Landfall: The Air We (Can’t) Breathe
Helen Klonaris
Originally published in Harvard’s Transition magazine, Issue 133, 2022
Of late I have not been able to take in a full breath. I can’t exhale deeply. My yawns are shallow. I don’t know what triggered this. I know it began long before the pandemic. Before I watched the video of George Floyd being suffocated by a policeman pressing his knee, his whole weight, against Mr. Floyd’s neck for a murderous nine minutes. Before the first Santa Rosa fires—the ones that leapt across a four-lane freeway and razed towns and neighborhoods, vineyards and forests to the ground. Before I began sleeping on the couch with a bag at the door, in case I had to evacuate at night. One eye closed, one open to the window and the black forest beyond.
But even that doesn’t fully explain it. It doesn’t explain how the air becomes hard to take in. I remember listening to interviews with scientists on PBS about the dire threat of the loss of oxygen on our planet. We were losing phytoplankton in the oceans because of global warming. Trees across our most ancient forests were being exterminated faster than they could grow back. We might not be able to breathe in another 25 years or so. That’s what they said. And in between these voices on the radio, the chilling cries of black men across America repeat over and over, I can’t breathe.
—
June, 1973. I am six years old. I am lying on my back under a cherry tree in our backyard in New Providence, Bahamas. I am watching the sun stream through branches and leaves, pool honey gold between my body and the canopy overhead. I know light is angelic. Heavenly. I heard that somewhere—maybe Greek Orthodox Sunday School—or I saw it someplace—the oil paintings of golden-winged angels that cover the walls and ceilings of our white and blue stone church on West Hill Street. I am too young to fully comprehend the differences between heaven and earth. Breathing in the sweet scent of warm Bermuda cherries, the slightly damp grass, the dark brown soil under my body, I think this is what heaven means. This, here.
I do not yet know the difference between God and my body. God and this tree. The honey-gold light is everywhere and everything, like the love of God. It is one with my breath and luminous; I am breathing in light. I am breathing in and I am: this honey gold air. Meli is what my grandmother calls honey. Goodness. Sweetness. Streaming.
Later, when I am told God does not live in rocks and trees and honey, in the bees that make it, in the Earth herself, or in my own body, I will have this to remember. This, before. I will know in my cells a different story.
July, 1973. The Union Jack—red, blue, white—flutters in a warm breeze as it descends on its rope, brown hands pulling it firmly back to earth. In a moment, a new flag—black, yellow, and turquoise—will be hoisted, its cloth catching the breeze, rippling, changing the vibration of air, changing how the sky looks to those arching their necks towards an upside-down sea of possibility. I do not yet know what colonialism means. How it works to divide bodies from each other and themselves, from their gods, from their earth. How it changes the quality of seeing. How it changes the air—its makeup, its temperature. But I am already breathing that air, and the rippling out of yellow, black and turquoise that sends waves of new perception across these limestone islands.
Perhaps it is something about this subtle shift in the air that awakens me to other perceptions. I wonder: if there is no difference between God and this tree, God and my body, God and the brown earth holding me up, then why does the air move faster, molecules tighten, and white people’s breathing change in the presence of black passersby on the road in front of our house? I am assuming, in my 6-year-old body, that God is everywhere. Not just the white bodies, but the black and brown bodies of people who are passersby, next door neighbors, the plumber who comes to install the new washing machine, the woman who cares for me and my sister when my parents are at work. Something in the air, tightness of white people’s words in the presence of black people makes me question this—God’s presence. Or, at least, troubles the way I breathe.
When a person experiences a trauma, the first thing they do is hold their breath. In that moment, a part of their consciousness gets stuck. A division occurs between the breathing part of themselves and the part that is stuck, holding its breath. One part goes under, like a drowning person succumbing to the underwater current. The other part, the survivor, gets pulled onto the safety of the bow of a boat, chest heaving. Now there is a perpetual split. The stuck part is always underwater, heavy, holding its breath, unable to breathe, while the conscious part goes on breathing, lighter, unaware of the part of themselves that is lost to the water. That split goes on to become a chronic emotional ache that we learn to live with (a heaviness in our unconscious) and whose source is, we imagine, beyond us. <PQ>Sometimes the trauma is part of this life. Other times it’s part of another life lived before this one.</PQ> Oftentimes, it is the traumas of our ancestors passed down through DNA and memory. In a-lived-over-and-over-again-across-generations expression of the body, a movement that mimics the heaving up out of the water, and the loss of the one who drowned and is exiled to the sea and tides and powdery seafloor. What that expression looks like on a body varies. A going, going, going till the knees give out. A rage that leaps across the space between two bodies and strikes down what is powerless—a child, perhaps. In dreams we hear the waves, the sucking in of breath, the cry just before the absence of sound, the disappearance of some precious thing to the water. In dreams, we are reminded why it would be perilous to wake up. The forgotten cry, the hurt that came before it. We rise groggy, amnesiac.
September, 1975. In elementary school I learn the song-poem, “In 1492, Columbus sailed the ocean blue…”
He had three ships and left from Spain;
He sailed through sunshine, wind, and rain.
He sailed by night; he sailed by day;
He used the stars to find his way…
…October 12 their dream came true,
You never saw a happier crew!
“Indians! Indians!” Columbus cried;
His heart was filled with joyful pride.
But “India” the land was not;
It was the Bahamas, and it was hot.
The Arawak natives were very nice;
They gave the sailors food and spice.
Columbus sailed on to find some gold
To bring back home, as he’d been told.
He made the trip again and again,
Trading gold to bring to Spain.
The first American? No, not quite.
But Columbus was brave, and he was bright.
We learn about Columbus the way Christian children learn about Adam in the Garden of Eden; he is the beginning of all things. His story is our origin myth. We are here now, in these islands, because he set foot here first. And as with all creation myths, this one is the cornerstone of our worldview. My friends and I—black and brown and white children—sing the poem to each other on our playground during lunch. So, in high school years later, we experience a profound dissonance when we come to discover that the Arawak die in the water, in the mines searching for pearls and gold; that they die from disease and outright murder by the Europeans who invade their islands and homes; that Africans are enslaved by the millions, and those who do not die in the water are brought over to replace the disappeared Arawak, among the so many other Indigenous peoples of the so-called Americas; that they are beaten and tortured to generate wealth that will power up an industrial revolution across Europe. For seconds, perhaps, this discovery causes us to hold our breath. In the pause, we hear the echo of “he is brave and he is bright…,” like a song that rises from a fissure in our memories when the psyche needs it most. In the exhale, we perceive (because we want to survive) it is hard. Hard to blame Columbus. Hard. Hard to see the devastation as anything but progress, progress that development will surely one day afford our newly independent country. With Columbus as our cornerstone, we are at a loss for the words we need to explain the split that is shaping the way we think. The split that is shaping our (un)awareness of history. The split that is shaping the way we think about who we are, what we know, and how we feel about what we know. The split that is shaping how we see our bodies, and our disconnection from them and the land we live on. The split that is shaping how we as black and brown and white children see and know and feel about each other. And how we are with each other. And our (in)ability to imagine what exists in the absence, where the Arawak, who once lived here, used to breathe.
When societies experience a trauma—invasions, inquisitions, wars, mass torture, genocide, holocaust, slavery—there is collective holding of the breath, and the disappearance of the consciousness that gets stuck in the unbreathing part of us. A fracture in the collective psyche appears. A split in our awareness. A walling off. A way of not knowing what is unbearable to know. A way of turning from the inconsolable so we can survive.
For centuries before European expansion across the wide Sargasso, before the first ship set sail from Angola with its cargo of human beings bound for Virginia and the new colonial enterprise, Europeans had been waging war with their neighbors: they conducted crusades and inquisitions, facilitated pogroms and genocides, tortured and burned people deemed heretics and outsiders. They crafted tools dedicated to inflicting pain and punishment – the stocks, the cat o’ nine tail, the Spanish boot, the iron maiden. Again and again across that continent, a collective holding of breath. A collective turning away from the inconsolable.
In Indigenous societies, like those of Turtle Island before it became North America, like those of the Yoruba and Igbo and Fon before they became West Indians and North and South Americans, there were communal ceremonies, rituals, spiritual technologies for the healing of the split, the fracture in a person or a people when they got stuck. Ways of diving under and resuscitating the drowned one in the unconscious and bringing them back to the whole. There were ways too in European countries before inquisitions turned people on their neighbors for the crimes of loving more than one god, for the sins of laying on of hands, of calling down the moon, for the healing of the spirit.
But the traumas inflicted on Africans and Indigenous Americans by Europeans during the hundreds of years long colonial project did two important things: it criminalized all African and indigenous spiritual technologies and those human beings who enacted them, and it carried the European collective split forward: Africans and Indigenous peoples of the so-called New World became targets of a vast unconscious shadow – the darkness Europeans carried with them; which is to say, generations of unhealed trauma unleashed on the bodies of brown and black people. And if Europeans saw through the prism of their collective psyche Africans and Indigenous peoples as dark, which is to say, demonic, evil, they saw themselves as light. Light is Godly. Heavenly, we remember. Now the split has become its own reinforcing idea – taught by priests and slave masters alike. By turning away from the inconsolable within themselves and criminalizing the very methods by which they might return, Europeans fashioned of unhealed wounds their New World.
The traumas inflicted on Africans and Indigenous Americans by Europeans during the colonial project did two important things: it criminalized all indigenous spiritual technologies and those human beings that enacted them. Those religious and essentially communal traditions that identified first-nation peoples had experienced the most extreme eradication and left Indigenous societies with the diametric opposite of their tools for healing, bonding, and ceremony. Secondly, the dark record of European colonial practice, already bloody from the persecution of their neighbors, has become grounded and, with a whole new world to pillage and scar, has calcified capitalistic ambition to an unimaginable scale. Whatever the Europeans, across generations, used to justify the subjugation of their neighbors, they carried those technologies of conquest towards the New World without hesitation. What we can learn from this, this tried-and-true ability to wash away the humanity of the person directly in front of you, who is taking up the same air, is a darkness that Europeans carried with them. That is to say, Europeans already had ways of enveloping Africans and Indigenous peoples as dark (backward, stupid, sinners) and so already had schema to identify themselves as light. Light is Godly. Heavenly, we remember. They separated themselves from the truest aspect of themselves, their humanity and human spirit, in order to inflict the worst of themselves onto an entire hemisphere.
In many ways, we’ve reached the point of no return. But at the same time, I know that if we, all of us, maintain our ignorance of the ways we’ve held onto
And here is what I know: if we do not understand that we have turned from the inconsolable, that we carry around inside us a collective split that keeps on reproducing itself from generation to generation; and if our languages, our religions, our philosophies, our institutions of learning all are somehow shaped by this split that keeps us turning away from the inconsolable in our collective psyche; and if we keep holding down our unbreathing parts, refusing to waken to their chilling underwater cries, we become a danger not only to ourselves but to others and to our living, breathing planet.
August, 2019. Another hurricane is poised in the northern Atlantic, headed towards my islands. I am not at home; I am in California, the Bay Area, one eye on my Bahamaland, the other on the fires up north, south, and east of us. It has been year after year now that my partner and I wear N95 masks to protect our lungs from the smoke of wildfires that eat through forests, habitats, human neighborhoods and homes across the western coast of the US, here in nearby Sonoma, Napa, and Solano counties. It is the summer of 2019 and the pandemic has not yet begun. We do not yet know that a virus will be loosed into the air and cross oceans to colonize our lungs, take up residence there, send millions across the planet into hospitals where they will mostly die alone, connected only to machines that try to help them breathe. We do not yet know how the quality of the air will be changed, again. But I have masks in my car, and in the drawer of the hallway table in my cabin in Mendocino. Fire season and hurricane season are two realities on opposite sides of this stretch of earth and I am keeping my eyes on both.
My sister WhatsApp’s me an alert on August 30, at 5:44 a.m. Eastern time. It is dark and I am asleep, but I hear the thick vibration through layers of dreaming. I reach for my phone. I squint.
….DORIAN IS FORECAST TO BECOME A MAJOR HURRICANE LATER TODAY …
A HURRICANE WATCH IS NOW IN EFFECT FOR THE ISLANDS OF THE NORTHWEST BAHAMAS. THIS INCLUDES THE ISLANDS OF ABACO, GRAND BAHAMA, BIMINI, BERRY ISLANDS, NORTH ELEUTHERA, NORTH ANDROS AND NEW PROVIDENCE.
A HURRICANE WATCH MEANS THAT HURRICANE CONDITIONS COULD AFFECT THE MENTIONED ISLANDS WITHIN 48 HOURS.
AT 5 AM EDT, THE CENTER OF HURRICANE DORIAN WAS LOCATED NEAR LATITUDE 23.8 DEGREES NORTH AND LONGITUDE 69.1 DEGREES WEST OR ABOUT 338 MILES EAST OF SAN SALVADOR…
San Salvador was the site of that other landfall, Christopher Columbus and his men and their three ships looking for India and gold. A now infamous error. An error that would eat its way through the bodies and lives of the Arawak living in these islands, eat its way through the bodies and lives of Taino to the south, and Seminole and Cherokee and Iroquois and Mohawk and Apache and so many more across the waters to the north on Turtle Island. Even eat through Earth herself. Is still eating. There should be a difference between hurricanes, fires, and colonialism. But they all kill. They all take what they want.
The winds are only at 105 miles per hour. We have seen ourselves clear of many hurricanes before this one. Matthew, Frances, Jeanne, Andrew, David, Betsy and others. I have watched our street become a river, fish swimming in confusion towards the swamps, the sea, our submerged yards. By noon the following day, the Bahamas Department of Meteorology tells us, DORIAN’S FURY IS AIMING AT THE NORTHWEST BAHAMAS…MAXIMUM SUSTAINED WINDS HAVE INCREASED TO NEAR 150 MILES PER HOUR WITH HIGHER GUSTS. DORIAN IS NOW A CATEGORY 4 HURRICANE ON THE SAFFIR-SIMPSON HURRICANE WIND SCALE. SOME STRENGTHENING IS POSSIBLE TODAY. SOME FLUCTUATIONS IN INTENSITY ARE LIKELY, BUT DORIAN IS EXPECTED TO REMAIN AN EXTREMELY DANGEROUS HURRICANE…
I go to sleep that night one eye on my dreams, the other on my phone, waiting for the next alert.
At noon on September 1st, I read:
…DORIAN BECOMES THE STRONGEST HURRICANE IN MODERN RECORDS FOR THE NORTHWEST BAHAHAS…CATASTROPHIC CONDITIONS ARE NOW OCCURING IN THE ABACOS…A HURRICANE WARNING REMAINS IN EFFECT FOR PORTIONS OF THE NORTHWEST BAHAMAS…
We are a small country: 400,000 people—85 percent of African descent, 12 percent of European descent, 3 percent Asian, and 3 percent Latin American—live across 20 islands that lie cast out across shallow seas, as though a goddess had shaken stones like dice in her wide fist then thrown them all at once into the water. They shimmer green and brown and white when the sun is high. My family live in Nassau and in Grand Bahama. I am watching video clips on Facebook, flipping back and forth between the Weather Channel and ZNS, the broadcasting station of the Bahamas.
The winds have turned deadly—now 185 miles per hour with gusts of 220. And the entire movement of the hurricane over land has slowed. I watch in horror as a massive spiraling white cloud sits over the Abacos and then Grand Bahama for days, moving at an unprecedented one mile per hour, unleashing torrents of water from skies that cannot shelter. After an excruciating silence, we hear the stories emerge; how a woman, her husband and her elderly mother hold onto the tops of kitchen cabinets as the water rises almost to the ceiling of their farmhouse in Freeport. How the woman holds onto her mother to keep her from drowning. How in Abaco, a man tries to hold onto his baby boy, but the rushing flood of water is too strong, and rips the child from his arms. I am getting video clips from my sister, I can see and hear in them the catastrophe unfolding, the hysteria in people’s voices as they try to hold on, recording for those who are watching how the rain and winds are tearing their homes and hearts apart. How the air around them, even after the hurricane moves on, dissipates, has changed. How it is hard to breathe.
It will be many weeks later that we who are watching find out that the hardest hit were Haitian immigrants living in shanty towns across Abaco. We will find out that nearly 30,000 people are homeless and without jobs. And that the damages amount to a quarter of our GDP—3.4 billion. We will find out that the death toll of 74 is not an accurate count, because amidst the ruins are bodies that the government does not have the resources to locate, and years later there will still be hundreds who are missing. Only six months into recovery, Covid-19 strikes. A country whose dead are still missing, whose homeless are still concerned with accessing housing and work and groceries, goes into lockdown.
May, 2022. I am back home, on my island of New Providence. The worst of the pandemic seems to have subsided. Outside, the rains have come, a clattering on the aluminum awning that shelters my living room windows. The air is cool, smells open and wet and green. In a month’s time, another season of hurricanes will alter the air, and, perhaps, our lives.
The earth seeks balance. It is a self-regulating system. Hurricanes help regulate the earth’s biosphere. They move hot tropical air to cold arctic climes, and out into space. They oxygenate the oceans. They pull up nutrients from the ocean floor and spread them around. They break up swaths of bacterial matter. They help the oceans thrive. The hotter it gets, the more work they have to do. The stronger they need to be. The slower they move.
Our human psyches seek balance and repair too. The breathing part of ourselves longs for union with the unbreathing part, the part that is heavy, heavy under the water waiting to be found, waiting to be retrieved. The survivor on the bow of the boat must find a way to dive back down and resurrect the unbreathing one. No matter she has been under the surface twenty years, forty, or four hundred. The survivor has to find the courage to go back, to find the shadow self and breathe into her mouth something like the breath of life. Coax her gently back to the surface of the waves. Bring her home.
We need this homecoming as individuals and as entire communities. But for those of us raised to think of ourselves as white, to ignore the cries of “I can’t breathe” above the surface of our collective psyche as well as below is not only dangerous, it is immoral. It is that killing ignorance that stands by while ancient forests and human beings burn.
June, 1973. Before there is the split, there is breath. There is honey-gold light streaming between this body and that tree. There is breathing light, like water. There is communion. Later, when I will be told that my white body and black bodies do not mix, when separation shapes our neighborhoods and cities, here in Nassau, Bahamas and in Cape Town, South Africa, and in Sanford, Florida, I will remember a different story. I will hold onto that story as I dive into blue-black waters. I will remember how to breathe.
Helen Klonaris 