I Grieve the Ways the West Has Won With Our Tongues and Ties
I grieve the things we do not talk about / Like aesthetics & beef & illiteracies & fissures & the politics of playing it cool / All the roadblocks on the paths we share & the paths that drive us apart
I grieve the things we do not talk about Like aesthetics & beef & illiteracies & fissures and the politics of playing it cool– All the roadblocks on the paths we share And the paths that drive us apart. I grieve the loss of grief as sacred– I grieve everything made a stage. I grieve that of 15,000; 5 is the median age. I grieve my misunderstandings of safety And I grieve the naivety too— I grieve the compromises I have made And the ones my ancestors made And the ones my family make My friends make We all make To stay alive To stay sane To stay afloat. I grieve the ways the West has won With our tongues and ties. I learned this week that in Palestine it is forbidden to collect rain water And then I scrolled and watched my countrymen swallowed by rains that we can’t stop— All from my palm, powered by cobalt from a weeping land. Yes, I grieve the ways the West has won with our tongues and ties; And still I celebrate with grief in stride that its lies will not survive.
I feel the bone-chilling weight of colonialism, capitalism, heteropatriarchy, racism, climate crisis–all of it–almost all the time these days. Everywhere I turn, there it is. I wrote the poem above over the past couple of days, trying to make sense of it all. Feeling heartbroken because, frankly, the West has won in ways that enrage me to admit. I am writing this in English. I am posting on their platforms.
I am a product of investments and betrayals and concessions that will take my whole lifetime to undo; and even then, the ones who are yet to be born will inherit lifetimes of their own to continue detangling. Somewhere amidst the grief and the rage and the exhaustion, though, is a glimmer of something else.
I have been in 4 different continents in the last 4 weeks–Europe, Asia, North America, and now Africa; watching in each place as collective dissociation has evolved into action out of necessity. On the International Day of Solidarity at the beginning of the month, I went to a march in Berlin–a city home to Europe’s largest Palestinian diaspora (300,000 people!), in a country that just this week drafted a law proposing to make supporting “Israel’s right to exist” a requirement for citizenship, threatening to reject peoples’ refugee/asylum status if they do not comply–and watched as the police state showed out in full force. But I also watched as thousands of Palestinians stood side by side with diasporas from every continent, chanting together about international solidarity, and breaking past the fortress of Germany’s complicity.
Last week, I went to an action in San Francisco, led by dozens of kids under the age of 16, whisper-chanting “ancestors watching, I know they’re watching; ancestors watching, I know, I know” outside a building where Joe Biden was speaking about the economy. The children created a collective altar, and in front of it, created a mountain of kids’ shoes–echoing the imagery from the Holocaust and visualizing the heartbreak that powers the phrase “Never Again”. Police officers flanked the area of the vigil–a stark contrast to the inner circle where the children were which was protected by parents, community members, and indigenous Ohlone drummers and medicine workers who cleansed the space with sage–and I wondered to myself how the Zionist state militia could justify their aggression amidst what was indisputably a site of sacred declaration aimed at affirming life. Never before have I felt this devastated and this hopeful at the same time.
What was the last thing you learned that broke your heart? What was the last thing that helped piece it back together?
I was in California to give a talk at the Stanford Humanities Center as part of their series on Anti-Colonialism in the Digital Age. As a college drop-out, I have some pretty deep skepticism around academia; but the level of compassion and vulnerability that everyone brought to my workshop was the most timely balm. The next talk in the series is this upcoming Monday, November 27th, and will be happening virtually. The SHC has invited Dr. Hanine Shehadeh, author of “Palestine in the Cloud”, and Islam Kamal, the Manager of the Palestinian Museum Digital Archive–to speak at the event; and I can not emphasize enough how important it feels that people spread word about their session.
“[Palestine in the Cloud] aims to understand how Palestinians have been able to somewhat crack Israel’s matrix of control by utilizing, for the past 20 years, new media as a battleground—despite enforced digital colonialism—and how these media served to articulate and create what I call a digital “floating homeland”. I borrow the term “floating homeland” from Haitian writer Edwidge Danticat’s Create Dangerously, which she employs to describe a Haitian non-submersible eleventh department that she adds to the already existing ten geopolitical departments. According to Danticat, this floating department is derived from a collective conception of an additional, yet purely ideological, homeland where Haitian immigrants and exiles reside following their dispersal into the diaspora (Danticat 2010). The floating homeland serves as an ideological space for survival and resistance, preserving the cultural identity of exiles through its connection to Haiti as the motherland. I argue that the sustained chains of protests in Palestine since April 2021, mushrooming out of a networked movement, have materialized in the Palestinian digital floating homeland. This article analyzes how a people, separated physically, legally, and militarily, were able to transcend the many colonial and factional divisions, by coordinating various forms of resistance through online platforms that eventually materialized in the unprecedented revolt that erupted in April 2021 across all historical Palestine.” – Dr. Hanine Shehadeh
The Palestinian Museum Digital Archive, stewarded by Islam Kamal, is a mind-blowingly thorough collection of over 300,000 digitized resources showcasing “over 200 years of Palestinian life portrayed through photographs, documents, letters, diaries, publications, and audio & video recordings. It focuses on the average Palestinian who might be overlooked or distanced by history. The project also aims to promote a culture of safekeeping and digital archiving, as well as raise awareness about the importance or archives and their limitless possibilities.”
The opportunity to hear Islam Kamal and Dr. Shehadeh speak about the role of digital media in movement building for Palestine will be a true privilege, and I encourage everyone reading this to both RSVP, and share the event with people in their networks.
Earlier this week, I arrived in Kenya and had the privilege of co-facilitating a zine-making and book-binding workshop in solidarity with Palestine at Cheche Books alongside Rosie Olang’. The ice breaker questions were “what was the last thing you learned that broke your heart?” & “what was the last thing that helped piece it back together”?
Just as the event was starting, I got a call from my best friend telling me that they wouldn’t be able to make it to the event because they’d gotten in a car accident–a result of the heavy rains. (Later that day, I ordered us food on Uber eats and our delivery driver also got in a car accident on the way to us. What broke my heart most was him messaging me saying he wasn’t okay, then asking me to please get ahold of Uber because if he didn’t make the delivery, they would suspend his account and he relied on the app for his livelihood. We called him and he was at the police station, and sounded deeply distressed. Because I earn in dollars, I was able to send him the money he needed to fix the bike, but atop all of the other layers, the whole situation was a sobering reminder of how unjust the volatile gig economy is).
During the ice breaker, someone in the group said that the thing that broke their heart was learning that their friend hadn’t eaten in 2 days because they couldn’t afford food (the exchange rate used to be 1 USD: 100 Kenyan shillings; now, it’s inflated to 1 USD: 154 Kenyan shillings–resulting in a devastating cost-of-living crisis); but their friend group managing to get together to support this friend through mutual aid is what healed their heart. Another attendee said that what broke their heart was missing their mom, wanting her comfort, but knowing they can’t speak because to their mom their queerness is a sin; seeing their queer & trans kin in the room is what pieced their heart back together. Everything people shared gutted me, but by the end of the event, there were as many joy tears and tender embraces as there were grief-stricken ones. And I’ve been holding that duality extra-close to my heart lately.
These past weeks have reaffirmed my belief that for every devastation, there is repair–somewhere, waiting to be claimed. I’m cautious of naïve optimism, and equally cautious of romanticizing the fervor of the present moment because there are people quite literally being massacred as I write this. There is nothing to celebrate about death as a catalyst. There is, however, something to be honored about a tide that is turning. A tide that will continue to turn until we are all enveloped in its transformation.
Gratitude to all who are deepening in commitment 🤍
In Solidarity,
Neema
an important note to start the week afresh, thank you always Neema. In love and solidarity, Ola
thank you. <3