The Liberation of Love-Samia Azam

Samia is currently a mental health coach based in England. She studied English Literature at university, with a focus on the topic of decolonisation. Her writing can be found online on her instagram.

Before I go on, I must confess that, even I sometimes forget that the world is indeed full of moments of love and people who love. I forget that the world is full of softness and compassion and the pivotal thing is that we must seek out these moments and these people and fall into love wherever we possibly can. When we're surrounded by apathy and the smokescreen of normality, we may find ourselves drawn into the familiarity of darkness, into this despair and aloneness that causes us to cave in on ourselves, into isolation. Despair whispering to us in the dark, whispering that it is easier to just look away, just pretend, just shut your eyes tight, my beloved, and you'll be safe. Like a child in the night, perhaps if we don't acknowledge the horrors, they won't stare back at us in the shroud of darkness. We are led to believe, falsely and to our detriment, that our old friend despair is the only route to a soul at peace with itself.

The longer I live, the more deeply I learn that love — whether we call it friendship or family or romance — is the work of mirroring and magnifying each other’s light. Gentle work. Steadfast work. Life-saving work in those moments when life and shame and sorrow occlude our own light from our view, but there is still a clear-eyed loving person to beam it back. In our best moments, we are that person for another.
                                -James Baldwin

It takes a reckoning of the soul to come awake again. It takes radical love to bear witness consciously and continuously. It takes bearing witness to great evil to seek love while we believe there is none to be found, and to realise that we are never carrying the burden of our souls alone. Isolation and despair deplete us, starve us of our capacity to carry the grief and pain and rage of the world. Only with collective care can we transcend the beckoning of despair and find solidarity, find solace, find love within community. When one of us, a branch, a limb of the collective reaches our limit and must rest for a while, we will always have someone to carry the burden for both of us, so that we may rest and replenish and rejoin with renewed vigour. And this is love in its most potent, most grand form. Love in the spirit of a comrade, love in the arms of lovers, love in the vow to bear witness. Love beckons us all in the call for liberation.

But hate has its place in the liberation of love too. How could we embark on this lifelong journey, on this path of dismantling oppressive entities, without understanding them and hating them, deeply, faithfully? This hate is conjoined with this love. It is the hatred of empire, the hatred of capitalism and greed, the hatred of supremacy, the hatred of apathy. The hatred of all evil and corruption is the fiery sister of the love of justice and humanity. It is a hatred of hate itself, borne of a love of love itself. And neither would have might without the might of the other. Indeed, the opposite of love is not hate, but indifference. To feel nothing at all, to be so cold and empty, when the very world we inhabit is screaming at us, is there anything more bleak? Is it not better to feel, and feel, and feel the pain of the entire world, than to feel nothing at all? How else do we know that we are alive and not just living?

So I don’t have faith in the politicians, or the media or the silent, sleeping masses, I never have. I have faith in those who are brave enough to love, who are defiant enough to love. As long as there is love to be found and love to be had, there is hope and there is substance for the makings of a better world. There are connections to be made, there is solidarity to be shared, there are pockets of people everywhere with their hearts wide open ready to receive you. Let us find each other in this barren world and meet one another in community, in solidarity, in love. And when the old world is brought to its knees, we will emerge with justice and liberation, and rebuild on the foundation of love.