Love in all forms - Myra Khan

Welcome back to the Community-Driven Archives (CDA) Initiative blog! We hope you had a wonderful holiday season, and we hope 2021 will be a great year for everyone.

We start this semester’s CDA blog with a submission from Myra Khan, one of our amazing student archivists who is currently a senior at Arizona State University (ASU) studying Sustainability with a minor in Political Science and Transborder Studies. Myra’s post is a wonderful reflection on the complexity of love and the ways in which love can show up in a person’s life. Please enjoy Myra’s reflection below.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Personally, I can’t remember a time when I didn’t have a complicated relationship with Valentine’s Day. Nothing seemed to exemplify the culture of excess, waste, and performative affection more than the fourteenth of February. Wonderfully, though, I’ve come to realize that it doesn’t have to be as such; our social conception of love doesn’t have to be as such.

Love is empathy; love is compassion; love is care, kindness, selflessness, service, courage, boundlessness, connection, freedom, openness, energy, optimism. Love is so much more than romance. Love is a force that joins us with our hearts and the depth of our emotions. Love is what allows us to toil for the betterment of ourselves, each other, and our world. Love is not simply restorative but creative and it inspires us to be better, to do better, and to make things better.

It has never been guilt, nor hatred, nor fear that has motivated great progressive social change. It is the love of life and the future that makes movements possible and keeps them going. When we take the overpriced bouquets and mass-produced cards out of love and, more importantly, put the unconditional support and strength of community back in, we end up with a force so powerful it can fuel and inspire generations.

My recent understanding of love has largely been influenced by Arvind Narrain’s writings on “Queer love,” a sort of love that de-commercializes affection and re-centers kinship and service. Narrain’s love is a force that smashes shackles of oppression in the same breath that it joins together families. Instead of seeing love as a burden we must perform to keep up appearances, queer love challenges us to find and use a sincere love to truly de-alienate ourselves from one another.

As a community archivist, I see this love everywhere in my work. The point of a community archive is to preserve not just the “objective” facts of history, but also to protect the emotion—the love, the pain, the joy. Curation requires care, care that truths are being told and care that humanity is being shared. Preserving the tales of your kin, present and past, is an obligation that is only made possible through vast, genuine love.

So, this Valentine’s Day, I hope that you have all of the chocolate your heart desires but also remember to find ways to show your love to your community that don’t involve a last-minute trip to Walgreens. 

Thank you, Myra, as always, we appreciate you and your contributions to the CDA blog. Contact me, Jessica Salow, with feedback at Jessica.Salow@asu.edu, as I would love to hear from you your thoughts regarding the work, we here at ASU are doing in community archiving around Arizona. We also want your feedback on what you would like to see from us in future blog posts. And if you would like regular updates from the CDA team please follow our CDA Facebook page or the CDA Instagram page to keep abreast of the virtual events we do monthly. We have some amazing events coming up in February 2021 so please check out our social media pages for more information. And please visit our website and our connect page for more information regarding the work we are doing around community-driven archives at ASU Library and with our community partners in Arizona. 

See you soon!