“In Tamil there is no word for hope…Instead, the word handed over to me by my unsuspecting mother was the only one she had available: faith. At the time, it felt like a poor woman’s hope.”
- Nimmi Gowrinathan, Radicalizing Her: Why Women Choose Violence
Hope is rooted in expectation. Faith is rooted in trust.
Faith requires the cultivation of a relationship - both with one’s self and with something beyond one’s self - in a way that hope doesn’t necessarily.
Hope doesn’t require anything of us. Faith demands our loyalty and our labor.
Hope is connected to an outcome. Faith is “pouring into a possibility without knowing what the outcome will be.” (Alexis Pauline Gumbs)
Hope is the desire for something to happen. Faith is the belief that it will, it must.
Hope wishes. Faith materializes.
Hope stretches as far as the eyes can see and the mind can imagine. Faith is “the ability to believe in realities we cannot yet see.” (adrienne maree brown) It stretches as far as the body can sense, and the spirit can know.
Hope is governed by wanting. Faith is governed by will.
Perhaps faith is a poor woman’s hope because she cannot afford to expect, to attach herself to an outcome, to desire, or to wish.
What she is allowed to see or imagine is myopic, by design.
Rather, she must become the force that materializes that which she is forbidden to expect, designed out of desiring, and walled out of wanting.
A becoming that requires her to lay down the burden of impossibility at the foot of a higher power, so that she may become and materialize what is not possible, what is not afforded, to those of her class.
Language is born of experience, and the absence of a word can signal the absence of an experience.
“In Tamil there is no word for hope...Instead, the word handed over to me by my unsuspecting mother was the only one she had available: faith.”
The essays shared in this Substack build upon the foundations laid in the Dismantling the Master’s Tools toolkit (launched February 2022), which is available for free as a PDF and an audiobook. For any inquiries, feel free to get in touch at hello@dismantlingthemasterstools.com