About ten years ago a young Muslim woman called Abeer Ameer came on a mindfulness course I taught at the Cardiff Buddhist Centre. She wore a hijab and was very quiet and modest in demeanour. She was researching whether mindfulness could help her anxious patients (she worked as a dentist.)
After the course she and a friend came to see me for a private session. Abeer wanted to explore one of the themes the course had touched in her. Having learned to settle the mind and tune in to the body, we ask participants to turn their attention towards difficult aspects of their experience. The principle, which Buddhist thought shares with cognitive psychology, is that behind problems like stress, anxiety or anger often lie unaddressed feelings of pain or upset. Healing comes when we allow ourselves to turn towards those feelings and experience their full emotional truth.
No doubt that’s helpful when a dentist is drilling a hole in your tooth; but it also spoke to something much more personal in Abeer. She found herself turning towards the shadows in her own life, and, a little later, she told me she’d started creative writing classes. She’d never written before but now poems were pouring out.
A couple of years ago Abeer gave me her first collection, Inhale/Exhale. The poems tell the story of her parents’ lives in Iraq under Saddam Hussein’s dictatorship. They describe what they suffered, why they left, and Abeer’s experience of growing up in the UK in a refugee family. The strongest poems evoke both the beauty of ordinary life and the terrible impact of fear and political violence. Their strength is that they do so calmly, with neither anger nor hyperbole.
This was around the time of the October 7th attacks in Israel, and I told Abeer that, as a person of Jewish descent, I felt I too had been attacked. My father came to Britain as a Kindertransport boy, fleeing the Nazis, so I had also grown up in a refugee family. Many people were saying that the attacks were an echo of the Holocaust, and I also felt that myself. But I also dreaded what would come next for the inhabitants of Gaza.
As the war in Gaza unfolded I was barely able to follow the events; they were too upsetting. Like many of my Jewish friends, I found myself in the state Buddhist psychology calls ‘horrified anxiety’: emotionally affected, but not knowing what to do or say. Perhaps the most upsetting part was hearing people defend Israeli actions in Gaza by invoking the Holocaust.
Meanwhile, Abeer wrote poem after poem about the war. Some were angry, but many simply described casualties with her characteristic calm, reinforcing their message with quiet understatement and irony.
Last month, one of these poems, entitled ‘At Least’, was named Best Single Poem in the Forward poetry prize, the UK’s leading poetry award. It ends:
at least/ now they’re just waiting/ for a proper burial/ at least/ at least/ it’s over now/ at least/ for the dead/ at least/ these children/ don’t need to fear the dark/ at least/ not anymore/
The poem is devastatingly restrained, evoking a truth by evading it and quietly echoing our own evasions. I would never have guessed, when I first met her, that such grandeur waited within Abeer.
Now the focus has shifted to Iran. First, the country’s ‘Woman, Life, Freedom’ uprising echoed Abeer’s stand, but the protests were brutally repressed. Now American and Israeli bombs are killing Iran’s leaders and protesters alike. The context is different, but the lesson for those of us who are looking on is the same.
My father learned from his traumatised childhood that when we suffer we have a choice: We can react with blame and anger or we can vow ‘Never again’. Facing our pain creates the space for another response: compassion – recognising that others suffer as we do and feeling moved to respond.
I don’t know what I believe about many things in the world. There is no end to my ignorance and confusion. But I do believe this: that our humanity calls us to turn towards the whole truth, irrespective of our sectarian allegiances, and however hard that may be for all of us to face.