The loneliness of violence

Posted by anarcholatina on 2023-08-02

If you are privileged enough to live with a source of income in a first world country, it’s possible to maintain this illusion that violence is something that happens far away—in time, space, class: it happens to other type of people, to poor people who live in distant countries, in wars we read about in our history books. Everyone knows that this peace is an illusion; but it’s still a shock when it’s your turn for the illusion to shatter.

After you clock a few more encounters with violence, you start feeling like you live in that faraway world, the world of history book wars, of pop media’s violent imaginary. The boundaries of reality thin; the people from your life are the ones that seem faraway now, living in some distant land where you can sit on a restaurant without choosing a table with a view to the door. Where you can get off a bus and not wait on the stop until everyone left and you’re sure no one is following you. Where you don’t jump when a lover touches you from the back.

You can’t talk about this, not meaningfully. If your community is a queer community it is easy to find people to talk about sex and gender, computers, anime. If your community is a leftist community it is easy to talk to people about the finer points of various theories and what type of anarchist you are and what behaviour is inappropriate from male comrades. It’s hard to talk about how it feels to have experienced a murder attempt or three or four. It is very hard to talk about how it feels to have learned to mobilise violence within yourself. It is hard to talk about how to defend oneself in concrete, let’s-do-it ways. Ask in a political group who wants to do a protest about the latest political outrage, who wants to do a zine about carework in anarchist assemblies etc.: it is easy to mobilise people this way. Try to ask who’s willing to come to fight with you in case the boots come knock: uncomfortable, guilty silence.

In USA movies, war veterans go to veteran bars where they recognise the presence of this silent ghost hanging around one another’s souls. But the type of violence we experience, as targeted, marginalised communities in times of rising fascism, is a violence that marginalises us further. You know that there must be other people who are coping with the same things, but they are staying very quiet, for safety reasons. There is no bar for the bashed.

The worst part is that this is how things should be. Much as this wall of realities isolating you from everyone increases the weight of trauma, I can’t exactly wish that more people around me understood what I’m talking about. Sadly I think more people will, soon, regardless of what I wish or don’t wish.

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