Episode #153: Tears Matter (Bonus Shorts)
“We founded A Cup of Color with the goal to bring art to places where there is brokenness,” Rahel explains about the organization she founded with her husband, Damon. She describes how their mission can be traced back to the Red Light district of Kolkata, where they painted a series of murals on walls in the slums “to give signs of hope and of life.”
Though they live in Switzerland, they have strong family and cultural ties to Hong Kong, where Damon is from. So when Hong Kong’s democracy movement took shape after the Chinese takeover of the government in 2014I, Rahel and Damon naturally turned their attention to the situation there, and began to create artwork in solidarity. Because of their public stand, however, they are not sure if they will ever be able to return to Damon’s native land.
With their extensive experience standing by the downtrodden, and with some similarities to the oppression that democracy activists were facing in Hong Kong, Damon and Rahel began to become interested in events in Myanmar. Their involvement was precipitated by a request from Raise Three Fingers, an artistic collective resisting the coup, inquiring about their interest in painting a mural in Zurich. “In our own process of dealing with all the painful images and all the traumatic experience we had… we started to ask, ‘What can we actually do to heal our own trauma, and also help others?’” With this in mind, they agreed to collaborate, and set about finding a way to paint “a wall where people can just express their pain, and put down what it is they carry inside.”
Once they were able to get city approval, no easy task, they then went about soliciting Burmese around the world about what messages and images they might want to express on this blank canvas. “It was about giving a voice in a very dark time and helping to release the pain and the trauma, so that we have a space where our pain is seen and that we are not alone with it,” she describes.
In the end, they designed a mural whose central image features “a woman holding up the three fingers, and it's a woman who is mourning for her family member who got killed.” Calling the finished piece “Tears Matter,” the woman is surrounded numerous words and other images, which came from the many submissions that were sent in from around the world.
Capturing a sense of common humanity underlying the conflict was particularly important to Damon, and he was grateful the final result was able to achieve this purpose. He remembers one Swiss man who “was crying because of reading all this different writing. His heart was connected to the people’s experience in Myanmar.”
He also describes how, given his background in Hong Kong, he is unfortunately all too acquainted with the trauma that comes from experiencing state violence, and how the initial waves of optimism and engagement give way to darker mental states such as hopelessness and despair. So the situation in Myanmar resonated powerfully in him. “We want to fight hard, we want to fight for what we dream of,” he says. “But after a time, people get exhausted. Seeing people being arrested or disappeared, or fleeing. So I'm focusing on a way to share hope and to let people to know that somehow we need to continue, because we need to know what we're fighting for is actually worth fighting.” For Damon, the wall became not just a monument to the experience of trauma, but also a testament of hope and encouragement to keep going on, even when the conditions became much harder than ever imagined.
Besides their charge to create a symbol that honored the trauma and pain of the Burmese people, they also hoped the piece would move people to start paying more attention to the situation in Myanmar. This was especially important for Rahel, who recalls her feeling when people would inquire about the democracy protests in her husband’s native country.
“It was so comforting when people asked me, ‘How is Hong Kong?’ Even though it was one thousand times the same story, it was so helpful to have places where we could talk about it,” she recalls, sympathizing with how Burmese in the diaspora must feel when life goes on around them with little thought to the awful situation in their home country. “If no one speaks about [Myanmar] anymore, it's dead. And so this was actually one important point: Let's make something so that people speak about it!”
So ultimately, the project did fulfill the goals they set out to achieve with this work, giving voice to the feelings of Burmese while engaging and informing the local community. Yet Rahel and Damon also realize that they benefited personally from their involvement. “I feel almost all of our friends, they got more beautiful,” Rahel says, describing how committing themselves to bearing witness to atrocity made them appreciate what they have all the more. “[Our friends] got more human, and I also think that our marriage and our relationship, and we ourselves got more beautiful. Even if we lost a lot of naivete, I feel we got something that that I would never want taken away again. It's a richness, it's like diamonds you cannot replace!”
Damon has a unique sense of the role that creatives play in liberation movements. “As artists, we have a responsibility to reflect what's going on in the society,” he says. With this commitment, the artist lets go of their ego so their creativity can be used freely for the cause, and Damon notes that he has seen this in both Burmese and Hong Kong artists. Circling back to their mural, Rahel adds the caveat that artists in Hong Kong tend to speak better English and have wider international connections, so their message can more easily spread beyond its borders than is the case with Burmese artists; Rahel and Damon hope their project can help Burmese artists reach a wider audience as well.
“[Burmese in the diaspora] are really not suffering loudly, but they're very silently suffering…[and it] is very, very deep,” says Rahel. “I think that's stood out. Myanmar people can make jokes about the darker things. That's kind of a way they survive, which helps you to be with them in the really difficult times. But seeing their silent tears, it's very heavy.” This suffering also comes in the form of survivor’s guilt, which affects every democracy activist and resistance fighter, regardless of how much they’re sacrificing. “Everyone feels guilty,” she adds. “It's this constant guilt of not being there, not fighting, not doing enough.”
Rahel talks about Holocaust survivors who wore a lifetime of guilt on their sleeves because they survived when so many of their family, friends and fellow inmates died horrible deaths. In contrast, Damon emphasizes what Rahel said about how Burmese people deal with difficulties, recognizing a uniquely Asian way of dealing with this burden. “When they are happy, when they smile… they [seem] so simple, almost naive, but at the same time, this heaviness is actually very difficult to deal with,” he says.
In any case, the couple is committed to bearing witness to the horrible atrocities taking place in Myanmar, and doing their part to making them known to the greater world. “I decided a long time ago that when someone knocks on my door, I open and I listen,” Rahel says, “What I do with it, I don't know. But I will listen.”