Source: Azaad, Amba. “Fire to the Grass.” The Massachusetts Review, Volume 65, Issue 1, 2024, massreview.org/sites/default/files/10_65.1Azaad.pdf.
IN this essay Amba Azaad makes a strong and comprehensive case for radical unforgiveness.
It’s a gorgeous gorgeous essay and everyone should read it, the following are some quotations that spoke to me.
Resentment and bitterness are treated like bruise marks—evidence of a past crime, but of no further use, meant to be erased as soon as possible.
Victims of abuse have been told so often that true love is forgiving that it feels like a lie to state that their love and unforgiveness can coexist, equally authentic
Just as you cannot truly envision the complex reality of what abuse is without granting that a person can be both loving and abusive, you cannot begin to talk about battered love without talking about unforgiveness.
To love someone who has harmed you, and to fully name and recognize that harm, and to deem it unforgivable, and to continue living in some relationship with each other: that is what the vast majority of people in abusive relationships do. As we come to more open and investigative reckonings of abuse, it behooves us to treat unforgiveness as praxis of survival—not as a dirty byproduct of harm, but as a multifaceted philosophy worth theorizing.
Forgiveness certainly has a place in our social strategizing and mental toolkit; however, deglamorizing its status as a mark of born-again Bodhisattva will help to prevent abusive demands for it. To legitimize unforgiveness, it is necessary to start by toppling the idol of forgiveness: a virtue enshrined in several religious traditions and wielded with particular brutality by modern Christian ideologies against anyone with the temerity to hold the powerful accountable. If we remove divinity from the equation, it is clear that both “to err” and “to forgive” must be analyzed strictly in profane terms of power.
Radical unforgiveness renames your experience from acceptable, and therefore good enough for others, to unacceptable and not to be replicated.
We have been told that unforgiveness is useless so often that it can be hard to redefine what productivity looks like when marginalized and derided forms of labor are taken into account. Holding space, bearing witness: these are seemingly passive forms of productivity. It takes energy to stand still in a crowd that pushes you to move on. The unforgivers are the ones who stay petty, who don’t just get along, and they are the ones who force changes through in organizations where it is easier to let it go.
Here’s a freeing thought: What if one has a responsibility to unforgive, what if one is achieving some measure of restitution by being a stone against the flood that tries to wash away the evidence of wrongdoing? By not being able to forgive, you are not failing at humanity. You are reforming humanity—by being a record keeper, by bearing witness.
Unforgiveness is not the negative space of the absence of a thing; it is a concrete, voluntary action, a choice. Broken relationships are not failures; they are proof of the work of unforgiveness.
I really want to add more quotes but I think this is enough.
Amba ends the essay with acknowledging how unforgiveness has been misappropriated by revenge, and what we can do to prevent that.
Overall, I think this is a call I will be thinking about a lot.