Lot's Wife

The rupture of a miscarriage of justice is something that calcifies, growing harder and more stubborn as the world keeps spinning. Initially it wrecks like a flood of toxic water rushing into every cherished and carefully earned part of a home. In the ruin and debris of destruction, many rooms that once buzzed with life turn to stone. Things cannot go back to what they were. And one cannot look back at the destruction while fleeing forward; that risks turning us to a pillar of salt.

Yet what happens next? When a system fails, it cracks identities. Life as we came to understand it appears a lie. What are systems? What are institutions? What are values? What are nations even? Are we loyal to any of it after such a thing?

The story I am about to share is terribly shocking.

Today, body cam footage was released of a young man who was left to bleed to death by the British police in Hampshire. The last thing he heard were his rights being read to him, while his murderer stood over his body, having convinced the police that it was he who was the victim of a “racist” attack that gave him an invisible bruised eye.

Henry Nowak was unresponsive as the cuffs were placed on his hands, after the police dragged him across the ground and he complained of being stabbed. “I’ve been stabbed,” were his last words. The officer said, “you’ve been stabbed, whereabouts? Don’t think you have mate,” as Nowak bled out in front of him.

A young white male was murdered and ignored by police officers. His murderer, Vickrum Digwa, claimed the 18-year-old finance student had racially abused him. But it was Nowak who was stabbed four times. Today Digwa was sentenced for murder after Nowak’s loved ones were put through a trial ordeal in which Digwa’s entire family lied about Nowak’s character, so far without consequence. The system that trained the police to hear the word “racist” and switch off every instinct they had, helped the Digwas paint Nowak as the villain. His family’s fight for the truth is far from over.

Words have become so final. So fatal. The knife was not what killed Nowak.

I saw this horrific thing by accident today as I was in my own looping memories about miscarriages of justice. Nobody ever talks about what happens next. The climax is the terrible happening, but the happening is not the end. Those who suffered it have to then somehow make sense of the world again, and without any guidelines. Make sense of their life up until that seismic jolt comes and everything you ever knew and understood is swallowed by a black hole. When the dawn breaks the next day and nothing feels real any more, and you’re wondering the truth of all sorts of accepted realities you adhered to. If perhaps the Moon Landing really did happen on a movie lot. There’s a song I love with a weird lyric - “every time the sun comes up, I’m in trouble”. It’s that. The innocence of assumed safety is permanently disappeared.

Turn to “God”, say believers. Well yes, but many people don’t want to choose “God” in that moment. They want a map that works. They want scientific explanations. They want systems they can see with their own eyes.

So I’m asking now: what happens next to Nowak’s parents? His friends? His family? How do they not split open like the Earth’s crust? This is how people crumble. So isn’t this how societies pulverize?

I woke up this morning, and I lay in an expanse of quiet that may be familiar to anyone who has once been hurled into an upside down, into a matrix of surreal realness. It’s an impossible quiet. A quiet that fills a room with something that feels heavier than the scenery of life outside, because life outside never looks quite the same as it did before. Because now you know things are not right, that we cannot trust in our institutions, that the place we may call home doesn’t have our back. But you also know that if you linger too long, you will become stuck like Lot’s wife. Alone. A lone. So you have to keep running. But running from what? From who? And to where?

I don’t have answers. I just write. I try to make sense of what doesn’t make sense. I am sorry for the irreversible failures by authorities and systems to innocent undeserving victims of hateful criminals. Every person is a universe. And a universe implodes after something like this.

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