Creative Nonfiction By Tatiana Chaterji
Before, I didn’t know what a traumatic brain injury was. My tongue had not curled the letters T-B-I together, shaping the sound of nightmare. I had not heard the clipping of staples from a scalp fused after it was split. To release pressure, they said, removing the right cranial bone flap. Not conceived of the skull as giving pressure, a living organism of its own, a piece of it stored in a freezer for months after being removed in the dead of night /attempted murder / vehicular assault under a blanket of fog, this city, these hidden stars. Never concerned myself with science or medicine or the mechanics of survival, the filaments of me un-breaking, encased as they were in a thick clay from where I stood young and forceful. Standing or walking or sitting because I wanted to /will /full /bold joy stubborn. Had not needed to wait for the “all clear” discharge orders that released me to a world of indifference.
Before, I didn’t know life without its scents, its tastes. That the olfactory nerve stretches behind the eyes vulnerable to bruising or severing from an impact to the head, that you won’t know until you know, an extended game of dice that ultimately rolled “no permanent damage: you will smell again but with loss /unfamiliar /associating jasmine for coffee revulsion to orange comfort in cinnamon.”
Before, I had not been the target of any physical or lasting harm. Had not thought that “victim” or “survivor” would ever describe me. Had not organized a vigil for rape survivors as I did while unconscious, dreaming /waking up to pelvic bruises /believing I was one of them.
The brain injury bisected my life until I realized it was one in a string of paper cuts that stop hurting, eventually. That there will be other moments that change me. That there are many ways to slice a life.
When I pull her to my chest, a sticky slimy worm. Six pounds four ounces eyes closed mewling to find her place on my chest, for the first time my chin against the wet mess of hair.
When he carries me over the threshold into our suite at the Wise Owl hotel in South Kolkata. Garlands of sweet jasmine adorn my hair and my henna-painted arms drip with gold.
When the drama therapist asks the group to simulate the attack, rushing towards me so I can do what I wished I had done: run away. It returns, my power, and I own what’s mine, fingertips throbbing with the life they can grasp. Sirens through the dark /machines beeping into a week of unconsciousness / awaking to wonder and madness, one toe at suicide’s brink /recovering in this outpatient treatment program for depression and anxiety. All of it, here, the breath and meat and sky.
When I walk through the gates of San Quentin State Prison for the first time, I shudder at the cold heavy clank /permanence /at my back. The man in front of me breathes nervously in his starched blue uniform, gently meeting my eyes to say: “I’ve never met a real victim before. Thank you for coming.” He is, of course, a crime victim, but also an offender, and there isn’t room to be both in this place. I am here for the penultimate session of the Victim Offender Education Group, where the men have met for over a year now each week to learn empathy and build rigorous self-reflection /muscles to take accountability. They are ready to present their crime impact statements and to listen to a panel of survivors. We are all surrogates: none of us directly harmed or were harmed by each other.
This, then, is the greatest innocence, the widest gulf I’ve crossed. Before sitting with men who have killed, who have touched this threshold, this fever-wound of life and God and pain, my eyes were full of dew. I was blind to the logics of violence, the way the toxins seep under and you merge with its poison. That you become dehumanized, brutal, a mentality of war /the hurt echoing at a different pitch /copper pebbles in an empty cave.
Before, I sat alone in confusion, untangling the threads of my trauma with what I knew from a peaceful life of privilege. In that first circle at San Quentin, and every subsequent circle, I uncloak this ache. Hear from men who explain the numbness /danger in every corner, under the shadow of each day. I let them hold my story, share its load, and listen to theirs, my witness-body lifting off bits of the weight they carry. I welcome insights previously unimaginable, receive apologies I didn’t know I needed.
It’s as if the lights switch on, all at once a brightness. The dialogue melts the isolation of my suffering, its icy blanket of shame, allowing me to see what had been there all along. Not monster, a human did this to me, broken, alone – and suddenly, I have permission to heal.
For ten days, baby birds remain in the nest their mother has built. I spent ten days in a coma, from within the protective circle my family had drawn around me for the entirety of my two plus decades on earth. Infant wind-boned creature before flight, twenty-four years collapsed to ten days in the coma nest so I could bear-free the weight of the universe.
Soaring /my mind at ease, a fresh page appears, the dotted line of life’s flash points waiting to blink on /forward /cuts and salves.
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Living with a traumatic brain injury from community violence and grieving the loss of too many students to the same, Tatiana Chaterji writes to set free the cycles of healing we need for freedom. She is an emerging writer, mother of two small children, conflict worker, educator, restorative justice practitioner and theater-based healer based on Ohlone land in Oakland, CA. Her essays and poems are featured in Seventh Wave, Indianapolis Review, Rise Up Review, The Rush, Panorama, and Voicemail Poems and forthcoming in Cherry Tree. Learn more at http://www.tatianachaterji.com.