Invisible Leavings

Hi, my name is Nuna and I come from Nunuland. I’m a left-handed woman in a big world of predominantly right-handed people. I was born left-handed but those in power have made it out as if I “chose” being left-handed. Some suggest that I got bored of right-handedness and decided to try a more exotic choice. Some think my left-handedness is a psychological disease that I need to get “therapy” for. And some label me as “dexterously deviant.” Just for being myself. People who have never lived my experience will talk about me as if I’m a theoretical concept or “issue” or political movement. But I’m just a human being existing, just like them. When I get any representation, the dominant right-handed folks get angry for some reason, but I don’t understand why my existence threatens them. When we left-handed folks form our own safe spaces, some hateful right-handed folks will come and hurt us. We have tried everything, from logic and science, to love and peace, to reason with the dominant folk...

Stockholm Syndrome among racialized immigrant communities in Canada has always been a thing, but I got to taste a very real version of it at a recent one-on-one conversation with another first generation immigrant in the Nova Scotian Muslim community. The unsaid gist of what he was telling me - in relation to my equity-seeking posts - was basically, “how dare you be so free when my colonized mind never allowed me to be?”  There are depths to this trauma manifestation, this syndrome, in the colonized psyche that go beyond idolizing the oppressor and adopting their language and logic. There is also a sense of wanting everyone else who fits the category to be shackled by the same disease; a desire by the oppressed for the perpetuation of the cycle of oppression so as not to be alone in their trauma. “If I’m not free, then neither should you,” kind of thing.  Another psychological layer for this desire for perpetuation may be guilt. Oppression trauma involves a very real layer of ...