See No Stranger: A Memoir and Manifesto of Revolutionary Love

by Valarie Kaur

Your breathlessness is a sign of your bravery. It means you are awake to what’s happening right now: The world is in transition.

If you cringe when people say that love is the answer, I do, too. I am not talking about sentimentality or civility or thoughts and prayers. I am talking about love as labor, a conscious embodied practice. Social reformers and spiritual teachers through history led entire nonviolent movements anchored in the ethic of love. Time and again, people gave their bodies and breath for one another, not only in the face of fire hoses and firing squads but also in the quieter venues of their daily lives. Black feminists like bell hooks have long envisioned a world where the love ethic is a foundation for all arenas of our society. It’s time to reclaim love as a force for justice.

Love is a form of sweet labor: fierce, bloody, imperfect, and life-giving—a choice we make over and over again. Love as labor can be taught, modeled, and practiced. This labor engages all our emotions. Joy is the gift of love. Grief is the price of love. Anger protects that which is loved. And when we think we have reached our limit, wonder is the act that returns us to love. “Revolutionary love” is the choice to labor for others, for our opponents, and for ourselves in order to transform the world around us. It begins with wonder: You are a part of me I do not yet know. It is not a formal code or prescription but an orientation to life that is personal and political, sustained by joy. Loving only ourselves is escapism; loving only our opponents is self-loathing; loving only others is ineffective. All three practices together make love revolutionary, and revolutionary love can only be practiced in community.

Wonder is our birthright. It comes easily in childhood—the feeling of watching dust motes dancing in sunlight, or climbing a tree to touch the sky, or falling asleep thinking about where the universe ends. If we are safe and nurtured enough to develop our capacity to wonder, we start to wonder about the people in our lives, too—their thoughts and experiences, their pain and joy, their wants and needs. We begin to sense that they are to themselves as vast and complex as we are to ourselves, their inner world as infinite as our own. In other words, we are seeing them as our equal. We are gaining information about how to love them. Wonder is the wellspring for love.

Wonder is where love begins, but the failure to wonder is the beginning of violence.

Love is dangerous business, Papa Ji explained. If you choose to see no stranger, then you must love people, even when they do not love you. You must wonder about them even when they refuse to wonder about you. You must even protect them when they are in harm’s way.

The most powerful force shaping who we see as us and them is the dominant stories in our social landscape.

I discovered that the margin can be a space of strength—I could see what others could not see; I could tell stories no one had heard. This is how I came to manage my own strangeness: I learned how to tell stories that inspired wonder and invited people to see me through new eyes. It didn’t always work right away.

Any theology that teaches that God will torture the people in front of you in the afterlife creates the imaginative space for you to do so yourself on earth.

How I wish that my story could end there! How I wish that a thousand Fayes were enough to repair the world, and to repair me! But shame inflicts deep damage. We all carry memories of wonder, but we carry memories of shame, too. That shame returns when we receive messages from the world, sometimes within our homes, that make us feel alienated and strange in our bodies. We are told that we are not smart enough, pretty enough, strong enough, straight enough, or good enough to belong. Some of us are also told that we are not white enough, not civilized enough, and therefore not human enough. By the time I left home for college, I still needed to learn how to wonder about myself, the parts of me that I did not yet know. Only when I could explore my own internal world without shame—the grief and rage I had suppressed—could I begin to love myself.

Grief is the price of love. Loving someone means that one day, there will be grieving. They will leave you, or you will leave them. The more you love, the more you grieve. Loving someone also means grieving with them. It means letting their pain and loss bleed into your own heart. When you see that pain coming, you may want to throw up the guardrails, sound the alarm, raise the flag, but you must keep the borders of your heart porous in order to love well. Grieving is an act of surrender.

Grief does not come in clean stages: It is more like the current of a river, sweeping us into new emotional terrain, twisting and turning unexpectedly. In one moment we need to cry and rage, in another we feel nothing at all, and in another we feel a sense of acceptance, until we find ourselves one day sobbing on the steering wheel of a car as a song plays on the radio. Grief has no end really. There is no fixing it, only bearing it. The journey is often painful, but suppressing grief is what causes the real damage—depression, loneliness, isolation, addiction, and violence. When we are brave enough to sit with our pain, it deepens our ability to sit with the pain of others. It shows us how to love them.

Did people of color have to be perfect in order for our lives to be grievable? I marveled at the labor it took to prove our humanity—it seemed like we had to be superhuman in order to be seen as human. But looking back at history, even that has not been enough.

New horrors keep arising from old impulses. The past keeps bleeding into the present. No civilization in the world is exempt. But what is particular to America is that many who suffered enormous loss and destruction have had to do so alone, had to marshal language to tell the story, only to find that there was no one to hear it because their suffering contradicts the story that the nation keeps telling itself—the story of American exceptionalism. America is a beacon of light, the singular enforcer of truth. Our story of exceptionalism doesn’t allow us to confront our past with open eyes. A nation that cannot see its own past cannot see the suffering it has caused, suffering that persists into the present. A nation that cannot see our suffering cannot grieve with us. A nation that cannot grieve with us cannot know us, and therefore cannot love us.

You don’t need to know people in order to grieve with them. You grieve with them in order to know them.

Back in 2003, I did not know all that was to come. But I knew enough by the time of my college graduation to believe that we had fought—and failed. We didn’t stop the war. We didn’t stop the policies. We didn’t stop the hate. All that energy and momentum and power of thousands of people in the streets, all that history rushing at our backs as we offered up our bodies and our voices, all that bravery and conviction—what good was it? What good was our fight?

“Pain that is not transformed is transferred,” says Franciscan priest Richard Rohr. When we leave people alone with their pain, their alienation becomes the precondition for radicalization. But in listening to people’s pain, we can help them transform it.

But isn’t that how social change works? A thousand small acts that don’t seem to make a difference, until a critical mass bursts into public consciousness.

We arrived in America more than a century ago with vitality, potential, wisdom, and many words—but hate in the form of white supremacy has tried to kill us. Hate paralyzes our bodies and silences our voices. It finds us in our homes and houses of worship, our schools and streets, and online. Hate strips us of language and denies us recognition. To this day, America cannot pronounce our names or remember our tragedies. Our turbans mark us as terrorists, not seekers of truth and justice. America forgets us, or never knew us to begin with. Yet we go on living; we refuse to die. In fact, we find a way, beyond all odds, to communicate that we are still residing in the Sikh spirit of chardi kala. We blink twice. That is our defiance—to practice love even in hopelessness. And to show you. So that you might take our hand, and love us,

This is what I want to tell you: You don’t have to make yourself suffer in order to serve. You don’t have to grind your bones into the ground. You don’t have to cut your life up into pieces and give yourself away until there is nothing left. You belong to a community and a broader movement. Your life has value. We need you alive. We need you to last. You will not last if you are not breathing.