persee

One of my earliest encounters with violence happened quite normally. I was a teen who was drinking on the streets. And cops came in and ushered us into a world of violence. The truth was, we were just kids drinking. We had smoked a few cigarettes and sat around in the car. But we hadn’t done anything major. Why am I talking about this? Because violence from the state is often neither explicit nor created equally.

The Anatomy of Violence

Let’s assume we’re all living our lives normally. That in the brief history of everything, there has been nothing wrong at all. But then you realize that things are not as they were before. I think to recognize state violence, you likely need to flip the switch. Just think of what you’d consider as abuse in a relationship: * Verbal abuse: Cursing you, using slurs, using a variety of words to get you down * Emotional abuse: Bringing you down again and again * Isolation abuse: Leaving you alone * Food/money/other abuse: Depriving people of food, shelter, or monetary gains If you see this list, you will see that the state has been violent throughout. That personal violence has been an ongoing problem for you, and every time a politician curses you out, says hijra-mukto Jadavpur and something else, and every time they beat you up or deprive you of property that is already available and so easily given, or put a pre-requisite of money for any socialization.

Building Understanding

The second phase of uncovering state violence is creating understanding at every level. Now, this is admittedly difficult. We often don’t realize the violence being done to us because we can’t understand how something drives such inhuman conditions at the outset. Maybe because the level of abuse is not measurable, the idea of measuring is difficult, too. So, you spend a lot of time trying to bridge the gap between your relative ethics and the objective morality of the state. The point is simple: if you have a constant state of ethics that guides you, you’re better than the state. And because you’re a good person, you think no one else also violates this set of ethics. This isn’t true. The state will be a greater evil because it needs to be the greater evil. It needs to be something more than the average person. So, it creates chains of responses that deprive you of everything you desire. It creates frameworks that work against you directly, and then it continues to do this repeatedly for the next eighty years until you die.

Confronting Death and Surviving

Violence is difficult to understand. But, it is far more difficult to confront violence and come out alive. When you fight violence, you must build spaces where you can be violent. This doesn’t need to be exhaustive. You don’t need to knife a cop to be safe. But you need a space to scream, rant, and cry. A place where you can look at yourself and remind yourself that unethical behaviors should always be measured against the scale that the state drives at every second of the way. Also, you need to be anonymous in this space. You need to be more than yourself while simultaneously being less than. This is achievable through practice. Once you enter the space of violence, you let yourself leap. You sort through the masks you’ve worn for the state and let the real you peak from the curtain. You might argue that your real self is not anonymous, but we’re hiding so much of ourselves all the time that the real self is the only true masked representation we can find.

Defining the Space

Remember that state violence is not always physical. Remember that violence itself can grow like a fungus and control your soul. So, when you’re defining the space, it doesn’t need to be a Fight club; it needs to be * Safe * Secure * And Homely A community space where you can sing songs together is violence against the state program of isolation. A place where you make love to your partner is a violence against the state program of unlove. Heck, a place to serve food to your friends is violence against the state program of hunger.

You’ve won before. You will again

During the COVID-19 pandemic, Mutual Aid groups were spreading like fungi across the lines of states and cities. People came together to cook for each other and then spent time talking to each other and building rapport across the space. This was the sign that the world was turning, maybe not upside down, maybe it never had the capacity to turn upside down. But, it was turning a little bit so as to give space for you to expand yourself, And trannies everywhere were making friends, building connections, and creating a story.

We can always create that same space again. It requires unyielding hope and an enemy we recognize and acknowledge. The first step, however, is understanding that violence exists, that it is forever, and to fight against is will never be the same level of violence because the state’s violence will always surpass yours. And your violence will always be just survival.