Our Logo of Liberation
I was setting up the classroom that morning, when little Sanjeev stood by the doorway, clutching his open notebook to his chest. His eyes were shining, his tiny face was full of excited anticipation. He bobbed up and down on his toes, his patience slowly bursting at the seams as he waited for me while I pottered about.
“Good Morning, Sanjeev. What’s up?” I asked him.
“Ma’am I did my homework!” He said.
“Thank you Sanjeev! I’m really excited to listen to your reflections today.”
“Ma’am I also did special homework. I gave myself this homework.”
“Did you, now? What was it about?”
“I thought about it, ma’am. The world is not yet one world because there’s no logo for one world, ma’am.”
“Interesting,” I said, kneeling in front of him. “Will a logo help?”
“Yes ma’am. Like all fans of Real Madrid all use the logo ma’am. All fans of sports brands use their logo ma’am. These fans are all from everywhere but they don’t fight because the logo unites them. They can have different ideas but they won’t disagree on the important things. They will show up for each other fully. So I made a logo for one world. Then everyone can become a fan of one world and we’ll have one world!”
His eyes were the brightest I’ve seen. And his heart, among the purest I’ve known. Without him necessarily knowing it, he taught me things I would learn words for much later: Relational Solidarity. Movement Intersectionality. Radical Love. “Agree to disagree” stops when the disagreement is rooted in oppression. Acuerpar, and not empty, vacuous empathy. Sumak Kawsay, or wellbeing of the individual being tied to wellbeing of the community – and not my wellbeing at the cost of yours.
Years later, I would – like many of you reading this – scroll through Instagram every day, watch the relentless bombing and murder of Palestinians by a colonial, occupying, military hegemon. I would – like many of you reading this – feel helpless and lost and in a state of dissonance with the life around me in my immediate universe. I would – like many of you reading this – wonder at the point of it all. What is ease and love and comfort and warmth in a world where these things are within easy reach for some and are brutally kept out of reach for others? What a world it is to be in – to have three square meals, a roof above your head, and a device to watch a genocide unfold – when in another part of the world, a people are forced to audition, over and over again, for your empathy. What a strange thing it is to be in a world where you are witnessing “educated, privileged people” brazenly support a 76-and-counting-year-old military occupation.
We’ve been given a learned helplessness about these things. Think about it: How often did it cross your mind that we can’t do much anyway, or that these things are bigger than us, or that posting on social media is pointless… or that life goes on? We’ve gone so far normalizing the master’s tools that we think we haven’t any other tools to use, that the master’s container is our only home, and that our radical imagination is doomed to being a glorious figment in our minds.
And yet, we are in, of, for, and by this world we built for ourselves. We owe it to ourselves to “Keep going,” as Rilke said, for “No feeling is final.”
And this in itself is everything: We turn to each other. We see that we’re built out of love. We see that the master’s house is built with bricks of hate and cement of violence. We see that the master’s tools only foment this hate and restore this violence. We see, that our liberation can come only in the collective, and through love. A radical, revolutionary love that sees how your full humanity is tied to my full humanity is tied to their full humanity is tied to our full humanity.
And like little Sanjeev caught on nice and early, this revolutionary love is our logo.
Our logo of liberation.
About the Author:
Kirthi Jayakumar is a peace educator, feminist foreign policy practitioner, lawyer and writer. She is a Commonwealth Scholar, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, and was named as one of UN Women Asia Pacific's 30 for 2030. She founded The Gender Security Project, an initiative working at the cross section of gender, peace, security, feminist foreign policy, and transitional justice through research, reportage, and documentation. Basically she’s hot stuff and one of the kindest, most humble people we know. Thank you for sharing your words here, Kirthi!
