On Tsunamis

& the fear of them

from Tsunami Notebook

I am terrified of tsunamis, and I think of them often. They’re a ghost that haunts me, like a motif of magnanimous vengeance.

I think this is a fear that was implanted in my subconscious after the 2004 earthquake and tsunami that hit the coast of Aceh in Indonesia, Sri Lanka, Tamil Nadu in India and Khao Lak in Thailand.

They say a quarter of a million people in Aceh alone were killed, not counting the death toll in all the regions that were hit. About 14 nations were devastated, including Bangladesh, my familial home, and created mass houselessness and a vast increase in poverty and malnutrition across the many regions that had already been devastated and brutally extracted from through colonization.

When do the poor, the colonized, ever get to rest?

I was 14 when it happened, and it was the first time I really felt like an organizer. I was the vice president of the social justice club, and in a united front with other groups from my school, we reached $25,000 in donations over just a few days. It was the first sense of an emergency I had felt in my life, and our efforts were not enough. I remember witnessing bureaucracy for the first time, billions were raised for the survivors, yet still, these places remain(ed) ravaged, unkempt, unthought of — all the while being tourist traps for cheap thrills.

I remember feeling so downtrodden and so much grief for the restlessness of not doing enough. That grief has not gone away eighteen years later.

*

The tsunami lurks inside my dreams, what is this monstrous force, like Medusa killing all in her path, trying to tell me?

*

I’m in Indonesia right now. I was invited by the Ubud Writer’s Festival to come here and I’m immensely grateful that I could come. But, as soon as I got the invitation, I worried that I’d die in a tsunami. It was irrational but present enough that I had to have therapy over it. I told E my therapist that I was scared I’d die and she went, “Ugh… let’s unpack that.”

E is from Japan, and as a way to explain my feelings, I told her a story about the documentary Ryuichi Sakamoto: Coda. Earlier this year I watched it again, only to be struck (again) by Sakamoto’s peaceful confrontation of death through a focus on his own cancer, work, and life as an environmental activist. It’s one of the most affecting things I’ve ever watched—and he is probably one of the most influential artists of my life. The film also centers around The Fukushima nuclear disaster in 2011, which happened when the Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami hit the power plant Ōkuma, in Fukushima, Japan. It remains the most powerful earthquake ever recorded in Japanese history and is the most severe nuclear accident since the Chernobyl disaster in 1986. Since the devastation, Sakamoto has been protesting to close the plant. In many ways, I see Sakamoto’s work and activism as a roadmap for mine.

I often think of the scene where he is describing the faces of those found in the debris, like those found in the ash of Vesuvius, forever caught in the contortion of witnessing horror. They say a tsunami hits like a black wall, and my friend Celeste told me, after watching many videos of tsunamis (the bravery!) that they almost always look like entities, feasting for blood. I imagine what these faces saw, locked in complete fear as they face their death, bodies taken out to shore, never to return again.

I also think of the sweet lone piano that Sakamoto nursed, “the tsunami piano…” and what it means to care for the wounded, the injured, the objects and people completely bewildered by the trauma of disaster.

It haunts me, I can’t let it go.

So I tell E, I fear this. I fear for others. I fear for myself. I fear disaster.

She points out, what if the fear is something nascent, lingering in the shadows? What if my real fear is a subconscious entity that can overtake in seconds, like an uncontrollable deep-sleeping, bewildering power?

What if what I fear is actually in me?

I finished this book in one sitting. It was in the library of the ayurvedic center I’m at where I’m doing panchakarma for the first time (I’ll be writing about that next week) and when I saw the book, underneath a pile I amassed, immediate chills went up my body. It’s as if I couldn’t escape my fears, they wouldn’t let me.

Before I came, when people expressed excitement over my time in Bali it was hard (and maybe pathetic) to not bring up tsunamis. Bali isn’t even close to Aceh… and yet the ocean, she calls to me. Or maybe I call to her? The process of panchakarma is intense, and no surprise, as I’m here for my IBS, it’s bringing up memories of my teenage years. I was also 14 when I was first diagnosed with IBS.

I have always felt like I was on the precipice of death. As a child, it was always on the horizon. Sometimes when I experienced my mother’s violence, I wouldn’t know if she’d stop or if would she keep hitting until she met the bone marrow or shards of my brain. My body has forever been at the behest of her hands. As I’m here, it’s been important to tell myself I’m safe. I’m safe. I’m safe. I’m safe in my body, I’m safe here. If death comes, death comes. But I am safe in myself, in my emotions, in who I am.

*

We live in times of climate terror.

I remember when I was with my former partner Shaka, years ago, and as we drove down the rolling streets of Portland there were warning signs of tsunamis; this year in LA I saw my first ever tsunami warning on January 15th after an underwater volcano erupted near Tonga. I’m planning on a trip to visit a friend in Tokyo next year and all I can think of is tsunamis…. it keeps haunting, it keeps haunting. What does it mean?

I can’t explain it, but it’s present. Maybe it’s just grief, grief for a world already dying. For my body, that has felt so close to death my whole life. For us, as a species and civilization, so torn away from each other. I wish I could explain this feeling, but for now — this is what I have. My anxieties, my fears and my desire for a world that cares more and better for each other.

*

The salve is always love, it’s the only thing that can release fear.

As I watched Sakamoto this year, I was continuously moved by his elegance. Some of us have known death and devastation too early, and that memory convulses and becomes sadness or disease. Though Sakamoto’s throat cancer went into remission last year, he was later diagnosed with rectal cancer. I think of the words he shared on his website after getting the news, “From now on, I will be living alongside cancer. But, I am hoping to make music for a little while longer.”

My writing is a way I try to process all this, but we are all living alongside death. Still, I am hoping to make a little bit more of this life for a little longer. That much I’m grateful to have. Life, as long as we have it, is a gift.

The woman who compiled this book is Robin Lim, a Filipina-American midwife who has dedicated her life to the reproductive health of Indonesian women. To give my thanks to this land, I will be donating to Robin’s foundation Yayasan Bumi Sehat, if you become a paid subscriber this month all of those proceeds will go to this foundation. If you want to donate more you can donate directly via the site or to my Venmo (pls make a note of what’s it for) and I’ll send it my way.

Reading the words in the book, what stuck out was the resilience of women. Of the mothers that lost their babies to the great deluge, as in the water came and took their babies out from their very hands, but still, they have had the courage to birth again; to the women who rebuild society at its very foundations — through birth — but are never rewarded for their tenacity of being. For all the women in Iran fighting for their right to life under tyranny. The sadness is plenty, but I’m reminded of these women and their courage and it makes me find mine too.

As I write this, I’m in a great death and a great rebirth. I hope this helps you find the words I am still searching for. Thank you for reading.

All my love,

Fariha,

Bali, Indonesia, November 6th