Hauntings from our histories, personal and political

The muses seem to have been ghosting me lately. I call on them but hear only a muffled reply.

I have a long list of things I’ve planned to write, or re-write, as I continue to review my life. I want to share middle school experiences of bullying and exclusion, looking at how they rippled out across my life…and contemplate how understanding adolescent group dynamics might help us understand the contemporary political and social life among (supposed) adults. I have thoughts on growing up in suburban white Middle America - all the ways we didn’t learn about histories of race and racism. Some things to say about being a “smart girl” in a sexist world, and a woman in academia. Some beautiful lessons as well, from my years in the solidarity movement in the 1980s: things I’d like to look at anew as I try to make sense of the times we are in.

Life review work is kaleidoscopic: we look back on our lives and see clear patterns, but the patterns keep shifting and morphing, with new images and shadows coming into view, and some disappearing completely. Writing can offer a way of putting old ghosts to rest, making room for new things to emerge.*

However, this only happens when we have the privilege of growing older - as too many people do not.

That’s what’s haunting me today. That’s what finally prompted me to write.

I’m haunted by the face of young Joan Guerrero, smiling with his wife and baby by his side, who went to work one morning and never came home. Shot in the head by ICE at age 26.

I’m haunted by the image of Lorenzo Salgado Araujo celebrating his 52nd birthday. (52 sounds so young to me now.) Lorenzo, like Joan, was shot in the head by ICE.

These latest murders by ICE awaken the ghosts of so many others who have been killed at the hands of the state, in the name of “national security,” here, and around the world.

I’m also haunted by the face of Nolan Wells, barely 18 years old, who by all accounts was someone who crossed borders freely and lovingly, something the world so desperately needs to learn. He wasn’t murdered at the hands of the state - we really don’t know the details of his death at all - but his death calls forth the ghosts of countless young Black men who have died under suspicious circumstances - those hauntings from our collective, national past.

And for sure, there are ghosts lurking further out in shadows (i.e. not just the ones that make it to my social media feeds). Too many young people who will never have the privilege to look back on lives they never got to live.

Ghosts – even the benevolent kind that I think the muses are - haunt us because we can feel their presence. They remind us about unfinished business. We hope they will just go away if we don’t look in the closet or under the bed or into the deepest reaches of our psyches. But they lay there in wait.

Maybe the muses aren’t ghosting me at all. Maybe they’re just waiting for me to face more things I don’t want to face: more of the small and huge ways that humans hurt others, creating pain that reverberates across our lives and generations.

But maybe I can use the writing process to put some ghosts to rest. Then turn the kaleidescope wheel, and see what emerges.

I’ll try.

*But only if we engage with the writing process - writing and rewriting, chiseling and honing what we have to say, being willing to scrap it all and start over, and letting ourselves be surprised by the words that stumble out of our minds. I fear this process is being short-circuited in the age of AI…but ‘I’ll save that for another essay. I’ll just say that I’m not yet satisfied with this short essay but I want to put it out as my small way of honoring Joan Guerrero, Lorenzo Salgado Araujo and Nolan Wells, before I return to more personal writing. See their photos. Say their names. Look at the patterns in our histories. And if you’re moved to do something against ICE killings, look here.