Soul Care - Part 1: The Reckoning

Soul Care - Part 1: Reckoning 

I am overwhelmed with where to begin. I suppose that's why it has taken so long to write this.

My experience is that deconstructing and decolonizing is a slippery slope after all. Because once you go looking where you were told not to, there is no going back to the way things were.

The truth has consequences.

The more you uncover, the more visible the cracks in the foundation. From faith to history to worldview, and it doesn't end there, the understanding of self and identity also comes under review. Some of the things that once provided a sense of comfort and reassurance in trying times must also be examined.

For me, the narrative of my immigrant parents working hard for a better life after Great Britain impoverished India is just a sliver of a larger truth. 

Colonization never ended.

We are just in a different stage of it now. The settler colonial stage. With this realization, ancestral grief is juxtaposed with the current and perpetual grief of realizing that we were never actually free from it. We, in fact, help to uphold it.

It is from this space that I want to tell you about my time in stolen Palestine. I want to tell you that I have been to Israel. 

But before I go further, know this: This piece and the ones to follow are not about penance or seeking absolution. This is a reckoning. For the sins I did not know I committed. An exploration into the insidiousness of empire. How its tentacles continue to grip generations long after independence on psychological, spiritual, cultural, and material levels. I did not create this beast, but I am seated in its belly.

This is not intended to be my magnum opus; I say this so I do not further delay. I am scratching the surface of a work that is a lifetime in the making and will continue to unfold with every breath until the end of my days.

Let us begin.

I always had a reverence for Judaism. I grew up in the Jewish corridor of the historic Devon Ave. in Chicago, known by some as "Little India" due to the concentration of South Asian businesses that made a home there in the early 70's. Before that, it was populated mainly by Ashkenazi Jews. My neighborhood consisted of a large number of Hasidic, Orthodox, and Reform Ashkenazi Jews. When my family moved into the neighborhood in the 1980s, we were part of a wave of Indians, Bangladeshis, Koreans, Assyrians, Chinese, Romani, and Filipinos, making a way for themselves as first-generation immigrants in this new place. The Hasidim did not engage with us. They remained within their exclusive blocks. The Orthodox and Reforms fled to the nearby suburbs as more of us entered the neighborhood. Regardless of their attitudes and not-so-subtle dislike toward us, my father insisted we respect their way of life. Having been a religious minority in India, coexistence and community care were virtues in our home, even if not reciprocated.

We were Christians, and our holy text called them "chosen" while naming us gentiles. They were special, a people set apart, and we were the perpetual other by birth, by migration, by dispossession, grateful to be "grafted in" by way of Jesus, grateful to be allowed in by way of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, and a nursing shortage in the United States. 

Our neighbors next door, the Dukulskeys, had 3 children who were a generation ahead of me and my brother. Each one made aliyah after college and permanently settled in Israel, as their "right to return" rarely ever visiting their parents. I did not find this strange, as my parents taught us about the Paradesi or Cochin Jews on the Malabar coast of my mother's home state of Kerala. The Cochin Jews claim roots that stretch back to the time of King Solomon. After 2 millennia dwelling on the Malabar Coast of Kerala with no incidence of antisemitism, a majority of the Cochin Jews made aliyah to Israel in the years following 1948. When I visited "Jew Town" in Cochin in 2001, only 15 descendants remained. As the child of migration, I did not see anything wrong with it, per se. As a daughter of the Global South, part of me did wonder why, after 2000 years, they yearned for that land instead of the one that allowed them to flourish in peace, even under occupation. But I was in my early 20s. There was so much of my own story, faith tradition, and identity that hadn't been given room for interrogation, so this too would not be revisited until much later.

I will close here to allow myself space to breathe. Room to sit with the questions of, How does the language of Chosen and Gentile shape our identity? What does the language of being "grafted in", an outsider in the context of religion, inform how you see yourself and your sense of belonging, when you are the child of migration, when you really do not belong anywhere? Not in your country of residence or the kingdom of heaven without an asterisk? How does migration, coupled with being a religious minority within your people group, shape your worldview and allegiances? What does learning intimately the details of one group's suffering over and above all others do to your understanding of your own oppression, and the oppression of others? How do all of these things inform who you see as innocent and who is viewed as wicked?

I find that shame is a crippling emotion that does not serve me when grappling with these difficult questions, so I am going to lean into honesty and truth as my North Star in this sojourn, and I invite you to do the same. As I post this, we are 668 days into the assault on Gaza, while the whole world watches the intentional starvation of the Palestinian people, orchestrated by the state of Israel. Just like Great Britain did to my people in Tamil Nadu. I know what this is,

This. Is. Genocide.

To quote Ta-Nehisi Coates, "oppression in itself is not ennobling." Oppressed people absolutely can and do oppress people.