Can anyone ever be completely fearless?
Thoughts on fears, flowers, freedoms and barbed wires
“Hey… heard the podcasts. Just LOVED them. Your friend is fearless & fantastic.” My friend sent me this message from an acquaintance who listened to my podcast last week. Earlier last year, at Jaipur Literature Festival, I briefly interacted with a North Indian author with whom I shared my podcast work. Without asking much about it, she said, “please be careful, okay?” A friend’s husband on hearing about the podcast called my work “courageous”.
The podcast I run is a space where Indian Muslim women share their lived experiences and stories of navigating this identity in personal and social spaces. These are stories of young footballers from low-income families sharing journeys becoming coaches, authors reliving their early days growing up across different towns in India, or girls from remote districts becoming the first women in their families to clear IIT examinations and becoming engineers. It is surprising then that the first words that these listeners have for the podcast is “fearless”.
On closer look, what they might be saying is the situation is so frightening that to even think of Indian Muslim women simply sharing their journeys doing things they love, is an act of courage.
Nobody is fearless. Fear is very much a part of human condition. We all grow up being afraid of things unique to us: heights, closed spaces, darkness, etc. However, a fear where one is supposed to be worried about their identity, is not borne from within. It is a fear created out of circumstances and systems where to simply be oneself is met with threats and violence. In that scenario, being fearless becomes an act of survival. It is the only thing to keep oneself sane in a mad mad world.
Waking up to news of demolitions, mob menace, attacks on persons or properties with visible markers of Muslim identity, is not just news - it is a threat, a very tangible one. I fear for my parents and loved ones’ safety in the conditions they find themselves in. I fear for my nephews and nieces being bullied or harassed in schools. I fear for my parents’ house being a target simply for being owned by Muslims.
In such scenarios, being called fearless is not a compliment, it is a reminder of the absolute failure of the society we all are part of. What calamitous times do we find ourselves in that I have to be “fearless” to simply talk about an identity I was born with?
Those who call me fearless, actually separate me out. They other me again. They look at me differently. They still think it’s solely my work to rise above the fear, hatred and violence that permeates everyday within our social fabric. And they make it my job to save myself from the society that has largely been designed and driven by the privileged, majority community.
American writer and civil rights advocate James Baldwin once said, “We've yet to understand that if I'm starving, you're in danger. People think that my danger makes them safe. They're in trouble.” It is vital that the good-intentioned folks from India’s majoritarian, upper-caste, privileged communities, recognise that.
To call me fearless, you must first admit of being afraid.
The podcast I run brings conversations filled with resilience, but also joy, laughter, warmth and most of all, a sense of community that can lift our hearts. I do what I do because it is an act of self-preservation in the face of senseless annihilation. If despite listening to stories of Muslim women championing their lives and rejoicing in their journeys, one still thinks that what I am doing is ‘fearless’ then one needs to introspect, why do they think so? What are their fears? And, what is stopping them from being fearless?
To borrow Baldwin’s phrase the moral bankruptcy we find ourselves in will not be redeemed by patting the backs of those who call it out. It might only be salvaged when each one of us recognises our part in doing so. I refuse to be a fearless model of the well-meaning, left-leaning liberal Indians. I do not need saving, we all do.
When we begin doing the work of facing our fears, we overcome what holds us back from recognising our own part in oppressive systems.
So, next time, before you compliment me or any other marginalised group for “being courageous or fearless” for speaking about their identities, think about why you use that word. If one can overcome this mental block, one might begin to see their role and possibilities of collective work, empathy, joy and liberation. Perhaps that is the way we save each other too.
When we see flowers growing amid barbed wires, our job is not just to praise the flowers, our job is also to cut the wires.
Mariyam Haider is an independent writer-researcher, spoken word artist and producer & host of Main Bhi Muslim podcast. Her writing has appeared in Scroll, Kontinentalist, Asian Review of Books, Centre for Feminist Foreign Policy, AWARE, Livemint, Mekong Review, among others.