In the Mood for Love & Revolution

Is this love?

For as long as I can remember, preparing for the worst has always been a part of my routine. Growing up as a South-Asian-Muslim-American in post 9/11 America, I was not allowed the same kind of innocence my peers had as children. I learned that for every hyphenation my identity accrued, I was perceived as a greater threat against what it meant to be American, and therefore unwelcome. Eventually, “go back to where you’re from” became less like vitriol hurled at me and more like kindness. After all, isn’t it a much safer place to be where everyone else looks like you, knows your culture and speaks your language? This country had no love for me, but I was still loved within its borders by the people I came from, and that had been enough. What I was never able to prepare for, though, was the sudden alienation from where I once belonged. Through greater self discovery, I became divided further by these hyphenations, and gradually became less like the people I found refuge in. I was no longer the curious and intelligent child but the insolent and disrespectful young woman who didn’t know her place as I resisted gendered expectations and grew critical of bigoted traditions. I grew aware of my culture’s flaws– the classism, racism, rampant misogyny and homophobia, the refusal to accept those who went against the norms. I aired out these flaws and I embodied their fears, just like the Americans had. I became hard to love.

But is this love?

I often find myself grieving my own inability to find the connections I yearn for in life. Yet, I find myself wanting better for the very people I felt abandoned by. Within my complicated relationship with my own community, I can't help but empathize. They are only like this because they have their own traumas to process. No one can hear my pain because there are things that they don't talk about, deep aches that cannot be identified let alone cured. I can separate myself from my culture, my community, myself but to an outsider, I am one of them still. Perhaps the reason I cannot come to hate my own community is because they are me, and whether I accept it or not, I am a part of them. I cannot simply reject or shake off the things that cause me to be marginalized, and so, I am once again a member of the community that I abandoned but cannot let go– the community that abandoned me but where I remain in its grasp. Grief. Feelings of low self-esteem– rejecting the communities I was a part of because they were deemed unworthy and unwelcome by those around me and because I was no longer welcome in the spaces I belonged to. I blamed myself on both accounts, using internalized racism as a shield and a means of assimilation. I viewed these hyphenations as teeth, defanging myself in order to make myself more palatable, ignoring how I would never be able to smile the same way again.

Grief. A growing apathy, a poisonous thing that festers if left unchecked. We live in a time where every bad thing that happens in this world is broadcast on big screens and streams of information that follow us relentlessly, all while we feel helpless to stop it. At the same time, we live in a world where humanity is devalued unless it is profitable or productive. How do you care about anything in a society that clearly doesn’t care about you?

It is very easy to fall into this pattern of thought and grow resentful. It’s almost comforting in its familiarity, masochistic as it is. The loss of love and the struggle to navigate the notion of love is a concept that bell hooks was all too familiar with, writing in her book All About Love: New Visions: “but it was love’s absence that let me know how much love mattered… we can never go back, I know that now. We can go forward.” In the study of care ethics, a feminist approach to moral education, love and justice are intertwined, and it is implied that there is a significance in the foundations of relationships and dependency on others. bell hooks writes: “there can be no love without justice.” The loss of love had given hooks the opportunity to look at the concept of love objectively. “To love consciously, we have to engage in critical reflection about the world we live in and know entirely.” Running on resentment, your entire platform becomes a constant cycle of antagonism. You begin to isolate yourself and alienate others, and your capacity to see beyond yourself shrinks. Once you’re alone do you wonder– who are you fighting for? It's one thing to be anti-oppression, to avoid it, and condemn it loudly– all from a position far removed from the actual site of the conflict. But where is your solidarity? Are you uplifting the people facing the brunt of the oppression you stand against?

Love and the desire for better for your community should be the driving force behind activism.

Separating emotion from community does nothing but push people away from activism, making it an isolating experience rather than a collective effort. Ultimately it becomes detrimental to an individual and their cause. You are not alone. There have been people who have come before you to create the tools and language you have now, and that there will continue to be people after you to prolong the fight– as long as you give them the ground to do so. In other words, you need to know the people you’re fighting for and fighting with in order to really fight for anything. Love does not exist in a vacuum, it requires dedication and understanding. In hooks’ words, “being aware enables us to critically examine our actions to see what is needed so that we can give care, be responsible, show respect, and indicate a willingness to learn.” For University of Central Florida professor of humanities and cultural studies, Dr. Christian Ravela, community is both his identity and profession. “My work is driven by love and curiosity for these communities” he says. “I grew up in Southern California in a largely Asian American suburb of Los Angeles. As such, it forged me and others in obvious and complicated ways that merit attention and acknowledgement. My academic community, on the other hand, has been the vehicle to explore such questions and gain critical distance and appreciation… [for a panethnic racial community like Asian Americans] The internal differences, multiplicity, and heterogeneity of Asian American as a category puts so much pressure on the very notion of community.”

Khaled Itani, a UCF alum, med student, and former leader within the undergrad Asian American community at UCF proposes that the solution to apathy is collective effort. “If we are apathetic from now in relatively minor positions, what guarantees us that once we have a greater say in society that we will be in the headspace to influence the discourse? Our communities [...] need to believe in the power of collective change and part of that is believing in ourselves, it will always be an uphill battle but if that's our argument for complacency then what is the point of anything? Not taking a risk is a risk in itself.”

The key is to reach out to others despite the opposition you may face.

Itani connects his activism with spirituality, describing his view on his community with: “this dynamic [community] has multiple layers as not only are we connected by cultures with ultimately similar values and interconnected histories via the Silk Road and Indian Ocean Trade, but also we share a post-imperial identity as children of the global south who grapple with the effects of colonialism and empire on our histories in one way or another… being able to bring people together is a struggle no doubt, but it is a humbling privilege and quite frankly an act of worship.” For him, his relationship with his community is a labor of love, appreciating the ways the facets of his identity differ and overlap. This in turn allows him to view these communities as a collective of individuals and empathize with them on a more personal level. He is unafraid to connect with others and understand where they are coming from regardless of where they stand. “It takes an element of faith to soften your heart and ask why our communities are the way they are [...] from fear of losing everything they gave themselves up for to build, to they themselves becoming jaded after being so optimistic and believing in the power of people to change their conditions before some tragic war or socioeconomic hardship beat that out of them, life is hard and people deal with it differently”

What I had to learn while navigating my grief was the maintenance of boundaries, objectivity, forgiveness, and recognition. A slow and painful process, the ethics of care functions as the key to balancing yourself and maintaining a healthy relationship with yourself and others. According to psychologist Carol Gilligan, the ethics of care develops in three steps: first– a focus on caring for the self to ensure survival, second– the transitional phase where the criticism of selfishness and the understanding of connections between the self and others leads to a sense of responsibility, and third– the balance of the self with others and the relationships between them.

I first learned to maintain boundaries. Constantly allowing others to invade your boundaries causes a corrosion of the self, eventually leading to burnout, apathy, and a loss of love within the self.

Mechanical Engineering student and former student leader at UCF, Duc-Tanh Nguyen had experienced such apathy and loss of love over the course of his leadership. Only after stepping away and refocusing his notion of community was he able to overcome it. “A way to recover from apathy is to reprioritize your own objectives in life,” he says. “If you can move forward with the new goals for yourself, do so. By doing so, if the community that you struggled to engage with comes back in your life willingly, then it was a sign that you belonged there and you just needed time.”

In a conversation with bell hooks, her mentor Thich Nhat Hanh explains: “The reason we might lose [love] is because we are always looking outside of us. That is why we allow the love, the harmony, the mature understanding, to slip away from ourselves… that is why we have to go back to our community and renew it. The love will grow back.

“So the question is are we practicing loving ourselves? Because loving ourselves means loving our community… Anything you do for yourself, you do for society… anything you do for society, you do for yourself.” The search for community is an inherent part of personhood, where people suffer terribly in its absence.

The inverse is also true, a community is nonexistent without the people within, and cannot develop or progress without individual effort. It is imperative that intersectionality remains within the foundation of one’s activism and advocacy, as no person has a singular identity. Constructive criticism of a group, movement or ideology is another form of love, a call from within that indicates that there is always room for improvement and that there is someone willing to bring changes to light.

Think of yourself and the things that make up your identity and your place in society and its intersections. Think of those around you, the ways in which you are similar, the ways that you are different, what makes you stay where you are. In All About Love, hooks writes: “Loving friendships provide us with the joy of community in a relationship where we learn to process all our issues, to cope with differences and conflicts while staying connected.” It is only really with the help of others that you will find the meaning of community, be it your family, your friends, or people you choose to do work with. Only then will you be able to find meaning in what you do.

Life involves the constant learning and unlearning of things. This is why you must constantly go back and start from the ground up. Think of the little things, like love itself. I find love in actions like peeling oranges for someone despite not liking the taste of citrus. I find it in the color green, the color of the earth, and in how plants can grow despite the hostile environment around them. It's in the way we learned that one of the first pieces of evidence of society was a healed femur, which showed us how humanity had made it this far not through survival of the fittest but through the caring of each other. I even find love in my own grief– because what is grief, if not love persevering?