I don’t know which part of the museum I am in; I have never been adept at navigating large spaces. As I leave my first stop, the Mesopotamian exhibit, I follow the sounds of a faint echo. I climb up a short pair of stairs when I stop to look at a familiar but strange sculpture: Arabic letters locked behind the shackles of a cage. The outline of the letter ha, cast in bronze, leans flirtatiously atop an encaged letter that I cannot decipher. The warm lights guide me closer to the sculpture, placed in afterthought amidst a walking path to the stairs. Its plaque reads “Heech in a Cage, 2005,” by Irani sculpture-artist Parviz Tanavoli. The letter I could not previously make out is che, making the Farsi word for “nothing.” I stand and gaze at the silhouette of the letters, tracing the chiaroscuro, pondering the two-sentence description afforded to me: heech—nothingness, annihilation of self—is the final step on the Sufi path of unity with Allah.  I smile at the familiarity of something I have never seen before, as if the sculpture knows that I say “heech” regularly in my Iraqi dialect or that I am learning more about Sufism by way of the British Museum. 

I continue past the Heech to follow the sound. I cannot gather my thoughts from this moment until I saw it, the echo, sitting in a large room filled with artifacts from Hawaii, Papua New Guinea, India, Palestine. The exhibit is named something of legacy or resilience, though I more aptly associate it with suffering the longer my eyes scan the room. I find the source of the echo, a television in the panel of Hawaiian artifacts. It is the chant of a hula, accompanied by a short with scenes from the island. As I read the plaques with familiar details of subjugation and colonization of the Hawaiian people, the mystical operatic aria that I heard earlier turns into a statement much more urgent. I look further down the room, when I see the face of a Palestinian woman crying, dated 2002. I turn and find the embroidered cloth of an Indian woman living with HIV. 

I spot a bench along the back wall of the room and sit, awaiting the moment my frustrations and indignation and loss materialize into salty lacrimal water. Though I’ve been making an honest effort at crying less, a tear rolls down my cheek regardless. If these stories are meant to be uplifting, why am I so bothered? Am I incorrect in feeling the polar opposite, the crushing weight of acculturation and the institutionalization of suffering? It may be the resignation and disappointment I feel in realizing the British Museum’s history of stolen Benin Bronzes and broken Lamassus are entirely based in reality, that it is still dissonant to display Palestinian suffering from two decades past without speaking on it now. 

I sit silently on the bench for some time, then I leave. 

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It has been two days since I wept at the British Museum. I drink chai at an Iraqi restaurant. I remember that it is nothingness which brims with life itself, and most of me knows it’s going to be okay.