First of all, thank you for caring and not looking away. Your witnessing matters. Your help matters. You can donate money to organizations that aid migrants, show up at the Keep Families Together marches and vigils, demand that your government take action to close the concentration camps, abolish ICE and help the refugees. If you can afford to, by all means march to the camps and risk arrest, as so many brave Jewish allies recently have, to stop the cruelty. Any contribution you make to any of these causes means you are using your privilege for good and your conscience will know to breathe a little easier. You have power, and you can be part of the solution.
Some of you, especially my white friends, seem to be wondering why I am not more shocked, why I am not flailing in a panic, crumbling into paralysis, raging up a storm. After all, it is the children of my people who are withering, ill, starving and dying in cages. I am going to answer you with stories, please bear with me as we go down this meandering path.
Fifteen years ago, when I was becoming a therapist, I had the chance to train with several world authorities on posttraumatic stress, including Dr. Bessel van der Kolk. In teaching about the importance of attachment between young children and their parents, he showed us an old black and white British film from the 1950s. It followed a family that checks into the hospital to have their second baby and leaves their toddler for a week in the care of nurses in a separate hospital wing, a common practice at the time. The first day, the boy played happily with the available toys. The second day he asked nonstop for his mother, and cried. The third day he raged, kicked, screamed at the nurses, demanding to see his mother. The fourth day he alternated between being listless and fearful. At the end of the week, when the parents with their brand-new baby picked him up, the child was devoid of any spark, depressed, almost catatonic. It was painful to watch: all it took to wound the spirit of a two-year-old child was to separate him from his parents for one week.
This revolutionary film taught the world about the essential nature of the attachment bond and singlehandedly did away with the practice of separating newborns from their parents in maternity wards in most of the world.
Van der Kolk mentioned other examples. During WWII when London was being bombed, millions of children were evacuated from the city to the countryside in Britain in an effort to save their lives. According to the BBC, "schoolchildren, who had been labelled like pieces of luggage, separated from their parents and accompanied instead by a small army of guardians - 100,000 teachers....
Talking to evacuees now about the events of those days in 1939 recalls painful memories that have been deeply hidden for 60 years, exposing the trauma of separation and isolation and the tensions of fear and anger."
Longitudinal studies that followed show that the children who stayed with their parents in the city under siege fared better (in terms of life expectancy, health and life satisfaction) than those who were protected from the bombing by being sent away from their families.
Separating immigrant children from their parents is the greatest injury, even if they had sanitary conditions, adequate bedding, healthy food and recreation. It will create what we therapists call Reactive Attachment Disorder: an impaired ability to give and receive love and develop healthy relationships. It unravels the fabric that keeps families and communities connected. This kind of trauma gets passed on through the generations. That's why it's included in the United Nations' definition of genocide.
One reason I don't feel as newly horrified about this as you might expect has to do with the history of this country. After 90 % of Native Americans died by murder, smallpox and other ills of colonization; and after Africans were kidnapped, transported in cramped, unsanitary ships and sold into slavery on this continent; the practice of separating children from parents continued through the centuries as a way to destroy the fabric of those communities and ensure their oppression. Slaves were not allowed to marry, but instead were forcefully bred, and African-American mothers had their children taken from them and sold at auction. After the Native Americans' land was stolen, their food sources destroyed, forced into reservations and into dependence on government rations; their children were taken away and forced to attend boarding schools where their hair was cut and they were forbidden from speaking their own language. The United States was built on genocide.
Furthermore, the United States relies on cheap labor from undocumented Latin American migrants. By outlawing their entry into this country, U.S. policies have been separating migrant families for decades. As a therapist I worked with a woman, let's call her Rosita, from El Salvador. She left her two children in the care of her mother and came to the U.S. to make money to support them. She shared a one-bedroom apartment with two other families. She worked two jobs. She sent money home to her kids and mother every month. It took her a decade to pay off her own smuggler and save enough to pay another smuggler to bring her kids here. Her children had not seen her or felt her embrace in ten years. By the time they showed up at my therapy office, they were sullen teenagers, who accused Rosita of abandoning them. It was going to take a huge amount of love, effort and resources to heal them, a family that was barely scraping by. There are millions of stories like theirs.
Some Americans ask, "Why don't those Latinos stay home? Why do they have to come here in the first place?"
Do not think for a moment that Latin America has not tried to remedy poverty, redistribute land, and democratically elect socialist leaders who want to create better living conditions for their citizens. We have. And every time, the long arm of the CIA has torn down our efforts. Every time, the United States government has installed authoritarian, repressive regimes in our home turf. If you don't believe me, all you have to do is read Howard Zinn’s People's History of the United States. Or look up the School of the Americas, a military training school in Fort Benning, Georgia, where Latin American soldiers are schooled in torture and military repression.
I didn't have to read about it, it happened in my father's natal Guatemala in 1954. This is why, after my grandmother died when my dad was 5, his father had to leave him and his siblings when he was 8, to save his own life. He was persecuted for being a “socialist.” The CIA-backed coup that deposed president Árbenz and installed a brutal military dictatorship that killed and tortured every leader of the civil society for decades afterward made my father an orphan and injured him for life. I know because my sister, my mother and I bore the brunt of his wounds: he ruled our home with rage. I cannot see the world except from my perspective: torture reached into my home, into my childhood. What is so shocking to you is not new to me.
Let me tell you another story that begins with torture and leads toward healing: my own and that of many others.
In 1973, the year I was born, the CIA backed another military coup, this time against the democratically elected, socialist government of Salvador Allende in Chile. On September 11th of that year, Doctor José Quiroga was present at the National Palace in Santiago, where he served as personal physician to the president. Dr. Quiroga watched the troops storm the palace. He saw people being executed. He was beaten and tortured, but his life was spared.
Three decades later I met Doctor Quiroga at the nonprofit he founded in Los Angeles, California, the Program for Torture Victims. One of the great ironies of life is that many survivors of U.S.-supported torture seek and sometimes find asylum in this country. This is the luminous side of the United States. Here Dr. Quiroga has helped thousands of survivors recover and get the support they need to rebuild their lives.
At that time I was working as Program Coordinator of a center for survivors of torture from Latin America in Eugene, Oregon. With the help of a special grant I was sent to L.A. for training alongside the staff of every torture treatment program in the country. Thus I came to attend Doctor Quiroga’s presentation on how to document torture injuries in applications for political asylum.
I took a seat among my colleagues while Doctor Quiroga stood at the head of the long table operating a slide projector. Snow white hair and dark eyebrows lent him an air of gravity.
The doctor began his presentation, saying he had 100 slides to show us. On the screen appeared partially nude human bodies with scars. Doctor Quiroga explained their injuries, the instruments with which they were inflicted, what they look like when they are recent, and what scars they leave over time. It was surreal, listening to all the ways humans can inflict maximum pain on each other without causing death; learning about devices that were invented for this purpose. Every time he described a torture injury, I imagined it happening to me. Would I scream? Would I break? Could I endure that without selling out my family and friends?
My colleagues shifted uncomfortably in their seats. Some looked away. We were only on slide 12. One person let out a sob, another retched and ran out of the room, a few more headed for the door.
Dr. Quiroga’s voice boomed, “Don't you look away.”
The escapees froze in mid-step.
The doctor pinned them to the floor with the intensity of his gaze, “How dare you presume to help survivors if you can't even look at these photographs? Your clients lived through this in their own flesh. Your job, first and foremost, is to be their witness. How can you tell me that you can't stand to see a few photographs?”
I wanted to say that a hundred photos were not just a few, but I didn't dare. He was right. I remembered what my West African teacher of ritual, Sobonfu Somé, had taught me about grieving, and I decided the only way I was going to get through the presentation without collapsing was to cry. Remember when I said grief is like water? As I witnessed these injured human bodies, pain entered me and grief ran down my face in the saltwater of my tears. In and out, like my breath, I let it move through me.
On the last day of the training we were invited to a large-group session in a spacious room where chairs were set up in a circle. We were welcomed by a ponytailed Colombian whose hands rested on a conga, and a tall, ebony-skinned Ethiopian in a colorful tunic, before whom stood a tall ngoma drum. In the center of the circle was a table on which an intricate altar had been built in the shape of a village with little houses and tiny people in it.
With confident palm, the men made beautiful rhythms with their drums, and began telling a story about a great big monster called Rage, who was insatiable and terrorized the land. It was an allegory for torture, a story that helped us begin to understand and digest all the information we’d been given in the past few days. Reassured by the drumbeats, I swayed in my seat, and this time I cried tears of relief.
I wish I could remember their names, these beautiful drummer-storytellers who volunteered at the PTV and offered this healing story to their peers. When the story concluded, they had us stand and move, as they led us through a song. “Puramamine… Purasamine…,” went the repetitive lyrics.
I knew this song. Sobonfu Somé had taught it to me. It was a song that called on the ancestors, the mothers and the fathers that have gone before us. This was no simple storytelling activity, it was a powerful ritual that could transform pain into something else. Something I didn't yet have the words to grasp.
I could feel heaviness leaving me and a seed of something beautiful sprouting in the center of my chest. I hadn't just come here to traumatize myself with slides of tortured bodies. I had come to taste the possibility of healing a pain too huge to name, except in an allegorical story, tamed by drums, made pliable by song, and held by a community of people. What I was experiencing in every cell of my body was pure medicine for humanity. I have never forgotten what it feels like, and I want others to feel it too.
But to answer your question: the reason I am not flailing, or wailing or crumbling at the inhumane treatment of children at the border is simply that I know social justice activism is not a sprint, it's a marathon. I can't afford to squander my energy in pure emotion without action. I have been doing this work for twenty years and I've burned myself out before. In the coming weeks I will be sharing with you how I have woven social justice (and climate) activism into my daily life. If you add your ideas to our conversation, we will all become more effective together.
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Thank you Magali Morales for sharing your story, not just of the horrific things that happen in the world, but of the path to healing, and the light that shines through even in the depths of darkness. May all beings find peace.