A Note on Intergenerational Healing
In 2020, I moved back home with my parents to ‘start again’. Life had taken a turn. I wasn’t well. So I went home. Blessed really, when I think about it, because some people don’t have a home and two loving parents to go to when things take a turn. And then later in the year, the whole world joined as COVID hit. And the whole world, already ensnared in war and genocide, in poverty and inequity, found itself taking another turn in a pandemic. That same year, I was invited to join the collaborative initiative Writing the Archive with Prerana Kumar, envisioned by our wonderful friend and writer, Fahad Al-Amoudi. Doing that work shifted something in me. I found myself becoming rooted in my heritage, and really opening the box called family. I had tentatively looked before, I had pondered on it. But it was there I fell deep inside. Initially I sat transfixed by the relentless rape and ransacking of Algeria. I found it hard to see anything but the pain. I had always known that the suffering was at the heart of my father’s complexes, that this history was the root of our ancestral rage. In my own lifetime, certain experiences thickened that same rage, stirring and yawning within, ready to surface with its destructive fist. Suddenly I saw myself in my father, in his mother, and in her mother, and so on. I felt we were a Russian doll of history. So I began my doctorate in 2022, with the premise of writing about intergenerational trauma, through the lens of Kabyle poetry, specifically from Kabyle women. I remained enraptured by the abject suffering of my Setti (Nana), and how the gnawing grief and shame had silenced our family shut to certain truths, or rather, feeling those truths and embracing them with full hearts. Until one day I heard my father laughing very hard, reminiscing on a story with his younger brother. They had been sleeping in Tizi Ougheni, in our family home, when my father was snoring so loudly it awoke his brother, who sat up stiff yelling, Zinzillah, zinzillah! Earthquake, earthquake! My Dad laughs, I mean, he laughs so hard, every time he remembers this story. And his laughter is infectious. I find myself belly-aching with it next to him. So if trauma, can be passed on, so too can laughter, and so too can healing. And I began thinking about the connection between he and his siblings, and their deep love and community. I began thinking of my cousin Sofiane, allowing his uncle to borrow his car for weeks on end. I remembered unfiltered generosity. I remembered honey cakes and semolina. I remembered kaftans and red lipstick, my Aunt Taous’ bangles, forever a dish of felfa on the table, and invitations to eat with all of my extended family. I remembered my mother’s arms, how she could give and give. How there was never an end to her care, no measure of time that would be enough, to holding us. The way we gifted olive oil to friends. The way my Dad held me on the plane. How he arranged for me to stand in the Sahara desert at sundown. My Setti’s legacy of ten children, living and passed, with children and grandchildren of their own. And this was the marker of resistance. This was the healing. This pure joy and unassailable belief that we would always grow. That sharing ourselves was our way of seeing — it was inherent in how my father was raised and it became part of my teachings too.
Intergenerational healing is hard work. It is what we came here to do, as a species, and the complex web of disentangling that healing requires generations of us to do. We pass the baton on, with our traumas, adding some new ones, locked and loaded into our genetic blueprint, for the next to configure and accept. Accepting is their resolution. Because we are all fucked up, and so too were our ancestors. And it’s only in recognition of our ancestors for how they tried, or how they coped, that we learn how perfidious the System is, and what cage of our own design we continuously learn to unlock ourselves from. By we, I mean all of us. I mean you, reading this. Every being on this Earth. Whether we try to escape our wounds through reckless hedonism, through the agony of addiction, or confront it head on in the throes of therapy, or relapse into our cycles, whether to self-protect, to self-destruct — healing and trauma is implied in all we think and do. For we are all hurting, and in the hurt, we find the antidote all along. So my doctorate became much more all-encompassing and it became about how we use poetry in our Kabyle communities to effectuate healing, by acknowledging our trauma first. Since in that suffering, was a teacher. My doctorate became a study of intergenerational healing, of which trauma played half a part, but not the whole.
The teachers that have mentored me over the past few years know what I am saying is, in a way, oversaid or possibly even cliché. Since they have embodied this as their truth and lived it for many more decades I have lived. For indigenous societies, this is a principle they have embodied over millennia. But today, it’s not a message concurrently held by all the world. Perhaps it would be unnatural if all were to think and believe in this; it would deny the autonomy and rich variation of perspectives of all beings. Rather, when I set out to write this note, it was because my doctorate was coming to an end, and I had something I wanted to say to the world, even if it reached a tiny portion of people. I wanted to say, that I am reflecting on the way this doctorate is ending, which posits so many beginnings. So many more cliff-faces to jump from. And skies to ascend. I wanted to say that the only way out, is to go within, into yourself, into the battle of your mind, where from time to time, you might find blissful waterfalls. I wanted to say that intergenerational healing is our future. And that healing is never linear, and part of its wondrous dynamism is the enraging repetition, the fallbacks, and the compassionate self-forgiveness to get up and try again. I have healed in so many ways, through dancing wildly into the early hours, through screaming into a leather sofa, through eating bags and bags of sugar. Through lifting 230kg on a leg press. And through not leaving my bed for days at a time. Through the self-sabotage and self-liberation, the shades of healing coexist as one united spectrum. And the conscious storytelling of how this baton was handed down to me, through generations of people who made it possible for me to live and breathe now, is a gift. You are The Gift. And the pain, the struggle, the fight, is the enduring gift to the soul having a human experience. It is part of the healing evolution.