Eclipse of Dreams by Marco Saavedra

Author:Marco Saavedra
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: AK Press
Published: 2020-04-21T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter 4: Layers of Pain

Claudia Muñoz, infiltration of Calhoun County Correctional Center, Michigan, 2013

“Ships at a distance have every man’s wish on board. For some they come in with the tide. For others they sail forever on the same horizon, never out of sight, never landing until the Watcher turns his eyes away in resignation, his dreams mocked to death by Time. That is the life of men. Now, women forget all those things they don’t want to remember, and remember everything they don’t want to forget. The dream is the truth. Then they act and do things accordingly.”

—Zora Neale Hurston

Suffering and Pain—The Women and Me

I cannot look at photos of my mother on social media because I break down. My chest literally feels heavy and tears start flowing down my face no matter how much I try to stop them. And every time I find myself saying, “you have to be strong, this is the price you pay. You were born in a fragmented way, therefore, your heart will be forever split.” But this doesn’t help. I see my mom’s face, now in her mid-70s, a face that I mainly see through photos because, when I left her side, she was in her late 50s. My mother, so beautiful, the light of my life, now looks much older. I can see things on her face I hadn’t seen before I left, and I ask questions I never asked before. How many layers of pain does she have in her soul, I wonder? My mother who could only attend school up until the first grade, whose father abandoned her when she got very ill as a baby, who grew up so financially poor that she didn’t wear shoes until she was six or seven years old, whose mother went to the city and married an abusive man who could at least afford shoes for her younger children, who learned how to read and write in her 40s when I started going to school, who raised nine children on the salary of a man who, for many years, drank almost as much as he worked. My mother—how many layers tell your story? How many layers will tell mine?

I have to say that up until I sat in a cold jail cell in Michigan, almost in complete darkness, that I had spent little time pondering these so-called layers of pain or stages of trauma. I knew before then that people go through many issues and problems throughout life, but it was hard for me to think of these many issues as trauma on top of trauma because it seems that, often, there is one traumatic event that overpowers all others. As a community we have done a poor job at seeing people, especially women, as multi­dimensional. I mostly embraced the idea of trauma being linear or one dimensional because, when I joined the immigrant rights movement in 2001, there was a notion within immigrant groups that the biggest problem undocumented people had was in fact, being undocumented.

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