By Sol Abejón Olivera*
I write this text deeply connected with many parts of me: with the pain for the Genocide in Palestine, with the rage that comes up in me living in Europe and seeing how I am not doing anything to stop this issue, with the anesthesia that immobilizes me to do something, and with the feeling of guilt for not doing anything while people are being killed.
I see how this doing nothing is the result of a numbness, which gives me the privilege of being able to disconnect from feeling what is happening. An anesthesia that I sometimes consciously create: I don’t want to read. I don’t want to see images. I don’t want to connect with the genocide, and another that is unconscious, my body unconsciously anesthetizes itself as a reaction to the impact of the violence of the Genocide, and to a feeling that this is very big and cannot be stopped.
Yes, Genocide is something very big, which has happened in other historical moments. It is a ghost that awakens other ghosts and the wounds of the collective and historical trauma of other Genocides: the Holocaust, the Armenian, Rwanda-Burundi, indigenous peoples in Abya Yala and all colonized lands, the Genocide of the slave trade and slaves in Africa, slavery…. And the Genocide that is being caused on another scale, but which is also Genocide, the Schengen area and the different laws around immigration in Europe. And it is happening right now, also in other parts of the world: the Democratic Republic of Congo, Yemen, Ethiopia, Myanmar, and all those I leave out. I apologize for not naming them.
This anesthesia that I feel is also ancient: the people who lived next to the Holocaust extermination camps, carried on with their life as if nothing was happening, just like other segments of the population worldwide. People who colonized and murdered “Indians” (Native Americans) did not react to such bloodshed. People who were merchants and participated in the slave trade felt no remorse. We decide to do as if nothing is happening when people are dying every day in the Mediterranean.
I repeat, all these named parts are in me; the privilege and anesthesia, the guilt, the rage, the pain, the freezing, and the pain of connecting to other historical traumas like the Genocide of Abya Yala, the present one, and the immigration laws.
And, right now, I am and want to be connected with the part that wants to break this anesthesia and wants to do something, wants to get out of the traumatic response of freezing, of dissociation, of running away, of disconnection; to connect with my body, connect with the world channel, connect with the emotions of pain and rage; connect with the other part, with Palestine and death, with the Genocide.
Movement and action are ways to transform and avoid trauma.
The other option, staying with the unprocessed freezing, anesthesia and guilt, perpetuate it and perpetuate Genocide.
I want to break the silence of trauma and say: Stop! We have to talk about this and we have to do things.
Invite all of us to go deeper into the freezing and the dissociation and find what is useful in that state and then use that so that we consciously act to Stop the Genocide in Palestine! And all Genocides!
*student about to finish the Process Work Diploma and member of the Process Work Institute.