Fuck Your Lecture on Craft, My People Are Dying
Why I'm writing amidst genocide
I’m writing this on Nakba Day, 7 months, 220+ days, 35,000+ martyrs into the current genocide. I’m also writing this after having been in the catacombs of Green-Wood Cemetery for a volunteer shift.
I haven’t always been surrounded by death so intensely.
The First Thread
I grew up in the land of eternal spring as the daughter of a Palestinian father and a Guatemalan mother. It was there that I studied fashion and worked under independent designers creating jewelry, beading, womenswear, and genderless clothing. In 2019 I moved to the US where I started working in luxury resale with vintage clothing & historical pieces I never expected to see in person, let alone touch. Artifacts of material culture and the circular economy.
This probably sounds more glamorous than it was. In reality, these places still operated like factories and warehouses. I have many gripes with the industry, but I still deeply love fashion, textiles, and handmade techniques.
Death Knocks On Our Doors
Since 2020 there have been waves of collective grief rippling throughout our society: COVID-19, BLM, climate change, and multiple ongoing crises in the global south. While we‘ve all been impacted by these to varying degrees, I hadn’t been so completely undone and disrupted by grief until the fall of 2023.
I don’t have the words yet to tell you what these past months have been like. My paternal family lives in Gaza so it all hits too close to home. I’ve lost 16 family members, the most recent on my 30th birthday. So I’ve been thinking a lot about my own mortality and what we leave behind.
I was first exposed to death education when I started volunteering at Green-Wood in April last year. It didn’t become a lifeline until after October, when grief spaces became one of the few things that have held me together during a time of so much chaos and destruction while far away from any family. I’m still unraveling, forever in mourning, but I’ve learned rituals help transmute the pain.
I’m not sure what this newsletter will transform into. Curricula as I consider becoming a pro bono death doula? Unfiltered rants about fashion? A way to practice and fail in public? However, I can tell you what it won’t be centering.
An Anti Manifesto:
fuck the white male canon
fuck europe being the epitome of culture, taste, and civilization
fuck trends & large conglomerates being the end all be all of fashion
fuck “flattering” clothing
fuck mass market fast fashion manufacturing
fuck success within art institutions and galleries that cater to the filthy rich
fuck social media owned by egotistical billionaires
fuck hiding my identity and politics so I’m marketable
fuck being known for my face rather than my work or ideas
fuck celebrity and fame
fuck the denial of death, ignoring that we are all gonna die one day
fuck the death wish of the zionist project
fuck pitting muslims & jews against each other, we have much in common
fuck viewing life as something disposable, including nature
fuck not having basic needs met because you didn’t win the birth lottery
fuck western exponential growth & “progress“ if it fails the greater good
I’m not usually like this. I don’t curse often and I believe in investing energy in what you want more of, rather than being in antithesis to. I want to focus on love and beauty, but it can feel futile to create art in the face of annihilation.
Fuck Your Lecture on Craft, My People Are Dying by Noor Hindi
Colonizers write about flowers.
I tell you about children throwing rocks at Israeli tanks
seconds before becoming daisies.
I want to be like those poets who care about the moon.
Palestinians don’t see the moon from jail cells and prisons.
It’s so beautiful, the moon.
They’re so beautiful, the flowers.
I pick flowers for my dead father when I’m sad.
He watches Al Jazeera all day.
I wish Jessica would stop texting me Happy Ramadan.
I know I’m American because when I walk into a room something dies.
Metaphors about death are for poets who think ghosts care about sound.
When I die, I promise to haunt you forever.
One day, I’ll write about the flowers like we own them.
I want to write about flowers, and the moon, and handcraft. Not as distraction or escapism from the ugliness of the world, but as a lens to confront and engage with the things that pain us. I want to write about them because Palestinians deserve beauty too.
I’m not a professional writer, journalist, academic, nor an experienced organizer. But Juliano Mer Khamis of the Freedom Theatre notes that “the third Intifada will be a cultural one”. Mourning can be a form of resistance. Venerating our marginalized ancestors can be reparations. Tending to textiles and the fraught history they carry can be a worthy struggle. Fashion can be a narrative tool. A cultural quilt to hold the shared grief of collapsing worlds.
Beauty in revolt.
I’m launching this project on May 23. Please subscribe and share with friends. I‘m grateful for your support. Free Palestine.
thank you for these words, leila❤️🩹
my heart aches with you. beauty in revolt, indeed.