covid you can read our report Breathing Spaces: Crisis, Denial, and Building Collective Care in the Age of Pandemics. |
Related
Herbal Care for Our Times
Introducing plants in our surroundings and homemade recipes that can support us during challenging times.
Lived Experience Mental Health in Times of Covid-19
Learnings from user-led mental health initiatives during the pandemic period.
Anchoring Resilience
A workshop sharing frameworks and practices to reduce stress, address trauma and build embodied resilience.
Skills & Wisdom of Disabled People
A conversation about the skills and wisdom that disabled people bring to surviving and thriving during the pandemic and beyond.
Breathing Spaces: Crisis, Denial, and Building Collective Care in the Age of Pandemics
This report reflects on the Covid-19 pandemic, the denial of its ongoingness and how folks who are positioned as most vulnerable to the virus continue to organise to collectively respond to the current moment.
Deaths by Welfare
Explore the the Deaths by Welfare Project timeline, podcasts, resources, and videos. Together we are transforming our understanding of welfare state violence.
No going back
HJL’s Health Justice Researcher Dr Stephanie Davis writes on the future of collective care, labour and organising in this short fiction piece.
Inside Movement Medicine: Meet Macole
“I’m learning how it also starts from the self and how it is at the cellular level in which we create ripples and changes at a more macro scale. Innerstanding that being in the body, as a site of transformation, simultaneous effects broader structures. So much of the time we are understanding oppression by intellectualising it.”