“The Church says: the body is a sin,
Science says: the body is a machine,
Marketing says: the body is a business,
My body says: I am a party”
E. Galeano
Many years ago, I heard a good friend of mine say that to be an activist meant being ready to have your heart broken over and over again. That phrase continues to resonate with me. As we move through movement work, we have less and less space to talk about what is at stake. It is fundamentally necessary to address how being an activist breaks your heart and at the same time, helps piece it together.
When I first heard my friend’s phrase, I thought: “Who would want to be heartbroken forever?” At the time, I could not imagine myself permanently existing with a broken heart. Yet, we live in a world that far from resembles the world we want. For those of us who see the world as it exists now, with its beauty and its horror, it is inevitable to grieve for inequality, violence and suffering. I have been honored to work with activists from all over the world, especially from Latin America and the Caribbean, and I like what Argentinians say about the complexities of doing movement work, comparing it to “rowing in dulce de leche”, as this sweet delicacy is as thick and heavy as it gets. I couldn’t agree more with them. Maybe being brokenhearted is not so much about wanting it but being willing to do it.
I have been a social justice activist since 2010. Being an activist concerned with changing things has molded who I am. I think back on my younger self who was full of passion; who saw hope everywhere; who wanted to do and say so many things. And I did. It has been beautiful to experience the world in such a sensitive and collective way but I can’t deny it has also put me in a relationship with heartache. I often think about people who have been here many years before me and those who are coming and can’t help but wonder how many crushed hearts it will take to make the world a better place.
In her devastating essay, On Movement Heartbreak, Clarissa Brooks writes: “I know nostalgia to be a trap that tastes best when rooted somewhere intangible. Every time I used to see the mariame kaba quote “hope is a discipline” questions would follow: What does discipline entail? Where do we find hope after immense grief? What can bring us back after loss?”.
I have so many questions to add: Are we really taking care of others and ourselves to make hope a discipline when doing movement work? Are we willing to feel something other than “good” things? How do we prepare ourselves to acknowledge the pain, the suffering, the desolation, the isolation, the tremendous loss, the longing, and the anguish that comes with movement work, while simultaneously maintaining an uplifting embracing of joy, the pleasure, the connection, the wins, and the changes movement work is meant to do? How does the fear of being seen as imperfect or ignorant or unrefined or without the right language prevent the work we do in social justice activism? What do we still need to learn to talk about what we feel alongside what we think? What are we doing collectively to question ourselves and our movements so that we can —really— ask “what's the point of the revolution if we can’t dance?”.
Like many people in activism, I have always cared so much. Still, as Clarissa Brooks states in her essay, caring is not enough. Our willingness to be heartbroken and to keep showing up is crucial. Maybe that is the muscle mariame kaba talks about in her book “We Do This ’Til We Free Us: Abolitionist Organizing and Transforming Justice”. In a country like Mexico and a region as Latin America and the Caribbean, where there is so much violence, femicides, disappearances, injustice, inequality, where change is so needed, there is also very little space left for hope. It takes a toll, but we continue regardless, learning the discipline of hope, rowing through that dulce de leche.
When I heard my friend talk about heartbreak and activism, it was also the first time I heard the term political home. It struck me. We don't have that language in Spanish, or at least not in the spaces where I participated. What is a political home? adrienne maree brown defines it as “a place where we ideate, practice and build futures we believe in, finding alignment with those we are in accountable relationships with, and growing that alignment through organizing and education. a political home is where we solidify our critiques and generate solutions for human and planetary futures that, with practice and time and a functional government, become viable enough to scale (deepen, normalize), or, faced with resistance and dysfunctional government, divergent enough to move for secession or battle”.
It is so important to have a political home and I agree that the only way of having one is through collective work and community building. As I have learned being an activist in feminist environments, a home is not at all a perfect place; yet it is necessary and hopeful and complex.
One of my favorite things about writing is how sometimes words come back to comfort us, even through heartbreak. As Clarissa Brooks says “we/i/us all deserve a reason to stay in this work that has roots and often that requires our own reckoning in order to see those seedlings burrow down and nourish our political understanding”. We need political homes that are ever changing, grounded and rooted in complexity and messiness and a radical understanding that we are here for the long run and we need to care and take care.
There are times where the heartache of political work is so bad, it is difficult to continue. There are other times, though, when that same work brings healing and freedom. My goal is to keep building spaces where we talk about both. We should expect more nights where we know we lost a whole battle because of just a few votes by people who never represented us, followed by days where we feel invincible, walking along our comrades in the streets. Evenings where we come home devastated because there is nothing else to do when a life is lost accompanied by those many moonlights where we know better times are coming because we are together, no matter the obstacles.
I have experienced this while working in making sure reproductive justice becomes a reality, even though abortion access and bodily autonomy are often issues where one step forward comes with three steps back.
Half of the work is to ask those before us how they came back from stolen lands, stolen voices, and stolen dreams. To listen to what they have to say. The other half is to prevent those coming in from having not only their lands and voices stolen, but also their hearts. Being an activist comes with its own kind of pain and that pain can make you bitter, cynical, hostile, robotic, overly pragmatic. That is neither right nor wrong. In social justice activism, we need people who feel and care. Pain is part of feeling and caring. But we also need and deserve more than pain, so that the bitterness and the pragmatism do not take over the needed romanticism of wanting and being willing to build a better world for us and for others.
Maybe there is no cure for the broken heart that comes from wanting other worlds to happen. But we can definitely make sure we have more political homes that offer us another understanding of this not as failure but rather as growth, intimacy and connection. This is what I have worked on doing since 2010.
One of the most important and wonderful things I learned from my friends is that it is okay to feel more than happiness. We need to make more space for that. We need to make sure that people can come back from a broken heart, if they so wish to, that they can keep showing up with care, with communities that embrace the complex ways in which every one of us deals with pain and longing. That is a political home in itself.
