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Trauma, Victims And Patriarchy After #MeToo by Hina Ahmed

Although there have been shifts and tides since the onset of the #Metoo movement, it remains deeply pertinent and personal to so many of us, triggering memories of our own sexual traumas, causing us to speak to the interiority of our experiences and band together like never before.

It is no surprise that the movement has triggered my own repressed memories of men taking advantage of me in a variety of different contexts, all sharing the paralysing and confusing state of emotions and behaviors within shared intimate space.

In one particular encounter, a trusted male friend intentionally broke our initial contract of consent and then proceeded to lie to me afterwards. The day following the incident my phone and Facebook account were flooded with his messages, all begging for forgiveness, followed by selfies of his sad, guilt-ridden, frowning face. Saying he ‘didn’t mean it,’ that he ‘was in a stressful period of his life,’ that he ‘deserved sympathy and understanding,’ that he ‘would never do it again,’ that I should ‘just forgive’ him.

Furious and overwhelmed, I blocked him.

With the help of an experienced therapist, I was able to explore the full range of my emotional experience, from regret, to self-blame, to disappointment, to rage, to sorrow. I learned that each emotion would play a pivotal role in my recovery process.

It was during this process that I felt the pain of confronting the fact that a trusted friend of 10 years violated me. I also questioned the power this encounter had to erase the context of our friendship, as well as the moral question of whether or not it should. My therapist also helped me realise that I didn’t owe him forgiveness.

After a few weeks passed, I decided to unblock him. A brief conversation followed in which I confronted him with my anger, my hurt and pain.

“I understand. I am sorry. I know nothing I will ever do will change what happened. I hope we can still be friends,” he said. A part of me felt that would be impossible, and yet a small part of me wanted to consider keeping him in my life, wanted to hope that our relationship could recover, that we could move past this, that the painful memory of him, didn’t have to be the only, or last one of him.

But then, a few weeks later, the news came.

“I don’t know how else to tell you this, but our friend took his life last night.”

I sat, paralysed. “WHAT!” I exclaimed.

“I’m sorry. I don’t know the details, but I thought I should tell you.”

After several days of uncontrollable crying, what followed was a series of many more therapy sessions, where I realised that I could hate what my friend did to me, without hating him, that I could see him as an extension and victim of the patriarchy and that my ability to sympathise with his victimhood, did not erase my own.

This leads the conversation into another necessary direction. One of my critiques of the #MeToo movement is alignment with Tarana Burke, who told The Washington Post: “The problem is we hone in on the perpetrator and rob ourselves of opportunities for reckoning. Culture shift doesn’t happen in the accusation, but in grappling with necessary questions.”

We need to turn our attention to the systems in place that have allowed for the patriarchy to take over; systems such as capitalism and fascism. Although public shaming of perpetrators can be an effective tactic of resistance, we also need to move beyond that. We need to recognise their victimhood in these structures as well. The patriarchy has victims of all genders.

We have an increasing responsibility to take the lessons learned through #MeToo and turn them into actions of resistance against the exact powers that violate us, as they exist within our administration, within our political parties, and within the domestic policies, notably in the United States, but in other nations as well.

We have the power to push legislation, organise our communities, and speak out in the name of justice. Our lives depend on it.

identity

Shoot In The Dark

They call them tests.

Unlike in school, it required no preparation on my part–my performance had little to do with the outcome. The completion of such tests didn’t move me closer to a tangible achievement; there was no diploma on the horizon.

The whole point, as explained to me by the agency, was to get a single good photo that could be used for my promotional materials. I, like all models, had composite cards and a portfolio that needed constant refreshing.

Photos sour quickly like milk.

The memory of one such session hasn’t diminished over time. It lives in the recesses of my mind, safe and comfortable in its long term housing.

It happened in Miami when I was nineteen years old.

Not that I wanted to be in Miami in the first place. I wanted to be in New York. And I didn’t want to be a model used for bathing suit and lingerie work but that’s where I had found myself. My youthful agency had given way to a fatalism fed by despair.

There I am; in a black bikini, sitting on a stranger’s lawn in the dark. Around me stand five men–the owner of the house, the photographer, a makeup artist and two others who played no clear role. I’m waiting for the photographer to inflate a baby pool.

It was impossible in those days to feel heartened but I could still feel degraded by what was about to happen. An unflinching conviction that I was more than the sum of my physical attributes burned softly in a deep place, as it always had.

The pool was filled with ice cold water from a garden hose. I got in slowly and lay on my back with my legs stretched out in front of me. My head had no firm place to rest; I draped it back onto the grass. The camera clicked away; each shot marked time propelling us toward the end. The photographer paused: something was missing, but what? That something was ice cream toppings.

Someone went in to the kitchen and brought out fudge sauce, whipped cream, and cherry syrup.

The guys who were just there started pouring it all over me. Having the liquids land on my body was bad enough–but then they reached my face.

I think one of the amused male onlookers asked me to open my mouth but his aim was poor and a cherry landed in my eye. I blinked and closed my eyes against any more exposure. With no vision, I could only feel the fudge being poured in figure eights while the cherry fluid kept raining down; the occasional soft cherry landing on my neck or torso.

Someone said “This is like a Hugh Hefner cocaine party”, everyone laughed. I did not.

This wasn’t a joke I could be in on even though the photographer expected me to appreciate the satire. If this was satire, they were off the hook.

Finally there were enough pictures. I was given a hand to get out of the pool. The owner of the house offered me his shower and I made my way to the bathroom while everyone else sat downstairs.

Any relief I felt from the shoot being over was quickly replaced by fear that the photographer would join me in the shower. He’d already picked some blades of grass off my back in a way that alerted me to his intentions. The urgency to get out before an intrusion didn’t make the work of removing sticky fluids from my hair any easier.

I got out of the shower prematurely but alone and back to the over populated model’s apartment where I lived. Some fudge remained in my hair. I’m guessing the photographer gave me a ride; the agonizing alone time ultimately unavoidable. No attempts to touch or kiss; I got lucky.

The pictures were never used. I didn’t even see them. Those hours shooting, that loss of dignity served no commercial purpose.

Weeks later when the photographer called me to say my body looked amazing in the images, I shuddered at the reference to a record of events.

I choked out a “thank you”.

community

Psychological Impact of the Trump Era by Hina Ahmed

A good friend of mine recently asked me to write a piece on the way that depression has impacted my life for a friend’s blog. Through the process of thinking about it, I have come to realize that the psychological illnesses that I have incurred over the years must be situated within a body that embodies the history of postcolonial trauma.

My ancestral heritage goes back to British mandated India, where members of my family broke away first from Great Britain, and later from India, where they eventually formed the Pakistani identity with the formation of the state of Pakistan in 1947. During the 1970’s my father immigrated to the United States and my mother later followed when they got married. My siblings and I were born in the United States, where we reside now as a part of the growing South Asian diasporic community.

In order to better understand myself, I have come to think about how the traumas of my ancestors have affected my own body. The emerging field of epigenetics suggests that the manifestation of genes is actually altered as a result of the trauma in ones environment and that these altercations can actually be inherited. Epigenetics has made me think about how postcolonial bodies may actually carry the trauma of prior generations in their own bodies. I believe my impact from postcolonial trauma began at birth causing me to struggle with both depression and anxiety for most of life; which has only been made worse with the election of Trump.

The institutions in place during this era have facilitated psychological encroachments on our minds as they have created systems that maintain and produce cultural trauma and promote cultural separation and racism today. This inevitably has had an impact on the psychological wellbeing of those of us directly targeted by this administration. These institutions are part of policies that are rooted in discriminatory and racist ideological frameworks that make the following possible: stop and frisk, a delineation between ‘legal’ versus ‘illegal’ immigration, a normalization of police brutality, violent and acceptable forms of border patrol, and the Muslim ban, just to name a few.

As a result of the institutions that are necessary for the livelihood of Empire, I, like many first generation immigrants have struggled with an identity crisis. Born into a western world with Judeo-Christian values, I always found it challenging to situate my upbringing based on eastern values and Islam within white Empire. As a result, I often struggled with self-doubt, double consciousness, and feelings of helplessness and despair. Who was I–when my eastern and western halves often felt at odds with one in another?

For me personally, living as a Muslim woman in the Trump era, answering this question makes me define precisely what I am not. I am not a terrorist, I am not a jihadist, I am not a ‘security threat.’ Therefore, I often feel that I am in opposition to the mainstream narrative that has been imposed on me, whose goal it is to reduce my identity to nothing but the oppositional mouthpiece of Empire itself.

I have come to realize that this oppositional narrative must be eradicated for true agency and resistance to emerge. As marginalized groups living in this country, we must create and define our own authentic narrative independent of the one that has been imposed on us.

My personal experience has made me think about the countless marginalized people in this country and the ways in which simply living amidst these trauma-inducing institutions has damaged their psyche. A relevant question for us to then ask is: How have the feelings of personal despair, depression, anxiety, PTSD, and suicide rates amongst those affected by Trump’s policies shifted since his election—and what does this mean for the psychological welfare of our nation? Furthermore, what does it mean for our current treatment methods of mental illness?

I think it is imperative to reconsider Eurocentric models of treatment that tend to universalize trauma and simply prescribe medications as the solution to a complicated narrative that must be situated within the individuals personal and lived experiences. I call on the fields of western medicine and psychology to both create and expand space to consider the political unconscious amongst postcolonial identities in their treatment methods. Doing so would open the gateways for western medicine to shed its colonial skin.

Another empowering approach may be for the patients themselves to claim their own space in healthcare settings, instead of waiting for permission to be granted to them, or further yet, for them to create alternative spaces of healing for themselves.

The pathologization of mental illness among the colonized cannot exist independently of the structures of the Empire in which they currently reside. In order for a complete healing and agency of a people to occur, an end to the psychological dominations of Empire would be necessary. This will only emerge from a collective awakening and a determined resistance to its imperiling power.

Category: identity

Trauma, Victims And Patriarchy After #MeToo by Hina Ahmed

Shoot In The Dark

Psychological Impact of the Trump Era by Hina Ahmed