Dancing Through the Wound

 Dancing Through the Wound: Reflections on Africa, Palestine, and the Art of Healing

Last night, I witnessed a dance performance that left my chest tight and my eyes wet. It was a history lesson . It was memory. A trembling truth pulsing through the bodies of dancers who became vessels,spirit carriers, moving through the anguish and beauty of African histories, through the legacy of slavery and the ripples of colonial violence. Every movement seemed to echo with an ancestral ache still too present in the now.

The cost of colonialism on Africa was laid bare; not in facts , but in sinew and sweat, in rhythm and rupture. The performance wasn’t telling a story, it was releasing one. A collective grief, trapped in generations, still playing out in the art of a people searching for healing. Searching for themselves beyond the stolen land, the stolen names, the stolen gods.

As I sat there, a witness in the dark. My breath slowed. My hands trembled. My heart said: “This is not history. This is happening.” I thought of the mothers. I thought of the children. I thought of the displacement, the diaspora, the dreams cut short but never fully extinguished.

And then—Palestine entered my mind.

Not as a political parallel, but as a spiritual kin. Another place where the cost of occupation is not just measured in bombed buildings or news headlines, but in broken hearts, disrupted rituals, and generations forced to carry the weight of a wound they didn’t create. Another place where art has become survival. Where song, dance, poetry, and painting are not luxuries but lifelines. Where culture becomes resistance, becomes prayer, becomes memory-keeper.

In both Africa and Palestine, I see a dance of survival. I see artists becoming truth-tellers, dream-weavers, and spirit-healers. I see bodies remembering what the world would rather forget. I see the long arc of human suffering being bent; if not toward justice, then at least toward dignity. Toward presence.

Colonialism is not just an old ghost; it’s a present system. Its impact lives on in broken economies, in fractured families, in inherited trauma. But art is also a system, a sacred one. A way of reweaving what was torn. A way of saying: We are still here. We have always been here. And we remember.

As a displaced woman I hold space for these griefs to speak. I don’t rush to resolve them. I know healing takes time, several generations, sometimes. But I believe in the medicine of art. I believe in movement as prayer. I believe in the possibility of repair, not just through policy or politics, but through the sacred act of bearing witness.

As a re telling as re writing the future but holding the story close.

May the ancestors of Africa, of Palestine, and of every place touched by violence feel the pulse of these prayers rising. May the dance continue, not as performance, but as ceremony. Not as spectacle, but as reclamation.

And may we all remember: the body knows. The soul remembers. And art can bring us home.

~Shanti Freedom Das