Trauma is Not Remembered, Trauma is Relived 💢
no sound bite, no sound bite, no sound bite
‘The grief is still deep. The rage still sharp. The tears have not dried. And a strange, deadly war is raging around the world. Yet, each person who has lost a loved one surely knows secretly, deeply, that no war, no act of revenge, no daisy-cutters dropped on someone else’s loved ones or someone else’s children, will blunt the edges of their pain or bring their own loved ones back. War cannot avenge those who have died. War is only a brutal desecration of their memory.
To fuel yet another war – by cynically manipulating people’s grief, by packaging it for TV specials sponsored by corporations selling detergent and running shoes, is to cheapen and devalue grief, to drain it of meaning. What we are seeing now is a vulgar display of the business of grief, the commerce of grief, the pillaging of even the most private human feelings for political purpose. It is a terrible, violent thing for a State to do to its people.
It’s not a clever-enough subject to speak of from a public platform, but what I would really love to talk to you about is Loss. Loss and losing. Grief, failure, brokenness, numbness, uncertainty, fear, the death of feeling, the death of dreaming. The absolute relentless, endless, habitual, unfairness of the world. What does loss mean to individuals? What does it mean to whole cultures, whole people who have learned to live with it as a constant companion?’
- Arundhati Roy, 2002
I find myself without words again. I find myself damned. I find the world fragmented. I find myself unable to condense the past year(s). I find myself unwilling to fit into ‘sound bites and word limits filled enough with statistics to counter measured response’.
Instead today I’ll share old words and words that aren’t mine. Words far more important, far more urgent. Words from the past whose echo I can still hear.
Expanding Terror
‘I’ve long been struggling to articulate to people, who don’t know it intimately, the vertiginous feeling of watching your country being devastated from abroad - the way the sense of helplessness is compounded by cognitive dissonance, with your body in one place, cocooned in the safety of one world while your awareness is hyper-focused on the terror of another…The cognitive dissonance of being in the West while the East burns isn’t simply that misalignment between where your body is and where your mind’s at. It’s being in a place whose every venerable institution insists that this burning is right and good, no matter how barbarous or savage.’ - Lina Manzour
But One Branch of a Family Tree
‘Amidst the harrowing realities of conflict—its grim tableau of death, deprivation, and perpetual peril—our family found itself grappling with the stark choice of survival amidst the horrors of war. The tranquility that once enveloped our family, suffusing our home in Gaza with warmth and affection, has been obliterated by the encroaching shadows of adversity. Our cherished abode, once a repository of memories, now lies in ruins, shattered by the indiscriminate bombardment of tanks, reducing our once vibrant haven to a desolate landscape of rubble and shattered dreams. Faced with the unrelenting onslaught, in a desperate bid to escape the relentless cycle of violence and bloodshed.’
- Wala Sufian, my cousin from Gaza during April 2024
‘No time to waste, no time to claim, no time to be something other than who we are. No time to waste in soulless company, no time to waste while not making enthusiasm move our passions. Age leaks out of our fingers like dirt on a windy day. And we’re here, once we’ll be here, remembering overwhelmingly the magnitude of the days we spent in the wrong ways. In catching up with dreams that don’t mean us, sitting, staring at people whose existence doesn’t move us much. In the advancement of days that do not resemble us and a life that we do not belong to. We lived enough for others, let’s save the rest of our life, not much left. Let’s love those we love with every atom of our being, let’s hug like it is the last day. Let’s say the messages we postponed, let’s leave the places that made us strangers. Let prayer be a timeless moment. Let’s put our hands on our parent’s shoulders and bow in front of our mother’s knees. Let’s make our late apologies. We take back the things that we took and it wasn’t for us. Let’s grab what we deserve to grab, the brave people who know what they are and who they are. Let the rest of life be a full experience.’
- Ismail Radwan, my cousin in Gaza during June 2024
A few months later….
‘Unfortunately, the situation is very difficult in terms of lack of care of medicines and reinforcements. I am launching a project for children and women and helping them provide their necessities under difficult humanitarian conditions, but look for a donor and a supporter.
Moral and material support is the one that raises the morale of someone who has reached the brink.
This war affected my psyche from the inside because I lost everything and approached the year and we are under war.
Man has limited energy, and then he starts to break down. Destruction, pain, suffering, lack of work and money, and I don't have the salvation of all this.
The war continues to rise, as the death toll and destruction.
All Love For You To Stay With’
- Ismail’s messages to me during September 2024
Unfinished Poem
This is a country taking hold of your breath
wrapping your tongue around words you never uttered
This is tears dropping like bombs, an unrelenting deluge
This is grasping for a way to continue living as my people die daily
This is keeping afloat while all my loved ones drown
This is a family’s fate in the hands of virality
This is your pain not having value if you can’t spin it into a story
This is exorcising your strife for the sake of stranger’s eyes
begging god your words will be enough to save them
This is the difference between survival and obliteration
Hala Alyan
The unfinished piece was inspired by this untitled poem from Hala Alyan, 2014.
Hala Alyan’s words stay with me. I return to them often. I deconstruct and reconstruct her words when mine fall short. I pick up the threads she’s weaved with other poets like Fariha Róisin:
I return to her words on days like this when my efforts feel futile but the journey is long and the end to struggle is not in sight. Days when protests, vigils, and fasting aren’t enough. I return to her words that serve as a balm to my heart heavy with despair and in need of reassurance:
Poetry & Art Is Not Going to Save Gaza But…
'I want to use art as an example because I can speak to something that's very connected to myself which is, you know, the truth is that I'm a poet. I'm a writer. Poems are not going to save Gaza right now. You know, they're not, poetry and literature and art are not going to save what needs saving. They're not going to stop what needs stopping right now. They are not a replacement to action, to policy change, to ceasefire, to an end to the occupation, to Palestinian self determination, dignity, rights. They're not a replacement to those things.
And at the same time, what I would offer dialectically is that art also fortifies it, sustains. It can help remind us of what we're doing and why we're doing it. And so art, like other forms of care that we're going to hear about today, can become useful as sort of compasses, you know, or rest stops or places that we can catch our breath. Places where we can rehearse ideas, where we can sharpen our ideas, where we can clarify our thinking. Because this is a time where we really need to be clear on our thinking and our action and our direction and our language, and they can be places to find community. And so I think we can and likely need to sit in both of those truths that we need action and we also need whatever it is that's going to help us continue showing up for action and showing up for the things that matter.' - Hala Alyan
‘I care to be a writer, an artist, a friend, a lover. I care to immortalize the Gaza I knew and loved into stories. I care to practice resistance through the art of remembering, preserving, and affirming. I care to be in community with other artists, writers, musicians, and poets. I care to build in love rather than transact in lust or power or clout. I care to humanize Gaza, to remind people that Palestine is more than a cause or symbol. Palestine is people. Palestine is people. Palestine is people.’ - Anam Raheem
Tangible Actions
GoFundMe: this is the most direct and immediate way to help the people of Palestine. This gofundme is for my family who is currently in Gaza & Cairo. Please consider contributing whatever you can. You can also receive this artist book by donating on a sliding scale. If you can’t contribute financially, please help me share and circulate the fundraiser ❤️🩹
Action Toolkit: this includes resources for direct action, community care, cultural education, and other campaigns you can invest in. I compiled this last year and I haven’t updated it in a while but there are plenty of jumping off points and additional toolkits are linked.
Raffles & Radical Business: this includes simple instructions for organizing your own raffle, prompts for identifying your values, and 59 ideas for putting those values into practice.
Start Local: start with mutual aid, build with the poor and most marginalized folks in your community, the hood holds the keys, act local & think global!
‘When I cry my tears fall downward. Over a grave that cannot be fully covered. The sky is black and devoid of starlight…What tomorrow brings I cannot say. But the amount of heartbreak that I feel for my living family and my ancestors swings back and forth between confusion and grief by the hour…The sensation of being split apart between physical locations is doubly, triply, wholly felt on the psychic level for those of us with a mixed background. I do not have a country to refer back to, to call home. Just a throbbing bloodline riddled with contradictions, yet no less painful in its grieving of the kindred spirit. When lamentations break me open, I grieve not just the destruction of my people, but also the connections that I never had.’ - J.M. Hamade
A moment of silence for the sake of Gaza. A moment to consider the perplexing smiles of the children of Palestine. Sending my love to all those who’re grieving.
The last thing I’ll leave you with today are songs because when my words have dried up I turn toward the words of others. I turn to the Poets.
‘I turn to the Poets because they don’t falter under Blackened skies, they don’t struggle to see the traps of this capitalistic scene, and they lead with opaque eyes unbeknownst to a certain kind. I turn to the Poets because they write about flowers while coughing petals up from their lungs & end up talking about suffocation. I turn to the Poets because I don’t know where their words will take me but they will steer me closer to home, key in palms, awaiting a free & unoccupied land. I turn to the Poets because they weep for a freer world & their words open up the floodgates to create the change to see it. I turn to the Poets because they affirm life & love in the same way that Palestinians teach life’.
- Kay Brown, October 2023
So, so beautiful, Leila. Sharing to my Facebook. We need voices like yours and other writers