Sowing Seeds and Threads into a Landscape of Grief: Embodied Voices for Palestine
Deborah Taffa, traditional Puebloan lands of the Tanoan and Keres speaking Peoples
Flyers amass in my office, Indigenous calls for freedom hang on my refrigerator at home, the resistance flashes across my phone screen as I scroll social media sites: CEASEFIRE NOW! END THE SIEGE ON GAZA! STOP KILLING CHILDREN! In a dark winter, one lingering question won’t go away: “What forms of resistance matter?”
I can march. I can donate money. I can burn sage and make phone calls. But as an anonymous citizen of the United States, I cannot change the course of the U.S. government. It’s easy for an Indigenous woman--a mother, a grandmother--to feel small. I feel helpless as I hear Indigenous friends vowing not to vote for Biden, because they are angered by missiles fired, frustrated by our leader’s inability to use non-violent means to resolve conflict. For so many of us, the killing feels like an ancient form of déjà vu. Retaliation on retaliation. It has been more than 120 days since Hamas revolted against Israeli oppression and 1400 Israeli lives were lost. It has been more than 100 days since Israel retaliated. We know these facts. We are witnessing new generations of anger fostered, new wars nurtured as I write.
More than 26,000 Gazans have died, 11,500 of whom were children. I could attend one funeral a day for these babies, and it would take 31 years to mourn them. 64% of Gazans say a family member has been injured or killed. Two million Gazans have lost ancestral homes. The pace of devastation exceeds any recent world conflict, yet no one is safer for it.
I stand at my campus window at the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa, Fe, NM, and imagine a landscape like my own. The Negev Desert is 7140 miles away, but the similarities in our colonial history stand. I peer at a computer map. It depicts unimaginable destruction. I leave my office and walk into the desert. I sit on a boulder and see the bloodied pink sunset along the Cristo de Sangre Mountains.
My throat hurts from not speaking. My brain hurts from asking how we come together as a planet to avoid destruction. In times like these, art and community are all I have. The integrity of students, the love of students, the leadership of students push me to aid in the creation of this polyvocal. We remind each other that shaping sentences is our own small way of adding beauty and peace to our existence on this planet--and we sit down to write. It’s easy to feel irrelevant. It’s harder to speak, knowing our effect is humble. To hold hope for the future and refuse to give up. To map our grief and insist on remembering the value of small ones, even as so many of our own are still at risk and in pain.
Our bodies are aching from inaction. What does it look like to resist while holding one another in grief and accountability?
Lenna Jawdat, occupied Nacotchtank & Piscataway land
On October 21st, I pull myself out of bed in the dark. I shuffle to the kitchen, consider turning on the light, but think of Gaza, without power. I squint instead. The recipe calls for filtered water, so I fill the pitcher from the tap, aware that in Gaza, they are drinking sea water. I filter for them. I use two big pots on the stove, and my electric kettle, because I have electricity. Sadness simmers in my throat. I open a jar of dried sage, a gift from my mother. Shay bil maramia, sage tea, is commonly kept in Palestinian homes to welcome guests or soothe stomach aches. I slip outside to clip some fresh leaves from my sage plant, and consider whether any plants have survived the bombs and the clouds of white phosphorus. Their root development stunted, leaves yellowed, mouths gasping. I snip leaves carefully at the nodes and return, combine the fresh leaves from my garden with my mother’s dried ones, let them commingle in the bubbling pot, steep together. Strain. Sweeten with a touch of honey from a small apiary around the corner from where I grew up. I imagine a version of this story where this is teta’s kitchen, Palestinian sage, grown in the family garden. I imagine a version where we’ve been in Palestine the whole time, generations on the same soil, rather than one in which I was displaced nearly forty years before my birth.
I’m making tea for the last day of my community herbalism training. After two weeks of constant panic, rage and grief, I’m attempting to be human. This is made more difficult by the fact that I’m bombarded in all directions by assertions that I am not human, merely animal. I’ve been flooded by the desire to burrow deep underground, to curl up and disappear. Wait out the storm. The thought of making a presentation right now, of being visible, is almost too much to bear, eclipsed only by the exhaustion which limits my capacity for clarity or caring. When I share this pot of tea with the group, tearful and rambling through my brief presentation, tripping over my words, I hope that the tea speaks for itself. Words escape me, and tears come instead. I feel the warmth of the tea spread across the group, feel their hearts unfurl like dried leaves in water.
Among its many benefits, sage can help with:
-Digestion.
Because eating while my people starve makes me nauseous. A friend texts me regularly to remind me to drink water.
-Anxiety.
Near constant panic, fear of annihilation, fear of speaking out, fear of being targeted.
-Grief. Sage contains thujone, a GABA and serotonin receptor antagonist, like antidepressants.
Because my homeland is being destroyed, what remains of it being stolen before I have a chance to see it, to feel my feet on the ground. Because bodies are piling up in the streets, roads have become rivers of blood, people are being killed as they flee, as they receive care in the hospitals that are being bombed, their names and their records and their books destroyed.
-Calm and clarity.
Because I haven’t been able to focus for days, my mind whirlpooling
-Memory.
Because we’re built to forget pain, but we must remember the people who are living through hell, daily.
Sage can also be used topically to stop wounds from bleeding.
____
It was a summer day and as I lapped the pool, gaze soft over the tip of my nose to the bubbles gliding over my hands, I realized that’s how I’d lived my whole life, unable to see beyond my own outstretched arms. That’s the legacy of displacement and war. In the depths of adolescent depression, my parents taught me to focus solely on what was right in front of me, to chunk life into bite sized morsels, taking one week or month at a time, a lesson they learned living in conflict zones through early adulthood. Why save for retirement when the world is always on the verge of collapse? There’s no point in a 5 year plan. No point in deciding on a career, or whether to have children, when you can’t even plan a vacation more than 3 months down the line. But after making a lifelong commitment to my partner, I was ready to reclaim my future, ready to believe in a future.
The ancestors showed up in every tarot reading, every meditation. The magnet of the land tugged at my bones. I finally got up the courage to book a flight. After a lifetime of fear, I was no longer able to ignore the signs that I needed to visit my grandparents’ homeland to heal inherited wounds. Like 700,000 others, my grandparents lost their homes in 1948 and were never able to return. Palestinian Americans weren’t even allowed in until recently, forced to undergo hours of interrogation by security agents at the airport and having all their devices scoured.
I booked a direct flight to Tel Aviv, leaving on my grandparents’ wedding anniversary, arriving on 11/11: it felt destined.
The moment the confirmation came in, my creative floodgates opened. I felt the surge return. The urge to return. I did my research, planned what I’d say. Prepared for the worst, I thought of all the possible, more palatable reasons for visiting “Israel.” Recited my script over and over like an incantation. My jewish husband wants to share his travels, his birthright trip, my father-in-law’s kibbutz
I wondered, Do I buy a burner phone? Deactivate social media? Erase my hard drive? Will they see my online presence and see a threat, or someone docile who can be intimidated.
Can I deprogram myself, encrypt my identity?
____
On October 8 my body is dead weight. Despite reassurance that things always blow over, I know I’ll have to cancel my trip.
____
By the end of the month, so much has been destroyed, that I worry there will be nothing, no one, to return to.
____
Focus on the site of the wound, on my body. After a lifetime of assimilation, of being told by my parents to be careful about who to trust, being taught to be small and quiet and polite, I realized that silence was not keeping me safe, was not serving me. The cloak of silence kept me invisible. Who benefits from this invisibility?
I find my voice, and I start to speak, and to write, and to listen. My body wants to scream and yell for help, so I let it. I find others in the crowd, hear tens of thousands of new friends shouting for a free Palestine. On days when hope is scarce, I listen to my body and I find my voice, my grief and rage and despair alchemize within me, spinning into gold thread that I’m weaving into silk. I’m writing, creating, organizing. Turning silence into abundance. We will not be silenced. We will not be erased.
Our bodies carry ancestral wisdom. I greet my body with gratitude when it responds authentically to horror because it connects me to my humanity.
Bhavna Mehta, Kumeyaay/Kumiais land
In mid-November 2023, when the al-Shifa hospital in Gaza had stopped operating as a medical facility because of being stormed and raided by the Israeli military, I fell from my wheelchair onto the sidewalk in a hip San Diego neighborhood. A friend and I were on our way to an art opening, and we had just crossed a busy avenue. One small front wheel hit the curb with just enough speed and I catapulted in a single long moment. My hands hit the pavement and I felt mortification as I sat there in the dark, with my legs stretched in front of me.
This I knew: the Israeli military was looking for tunnels under the al-Shifa hospital after Hamas launched several missiles into Israel and captured hostages in brutal attacks on October 7th. Hostages included women and children, young and elderly people—many were from other countries and worked in Israel. Thus began the pounding on Gaza. But my mind didn’t stay there; it went back and back and back, barely grasping the long troubled history of this land by the Mediterranean Sea.
My friend offered to help me back into the chair but I knew we needed another person. We waited, and soon a young white man with earbuds walked by. He did not look at me and refused my friend’s request for a hand. “No,” he said. We watched as he walked away, unable to understand his refusal. Rage began to enter us. Soon a young white woman came along, put her purse beside me, and helped.
We went to the beautiful opening. I hadn’t hurt myself and forgot about the little incident. I smiled and hugged and talked. But the next morning I broke down while cooking breakfast.
Why? I cannot help but translate the inability to witness and assist that I experienced working itself out into a larger, more dangerous and escalating condition in society at large. I find myself unable to separate the reality of disability sitting side by side with poverty, class, incarceration, war, terrorism, occupation and its aftermath. Over decades, Palestinians have lost their homes, gardens, schools, playgrounds, businesses, places of worship, places of gathering. Where there ought to be cooperation within communities living side by side, there is the horror of shattered lives and family relationships. There is no safety in war for either side. There is only ongoing pain and no pain medicine. There is loss of limbs and loss of senses, and no rehab, no space for a gradual readjustment to society, no recompense for a body that once was. The ableism of war is astounding in its violence. Modern day weapons can shatter, singe, maim, and gouge in ways that are unimaginable and overwhelming.
In her poem Gaza, from the diaspora - part two, Palestinian poet Jehan Bsesio writes:
“Habeebi, I thought you lost my number, turns out you lost your legs,
On the way to the hospital from Khan Younis to Jabaliya to Rafah.
The border is closed, but my heart, tunnels.”
Poetry teaches us what to do when we stay alive and awake. When we survive. We care and we communicate. We reach and we search and we name an atrocity while we leave room to carry another across the border. But really, I don’t know how to do that yet. My paraplegia is because of an infectious disease and I am aware that disability and brokenness are inherent to living. But, I don’t know how to be part of a global disability justice movement and not agitate against the crippling of bodies caused by state power. I want to imagine a time where disabled bodies are accepted and invited but the unrelenting horror of missiles, bombs, subjugation, and targeted disabling shuts me down.
How do we care when we find ourselves separated from the pathways of solidarity? It is to writers whose work shines with non-violent protest and clarity of purpose that I turn to. In her book, Ordinary Notes, Christina Sharpe writes:
“Care is complicated, gendered, misused. It is often mobilized to enact violence, not assuage it, yet I cannot surrender it.
I want acts and accounts of care as shared and distributed risk, as mass refusals of the unbearable life, as total rejections of the dead future.”
I read these words again and again. I want to understand what it means when care is “mobilized to enact violence”. I want to understand what “distributed risk” means for governments, communities, and for individuals. Concern for the Israeli hostages captured by Hamas is wielded to justify the absolute destruction of Gaza. No matter that dropping bombs and selecting targets might, in fact, harm some of the same hostages. With scores of Palestinian journalists and artists killed, who will now report on the lopsided rhetoric of concern and safety? With Palestinian doctors, nurses, midwives challenged to work in bombed-out clinics and hospitals, how will they cope with lack of food, water, soap, electricity?
In the disability community, “distributed risk” reveals itself in the idea and practice of interdependence; without which most of us simply wouldn’t survive. When the young man refused to help me, I was upset but remembered that I had enormous resources. I was in a familiar place, and knew that a group of strangers and friends would lift, carry, and reassure me if needed. Interdependence is tricky—it means that while I thrive when several people rally around me, I also want to be dependable. But this distribution of dependence is rarely even. There cannot be a tallying up of the receiving and giving. It requires vigilance and acceptance, generosity and forgiveness. It is the opposite of war.
But what does it take for the body to release its own violence, to recognize the manifestation of harm within its own borders?
Julianne Warren, unceded Lower Tanana Dene land
It is already dark outside with eighteen hours before the next sunrise. Night feels ever more creaturely a month away from winter solstice. Fairy dust snow born of dry cold sparkles in headlights of arriving neighbors. Here in Interior Alaska, unceded Lower Tanana Dene geography, the Land makes it easy to remember interdependence. When I enter the well-lit room, friends hand me a small square of birch bark. There is no explanation. Knowing these persons to be trustworthy, I want none. Thanks to a coalition of Alaska Native and non-Native organizers, we are gathering for a community discussion open to all, minus hate. We are gathering in the aftermath of October 7, which has precipitated a fresh retaliation, not merely of revenge, but of genocidal fervor – of colonialist empire against colonized.
I am drawn into this room so as not to be alone nor to leave others feeling isolated. I am grateful when the meeting facilitators, Jody Hassel and Princess Daazhraii Johnson, encourage us to listen deeply, to listen for understanding, including of our own body’s astuteness. I don’t assume that everyone has been drawn here by the same forces. We each have entered into this warmth in common and each is wrapped in our own skin. Being human beings connects us and also enfolds differences bearing intergenerational racialized, gendered, disability-based, and otherwise hegemony-divergent oppressions and inequitably distributed privileges. Differences can enrich our enactments of shared love, including by shining a light on what justice requires.
I agree with the facilitators’ introductory ground-rules centering respect. I agree to co-constitute safe space to engage not only my mind, but my heart – TO FEEL. The bark of the birch, a familiar tree surrounding all of us, smells like summer warmth reminding me of sunlit river woven sub-arctic boreal forest. The bark feels smooth and rough with lenticels sprinkled through, those mouth-shaped holes that allow for the exchanges of oxygen and carbon dioxide – that is, that allow for breath, the tree’s and mine in reciprocity. The stories told in that room belong to that room. I may carry out the lessons. So I also know myself, my thoughts and feelings, my respiring as in communion as I write this
I breathe in fear that, beyond the welcoming and reassurances, I do not belong in such a room nor on this page (which would mean I belong nowhere).
I breathe out fear that my ignorance – about histories of Palestine and Israel, about needs and wants of Peoples, whom I do not know – desires for water? oil? olive groves? what is sacred? – while bent into dis/empowering structures, while bent into rent conditions of health for human and more-than-human kin – fear that my ignorance will keep me frozen in silence, and complicit in silencing.
I inhale feeling my body move her neck left and right, with Hassel’s somatic guidance. Softening into my feet into the ground, I can hear reassurances and sense safety enough to listen.
I exhale fear that my white, cis-woman, U.S. middle-class entrained, patriarchal, Christian Zionist assumptions and maladies – as sincerely as I am committed to their, that is to my self-transformation – go so deep that I still may do as much harm as good in making relations.
I inhale care for Birch, standing with their survivance, amid climate change-intensified wildfires, burning thirsty trees, upon whose inhalations of carbon dioxide depend ecologies, weaving human beings and King Salmon, everyone.
I exhale anger and grief stored in my body with the vibrations of heavy mining machines and military aircraft, the scary monster sounds of unquenchable greed and empire, breaching sacred Earth.
I inhale care for King Salmon and salt tears for their reappearance, their weathering over-warmed oiled sea and gold-spoilt ribbons of Yukon, into which flow the Tanana and Chena Rivers, merging here near small-town Fairbanks. “It is much more than nets / That need mending,” writes Johnson.
I exhale acknowledgment of “the profound grief of Indigenous communities along the Yukon River, who have been unable to practice traditional ways of fishing for King Salmon, passing Indigenous Knowledge to younger generations, and feeding their families traditional food for four years.” I exhale in solidarity with Gwich’in and other Arctic Indigenous Peoples’ rights and responsibilities, their Declaration, their collective self-determination in perpetuity.
I inhale belief that how we face one another where we live day-to-day – the norms we do or do not enact, the structures we subvert and co-craft, the healing of traumas we do or cannot undertake – ripples outward, affecting those whom we may never meet, in this lifetime, in what is and is not a world I cannot grasp.
I exhale words of Palestinian writer Refaat Alareer, “#FreePalestine #Gaza,” murdered by an air strike thirty-seven days after posting his poem, which concludes: “If I must die / let it bring hope/ let it be a tale.”
I breathe in the slice of lemon on the poet’s tongue, tasting the only fruit available in the Gaza City food market, while he sings his last songs.
I breathe out the question, thirty-seven times thirty-seven times, as I tune my ears to the shared breaths of all beings, of all creeds dwelling in the hands of reciprocity,
What might you need, dear friend, in the difficult place from which you cannot awaken?
Softening into conflict, deepening into its embrace, it teaches me how to breathe out the words “Ceasefire Now” within the borders of a cruel country, rippling out across the entire world.
Katherine Locke, Hopitutskwa, Pueblos, Ndee/Nnēē: (Western Apache), Hohokam lands
Again, today, I found myself staring out at faces with nothing.
No idea how to express what I should say about how they, as students, as journalists, should cover a complex story about Israel and Palestine. For months, since last semester, since Oct. 7, I have been trying to find words and there are none. I have none. Is the numbness what the government wants? A thought, a question, that has flitted through my mind — how does the constant drumbeat of turmoil in the news affect all of us? What do we allow by tuning out, turning away? Who benefits if we’re all too numb to engage? Who is harmed?
I don’t feel this numbness about any other subject. I don’t have problems standing up and giving my opinion, lifting voices that need to be heard. I wondered for a few weeks if I was scared, if I didn’t have the courage to express my convictions. But it isn’t that.
I don’t think it’s that.
I’m one of the professors who talks to the students about the news. Since many of them are journalism students, knowing and understanding the news is their job. It isn’t always fun. The job is to report on a little girl, kidnapped and molested, killed, her cousin let go, the Amber Alerts that now happen on the Navajo Nation because of it. The job is to look at any situation and report on it, observe and record the details that draw someone into a story, to make a reader care about what is happening, what you are reporting on. That’s the job. It’s not about how any of us feel. It’s about how others feel.
After working for ten years as a reporter covering the Navajo and Hopi nations, I talk about Native issues with authority. I stand up and use my voice to counteract stereotypes about Native people, to engage in discussion and advocate for Native people about land, about missing and murdered Indigenous women and men, to discuss how federal policy affects Native people, about government-to-government relationships. About sovereignty.
I talk to the students in my classes about school shootings and what we will do as a class to survive. I ask them if they know where the exits are out of the classrooms we’re in. For them, the threat from a school shooting is real. The shootings happen over and over and over and over again.
When the students bring up what is happening in Palestine, and it is always Palestine they bring up, I go numb. Instantly, the latest press conference, or news story I’ve read flashes through me. It’s like silver flashes of light in my mind, pretty, except it’s like sharp, thin glass slicing through my mind. Images of Gaza, buildings destroyed: hospitals, schools, homes. Me, late at night in my bedroom, reading the last words of a Palestinian poet, tears sliding down my face. If I must die/you must live/to tell my story… it’s the poem he leaves to his people. His words are what it sounds like to know you will not survive. He is killed by bombs a few days later.
A little girl, a hostage released. Her face is blank. Her eyes, vacant. She curls her body into the arms of her family, letting their arms form a protective barrier around her, too late to protect her from what she’s seen and experienced. Her face shows what it is like to survive.
Another flash of light and I’m back in the classroom, a buzz in my ears, I’m looking through a brown veil at the images in my mind, at the class. Distantly, I wonder how long I’ve been seeing the images in my head. A minute? Five minutes? Ten? I look around at the students’ faces watching me, trying to bring myself back. I open my mouth; my throat is dry, and nothing comes out. I can’t find any words where I should have some. They sit in silence in class and wait for me to find words.
Months later, it’s a new semester, and I still can’t find words. Instead, I talk to my students about trauma. About how much reporting on death during the pandemic burned me out emotionally. I tell them that is the reason I am sitting in front of them as their professor. I talk about objectivity and balance and history and complexity. I admit to them that those first few days I felt the trauma reaction inside, where I wanted to shut everything down, where I felt I was walking around in a fog, distanced from everything, sounds muted, where I couldn’t find words.
What is the right thing to say to them? Is there a right way to say anything about what is happening?
Today, I found some words after a discussion in class with students where one of them proposed a story about Native groups comparing colonization and genocide to what is happening now in Palestine. They asked me how much history a journalist is expected to put into a single story about a complex subject. I want them to understand — they must understand complexity to write about complex subjects. What I do know about Israel and Palestine is there are no easy answers. There is no easy solution.
The only words I can find today, the words I force out of the numbness I feel into their waiting silence: innocent people don’t deserve to die. There’s too much killing. Too many innocent people are dead. A generation of journalists are dead. It’s all horrible.
Horrible. It’s the word I say. It’s what comes out of my mouth in the moment. It’s not enough.
But it’s all I can say.
_______
But it isn’t. The day after I write this, I read it to my students, giving the words to them. I thought it was definitive answers they needed from me. It turns out it wasn’t that. They aren’t silent anymore as they say, “We don’t know what to feel or say either.”
When trauma makes it impossible to speak, who benefits from the silence? When something cannot be fixed, what can we build instead? Create your portals. Answer the calls.
Aimee Hanna, unceded Chumash Land.
On Thanksgiving Day AKA day 48 of Israel’s active genocide in Gaza, my grandmother asked me if I knew that half of her family is Palestinian. No, I said, I didn’t know and asked when they left Palestine. But my grandmother shook her hands and said Oh, no, no. We followed my cousin’s wealth into Egypt. Before she was born in 1933, her parents were living in Lebanon and I wanted to know more, but she’d say Lebanon is ruined. Lebanon is finished. To that, I didn’t know what to say. But I felt her longing.
On December 17th, AKA day 72 of the genocide, my bosses met with me.
The Board decided against releasing the statement. They just don’t want to take sides.
It could have been shock, it could have been complacency, it could have been my trauma, but in response I said, Makes sense. That’s fine. I’m Fine.
I’m not fine. Because it wasn’t fine. It still isn’t because there are not two sides. There is one side killing and the other side that is being killed.
More than their response, though, I’m disappointed in myself. That I didn’t fight harder, that I didn’t tell them there aren’t two sides and damn, you should have invited me into that meeting so that I could defend the letter. I tried to rally a few coworkers, but everytime I brought it up, most made me feel like I was alone in this sense of urgency, forced to prioritize their own family hardships. More than their responses, though, I’m disappointed in my lack of communication skills, lack of strength and conviction in my voice. The reminder that my cognitive functions seem to fail me when it comes to advocacy and I wonder if I’m meant for this kind of work.
I consider quitting. Whether it’s work, romantic, friendly, I consider quitting. I consider the relief that would wash over me, the liberation from responsibilities, from commitment. Commitment isn’t something that was offered to me and it’s not something I give and a lot of the days, I refuse it. Because of this, relationships are my weakest point, yet relationships are the strongest heartbeat of humanity. It puts me in a place of radical self-awareness that I cannot, for the life of me, figure out and put into practice. And maybe that’s what life is about. Figuring it out.
But when it comes to my grandmother, for the first time in my 28 years of living, it feels different somehow. It could have something to do with my name being hers, revised into the french spelling Aimee. It could have something to do with the way my mother rejected my grandmother, seeing her husband’s mother as someone less than her, as someone to blame, someone to antagonize. After I stopped talking to my mother and purchased my own car at 25 years old, I finally had the chance to reconnect with my grandmother. Her love is the most undeniable feeling I’ve ever received and I wonder. I wonder what it would have been like to have her in my corner during all of those years that I wanted to die. I wonder what she would have said. I wonder how she would have proved my mother’s lies wrong, just to prove to me that I am worth the trouble. I wonder if I’d be braver now.
For New Years, AKA day 88 of the genocide, I went to visit her and brought two tins of Zalatimo cookies from my local Arab market. While my grandmother was pleased, grabbing one ghorayeba minutes after she'd forgotten that she'd already eaten one or two, she still proclaimed that Lebanon has the best sweets. She asked Did you know that Lebanon has the best sweets? And like always, I said No, I didn’t know. But I think, like her, I felt a yearning to taste those sweets for myself.
Buttering za’atar on a slice of sourdough bread, my Auntie told me that Grandma’s sister and her family fled from Lebanon in the 2006 war. She said that they’re all still traumatized from the horrors. And then I wonder—What about the children of Gaza? What will their trauma look like after enduring 6 wars and a genocide that’s been bludgeoning their homeland for over 100 days? All of this war, sometimes it’s too much to hold, but at the same time, it feels like nothing when every single unimaginable type of torture is placed, displaced and placed, over and over again on the beloved people of Palestine.
It’s day 108 of the genocide as I am writing this and I don’t even want to tell you how many people have been killed. How many dreams, creatives, scholars, mothers, musicians, athletes, fathers, cooks, babies, engineers, doctors, journalists have been taken from us. How many universities, mosques, schools, houses, restaurants, churches, roads, cafes, fig, lemon, orange, pomegranate, olive trees have been exploded by the occupation. As of day 108 of the genocide, there are no working hospitals for the unnamable number of wounded and injured. Why is it that only some people get refuge and medical aid from this deliberate attack and others do not? Why is it that when it’s my turn to speak up, I shut down?
I thought Palestine had the best olive trees, but my grandmother insists that Lebanon does and I believe her. To me, Lebanon and Palestine are siblings, both children to abusive parents. And for these siblings, I will continue to challenge myself to advocate. This pain that we feel, as Lebanese and Palestinians, we feel it reverberating across generations and it’s time to put an end to it. For some, speaking out loud is their way of calling these atrocities out. For me, it’s writing that helps me contextualize and realize the end because it welcomes love-centered futures. Writing makes it permanent, it files our stories, and I wonder if that’s why my job declined the statement because it would be a permanent record of condoning a liberated future. To honor their rejection, I sow letters into seeds and plant them into pages.
Like the mycelium that connects roots under the soil, relationships are the most important vein of life. There’s something here for us. There’s something here for us to learn. I wonder if it’s how we dialogue with one another, in its expansive breadth of ways, churning over and over again, drowning under the rising waters of capitalism, healing strained and desperate, we are relational beings, interconnected, and will never be desensitized to the glorification of murdering children. Only through resistance may we return the lives that our grandparents lost, return to land, return to freedom. Return to home.
You. We. I have been suffering through the apocalypse for generations, splitting us in two. Buried in blood, entangled with mycelium, we continue to sow seeds, rising from the ashes, our medicine stitched into every letter’s curve, until we return home to sovereignty.
Timotéo Ikoshy Montoya II
There is an after, there is always an after. And now there is a before. And this point forward there will always be both. The line between marked like a grave, like a shrine, like the fading borders on an old map, like a soft dewed flower in the Jericho Botanical Gardens.
It is this simple fact, this timeline now marked, that breaks my heart more than all the brutality, all the concrete caked faces, the stained bandages, the tears and wails. That brutality is not a mystery, it is what western colonialism does. It splits time in two. Splits a people in two. Splits hearts, minds, and bodies in two. It strikes a fount of blood, that everybody else will have to clean up, honor, pray for, grieve. And it takes decades, centuries, epochs.
If you seek the before, the blood never dries. If you seek the after your feet slip on a forward march. So, what does it take to stand still? Restitution, reparation, revenge? That would be Just. But so rarely does the colonial machine deal in Justice.
So I ask you to consider, what sovereignty looks like during a genocide? What freedom looks like on forced marches passed our kin piling dead on the street? What hope looks like while holding an infant, now deaf and never to be touched by their parents caring hands again?
It looks like embers and seeds.
We, a people marked by genocide, are post-apocalyptic. Much of the world’s beings will be labeled as such before the machine has finally drowned itself in rising seas. That is not pessimism, it will drown, and many valiant hands and voices will make it so.
Let it be so.
But it is also true that it is not yet yielding.
We too have marched, run from lands that once sang us to life, that once held us, formed us, fed us, loved us. Shoved into smaller and smaller parcels, a shitty magic trick that fools nobody, until our lands fade, renamed and paved, and we now trespass where our ancestors after-birth and umbilical cords stay buried, tethered. We too have fought and died for the lives of our people, we too have been told we were defeated, that we brought it on ourselves with all our savage violence, that we lost, and are simply sore losers.
Say what they will, what they didn’t know is what we carried.
We slipped it into medicine bundles, deep at the bottom of our bags, embers smoldering in pitch and fat, seeds stitched into the lining of our dresses and shirts, tied in our hair. Embers and seeds seeking a resting place, a hearth and soil. Planted and prayed over until roots take place, grow wide, give shade to our kin. Kin that will never know what genocide feels like, will be so preoccupied with living and loving and creating, that the story of genocide will only live with the elders, saved for an age when they can safely grieve the pain of eons, of myths so old and ancient, the myths of killing another for the land beneath their feet.
This is no “there, there,” no “back then,” no current world free from violence. There is now, there is forward and there is a remembering. Be courageous kin in your grieving of what disastrous monstrous change looks like. I do not write this for the breaking hearts and bleeding arms, let them break and bleed. I pray that they are wailed for long and wildly, for more will die. Let their spirits be sung and praised to the other side, at peace, it is the living that must contend with what all this means.
That is who speak to you, children of after, the apocalypse readying to be branded onto your soul, psyche, and heart. I pray as you bundle up your homes in a backpack, terror at your throat, you remember to carry seeds. Remember the breeze through olive trees. Blow into the bundle, keep the embers hot. Remember dancing at sunrise, your lover’s lips on yours, your people’s language swirling in the air of warm evenings, how you picked sage, jasmine, and honeysuckle, to serve in your tea, before. Remember. Stitch it into the hem. A language laid for secret fingers that will know when and where a hearth waits. An after place. Eager eyes and ears of children, waiting, waiting, waiting for stories of joy and mystery such as yours.
To think generationally is a balm to loss. The only balm of genocidal loss. That we be foolish enough, brave enough, in our living and dying to think about the next three generations.
And never forget. In the depth of your rage, grief, and sorrow. From your kin across the sea. We are still here. As you will be. As will be proclaimed to your children’s children’s children.
Works Cited
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Sharpe, Christina Elizabeth. Ordinary Notes. First American edition. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2023, 333.