[Barriers to, Practices of, a Cleansing for, A Prayer for] Solidarity in a Time of War

By Janet Arelis Quezada

Barriers 

I’ve been reflecting on the barriers to solidarity that keep our individual and collective power bottled up. We learn through childhood traumas to isolate which restricts our flow to each other. Institutional messages privilege individual gains at any cost to this beautiful planet and constrict our natural concern for each other. Things are structured so that we are constantly encouraged to compete with each other for attention and resources instead of flowing and connecting. Greed, exploitation and disregard siphon off our encoded ancestral gifts of wisdom, compassion and interdependent resilience. We are kept in cycles of want; always needing more to survive so that we don’t have time to create new realities. The rent gets higher. Water and food are unsafe and inaccessible. There is less civic space to construct respectful solutions to our conflicts. Our Earth is bombed and mined to pieces. Our beauty falls to the cult of violence. We cannot move with dignity from place to place. Our heart, despite all the pressure, works to keep us alive literally by pumping blood, spiritually by being open to an active, liberated love across our specific realities. 

Practicing Solidarity 

In Bahia during their festival of Sao Joao, I looked up at the pink, green, red and white banderías dancing in the winds strung up between the buildings.

Indigenous, African and Caribbean spiritual worldbuilders teach me solidarity practices. I’ve kept pictures to help remind me of these lessons including one of a cemetery in Cangrejos, Puerto Rico. In the picture there is a close up of some pink and red flowers tied to a pillar surrounded by raised tombs as seen from below. I think about the free Black people that founded Cangrejos during enslavement and colonialism. I think of the Black people now in Cangrejos working hard to learn more of this history and continue connecting future generations to the technologies that were almost lost. I understand that liberation is an ongoing ancestral assignment. 

It takes work to embrace vulnerability. To admit that I can’t live this life alone. Realizing that although I can decide how to act and react I’m not in control. Reaching out despite misunderstanding, rejection or betrayal. Knowing that the more I love, the more I will grieve. 

It’s joyful to be myself. To tell others that I care about them. To weep at the ocean shore. To recognize life in the tree, the butterfly and the rock. 

In Oaxaca women come together to talk about their problems. They create a center to test solutions. They teach themselves ancestral medicines that had almost been lost. They organize cooperatives. 

In California they create spaces to exchange cultural knowledge respectfully. They inspire each other to deepen their own relationships with their ancestors so that they can hear each other better. 

In Puerto Rico they mark forgotten histories, organize mutual aid pantries, keep familial traditions alive and reclaim abandoned buildings. 

In Bahia they lead with spirit, they steward the land, they craft a non punishment based safety, they celebrate unique expressions of love and beauty. 

In Boston they gather caregivers together to learn with each other, they widen and strengthen the connections and expand the “we,” they continuously collect and tell stories of survival. 

In Miami they share healing technologies, they invest in youth and elders, they make lakay, bohío, yard and solar in new spaces. They share the medicine of music and dance. 

Solidarity practice requires vulnerability, humility, joy, intelligence, love, organization and the willingness to repair and try again when we fail each other. I’ve seen examples of what can happen when two or more people organize responses to our struggles led by heart and spiritual wisdom across differences. 

Cleansing

This is the hard part. 

I am lonely sometimes. I am still learning how to give up the myth of control and self sufficiency. I lack resources and power. I’m sometimes overwhelmed by how hard it is to stay joyful as I witness so much death, imprisonment and neglect. It is hard to reach out when I’ve been met with so much silence. The spiral of family trauma in its shell of structural trauma in its shell of global trauma is hard to carry. 

I offer a cleansing. I gather the herbs. I sing the songs. 

I pass the incense throughout the house. 

I move my body to shake off the indecision. I use my  garabato to pull away “the way it has always been” and “what can we do when they have all the power” so that I can somersault into action. I’m shaking my head and laughing. 

I see you now. I’ll offer you my full attention and my full self. Let’s see what we can do together. 

It’s your turn to cleanse and dance.

Questions

In Bahia during their festival of Sao Joao I looked up at the pink, green, red and white banderías dancing in the winds strung up between the buildings pictured here. My head was and is full of questions. 

Is the harm that has been done to the ocean, the rivers, the animals, the plants and our human liberation and integrity irreparable?

Are we all irredeemably selfish?

Will despair, depression, addiction and desperation win?

Will the corporate entities divide us up?

What do I really know?

What is real?

What is true?

Will our ancestral technologies survive the renewed, resurfaced and reimagined techniques of colonization?

Is it in our destiny to win? 

How can we heal what has gone on before and what is going on now? 

What roles can I play?

Prayer

Entities of love whatever your name and origin. 

God, ancestors, Orisha, Eggun. 

Allah, Jesus, Adonai, Waheguru, Creator, Bhudda. 

Loving secular wisdom. 

Thank you for life. Thank you for however we show up; leaf, feather, scales, water, grain of sand, breeze, flesh and blood. 

Thank you for our relationships. 

Thank you for the possibility we still have to be a higher expression of that love. 

May you help us remove the barriers so that we can live in peace and joy. 

May we end death, violence, neglect and want together. 

Author bio: Janet Arelis Quezada writes about family, migration, grief and healing in her poems, narrative nonfiction, plays, films and short stories. She draws from her experiences as the queer daughter of Black immigrant parents from the Dominican Republic who still has extensive roots and family back on the island. She has worked alongside communities in New York, the Bay Area, Los Angeles and now Miami fighting for peace, health and survival in lands that are overexploited, under-resourced, gentrified, polluted, policed and unjustly distributed. She is the oldest child, a Pisces and is guided by Yansan and eggun. You will find her writing in special edition of Palimpset by SUNY Press on Gayl Jones’ work; the Florida Review; Ambientes: New Queer Latino Writing edited by Lázaro Lima and Felice Picano, in La Galeria Magazine as well as in the Huffington Post and The Advocate. She has a BA in English Literature from Wellesley College.