Darkness into Light
A story told by Erin Graham of Vancouver Rape Relief and Women's Shelter, a participant in the Canada-Burma Women's Exchange (Women's Resistance, Women's Resilience) held in Thailand in November 2002, coordinated by Inter Pares, as part of the Canada-Burma Capacity-Building Program, with support from our counterparts on the Thai-Burma Border.
In Northern Thailand, on the night of the full moon of the eleventh month of the year, there is a festival called Loi Kratong. At midnight on that night, people float boats made of lotus leaves, lit with candles onto the river. In this way floating away the sins and bad luck of the previous year, and giving thanks to the water goddess for the rainy season. I knew nothing of this festival a few months ago. But my world became much bigger this fall.
Seems like most places in the world have a way to mark the darkest part of the year, and foreshadow the coming of the light. This is a time in the year that is about darkness and dread and death. Humans, optimistic little critters that we are, hang out with despair and try to get it to laugh. We festoon our rooms with sparkly things, we eat all kinds of comfort foods, we seek out the company of our friends or our families. We hang lights, or float lights into the river, or fire them into the sky in balloons or as fireworks. To remind the darkness that there is another side. To remind ourselves that the other side of death is life. After sleep comes wakefulness. Out of shit comes compost, comes gardens full of flowers, roses here, orchids in Thailand...
Listen. I work in the downtown eastside. Everyday I fall in love. Everyday my heart is broken. Sometimes I get stuck, stranded in the forest that I can't see because of the trees. Do you think needles grow on trees? The particular trees that don't grow downtown; the particular trees choking the forest of piss-smelling alleys... It's raining needles downtown into the alleys. And the rainmakers keep me in work. Thank you down. Thank you up. Thank you rock. For giving me a job today. Thank you capitalism and patriarchy for giving me my daily bread. And cake and coffee and way more than I need because I apply bandaids to those who have nothing.
Sometimes my world has been so small. Get up, go to work, apply band-aids, go home, grieve, sleep, get up, go to work, fall in love, apply band-aids, go home, rage, sleep, get up, go to work, apply band aids, sing at the top of my lungs, go home...Sometimes I forget to look up.
What do I know of that kind of life? The violence and chaos that the women I work with live with every day? What do I know of dread? I was raised in sunlight, And the nights lit with a million stars in the sky. Darkness was not to be feared. Nope. Except for the nights after I read those spooky comic books, the stories of phantoms and devils and stuff like that. Even then, it wasn't the darkness of the night sky, it was the mysterious pit of my closet and under the bed that freaked me out. Still does, in fact. So many shapes of my own making and my own forgetting, lurking there...But the sunlit life of my childhood... I was always cherished and protected and encouraged. Encouraged. I did need that courage, though, really. Because I did know dread sometimes.
Sometimes, I would wake up in the middle of the night, my mother at my side, and she'd be saying to me, "Breathe deep and relax, Erin, breathe deep and relax" before I was aware that I was doing neither. Those nights, cool and dark, full of stars, my breathing sounded like grass growing. Like the squeal of machinery, factory sounds, dust on the move. Oceans crashing to shore.
I imagined, for my comfort, that in my chest was a treehouse. A treehouse within a vast labyrinth of branches. And in the house lived a family. This was the Wheeze family, and the children fought, like my brother and I did. The parents got on alright, but sometimes the mother would threaten to come after the rowdy kids with the wooden spoon. That never seemed to settle them down, especially not in the middle of the night. Until my mother made me hot honey and lemon and we talked about the sound of the grass growing, the real sound we could hear in the deep stillness of the night. We talked about what she had wanted to be when she grew up. And we talked about how I was afraid to grow up myself. And in general, our conversation was so interesting, and the hot honey and lemon was so soothing, that the Wheeze family settled down to listen, as if clustered around a radio in the treehouse. And then we all slept.
But sometimes I nearly bought my ticket. For the big trip, the long goodbye. And those nights, my mom would bundle me into the car and drive like a stock car racer through the sleeping town, flying over the train tracks (I don't think we ever caught air, but I always hoped we would) to the hospital on the hill. The treatment in those days was a shot of adrenalin in the upper part of the arm. Holy doodle was that a trip of a different kind. The relief of being able to draw breath was nearly cancelled out by the staccato beat of my sped-up heart. I would be exhausted and wired all at the same time. The Wheeze family dropped to get away from the crazy adrenalin speeding willy-nilly through my blood stream. We waited out the rush and slept peacefully after that.
So sometimes I knew something of chaos and fear. Something about dread. I'm not completely misplaced in the downtown eastside. And I had so much sunshine and love in my life, I can spread it around. It's my job. Hanging out with despair and trying to get it to laugh. It's pretty good, I get to meet people who should be famous, people who survive spectacularly given the world around them that drives them mad. But sometimes my world is pretty small and forested by a zillion little trees that I keep tripping over.
I kinda needed to get out for a while. But I didn't know how. Sure gets dark in the forest early....When I was young I thought I wanted to travel. Everyone told me I should. It was a thing the young did. But I never did, I was afraid for a while of what the Wheeze family would get up to, and how do you say, "Ventolin" in Greek? Then I just became afraid in general, and now I'm in my middle years and I thought perhaps I wouldn't travel. But I would like to go to Newfoundland.
Then I got a chance to go to Thailand. Here's how it went. I am a volunteer Collective member of Vancouver Rape Relief and Women's Shelter. We caught the eye of an organization in Ottawa called Inter Pares (among equals). They wanted to put together a small group of women who were doing social justice work in their communities, and they wanted a member of Rape Relief to be one of that group. Holy doodle. A free trip, to go and exchange strategies and ideas with organized groups of women on the Thai Burmese border. I was afraid. I've never been off the continent before, would I be okay to go? Would things be too scary? Would I do exactly the wrong things? How do you say 'hello? How do you say 'thank you'? How do you say, "what is this I'm eating?" Never mind, I don't want to say that.
Thailand is way different than Canada. It's hot for one thing. And there are bananas growing wild, like blackberries do here. And the grass looks different. But it sounds the same as it grows. There are Christmas decorations everywhere all year long, and the cell phones ring tunes like Jingle Bells and Amazing Grace. I kid you not. And the language is way different, but I learned how to say hello (Sawasdee-ka) and thank you (kaap khun ka), but I didn't say it for a while after I learned it, because Thai is a tonal language and you have to be careful with tonal languages, I know that much. And the people are smaller, and they bow, like this, and in restaurants, the portions are smaller, they are enough. In general there is less. But enough. And also way way more colour, holy doodle. Beautiful and gorgeous and enough.
The women we met are different from us, too. But not much. They are refugees, women who come from Burma, who love where they're from as much as I love where I'm from, but they can't go back yet. They're in refugee camps or just illegal and they yearn so for freedom. Me too, I yearn for freedom. Me too, I want them to go home. In two weeks, those women taught me how much I want democracy in Burma and why it matters to me that some of them are sold into slavery. And why it matters to me that the stuff I wear, the GAP and the Levis and the Reeboks are killing them and their children. It matters to me because they are just like me, and they are just like the desperate brave women I fall in love with every day and they are all just like me except they don't have as much slack in their chain as do I. I flew into tomorrow and I saw how the other 9/10ths live. They have squat toilets and they don't sit in chairs as much as on the floor, and they dress with way more colour, and they're just like me.
Madeleine, who came with us, during one of the workshops we presented, she said, "Enjoy your free trip around the sun each year." She is Aboriginal and knows something about displacement. She knew something about being a refugee, about being unable to go home. And she said "We all get a free trip around the sun every year, together. Enjoy it."
I thought we would see things that would make the downtown eastside look like a walk in the park. And I saw people who had been disfigured by landmines and people who had conjunctivitis from working in the rice fields and people who had goiter and...but they're getting along okay. And I heard of towns in Burma where the citizens were nearly all addicted to the opium they had to grow to survive now...But the refugee camps and the migrant workers communities were well built and clean, not squalid. The people were living in close quarters, but they...Not freedom, but hope. The women we worked with, they're like the women I work with at Rape Relief. They have a vision. They are after unity, democracy and freedom.
They're like us. And they are happy to do what they have to do to get there. They risk arrest from the Thai police, they are in danger from the Burmese military, they are often denounced by their own people, too, for agitating for more, for bringing the heat down on their communities. We exchanged stories with women who had been displaced from their homes, women who had fled armed conflict, women who had or had not escaped being raped and tortured by the military junta in Burma, women who had grown up in refugee camps, never having seen their homeland. I knew they would be brave and inspiring and rowdy and funny and flawed and radiant. And they were.
Just like me. Just like lots of women I know here. They're like us. And the hot lemon drink I had one evening tasted exactly like the hot honey and lemon my mom used to make for me. And the big waxing moon in mid-November hung over all of our homes.
When we left Thailand, it was two days before Loi Kratong. At midnight on the full moon of the eleventh month, the people float boats made of lotus leaves lit with candles onto the river. As the lights float away, it is supposed, so do the sins and the bad luck of the past year. And thanks is given for the rainy season to the ancient water goddess Mae Kong Kha. I don't have a lotus leaf boat, but we have a rainy season, and I have a mini mag light, and I'm travelling every year around the sun with the beautiful people, more of whom I know, now and I'm adding my light to theirs, to yours, so the bad luck will know where to go.
When I'm stuck in the trees, when it's raining needles downtown, I'll remember to look up. The world is not so small.
Click here to read 'Dangerous Places, Safe Spaces,' an article from the March 2003 Inter Pares Bulletin on the Canada-Burma Women's Exchange.
| Reviewed June 1, 2004 |  |
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