“I gift you two worlds, this dance, this arrival to yourself regardless of the thousand inevitable little leavings you are forced to live through.
Remember, home is the ocean within, endless is the swimming.
Home is the ocean…
endless–
He bids me to swim, i sink.”
– Enbah Nilah
His fishhooks, snagged in a couch cushion or the lining of a hoodie, have littered our homes for years. My son catches my ire more often than large-mouthed bass.
One afternoon, well after I instituted the (failed) Ban on Fishing Paraphernalia in the New House, his indoor casting practice snags the edge of a rug brought as a gift from Iran. The textured fabric was just settling into a comfortable flatness after a cramped return journey filling the void of Tums bottles and other mundane contraband smuggled in outbound luggage from America. The rug conforms to my home’s unintentional design: elevating reminders of suffering on the outside above any interior aesthetic vision. I give my son a look but say nothing as he works quickly to untangle the hook. Activists and mothers learn to pick their battles.
The pole, meant for fly fishing, is my son’s latest acquisition, joining the gaggle of other fishing devices forced to tolerate a groping curiosity that mangles their parts. Certain the new purchase will keep him occupied, buying me a few moments of mid-day silence, I sit across the room, reading an article on climate justice.
Happily freed from focused supervision, he swings the elongated stick around again. When the weather and his mother limit his access to the water, he fishes at home. Watching the rod extend from wall to wall, his imagination stretches to fill with waders and new lures. He barely notices the tip knock the art carefully hung above the Iranian rug.
In the lounge chair (that in practice is a jumpseat for surveilling the children in the living room), I am taken by how Anna Badhken writes of the Spanish acquisition of Mexican land in her essay for Adi Magazine. “The landscape of their imagining was devoid of human life, and their maps called the land El Despoblado: The Unpeopled.” Her words draw ecocide and genocide closer together—closing a gap I’ve unconsciously maintained. My unapologetic pre-occupation has always been the disposal of human life in pursuit of dominance—in America and Sri Lanka.
I hear my son’s stick hit glass. He hears me yell. The over-enunciated consonants in his name startle him. He sighs, puts down his stick, and picks up his own reading. The book is his own stuffed tiger—his tattered copy of The Essential Calvin and Hobbes dragged alongside him as the loyal ally of the perpetually misunderstood.
I get up and carefully reposition the piece on the wall. The art itself has escaped his child’s-eye-view of his world. Like the strings of a worn sari, a net made of straggles of coconut fibers is captured in still frame. Delicately painted in the middle of the repurposed net, turned upright, is a very stern-looking fish.
* * *
European-oriented psychoanalysis believed the mind to be divided into three parts: conscious, subconscious, and unconscious. Freud likened the parsing to an iceberg, with the tip (only ten percent) visible and readily available to us as consciousness. The bulk of the mind, then, is completely submerged in the deep recesses of unconsciousness, with pre-conscious thoughts floating just below the sea line.
* * *
“The sea is broken, fishermen say. The sea is empty. The genii have taken the fish elsewhere.” – Anna Badhken, author and journalist
I have indulged his fishing obsession since he was five. Sensing he had prematurely located his own natural peace, I took him to scout the lakes, streams, and oceans on three continents. He covered as many American states as he could cajole a license-bearing adult into accompanying him. Some children ask questions; mine makes statements. He took to lecturing from a young age. As the offspring of two academics, he may have been committing an act of mirroring, rebellion, or both. He was five when his father and I separated, and he needed things to have a proper place. In the tiny apartment where we landed after the breakup, he noticed cardboard mixed in with regular trash, and scolded me.
I was taken aback. Not by the reprimand itself (You’re not thinking about the planet you’re leaving us!), but by this child’s emerging consciousness. The jolt tapped into my endless reservoirs of guilt, unsettling a question that flitted in and out of my mind when confronted with some upcycled detergent-box-turned-clutch that was the face of a consumer-driven environmentalist movement in America.
Why wasn’t I, as an activist, more invested in the environment? Reparations for those sunken in mass graves shouldn’t preclude healthy air for the living?
Anna Badhken asks, “What does unpeopling a place permit?” and answers, “It permits exploitation and erasure of environments and the human communities these environments contain and sustain.”
* * *
The fish on the wall is a gray mullet, one of the native species disappearing from the Batticaloa lagoon in Eastern Sri Lanka. The artist highlighted the loss in order to draw out the plight of his people—taken in large numbers by the military—without being vanished himself. Undocumented violence made visible by the disappeared.
My earliest work, nearly two decades ago now, focused on Tamil girls on the cusp of adulthood who fought for their lives, and their land, as women. When I met them, they had moved off the battlefield into a children’s home lining the Batticaloa lagoon famous in local lore for fish that sing. The children mapped their own journey, pushed from inland homes into a resistance movement, with cartographic precision: moments of war in interior villages became landmarks on the terrain of nascent memories. A father killed by the Sri Lankan army, a mother cast off as “unwell,” an uncle prone to abusive bouts of PTSD.
When he was eight, old enough to accompany me to sift through the wreckage of defeat, my son and I had driven past miles of land emptied by war, its traditional inhabitants forcefully moved to inhospitable territory. When we reached the sunlit zones just north of the Batticaloa lagoon, my son convinced his grandfather (to my relief) to join him on a hotel-arranged excursion into the same edges of the Indian Ocean his ancestors on both bordering land masses had fished. He returned dejected, as he always was when his oceanic comrades refused to reveal themselves. There were no fish left to catch.
A genii, in Islamic mythology, is a supernatural creature, beyond scientific understanding. In Kashmir, a mother leaves all her doors ajar in anticipation of her son’s return. The state, activist Ather Zia notes, “makes a disappearance appear as an aberration of dubious origin, rather than a deliberate punishment.”
At an age where child-like curiosity was beginning to fade, my son seemed to accept the cries of mothers sitting in a lagoon-adjacent temple in Sri Lanka whose children have been disappeared by the military as natural. A part of this thing called war. But he cannot understand why the army would destroy the natural habitat of the fish.
* * *
Some scientists believe imagination exists at a level below conscious awareness. Others feel it is burrowed much deeper in the unconscious, emerging from thoughts and feelings unavailable to introspection. “To imagine is to represent without aiming at things as they actually, presently, and subjectively are.” 1
* * *
After his summer in Sri Lanka, in fourth grade, my son organized his own action—starting a petition to end the use of plastic utensils at his Bronx elementary school. He realized, he tells me, that the climate crisis meant the fish might disappear completely by the time he had children. “How will my grandchildren fish?” he asks. A condemnation masquerading as a question.
I begin to be performatively thoughtful in the everyday. Carefully folding cardboard and sorting plastics in a series of household micromovements that placate his demands for individual action yet seem tenuously tied to my commitment to collective resistance. “Too many people are blissfully ignorant,” he opines with a smugness lined with a hint of the joy so easily available to him. Without the weight of self-consciousnesses, every childhood thought bubbles to the surface. He is his own omniscient narrator.
* * *
Wherever I settle to work, I place a picture of a child in an oversized red shirt half-smiling as I bounce a yellow ball to him. My own silhouette is blurred, but the child’s gaze is a lucid mix of fear and joy. My son had always been curious about this print that had followed us from my desk in our shared bedroom to our new house. Who was this child, he asks, who I was so attached to? This child who wasn’t my son?
I had told him about a tsunami that ejected the Batticaloa lagoon onto land, obliterating a habited coastline. He was intrigued, as he always was, with what he called “weather events.” When a flash hurricane caused water to drip into our living room, he ran between windowsills with a bucket. He carefully tracked the inches predicted and produced by a snowstorm and always called from his father’s house down the street to inform me that hail was falling in a slanted attack on old windows. Without a concerted effort on his part, these moments felt as if nature was speaking, just to him.
I would try to tell him about the little boy in the red t-shirt, about the people in refugee camps moved inland, but his eyes widened when I told him about the sea. “It really turned black? Thirty feet high?” Questions to confirm what he already knew. His face crashed with a sudden realization: “Think of all the fish that died.”
The art from the lagoon hangs in our home just as the artist insisted that it should. The image of the fish is placed vertically, like the stiff Tamil portrait of a loved one gone too soon—not horizontally as the fish might freely exist.
* * *
The unconscious mind exists outside conscious awareness. It holds biological instincts for survival, aggression, protection. It is often described as a reservoir of unpleasant feelings tied to pain, anxiety, and conflict.
* * *
When chaos, and violence, erupts, women are attached to their children. Women and children are elevated above the general fray of suffering to raise funds, evoke empathy, and trigger a collective responsibility to protect. In the years after the Boxing Day Tsunami, before my son was born, I watched as humanitarians flooded the children’s home after the lagoon settled back into place. Young women were offered crayons, older women sewing machines—both, in their own way, “infantilized.” To infantilize women is to treat them as a being with no emotional awareness or insight: to treat them as one would a child. Children, by universal consensus (should?) have no politics.
As the aid workers invaded, the military recharged. In the chaos of a natural disaster, lines of political control for territories once firmly under the grip of the resistance began to blur. The artist notes the introduction of a new kind of net, with finer meshes than traditional hand-woven coconut fiber. Powered by military-grade strength, smaller local species were rounded up en masse.
When the water temperature rose in the lagoon, the fish moved to the bottom in search of oxygen. As the war closed in, the people dug bunkers deep in the sand. White phosphorus burned human flesh and built up inside the bodies of marine animals. As the military occupied Tamil homelands, it introduced a dominant species in the lagoon—one that fed off of indigenous fish.
Traditional inhabitants, both disappeared in plain sight while the children watched.
* * *
Just below sea level, the preconscious is immediately available and accessible to inform a conscious awareness. Thoughts and feelings float freely, unrepressed, but not fully realized.
* * *
When he was six, not much older than the boy with the red shirt in the refugee camp, after our first few failed fishing excursions, I bought my son a net. My theory was that if his little hands couldn’t yet master the precision of string and bait, the wide expanse of the net (often dunked along with the right side of his body) might yield a few tiny friends in local beaches and shallow tide pools.
Years later, as he became marginally more skilled in his passion, he sought out live bait to dangle below the glittery lures he’d spent his allowance on. On the way to brunch one day in city-adjacent rural America, he convinced me to stop at a tackle shop to procure a bucket of minnows that I insisted remain in the car.
As the human adults sipped their way through a slow meal, he grew anxious. He fidgeted and asked if he could return to the car. When he returned his eyes were welling with tears willed not to fall out of deference to his near-tween status. Both frustrated and concerned, I asked what was happening. He sighed and explained.
“The oxygen inside the car is limited, mom. The top layers of the water in the bucket are getting warm, and the fish are already moving to the bottom to find air. One is already dead. Can I please sit with them on the sidewalk?”
That afternoon, before he set off with the remaining minnows, my son, now a fisherman, insisted I not say “good luck,” but, rather, “tight lines,”—a phrase that evokes for me the thick blue string tripping me in the house, not the fleeting moments a fish was drawn to this child’s carefully chosen lure.
* * *
The conscious mind holds perceptions, sensations, rational thoughts and feelings that occupy a hyper-present awareness.
* * *
My son scours National Geographic media and YouTube, alternating between fishing hacks and understanding why the floor of the sea is rumbling and its surface rising. His privilege allows him to build awareness behind a screen that others in his generational cohort experience as a relentless lived reality.
The young women who startle easily and battle nightmares in Sri Lanka tell me, “I keep wondering when the next attack will be,” their fears distributed equally between water and land.
In Palestine, a ten-year-old child pleads with the world to grapple with the destruction she is forced to exist inside. “This isn’t fair. It just isn’t fair,” she repeats, a clear thought against a background of chaos. In Colombia, an unarmed nine-year old girl playing is presumed to be a “machine of war.” With her friends watching, she was killed in one of several government attacks during a ceasefire. For these children, toxic moments deplete protective layers, leaving an indelible imprint of trauma.
For all children, pressure builds as submerged anxieties demand a release: a deep angst begins to shake within. Unformed thoughts on equality and justice displace a pristine vision of the horizon. Lines are blurred as consciousness expands, visible as both a developmental milestone and political threat.
Every disaster is created by adults. In most countries, in this country, the narrative shelter of childhood is the only shield offered to them. As with other displaced selves, they barter their claim to a complete humanity for any temporary refuge. The interlocked existence of a people and their place swirls inside the children closest to the earth’s discontents. These children are a different type of woke—forced into a constant state of alert.
For me, questions circle in an endless loop of critical thought. Is the possibility of an evolving consciousness, if not a fully formed identity, an unfair imposition on growing internal lives… or the breathing space necessary to process their external existence? My son’s every day was weighted so differently than the children I encountered—could his consciousness be lifted to correct the imbalance? Or should every mother wish for their children to live through their formative years in blissful ignorance?
* * *
Psychoanalysis drawn from thinking from lands bordering the Indian Ocean believed the unconscious to be populated by the collective, rather than limited to the individual. A collective unconscious formed through a shared set of experiences that maintained the connection between human beings and their ancestors. When it is accessed, the unconscious reveals a deep reservoir of pain.
* * *
Wartime correspondent and author Anna Badhken quoted the poetry of Pattiann Rogers to collapse the false divide between humans and nature: “Nature is what is, everything that is, everything that has been, and everything that is possible, including human actions, inventions, creations, and imaginations.” For a moment in the middle of the war, the disappeared re-appeared in the lagoon. Like fish, dead bodies float to the surface. Undocumented violence made visible by the disappeared.
My son and I are both thinking about extinction: he, the fish, and I, the elimination of a people. Both evolving and oriented towards suffering, we meet in nature. The moments that his underwater friends are lured to him are a flurry of flopping fins and little hands working quickly to release them. He has never kept a fish that he caught.
Just North of Sri Lanka the glacial ice of a third pole is melting. His imagination expands as my consciousness grows. In Sri Lanka a regime committed to genocide is left without diesel to power fishing boats. Forced to sink, the fish no longer sing and only a few gray mullets remain.
Endnotes:
1 Kind, A. Can imagination be unconscious?. Synthese 199, 13121–13141 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-021-03369-0
