It's Quiet Uptown: Forgiveness

I woke up this morning at 4:28am. Ever since my husband died, i always note the time I wake up. I slept through his death. I will never forgive myself.

My first full, theoretical, thought around 5am was about forgiveness. I had been scrolling through twitter and someone had posted a question about forgiveness. The tweeter suggested that that we were not giving forgiveness enough consideration. They said "Like in Hamilton 'Forgiveness, can you imagine?'" and then went on to preemptively take on the twittersphere around what was certain to be a rejection of the considerations of forgiveness.

This was many days before, what I believe will be understood by critical and social theorists as a historic moment, Brandt Jean publicly forgave his brother's killer. I was ready to stand up for forgiveness. Until this point I would have said I believed in forgiveness. I needed forgiveness. The world needed forgiveness.

"Forgiveness, can you imagine?". That is one of my favorite lines in Hamilton if not of all time. It occurs in the song "It's Quiet Uptown" and it starts with the lyrics: "There are moments that the words don't reach. There is suffering too terrible to name. You hold your child as tight as you can. And push away the unimaginable." The unimaginable. Things too powerful to name, and too terrible to forgive.

But people do forgive, or at least they are expected too. Brandt Jean is an example of the kind of forgiveness that belies human self-preservation. And for Jean, there is a G-d - a Christ - that directs us toward the forgiveness of grievous, unhealable wrongs. Many of the news stories talked about Jean's "grace" in forgiving his brother's murderer. And, it would seem, the more heinous the injury, the more public the forgiveness is supposed to be. Forgiveness is voyeuristic.

We socialize our children to forgive with the same, if not higher, level of compulsion as apologizing. "Apologize to your sister. Now, accept her apology." There is a problem here. Often, people are criticized for not apologizing but the assumption, I think, is that there is already a moral gap in the person apologizing. The consequence of apology can be justified - the apologizer is wrong. Forgiveness, however, seems to be measured on a singular moral scale with the forgiver being located as a better person and therefore beholden to give forgiveness because that - forgiveness of unimaginable harms - is what good and moral people do. It is a concept I have never quite understood.

"The moments when you’re in so deep...It feels easier to just swim down." I have been swimming down for a while now, Swimming away from the pain and suffering that there are no words for. I can hear my own heartbeat in my ears in that deep, suddenly too quiet, kind of way. There is no way to articulate the grief, the trauma, the harm. Watching Botham Jean's family, as so many other families have, struggle to even stand under the weight of their grief, loss and irretractable harm by another person. The court process, the verdict, the waiting, the hoping for the right outcome - the punishment of your child/brother/lover's murderer, is somehow supposed to be ... enough. And, when the verdict is or is not, nearly, mimimally enough, your should be grateful. You should feel vindicated, relieved, supported, seen, uplifted ... you should feel - enough. And, you should forgive. You MUST forgive.

In this iteration of life - the how I got so far having experienced so many bad things iteration of my life - my center... the way I cope... has everything to do with letting go - with forgiveness. So, I am pretty surprised to find myself pushing back against forgiveness. I am pushing pretty hard. I started writing this essay before the verdict in Botham Jean's case, but Brandt Jean's forgiveness moment certainly has strengthened my sense and/or rejection of forgiveness as a necessary part of restoration and healing. I actually kind of think forgiveness, as a requirement, is actual bullshit.

Forgiveness is a construct. Forgiveness is human capital. Forgiveness is the capital of suffering. Forgiveness is a commodity. Forgiveness is not objective. Forgiveness is where we direct people who have been harmed repeatedly, unimaginably, rather than directing them to intentionally created spaces of restoration. It is the place to which we compel the harmed rather than spaces of healing.

Forgiveness is not healing. Forgiveness is a command performance. Forgiveness is hegemonic. Forgiveness is the only thing that people who have been stripped of everything have left to give, to bargain with, to pay ransom with ... to have extorted from them.

I am known for challenging ideas of morality, ethics, reasonableness as hegemonic constructs. I ask "whose morality"... I am not a lot of fun at parties, or meetings, or in general. I feel the constraints of these constructs in the dominant, oppressive ways they are intended. I have seemingly always understood that the leveraging of morality and reasonableness have always been a power move to silence and/or negate me and people like me.

I never thought to problematize forgiveness. "Can you imagine?" I never thought about forgiveness as oppressive or dominant, I always thought forgiveness was a power unto the forgiver. I never thought about the ways that one is, as a practice of morality and ethical reasonableness, pressured into forgiving. Sentenced to forgiveness.

It will save your soul. Forgiveness is for you not them. Forgive but don't forget. Forgiveness has been constructed as grace, as self-mercy. I have always thought about forgiveness as a necessary part of my self-healing. I have regularly sought forgiveness from those who have no power to resist my relentless pursuit of absolution. I expect to be forgiven. I have never been able to forgive thoughtlessly. Perhaps, I have never been able to forgive at all.

I cannot forgive my parents, not my adoptive nor genetic parents. I cannot forgive my living genetic relatives who continue to withhold vital information about my identity. But every single conversation I have with people about adoption, about the violence I have experienced in and because of adoption, they tell me to forgive.

I can let go. I can understand. I have done neither of those things around my willful genalogical dislocation... my abandonment. But, I have let go of some really heinous things. But forgiveness? I am not certain that I have truly forgiven. And, today, I am not certain such a thing even exists. What I am more concerned with, however, is the expectation of forgiveness.

Why would I forgive a person who willfully and maliciously abandoned me and a genetic family that will do nothing to repair and restore me ... as a person ... as a family member. How could I forgive a person who violently abused me, another person's child, for decades. My adoptive mother asks me to forgive her regularly. She says it as if it is my duty. She is my mother. It is what I am supposed to do. I don't. And this is not a can't ... I simply will not.

Forgiveness is a construct. Forgiveness is not objective. Forgiveness is not passive nor grace-filled. Forgiveness is doctrine at best. The compulsion of another to forgive, is violence. Forgiveness is violence.

"Can you imagine?"

More soon...

Baby Girl