Portrait of George Floyd painted on a wooden panel, (Minneapolis, United States), by Peyton Scott Russell.

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Solar Plexus

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1
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A few years ago, my chest fell apart. Inside me, my diaphragm poked out over my stomach. Doctors called it a hiatal hernia. It had been a long time since I’d thought about that part of my body. I remember a high school music teacher waving her arms and yelling at the class: “breathe in through your diaphragm!”

I wasn’t surprised when doctors told me they might have to operate. It was a time in my life where nothing felt safe. The man I expected to grow old with had left me. Losing him made my heart feel like a soggy teabag dragging down on my chest. A few months after the separation, I suffered a burnout in my job as a human rights researcher. A field mission left me sobbing on the side of a hot highway. My mind was flooded with the stories of refugees I had interviewed on the border of Mexico and Guatemala.

I had first entered Mexico a decade before, with my Australian passport. I had walked over the bridge on that same river where I would years later draw sketches in my notepad, as a researcher. I noted down teargas canisters attached to soldiers’ rifles. Weapons primed to shoot at migrants and refugees. Families who had fled violence and poverty and come to wade across the river to enter Mexico. They couldn’t walk over the bridge like I had years before. This was simply because they looked different from me and they didn’t have passports. I had seen too much of how humans treated other humans. I had seen too much of myself.

For years after my burnout, whenever doubt emerged, I jumped on it like a sticky sliver of meat stuck inside a bone, elusive and enticing. I became addicted to doubt. In the bottom of my stomach, a pulling, tugging feeling. Just when the acute stage of my burnout was subsiding, the global pandemic hit. The juggernaut that was Covid ensured doubt stayed around as a constant channel in my brain for some time.

For many long months after returning from the field mission on the border, my throat seized up as the acid grew in my chest. I was scared about the idea of the hiatal hernia operation. A friend had had that same operation some years back.

“It was the worst decision of my life,” she said.

“I feel like since then, I can’t breathe in fully. It’s like I’ve lost all my power, right at my centre. In my solar plexus.”

Did I still have any power within me? Did I still trust myself, or anyone? I wondered about that very spot in my centre – my solar plexus, and above it my sternum, my heart. I felt a lead weight inside, and didn’t know how to get back to feeling softness. Back to trusting myself, or trusting life. Or to caring, for that matter.

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2
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Somewhere along my journey of reckoning with my burnout, I saw a documentary on the life of Luciano Pavarotti. I stopped the film to re-watch a ten second frame. The interviewer asks: So, Luciano, you travel around the world and meet all different types of people as you sing opera. After all your experiences, would you say you trust people? Pavarotti draws a sharp breath into his barrel-like chest. His dark eyes shoot back an incredulous expression. Then, in a millisecond, he adjusts his gaze and throws a firm look at the interviewer.

“Of course I trust people!”, Pavarotti answers. I was rattled.

Sometime before, I would have agreed with Pavarotti in a heartbeat. In a breath. Of course I trust people! My nature had always been to trust. In the school yard, I would sit with my friends eating rectangular sandwiches under the Sydney sun while they complained about another girl in our grade. I often chimed in offering up the person’s good attributes, much to the chagrin of my friends, who just wanted to gossip in peace.

Yet during my unravelling, I began to wonder. How could I be so naïve? I questioned everything. In love, I had decanted my heart into the heart of another. I expected the moon and thought we could hitch a ride there on the lofty wheels of my mind. In my work, I had drained myself dry, running behind other people’s stories, devastated by their experiences, hanging myself off the addictive idea that it all came down to me. Love and trust felt like silly words that had blown me up until I deflated in a tattered flutter. I panicked. And my lungs, where I breathed, felt constricted. I feared my chest would crack with everything inside it.

I thought about the aria that Pavarotti is most famous for. Nessun Dorma. It’s a song about a man with everything on the line. Everything is a mess, and there is only a small chance that he can know love. It is late at night, and the man is talking to his soul. The music builds with a swelling crescendo, as he realizes one thing. I will triumph, he repeats to himself. Vincerò. I will triumph.

Many years before my burnout, and before the seismic shift that was the pandemic, I saw the opera Turandot live on stage. My uncle had given me tickets to the Met Opera in New York. My seat looked down, squaring directly on the spot where Pavarotti would have sung the aria on that stage in the Lincoln Center decades before. My chest expanded as the tenor’s voice rose to the final refrain of Nessun Dorma. I bowed my head, in tears.

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3
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Typing the words “Nessun Dorma” into YouTube, I found a couple of videos of the three tenors. Alongside these, I was stunned to find multiple videos entitled “Nessun Dorma reaction video: see how I react watching Nessun Dorma for the first time!” Many of these videos were posted during 2020, amid the pandemic. Before Covid, I was not aware of the phenomenon of “reaction videos.”

In the anxiety-filled days of early Covid, at a time when people were attacking each other on social media over their beliefs, people from different cultures and races were watching Pavarotti sing this aria. I watched one of them. A black American man with a channel called “JayVee TV” had over half a million views.

As he starts watching the aria, he says “I´ve never been to an opera before.”

His eyes watch Pavarotti intently, and as the melody develops, his face takes on a yearning expression. Halfway through the video, Jayvee bows his head in reverence, closes his eyes, then touches the middle of his chest.

“Man, this guy just touched my soul,” he exclaims.

By the end of the aria, his eyes are moist.

As Pavarotti’s eyes are welling up with tears too, JayVee says “Wow, wow. Jesus, man.”

Two days after JayVee posted his reaction video in May 2020, another black man in America was seen on video around the world. That man’s name was George Floyd. I thought about how George died. I thought about how they took away his breath. I never could grapple with the cruel parallels of a virus killing millions due to lack of oxygen, at the same time as we watched a man being killed through asphyxiation.

My mother called me on the phone from Sydney:

“Your father and I are glued to the television watching the protests in Minnesota and around the world. We think ´I can´t breathe´ is the most powerful protest chant ever. ´”

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4
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I started to realize that even though I had been a human rights activist since I was a teenager, I always skirted around the issue of racism. Even as a white person living in Mexico for over a decade. I hadn’t grappled with it fully.

I clutched a friend’s hand as we walked along a street during the third wave of the pandemic:

“Can you imagine – I actually used to dread having to work on the issue of racial discrimination. I thought it was boring. Something in me thought there was nothing that could be done about it. So I found it a drag to think about.”

In my job I had looked at dozens of police files that showed evidence of torture through asphyxiation. It made me think of how George Floyd died. The difference is that the detainees I spoke to lived to tell their tale, and George Floyd did not. One of them was hung upside down by police in northern Mexico and raped, while her lungs filled up with fluid, making her feel like she was drowning. I thought of dozens of medics reports with sketches made on diagrams of arrested people’s bodies, noting wounds and bodily damage.

According to media reports, George Floyd’s autopsy shows lung failure due to asphyxiation. I have never lived in the United States and have only visited family there for short periods. All I had to help me understand were different contexts: other contexts of pain, that I had heard through the testimonies of people I had interviewed. Dozens of torture survivors, rape survivors and prisoners. And at some point, along this road, it had all started to break my heart. To push down on my chest. And to question everything, with doubt. I don’t think I ever watched the full video of George Floyd’s arrest. I couldn’t bring myself to sit through every one of those nine minutes and hear Floyd repeat the words “I can’t breathe” over twenty times. I didn’t go to the protest march either. I was numb. A friend invited me to the protest outside the US embassy in Mexico City after Floyd’s death, but I was in lockdown in my apartment, and engrossed on typing up a report for my job, about the rights of health workers during the pandemic. I was busy on the phone interviewing nurses and doctors from Nicaragua to Chicago. But the truth of it, when I look at it now, is that I was paralyzed. Something in my heart said, it wouldn’t make a difference anyway. Something inside me was giving up, just a little.

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5
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I remember when I interviewed Enrique in a maximum-security federal prison in Guadalajara, in northern Mexico. In the two hours that we sat in a small interview room, prison guards kept another inmate waiting for me outside - standing pressed to the wall with his face down in a forced position. Enrique was a university student, a champion chess player, social activist, and avid reader of philosophy. He mailed me poems he wrote in prison to my office in Mexico City. He had been falsely accused of a crime he didn’t commit. He narrated me every memory of the 24 hours of torture the police subjected him to. He had developed a twitch in his eye and looked skinnier than he should. Later, when my colleague and I were escorted out - as they pulled the bars of the door in front of me - during my last glimpse of Enrique, all I could do was look in his eyes, and put my hand on my chest. Near my heart.

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Three years later, Enrique was finally released from jail and he came into the office. I sat down with him and gave him a cup of coffee and we spoke for hours. Here I was, sitting with a man that had literally survived death. The first thing he did when he got out of prison was continue his social struggles for justice.

“How do you do it?” I asked him. “How do you keep going? How do you not get eaten up by rage, by hatred?”

Enrique leaned back and stretched his arms across the back of his chair.

“I’m not angry at those policemen for what they did to me,” he said. “They were just following orders. And rage? Hatred?”, he said.

“We’ve got to be careful with that stuff. It can make our face crooked and tire us out.”

I wondered how he continued to trust. Where inside did he still feel a voice saying Vincerò? Then he began to quote me a poem by Bertold Brecht:

Hatred of oppression still distorts the features,
Anger at injustice still makes voices raised and ugly.
Oh we, who wished to lay the foundations for peace and friendliness,
Could never be friendly ourselves.

Hatred distorts the features. Brecht’s words felt true to me. I wondered if hatred could distort the features, could it distort internal organs? Could it distort the heart? An image came to mind of a man standing shirtless, backed by the white marble of the Capitol building in Washington DC. He was wearing fur and had horns on his head. He is the face of the Capitol riots. I reflected on other faces, faces of Charlottesville, or of the Cronulla riots in Sydney. Some time later, a my cousin in New York raised his voice in agitation when I said it was the work of all of us to look at racism inside of us:

“That’s focusing our energy in the wrong direction: the real people to blame are those crazy Republicans! I hate them! Those guys are awful, they should pay.”

I thought about the men that rioted on Capitol Hill. I couldn’t find hatred for them inside of me. My bones felt weary, and particularly, weary of hatred. What pricked inside my chest was sadness, and an overwhelming feeling of curiosity. What happened inside the chests of the Capitol rioters? What propelled them to spew spleen all over Washington DC? I even had inane questions in my head, like where had they bought those colourful costumes? In my life, as a white woman, could I be sure that I had never shared a room with people who felt like this? I had dipped my foot in enough circles of privilege: opera tickets at the Met, cocktails at ambassador’s houses. Were there people in those functions whose chests had become muted, from fear, or hatred?

During the pandemic I read White Supremacy and Me, a masterful book by author Layla F. Saad. Over many months, with some fellow readers, we started to explore layers full of pain, centuries of pain. Each time we knocked at the door of anecdotes and shame and sadness, the breath caught in my chest. I started to realize it was so easy for white people like me to cling to the common refrain: “why do other people always have to make everything about race?” We hate that – because it brings us to a feeling we have never had to feel. It is an awfulness of feeling different. I remember one day standing on the subway platform in Manhattan and looking around me. The thought hit me in my chest. It was a distinct moment and ever since then I feel like I cannot put on the glasses I used to see the world with before. The thought went like this: Perhaps the awfulness of feeling different is the feeling everyone else has had to live with all their lives. Someone called this work “heart breaking work,” because feeling the pain is part of the process of opening the heart. I felt rattled – like the day when I first saw Pavarotti’s startled eyes saying “Of course I trust people!”

I remember the first time I felt the hot shame of racist thoughts that could pop into my mind. As a teenager, walking through a neighbourhood that wasn’t my own, and feeling it wasn’t my own. Then feeling I should get out of there and hating myself for feeling that. Hating the story in my mind that I could be in danger because the people looked different there. I wonder if all hatred starts at hatred of ourselves. And I wonder whether each drop of hatred is a weight on the chest. Perhaps each drop is an invitation, to give up, or to triumph: To listen.

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6
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One evening in 2021, I stood outside a supermarket in Manhattan’s Upper West Side. It was a day where the air hung suspended above the criss-crossed pattern of New York streets, almost as if holding them in place like cotton sheets hanging from a line. The scene still unravels in my memory in slow motion, as if traced through my heart. A black man was shouting at some police officers, who were standing facing him with their hands behind their backs. I didn’t understand what was happening: people were already gathered around, and someone had taken out their cell phone and was filming. It seemed their filming was preventative, in case police brutality started to unfold in front of our eyes.

There was a piece of paper in the man’s hands, maybe a fine or an official warning. I couldn’t make out what he was saying to police officers. I stood for a few seconds, and then continued into the supermarket. The number of bystanders at the scene seemed to have things covered, and I knew the perils of assuming the saviour role without knowing the context, or escalating things based on assumptions.

When I walked out of the supermarket with a bottle of milk, the man had a pen in his hands and was asking one of the police officers:

“What is your name?”

I remember how the man’s lip trembled, and his eyes were widened in sadness, in anger.

In response, the policeman spoke softly as he gave his name: “Rodriguez.”

The man responded, “Rodr – how do you spell that?!”

The police officer stood with his face looking to the sky, his hands still behind his back, and his expression seemed to be imploring the ground to swallow him up, to be gone from this scene, from this uniform. For me, Rodriguez was a name I heard every day, a name I knew how to spell. It was the name of man who had broken my heart. For the man on the street, it was the name of a police officer. In the officer’s face, I also saw sadness and pain. I left the scene, again, feeling like I was floating above it, suspended somewhere else, watching it from afar. I felt a grief inside me I didn’t know how to describe. It was a grief for all of us that had lost who we really were inside. That famous “content of our character” was not the story that we were living. We were the pain our differences had etched into us, based on our skin colour and the role life gave us.

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7
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The reaction videos that multiplied - from May to August 2020 - generally used a famous video from 1994 of the Three Tenors’ concert in which Pavarotti sings Nessun Dorma, dressed in a tuxedo beside his fellow tenors. Yet almost twenty years earlier he was filmed singing the aria in the Lincoln Center in New York in 1979. It is a younger Luciano - more gregarious and light-hearted in his demeanour.

Two decades after that video of the joyful younger singer, the 1994 Pavarotti has a different expression. By that time, he had lived a longer life and seen loss and sorrow. As he sings the song, he seems more serious than his 1970s self. And yet, when I watched this video, and watched dozens of people watch this video, it seemed to me that Pavarotti knew what he was communicating. And his voice told me that this feeling in his chest is something he took very seriously. Perhaps he knew he was singing the truth, the wide-chested, jolly-faced man that he was. I got the sense that right at that spot, where a medic could draw a dot on the middle of the chest, is the place where we can expand, or contract.

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8
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My nieces have a book I read to them over and over again called Rosie Revere. It’s written in rhyme and has beautiful illustrations. It’s about a little girl that tries and tries again. Their voices raise to the end as we fill our lungs and chime the last line of the book together: “Life might have its failures, but this was not it. The only true failure can come if you quit!”

I wonder about the rioters on Capitol Hill, or Derek Chauvin, the officer who killed George Floyd. I wonder whether they gave up.

In April 2021, I was sitting barefoot on the grass in New York’s Central Park. Suddenly from behind me, a man’s voice carried across the dozens of people sitting under the midday sun:

“Guilty! On three counts!”

It was the day of the jury’s verdict against Derek Chauvin. I felt a flicker in my chest which stayed for days afterwards. A wave of applause rippled through everyone sitting on the lawn that day. My heart expanded. Somewhere, there was still that younger heart, who had first listened to Nessun Dorma.

Black lives mattered. Life mattered. The electricity of our breath mattered. There was a verdict that said so. I felt joy at all of this. Grief for a man who was no longer with us. Despair for the man who had given up and killed him and was going to prison. I felt determination to look further into my own heart.

Five years on from Floyd’s death, I continue along this slow path. To see myself as a white person. To not run away from what that means. I try to listen.

I didn’t get an operation on my hernia. I started singing lessons. I joined a choir. I started learning how to breathe again.

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