Carolyn Forche, award winning poet and human rights activist, on the need for healing the human soul.
"We live in the aftermath of genocide continually.
We don’t live after the events end in the sense that we think of time ending and living after. We live in the debris of spirit; in the aftermath of a world in which the human soul is damaged.
When crimes against humanity are permitted, when crimes against civilians during war are permitted, we inflict irreparable damage on our souls, and that is inflicted on all human souls worldwide. Take away mass killing, take away that radical "othering" of humanity and I think you begin, slowly, to become conscious of how important we are to each other.
A society is only as safe as the most vulnerable of its people are safe. A society is only as rich and secure as the most vulnerable and fragile of its members are rich and secure. It just seems to me that unless we view it that way we are lost, we are condemned to a traumatized soul.
I don’t think we can say that we have achieved anything until we have achieved a kind of universal respect for each other. The rest of the achievements are nothing without that.
If I could envision a world without genocide I would envision a healing human soul. And I would envision a new soul for humanity – some way in which we would become other than we have been, and that we would somehow recognize who we really are, and how connected we are, and how important it is that we care for each other; that we don’t inflict harm on our own species or on other species.
I’m hoping that some of us, the youngest of us, might live to see that. When I was young I thought I might live to see that because I was idealistic and hadn’t seen too much of the world yet. I hadn’t seen what I have now seen, but I am hoping my son perhaps, or my young students will live to see this realization."
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