Tungshang Ningreichon
The magnanimity of the human spirit is sometimes measured by the power of forgiveness even if you have been wronged and robbed of your peace and childhood and pushed to the brink of suicide.
Yuimi Vashum, a young poet and blogger in her compelling collection of confessional poems titled ‘Love. Lust. And Loyalty’ speaks about this power. She runs us through her stories and struggles with screams of profanity, which no alternative vocabulary would be able to capture, to convey the trial of her experience, memories and nightmares other than the four letter word she uses abundantly to express what sexual abuse is. It is not about the absence of consent but the inability to even comprehend what was happening and being done to her. She was just seven!
She talks of the trauma and shame that she grieved later in life, resurrecting time and again; making her contemplate jumping off a height or ramming against a running train, as though healing could be found there.
Fourteen years later she calls it ‘closure’ in a beautiful agony cry named ‘battle of the mind’ where she overpowers the horror of the past, and the wounds within, that were pushing her to self-loathing and living with the gnawing pain of the past. She puts it as ‘being punished for the crimes she did not commit.’ Forgiving the wrongdoer liberated her and gave her the strength to reconcile with the past and she poignantly writes,
“All these glorious years I have wasted in Anger Shame Regret The bitterness I birthed over the years. I wish I had known sooner, The battle of the mind Is won only by Forgiveness And Forgiveness carries no cost Only Peace. I wish I won this war sooner, (and if you have fought demons like I did) I hope you win the war sooner Than I did”
The depth of her work is in her profound story telling through simplicity of composition and writing that will allow the reader to recognize the power it radiates. Her poems, and brutal honesty, speak to our soul and nudges our conscience to pick on the issues she is raising for every child whose life and laughter are consumed by the insanity of a man, made worse because the person is closely known to the child or is related, even incestuous!
It cost Yuimi her childhood and nearly all her youth to overcome the hurt and wounds, transform them into words for the “battered souls” and triumph over the horror to rise like a phoenix. She encourages other survivors to rise and to break shame and stigma associated with sexual abuse.
Her poems are not just about darkness. She adds love and life to her writings and charms us with her stories of relationships and human desires.
Yuimi wishes her story would serve as a tool of awareness and as a seed of Hope for survivors.
Yuimi’s stories, poems and profound profanity teach us that the past does not imprison our freedom to live, forgive and roar with magnanimity.
Her testimony may help forever change shame of the survivors to hope, change the landscape and course of our everyday conversation on violence against women and children from denial to acceptance and collectively work to end it.
It could change the way we educate our children by teaching our sons never to harm and hurt others and that they may pass on the sacredness to his children too, by telling our daughters’ stories so that the human spirit will live on, by telling everyone that we must protect our children from nightmares and utter desolation so that no childhood is smothered by insanity, by telling the survivors they are heroes!
