a rage room in heaven

to claudia

early this month on the eve of spring, my close friend and colleague radical herbalist claudia manchanda transcended after a heroic 12-year fight with breast cancer. they were an absolute badass and i have spent the month processing this loss by writing to them. i’m sharing some scrambled parts of that with you as i let go, as they journey on. you can also read more about them, and the work they did with misery and beyond in the embedded post below.

Loving Claudia Manchanda

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to claudia,

i am writing this in bed with a black dog asleep across my chest. not the metaphorical one though he’s here too. my dog. she is not a puppy she is just tiny. i have to say that 300 times a day now. suddenly the people of the united kingdom know joy. everyone needs to chit and chat. the last in-person conversation we had, a month before you died, was about her. i keep playing it back to have something to hold onto. when i showed you her photos on the adoption website you made a face like you were disgusted, but only because she’s so cute. i do that too. i was relieved you liked her. when i drew back the curtain on the hospital bay you cried when you saw me. i only saw you cry twice. through all you suffered, i saw you laugh so much more. you cried because you knew you wouldn’t leave the hospital, and you wanted to live. you wanted to see your cat again. you wanted me to get the dog. i never had a chance to tell you but i did. you would like her. i miss you. 

claudia holding a little linden flower medicine i made them

the week you left, the sun shone big and long every day. the stars were brighter i swear. the first full moon without you was the blood moon in virgo. i ran into the buddhist center and dragged any perceptible queers i could find outside with me and we stood for an hour heads back watching the crisp black clouds pass over the magnificent moonbow, all shades of red and orange and rust, your favourite colour. i’d never seen a moon like it and im not even chatting shit i promise. i talk about the full moon, but rasheeqa said all the moons were shining with claudia energy. and they were. they burned with the howl of a sagittarius at the start of a new journey, with the fervour of a person who kept themselves alive again and again and again, because they wanted to live. now you are the moon. it suits you claud. come to think of it, chand means moon doesn’t it. now you are the moon claudia manchanda.

every time i took my clunky film camera out to photograph you these last couple years, you told me to fuck off. before acquiescing. or as per my favourite photo, before giving me the finger (while reading from a mindmap you’d made about depression nutrition, while also working out to build back the muscle mass you had lost through chemo). i love your naughtiness. i love your fearlessness. i love that though you were just as adored as all the instagram captions say (and beyond and beyond!), you were also disliked and blocked and beefing. there is no way to be principled, honest, to be as real as you were and not be. they were a hater in the best sense of the word!!! soha reminds me as we reminisce. and in these community/as/theory/get/ur/bag end times, thank god you were. so steadfast. so complete. so grounded in your truth, in justice. thank you for caring enough to say and do the thing. thank you for loving community but hating bullshit more.

doorstep strawberries

i didn’t want to be your friend at first. it wasn’t personal, i was just so traumatised from years of community work that i kept everyone i met that way at arms length by default. but after a while of working together you called me and said i don’t need to be such a recluse! that i could let you in! that you wouldn’t be around forever and you wanted to make sure i’d be okay when you’re gone. that you respected the way i do things and that misery was the first time in your life you hadn’t been made to feel like a problem. and then we never stopped talking did we. about plants, love, loss. about our dreams, nightmares. thank you for demanding that of me. and thank you for sharing your last years with me, for trusting us. for holding me through the hardest year of my life, while living the last of yours. i cherished it every day and i always will. i hope i told you enough. 

the loss of you is so big i still cannot fathom it. when you died i felt rage which is not something i feel often. but rage, at the unfairness of it. i kept asking how it is possible for such an immense force for good, such an unbelievably generous steward of the earth and its people to have to go, while so much evil continues to roam. you were not religious and neither am i but i cursed god anyway. maybe that’s an infantile way to think about things but i’ll let myself have it. mara said i should be prepared to cycle through all the stages of grief multiple times a day and that has helped me feel less bonkers for sure. 

claudia with the giant wreath they made, highlighting lives lost to police brutality, at hackney’s if mi nuh laugh mi cry festival 2024

last summer we sat on a hill on hampstead heath in the sunshine for hours, talking about everything. you were so excited to be outside after being bed bound for days. i asked if you had always had this energy or if you had summoned it to help you live. i had an idea but i was curious, as i often am about anyone with any energy really. but you had something effervescent. i remember watching you at one of the early misery medicine herb walks, before we knew each other and before you started working with misery and before you shaved your hair off. you bent over to smell and caress every flower we passed, seemed completely dedicated to it, like it was your first time. i didn’t know who you were but it amused me.

you looked ahead to the little garden in the distance and said i just love life. i have always loved life. maybe you said it in french or maybe my memory brain is getting excited because i know how to say that in french.  joie de vivre. joie!! de vivre! despite the horrors of the world that you so intimately made your responsibility, despite your encyclopaedic knowledge of worldwide oppressions, despite the loneliness and the let down of life, you had that joie de vivre. you loved life and you made life more loveable for everyone else.

at a grief circle the other day, assia asked us how we will each honour you going forward, and this memory of you bathed in sunlight on that hill came to me. may i find the courage to love life as you did. may i honour you by making playfulness and curiosity, creativity and justice central to my life as you did. may i always ask others how they are no matter how unwell i am as you did. and may i immerse myself, deeply and routinely in the more-than-human world, so i might just Love Life, as you did.

aforementioned cheekiness

death is a bit of a circus isn’t it. plot twist, revelation, suspense, contortion, performance. that’s a shit metaphor to say i have found your death hard. it has been a lesson in expectation. there has been little group ceremony since you left. apart from maybe online? i've been off socials for months, but it seems like that’s where grief ritual lives now. out in the open. i thought about coming back to join in but samirah said you would probably find it cringe if i reactivated my whole instagram account to write a caption about your death. idk. it has been lonely. you made ceremony out of everything, out of nothing. an altar for every occasion, a foraged mandala for every floor. i have felt like the village madman, roaming around inviting people into grief practice no-one’s ready to do. i am feeling calmer about it now, more patient, more empathetic, more trusting. but there have been nights this month i have been sure we will not survive the revolution. and you’re the person i would normally bitch about this stuff with. and you’d get it. you weren’t interested in talking about ceremony around death though. you just wanted to live.

at a protest demanding the release of marieha hussain who was arrested for carrying the iconic coconuts placard

maymana took us to a rage room. i didn’t know they were a real thing. we travelled into deep south london, put voice of baceprot on really loud and smashed the fuck out of everything we could see, in your honour. it was wonderful and i did feel your presence very strongly. the walls were covered in writing, though we only really noticed at the end. turns out there is a large community of woke baddies with a rage room practice. the walls said free palestine fuck australia fuck cancer fuck higher gcse maths this is for the brown girls!!! and on one of the walls, right in the middle, in bigger letters than the rest, there the whole time, was C L A U D I A. i hope there’s a rage room in heaven. 

prompted by a tiktok sana told me about, i suggested we treat the rage room as a thrifting experience. so maymana and i both chose something to take home, pre-smash. maymana took a pretty dish with bramble painted on, and i took a heavy metal golden duck with both of its feet missing. this morning, when i was doing my final checks before moving my boat, i found eggs under the decking on my roof, nestled around my life jacket, and with a few feathers and sticks laid around. later, i saw a mallard fly from the roof when i came out to check on them. duck eggs, a nest. or what constitutes for one in east london. and all this, the same week i put a deposit down on a new boat, something you’d wanted for me for a while. your magic is large.

some memories keep circling. in an early misery medicine session, before we knew each other, we were prompted to go around the circle, each saying what our favourite medicinal plant is. i was embarrassed by my choice - rose - which while true, felt a bit basic in front of the proper herbalists. when it came to you, you glanced at me, and said roses too, but less apologetically than me, obviously. i flooded with warmth. in the uber on the way to the malak mattar exhibition we were talking about the mess of our lives and i took your hand and you held mine back for the whole 40 minute journey. it wasn’t so like me to do that but i’m glad i did, because i can still feel it. this time last year at randa’s botanical ink-making session at misery medicine, i made you a painting that said ‘spring is medicine’, a quote from an impromptu speech you gave at the start of the session. how true that is, and how deeply it is felt this time around. and i am eternally thankful to you for teaching me the rhyme - when in doubt, leave it out - grateful for all of the mediocre club nights i have missed. 

misery medicine <3

on the train to leeds this time last year, to speak on a panel about ~community~ we were voicenoting back and forth. you were excited for me, as you often were, and “banging off my single tit on fucking steroids”, as you’d say. i’ve been listening to them, as an antidote to a grief that has pushed me towards resentment and hopelessness. you said:

“i’ve got so much i could rant about community. about how important it is to have these safe spaces. because it’s really been pertinent to stuff happening to me at the moment. some random cascading thoughts are what is community? in this country we had thatcher’s government from 1979 till like fucking 1990 or something, which totally ripped apart invested community structures, striking, the thought that people could actually do things together and help each other and made the whole focus on individuals being responsible for themselves. she’s got so much to answer for, cause we had like, community electricity, community gas, the nhs was community and now it’s privatised at every strata. every strata of our society is non-community by state ordination because it’s all “divided, we rule”. and they do conquer. 

it’s working out what community is and not glorifying it. and realising that communities are very multi-complex things, especially when there’s multiple traumatised people trying to navigate a space. don’t idolize it. it’s something to work towards, it’s not necessarily that everybody has access to it in a perfected state, there’s no such thing as that. a bit like ying and yang, things ebb and flow and there’s going to be problems. shit’s gonna happen. people need to be kind and forgiving but have boundaries for bullshit.

community means giving up privileges, so if you want to work as part of a community you can’t be a selfish arsehole. it means sometimes you have to stay in your lane and give people their dues. so if someone’s better at doing something in a community, let them fucking do it. if they can help you do it, let them. always acknowledge each other’s skills and what everyone brings. people need to be able to, in a boundaried and safe way, be able to talk to each other. colonisers need to be removed. and when i say stay in your lane i mean be real. like if you can't commit to something, that other people, marginalised people, are depending on, just don't commit to it. that’s not to be ableist, you can come back to it when you can. or figure out ways you can comfortably contribute. staying in your lane is also important regarding producing work that doesn't reflect your background or knowledge spectrum.

there are duties involved in building an intentional community. it’s a duty to hold space for people affected by violence. to hold space for acknowledging intergenerational trauma. it is our duty to understand that if you’re traumatised, you’re going to have trauma responses that aren’t neurotypical, that are going to get you judged by the state, and that we need to provide spaces that are going to accommodate that. it is our duty to break our intergenerational, familial traumas. protect our kids, our beloveds, if we can. even if it’s slowly, slowly. that is our duty. and it is our duty to break the systems that cause intergenerational trauma. that’s an aspirational community. but intention is a big thing, carry that intention through to everything you do.”

claudia, i cant imagine you dead, only as the very alive thing you are. people say i am lucky to have gained an ancestor, and i am, but that’s not what you wanted. you wanted to be here, to keep loving life. i am grateful you can rest now. there is solace in that. that you are now journeying far from the chains of this world. solace then, that you are the moon. that you are roses. that as you used to say, when i smell roses, my ancestors smell them too. that you are freedom and love driving hand in hand into the night.