I was the only Sikh undergrad I knew who was not premed. For the first time in my life, I felt seen by the surrounding world. My roommate, Mariah, was more like a sister, and our dorm was home. It would have been easy to feel lost or intimidated, but my advisers-Linda Hess, Tommy Woon, and Scotty McLennan-were dedicated to creating a strong sense of community for first-year students like me. It was easy to spot the others who felt like me, first to go far from home for college. I wasn’t supposed to be here, but here I was. As soon as I set my bags down, I felt a surge of astonishment.
When I arrived, the entrance was lined with palm trees that swayed in the wind, the hills shone gold in the distance, and ivy grew on Spanish-style architecture under a sky that was always blue. Stanford University is nicknamed “the farm” but really it is more like a beautiful garden. The only choice is to find a way to speak-and grieve-even when our wounds are still open and bleeding.
But what happens when we don’t have time and space to grieve because the violence is ongoing? As soon as we find our voice, we are thrown into the hole again. The act of naming the violence and grieving loss in community is how the hole turns into a wound that can heal.
We tell a story about violence to make sense of it, and the story returns us to the public realm where grieving is possible. Human beings cannot remain in this silence and survive, and so we have to learn to say what is unsayable. Hannah Arendt calls this the private realm, the dark shadowy place that violence throws us into, shocked and speechless and alone in our loss. The hole swallows up language, memory, and meaning and leaves us in a scarred and stripped landscape. Violence makes a hole-not just the damage it inflicts on the body of a person but the pain it causes in the body of a people. I love that the book is inviting people to go on that journey with me.”īelow, an excerpt from Valarie Kaur’s See No Stranger: A Memoir and Manifesto of Revolutionary Love. If you want to understand the 9/11 on people of color, you have to be able to walk in their shoes. That kind of depth you can access with the written word, you can’t get though any other medium. Twenty years later, there’s a chance to go deeper and to invite people not just to know what happened but to know what it felt like. “That did do its work, we crisscrossed the country showing that film, so people were introduced to the experiences of people of color after 9/11 that they were blind to before. “What I first created after that trip across the country was a film, because I needed people to see our faces and hear our voices and come to understand the struggle of the Sikh community through stories on screen,” she says.
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