The memory in our bones

Photo credit: Booker T. Sessoms 2022

The stars we see don’t really exist.

I had a lot of time to think about this over the weekend, as I was on a sailboat, offshore, away from the media, with no moon to light up the night. All you could see was the expanse of the sea. And the stars.

We all learn this in primary school: the stars are so many lightyears away, that the constellations we observe are a message from the past, a memory of what was. The shooting stars I saw died eons ago. And yet, their imprint is here, generating joy, longing, awe.

We are part memory too. The lived experience of generations resides in our bones, our nervous systems, our ways of reacting to the world as it is today. Sometimes we call it intergenerational trauma, but mostly, it just registers as internalized bias and irrational fear: triggering points we don’t quite understand, outsized emotions that feel somehow unrelated to facts.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but in the aggregate, the memory in our bones — intergenerational trauma — is what gets us genocide. And equally horrifying, it is what makes it even halfway possible for us to excuse or justify or ignore genocide. My grief for this dehumanization is so massive, I need a new word for grief.

But this is not inevitable.

Unlike the stars, we have choice, conscience, free will. Unlike the stars, we can act. As the world watches the election unfold in the United States, my second homeland, we must remember that an election, even as momentous as this one, is just one moment in time. We can choose joy, life, love, also after the election. We can choose to oppose genocide and war.

We can choose to honor the memory in our bones that says: we are all made of stardust and water. We are of the earth, and we are in this together.