Written in 2018.
I’m reading one of Maria Popova’s essays on Brain Pickings and listening to When Rivers Cry by Rwanda singer, Somi. In the essay, Popova quotes Nietzsche, who claimed that heroism is the ability “to face simultaneously one’s greatest suffering and one’s highest hope.” I think about this. I think for a moment about my time in Yonago, Japan. While there two years ago, I fell several times from my bike – grief-stricken, motionless – onto the street.
I moved to Japan in mid-2014 to seek medical care for my decade-long illnesses. My first year there was the most terrifying period of my life. I was crippled by fear, shame, thoughts of death. One morning, as I rode my bike to work, I lost control of my limbs and fell. As I lay on my back, paralysed and cold, I had flashbacks: mother’s hand around my neck, uncle’s hand around my neck, rope around my neck. My heart thumped the tarmac, thumped hard. I closed my eyes and tried to die.
I wonder if Nietzsche would have dismissed me as a coward for reaching for death, for wanting to surrender during what was also the most auspicious period of my life. I think of how societies demand that victims perform heroism. We are expected to suppress our grief, to perform wellness, to carry, often by ourselves, the weight of what fills us with rage and fear and shame and hate.
Recently, in one of my classes at the University of Bradford, I shared a story I’d never shared in public. A story about the dead man I discovered at age ten. Sometimes this memory haunts me – the strong scent that pulled me from the trail to his corpse in the bushes, the maggots spread like garb across his torso. No one thought of hugging the boy who’d discovered the dead man. People shrugged and resumed their day. I also mentioned my friend who was raped several times, on separate occasions, by different men. Who performs wellness in public – in her many leadership roles – who, whenever she calls reminds me how, even now, ‘everything feels like rape.’
I think of Nietzsche’s words and wonder what he meant by “one’s highest hope”. Whether, in the midst of one’s greatest suffering, one’s humble resistance – or the offering of one’s self to the daily rituals, survival – is not also, in some ways, heroic. “It is difficult to think yes or up" writes Yuknavitch in The Misfit’s Manifesto – “when all you know is how to hold your breath and wait for horrors to pass.” Is this waiting for horror to pass not heroic? There is a “different suffering story”, notes Yuknavitch, “that cannot be corralled by a culture that asks you to process your suffering in ways that make you a good citizen.”
A longer version of this post was submitted as part of a portfolio for a conflict resolution course at the University of Bradford in 2018.
Juleus Ghunta is a Chevening Scholar, children’s writer, a member of Jamaica’s National Task Force on Character Education, and an advocate in the Caribbean’s adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) movement. His picture book Tata and the Big Bad Bull was published by CaribbeanReads in 2018, and he is the co-editor of the December 2019 and March 2020 issues of Interviewing the Caribbean (The UWI Press), which focus on children’s literature and ACEs in the Caribbean. His new book, Rohan Bullkin and the Shadows: A Story about ACEs and Hope, was published by CaribbeanReads in December 2021. His Notebook of Words and Ideas, which features prominently in Rohan Bullkin and the Shadows, will be published in 2022.
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