Radical love.

What would you do for loved ones and that which you love?

I began negotiating these responses with myself and partner after my children and I were verbally assaulted and threatened at the start of lockdown 2021. The shock left me housebound and unable to exercise the 5km radius privileges we were given.  Instead, I ruminated daily, fantasising about collecting and catapulting soiled nappies on the perpetrator’s multiple souped-up Commodores utes, Staffies and the rusting Bunnings furniture on their front porch.

While my thoughts of vengeance seem trivial and maybe even petty, the issue of interspecies violence and White colonisers threatening women and their children is not new, neither is our resistance or defence of it and it took me to a few different examples of the way we have continued to resist White heteropatriarchy and show ourselves and our communities radical love.

In these lands we now know as Australia, First Nations women have led this movement since early invasion. Leaders such as Cammeraygal woman Barangaroo openly refused and resisted colonial ideals of propriety and respectability, Palawa woman Truganini joined a group of resistance fighters and rejected colonial niceties and Oodgeroo Noonuccal’s poetry memorialises this as she pens resistance and remembering and decolonising.

I then thought of the way Girmitya women who, on Feb 11, in 1920, led a series of protests against the physical, sexual and economic exploitation of indentured women in the cane belts of Fiji. Locally known as the “Women’s Gang”, I first read about their acts of interwoven self- and community-love via @badfijigyals. Led by Esha Pillay and Quishille Charan, the pair have been working to challenge heteropatriarchal narratives on the histories of indentured labour in the Fiji isles. Pillay and Charan describe their own work as one that is driven by “a mutual love for our ancestors, community and Viti”.  

From there I took a dive into my own “homeland’s” colonial history, the island now known as Sri Lanka, and discovered stories of womens’ fierce resistance throughout the 443 years of colonial involvement and violence, 60+ years of a bloody and brutal civil war, and the current uncertainty of the present. Oral stories of Tamil, stick-wielding women, ridding villages of colony-patriarchs, and others spiking toddy to make the White man sick, are whispered and then laughed about in proud defiance while reclining, post-rice and curry, on a woven palmyrah pāy/பாய்.

I would love to be able to quote from book or essay but the Jaffna library, was burnt to the ground in 1981 taking with it written histories.

We are often told that non-violence is the way forward and yet, it has been because of such radical acts of love, in which bodies are placed on the line for the places and people that they love that we have the rights and privileges afforded us. 

So today, I pay homage to the people of Hawai'i ,who defended their land and leader, Kalaniʻōpuʻu, and rendered Captain Cook dead on 14 February 1779.

Cook, an icon of colonialism and capitalism brought with him disease and dispossession, just as the Portuguese, Dutch and British had done so to Eelam. His killing was radical love embodied, not just for whoever swung the first blow, but for the entire Hawaiian community, a mutual love for ancestors, community and the future. 

Which is why the constant question of, who and what are we willing to kill off in our lives to rid us of the disease of colonialism?, must remain at the forefront of our consciousness. For some of us its family, for others its friends. It might mean giving less of ourselves at work, or leaving that job altogether.

Tuck & Yung put it plainly: “decolonisation is not just a metaphor. When metaphor enters the decolonial vernacular it recentres whiteness and theory and extends innocence to the settler”. When we talk about decolonisation it is not as a metaphor nor is it in place of anything else, for decolonisation does not have a synonym. 

Decolonisation acknowledges the need for both love and rage so that we can build a new world. It honours the hard realities that that which we once thought was good, family, friends, communities, is not actually good, nor does it serve our growth and our nourishment. Of course, cutting is always painful. But pruning brings new growth and has taught me that collective acceptance is not the end goal. Collective care and consciousness is. And that is radical love and self care.

Of course, any form of dismemberment is always painful.

But pruning brings new growth and has taught me that collective acceptance is not the end goal; collective care and consciousness is. And that in itself is radical love .