‘Uprooting Our Stories’: A Reflection
Sometimes, the most profound gift we’re given in a lifetime is the gift of witnessing, i.e., of having our pain and joy witnessed and to witness another’s pain and joy in return. In collaboration with Juice Magazine and Pardesi, Gifted by Nature’s ‘Uprooting Our Stories’ invited us to journal together, unearth answers, and more significantly, verbalise important questions about our complicated identities as South Asian women. Audre Lorde famously wrote that ‘without community, there is no liberation’. If that evening of journaling, conversation, and meditation were to be summarised in a single neat word, it would be exactly that: liberation.
We began the session with the image of trees. Vicky Pasion introduced the session, ‘I use the word “uprooting” because I imagine all of us as trees, growing and stretching towards limitless possibilities as we uproot our inherited stories.’ Like the tree that sheds and grows simultaneously, we empowered each other to resist the systems and hierarchies that dictate how much space we’re allowed to take up. With each journaling prompt, we uncovered the sense of purpose we needed to flow uninhibitedly beyond these systems, like the indigenous rivers and seas that brought us here. And by sitting with each other, dissolving the distance between our laptop screens with our focused attention, I like to think we began reimagining and rebuilding a reality that affirmed each incongruent yet coexisting facet of our beings, like the tree that changes shapes and colours in seasonal cycles, yet stays grounded in the place it always was and is meant to be.
We journaled and spoke about the warring ways our personal and collective histories manifest in our daily lives and inform our present fears, strengths, insecurities, and successes. While exploring our intangible heirlooms, a lot of us made discoveries about ourselves: how a pervasive duty to family informed a lot of our decisions, how our practices of boundary-setting had been warped by extended family dynamics, why we struggled with leadership and authority as a result of years of confusing assertion with disrespect, among many other illuminating conversations. In this collective act of affirming ourselves and each other, we began shedding the weight of our bloodlines and the trauma and violence they carry. We upheld the legacies of the matriarchs that came before us by briefly leaning on each other for comfort. Over the course of our mutual explorations and discoveries, we began to embody the tree that sheds and grows simultaneously: stretching, uprooting, evolving.
Each of us self-admittedly started off the evening feeling overwhelmed; by our political climate, by the easing of restrictions after a year and a half of confinement and anxiety, by the discomfort of transitional periods in our lives. We are the flag-bearers of the burnout generation, after all. However, after spending almost two hours in each other’s company, I remember returning to a sense of lightness and warmth. I say ‘returning’ because it’s a feeling I recognised from 2 am phone conversations with a long-distance friend, or from sitting on the kitchen countertop and listening to my mother’s girlhood misadventures. It was the sublime and familiar aftertaste of unwrapping that very precious gift: the gift of witnessing, and being witnessed in return.