Dance on Through to the Other Side

Resisting Violence with Joy

Violence, in its many forms, is seemingly unceasing. But often it is shame, not physical wounds, that suffocate survivors like a heavy blanket they cannot throw off. I am endlessly inspired by Nurjahan Boulden, speaker, activist, and dancer, who teaches students such as myself how to transcend it all in her online belly dance courses. I am so taken by this woman that I’m going to spend some time here straight-up fangirling. I’ve never taken a class with a dancer whose joy was so visible on her face and in her body. She provides modifications (easier dance moves) for people with chronic pain, and so clearly approaches her teaching as an opportunity to empower. Struggling with chronic pain like Nurjahan once did, these modifications make me feel seen, even when I don’t use them.

Nurjahan began belly dancing in the womb, as she describes. She characterizes this dance form as a way to connect with her body and the other women in her community. As she reveals on Instagram @nurjahanboulden, she learned that the dance was for her, not the male gaze. Body shape, size, choreography mattered less than her own connection to the music, her body, and the circle of women around her—but in Tanzanian culture, women dance in private spaces. Nurjahan dreamed of becoming a professional dancer, so this cultural taboo against public dancing created shame.

In a 11.14.2022 post, Nurjahan tells her story of becoming a gun violence survivor. At age twenty-one, she went to a nightclub in Toronto where she was shot in the leg and others were fatally wounded. Her first words after the assault? “I’m never gonna dance again.” Members of her family later placed blame for the shooting on her—“she went out dancing, what did she expect?”

Gabor Maté teaches that it is not the trauma, but being alone with trauma that causes the most damage. “Trauma is not what happens to you but what happens inside you,” Maté writes in The Myth of Normal, which is the book I would assign if I could decree that all citizens read just one book. It is inside the self, inside the family, where oppression begins and ends. Do you agree to the terms of your oppression?

I bear witness to this internalized oppression. Survivors take on the voices of outside haters. If I hadn’t been out dancing, if I hadn’t taken that drink, if I hadn’t confronted my husband, if I hadn’t walked to my car alone so late. . . Why do we have this profound propensity to blame ourselves, to blame the victim?

Believing there is something we could have done, should have done differently to prevent violence creates an illusion of safety. The myth of control is seductive because it is less terrifying than believing we live in a world where random and cruel things can happen to anyone at any time.

In the Spring of 2019, I went to visit my friend Joni on her homestead outside Trinidad, Colorado. Far beyond the end of the beaten path, down many unnamed, unpaved forest roads, sit forty acres that had been a haven for me as a young woman. This was the place where I had learned how to farm, how to cob, how to share communal meals and sunbathe nude besides other dirty hippies and idealistic young people.

But, as I have found too many times, transporting modern humans onto wild land does not cleanse them of their trauma or their conditioning. On this visit, I met a young man named Jonathan and another handful of WWOOFers currently living on the property. Later that day we sought refuge from the heat at the pond, stripping bare as was the local custom. Jonathon, who I’d met just hours before, came up behind me in the water and before I realized what was happening, he rubbed his penis on my bare back. I jolted out of the water as if electrified, running to find dry land where I could redress myself as others looked on, confused.

I had no physical wounds, but my body was harmed, nonetheless. I felt hypervigilant and emotionally dysregulated. I couldn’t understand why or how this had happened, how to make his behavior make sense. I felt like the law of cause and effect had broken, and that gravity might break along with it. I don’t think the incident made sense to Jonathon either. He packed his belongings and disappeared in the middle of the night without telling anyone where he was going.

The traumas I have experienced are minor compared to many, but they echo through my life and questions rebound within my mind. Should I hide my body from onlookers? Would a bathing suit have protected me? No on both accounts. I will bask, I will swim. I will soak in every ray of sunshine, feel every molecule of water against my skin. I will be naked, be raw. No cloak, no pretense. How can my naked self be offensive or give permission for violence? It cannot. I will carry no shame.

This summer, sunbathing on a relative’s lakefront dock, I was asked, “not to give the neighbors a show.” Anger flared like a fire in my core. I had to leave the dock and walk it off. This relative doesn’t know that it is a triumph for me to be comfortable in my skin. She doesn’t know that soaking in the sun helps me feel embodied, feel safe. It might feel like she is upholding a system of oppression, but perhaps she feels that my clothes will make me safer, make us both safer. Different bodies make different calculations. Sometimes it’s a daily struggle, against society, against propriety, to maintain autonomy and authenticity. But I bathe naked, when and where I can.

And Nurjahan dances. She dances seemingly every day, posting new videos in her long, vibrant dresses. She ignores the people who seek to make her invisible, those who snarl that the dresses of her grandmothers “hide her movement.” Racist trolls openly mock her culture and her politics, seeking any angle to censure her bodily expression, but in Nurjahan’s words, “it was okay to share my joy publicly without fear of punishment.” Here is a woman that knows in her bones that her “body is not an apology,” to quote Sonya Renee Taylor. Our choices are so different—long dresses vs. naked body—but they are both expressions of autonomy, our own authentic medicine.

I struggle to wrap up this post. What do I want you to take away? I feel discomfort comparing my story to the story of another and yet, is it not true that we are united by violence or the threat of violence? I have no idea, really, what I’m doing most days. I just dance on into the future, trying to heal my ‘small-t trauma’ and making space for others healing traumas big and small.

This content is free, but you can always buy me a coffee. Cheers!