JOE-ANN CHAVRY
A year ago, I prayed, asking God to show me how to love. I asked them to open my heart again only to realise that it had never actually been. That little heart of mine was shaken, bruised and on a permanent rollercoaster, but it had never been open.
Growing up, I internalised that the best way to protect my heart was to shield it from the world – to never reveal too much of what it could hold. According to my elementary understanding of life, my heart was in constant danger of being misunderstood; I had to protect it at all cost.
God heard my prayers. They delivered me with the richest form of heart-to-heart and intellectual connection with a man I never thought I’d meet, let alone hold close to that little heart of mine. In addition to this God granted me another gift: the love of self.
I suppose that God felt bad for me and tried to make up for all those years of lovelessness. That was a double-edged sword. While my newly-opened heart was hesitantly learning how to love a romantic partner, like a new-born foal learning how to walk, it was also suddenly attuned to its own desires. It was starting to feel awake in places it had not been awake in a long time. It started to feel braver, sturdier and hungry for life. My heart started negotiating with my brain about scenarios that once felt scary. My brain had been the captain on board for a while now; favouring rationality – whatever that meant – and safe choices, but there seemed to be a shift. The idea of leaving Mauritius again did not seem so unfathomable. It had lived the past decade on a flight or fight mode. But suddenly, the idea of going back to university was not what nightmares were made of anymore. The idea of expanding my mind and my universe didn’t seem like something that “wasn’t for me”. It felt like it was very much for me.
At first, I told myself that it was temporary; that my budding romance had me wearing pink-coloured glasses. Brain suggested that I was seeing “la vie en rose”. However, my heart continued to expand. It was finally opening, forcing me to listen to it.
“What is it, Heart? What do you want?” I asked.
“I am hurting”, Heart replied.
“I have tried to protect you, and yet you hurt?” I said.
“Yes, I do.” It continued “I was silenced, and now I am hurting so much that I need to know why. I need answers…I need to heal.”
“How do we do that?” I asked.
“We leave, to understand the world”, Heart answered.
Beloved author, professor and black feminist, bell hooks, whose loss many of us still mourn, once said: “I came to theory because I was hurting—the pain within me was so intense that I could not go on living. I came to theory desperate, wanting to comprehend—to grasp what was happening around and within me. Most importantly, I wanted to make the hurt go away. I saw in theory then a location for healing.” I can resonate with that.
bell hooks further sees love as the “practice of freedom” which is absent from our current neoliberal societies. She remarks that there is very little political discourse on love. Without an ethic of love shaping the direction of our political vision and our radical aspirations, we are often seduced, in one way or the other, into continued allegiance to systems of domination—imperialism, sexism, racism, classism.
Like her, I find baffling how women and men who resist and oppose one form of domination can be systematically supporting another. I am puzzled by powerful visionary male leaders who can speak and act passionately about emancipation, work in resistance to racial domination and yet remain silent on sexist domination of women, or by feminist women who work daily to eradicate sexism but who have major blind spots when it comes to acknowledging and resisting racism. I remain startled at people professing their love for their country, calling her “Motherland” only to defile her by littering at any and every chance. The ability to acknowledge such blind spots emerge only when we expand our concern and understanding of politics to care about the exploitation and oppression of others. To hooks, a love ethic makes this expansion possible.
As a country birthed through colonisation and a culture of domination we are brought up on anti-love. We learn that tough love is somehow “for our good” and/or that showing emotions is to be weak. These days, we also operate within a framework of competitive consumer capitalism that teaches us to see love as a business deal. It runs on a concept of love that assumes that the machinery of buying and selling of needs is what makes world go round. It regards life as a market and love as a variation on free enterprise. Although many of us recognise the commercialisation of love, most of us see no alternative. Not knowing how to love—or even what love looks like—we often feel emotionally lost, and search for definitions; for ways to sustain a love ethic in a culture that negates human value and valorises materialism. Likewise, dating apps contribute to our neoliberal subjection by allowing us to love from a safe distance. As French philosopher Alain Badiou reflects that such artefacts represent a “safety first” kind of love. By obtaining a photo, details of his or her tastes, date of birth, horoscope sign, controlling swipes etc., you can assess whether a person is a relatively “risk-free option”. In a time of hyper-realism and speed, love becomes a transactional convenience; nothing more than ticking a box on a neoliberal bingo card.
To hooks, however, the practice of love offers no place of safety. We risk loss, hurt and pain. We risk being acted upon by forces outside of our control. In his popular self-help book, The Road Less Travelled, M. Scott Pecks contributes to the reflection on self-esteem, self-love, and our ability to be intimate in relationships. He explains that while everyone in our culture desires to be loving to some extent, many are actually not loving. He continues with “I conclude that the desire to love is not itself love. Love is as love does. Love is an act of will – namely both an intention and an action. Will also implies choice. We do not have to love. We choose to love.”
I was presented with a choice: be with the lover I had asked God to put on my path or give Heart a chance to heal. It felt unfair. I was starting to feel “at home” in that place that never felt as such, but Heart wanted us to take off. Heart was right. Education is allowing my critical consciousness to emerge and be sustained. It is providing me with a blueprint that aids me in the process of personal and political self-recovery. As I explore how systems of domination operate, I am also learning to look both inward and outward with a critical eye. Reflexivity and awareness are central to the process of love as the practice of freedom. Whenever members of exploited and oppressed groups dare to critically interrogate our locations, the identities and allegiances that inform how we live, we go beyond resistance towards transformation. The moment we choose to love we begin to move against domination and against oppression. The moment we choose to love we begin to move towards freedom. We act in ways that liberate ourselves and others, and that action acts as the testimony of love; as the practice of freedom.
(Self)love comes with living with our choices and often walking a long, lonely road. Heart and I are part of this journey, together. We will walk that road till the end…and we don’t mind Brain tagging along too.