As we reflect on the fall of the Assad regime, and join our Syrian comrades in deep witness of their years of struggle—the liberation of prisoners from death camps, the reunification of families, the possibility of return for exiled Syrians, and all the complex ranges of emotions being held—Mizna presents an essay by Syrian theatre professor and artist Sami Ismat, reflecting on the future of Syria, its diaspora, and the broader Bilad al-Sham, through mediations on architecture, literature, and the collective-oriented values underpinning these artistic traditions.

—George Abraham, Editor-at-Large

“But the immense neglect and physical destruction of these places along the societal fabric puts doubt in whether the new free Syria, with its new and varied diasporic community, can reclaim a healthy and thriving society with a collectivist living philosophy. It is a challenge that requires utopian imaginings as well as forms of expression and commemoration of the sacrifices and displacement faced by the people.”

—Sami Ismat

The Levantine “Bilad al-Sham” diaspora has been facing waves of forced and often violent displacement that carry much loss and grief. As with many diasporic communities, the “Shami” diaspora is neither monolithic nor static. The vibrancy of this particular diaspora has allowed it to thrive in many diverse regions, extending to both of the Americas. In the search for connection within an increasingly isolated and individualistic society, a pervasive sense of collectivist nostalgia takes hold: a longing for a past that exists only within memorabilia and in past personal experiences, specifically, a profound longing for the architectural splendor of historic Levantine cities.  The new Syrian diaspora is a prime example of this phenomenon, with the romanticization of cities like Damascus, Homs, Hama, and Aleppo emerging as a defining feature within the diasporic consciousness. While ample documentation focuses on the destruction aspect of Syria and the crisis under the fallen Assad regime, this essay will examine forms of expression among Syrians about how the architecture of lived spaces reflects the collectivist-oriented nature of the Levantine “Shami” people.  While there are a variety of iconic figures, such as Nizar Qabbani, who historically wrote about Damascus, this piece will instead shed light on those who expressed cultural identity with ties to architecture under the shadow of the recent Syrian crisis during the past 14 years. 

To understand where these forms of expression stem from, we need to examine the type of longing common among the new Syrian diaspora. The type of longing that extends beyond mere aesthetic appreciation or recognition of the historical value of architecture; it reflects a deep-seated connection to our cultural heritage, rituals, and lives. Syrian architect Marwa Al-Sabouni eloquently articulates this sentiment in her book The Battle for Home: “architecture offers a mirror to a community, and in that mirror we can see what is wrong and also find hints as to how to put it right.” ¹ Through this lens, we not only behold the beauty of our architectural legacy but also discern the underlying challenges and injustices that afflict our society. Al-Sabouni is not the only author to reflect upon this idea. Suad Amiry’s memoir My Damascus vividly portrays the significance of a single house in early 1900s Damascus, underscoring the role of architecture—specifically the courtyard house—in shaping the lives of the elite Syrian Baroudi family. This focus on a single house that cannot be revisited encapsulates the deep feelings of  “hiraeth” that permeate the Syrian diaspora. Hiraeth is a Welsh word that lacks a direct English translation. At its root, hiraeth conveys a deep homesickness for a bygone era that can never be fully reclaimed; in Arabic, it would be best described by the phrase “الشوق إلى أماكن ضائعة” which translates to longing to lost places. The word hiraeth is referenced in an interview by Syrian American artist Mohamed Hafez, who expands upon this concept with his work that visually attempts to express what has been lost and stored in the diasporic memory. Since the onset of the protests in Syria in 2011, followed by mass displacement and exile, hiraeth has become a constant feeling in the collective consciousness of Syrians as they hold nostalgia and trauma in their memory.

Photo courtesy of Mohamad Hafez

 Prior to diving deeper, it is important to acknowledge that the described feeling captures a significant aspect of our diasporic experience. However, the feeling of longing for lost places alone cannot fully capture the breadth of our emotions and experiences of diaspora. Syrian-American storyteller, lyricist and poet Omar Offendum, reflecting on his experience at the Shangri La Museum of Islamic Art, Culture & Design, articulates the intricate complexities of emotions evoked by encounters with Syrian architectural heritage at the museum. Offendum shares: 

To be honest I was a little bit hesitant at first about digging deeply into the feelings that are evoked when I walk into some of these spaces, I am so far removed from their original context, [at] the same time there is another layer knowing that a lot of these spaces are just not safe anymore in their original context and so you’re kind of happy that they’re this far away from them [the contexts] but that’s a very difficult thing to wrestle with, specifically Syria and the Syrian rooms here. ²

This expression underscores the complex interplay between destruction and beauty, trauma and utopian nostalgic imaginings. Architecture guides our expression and remembrance; we not only honor our past through it but also share our deep longing for lived moments that shaped us within these places. The architecture of the places we left behind helps us preserve our narratives, and it shapes our living philosophy and values, which are collectivist-oriented and based in communal care.  

For many in the Syrian diaspora, the longing for lost places symbolizes a unity they experienced or remember. However, for over 50 years, the (now fallen) Assad dictatorship damaged this unity. The writings of Yassin Al-Haj Saleh expose the contemporary history of the policies of the Syrian regime that led to the loss of a unified Syrian state and people, as the fallen regime created rifts through aggressive nepotism to divide, instill fear, and maintain control through oppressive sectarianism. Al-Haj Saleh in his book The Impossible Revolution states: “sectarianism does not inevitably stem from inherited cultural differences, since those have always existed in every society, but is rather the outcome of social and political privileges. Sectarianism is essentially a tool for governing and a strategy for control.” ³ The regime has systematically developed methods to divide Syrian society through neglecting certain communities and privileging certain individuals, thus creating isolated communities and ruining the ancient social fabric that was based on collectivist morals of sharing and caring for one another regardless of background, ethnicity, or religion. Unfortunately, the Syria remembered by most has been neglected and physically destroyed, and along with that, the civic belonging of Syrians to Syria has been severed among many, including culturally. Those who stayed in Syria have been forced to abandon their basic moral values to get by and survive, or have resorted to becoming informants for the fallen Assad regime for self-gain.

These systemic actions became ingrained and contributed to dismantling the existing networks of social relations and structures, resulting in the degradation of shared cultural values within the average Syrian human, thus guiding individuals toward morally corrupt actions. The harm of these systemic policies and actions moved in tandem with the destruction of the old historic architecture of cities and their intentional urban planning, which was ruined through decades of neglect and indiscriminate bombing. Al-Sabouni provides a detailed account of the regime’s policies and their impact, particularly on the urban and moral fabric, stating that: “The undoing of the urban fabric has advanced hand in hand with the undoing of the moral fabric. And that is written in frightful scars on the face of Old Homs.” ⁴ These frightful scars etched on the face of the city serve as a poignant reminder of the interconnectedness between physical and moral decay under oppressive regimes. Architecture is culture and, upon closer examination, it becomes apparent that this idea holds true not only for Syria but for many societies worldwide, as suggested by Clifford Geertz: “Culture is the fabric of meaning in terms of which human beings interpret their experience and guide their action; social structure is the form that action takes, the actually existing network of social relations.” ⁵

Photo courtesy of Bayt Al Fann

*

While it’s undeniable that Syrian people, like any society, have their share of beautiful traditions, rituals, and values with all sorts of complex variations, including negative implementations, the last decade for Syria in particular has witnessed a notable disconnection from a collectivist-oriented approach that center communal values of sharing and caring for the collective. Such values that have an intertwined connection with our architecture—specifically to the courtyard houses—which make up the core of what a traditional Syrian home is and serve as a space for co-existence and participation in communal rituals based on values of caring and sharing. Renowned Egyptian architect Abdelwahed El-Wakil famously says, “I always say a house without a courtyard is like a man without a soul. The courtyard is the soul of the house. Not only this, it is the protagonist, because the rooms are built around the court.” ⁶ On a wider scale, this concept is even common in underprivileged rural communities in Syria and smaller homes where many members share one common room for everything and spend many hours of the day in it. The latter statement does not intend to romanticize poverty nor to endorse living underprivileged, but rather to describe that these living spaces in all their variations have a commonality that create a sense of critical closeness where one’s actions and values must adhere to the collective in a space as an everyday living situation. Al-Sabouni’s book underscores the intrinsic connection between the lost collectivist morality and the architectural heritage of Syria. Similarly, Amiry’s semi-fictional memoir provides a transparent portrayal of Syrian society, focusing on the rich architectural tapestry of old Damascus from the late 1800s to the present day. In her narrative, Amiry masterfully intertwines the story of Syrian society with the grandeur of the elite Baroudi family home. From the intricately designed living rooms to the serene sleeping quarters, every aspect of the architecture serves a collective purpose, with each room meticulously crafted to accommodate specific rituals or activities at designated times throughout the week in the family’s life. ⁷ The sociologist Émile Durkheim coined the term “collective effervescence,” which is described as a constant emotional commitment to a group and its moral framework, with rituals serving to uphold and strengthen bonds. ⁸ There is a seamless weaving between architecture, ritual, and communal life in influencing societal values that center on collective identity.

Within these lived spaces, Syrian families confronted a myriad of challenges, be they economic, political, or personal. The courtyard concept of these homes taught generations and served as a vibrant reminder of the shared bonds within Syrian families that translated to the larger society. For in these courtyards, the calls to prayer from mosques mingled harmoniously with the tolling of church bells, underscoring the religious and ethnic diversity of Syria. Amiry’s familial narrative further emphasizes this diversity, with her grandmother being indigenous Palestinian and her grandfather of Turkish descent, with the grandfather’s infidelity within the narrative highlighting the complexity of individual lives against the backdrop of communal coexistence. This collectivist environment inevitably confronts any ill actions sooner or later, as Amiry’s story leads the patriarch of the family to lose his grandeur position within the family. Despite these imperfections, personal struggles, and questionable individual choices, the urban fabric of old Syrian cities genuinely exuded a welcoming generosity, ethno-religious diversity, humbling care, and a confrontational sense of accountability that is nearly inescapable, epitomizing the social cohesion of Syrian society at large for generations. 

But the immense neglect and physical destruction of these places along the societal fabric puts doubt in whether the new free Syria, with its new and varied diasporic community, can reclaim a healthy and thriving society with a collectivist living philosophy. It is a challenge that requires utopian imagings as well as forms of expression and commemoration of the sacrifices and displacement faced by the people. Being trapped solely in past feelings and nostalgic memories poses a danger of getting stuck in an over-glorified past that is removed from the current reality. The work of Mohamed Hafez finds this balance, through his miniature architectural sculptures, which mostly feature homes from Syria. Hafez has showcased his works internationally, using memorabilia, pictures, and audio recordings of people’s lived experiences. Hafez complements the visual intricacy of the sculptures and the stories within them by adding in atmospheric sounds of the places. The artwork is both motivated by the concept of hiraeth or long lost places, and is centered around storytelling that attempts to bridge the beauty of the lost past to the present, but without ignoring or forgetting the scars from modern Syrian history

Hafez’s artistic journey began with his personal experience of loss, which evolved into a profound exploration of the narratives of refugees. The “UNPACKED: Refugee Baggage” project involved the meticulous sculptural recreation of rooms from the communal home environments that refugees (not exclusively Syrian) were forced to flee. Collaborating with Iraqi-born writer and speaker Ahmed Badr, in capturing and editing the real stories of these displaced families, Hafez and Badr approached this project in an ethnographic documentary style, giving a tangible meaning to the visual sculptures. ⁹ Each miniature sculpture in this series is framed by a symbolic suitcase, representing the emotional baggage and memories carried by refugees into their diaspora. Ornate objects are intricately woven into the architectural design of old Syrian homes and serve as visual symbols of cultural heritage and containers of history for entire civilizations.

In Hafez’s artworks, the memories of the recent Syrian diasporic communities (since the protests of 2011) are powerfully brought to life through this audiovisual medium, externalizing nostalgic memory and allowing it to express itself, but without ignoring the painful losses, sacrifices, and destruction in these spaces, which are rendered visible and feel viscerally innate. Each miniature sculpture serves as a snapshot of a forcibly abandoned life, surrounded by the turmoil of army vehicles, cracks, or bullet holes. These evocative representations become reminders and windows into the rich tapestry of heritage, identity, and collectivist-oriented living that centers communal sharing, caring, and confronts us to be accountable for our actions. Across generations, diasporic communities somehow tend to find a shared sense of belonging and understanding, transcending geographical boundaries and trauma to form an imagined community rooted in a complicated past and a cultural nostalgia. 

Photo courtesy of Mohamad Hafez

*

The exploration of the Syrian diasporic memory reveals the rich intertwined nature of architecture’s role in shaping the social/cultural aspects of the Syrian identity. Authors like Marwa Al-Sabouni and Suad Amiry provide invaluable insights into the significance of architecture as a reflection of societal values and communal life. Through their works, we witness how the destruction of physical spaces mirrors the unraveling of moral fabric within Syrian society, exacerbated by the fallen regime’s policies that exploit sectarianism for control, ultimately eroding the social cohesion that once defined Syria. However, underlying this devastation, there are glimpses of a shared consciousness and a resilient preservation of collectivist values that is driven by the utopian and nostalgic imaginings granted by the new Syrian diaspora and the Syrian revolution. The new Syria needs projects like “UNPACKED: Refugee Baggage” that meticulously recreate the environments and narratives of displaced Syrians who sacrificed much and are trying to find the means to reconnect with their roots, bridging the chasm between past and present, exile and belonging, in a Syria liberated from the fallen regime and its corruptions. These artworks become vessels fostering a sense of solidarity and pride in the struggle endured by Syrians dispersed across the globe, attempting to reconnect with their cultural heritage and to work with the local community that remained inside Syria to build a new society inspired by its architectural history and modern struggles. 

Author acknowledgement: While this essay primarily centers on the experiences of the new Syrian diaspora communities, it is imperative to acknowledge the broader historical contexts, including the enduring impacts of colonialism and other catastrophes in Levantine history. Further research could delve into how colonial legacies persistently shape diasporic identities and architectural heritage. Understanding how colonial interventions molded urban landscapes and architectural styles in Syria and the Levant can unveil profound layers of meaning embedded within these spaces. Nevertheless, the subjectivity of collective memory does not diminish the notion that, in the face of complexities, displacement away from our architectural environments brings solace and strength. Hope for a brighter future can be found and expressed in various other forms, such as art and literature, to uphold our sense of belonging to collectivist-oriented moral values. 

Sami Ismat is a Research-Practitioner in Performance & Theatre from Damascus, Syria. Currently, he is an Assistant Professor at Columbia College Chicago. His interdisciplinary artistic practice integrates performance art, devised theatre, documentary techniques, ethnographic research, filmmaking, and choreography. Sami has collaborated internationally as writer, director, creator, performer, collaborator, and consultant on diverse projects spanning major theaters and museums to street performances and unconventional spaces. Additionally, Sami is a semi-professional soccer coach, currently serving with Edgewater Castle FC.

His research explores Syrian identity, diaspora, and Arab representations in performance, including investigations of Islamic art and ritual. Through performance, he examines the dynamics of presentation and representation, particularly concerning war-torn landscapes, trauma, loss, grief, memory, and collective cultural consciousness.

Sami’s publications include several theatrical production reviews in Arab Stages journal, “Deconstructing Myths via Performance Strategies” in Deconstructing the Myths of Islamic Art, anda forthcoming book chapter, “Postcolonial Dramaturgies and Dialogic Practices: Embodied Approaches to Contemporary Theatre Dramaturgy” in Decolonizing Dramaturgy in Global Contexts.

1. Marwa Al-Sabouni, The Battle for Home: The Memoir of a Syrian Architect, (London: Thames & Hudson, 2017).
   ︎
2.  Omar Offendum, Omar Offendum Shangri La Artist-in-Residence, Video, October 9, 2018, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YaFRQZs32x0.
   ︎
3.  Yassin Al-Haj, The Impossible Revolution: Making Sense of the Syrian Tragedy (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2017). Pg. 23.
   ︎
4.  Al-Sabouni, The Battle for Home. ︎
5.  Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures, 2000th ed. (New York: Basic Books, 1973). ︎
6. Caravane Earth. 2022. “Documentary: Architect Abdelwahed El-Wakil.” YouTube video, 30:14. Posted November 25, 2022. ︎
7.  Suad Amiry, My Damascus, (Northampton, USA: Olive Branch Press, 2016). Pg. 37. ︎
8.  Émile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life, trans. Karen Fields (New York: Free Press, 1995)
   ︎
9.  Mohamed Hafez, Unpacked: Refugee Baggage, 2017, Mixed Media, 2017. ︎

The post Beyond Ruins: Exploring Architectural Nostalgia in Syrian Diasporic Art and the Resilience of Utopian Imaginings appeared first on Mizna.

Essayist Farah Abdessamad contemplates the layering of history atop history in a small Tunisian town on the Mediterranean coast, and the poetics of how memory and recollection sediment to become the future of the past—what we call our present. This Mizna Online exclusive feature is published as part of Mizna 25.2, Futurities, link to purchase HERE.

—Nour Eldin H., assistant editor

While omniscience is often equated with divinity, to forget is to be human—it is to die a human death. Remembering, then, works to resist the natural course of decay and extinction. We excavate our mind like we fumble in a wild garden; we scratch underneath family stories, tales, poems, books. To remember is to take an unknown journey and sometimes we come across special objects.

—Farah Abdessamad

Tunisian Afterglows, Chronic Collision

Twelve miles south of Tunis, I inspect the graffiti on the decrepit house. Spray painted in black against a wall the color of young apricots, are the words “Naro” next to “H-Lif”—an abbreviation for the town of Hammam Lif. In capital letters these two words float. Naro, Hammam-Lif’s Carthaginian past; Hammam Lif, Naro’s Tunisian future. In a shadowless street off the polluted beach, they exist simultaneously and become something else: a world-image and a new spatial realm. These two names won’t leave me alone.

Unlike more elaborate mural art, this graffiti contained no signature and no date. The unknown artist strolled, stopped, and appraised the abandoned house’s surface in near collapse under the weight of bygone halcyon days. Everything here is in a state of near-collapse. It must have happened at nighttime, when the beach’s laughter, made of discreet courtship near the wave breakers and hard liquor drunk by the bottle, subsided. Lulled by the rolling waves, the young man—let’s assume a young man—looked around. Silence. Next, he took his can of spray paint and gave it a vigorous shake, muffled by a second-hand sweater he wrapped around it. Without much thought, he tattooed the names of his town. Hammam Lif first, then Naro, a spontaneous but necessary addition as if one couldn’t be inscribed without the other. A quick outburst. Intentionally or not, he mapped a sensory grid: that of the living and the dead. I stare at the evocation, just like he did. As quiet as a cat, he left the scene toward the train station and farther west, joining the towering shadow of Jebel Boukornine. 

Graffiti is a public language; it captures a visual and symbolic mood when not a scream. Yet “[l]anguage is never simply a language, a tool, it is a reservoir of a people’s soul,” wrote Albert Memmi in The Impossible Life of Frantz Fanon (1973); this prompts recognition. The young man who spray painted the words Naro and Hammam Lif didn’t do so to show off his drawing skills or compete with others over matters of style or engage in obvious social activism. H-Lif and Naro, by their two-word minimalism—the drawing holding the finality of a signature—conveyed something of a different order. It brought to mind another mural I had noticed two years ago at Hammam Lif’s train station after a decade-long absence. That one shows a teenager with headphones listening to a cassette that reads “please don’t kill yourself” in English. Nurturing and supportive slogans on this anti-suicide campaign include “Stay 4 the strangers that will love you” and “Life is always worth it.” A loving whisper to counter a desperate, silent scream. It hurts to think that for some young people the train linking Tunis to its southern banlieue might be an attractive final destination, a relief to end a painful existence. The mood of inevitable capitulation is challenged in this anti-suicide graffiti by the station that appeared after the Revolution, commissioned by a local youth organization. I wondered why they elected to write these messages in English as opposed to our dialect if the intended audience was local youth. The image carried a distinctive American feel with its textisms and Walkman from the 1980s and 90s, which brought to mind a third graffiti by the beach promenade depicting the American hip-hop icon Tupac Shakur on the sides of a run-down kiosk. English is a social language, an elsewhere, an abstract country, a narrative landscape, much like Naro is to Hammam Lif. A Hammam Lif graffiti resurrects Naro like others vow to avenge the death of Tupac: these alternative spaces exist only in our subjective longing, but their entanglement doesn’t end there. More than a mass of archaeological fragments, Naro is the site of powerful dreamscapes, upon which a graffiti artist extends the affective urge to hold onto the memory of the dead through time. Naro and Hammam Lif etched like the romantic blanket protecting  a lover’s embrace; I got pulled in to examine what kind of longing they conjure.

It’s hard to chart with precision Naro’s timeline. The village and its people were part of Carthage’s expanding empire, which Rome razed to the ground in 146 BCE after three devastating wars. This genocidal campaign brutally erased most traces of Carthaginian culture, literature, and lifestyle, a sprawling civilization that stretched across the central Mediterranean for centuries. Victorious Rome incorporated and administered the territory as a province. The country, to which the Amazigh people are indigenous, changed hands countless times until being ruled by the Ottoman Empire and France before gaining independence in 1956. Hammam Lif, famous for its hot spring reputed to cure nasal ailments, sits where ancient Naro was and has grown from a modest fishermen’s village to a town of more than 40,000 people. At what point did the city cease to be Carthaginian, Arab, Ottoman, Vandals, or French to become something else entirely in our imagination?

Jebel Boukornine, the mountain of “two horns” in Tunisian Arabic, looms over Hammam Lif as it did over Naro. The twin peaks crown the Gulf of Tunis, belonging to the topographical memory of Tunisois today, of Carthaginians yesterday. In the times of Naro, Boukornine’s limestone gave a pink hue to syncretic statues prized by Punic and Roman patrons. On its western peak, where animals were sacrificed and votive stelae placed to honor the gods and commemorate the animal offerings, rested a sanctuary consecrated to the cult of Punic divinity Baal, later assimilated to the Roman god Saturn. There, worshippers overlooked Carthage and the small villages around it. I imagine them, not more than five or six climbing the mountain with their loads to visit the temple’s attendants. Upon reaching Boukornine’s western summit, they rested on small benches made of wood and rocks. The breeze cooled their burning cheeks. The supplicants shared a piece of bread between them before washing their hands to proceed with the rituals. And when nighttime descended, they lit terracotta lamps and stargazed, huddling against the shadows. 

I wandered near Jebel Boukornine one winter day. I went to visit the green and red painted sufi shrine of local saint Sidi Bouriga. A fire destroyed part of the building a few years ago. The zaouia had been renovated since, but it was closed that day. I followed the path leading to the mountain’s slopes that remain green despite the abundance of concrete and dust everywhere around it. The incessant car traffic muted; I paused to admire the expanse of the sea’s changing blue—a blush so warm and tranquil. Amid piles of plastic trash and unpleasant smells, I carried on the forested slopes until confronted with several young men who immediately hid their hands in their pockets when they spotted me. The mountain’s new guardians, I thought. I turned my feet and left visiting the old sanctuary for another day. 

Like the graffiti artist’s infatuation, I too have often thought of Hammam Lif and Naro. I could not roam Hammam Lif without roaming Naro and this spatial collision created an illusion of permanence, the existence of a vague continuum giving way to a love of legends and a mythological resonance. Several months after my walk to Boukornine I encountered ancient Naro when I least expected it in New York City. The Metropolitan Museum opened a show devoted to medieval Africa. Among the exhibition’s stunning objects were Jewish mosaics from Naro excavated in the late 19th century. They testified from a place where multiple faiths coexisted from the 3rd to the 6th century. The floor mosaics represented several potent images including a menorah, a lion framed by floral motifs, and a large-scale date palm tree. I came to know that they had been unearthed in 1883 by Ernest de Prudhomme, a French Army Captain who proverbially dug his backyard and found a treasure: the most complete evidence of ancient synagogues in Roman Africa. Men under his orders unfortunately damaged many pieces due to inadequate excavation techniques and handling. The Brooklyn Museum acquired these historical objects in 1905, around the same year of the Young Tunisians’ founding, a decisive political movement mobilizing indigènes, promoting Tunisian emancipation and equal political consideration under the French protectorate. 

In New York, I admired these vestiges and noted their familiarity despite not sharing the faith for which they were designed. I recognized in the lion the tales of the extinct North African Lion which once populated Tunisia’s forests and mountains up until independence. I visualized the many date palm trees lining the beachfront promenade of today’s Hammam Lif in their various states of desiccation, and in the mosaics the colorful tiles of our family home as well as the ostraca of a surviving past that pokes and gasps through the ripples of time.

That de Prudhomme found the remains of the Naro synagogue in his garden is rather uncanny. It emphasizes that soil is a stratum holding infinite secrets. History’s layers often mingle and argue like the daily pensioners glued to their plastic chairs in smoky, idle cafes amplified by the noise of a TV playing somewhere. These deposits sediment and superimpose, elbowing eras and events out of sight until they stubbornly spring back to view. 

The ancients distinguished between memory and recollection. In the same way, we differentiate History from collective and mythological narratives, and all of these from personal histories. According to Saint Augustine, born in Romanized North Africa, “the time present of things past is memory.” In other words, memory is the present of the past. Recollection, on the other hand, entails the act of piecing together fragments, a determination that leads to a form of realization. Collective and primordial memories may not concern our existence directly but they frame a mental geography. I, as the embodied form of the present, was not present during the birth of oceans and the sky, nor during those cataclysmic events—plagues, wars, natural disasters, famines—that still haunt the collective human consciousness. Yet as a historical being, I live through my personal memories in addition to those I have inherited, what German scholar Reinhart Koselleck referred to in Sediments of Time as a tension between “experiential space” and “expectation horizon”. And crucially, memory cannot be apprehended without forgetfulness and erasure. 

Little has survived Roman wrath to teach us about how Carthaginians philosophized history and human existence. They believed that the soul survived from its physical incarnation. In other societies not too distant from Naro, the dead underwent trials to be accepted into an afterlife; a moment often recounted as a voyage, a crossing of rivers. Forgetfulness grants passage to a new life in exchange for the past: the dead must relinquish the memory of those that attach them to the material world. Historian of religions Mircea Eliade wrote in Mythologies of Memory and Forgetting that “the dead are those who have lost their memories”—or, perhaps more accurately, traded. While omniscience is often equated with divinity, to forget is to be human—it is to die a human death. Remembering, then, works to resist the natural course of decay and extinction. We excavate our mind like we fumble in a wild garden; we scratch underneath family stories, tales, poems, books. To remember is to take an unknown journey and sometimes we come across special objects. 

* * * 

After encountering the laconic graffiti signage of H-Lif and Naro, I head back to the beach. The sea is calm and the scent of rotten garbage tickles my throat. Public benches have been smashed into pieces. Sea-facing restaurants and kiosks have shut, except for one with an empty freezer placed like it were part of a garage sale. Wild grass and trash have covered the area where sand used to be. I tiptoe between shards of glass and plastic bottles, baby clothes and broken toys, and dry balls of Posidonia oceanica, a common underwater seagrass, rejected by the sea. Famished flea-infested dogs and litters of emaciated cats haul leftovers of leftovers. Sand was harvested to embellish touristic beaches south, as if this place’s constitutive components were destined to elect one of two imposed choices: to leave or surrender. Following a heavy storm in 1981, ill-advised authorities installed large wave breakers which trapped marine currents, occasionally turning the sea a dangerous tint of green. Stagnating waters have mixed with sewage; it is too toxic to swim there now. When I was little during summer visits, my family rushed to secure a spot on the beach before it got crowded. This was before the sea turned into an irreversible poisonous pond where harassed and beaten-up asylum seekers go to die, trading their own memories for a one-way passage. At night, we would gather on white plastic chairs sinking into the cold sand, drinking sodas drunk on our stupid happiness. 

From the beach on a clear day, I can make out the Byrsa Hill of old Carthage and the elevated village of Sidi Bou Said, the Tunisia of social media influencers and hashtags, a vista that often feels like it belongs to a different country. Located north, both of these spots twinkle at night. Wish you were here, they tout to me, from my there on the other side of the Gulf of Tunis. Large ships anchor in the port of La Goulette—to France, Italy—they pass by until they make a turn and disappear in the far distance. Sometimes I think the ships and their passengers might pity this neglected town and its people who dream of visas they can’t obtain to travel abroad and escape (is visa-fantasizing an early form of memory-trading?). Work, lack of work, life is ghali—expensive. The Tunisia I know, the one of Hammam Lif, is left to old people, kids, and women, to it-was-better-before and look-at-these-young-women-now (always young women). A dirty dot, a stain on the polluted coastline along with Rades’ eyesore of an industrial zone. The old casino is collapsing despite multiple renovation announcements. The empty mansions have stayed behind while patrician families have opted to live elsewhere. The Bey’s winter residence is crumbling, the site reeks of urine. Cinema Oriental closed a while ago and the bakeries are sometimes half empty amid cyclical flour shortages, which have worsened in recent years. And not just flour: lines of caffeine-deprived people in front of the few shops selling ground coffee. But there’s fricasses, pizza, lablebi, and more and we’ve blessed a new dictator to replace the one we had deposed. The town’s characters ignore that they live on borrowed time as each new day starts following the same musical score. The streets bask in nostalgia, a dangerous affliction that infects people sitting, waiting, queuing in between a constitutional coup, an economic crisis, and news of arbitrary arrests. Those working in Europe and Canada front their exchange rate-enabled wealth. They don’t share stories of racism and hardships beneath their hard-won euros and dollars. 

“A remembrance is in very large measure a reconstruction of the past achieved with data borrowed from the present,” noted French intellectual Maurice Halbwachs in The Social Frameworks of Memory. I find this helpful to approach Naro’s shape-shifting nature. Naro’s ability to stimulate a reflection on the concept of time—both a physical place and a delineated periodicity—and the poetics of time. Naro has become a salve to soothe daily humiliations, an incantation to fight the static of the present. Naro is not a door for cultural supremacy or racist genetic theories. Rather, it is a revolution in the sense of circling back to a rumination—a poking question mark that gives way to mysterious ellipses. 

In our mind, the graffiti artist’s and mine, Naro is enveloped in a magnetic aroma of fresh fish, baking ovens, and a sticky, generous sea. The village enjoys stillness during napping hours once men have returned to shore with their morning loads of tuna, octopus, and cuttlefish. Children play on the beach and admire the boats going and leaving the port of Carthage. They dream of trading across the Mediterranean Sea one day in these agile ships, of encountering different lands, of worshiping Melqart in the various temples dedicated to him in Gades and Malta. Borders are malleable here. A grandmother scolds a child, who dirtied their cotton robe when drawing fish on the wet sand with his friends. A little girl shrieks and runs away from bees. 

Naro means “fire” in the old and extinct language of the Carthaginians, a connection also found in Arabic today. Fire is light, an emergency signal, a symbol of arrivals and homecomings at sea. It brightens crevices, fear, and human ignorance while projecting diffused shadows against the walls of our caves. Fire is a sun, a raging luminosity, an abundant summer and the warmth of a home during winter. Uncontrolled and unchecked, fire turns aggressive, tempestuous, and incandescent. As such, its cathartic release produces alchemical alterations. Intimate fire nourishes the feeble glow of candles one brings to vigils to remember the dead, to honor their memory, and to stay alive, together, through the night.

Gaston Bachelard had warned about fire’s magnetic allure and dangers in Psychoanalysis of Fire (1938). “In itself the flame is a major presence, but being close to it makes us dream of far away, too far away.” But fire is an avatar of Tunisian pleasure and pain; we feel it in the burning of our tongue induced by our spicy cuisine and acknowledge its presence in the combustion that killed fruit seller Mohamed Bouazizi, which has since left us feeling a little lost. Maybe it can guide us out of our maze. 

On the pale apricot wall, the unknown artist—a warm presence by now—drew an invisible bridge between Naro and Hammam Lif, two interconnected worlds that exist within and for each other’s eyes. The gesture might be brushed off as an insignificant spasm, yet the suggestion of this portal is the mark of someone who longs, dissents, and resists. The beach’s sand glimmers under the sun, the trees stretch their opulent palm leaves, parasols dot the vista with wondrous colors. Every able-bodied resident has donated a day annually to clean the city. Giggles rise from the emerald sea. Fresh seafood grills on the promenade and ice cold citronade refreshments. A ferry bound for Carthage, Sidi Bou Said, and La Marsa arrives at the pier. Those who disembark head for the casino, where children and adults listen to a captivating old storyteller. They will spend the rest of the day at the new spa at the bottom of Boukornine. In the city center, cinemas show the latest arthouse and experimental films in the mornings. Art galleries opened in two of the old seaside mansions. One of them, Africa House, specializes in contemporary art from the continent, offering year-long residencies to African artists who play chess and dominoes with residents during lazy afternoon hours. During winter, a fashion show takes place inside the casino with a dedicated prize awarded to the best fripes. Secondhand clothes sellers pick their models long in advance and compete for the best tailors in town. The bells of church Sainte-Marie sound on Sundays. The synagogue that was transformed into a children’s library has reverted to its former status and the children’s library has moved to a large annex. The children gather there, then volunteer on the public farm to take care of the horses, donkeys, and sheep. They tease the plump cats on their way. The trains come on time and service Tunis and other destinations every seven minutes. One season follows another—marked by scents of geranium, jasmine, orange blossom, roses, and verbena. Herbalists have set up kiosks near the spa. The market is buzzing with gossip and well-wishes. Couples cruise the sea in sail boats while others hike Boukornine for a more panoramic view. There’s a concert later tonight. I stand by the pale apricot wall and strike three knocks against the house’s blue door. 

Farah Abdessamad is a French Tunisian essayist and critic writing at the intersection of art, heritage, and identity.

The post Tunisian Afterglows, Chronic Collision appeared first on Mizna.

Part manifesto, part scholarship, part extended poetic engagement, Umniya Najaer makes a radical bid for a better future in a singularly peerless transdisciplinary work. Desktop viewing is recommended to preserve the original formatting of the work; a PDF version of this essay is available here for non-desktop users. Published as part of Mizna 25.2: Futurities, link to order here.

—Nour Eldin H., assistant editor

IF THERE IS AN UPPER LIMIT TO THE HUMAN CAPACITY TO COMPUTE MASS ATROCITY THEN THERE MUST BE A HARD LIMIT ON LETHAL TECHNOLOGIES BECAUSE THE IMPLICATION IS THAT AS VIOLENCE ESCALATES IT ALSO BECOMES INCREASINGLY INCOMPREHENSIBLE. THEREFORE, TO PROTECT THE HUMAN COLLECTIVE, WE MUST DISARM HUMANITY.

—Umniya Najaer

disarm humanity: meditations from the third decade of the third millennium

Dedicated to Aseel Hashim Hamdan
& all the children on earth
& in the infinite beyond¹

So many have died for us to
live at the beginning of the end.
—Hiba Elgizouli.

You were created out of love
so carry nothing but love
to those who are trembling.²
—Heba Abu Nada.

// heaven is crowded with children //
in the playground of the hereafter // they arrive tattered
& sprout new limbs // & practice cartwheels
across this chapter of human history
they flip the page // & we // the living // awaken
into a world with no blood on our hands

in the new world
no shackles // no hungry children
no limbs locked beneath rubble // no rubble
no human spirits tracing the depth of the sea
no drowned search for new country
no hungry child // on the side of the street
or in the belly of the mine // chipping away
the earth’s precious stones

in the new world
children bejewel the glistening earth

& every living being
already speaks the same cellular language

life seeks life seeks life seeks life

The year is 2025. On planet earth there are today 8.1 billion human beings. Two billion are children under the age of 14. More than 473 million, or more than 1 out of every 6 children, live in a conflict zone.

We have crossed 6 of the 9 planetary boundaries.³ We share this breathing planet with approximately 8 million species of animals. Together we are living in the most sophisticated and technologically advanced system of global domination to ever exist. Although wolves, lions, spotted hyenas, and bottlenose dolphins are known to kill their own kind, humans are the only species known to exterminate our own children en masse.⁴

In the third decade of the third millennium, the human-made world reflects the dominant consciousness of our times: accumulation-through-annihilation and power-as-deathmaking. There are on earth today an estimated 12,100 nuclear warheads—enough to destroy the world many times over—and 1 billion firearms, 85% of which are in the hands of civilians. There are 120 million people displaced by violence, hunger, and environmental catastrophe and 43 million refugees. By one metric, 281 million human beings face acute food insecurity. By another metric, it is closer to 800 million, about a tenth of our species. The words hungry, malnourished, starving, and emaciated fail to capture the experience of constant hunger, searching, worry, exhaustion, headaches, of being unable to sleep due to the abdominal pains of famish or due to comforting a child who is crying from and into the emptiness.

Of those starving people, more than a million are inside Gaza, where an alliance between global powers brutally exterminated between 45,000 to 300,000 people in just fifteen months.⁵ Engineered their starvation. Wounded and maimed 100,000 human beings. Eclipsed tens of thousands by the debris of cities turned to deathscapes.

In Gaza, a toddler is pulled
from the rubble, crying:

am I alive?
am I still alive?

he is wide-eyed
trembling &
soaked in blood.

* * *

a boy, about four years old
plays at the ocean’s frothing lip

his two feet amputated
to nubs at the ankle

both arms amputated
above the elbows

the waves wash over him
he caresses the sand

he is teaching himself
to walk, to kick into the waves

a yellow ball
to glimmer like a galaxy

twinkling at
the horizon’s edge

Must we lose our own limbs to understand the disarray of a global system built on endless cycles of destruction? Must our own neighborhoods come under siege? Must we burn to death? Must all the birds change their migratory patterns to feast on corpses before the hairs on our necks stand up in protest?⁶ Must the dogs eat us? Must our own children be crushed beneath the rubble of pulverized cities before we recognize that our collective humanity and futurity is on the line?

In the third decade of the third millennium, in the wake of harrowing crimes against humanity, at this juncture in history when life in the present is denied to hundreds of thousands, how can we orient toward the future?⁷ How can we cultivate attunement to the totality of this world while resisting hegemonic narratives of normalized brutality? How can we exit the repeating cycle of bloodshed, annihilation, and atrocity in order to build a world in which every life, and every child, is protected?

The year is 2025. Of those starving, 25.6 million are inside Sudan.⁸ There, in the bid for regional domination, an alliance between global powers conspired to corrupt the aims of the people’s popular revolution. To this end, they have extinguished 150,000 lives and counting⁹ and have forcibly displaced 12.4 million—130,000 of whom are growing new life in their wombs. The dead are too many to count.¹⁰

the ones I knew personally
the little ones I held in my lap
the aunties I kissed on the cheek
are just a tiny fraction of the whole

Igbaal waited in a line for bread for two days before succumbing to heatstroke and dehydration. Aseel perished in the grips of a curable infection, unable to reach the decimated medical center. A car full of relatives, en route to my cousin—nine months pregnant with her first child—were executed by the militia in broad daylight. The ones I knew personally are tiny drops in humanity’s hemoglobin sea.

The quality and value of life is incongruent with numbers. A number is essentially an abstraction processed in the occipito-temporal and parietal cortex. When grief’s vulture shuts her eye, in the dead of world’s night, there is clarity: to the elite class of war criminals and politicians, our countries are a strategic territory to be riddled with conflict. Emptied of life, it will be easier to occupy, to excavate resources, to construct military and naval bases, to feign diplomatic relations between war criminals who call annihilation by various names: “diplomatic relations,” “globalization,” “security measures.” In this neoimperialist ploy, the slow and sudden deaths of our loved ones are a small price for suppressing self-determination by scattering the millions who dared to pursue the dream of a civilian-led democracy, a nation free of military rule.¹¹ To the most elite class of tyrants, the scenes of our loved one’s annihilations are proxies anchoring their vision of a future in which those with the deadliest weapons and the lowest threshold for committing crimes against humanity will steer humanity’s forsaken, fettered ship.

In Gaza, in Sudan, in all the centers of militarized obliteration, the drone’s demonic hum pummels dawn. Each dawn arrives after an impossible night. Month after the month, the school is a blister, the mosque is a crater, the church is ash, the ash is patient, the patient is fully awake, and I begin to wonder: is there a limit to our comprehension of mass atrocity? Is there a threshold to the annihilation of life, after which even the tyrants and warmongers will tremble with the epiphany that our greatest need is the need for each other? And if, as I suspect, there is no threshold to annihilation—if the only line is the line we draw, if our ability to draw this line makes us human—then what is holding us back?

What will it take for human beings to organize the world in accordance to our highest potential as a species? What will it take to live upon the earth as if all beings have an equal and unequivocal right to life and the world’s abundance? What will it take to share resources equitably between all 8.1 billion or more of us? To repair what has been decimated? To lay down every last weapon and negotiate outside the language of annihilation? After annihilation, after brute power has run its course, once we exit the blood epoch, what language will we speak? How will we express power? Will there be a desire for othering? Are there limits to human consciousness? To collective learning? To our ability to fathom our twenty-first century reality? To our capacity for empathy?

Manifesting a solution to violence of epic proportions, to the fact that never again has become again and again and again, obliges us to contend with the scale of the whole. To reclaim our autonomy, let us face the whole world, each irreducible life, the entire human species. All of history. The sea of trepidation and possibility swirling in each of us: the living, the deceased and the unborn, the borderless unknowns.

How do we do this?

The year is 2025 and information travels almost as fast as light.¹² This is the age of genocide livestreamed by the besieged. The age of gloating torturers. Of soldiers who sign their children’s names on missiles sent to annihilate more precious children. To scatter and shred the children so they are uncountable and difficult to recognize. In this neoliberal hour of imperial domination it is possible to watch a barefoot Congolese child mine coltan in the rain from within the screen of a highly advanced artifact manufactured in part by the labor of that child’s enslavement.¹³ It is possible in the same minute to watch a video of seven-year-old Sila Husu, who was sheltering in the Khadija school when an airstrike fractured her skull. In the video, Sila says, “my wish is to be like a doll, to be the most beautiful princess, and to travel outside for treatment. I want to live like all the children of the world who are happy.” Sila runs her hand along the staples in her head, over her right eyelid, blanketing a detached retina.¹⁴ In the age of livestreamed genocide, complicity runs much deeper than ignorance.

HOW ARE WE STILL JUST WATCHING WHEN THE CIRCULATING IMAGES AND CRIES OF MILLIONS MERIT A GLOBAL STATE OF EMERGENCY?

One day I come across several experiments in the field of human cognition and psychology that suggest humans struggle to comprehend mass atrocity.¹⁵ There are all sorts of terms to describe this phenomenon. Psychological numbing is the desensitization to large scale suffering. Scope insensitivity is a cognitive bias, a failure of humans to adjust our emotional response to mass atrocities. With diminishing marginal sensitivity, each additional death is perceived as less and less significant. Some cognitive scientists go so far as to speculate that perhaps we experience cognitive overload because human brains evolved in the context of small-scale social formations. I don’t want to endorse the perspective that humans struggle to comprehend mass atrocity, and, under different circumstances, I would think it an excuse for complicity, but, in observing the callous indifference of some of us, I wonder if perhaps this proposition can also be an invitation to move with renewed creativity and vigor against the interior and exterior forces that sustain brutality by limiting the capacity of some to perceive the present scale of obliteration empathetically.

If our bodies, our literal lives are sewn into the fabric of a sophisticated system of global domination that feasts on life, and if some of us are not processing the excruciating scale of annihilation taking place on earth, how would this require us to orient differently to the tasks of peace and worldbuilding?¹⁶

IF THERE IS AN UPPER LIMIT TO THE HUMAN CAPACITY TO APPREHEND MASS ATROCITY, THEN THERE MUST BE A HARD LIMIT ON LETHAL TECHNOLOGIES, BECAUSE THE IMPLICATION IS THAT AS VIOLENCE ESCALATES IT ALSO BECOMES INCREASINGLY INCOMPREHENSIBLE.

THEREFORE, TO PROTECT THE HUMAN COLLECTIVE, WE MUST DISARM HUMANITY.

The first quarter of the third millennium is marked by radical intensification of the methods of warfare, including the use of sophisticated autonomous weapons against civilians. Today’s “unprecedented” scale of violence against people and the planet is precedented by a surplus of weapons stockpiled by the murderous global elite of mega-empires whose goal is not to manage the affairs of their own nations but to expand the sphere of their authority over more human beings and territories.¹⁷ As long as we allow military leaders and autocratic politicians backed by militaries to rule the world, there will be no peace on earth. A sophisticated flow of lethal technologies keeps the most powerful politicians and their armies in power by foreclosing the possibility of nonmilitarized politics. The excess of militarized conflict is orchestrated by multibillion dollar weapons manufacturing industries that work hand-in-hand with “liberal” and “democratic” superpowers to set a highly antagonistic tone for global relations. This lethal mode of checkmate relationality puts all of us and our future descendants at risk of experiencing violence, war, or annihilation. Every shipment of military equipment, every bomb dropped on civilians, every country invaded, every incinerated hospital, ambulance, and school brings us incrementally closer to the possibility of insurmountable loss.

The year is 2025 and we are at a point of inflection.¹⁸ Each dawn bears witness to more bloodshed. Uranium-tinged earth. Families cremated instantaneously. International organizations are unable to maintain peace, security, or human rights. War criminals roam with impunity, each one lending the other a hand or a veto. There is no order. No checks. No balances. Tyrants transform cities into mountainous deathscapes, starve children, target civilians, demolish archeological sites, and disrupt ecological processes. What took millennia to flourish incinerates upon contact.

AT A MATERIAL AND SYMBOLIC LEVEL, THE EMPIRE INTENDS FOR VIOLENCE TO BE AN INSTRUMENT OF COGNITIVE RECONDITIONING: TO BEND THE ARC OF HUMANITY FURTHER TOWARD FATALITY, DESPERATION, AND MORAL DEPRAVITY.

THE NORMALIZATION OF BARBARITY REINFORCES THE FAÇADE THAT ALL OF HISTORY IS A SET OF REPEATING STORIES AND THERE IS NOTHING LEFT TO IMAGINE.

As we witness internationally orchestrated atrocities in Sudan, Congo, Palestine, Lebanon, Syria, Yemen, and Ukraine, let it be with the understanding that every war, every genocide, all militarized violence, and all crimes against humanity double as symbolic gestures to normalize epistemic brutality, to disintegrate human autonomy, and to numb our imaginations.¹⁹ The empires of death aim to expunge the plurality of human history from collective memory, bloodwashing history so that this profusely violent present can stand in contrast to no other.

It is up to us to preserve the creativity, diversity, and humanity of our species’ past, present, and future with the understanding that the destruction of unquantifiable human life and civilization is just the outward facing function of militarized violence. The greater objective is to entrench the myth that malevolence, warfare, murder, annihilation, and alienation are natural extensions of the human condition. The propaganda that our diverse beliefs and origins obstruct harmonious coexistence sustains “wars without end” as a coverup for the centuries-old progression of imperial control, resource extraction, and life-siphoning cycles. The legitimacy of the current world order as a political sphere comprised of territorial militarized nation-states depends on the mass delusion that the human world is violent beyond repair and that it is therefore reasonable for empires to conduct the world through war, antagonism, annihilation, and bloodshed.

Peaceful negotiations, ceasefires, and arms embargoes threaten this narrative. Civilized relations between nations of equal diplomatic status jeopardize the skewed hierarchy of imperial supremacy. It is precisely because violence cannot deteriorate the core of our collective humanity that foreclosing the possibility of humane politics and civilized nonviolent conflict resolution requires a constant production of brutality and dehumanization. The empire strains to fabricate unequal power relations between nations, seizing power and territory through brute violence—but this does not amount to legitimacy. Since legitimacy cannot be taken by force, the empire deploys force to shape consciousness, to manipulate our ideas of what is possible and what is acceptable. Empires manufacture horrific deathscapes and wage endless wars in an effort to standardize their own impunity. Their allies get the benefit of the same legitimacy and impunity extended to them. Therefore every war criminal has among his allies a cohort of war criminals who masquerade as political leaders.

And yet, empires, like their figureheads, are temporary formations. For every war criminal there are millions of us who reject the propaganda that the way things are is how they will always be. For each person desensitized by the conspiracy of brutality, there are a hundred more invested in building a harmonious future that diverges from the gladiatorial present. Together, we dream and manifest a world unencumbered by bloodshed.

DECADES AND CENTURIES OF SURVIVING ORGANIZED DEHUMANIZATION TAUGHT US THAT FREEDOM DREAMS ARE STRONGER THAN DEATH MACHINES.

OUR COLLECTIVE HUMANITY, LOVE, EMPATHY, AND INGENUITY THREATEN TO UNRAVEL THE NARRATIVE OF NORMALIZED BRUTALITY, THE SEAT OF MODERN POWER AND EVIL, FROM ITS CORE.

While empires and military governments deploy brutality to shape human consciousness, to manufacture complicity, and to render democratic processes futile, the truth is that violence does not inevitably beget more violence. Even under the most extreme forms of degradation, the besieged in Gaza are planting tomatoes, eggplants, and peppers, knitting sweaters, and baking sweets to hand out to the children who invent songs, write poems, raise kittens, and carry their siblings all while pleading with the world to draw a line in the sand. Faced with the collapse of the state, Sudanese people are organizing grassroots “emergency response rooms” in the form of community kitchens, youth education centers, puppet shows for displaced children, surgeries performed in underground shipping containers, and critical psychological services for victims of militarized sexual violence. Whenever and wherever our governments, institutions, and civil liberties may come under attack, let the power of these mutual aid networks serve as a potent reminder that dignified life is made possible by the cumulative actions of those who step up and take care of their communities. However brutal the present may be, it does not foreclose the possibility of more humane futures. Brutality does not necessarily fortify the agenda of cruelty. Impunity cannot extinguish the seed of humanity. This means that we have a choice to live, act, and intervene with the certainty that despite extraordinary displays of violence, the future of our species will not be determined by the savage politics of militarized empires.

While experiencing or witnessing dehumanization and annihilation can engender numbness, despair, and imaginative foreclosure, it can also revitalize our investment in humanity. Black Studies scholar Nicholas Brady wrote, “paradoxically, the most hopeful people are those who have no hope in the system.”²⁰ The Lebanese anthropologist Munira Khayat put it like this: “When you’re looking at it from the perspective of the empire, the war machine appears totalizing. But when you’re in the crosshairs of the death machine, you always have hope, because you’re living it.”²¹ It is historical moments like ours, when brute power is at its apex, when, in the delirium of impunity, empires neglect to cover their bloody tracks, that a hopeless-hopeful alchemy takes root. All the veils fall away, the fragility of life is palpable, the criminality of our political leaders is apparent, the stakes of disarmament and peacebuilding are stark, and dehumanization, the seed of our collective suffering, becomes the source of a shared clairvoyance.

TO BREAK THE REPEATING CYCLE OF BRUTALITY WE MUST ORGANIZE THE WORLD AROUND THE SANCTITY OF LIFE.

The year is 2025. From inside the bloodiest center of empire, no task is as urgent as averting the acceleration of warfare. This is the year to declare every life worthy of life. Together, we, the living, must draw the line and usher in an era of human history in which power and defense are based in the sanctity of life, rather than the ease of ending life. For this to become possible, we will need to unilaterally disarm our species, defund our militaries, and demilitarize our borders. Otherwise, we may all, sooner or later, find ourselves or our loved ones in the crosshairs of a death-machine. Beginning with a rejection of narratives of normalized domination, the unilateral disarmament of the human species hinges on the collective’s ability to unequivocally value all life. Therefore, the call to disarm our species implores a metamorphosis in human consciousness and relationships.

If disarming humanity seems absurd, let us begin by naming and imagining it. Let us imagine a world without Aviation Thermobaric Bombs. Without GBU-43/B Massive Ordnance Air Blast bombs. Without Lockheed AC-130 gunships. Without AH-64 Apache Attack Helicopters.²² Without quadcopter drones which increase targeted attacks and lower the threshold for the use of force while crying out in the voices of vulnerable newborns and injured women. Let us imagine all children living without the threat of FGM-148 Javelin antitank missiles, which the RSF militia in Sudan uses against human beings. Imagine succumbing to a weapon made to destroy a tank or an aircraft. But more urgently, imagine a world without F-22 Raptor fighter jets or the Advanced Precision Kill Weapon Systems or the MK-84 general-purpose bomb or Hellfire AGM-114 missiles or landmines or nuclear weapons.²³

If we must begin somewhere, let us begin with the consensus that, in a global system built on perpetuating endless cycles of death and deprivation, nothing is more important than protecting all life unequivocally. The sanctity of life is the center of gravity around which everything and everyone must orient, each in our own way, orbiting life, traversing time, harmonizing our expressions. To exit the cycle of bloodshed, we cannot allow a single life to be taken in the bid for power or in the name of “defense.”²⁴ Let us vigorously contest normalized brutalities, especially murder, no matter the pretense.

Our species will enter a new era of human history when we collectively and consciously ban the production, stockpiling, trade, and use of militarized weapons by all state and nonstate entities.

Now, amid escalating violence, it is imperative to advocate for what has been deemed impossible:

a world without massacre.

a future without weapons.

land rematriation.

reconciliation.

world peace.

* * *

WHAT IS THE MEASURE BETWEEN THE WORLD AS IT IS & THE WORLD AS IT COULD BE, IF WE DECLARE THE PRESENT THE LINE?

As conflict and militarization escalate, amid increasing impunity, rising geopolitical instability, and an arms race for AI-powered autonomous weapons, I urge the people of the world to reclaim the possibility of peace. To pursue peace beyond its connotation as a pacifying conceptual tool of neoliberal murderous empires. To reclaim peacebuilding from international governing bodies whose efforts are rendered futile by the simple use of a veto. The evolution in consciousness that will enable us to exit the cycle of violence is also an evolution in our collective values, language, and praxis of peace, armistice, nonviolence, reconciliation, and harm reduction. If inner peace is a seed, then planetary peace is the forests; for these forests to flourish, we must protect and nourish the seeds and fruit of peace across time and space, among the newborns and the elderly, among the soldiers and the wounded, and especially in the bloody cores of empire. To exit the cycle of bloodshed, let us sow peace in ourselves, nurture peace in our children, practice peace in our classrooms, cultivate peace in our communities, disseminate peace in our media, and model peace in the relations between our nations.

The year is 2025. We are alive at a critical point in the history of our species and our planet. Our actions and inactions carry profound impacts beyond our own lives. While the long-term aspiration is a future without weapons, a world where all life is protected, we are today alive in the meantime—in the breach between the epoch of bloodshed and the world as it could be. In this meantime let us do everything in our power to protect those who may not make it to the future if we do not act immediately and decisively to deliver arms embargoes, humanitarian relief, and life-saving medical support. If the cost of our inaction is death, injury, and the degradation of our human kin, then let us not wait on the bureaucracy of transnational governing bodies. Let us resist militarization and tyranny everywhere. Let us provide direct financial aid to the vulnerable, prevent the deployment of weapons, deliver medical care to the wounded, care for the children traumatized by war, grief, and starvation; let us advocate for besieged journalists and boycott the war machine, regardless of who is in its crosshairs—we all belong to life. In this meantime between carnage and cohesion, let us shatter the deception of normalcy, let us speak openly and piercingly about human rights violations, about our complicity in them, about the need to hold war criminals accountable. In the breach between injury and vitality, let us speak the names of those brutally torn from this earth, let us amplify the messages of the besieged, let us say never again and let “never” mean not even today, not tomorrow, not anyone, anywhere, ever, not even the sharks. Let us take every action we can toward protecting life and pursuing peace on earth. Let us stop at nothing until we stop the world in its tracks. Let us stop the world long enough to sojourn the missiles, to honor all we have lost, to cleanse the blood from the earth, to dare to dream to start anew, orbiting love.

* * *

THE FUTURE IS AN OPEN INTERVAL, UNREQUITED BY THE PRESENT.

to exit modernity’s matrix
we witness-dream with open eyes

* * *
in my dream a boat sails toward Gaza
& reaches the shore unharmed
a universal ceasefire holds grief’s
ceaseless memory, softly

we reroute
the trajectory of our species

the world is becoming conscious of itself
through our most audacious freedom dreams
& the bravest among us are not even yet alive

* * *
imagine
we are points
along the continuum of life
& this is not our final form

we are the threshold
bridging timelines

the world as it is
cries out for
the world as it could be

with the memory
of a toothless child, her rapid moods
and clumsy feet, her panicked cries

as the interior landscape
catches fire, modernity glitches
knowing we cannot go on like this
smoldering, we jump the line

& we are every child
& the ceasefire is eternal

* * *
imagine

a mass exodus
from the blood epoch

we enter a new era in the human record

humanity disarms itself
soldiers neutralize every weapon
before burying their uniforms

a tender root system
germinates

from the formerly drenched earth
our species awakens trembling
with love

* * *
fragile
plural
human

insist
every life is worth living

to preserve life

to manifest a new relation to
life–&–death–&–the–world

abandon modernity’s deathtrap
pursue harmonious coexistence with all living beings
redistribute resources

protect life
provision nature to heal itself

manifest from the inside-out a metamorphosis
in the collective awareness of our species

* * *

THE ROOT OF ALL DEHUMANIZATION IS THE ACCEPTABILITY OF HARM BASED IN THE ILLUSION OF SEPARATION.

THE SEED OF HUMANIZATION IS A PRAXIS OF CARE BASED IN THE IRREDUCIBLE INTERCONNECTION OF ALL LIFE.

THEREFORE, LET US TRANSFORM THE CONSCIOUSNESS OF OUR SPECIES, UNIT BY UNIT, FROM THE INSIDE OUT.

The extraordinary brutalities, the genocides and ecocides of our present are ruptures in the fabric of the modern world. We are living at ground zero and every break is an opening for a metamorphosis in human consciousness.

Ground zero is defined as:
1) the point directly below, above, or at which a nuclear explosion occurs
2) the center or origin of rapid, intense, or violent activity or change
3) a starting point, the very beginning

The year is 2025. The world is ablaze. At ground zero, the earth glistens with human blood. The wind is a cradle for families dismembered in cataclysmic explosions. The sky sheds tears over spirits wandering among the debris of shattered cities. In the third decade of the third millennium, the lives of 8.1 billion human beings are shaped by the worldviews of an elite global minority who rely on millions to remain passive in the face of endless cycles of senseless murder, brutality, looting, and destruction. Passivity relies on an imagined partition, a phantom bifurcation, a rupture between the bystander who observes brutality and the person or population subjected to atrocity.

The artifice of separation is central to reproducing the internal justifying logics of othering, exclusion, exploitation, extermination, enslavement, and annihilation. Our twenty-first century system of global domination is fueled by various shifting illusions of individuality, which we may experience in an embodied sense as separation, isolation, aversion toward the “other,” or estrangement from oneself and the world. The first danger in all this is that it is possible to experience the illusion of separation as reality. The second danger is that the interplay between illusion and reality can breed pessimism and imaginative foreclosure as many are no longer able to envision a way out of this mess. At times, it is difficult to conceive that the collaborative future which is now deemed impossible will one day have seemed inevitable. This is the paradox of dehumanization and it is the reason we cannot begin the process of disarming humanity in boardrooms.

To disarm humanity, we must first transform the consciousness of our species. To resist the hegemonic illusion of normalized brutality, let us begin to cultivate species double consciousness: an empathic attunement to the reality of the world as it is now alongside a speculative and experimental knowledge of the world as it could be if we prioritized the wellbeing of all life. Looking with this double sight at the rift between the two worlds, the space between them is not hollow. From the rift between the world as it is and the world as it could be emerges the ancient, flickering force of human autonomy. One by one, the spark catches in the interior landscape of millions, an ancient and timeless momentum awakens, rousing us to action. To “unmake then consciously now remake the world,”²⁵ we must shed our old skin as mere participants in another man’s system and emerge as autonomous worldbuilders mutually shaping the present and future trajectory of our species based on the principle of life. Life is inherently free. Unfreedom is fabricated and ephemeral.

Cultivating transpersonal empathic consciousness to the collective reality of life on earth begins with a choice to decenter the singular experience of being in order to perceive the world through the stimuli and perspectives of those whose suffering has the capacity to renew the contract between all human beings—and between humans and all living beings.²⁶ To be humanized by our species’ brutality, we must be fully attuned to witness the entirety of our present world transpersonally. In his Treatise on the Whole-World, the Martinican poet and philosopher Édouard Glissant offers the following reflections:

“We do not always see, and usually we try not to see, the destitution of the world, in the forests of Rwanda and the streets of New York, in the underground workshops of Asia where the children do not grow up and in the silent heights of the Andes, and in all the places of debasement, degradation, and prostitution, and so many others that flash before our wide open eyes, but we cannot fail to admit that all this is making a noise, an unstoppable murmuring that we, without realizing it, mix into the mechanical, humdrum little tunes of our progress and our driftings.

Each one of us has his own reasons to listen to this cry, and these different approaches serve to change this sound of the world that we all, at the same time, hear where we are.”²⁷

Glissant depicts a polysensory empathic mechanism of echolocation and metaphysical transmutation. To “hear where we are,” to position ourselves in relation to the whole, and to perceive the collective condition of humanity within the longer arc of our species’ existence, we must become profoundly attuned to one another’s lived realities. To witness the entirety of the world does not require that we directly hear or see; we can be attuned to what happens behind closed doors—in the boardrooms of the billionaire political elite, in military torture chambers, in sweatshops, in the underground mines, amid the media blackout, in the deathscapes beneath the rubble—without hearing or seeing any of it. Glissant suggests that transpersonal attunement is a catalyst for metaphysical transformation. By tuning in to the whole world, we begin to transform it, similar to the way that the observation of quantum occurrences alters the phenomena’s behavior. Transpersonal empathic attunement begins with the aspiration to give up the comfort of anesthetized existence and the illusion of separation in order to absorb with our own body, mind, and spirit the totality of what is taking place on our living, breathing home.

Let us listen to the 117 million refugees, in tents, in immigration detention centers, where children are ripped from their parents rarely to be reunited again, in the metropolises straddling borders, searching for dignity in a country that is a stranger, crossing deserts, thirsty, hungry, cold. Let us feel the desperation of the women and girls raped and gang raped by soldiers. Let us be transmuted by the ricochet of exhaustion in slaughterhouses, in the textile factories, of the children crawling and coughing inside mines, digging for precious metals, hoping to afford a meal. Let our metamorphosis center the 50 million human beings trapped in modern-day slavery whose freedom necessitates a reformulation of the global order. Let us tune in to the discordant clatter of the saw mills plucking the Amazon bare and the melancholic quiet after the burn, when even the insects and macaws have turned to ash. Wherever we may be, let us hear the gentle whimpers of the panther whose paws are raw blisters.²⁸ The child who is fully awake during amputation. Inhale and hear the exhale of the polar bear who must swim for days on end because there is no ground to walk on.²⁹ Exhale and feel the sharp pains in the limbs of the infant in the long hours before cold stops her tiny heart. Share the heartbreak of the parents who cry into white bundles of gauze.³⁰

When we feel what each other feels, the transformative force of brutality permeates from the epicenter of the singular human experience outward into the collective, expanding the field of awareness, interweaving the syncopated lives and dreams and sufferings of 8 billion rare beings into a web of empathic awareness. To disarm our species and rehabilitate our planet, we must be willing to take into ourselves the abrasive timbre of it all and allow the fragility of all living beings to catalyze us into action, to initiate a praxis of empathic care, and unleash a landslide of solidarity with those deemed unworthy of life.

TRANSPERSONAL ATTUNEMENT TO COLLECTIVE SUFFERING AND EMPATHIC CARE FOR ALL LIFE TRANSMUTES MODERNITY’S ILLUSION OF SEPARATION, DECOMPOSING THE FOUNDATION OF ALL DEHUMANIZATION INTO THE FERTILE SOIL OF A NEW WORLD ORDER.

Awareness of the interconnectedness of all living beings and cognizance of the inherent value of all life are incompatible with the modern agenda of death. Scaled to the measure of the human species, transpersonal empathic consciousness has the potential to relegate the modern neoliberal necropolitical milieu to relics of a bloody human past. And yet, in the midst of genocides and neoimperial wars without end, it is not enough to be attuned to the reality of the world. We must act. Transpersonal and interspecies empathic consciousness are stepping stones for perceiving a gap between the world as it is and the world as it could be. The praxis of species double consciousness is yet another stepping stone for action. Action transmutes consciousness into autonomy and vice versa. Therefore, let us witness and not give in to despair in order to assert with the force of our entire living beings the basic reality that another world is possible. Our actions are the condition of its possibility.

In this world of possibility, we who inherited the epoch of bloodshed collaborate to formulate conditions where all beings can thrive. We engineer a global network to distribute resources based on collective needs and ecological sustainability, rather than profit. We ensure all people have access to safe housing, nutritious food, and quality healthcare. Freed of the need to earn the right to live, all 8.1 billion of us have more time to spend with our loved ones, to study, to celebrate the diversity of our species and planet, to innovate, to rest, to imagine and manifest even better worlds. In a world made to the measure of empathic intelligence, health is a universal human right. Hospitals are healing temples for the body, mind and spirit. Once knowledge is disentangled from competition and profit, collective learning accelerates. In this new world, wealth cannot be concentrated by denying others their right to life. Without the highly disproportionate accumulation of wealth, it is not possible to corrupt politics. Leaders are chosen for their humility, ingenuity, and ability to maintain peace through disarmament, dialogue, and collaboration. Armies are replaced by interdisciplinary teams of volunteers who specialize in crisis management—they address natural disasters, pandemics, environmental emergencies, and trauma. Former military budgets are reallocated to fund sustainable architecture, public transportation, education, and open access research. Schools are sites of exploration for diverse forms of knowledge. Rote memorization is replaced with critical, creative, and collaborative learning, and everyone has lifelong access to education. Diversity and invention flourish, elevating the human experience. People gather at festivals to celebrate cultural and religious traditions, to dance, to sing, to eat, and to marvel at the beauty of our brief time as miracles on Earth. All people are free to move, live, and work wherever they choose, and protected wildlife corridors ensure safe migration for animals. We collaborate to prevent extinction, restoring endangered species and ecosystems through wildlife rehabilitation, reforestation, reindigenization, and ocean-cleaning projects. The generation who inherited a noxious world lays down their weapons to detoxify the land, water, and food systems, improving the quality of life for all living beings. With collective human ingenuity directed toward sustaining life, the unnecessary suffering that defined the blood epoch is overtaken by a sense of possibility rooted in our interconnected capacity to care for one another. Once we cease to live in a competitive hand-to-mouth death-cycle, it is not only our time that will be freed up, but our very life force, the seed of all autonomy.

Between the world as it is and the world as it could be are our actions and inactions. It must not be up to the most vulnerable among us to elevate the systematically decimated consciousness of our species. In the centers of empire let us insist that our “comforts” are not worth the decimation of life. Let us refuse to make house within the depravity of this killing machine.³¹

Building new worlds begins with our resolve to form new connections and cultivate sites of possibility that center the value of life.³²

If there are no alternatives to modernity, then there is no possibility for us to consent to it. Generating alternatives to the hegemonic order is the basis of liberty and the condition of collective autonomy. By weaving new webs of relation and possibility, we begin to transmute our witness-dreams to action. We recover our human identity as active conscious agents shaping the present and future trajectory of our species and our planet.

Empathy is a historical force of unknown proportion which we can cultivate by “listening to the cry of the world.”³³

I invite each of us, as Bob Marley implored, to hear the children crying with the conscious knowledge that this sound initiates a transformative, empathic, worldbending process. I invite us to declutter our inner eyes, unveiling the connection to the inner child. Inside each of us lives an inner child who connects us to all the children, all over the Earth. We are the children of the world and the guardians of the children who will inherit the world from us. To guard them, to usher in a new era of politics, to terminate all territorial battles, to end the bid for global domination, to begin the process of global disarmament, to ensure that the children will one day grow up, let us hear the children crying, let us begin to feel what each other feels, and let us act on our visions of the world as it could be. Let us teach the children that this is not our final form, therefore this human chapter, this epoch of carnage and bloodshed, is a historical stepping stone: The third millennium is the beginning of the end of brutality. The time to leap the line is now.

For all who have crossed over, protecting the future of our world, like every form of love put into action, requires courage, stamina, and creativity. Abolishing modernity’s interlinked death systems is not a prerequisite to building new worlds. It is the afterglow. Transpersonal attunement, species double consciousness, and witness-dreams transmuted to autonomous actions are worldbuilding and worldbending tools beyond the master’s toolbox.³⁴

as life seeks life
on a blue jewel

let us be seeds
of peace’s forests

let us build a world
where children grow up

let us mold our lives
into tender cradles

for a future where we
carry nothing but love
to those who are trembling.

1. I dedicate this essay to my cousin Aseel, a young girl, one of tens of thousands, who was plucked from life in the first year of the counterrevolutionary war in Sudan. I dedicate my witness-dreams to every child denied a fair chance to experience life on Earth unencumbered by the threat of brutality.

2. This line is from the poem “Not Just Passing,” one of the last poems written by Heba Abu Nada before she was ripped from earth by an Israeli airstrike on her home in Khan Younis on October 20, 2023. The poem, translated from the Arabic by Huda Fakhreddine, is structured as a conversation between a star and the little light in the poet’s heart. On October 8, Heba wrote, “Gaza’s night is / dark apart from the glow of rockets, / quiet apart from the sound of the bombs, / terrifying apart from the comfort of prayer, / black apart from the light of the martyrs. / Good night, Gaza.” Then on October 18, she wrote, “Each of us in Gaza is either witness to or martyr for liberation. Each is waiting to see which of the two they’ll become up there with God. We have already started building a new city in Heaven . . . In Heaven, the new Gaza is free of siege. It is taking shape now.” Like Heba, I imagine heaven as the liberated meeting ground of all the innocent besieged. I imagine the children of Palestine, Sudan, Congo, Lebanon, and Ukraine playing games amid glimmering starlight.

3. Scientists at the Stockholm University Resilience Center quantified nine processes that regulate the stability and resilience of the Earth system. They are 1) stratospheric ozone depletion, 2) atmospheric aerosol loading, 3) ocean acidification, 4) biogeochemical flows, 5) freshwater change, 6) land system change, 7) biosphere integrity, 8) climate change, and 9) novel entities. Novel entities are defined as “new substances, new forms of existing substances, and modified life forms,” including “chemicals and other new types of engineered materials or organisms not previously known to the Earth system as well as naturally occurring elements (for example, heavy metals) mobilized by anthropogenic activities.” As of January 2025, planetary boundaries 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, and 9 have been crossed.

4. In the thoroughly critiqued book Demonic Males: Apes and the Origins of Human Violence, the biological anthropologists Richard W. Wrangham and Dale Peterson compare the propensity for violence in chimpanzees, bonobos, and humans, arguing that while the capacity for aggression may be biologically rooted, the expression of violence in human societies is heavily influenced by cultural norms and institutions. The question of whether violence and territoriality are “natural” obscures the fact that, as the philosopher and social critic Sylvia Wynter argues, humans autoinstitute the social codes we use to govern ourselves. We are the creators of our cultures, beliefs, norms, and world orders. From this perspective, violence is cultural. The forms of brutality, dehumanization, and oppression that define the twenty-first century are learned behaviors which, over time, become culturally and historically engrained. In her book Extraordinary Evil: A Brief History of Genocide, Barbara Coloroso demonstrates a continuum of dehumanization, from classification, to bullying, to extermination, and denial. The point is that humans are able to collectively guard against the possibility of mass atrocities by cultivating empathy, respect, and peaceful strategies for handling conflict. Our capacity to end the endless cycle of brutality and create in its stead a harmonious world hinges on resocialization in an ethic of empathy and the nonhierarchical value of life.

5. In July, 2024, The Lancet published a report titled, “Counting the Dead in Gaza: Difficult but Essential,” that states that, “applying a conservative estimate of four indirect deaths per one direct death to the 37,396 deaths reported, it is not implausible to estimate that up to 186,000 or even more deaths could be attributable to the current conflict in Gaza.” In December 2024, Dr. Ghassan Abu-Sittah estimated the true death count to be around 300,000 or 10%–12% of Gaza’s population. This figure takes into account people whose bodies were “pulverized” by bombs, those who died of infectious diseases, starvation, hypothermia, and lack of access to medical care imposed by the siege. Meanwhile, Reuters reports that “more than one million of Gaza’s inhabitants face the most extreme form of malnutrition—classified by the IPC as ‘Catastrophe or Famine.’”

6. According to witness accounts, vultures and other carnivorous birds have veered from their migratory paths, lured by the sheer mass of unburied corpses in Sudan. According to a Haaretz article, Israeli soldiers established an open killing zone known as the Netzarim Corridor. Any Palestinian who crosses this imaginary line separating the north and south of Gaza is considered a legitimate target. A commander in Division 252 told Haaretz, “After shootings, bodies are not collected, attracting packs of dogs who come to eat them. In Gaza, people know that wherever you see these dogs, that’s where you must not go.” According to vast archeological research, humans have been burying our dead since the paleolithic period. In fact, the oldest human burial sites, dating 80,000–100,000 years old, are the Es-Skhul and Qafzeh caves, located in present day Nazareth, or al-Nasirah, a mere 93 miles north of the Netzarim Corridor. And yet, in the year 2025, human beings are exterminated en masse and denied the basic human dignity of having their corpses laid beneath the earth. The world watches carnivorous birds and canines feast on our kin while empires expand their military budgets and deploy autonomous weapons to annihilate civilian populations.

7. According to the Hebrew calendar we are in the year 5785. According to the Chinese calendar we are in the year 4722. According to the Buddhist calendar we are in the year 2569. According to the Hindu (Shaka Samvat) calendar we are in the year 1,946. According to the Islamic calendar we are in the year 1446. And according to the Igbo calendar we are in the year 1025. Chronological accounting is relative, however, the current hegemonically accepted Gregorian calendar places us in the year 2025, where the year 1 AD represents the estimated birth year of Jesus Christ. This accounting of time takes as its starting point a story of occupation and forced displacement that continues in the present. In a recent speech, the Palestinian theologian and pastor, Reverend Dr. Munther Isaac reminded us that Jesus was born in Bethlehem, under the Roman occupations of Augustus Caesar and Herod, the ruler of the occupied Roman province of Judea. According to the New Testament, Joseph and Mary were forced to leave Nazareth and travel to Bethlehem so that they could be counted in a census enforced by the Roman occupation. After their forced displacement and upon arriving in Bethlehem, Mary gave birth to baby Jesus. When Herod ordered the massacre of all male children under the age of two, Joseph, Mary and baby Jesus fled from Bethlehem to Egypt. Reverend Dr. Munther Isaac draws parallels between the past and the present, stating, “The Christmas story is actually a very Palestinian story. The circumstances of Palestine 2000 years ago were not very much different from the Palestinian circumstances today.” Located a mere 6 miles north of Bethlehem, the city of Jerusalem, one of the oldest centers of human civilization, has been captured and occupied 44 times, starting in the Bronze Age and continuing into the present. At the 2025th annual Gregorian mark, it is high time to end the repeating cycle of occupation and brutality.

8. According to UNICEF, as of June 2024, of the 25.6 million facing “high levels of acute hunger” (IPC phase 3+), about 755,000 are experiencing the most catastrophic classification of food insecurity (IPC phase 5). According to the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC), approximately 24.6 million people across Sudan will likely experience high levels of acute food insecurity (IPC Phase 3 or above) between December 2024 and May 2025. This includes 8.1 million people in IPC Phase 4 (Emergency) and at least 638,000 people in IPC Phase 5 (Catastrophe).

9. Sudan’s humanitarian crisis is the result of a counterrevolutionary proxy war which intends to scatter the millions who dared dream of a country free of military rule and a democracy run by civilians rather than military dictators. Given Sudan’s strategic location and plethora of natural resources, at least fifteen countries are directly and indirectly supporting the two armed groups wreaking havoc on the country. The genocidal Rapid Support Forces (RSF) are supported by the United Arab Emirates, Russia, Israel, and indirectly by the US, UK, and European Union. The Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) have received support from Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Qatar, Turkey, Eritrea, Djibouti, and Russia, although the latter switched its support to the RSF. The US cannot rein in the UAE’s role in perpetuating war, famine, ethnic cleansing, weapons trafficking, human trafficking—the humanitarian crises in Sudan—because it is heavily invested in normalizing Arab-Israeli relations and achieving the aims of the Abraham Accords. The RSF and the SAF are part of the same coercive military apparatus. Despite their rivalry, both armed groups, much like their funders, share a total disregard of international humanitarian law.

10. In both Gaza and Sudan, there is no exact record of the deceased. In the case of Gaza, the United States banned the use of the Gaza Health Ministry’s death count, even as it has been corroborated by The Lancet and the World Health Organization. In Sudan, conservative estimates state that 16,800 people have been killed, but according to the US special envoy Tom Perriello, the death count is closer to 150,000 (as of June 2024). When there are too many dead to count, let alone to grieve one-by-one, that is a clear sign that the covenant of life has been breached. The year is 2025 and the balance of the life-and-death continuum is endangered.

11. Note on the aims of the Sudanese Revolution: Starting in December 2018, millions of Sudanese people mobilized under a united call for civilian rule and a peaceful transition to a democratic government, with three branches of government. One of the slogans was العسكر للثكنات والجنجويد ينحل, which is a call for the military (the SAF) to return to their barracks and for the dissolution of the “Janjaweed” militia (the RSF). The Sudanese people’s revolution is opposed to military leadership and foreign interference in Sudanese politics by nations, such as the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt, who have historically stood against democracy in Sudan. The idea of a fully civilian-led government did not sit well with the UAE and Saudi Arabia since they depend on military leaders who can be bribed to do their dirty bidding. Moreover, the UAE and Saudi Arabia viewed democracy in Sudan as a threat to their own authoritarian monarchic systems and therefore conspired to form within Sudan a government ruled by the military with minimal civilian participation. They took it upon themselves to corrupt the transition to democratic rule by funding two sides of a brutal counterrevolutionary proxy war that has cost 150,000–200,000 human lives, displaced 13 million people, left 19 million children without access to education, and put 25 million people at risk of famine.

12. Light travels at about 300,000 kilometers per second, while digital communications travel at about 200,000 kilometers a second. The speed of human processing is about 10–20 bits per second, with a maximum of 60 bits.

13. Minerals are the raw material of militarized power. The death machine depends on a constant supply of high-grade aluminum, beryllium, bismuth, cadmium, chromium, cobalt, copper, dysprosium, ferrochromium, ferromanganese, lead, lithium, manganese, mercury, molybdenum, nickel, niobium, tantalum, tin, titanium, tungsten, uranium, vanadium, zinc, and zirconium to manufacture various instruments of war, including nuclear weapons, missiles, helicopters, surveillance technologies, and AI-based autonomous weapons systems. Every quest of global or regional domination hinges on acquiring these minerals. Mines, therefore, are some of the least regulated and most degraded places on earth.

14. Another day Sila says, “I want to be a doctor when I grow up, and I want to treat little children.” To what degree is this dream conditioned by the catastrophe of thousands of injured children in the context of a genocide that targets medical staff, doctors, surgeons, and hospitals including the neonatal wards? Untouched by violence, what would the children dream?

15. Political analysis gives limited insight into the issue of human brutality. To understand not only the origins but the continued prevalence of violence requires a polydisciplinary approach to the study of our species. Studies in human psychology and cognition offer one of countless avenues to pursue insights into violence amongst humans. In his paper, “‘If I Look at the Mass I Will Never Act’: Psychic Numbing and Genocide,” Paul Slovic, a professor of psychology specializing in studies of human judgment, decision making, and risk analysis poses the question: “Why, over the past century, have good people repeatedly ignored mass murder and genocide?” He draws on research that suggests the affective responses that motivate human moral intuition and judgements—like empathy, sympathy, compassion, sadness, pity, and distress—diminish as the magnitude of the stimulus increases. Thus, as the loss of life increases, psychological numbing sets in, “diminishing sensitivity to the value of life.” Slovic concludes, “we cannot depend only upon our moral feelings to motivate us to take proper actions against genocide . . . It is time to reexamine this failure [of the genocide convention] in light of the psychological deficiencies described here and design legal and institutional mechanisms that will enforce proper response to genocide and other crimes against humanity.” In this essay I suggest that rather than abandoning the role of feeling in motivating transformation, we can work to transform the consciousness of our species by resensitizing ourselves to the inherent value of life. We can prevent mass atrocity by disarming humanity.

16. In his 2003 article “Necropolitics” and the 2019 monograph of the same name, the Cameroonian philosopher and social theorist Achille Mbembe characterizes modern power as “necropolitical.” Necropower describes a mode of governance in which modern states deploy direct death, terror, and neglect in order to kill members of populations that are already systematically marked as subhuman or “enemies of the state” by legacies of racial hierarchy and colonial violence.

17. The issue of whether the present scale of annihilation is precedented is subject to ongoing debates, generally privileging comparative logics. Contrasting one era, massacre, war, or genocide, against another neglects the constitutive nature of violent historical events and obscures the staggering scale of the whole. Considering all acts of organized brutality as interconnected points in the arc over our species’ history, reveals an alarming, trans-scalar pattern of escalation, spanning from the Iron Age to the modern period. Today, in the Anthropocene, brutality against human beings converges with brutality against the planet, threatening the wellbeing of the unanimous lifesystem. If nothing else, the planetary scale and impact of annihilation is unprecedented.

18. In 2024, the world faced 56 international conflicts, with 92 nations involved in conflicts outside their borders. A United Nations report states that “the world is facing the highest number of violent conflicts since the Second World War and 2 billion people—a quarter of humanity—live in places affected by such conflict.” The Stockholm International Peace Research Institute reports that in 2023, world military expenditure reached “an all-time high of $2,443 billion.” Meanwhile, the Global Peace Index 2024 report states that, “expenditure on peacebuilding and peacekeeping totaled $49.6 billion, representing less than 0.6% of total military spending.”

19. As the Jamaican social theorist Sylvia Wynter teaches, the malleability of human consciousness has been instrumentalized for millennia to uphold various epistemic orders and to consolidate and legitimize power. Writers including Noam Chomsky, Franz Fanon, Michel Foucault, Walter Rodney, and Sylvia Wynter have written about the ways that violence conditions consciousness. While some of these works focus on the effect of violence on oppressed peoples, it is in fact the Western liberal subject whose consciousness and worldview is most thoroughly conditioned to accept the degradation of human rights and large-scale destruction of our planetary home. Western education systems, media, and political propaganda instill ideological superiority and exceptionalism, enabling citizens of military empires like the United States to perceive the annihilation of human beings outside their borders as necessary expressions of progress, democracy, and defense. This worldview legitimizes the empire’s acceleration of warfare, crimes against humanity, and the degradation of international relations and human rights, while allowing Western(ized) subjects to maintain a moral high ground. Subjected to dehumanizing propaganda, these imperial citizens become complicit in crimes against humanity. But complicity is spectrum, from those who are reluctant yet systematically coerced participants in a criminal economy, to those who are deliberate propagators of dehumanizing ideologies and acts of domestic and international aggression against those deemed threatening to US homogeneity or US supremacy. As a result of the empire’s systematic instillment of ignorance, poverty, illness, despair, and compliance in its own citizens, a subset of the American public understand their position vis-à-vis the rest of the world as potential victims of imagined or projected future acts of aggression, rather than as participant-victims of their own government’s criminal and dehumanizing agenda. Therefore, when the Commission on the National Defense Industrial Strategy urges a “bipartisan call to arms,” and increases Pentagon funding from $5 trillion to $9.3 trillion to support the new National Defense Industrial Strategy, as it did in July 2024, few raise an eyebrow and fewer still protest.

20. Nicholas Brady wrote this in a public Facebook post on August 18, 2020. Link here.

21. This quote is from Munira Khayat’s research talk “A Landscape of War: Lessons on Resistance and Survival from South Lebanon,” presented on December 3, 2024 at Stanford University’s Center for the Humanities. Khayat is a visiting associate professor of anthropology at NYU, a clinical associate professor of anthropology at NYU Abu Dhabi, and the author of the academic monograph A Landscape of War: Ecologies of Resistance and Survival in South Lebanon.

22. The US military has a tradition of naming its helicopters after Native American tribes and leaders including Apache, Black Hawk, Cheyenne, Comanche, and Lakota, all of whom it massacred and continues to subjugate.

23. A single, modern nuke carries the power of 100,000 (or more) tons of TNT and could kill more than half a million people if detonated in a densely populated area. The Aviation Thermobaric Bomb of Increased Power, nicknamed “Father of All Bombs” (FOAB) was developed for the Russian military. The GBU-43/B Massive Ordnance Air Blast (MOAB, Mother of All Bombs) is a large-yield bomb, developed for the United States military. The AN/SEQ-3 Laser Weapons System (LaWS) is capable of unleashing 30,000 watts of laser power. The F-22 Raptor fighter jet carries an assortment of bombs and laser-guided missiles. The Advanced Precision Kill Weapon System is a low-cost, semiactive laser guidance system. The MK-84 is a 2,000-pound general-purpose bomb. The US transferred more than 50,000 tons of weapons to Israel including 14,000 MK-84 bombs, 6,500 500-pound bombs, 3,000 Hellfire precision-guided air-to-ground missiles, 1,000 bunker buster bombs, 2,600 airdropped, small-diameter bombs. These weapons, along with thousands of others, demarcate the reality of life on Earth. Weapons of war serve their purpose, whether they are detonated or not, by upholding the specter of death via instant annihilation. They empower nation states and their paramilitaries to actualize their aims through brute force, including the massacre of entire populations. The proliferation of weapons threatens the future of our species and the integrity of life, setting a deathtrap we must exit.

24. In the epoch of bloodshed, all of us are either covered in the blood of the innocent or the blood of our open wounds. Or both. The point is not that we are equally culpable, but that we are equally susceptible to shedding blood.

25. This is Sylvia Wynter’s formulation, from her essay, “Human Being as Noun? Or Being Human as Praxis? Towards the Autopoetic Turn/Overturn: A Manifesto.” In my view, the process of unmaking and remaking the world consists of three states of conscious embodiment: transpersonal attunement, species double consciousness, and autonomous action.

26. A note on suffering. There are multiple forms of suffering. There is suffering that is natural to the human condition—for example, the infant’s painful bowel movement, the grief of losing a loved one to old age. And then there is gratuitous suffering; suffering that would not exist if it did not benefit an external party who is its catalyst, as in the case of engineered poverty, famines, and droughts, modern day slavery, modern warfare, weaponized rape, ethnic cleansing, and genocide. By suffering, I mean unnecessary but externally mandated suffering.

27. Édouard Glissant. Treatise on the Whole-World. Translated by Celia Britton. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2021.

28. I am haunted by the image of an Amazonian panther’s paws burned down to the flesh. This critically endangered animal ran for its life through smoldering forest fires. Ninety percent of the fires in the Amazon rainforest are intentionally set by people to clear land for cows to graze on in an attempt to satiate a bottomless hunger for slaughtering and eating this highly conscious, social, and empathic animal that is known, much like humans, to mourn its loved ones. The combination of logging and burning annihilates the ecological habitat of countless plants, animals, and Indigenous people whose survival depends on their home not being razed.

29. When scientists account for all the mammals on planet Earth by biomass, it turns out that only 4% are wild mammals, 2% live on land, the other 2% are marine mammals. Humans comprise a whopping 34% of all mammals. The remaining 64% are “livestock,” animals like cows, pigs, and sheep who are bred—often in captivity—for the sole purpose of being slaughtered and eaten by humans. To create space for captive “livestock,” precious ecosystems are destroyed. How can a single species be so insatiable? How have we become so numb to the systematic destruction of our only planetary home? This discrepancy of biomass between humans, wild mammals, and captive mammals is an anthropogenic event of planetary proportion. The incessant slaughter of nonhuman mammals is also kin-shed. Blood and suffering spill over species distinction. Like the slaughter of animals, the incessant massacre of humans is normalized as a game of political, economic, and libidinal sport. Every act of violence is interconnected. Blood and death are the common denominator of our kinds. Life is incredibly fragile. All flesh is subject to atomization. According to various human cosmologies, an intangible dimension of being, called “the spirit,” transitions onward, whereas the body disintegrates in the mouths of millions. From this atomized form, our flesh continues the molecular metamorphosis of planetary life. Our bodies return to the elemental state of nature as soils, mosses, and flowers who feed the insects who feed the birds and reptiles who feed the mammals, and so on along the continuum of life-death-reformulation. The experience of embodied singularity is temporary, whereas life is eternal, inherently free and unencumbered by form.

30. According to a United Nations report, eight newborns and 74 children died of hypothermia in the besieged Gaza strip between December 9, 2024 and January 9, 2025.

31. These words are taken from a photograph of a person wearing a kuffiyah, holding a poster that reads: “I will not quietly nor politely sit and make house within the depravity of this killing machine.”

32. These new connections can be internal to our own minds, such as emerging thought patterns and belief systems, or they can be externally reflected in our relationships with one another. In most cases, one begets the other. Relationships are at the core of the human fabric because they have the power to elevate our awareness and diminish fear of the unknown. If dehumanization thrives on disconnection and separation, then twenty-first century technologies provide us countless modes to connect with people across vast distances, to transmit our voices across borders and thousands of miles of ocean, to befriend and support people surviving in the harshest conditions. One of the simplest ways to resist the illusion of separation is to talk to people and form new relationships. To ask: How did you sleep? Was it cold? Did you eat today? Are your children okay? How can I support you? While I cannot single-handedly stop the war machine, I can befriend and support many who are surviving in its crosshairs.

33. A note on empathy. Empathy has and continues to be a catalyst for social change. Empathy, or the capacity to understand and share the feelings of another person or being, has deep evolutionary roots and is not unique to humans. From a neuroscientific perspective, several areas of the human brain, including the anterior insula, the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex, and the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, are activated when individuals perceive or imagine the emotions and pain of others, suggesting that empathy involves both cognitive and affective processes. Empathy is related to the mirror neuron system: cells that fire both when an individual performs an action and when they observe the same action being performed by another. These neurons help individuals “mirror” the emotional and physical states of others. Research on neuroplasticity reveals that empathy is not a static trait and can be developed and enhanced throughout life. With this in mind, let us sow upon the blood-drenched earth the seeds of empathy.

34. Audre Lorde, “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House,” in The Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color, eds. Cherríe Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa (Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press, 1983), 98.

Umniya Najaer is an interdisciplinary poet, essayist and Black Studies scholar completing her PhD at Stanford’s Modern Thought and Literature program. Sudanese by way of Germany and Turtle Island, Umniya’s writing is invested in activating the human ability to feel what each other feels. Her work is guided by a profound reverence for our planetary home, a duty to protect all lifeforms, and a humanitarian commitment to oppose all systems of dehumanization, brutality and deathmaking. Umniya believes that peace is possible and that we are alive at a critical juncture in our species’ trajectory. We are tasked now with de-escalation, demilitarization, disarmament and with crafting an alternate world system.

Umniya’s recent publications include “Dear Alice: for the Murder of {your} Bastard Child of the Starry-Eyed Tribe Born to Children,” and “Spinning: Zuihitsu Fragment on Ecological and Cosmic Consciousness.” Her poetry chapbook Armeika was published by Akashic Press as part of the First Generation African Poets series.  Her work has received support from the Cave Canem Foundation, the Sacatar Institute, Stanford VPGE’s Diversifying Academia Recruiting Excellence (DARE) Fellowship, the African American History Mellon Dissertation Fellowship at the Library Company of Philadelphia, the Advisory Council Dissertation Fellowship at the University of Pennsylvania’s McNeil Center for Early American Studies, the Susan Ford Dorsey Innovation in Africa Fellowship, among others. Umniya will be serving as the Chancellors Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Colorado, Boulder with the Department of Ethnic Studies and the Center for African and African American Studies (CAAAS) starting in the Fall of 2025.

The post disarm humanity: meditations from the third decade of the third millennium appeared first on Mizna.

trans. by Nour Eldin Hussein
Image by Walid Daqqa, produced during his imprisonment

Thinker, freedom fighter, and political prisoner Walid Daqqa describes the systematic colonization of time in Zionist prisons in a letter to a friend. The original Arabic text can be found here. This Mizna Online exclusive feature is published as part of Mizna 25.2: Futurities, link to order HERE.

—Nour Eldin Hussein, assistant editor

We are a part of history, and history—as it is well known—is a condition and an action in the past. Except us: We are a past continuous and neverending. We address you all from it presently, so that it does not become your future. 

—Walid Daqqa, trans. Nour Eldin Hussein

On Parallel Time

My dear brother, Abu Omar,¹ greetings. 

Today is the twenty-fifth of March, the first day of my twentieth year imprisoned. Today is also the twentieth birthday of a young comrade. Such an “occasion”—the anniversary of my imprisonment, the birth of the comrade—reminds me of a question I posed to myself: how old is Lena today, who has become a mother of two? How old is Najla, mother to three? And Hanin, mother to a girl? And Obeida—traveling to America for his studies, bidding farewell to his youth, yet without my bidding him farewell? And my brothers and sisters—either kids when I left them on the day of my arrest or born after the fact—how old are my brothers and sisters, those “children” who have since married and become mothers and fathers to kids themselves? 

I had not asked this before. Time in the broad sense, how much of it passes—that had not concerned me as much as the minutes do when they would fly by during those short family visits. Too brief a time for me to lay out for them all the notes I’ve recorded on the palm of my hand; all the missions Sanaa² will need particular effort for—not just to carry them out, but to simply remember them, as they have barred us from the use of pen or paper during our visits, and so it is only memory that remains as the sole faculty available for recollection. And so I forget to ponder the lines that have begun to dig in the face of my mother for years now, and I forget to ponder her hair that she has begun to dye with henna to hide their gray from me so that I would not inquire after her true age.

Her true age? I do not know my mother’s “true age.” My mother has two ages: her chronological age, which I do not know, and her prisonological age. Let’s say her age in that parallel time is nineteen years. 

I write to you all from Parallel Time. In Parallel Time, where there is fixity of place, we do not use the standard units of your time like minutes and hours, not unless the two lines of our time and your time meet at the visitation window, whereupon we are forced to interact with your chronological formulae. It is, anyway, the only thing that has not changed in your time and that we still remember how to use. 

It has reached me on the tongue of the young delegates of the intifada—indeed, this was told to me personally—that many things have changed in your time. The phone no longer has a rotary dial, no longer works via coin slot but requires credit to activate; and also that the frames of car tires do not have another inner, internal structure, but are tubeless. 

I was quite impressed by such a system! One where the tire is made of a material that closes in on itself, plugging up any holes spontaneously and immediately, stopping any air from leaking out of it. I’m quite impressed, as it seems to resemble the prisoner who resists the tacks laid down by the prison guards by way of that self-contained system—the tubeless system. Generally, there is no escape for the prisoner save for relying on such a self-correcting regime, as our driver or drivers cannot see a tack on the road except that they drive over it or a bump in the road except that they trip on it, supposing that they are taking a short cut—shortening the distance, reducing the effort. It’s not just that our drivers have been reckless, they have simply been relying on that inner tube as if it’s not made of flesh and blood—as if there is no end, no goal. Until we become like cash passed around on the market, the market of political maneuvers: 

“Take this tire and permit us some of the vehicle.” 

Of what value is the tire without the vehicle? 

I do wish for the Palestinian and Arab leadership to improve. I do wish for our people and for their political power to take up such an internal, self-reparatory system without having to resort to those who call themselves “roadside assistance”—the Americans and their ilk who today corrupt all the earth in Lebanon. And if it is unavoidable to speak of politics—despite the fact that I have decided, today especially, not to speak of politics—then we, in Parallel Time, see you, while you all do not see us. We hear you all while you all do not hear us. As if glass, tinted just on your side, stands between us, like the kind for cars carrying important people such that some of us behave arrogantly as if they are, in fact, an important person. They have convinced us that we are important people. 

And why not! The prestige of the situation calls for it. In all the world, there are states and governments who have prisoners except for us: We are prisoners who have a ministry in a government that does not have a state!³

We—for those who do not know—have dwelled here in Parallel Time since before the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union and the communist bloc, before the fall of the Berlin Wall and the First and Second and Third Gulf wars, before Madrid and Oslo and before the eruptions of the First and Second intifadas. In Parallel Time we are as old as that revolution and we precede the genesis of some of its factions; we precede the Arabic satellite channels and the proliferation of the culture of hamburgers in our capitals. Indeed, we are before the invention of mobile phones and the propagation of those new telecommunications systems and the internet. We are a part of history, and history—as it is well known—is a condition and an action in the past. Except us: We are a past continuous and neverending. We address you all from it presently, so that it does not become your future. 

I have said that, here, our time is not your time. Our time does not proceed on the axis of past and present and future; our time that flows in the fixity of place ousts from our language typical concepts of time and place—or say that it confuses them, according to your standards. We do not ask “when?” or “where shall we meet?” for example, rather we have already met and still meet at the same place. We proceed here flexibly to and fro on the axis of past and present, and every moment after this present one is an unknown future that we are no longer capable of interacting with. Of no control to us is our future—a condition quite similar to that of all the Arab peoples, with the fundamental difference that our occupation is foreign and their jailers Arab; here we’re imprisoned for searching for the future, and there the future is buried alive. 

In our Parallel Time, most of us haven’t given an answer to that question posed usually to children: What do you want to be when you grow up? I, even now—even though I am forty-four years old—have no idea what I would like to be when I grow up! 

If it is the case that time as a concept is inherent to matter—if it is its moving aspect—and if place is the fixity of matter, then we in Parallel Time have come to represent the units of that time. We are the time that wrestles with place and in a state of internal contradiction with it. We have become units of time. We have come to define points on the axis of time by the arrest of so-and-so, the arrival to the prison of such-and-such or their release from it. Such things are important chronological events for lives in Parallel Time. We know how to define the hour and the day and history by your units of time, but they are units that go unused; what is used is: X happened on the day so-and-so came, or before or after such-and-such was liberated. And because we do not know when so-and-so will be arrested in the future or when they will be moved from one prison to another, we have nothing by which to define a future event. So, when we talk of the future, we borrow your chronological units.

Your time is the true time. Your time is the time of the future. 

In Parallel Time and in the controversy of the relationship between us and place, we develop relations with objects that are strange; relationships that nobody besides those imprisoned in Parallel Time would understand. How is it possible to understand the emotional relationship between a prisoner and the undershirt that was the thing he was wearing the moment before his arrest? How is it possible to explain the depth of our relationships with predefined objects, the loss of which may lead to sorrow and even weeping. Things like a certain lighter or a specific box of cigarettes acquire deep emotional significance because of their distinction as the last thing we had in the “future,” as if they affirm that we, one day, had been outside of Parallel Time—proof of our membership to your time. Such objects are not simply consumable materials to be thrown in the trash following their use: they are the drowning man’s last life preserver in the ocean of Parallel Time. 

In the year 1996, I heard the honk of a Subaru for the first time in ten years and I wept. In our time, a car horn is used for more than simply alerting passersby; in our time, a car horn is liable to stir the deepest of human emotions. 

Through their relationship with place, the people of Parallel Time develop relationships no stranger than those with objects. There you are suddenly, developing a special relationship with specks on the ceiling of your cell brought about by leaking water and the humidity. Or you might develop a relationship with a hole or crack in the door. Who would understand that dialogue replete with fervor, with emotion, with interruption and description as if it were a conversation on the topic of heaven and its door and not on the cell and its holes?

The first prisoner: “There’s nothing better than department four . . . Oh, to be back in the days of department four . . .” 

The second prisoner: “Sure, but the best thing about department four was cell seven.” 

The first prisoner—expelling all the air from his lungs in heartbreak over those days—interrupts: “I know, I know, but what can you say? From this cell you can hear the precise crack of dawn—the sound of cars on the highway.”

The second prisoner, also interrupting: “But that’s not it—you know the cell door? Between the cell door and the wall, right at the hinges, is an entire two centimeter-crack so wide you can see through it while lying in bed. You can see through to the ends of the earth.”

The first prisoner: “Man, why are you saying this? Department four is the best.” 

How simple the dreams, how great the human, how small the place, how grand the idea. 

I did not plan to write on a day like today—not about time, nor about place, nor about our Parallel Time, nor about anything: not about politics, not about philosophy. I actually had an inclination to write about what worries me—what I love and what I hate—but my unplanned writing resembles my unplanned life. I will even admit that I have never planned for anything: not to be a resistance fighter, nor a member of a political party or faction, nor even to participate in politics—not because all that is a mistake and not because politics is an objectionable, detestable matter as some like to see it—but because, in my view, they are huge and complicated topics. I am not a politician nor a resistance fighter despite previous insistence and observation. I very simply could have continued my life as a house painter or gas station worker as I was up until the moment of my arrest. I could have married one of my cousins early as many do, and she could have borne seven or ten kids; and I would have bought a truck and learned the business of car dealing and the going rates of hard currency. All of that was possible, until I saw what I saw of the atrocities during the Lebanon War and the massacres that followed it—Sabra, Shatila. It inspired in my being shock and astonishment. 

To stop feeling shock and astonishment, to stop feeling the misery of people (any people), the blunting of emotion before scenes of atrocity (any atrocity), was, in my view, a daily anxiety, and the measure of the extent of my steadfastness and solidity. To feel for people and the pain of humanity is the very core of civilization. The intellectual core of the human being is intention; the corporeal core is work; and the spiritual core is feeling—to feel for people and the pain of humanity is the core of human civilization. 

It is this core especially that is targeted in the life of the prisoner every hour of every day of every year. You are not targeted as a political subject in the first degree, neither are you targeted as a religious subject, nor are you targeted as a consumerist subject to be punished by deprivation from the pleasures of material life. You may adopt whatever political conviction suits you, and you may practice whatever religious observance, and you may even be provided with much of your material needs—but it remains that the targeted entity of the first degree is the social, human entity within you. 

What is targeted is any relationship outside of the self, any relationship you value with other people, with nature—even your relationship with the jailer as a human being. Truly, they do it all to push you to hate. What is targeted is love, your sense of beauty, your sense of humanity.

I profess now, in my twentieth year of imprisonment, that I am still no good at the hatred, nor the crudeness, nor the coarseness that life in prison imposes. I profess now that I still rejoice at the barest of things with the glee of small children. I am still filled with delight at a kind word of encouragement or compliment. I profess that my heart skips a beat at the sight of a flower on the television, at a scene of nature, at the sea. I profess that I am joyous despite it all, and I yearn not for any pleasure of the many pleasures of the world save for two: the sight of children, sent off from all corners of the village to their schools; and the sight of workers in the early hours of the morning as they proceed from the alleys of the neighborhoods in a dusty, wintry morning, toward the town square—vital, prepared to travel to their place of work. And I profess now that all these feelings, all this love, would not have remained if not for the sole and solitary love of my mother, the love of Sanaa and my brother Hosny, the support of my people and my dearest friends who surround me on all sides—I to them, and they to me. 

I profess that I am still a human being holding onto his love as if it were a flaming torch. And I will remain steadfast in that love—I will continue to love you all, for it is love and love only that remains my sole victory over my jailers. 

With regards, Milad.

1. 1.  
   Refers to Palestinian political science scholar Azmi Bishara. This letter was sent from Daqqa to Bishara in 2005 and is translated and published here with permission, with special thanks to assistance from Mazher Al-Zoby. Ed .
   ︎
2. 2. Refers to the journalist and activist Sanaa Salameh who was married to Daqqa. Ed .
   ︎
3. 3. Refers to the Palestinian Authority’s Ministry of Detainees and Ex-Detainees Affairs. Ed . ︎

Translator’s note: Born in 1961 in the town of Baqa Al-Gharbiyyah in occupied Palestine, Walid Daqqa was a Palestinian philosopher, political theorist, playwright, and armed resistance fighter. Despite evidence to the contrary, Daqqa was accused, charged, and convicted of involvement in a 1984 PFLP operation that captured and killed an Israeli soldier, for which he was sentenced to life by the Zionist entity in 1986 and subsequently languished, imprisoned until his death on April 7, 2024 (al-Shaikh 2021a, 276). The text presented here was penned in 2005 in Gilboa Prison, on the first day of his twentieth year behind bars. 

Despite his captivity, Daqqa remained politically active. As hinted here, he maintained regular contact with the cultural intelligentsia in colonized Palestine, enabling him to conduct a lively political life from within. Notably, Daqqa served as a member of the political party Democratic National Rally and headed the Palestinian Prisoners’ Movement. 

Perhaps the most significant of Daqqa’s activities in this respect are his intellectual pursuits, for which his comrades in captivity nicknamed him the Prince of Culture, Amir al-Thaqafah. Pursuing and successfully graduating with an M.A in political science, Daqqa produced a prolific—and largely untranslated—intellectual output that was transdisciplinary in form, taking the shape of screenplays, musicals, novels, nonfiction memoir, children’s books, and works of political and philosophical theory. Situated in the context of a post-Oslo status quo, his body of work proceeds from the urgencies marked by the transmutation of the PLO into the PA, the subsequent official renunciation of armed resistance as a political method, and the “dis-memberment” of the 1948 Palestinians from the national body (ibid., 274). In particular, Daqqa’s intellectual concerns revolve around the peculiar ontology of the post-Oslo Palestinian, a subject who is increasingly forced to exist in a state of a prospectless, futureless infinite present—the parallel time of Palestinian political existence. The text presented here is an early but foundational instantiation of this central intellectual project.

Daqqa leaves behind a legacy that demands dogged belief in a willful, agentic future. Indeed, at every turn Daqqa refused to capitulate to that hallucination of the infinite present induced by the apartheid state. In 1996, an imprisoned Daqqa met and became involved with journalist and translator Sana Salama. Though initially blocked by the Zionist entity, the two married after the intervention of Azmi Bishara—the addressee of the letter translated here and a member of the Knesset at the time—in 1999. Save for exceptional instances like their wedding and a single incident in which Sana managed to steal a hug in 2015 (ibid., 280) the couple conducted the entirety of their marital relationship separated by the steel of prison bars. The couple conceived via liberated seed, nutfah muharrarah, and Milad—birth in Arabic—was born on February 3, 2020 (al-Shaikh 2021b, 84-5). As in other texts, Daqqa concludes his 2005 letter to Azmi Bishara by hailing his future child: Ma’ tahiyyati, Milad.

—Nour Eldin Hussein

References:

1. Al-Shaikh, Abdul-Rahim. 2021a. “Al-Zaman Al-Muwazi Fi Fikr Walid Daqqa [Parallel Time in the Thought of Walid Daqqa].” المجلة العربية للعلوم الإنسانية. 39 (155): 271–308. https://doi.org/10.34120/ajh.v39i155.2889.
2. Al-Shaikh, Abdul-Rahim. 2021b. “The Parallel Human: Walid Daqqah on the 1948 Palestinian Political Prisoners.” Confluences Méditerranée N° 117 (2): 73–87. https://doi.org/10.3917/come.117.0075.

Walid Daqqa (July 18, 1961–April 7, 2024) was a Palestinian philosopher, political theorist, author, and armed resistance fighter who was imprisoned for thirty-eight years, the longest serving Palestinian prisoner in Israeli jails. From prison, he wrote a number of books including, The Tale of the Secrets of Oil, Fusion of Consciousness, and A Parallel Time. Daqqa died in prison, succumbing to a rare form of bone cancer which was exacerbated by medical negligence and torture of the Israeli Prison Service. He has not been given a proper burial as his body continues to be retained by the Security Cabinet of Israel at the time of this publication.

Nour Eldin Hussein is an Egyptian essayist, researcher, translator, editor, and enthusiast of the written and spoken word. He holds an M.A in Arab media and culture studies, and he lives, works, and studies in Minneapolis, MN where he serves as assistant editor for Mizna. He maintains lightedroom, a small blog on Substack where he writes about digital culture, life online, and the Arab world among others.

The post On Parallel Time appeared first on Mizna.

The Cyprus Pavilion at the 2024 Venice Biennale

Over the past eighteen months, the genocide in Gaza has laid bare the state of world, showing us the true brutality of neoliberal values and institutions, and the unadulterated depravity of settler colonialism. While much of the world has persisted in a state of complicit blindness, a blindness that tolerates the erasure and ghostification of Gaza, students, artists, writers, filmmakers, cultural workers, have been on the front lines of speaking out against genocide and imagining new forms of resistance and solidarity.

On a wildflower-lined gravel track off a quiet thoroughfare…, the exhibition which represented the Cyprus Pavilion at the 2024 Venice Biennale, invokes formal and conceptual notions of ghosts, always contextualized in relation to technology and power in Cyprus, specifically the country’s historic and current geopolitical role in the Levant region and in the genocide on Gaza. The artworks in this exhibition show us how ghost can be properly attended to and examined in order to develop a new sensory mode and thus a new way of engaging with the world around us. It was my pleasure to interact with and review this complex exhibition as my own form of digital ghost.

— Lamia Abukhadra, Art and Communications Director

Gaza is the ghost of the world, the persistent presence that, despite all efforts to erase it, to make it disappear, remains and resists. It is Gaza that has shown us the impossible: the horrors of settler colonialism at its most extreme and brutal, the ways in which resistance is possible in the smallest of gestures, and finally, the triumphant acts of return and reunification following the now-broken ceasefire agreement. The ghost of the world has shown us the world for what it is and what must be done, what alliances must be drawn in order to resist it. 

—Lamia Abukhadra

On Which Side of the Screen Lies the Ghost? The Cyprus Pavilion at the 2024 Venice Biennale

My notification doesn’t go off as planned; I log in to the Instagram live tour fifteen minutes late. By the time I am able to join, I have missed the explanation of the exterior of the space as well as much of the first room. No matter, a record of the tour is saved and uploaded later, acting as a trace of the last days of the exhibition. Apart from a detailed press kit and the virtual conversations I had with some of the artists, this is the only way I encountered On a wildflower-lined gravel track off a quiet thoroughfare…, the exhibition which represented the Cyprus Pavilion at the 2024 Venice Biennale. 

My initial meeting with some of the artists who collectively conceived, produced, and invigilated the 2024 Cyprus Pavilion—comprised of the Lower Levant Company (Peter Eramian and Emiddio Vasquez), Haig Aivazian, and the Endrosia Collective (Andreas Andronikou, Marina Ashioti, Niki Charalambous, Doris Mari Demetriadou, Irini Khenkin, Rafailia Tsiridou, and Alexandros Xenophontos)—took place on Zoom a few days before the exhibition was set to close. During our discussion, Andreas Andronikou mentioned that as the artists explored the varying intensities and materializations of the ghost in the machine, a key theme throughout the exhibition, the question “On which side of the screen lies the ghost?” was pivotal in conceiving the pavilion’s conceptual framework. Defined by the artists as the persistent, excessive presence of that which is repressed while paradoxically and simultaneously actively withdrawing, ghosts become the material in which speculative forms or methodologies can emerge. Within these alternative modes, that which has been repressed can be properly attended to and examined; a new sensory mode is developed. Through the process of “vigilance,” or the act of keeping vigil, the ghost in its many manifestations becomes a collaborator in sensing, imagining, and building new worlds from the one currently crumbling around us. 

On a wildflower-lined gravel track off a quiet thoroughfare… invokes notions of ghosts, ghosting, and haunting through several formal and conceptual approaches, always contextualized in relation to technology and power in Cyprus. The exhibition title is extracted from the opening lines of a 2019 Forbes article¹ which details a Cyprus-based spyware operation run by Israeli tech millionaire Tal Dilian and the Intellexa consortium. The article describes a wildflower-lined street in Larnaca where an unassuming black van is parked, inside of which exists an arsenal of technology capable of hacking into nearby smartphones with the purpose of gleaning and intercepting all of the private correspondences within. The Intellexa consortium as well as other companies associated with or owned by Dilian were found to be involved in several scandals, including the selling of spyware to the oppressive regime in Egypt and a paramilitary group in Sudan, mass unregulated internet surveillance in Nigeria, the surveillance of the murdered journalist Jamal Khashoggi by the Saudi government, and, most recently, receiving US Treasury sanctions for “developing, operating, and distributing commercial spyware technology that presents a significant threat to the national security of the United States.”² In referencing the black van scandal, the artists critically engage with the larger positionality of the nation of Cyprus as a covert or complicit ghostly presence in relation to the Levant region both historically and recently; a thoroughfare in which European, American, and Levantine geopolitical interests and dynamics meet. A mere 45-minute plane ride from the Levantine coast, Cyprus has long been a site for British and American military surveillance posts. The Treaty of Establishment of the Republic of Cyprus, signed in 1960 to grant Cyprus its independence from British colonial rule, includes several clauses granting the British government the right to maintain sovereign military bases in Akrotiri and Dhekelia, both of which remain active. More recently, Cyprus’ proximity to the Levant manifested through Cypriot residents hearing the 2020 Beirut Port explosion;³ in June 2024, the now-deceased Secretary General of Hezbollah, Hassan Nasrallah, threatened the nation, saying that it would be considered “part of the war” if it allowed the Israeli military to use its air or maritime spaces;⁴ and in January 2025, a report from the British Palestinian Committee laid out the extent of British military involvement in the genocidal war on Gaza, specifically mentioning the use of British RAF bases on the island of Cyprus for cargo transport to Israel and nightly surveillance flights over Gaza.⁵ Digging into the fantastical anecdote of the black van and the geopolitical associations it invokes, the artists collectively decided to create a framework for the entire exhibition to be the site of a speculative agency, Forever Informed. The aims of this agency, whose slogan is “smart solutions to weak signals” are left intentionally vague, but we are told that they gather information. The framing of the entire exhibition space as a parafictional surveillance company in disarray, in between setting up (appearance) and abandonment (disappearance), creates a space ripe for haunting. Each individual artwork is a complex examination of Cyprus’ geopolitical position that doubles as an exploration of this mysterious organization’s mythologies and imaginaries. The space itself existed as a satellite exhibition outside of the Biennale’s Giardini, an unassuming yet proximate presence haunting the main space of the 2024 Biennale. Rather than hiring the traditional gallery watchers to monitor and police the space, the artists themselves as well as invited residents took part in the practice of invigilation, drawing from the British use of the word invigilator: Those who look after a space. The practice of invigilation meant that the artists themselves stayed with their works and welcomed people into the space. Residents who took part in the Vigil Workspace were invited to perform and create discourse in relation to the exhibition as they sat vigil. Key to the practice of invigilation was the tours that the artists regularly gave of the space, thoroughly explaining the conceptual framework of the exhibition and the significance of each artwork in their own ways. 

Below is an abbreviated description of my experience attending a virtual walkthrough of the 2024 Cyprus Pavilion, partially embellished with additional information available in the pavilion’s press kit. 

**** 

I am sitting on one side of the screen, about to watch the tour of On a wildflower-lined gravel track off a quiet thoroughfare… on Instagram Live, facilitated by the Lower Levant Company. 

The phone camera is fixed on a view of an LED screen mounted vertically, like a phone screen, inside the facade of the Cyprus Pavilion. For a few minutes, we watch as the video looping on the LED monitor appears to glitch, fragmenting clips from a 2019 Forbes documentary which contains footage granted by the spyware dealer Tal Dilian of his black van conducting surveillance on a wildflower-lined street. The ambient noise of footsteps—assumed to belong to exhibition viewers drawn in by the screen’s alluring advertisement-like brightness—continue around the camera holder. In the darkness of early evening, the LED screen emanates light so strongly that it is the only thing the camera is able to capture, the surrounding environment is too dark and thus underexposed. 

The camera-holder, Peter Eramian, a member of the artist duo Lower Levant Company, backs up and Emiddio Vazquez, the other LLC member, appears in-frame and welcomes us to “the last ever tour” of the Cyprus Pavilion at the 2024 Venice Biennale. 

In addition to LED Screen (by Forever Informed), Vazquez points us to the other piece of the pavilion installed along the canal, Organ (by Rafailia Tsiridou and Emiddio Vasquez), a network of bright orange pipes which could be mistaken as part of the building’s infrastructure. As they come into contact with the vibrations created by the canal and its surrounding environment, the six PVC pipes create a feedback network of amplification and transmission. Organ is an eavesdropper or a spy, turning the sounds of the canal and the conditions of its surroundings into harvestable information. Rather than record or analyze data points, Organ simply transmits the vibrations that it encounters, feeding them into other pieces inside the space as live, unreproducible material, calling into question the purpose of the fabulated company Forever Informed. I recall the common cliché of when horror film characters first begin to suspect that a place is haunted, reassuring themselves that the strange noise they heard was “just the wind.” In this case, the wind and other natural or man-made elements create a haunting, gathering environmental elements to create an excessive force in which the tensions between information gathering and art are brought together. Yet, Organ does not gather, store, or organize any information, instead leaving us with purely sonic experiences available to us only in the present. On camera, the tour guides tell us that this particular artwork received a lot of attention and curiosity while it was being installed. 

We are led inside and after explaining the conceptual premise of the exhibition, Vazquez turns our attention to the first room which he describes as the “reception room” for Forever Informed. Among the pieces we are shown in this room, all of which engage with histories and materialities of information gathering and transmission, are Tyre Track by Lower Levant Company and Beacons and Pillars by Haig Aivazian. Sitting on the middle of the cement reception room floor is Tyre Track, a low rectangular mound of concrete with stones, gravel, seashells, and other detritus embedded within it. The indentation of a car tire track has been left diagonally across the rectangle. We learn that this trace was made by Forever Informed’s own surveillance van which has eerily similar capabilities as Tal Dilian’s infamous black van. The mesh peeking out from the edges of the object gives us the impression that this mound was not extracted from another location but cast. Upon closer inspection, the tracks appear to be a negative imprint, suggesting that the object itself may be a false or implanted trace of this covert operation. While holding the camera, Eramian adds that the dubious and archeological qualities of the piece leads one to question what other traces have been left on the island of Cyprus, especially those of a ghostly or clandestine nature. 

Nearby, hanging on a wall is Beacons and Pillars by Haig Aivazian, a Lebanese artist invited to contribute to the Cyprus Pavilion. Eramian tells us that recently Aivazian has been working on the dualities of light and darkness; light always associated with truth and enlightenment, as well as the Promethean myth where light and thus knowledge was passed on to humans, and darkness associated with criminality and unproductiveness. For Aivazian, we are told, this duality is not as clear as we may think, as the rise of modernity and neoliberal capitalism has meant that the materialities of light have been used or involved in the extraction of resources, policing and control of movement, and surveillance, while darkness could serve as a generative, fugitive space outside the watchful gaze of power. In this diptych of etched copper plates, Aivazian works with found etchings of torch bearers, which one could assume originate from representations of revolution or freedom, but are actually sourced from images of colonial expedition. As the camera approaches the etchings, Vazquez and Eramian as well as some of the other artworks in the space are reflected back. While the plate on the right consists of a small, isolated etching of a hand holding a torch surrounded by negative space, we are told that the plate on the left is a closeup of the texture of smoke from that a lit torch emits. In engaging with the analogue printing process, Aivazian invokes the mechanism of information and image circulation at the height of European colonization—where foreign lands, bodies, and ecologies were often imagined, represented, and reproduced through the medium of etching and lithography. But Aivazian edits this methodology of circulation, showing us only the matrix; the possibility of producing a large number of prints lingers as a ghostly suggestion. Copper itself, a resource in which Cyprus is rich, is an essential material in the contemporary battle over control, progress, and information, extracted for use in computing, electric conductivity, and signal transmission. The choice of cropping and zooming in creates an obfuscation. What could the texture of smoke hide? Are the torch-bearers leading the masses towards freedom or, as colonial entities, will they use their torches as a tool for mass destruction? 

As we move into the second room, we see AVRION PROIN EN NA DEIS, which translates to “TOMORROW MORNING YOU WILL SEE,” a sculptural work by Alexandros Xenophontos, member of the Endrosia collective. Sixteen tiles—three of which emit fluorescent white light that never turns off and one of which is missing—constitute a drop ceiling in the center of the space. In lieu of the missing tile, a subsea cable, usually used to transmit telecommunication signals across large stretches of ocean, descends and begins to make its way across the floor. As the phone approaches the severed end of the cable, a low, ominous, and irregular droning can be heard. We are told it is the sound of the activity of and around the canal being transmitted from the outdoor sculpture, Organ. The cable is wrapped in several tight fitting leather corsets, contrasting with the corporate office aesthetic of the ceiling and referring to the fetishistic nature of information ownership and transmission. As the phone is pointed into the opening in the ceiling, we notice a light flashing or glitching rhythmically. Perhaps this is the same flickering light one would see in the event of a haunting, or perhaps it is an infrastructural malfunction. We learn that the light is flashing the message “tomorrow morning you will see” in morse code, inspired by the message of a found telegram sent from Cyprus to Alexandria in 1955. Informed by the geopolitical history of Cyprus as a thoroughfare for telecommunications in the Mediterranean as well as a neocolonial command point within the Levant, the sculpture creates a foreboding atmosphere. In transmitting this message to us, is Forever Informed promising us enlightenment, or are they communicating a threat? 

Just outside of the second room is an enclosed courtyard where the sound installation Crossover Frequency Spectrum by Lower Levant Company also transmits some of the vibrations from Organ. Other sounds broadcasted through the six mounted Iwata horns include local bat chirps, whistles and cracks from the ionosphere near military antennae, and field recordings taken near the UK airbase in Akrotiri, all of which constitute sounds that Vazquez says are “very loud” but usually go ignored as we are not attuned to them. Atop a bedding of black copper slag, the mouth-like horns—some functional and mounted on a truss emerging from the slag, and others ceramic replicas placed directly on the black substrate—amplify and draw viewers to attend to new frequencies, thus imploring us to develop a new sensory mode.

Unintelligible sounds leak out from the room just ahead, named SOUNDR* after a codename for a joint British/American surveillance station in Cyprus exposed as a key site for surveillance in the Middle East. Darker in tone and in lighting, this last room in On a wildflower-lined gravel track off a quiet thoroughfare… is populated by video installations by Lower Levant Company, Haig Aivazian, and some members of Endrosia and serves as a cross section of the relationship between Cyprus and Lebanon. Their sounds overlapping, the three animation-focused video works in SOUNDR* explore the ghostification of cities through gentrification and real estate speculation, haunting and ghost hunting through digital materialities, and the generative, insurgent possibilities that spaces of darkness, often inhabited by ghosts, can have. 

The tour closes with a brief explanation of the practice of invigilation which took place throughout the duration of the Biennale and the multilingual publication produced in tandem with the exhibition. 

Vazquez and Eramian thank us for watching, the live video ends. Like a ghost, I rewatch the tour a few more times, retracing its path, attempting to glean as much as I can from it. 

*** 

I am on one side of the screen. 

On the other side, the acceleration of ethnic cleansing of Palestine through the eighteen month-long live-streamed genocide in Gaza. I am on one side of the screen of my phone witnessing unimaginable atrocities. On the other side, Gaza is living it. My notification goes off on January 18, 2024 and Bisan Owda is wearing a press vest, live streaming through the night of the Israeli siege and bombardment at the Nasser Hospital. My notification goes off October 13, 2024 and Saleh Aljafrawi is unable to describe the scene as he films Shaban al-Dalou burning to death in a tent in the Al Aqsa hospital courtyard after Israel committed one of many “tent massacres.” For months, Anas Al Sharif is on camera giving us tour after tour of the ruins and conditions of life in the besieged Jabalia refugee camp, unrecognizable from its pre-war photos. On one side of the screen, the killing of hundreds of thousands of people through bombing, sniping, blockade of all food, water, and medical supplies, besieging and destroying all medical infrastructure as well as entire neighborhoods; Israel’s attempt to exterminate all life in Gaza, to make it withdraw. Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians forcibly turned into martyrs, into ghosts. 

Often, as a civilian or a journalist would film an instance of forced displacement, the aftermath of an Israeli airstrike on a home, a car, or a group of tents, the influx of injuries or martyrs in a barely functioning hospital, someone looks into the camera and screams, “Who are you filming for?!” 

I am on the other side of the screen.

On my side of the screen, life goes on, and the genocide continues; we go to protests, we boycott, we occupy university property, we try to raise funds for mutual aid; concrete, political action is often stymied; international law is ignored. Every institution is complicit: From international human rights organizations and legal bodies, to western democracies and electoral politics, higher education, and to art institutions, we witnessed an expansion of fascism, an unwillingness to act justly in the face of extreme violence, an unwillingness to divest from systems of surveillance and arms manufacturing, an increase in policing of students, censorship of artists, and dismissal of professionals across all fields. Gaza is the ghost of the world, the persistent presence that, despite all efforts to erase it, to make it disappear, remains and resists. It is Gaza that has shown us the impossible: the horrors of settler colonialism at its most extreme and brutal, the ways in which resistance is possible in the smallest of gestures, and finally, the triumphant acts of return and reunification following the now-broken ceasefire agreement. The ghost of the world has shown us the world for what it is and what must be done, what alliances must be drawn in order to resist it. 

The ghost of the world has also exposed the hypocrisy of neoliberal institutions and their values. The 2024 Venice Biennale, unfortunately, was one of them, preferring to maintain its conventional format rather than acknowledge the genocide in Gaza in any meaningful way. It was artists and cultural workers, notably the Art Not Genocide Alliance (ANGA), who took the initiative to “haunt” the Biennale and center the ongoing ethnic cleansing in Palestine. For much of the Biennale, the alliance staged several interventions and protests in order to disrupt business-as-usual while calling to exclude the Israeli Pavilion from participation. The group also co-hosted or brought attention to several satellite exhibitions and events featuring Palestinian art and literature.⁶ This form of haunting, which took place within the Biennale, around the city of Venice, and through various digital campaigns, aimed at recalibrating the sensory attunement of one of the largest global art institutions and events, and create an alternative experience for artists, attendees, and cultural workers in extraordinary times. 

While ANGA intervened in the Venice Biennale’s actual and ethical positionality, the artists in the Cyprus Pavilion engaged with the ghost of the world on a formal and conceptual level, critically immersing themselves in all aspects of “representing” a country actively yet covertly engaged in the genocide in Gaza and the surveillance of the surrounding region. While Gaza shows the world for what it is, the artists at the Cyprus Pavilion present us with formal and discursive interventions—ghosts—which allow us to engage with our surroundings and to imagine worlds anew.

1. Thomas Brewster, “A Multimillionaire Surveillance Dealer Steps out of the Shadows . . . and His $9 Million WhatsApp Hacking Van.” Forbes, Forbes Magazine, 9 March 2020, www.forbes.com/sites/thomasbrewster/2019/08/05/a-multimillionaire-surveillance-dealer-steps-out-of-the-shadows-and-his-9-million-whatsapp-hacking-van/. ︎
2. David Kenner, “Notorious ‘predator’ Spyware Firm Intellexa Hit with New US Sanctions – ICIJ.” International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, 24 Sept. 2024, www.icij.org/investigations/cyprus-confidential/notorious-predator-spyware-firm-intellexa-hit-with-new-us-sanctions/.  ︎
3. “Beirut Explosion: What We Know So Far.” BBC News, BBC, 11 Aug. 2020, www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-53668493. ︎
4. Paul Raymond, “Hezbollah’s Threat Caught Cyprus off Guard, What Are the Issues at Stake?” Al Jazeera, Al Jazeera, 25 June 2024, aje.io/hrf0tx.  ︎
5. Oscar Rickett, “New Report Lays out Full Extent of UK-Israel Military Partnership in Gaza.” Middle East Eye, 28 Jan. 2025, www.middleeasteye.net/news/new-report-lays-out-full-extent-uk-israel-military-partnership-gaza. ︎
6.  A list of which can be found here: https://anga.live/venice.html ︎

Lamia Abukhadra is a Palestinian American artist currently based in Beirut and Chicago.

Her practice studies how disasters can resurrect and generate new forms of perception, collectivity, and resistance, often using the Palestinian context as an urgent microcosm. Within her drawings, prints, sculptures, texts, and installations, she embeds speculative frameworks which bring to light intimate and historical connections, poetic occurrences, and generative possibilities of survival, mutation, and self-determination.

Lamia graduated from the University of Minnesota with a BFA in interdisciplinary studio art in 2018. She is a 2019-2020 Home Workspace Program Fellow at Ashkal Alwan in Beirut as well as a 2021–2022 Jan van Eyck Academie Resident in Maastricht. Her work has been exhibited in Minneapolis, Chicago, Beirut, and Berlin. Lamia is a 2018–2019 Jerome Emerging Printmaking Resident at Highpoint Center for Printmaking, a 2019 resident at ACRE and the University of Michigan’s Daring Dances initiative, and a recipient of a 2017 Soap Factory Rethinking Public Spaces grant. She is currently an MFA candidate in the Department of Art, Theory and Practice at Northwestern University.

Abukhadra is also a cultural worker and currently holds the position of Art and Communications Director at Mizna (St. Paul, MN).

The post On Which Side of the Screen Lies the Ghost?  appeared first on Mizna.

Palestinian poet Summer Farah reviews Mohammed El-Kurd’s newly released Perfect Victims: and the Politics of Appeal in light of the horrifying intransigence of settler-colonial genocide on Gaza, adding to our understanding of the “rhetorical exhaustions” employed to nullify the impact of resistant political action. Order Perfect Victims HERE.

—Nour Eldin H., assistant editor

Subtlety: something I go back and forth worrying about, an oscillation between “not that deep” or “not worth it” to address, but with the knowledge that it is still cutting, cutting, cutting. 

—Summer Farah

Review: Perfect Victims: And the Politics of Appeal by Mohammed El-Kurd

In Toni Morrison’s speech “A Humanist View,” she identifies “distraction” as a function of racism: distraction “keeps you from doing your work. It keeps you explaining over and over again, your reason for being.” Over the past sixteen months since Israel escalated a genocidal bombardment of Gaza, as well as in Lebanon and the West Bank, “distraction” is a familiar repetition: stopping genocide requires not just attention, but action. It is only natural that those who commit genocide seek to make you as distracted as possible. 

What is claimed as “distraction” varies. In 2024, as a team with a racist mascot secured their second Super Bowl victory in a row, Israel launched an assault on Rafah, killing over 80 Palestinians. My Twitter feed was split between clips of Taylor Swift in the crowd, destroyed buildings, and the scolding of attention on Taylor Swift rather than the destroyed buildings. I do not begrudge the scolding, but I am reluctant to classify the Super Bowl as a distraction specific to Palestine; there are advantages the Zionists take, of course, when the headlines are sure to be elsewhere, but it feels indicative of the general dedication of the average US citizen, instead. We love sports, and spending, and gathering—no matter the context. We are an easy people to distract. 

Instead, the “distractions” I find particularly sinister are the rhetorical exhaustions that Palestinians—and our allies—participate in almost systematically when it comes to matters specifically relevant to the occupation. As if each time a new horror is unveiled, there is a cosmic requirement for it to be buried in layers and layers of linguistic gymnastics before we can get to the real work of stopping the horror. Sometimes, the language distorts so much that you find yourself on a path to stop something else entirely. Of distraction, Toni Morrison says, “there will always be one more thing.” In his debut essay collection, Perfect Victims: The Politics of Appeal, Mohammed El-Kurd identifies and dissects these distractions, accessibly codifying them into an index with which that “one more thing” can be dealt with quickly, sharply—until, I hope, we refine our language enough to no longer, in El-Kurd’s words, “defang” the Palestinian. We can then focus on what is necessary, urgent, and true. 

“I have always wanted to be human,” El-Kurd writes to open the second chapter. The severing of the Palestinian outside of humanity to a Western gaze enables the continued destruction of homes across Palestine, the murder of our families, the dispossession of land. It is not the actions of the Palestinian that disqualifies them from humanity, as “what makes some people heroes is what makes us criminals. It is almost simplistic to say that we are guilty by birth. Our existence is purely mechanistic; we are reminded, through policy and procedure, that we are unfortunately born to die.”

I come to Perfect Victims not from El-Kurd’s notoriety as Palestine correspondent at The Nation, but from his work as a poet. Poets working in other forms are often praised for the beauty they imbue into these other mediums—El-Kurd’s line is often beautiful, yes, but what I find most compelling is his brevity and control. The strength of Perfect Victims is its precision, its honesty. There is a trap in writing through the dehumanization of Palestinians via a book produced in English, from a US publisher, to a Western audience; El-Kurd is aware of these traps, of course. He continues, “When I wrote short stories about my grandmother Rifqa as a survivor of the 1948 Nakba, I was told to ‘humanize’ her. I searched in her character for quirks and quips that might pollute her humanity, then I effaced them.” Perfect Victims details this stripping on behalf of Palestinians en masse, utilized by media institutions that seek to nullify support of the liberation struggle and manufacture consent for genocide. 

The “politics of appeal” are what occur in an attempt to endear the Palestinian back to these institutions and audiences. These practices are used by our allies, our covert operatives, and ourselves. They entail: affirming a Palestinian’s proximity to empire by bringing up their US Citizenship (it will not save them from being killed in the West Bank), bringing up their Christian faith (it will not stop the IOF from raiding churches on Easter), their educational background (it will not save them from losing their job), their distance from resistance movements (it will not save them from being imprisoned). But, again, it is not the Palestinian’s actions that determines their “humanity” or lack thereof—it is their Palestinian-ness. The rhetorical gymnastics employed so often move the Palestinian towards whiteness, a US-centric respectability, rather than the identity we are proud of. And so, this rhetorical gymnastics employed, both for us and against us, are distractions to the goal of a liberated Palestine. In his introductory notes, El-Kurd writes “Our people have sacrificed and struggled artfully to work within and around an unworkable system.” The tactics analyzed throughout are not new. El-Kurd’s arguments are not revelatory for Palestinians, nor does he intend for them to be. Instead, he writes: “I want us to invent a new future, to break out of the hamster wheel.”

So, how does Perfect Victims aid us in getting off the hamster wheel? Its structure makes it a compelling recommendation: with short chapters divided into shorter, digestible sections, it is a text easy to imagine assigned in classrooms or cited to back up arguments against The New York Times and other media institutions who have violently failed Palestinians. As I consider El-Kurd’s admission of “effacing” the character of his grandmother, it is the work done in the footnotes of Perfect Victims that I find most interesting. There are many martyrs in this book; El-Kurd makes a note to explain his choices for the shift of the martyrs’ stories from the body of the text to footnotes: “I want to address the reader as if they are a guest in my living room.” The footnotes are where the text feels most like a “living room”—it is a place to expand and explain, of course, but El-Kurd transforms them into something more. 

From Rifqa, El-Kurd’s debut poetry collection, the poem I remember the most is “Laugh”—particularly the line, “My grandmother taught me ‘if we don’t laugh, we cry.’” The importance of humor, laughter, levity, is a major theme in Rifqa that returns in Perfect Victims, in the anecdotes El-Kurd offers of his time with other Palestinians, but also in his prose, and in the footnotes. A well-placed “Feminism!” as a footnote on a point about how Israeli snipers might be any gender is a burst of levity amid the grim reality that Israeli snipers of any gender are murdering Palestinian journalists. There’s a level of trust with the reader in these moments—an off-color joke to some (I would make this joke), it is an attempt to not strip his narrative voice of its specificity. Also in the footnotes is Arabic; this choice, too, brings the reader into the metaphorical living room. It’s an invitation, either way, whether it ultimately registers as intimacy or distance. And that distance is necessary for the narrative voice to maintain its complexity. 

The synthesis of El-Kurd’s processing of his own dehumanization—“The consequences of dehumanization, the staggering and the subtle, reveal themselves not only in how we are perceived but in how we perceive ourselves.”—alongside clear criticisms of these institutions is useful: this fuller picture of the function of dehumanization brings a closeness attached to the urgency. It is not just the passive voice, it is how we internalize it—our own complicity alongside the bombs. Perhaps one of the most important tactics El-Kurd identifies is subtlety:

“Considering that the most brazen declarations are obfuscated from even nut grafs and margins, why bring up the subtle? Because in that subtlety one finds a more dangerous, more insidious logic. Examining the conversation between a liberal television anchor and a liberal author unveils the implicit underpinnings of their discourse: Palestinians must denounce certain affiliations, determined by the West, to be considered worthy of living. Or, I should correct myself, worthy of condolences, as we are doomed regardless.” 

These sinister violences are present in cultural arenas outside of news media as well, such as in literary arts and film. Subtlety: something I go back and forth worrying about, an oscillation between “not that deep” or “not worth it” to address, but with the knowledge that it is still cutting, cutting, cutting. 

Of all of the tropes El-Kurd indexes, the most presciently felt is in film, especially as we approach another “distraction” in the form of an Oscars ceremony. El-Kurd presents the trope that’s resonant in film coverage throughout the 2024 awards season: 

“Take the genre of Israelis and Palestinians making films together. The Palestinian filmmaker is chaperoned to the film festival, allowed on stage as their authoritative cosignatory’s charismatic sidekick. No one—not the producer of the festival, not the columnist writing a review—seems to care about the content of the film, whether it is good or garbage. What matters most is that the film was codirected, a mode that satisfies a libidinal urge in the viewers. They eavesdrop a forbidden conversation, a titillating reconciliation between the slayer and the slain. Discussions about the film, reviews, the way it is promoted, and our excited elevator pitches to one another all become masturbatory, reducing the film to the fact that it was a collaboration between an Israeli and a Palestinian, fulfilling the viewer’s fantasy of a happy ending to an otherwise miserable story. We turn it into a fetish.” 

In her review of Palestinian-“Israeli” documentary No Other Land, co-directed by Basel Adra, Yuval Abraham, Hamdan Ballal, and Rachel Szor, about the expulsion of residents from Masafer Yatta, Mary Turfah writes: 

“The film doesn’t engage with other ways this suffering might end. The only resistance we see is nonviolent demonstration. Adra is an activist, a term whose configurations are vague except vis-à-vis violence. The film matter-of-factly captures plenty of violent Israelis, settlers and soldiers, armed and sustained by the state, their bulldozers and their unmoved expressions, or their twisted smiles as lives are destroyed, but no Palestinian fighters, no direct Palestinian response. Instead, Palestinians and their supporters are ‘armed’ with their cameras, committed to capturing an aftermath to which a sympathetic Western audience might choose to respond on their behalf. At the film’s start, Adra’s father, who has been imprisoned and abused by the Israelis multiple times, describes a desire to throw rocks at Israeli soldiers, then apologizes to his Israeli guest, explaining that sometimes he finds himself so angry. The woman’s son was shot at a peaceful protest.” 

Turfah’s description hits several of the points addressed in Perfect Victims, namely the “defanging” and distancing from affiliations that the Western viewer might deem improper. When the New York Times reports on Israeli atrocities, the actor is often missing. Violence hits the Palestinian as gravity forces the apple from the tree. Here, although the actor is filmed, the Palestinian remains a figure only in which things happen to them; in an attempt to restore the humanity to the Palestinian via collaboration of the “slayer and the slain,” the dignity of reaction is withheld—instead, they are still thoroughly dehumanized, made to apologize for even daring to have the thought of resistance. 

I wonder: how does the appeal of No Other Land stand up at an awards ceremony attended by hundreds of notable Zionists? On the night of the Oscars, what would No Other Land spoken into the room do for the residents of Masafer Yatta—should they choose to throw a stone in the face of annihilation? Perfect Victims asks the reader to consider what is the true value of appeal versus what is sacrificed in that attempt. Toward the end, El-Kurd writes that the dehumanization of Palestinians finds us “guilty until proven otherwise and otherwise is often impossible.” Beating the “impossible” cannot happen with the colonizer’s logic; let Perfect Victims be a guide in dismantling these distractions, and moving forward with dignity. 

Summer Farah is a Palestinian American writer, editor, and zine-maker from California. She is the author of I could die today and live again (Game Over Books, 2024) and The Hungering Years (Host Publications, 2026). A member of the Radius of Arab American Writers and the National Book Critics Circle, she is calling on you to recommit yourself to the liberation of the Palestinian people each day.

The post Review: Perfect Victims: And the Politics of Appeal by Mohammed El-Kurd appeared first on Mizna.

trans. by Nour Jaljuli & Aiya Sakr

It was April of 2024 that Mizna first published Diaa Wadi’s essay “Autobiography of Gaza”. Back then, executive editor George Abraham reflected that “‘ceasefire’—a bare minimum demand back in October—has come to lose all meaning as the horrors of Al-Shifa Hospital and other Zionist massacres unravel before our eyes . . .” Now, in January of 2025, we find ourselves yet again grappling with what it means to cross that threshold marked by whatever it is a term like “ceasefire” could ever hope to signify some 460 days and tens of thousands of casualties of zionist genocide later. We again urge all readers to consider donating to Diaa Wadi’s campaign to evacuate his family to safety.

—Nour Eldin H., Mizna assistant editor

Should I tell you a secret?

I’m afraid of the anguish I hold within me. Do people fear their own anguish?

—Diaa Wadi (trans. Nour Jaljuli & Aiya Sakr)

On the Edge of a Volcano, a Rip through a Gazan’s Heart

This grief is larger than anything I can bear. My eyes shatter from what I witness and my brain withers with the endless thoughts and storms of my own imagination.

I write these words while my heart rings like an alarm with fear and anxiety. I write as the Occupation’s artillery shells and war missiles drop on my family. But now, people see these bombs as raindrops, not tons of explosives and fires eating at Gazan bodies, souls, and buildings.

It is the worst of times. People are being slaughtered—mounds of flesh fill the streets and homes. People in the south of Gaza have turned into the new object of slaughter, while in the north, slaughter joins starvation and thirst.  Monumental exhaustion weighs down my tongue.

I imagine them now, spread across the corners of the tent with burnt edges. An empty tent with only gravel and stone. Each of them holding onto their suitcases, their documents, and their few belongings. They stare at each other. Fear sits with them as they wait for the end with each minute. They remember the moments they shared with their beloved martyrs, every person who left to the sky. They remember the warm family gatherings, loud laughter, daily bickering. They wonder, “Will the day ever come when we argue again, and storm out of our home?” But there’s no home left, no fights, it’s all rubble and ruin—ruin beyond anybody’s description.

I am now reading through reports and searching the faces of survivors and the names of martyrs from al-Shuja‘iyya neighborhood to find out what has become of my uncle, his wife, and their children after connection has been lost. I look for them so I don’t come across their pictures and names by accident as I had before with my martyred aunts and uncle.

Can you understand? You can’t understand and you will never know.

Death came near a few days ago. All of my senses were heightened. Except sight. I didn’t need my ears to hear, the voices were coming from inside of me and from the outside too. I spent my life trying to adjust, to heal from the torments of previous wars. I thought they would face no pain after I left them. Didn’t I do it for their sake? To protect them from harm and need? Did I not suffer distance, rejection, and lonely laboring to provide them with all their wishes?

Now, evil is growing. What is happening in Gaza is a genocide, a policy for organized mass killing. This is terrorism and ethnic cleansing. This is organized state terrorism. And my family is there. They are there with all of my people of Gaza suffering through wounds that can swallow a world whole. Fifty thousand martyrs. Life itself will end before we’re able to adequately mourn each and every one of them. The wounded are in every street, remnants strewn across rocks and trees, dogs are gnawing at the living and the dead, and helplessness is amputating every living part inside of us.

This is the truth that beats at us: that this unlawful attack is a mere tool to erode our very sense of self, to plow out of us every concept, idea, and belief; it is the  complete disregard of all useless laws laid out in ink on paper. What is happening in Gaza singles us out, a dignified people kneaded with death, a people whose fate is folded in with facing tragedy alone. This is nothing new in our cycle of setbacks. We don’t know fear and we don’t surrender to any weakness, even if it was the color of blood.

As for you, living outside the borders of these bombs, know that there is no room for a middle ground. You are either a person of honor defending against our pain with your blood, words, voice, and arms, or you are stuffed with filth, apathy, and so-called neutrality.

The greatest agonies in a person’s life happen during childhood and adolescence—not because of their relative weakness at that age, but because the concepts that may aid them to bear these pains have not yet formed and taken root within. So pain shapes and mutilates their thoughts as it wishes. My life in Gaza was filled with anguish of many forms and shapes. The war of 2008, another one in 2012, 2014, 2021, and now this war—a war a thousand times more violent than anything that has ever preceded even though I am not there.

Helplessness, grief, and loss mold a weapon that stabs at my soul, my heart, and my stamina. This weapon reshapes itself, again and again. It pounds at me until I am debilitated. Every day I grow more certain that what was taken from Gazans cannot be retrieved—this is at the heart of our journey. And the ugly truth is that this sorrow is invisible. No eyes can track it. No one can gauge the size of the blow or how deep the wound runs.

Baraa, my brother, let’s play a game.

I will let you go to bed late, and I won’t worry over you swimming long laps in the sea. I will give you hours to play and I won’t smother you with advice. I will get you the phone you want. I won’t tell mom about some of your grades, and I will hide your shenanigans from the family—keep it all in my heart like a gentle breeze. You can have all you want and more. Under one condition, brother: that you don’t leave on my behalf.

“They cannot expel us unless they transfer our corpses to Sinai. This idea they have of us walking there is a fantasy.” This is what my father tells me before the internet and all communications with them are cut off. We will not leave, we will not have a tent in Sinai, and we will not look back at Gaza longingly from behind a fence. Death smells good in the face of the hell our souls are now subjected to.

An international call comes through.

To be honest, I fear nothing more than an international call with a Palestinian code. He says, “Another Baptist Massacre, Diaa.” He cries and hangs up.

Oh God, give us our old fear back. The one that vanishes when we see family and friends.

Give us our old sorrows and normal life. Give us everything that was and forgive us for complaining.

Give us normal fear just like all people. Oh God, only give us what is mundane.

My mother tells me that some of the women cut off their hair due to the lack of shampoo and cleaning supplies. They’ve been off the shelves for ages. Some have even cropped their children’s hair for fear of lice and parasites. They want to maintain their personal hygiene even if by the bare minimum.

What an unremarkable piece of news. No one will care. It doesn’t have the word “massacre.”

Take this advice from a bereaved soul—pray to God more because you have your children with you; hug your mothers more and sleep at their hands; take photos with your siblings and forgive them for their mistakes; hug your fathers, touch their faces and heads, and ask for their blessings; give your thanks to God that your mothers are nearby and safe and that your family is well. Others have had their hearts eaten by sorrow and the world tested them with what  they hold dearest. I am others.

All of us are like this, with no exceptions. We each got our share of suffering, having to watch our families in tents, friends in hospitals, and their remains gathered in death bags.

Gazans have suffered every kind of torment there is. They’ve tried them all in order and they never stopped paying a dear and outrageous price the rest of the world cannot fathom. We pay with each passing second, literally, a hefty price no one in this time has ever paid. What falls on the heads of Gazans are lava balls of hatred, resentment, and a wish for our extermination. It’s a terrifying state that was never before experienced by anyone other than us in this modern day. Allah is almighty.

“Triers of pain,” that’s what Gazans are. We try pain, pain tries us, Gazan pain—what do you think? Are these titles catchy enough? Are they good enough for your fancy publications? Choose the most emotive descriptions and choose carefully. Take your time. This is not human blood. These are not real scenes. Stay neutral and don’t bother providing a single drop to those drinking filthy sewage water.

May whomever is standing on neutral ground fall. May they fall, those who didn’t give their money, or lend their voice, pen, tears, and prayers. 

We are humans and we know sorrow. But this feeling isn’t sorrow, anguish, nor pain. This thing doesn’t have a name. Today, on the phone with my uncle, he responded with a single sentence, “We’re hungry.” I hung up immediately. I couldn’t bear it.

What does the world want? We will die of anguish!

Should I tell you a secret?

I’m afraid of the anguish I hold within me. Do people fear their own anguish?

They must fear their own anguish and resentment when there’s no way to relieve it, to dispose of it, or deal with it. A sort of anguish that repeats daily in larger and larger doses. An anguish that cuts the strings of my heart and now seeps into my very features and behaviors. An anguish that, if placed on a mountain, would shake it or even force it to collapse.

“Stockpiling crisis,” this is the state in which Gazans are living now. They remain steadfast in their homes despite all that has happened and happens every day.

Gazans are stockpiling their crises and sorrows, so that once this war ends, another can begin. A war no news channel will cover, a war uncapturable without bombardment. A war of trying to eat without ash, now a permanent resident in our mouths. A war of going out to the street without conjuring amputated limbs and heads split open. From the war of tanks and weapons is born another war to build a new life.

“Israel commits a new massacre in al-Nuseirat.”

“Israel targets an UNRWA school sheltering refugees.”

“Israel buries children alive under the school rubble.”

“Israel kills entire displaced families inside the school.”

The world must understand that Palestinians, even when they carry weapons, are always the righteous ones, and that Israelis, even if they are lounging on the beaches of Haifa, are always guilty.

They have barely entered life’s threshold; they don’t have passports. They know the world only through screens. They know nothing outside of the wall. No trains, no civil planes, no mall escalators. They don’t know a boat or the sea without siege. They don’t know.

Baha, Alaa, Bara, and Mohammad, my brothers, don’t know.

After the war on Gaza, mothers will ask about their children’s graves.

If a mother wishes to sit by her son’s grave, “Where’s my son buried?” I don’t know. All I know is that this is a mass grave. Perhaps your son is here or there, or perhaps his parts are bagged together in a different mass grave.

You don’t know the meaning of anguish. You cannot understand what it means for your family to sleep on sand in a tent on the coldest and hottest days of the year. You cannot understand what it means to not find a bathroom to go to when you need it. You don’t understand the meaning of all of this. If we place all of this sorrow in a basket over your head none of you will be able to bear it.

This basket of sorrows is too heavy.

My brother Mohammad tells me that at the beginning of the war he only missed home, but now he misses opening the fridge door, sleeping in his own bed, and turning the lock on our front door.

He tells me about his discoveries in this war, “The thing is, you will long first for the main thing—our home. But then you start thinking about details that never crossed your mind, like opening the fridge.”

Mohammad, let’s play a game.

When we hear the bombs, we run.

Whoever gets tired loses the game.

I never imagined being on the outside of the war; the war that never left us. Loss and helplessness increase with the distance. Keeping up with the war through windows and streets would have been easier than constantly flipping between screens, news channels, images of martyrs, tracking neighborhoods, and endless phone calls, one after the other.

All that I do these days is try to find a way to describe how I feel. At least that way I will be able to hold the keys of knowledge and understand, even just a little, how my mind and heart can settle.

Choice turns into a daily hardship. Especially with the tremendous number of choices we must face in every moment of our lives.

But the choices this time are not only confusing, they’re deadly. Either your flesh is shattered to pieces, or you escape your home with no guarantee that you’ll even survive. You either suffer starvation and fear in the north, or the anguish of living in a tent with its unbearable heat in the south.

But the world did its best to aid us. The world was too generous and offered us a long list of choices: to be killed, or displaced. 

Oh Gazan, what do you think? Should you die by a missile that will turn you into pieces no larger than a finger, or do you want to die with your limbs amputated by a bomb?

No, you still have another choice, a lucky choice: to die whole. What do you say if a bullet should hit you between your shoulders, ripping through your body?

Language has changed, and words mean different things now. Children know school as a place of learning, boring math lessons, and a yard where they can run and play. But now school has become a shelter, a place where you sleep surrounded by carpet bombings and shelling. Mohammad tells me he won’t be able to go to school after the war. The only thing he’ll be able to see are images of him running between bombs to reach shelter in the same school he had once loved and studied in. This is the trauma that children won’t be able to escape.

There are moments when one is forced to question their own sanity. How did I endure all of this harm, my soul as clean as a bird’s? You are shocked by your own ability to endure, and are afraid you will suddenly collapse for no reason after having to bear all of this.

They peeled away all of my loved ones. I remain naked and alone, pretending that “strength” is the only life raft available to me.

After once shivering at the thought of us turning into mere numbers, shame has led us to see the genocide as some sort of victory because the Occupation failed to achieve its goals.

I am as silent as a lamb. I only speak when necessary, or I nod my head. I don’t talk much, and I wait for the night to look for them in my dreams. Last night, I saw them walking to the west, carrying their things. With every kilometer they walked, they would cry all at once to lighten the load. Off they went, no one knows where they are now. Perhaps they were killed or maybe they’re still walking. I don’t know if they have enough tears to see the journey through.

Humans have always been more brutal than animals. Even preying animals only eat because they’re hungry. But what is wrong with humans? Are they even humans, or monsters cast upon us?

I don’t know what to tell you about Gaza now. But the road to heaven is crowded in Gaza.

The great poet Al-Muari once wrote upon losing a dear one, “My sadness over his departure is like the blessings of the people of heaven, it’s born anew every time it runs out.”

The tears that fall by accident are the voices of loved ones preserved in our bodies after they leave us. They fall whenever the heart longs to hear their voice and has no other way to find it.

They disperse between bombs. Some survive and leave elsewhere. Death by scorched earth policies, families exterminated by every kind of weapon and tool, from missiles to vicious dogs, each dies according to their own fate.

Perhaps in heaven when martyrs come together, they will tell each other about how they died.

“How did I pass? By a missile.” Another says, “I was killed by a bomb,” and a child responds “Uncle, a sniper shot me.”

Diaa Wadi is a Palestinian writer and blogger. He studied mechanical engineering and has traveled to many countries speaking for the Palestinian cause at international events. Wadi believes in literature and writing as an effective tool of resistance against the Occupation. He writes about the life of Gazans and the details which are often overlooked by the camera. As Refaat Al-Areer said, “If I must die, / you must live / to tell my story.” Diaa writes on behalf of all those who left us, to honor the martyrs and send them eternal love—for the martyr Refaat Al-Areer, now more than ever. Diaa tweets @diaawadi2.

Nour Jaljuli is a translator and poet traversing between the worlds of Arabic and English. She holds an MA in literary translation from the University of East Anglia and is the Arabic translator of Rana Dajani’s Five Scarves. Her translations have appeared in ArabLit, Middle East Eye, Jummar, and the 2022 UEA MALT Anthology for which she was also coeditor. You can find out more about her work on nourjaljuli.wordpress.com.

Aiya Sakr (she/they) is a Palestinian-American poet and artist. They are the author of Her Bones Catch the Sun (The Poet’s Haven, 2018). A Pushcart Prize nominee, her work has appeared in Foglifter, Mizna, The Rumpus, and elsewhere. She is a co-organizer for In Water and Light, a regular community building space and reading series for Palestine. She is also a Winter 2023 Tin House Fellow, and has served as Poetry Editor for Sycamore Review. They hold an MFA in Poetry from Purdue University. She collects buttons, and is enthusiastic about birds.

Toward a Free Palestine: Resources to Learn About and Act for Palestine

We are proud to present this text as part of a list of resources to take action for and learn about Palestine, as well as works by Palestinian artists, writers, activists, and cultural workers.

The post On the Edge of a Volcano, a Rip through a Gazan’s Heart appeared first on Mizna.

“The reality that it is the refugees, who lost their homes and land in 1948 and have been living under difficult conditions for 76 years, are the ones targeted the most in this murderous war, and are thus paying the highest price of all. It is difficult to accept that it is mostly the refugees who are willing to pick up the weapons and fight a nuclear army with their own blood, whether it is the refugees in the Gaza Strip or in the West Bank.”

—Noora Said

During a few visits to Jenin Refugee camp in the north of the West Bank, Yousef Hammad documents a reality of destruction and resilience through a series of black and white photos. Leaving the role of contrast mainly to the shadows, this low-contrast series captures the stillness of life in the camp, as in the rest of Palestine; Palestinians await a bloody and unbalanced battle to determine their future. The camp is filled with bullet holes, relatively vacant streets, and destroyed houses, instead of its own people, whose lives have become impossible with the constant military invasions, which have only escalated since mid-May 2021. These photographs were captured from late May to early June of 2024, just a few months before the Israeli occupation’s largest recent military operation titled “Operation Summer Camps,” but after the second largest military invasion which happened in July 2023, a few months before the most recent Zionist genocidal escalation in Gaza. 

Driving through Jenin city to reach the camp, the rubble of the destroyed George Habash roundabout lies in the middle of the street. Habash, referred to as “the wise,” was a prominent Palestinian leader who founded the leftist political party, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP). He worked as its secretary general from its founding in 1967 until 2000. As a revolutionary leader, Israel intentionally targeted the urban symbol commemorating his memory and crucial role in the Palestinian liberation struggle. In the current manic psyche of the Israeli state, the army has been strategically and relentlessly targeting material monuments that symbolize resistance. There are many examples from Jenin camp, but some of the most noteworthy are the repeated destructions of the memorial that marks the exact spot where the martyred journalist, Shireen Abu Akleh, was shot and killed in cold blood by the Zionist army. They also destroyed the camp’s stone-made entrance, which is called “The Arch of Victory;” it displays the camp’s name and photos of martyrs, and a metal horse sculpture was built from the ruins of the ambulances that Israel bombed during its 2002 large offensive.

Jenin Refugee camp is referred to by Palestinians as the “castle of the revolutionaries” or the “capital of resistance” because it has historically been a birthplace of resistance fighters, and has always witnessed intense battles between its refugees and the invading occupation forces. Subsequently, the Israeli military refers to the camp as the “wasp’s nest” due to their obsessive panic over potential operations by a growing militant brigade. Since 2021, Zionist military invasions of Jenin refugee camp have become a near-weekly occurrence. In the year 2022, according to a Palestinian data center, Mo’ta, Jenin witnessed 97 confrontation incidents, 58 shooting incidents, and 41 stone-throwing incidents. According to research conducted by Abd Albasit Khalaf and published by the Palestine Studies Institute, Jenin city, including all of its villages and refugee camps, has been invaded more than 1500 times in 2023. In another documentation by the Anadolou Agency, from the 7th of October 2023 through the 21st of May 2024, Jenin has been invaded 72 times. Long before the most recent and brutal “Summer Camp” military operation, the resilient Jenin refugee camp has been witnessing recurrent military invasions since mid-2021.

The uprising in 2021, which some refer to as the “unity uprising” and others refer to as the “dignity uprising,” is crucial to the ongoing war in Palestine and the genocide in Gaza. The year 2021 witnessed a re-ignition of Palestinian armed resistance and revived a sense of Palestinian nationalism. This occurred gradually after a series of escalating Zionist attacks on Palestinians. First was the struggle of the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood residents, whom Israel is still attempting to forcefully evict out of their homes in Jerusalem. Palestinians came together from every city to participate in solidarity demonstrations in Sheikh Jarrah and protest the potential expulsion of these families. It is noteworthy here to mention that the photographer, Yousef, and his family are among the families living in one of the houses threatened with eviction. Unsurprisingly, the Israeli police and army met these peaceful protestors with brutal force to completely and immediately dismantle the demonstrations that were taking place daily.

Second, in May, during Ramadan of that year, the occupation invaded al-Aqsa mosque multiple times, attacking Palestinian worshippers there with tear gas bombs and batons and arresting more than 300 people. Both the al-Aqsa mosque invasion and the Sheikh Jarrah solidarity protests sparked a smaller uprising, especially amongst the youth of Jerusalem, historic Palestine, and refugee camps in the West Bank. The mobilization coming from Palestinians with Israeli citizenship presented an unhappy surprise to the occupation state. It completely infuriated the occupation government and a large-scale arrest campaign was conducted as a result. Following al-Aqsa raids and as a stand of solidarity, the resistance in Gaza began firing missiles at the occupation state, marking the start of the 2021 war on Gaza, which Palestinians call the “Sword of Jerusalem” battle. On a military level, supposedly, the Palestinians have won. However, the broken hearts and limbs of the orphans and the parents without their children resonate forever. Finally, in September of that year, six prisoners managed to heroically escape Jalbou, one of the most secure Israeli prisons, by digging a tunnel to freedom, though they were all later found and re-arrested.

These intensifying aggressions by Israel caused the birth of many combatant battalions to re-form, especially in refugee camps across the West Bank, synchronizing with the new generation’s moment and experience. Jenin is no exception. The Jenin battalion re-emerged, uniting combatants belonging to different political parties. The last three years have been tough on the seven-decade-old refugee camp and its inhabitants. With every weekly invasion, Palestinians, including children, are killed, as houses are burnt and damaged. Nonetheless, collective punishment is central to the strategic policy of the Zionist army. As their bulldozers destroy the infrastructure in nearly every invasion, they are cutting off people’s water pipes, electricity, and transportation, causing an obstruction of the refugees’ everyday life. In July 2023, Israel conducted an aggression against the camp, the largest since 2002. Today, many of the camp’s residents have temporarily left because a normal daily life has been rendered impossible. Many of them are sheltering with families and friends who live in the city of Jenin. 

Looking at the destruction and death in Jenin’s Camp, I feel something similar to the pain I feel while looking at the destruction and death in Gaza, the pain of knowing that those who are suffering now were always in vain, even before this renewed pain, knowing that the water pipe and electricity cable, were fixed 365 times last year, knowing that so many loved ones were lost already, and before even reconciling with that, a new loved one is lost. They were all young, so young and full of life.  

Through a broken brick wall, a segment of a sign of an UNRWA project reads “Jenin camp rehabilitation project.” The moment several Western countries unjustly cut off their funding from UNRWA, they cut it off from 5.6 million Palestinian refugees, including the roughly 2 million refugees in Gaza. That politically motivated decision, defying the orders of the International Court of Justice regarding the genocide case raised by South Africa, is an unnegotiable act of collective punishment that extends geographically to the remaining Palestinian refugees in the West Bank, Jordan, Syria, and Lebanon. Indeed, this biased act that submits to an Israeli historical strategy to eliminate the Palestinian refugee and their right of return; one that has an immeasurable impact on Palestinian refugees everywhere, including refugees of Jenin camp that depend on the aid for their survival. 

It is difficult to accept today’s reality that keeps resurfacing amidst the genocide. The reality that it is the refugees, who lost their homes and land in 1948 and have been living under difficult conditions for 76 years, are the ones targeted the most in this murderous war, and are thus paying the highest price of all. It is difficult to accept that it is mostly the refugees who are willing to pick up the weapons and fight a nuclear army with their own blood, whether it is the refugees in the Gaza Strip or in the West Bank. 

The slogan in all Palestinian refugee camps remains: “One day, we will return.”

Noora Said is a Palestinian filmmaker and artist. Said is also a co-founder of an audiovisual production house, Sirdab Studio. With an MA in Artist Film and Moving Image from Goldsmiths College University of London, and a BA in Film and Media Arts and Sociology, Said’s work delves into contested spaces, identities, and narratives, through socio- and geo-political lenses.

Yousef Hammad is a professional and self-taught Director of Photography and filmmaker from Sheikh Jarrah, Jerusalem. With a distinct filming and visual identity, Hammad has worked with prominent Palestinian, Arab, and international directors, artists, and cultural and human rights organizations. Hammad is also the co-founder of an audiovisual production house, Sirdab studio.

Toward a Free Palestine: Resources to Learn About and Act for Palestine

We are proud to present this text as part of a list of resources to take action for and learn about Palestine, as well as works by Palestinian artists, writers, activists, and cultural workers.

The post 1500 Invasions Later: Photos of Destruction and Resilience from the Jenin Refugee Camp appeared first on Mizna.

For the first time in recent memory, since Naomi Shihab Nye’s nomination for 19 Varieties of Gazelle in 2002, the 2024 National Book Award finalist list was graced with the presence of Palestinian American poetry: the books of Fady Joudah and Lena Khalaf Tuffaha. Unsurprisingly, especially contextualized within a broader literary cultural sphere of Palestinians claiming that mere representational wins within the US can never be enough as the Zionist-American genocide spirals on, both Joudah and Tuffaha used their NBA platforms to call out American complacency and inspire further direct action to end this genocide and work toward a free Palestine. Lena Khalaf Tuffaha, who was the winner of the National Book Award in Poetry for her collection Something about Living, began her acceptance speech by reorienting us in space-time, translating a good evening in the US into a good morning to “beloved Gaza,” translating an annual ceremony in ordinary time in the US into the 411th day of genocidal escalation for Gaza. 

The night before this historic win, at the finalists reading, Fady Joudah and Lena Khalaf Tuffaha were the only authors who used their platforms explicitly to bring Palestine into the space of the National Book Awards. There, Joudah performed a devastating new poem which was written  for the occasion, turning toward the complicit US audience and daring to ask, “Wouldn’t you agree that Palestine today is the empire of the human heart?” Tuffaha read excerpts from Something about Living that connect today’s moment to other events in our ongoing Nakba, such as the great March of Return and the Zionist invasion of Lebanon, during which June Jordan’s “Moving towards Home” was written. 

I sincerely hope that this NBA recognition inspires further critical attention to the lifelong bodies of work by these two brilliant poets. I am a longtime lover of Fady Joudah’s work, not merely for his capacity to expertly translate Palestinians living and dead, but also for his own poetry. The lyric momentum of the NBA-nominated collection […] is not a linear progression through our ongoing Nakba, but is instead a circular arc of returning. Traces and echoes from his earlier The Earth in the Attic and Alight appear recast through the Nakba of now—for it is and always was that same Nakba—in ways which ask the reader, if even implicitly, where have you been in all of this? Similarly, Something about Living, which was drafted and under contract before the Zionist entity’s 2023 genocidal escalations, embodies a line from Tuffaha’s Kaan and Her Sisters, “repetition is a Nakba,” as it creates un/knowable spectral rhymes between the current genocidal assault on journalists in Gaza and repetitions in recent history such as the assassination of Shireen Abu Akleh (allah yerhamha) and the broader question of, per Edward Said, Palestinian permission to narrate. The nonmetaphorical nature of our permission to narrate can be seen in the details of the post-National Book Award Nomination trajectory for both poets, with NPR censoring words such as “genocide” in their coverage.

I dream of one day assigning these two books together to future poetry students as they provide different models of lyric form and relationality through Nakba. Whereas Joudah’s […] embodies a generative formlessness, with poems liberated from titles and pronouns, that flow like water, undermining violent Western desires for self-explanation and qualification in such a poetics, Tuffaha’s Something about Living builds on her last book’s project of radicalizing Western poetic forms through sonnet crowns that grow thorns, centos composed entirely of Darwish lines, and poems riffing on intellectuals such as Edward Said alongside poets such as Myung Mi Kim and June Jordan.

Although the Western lyric is, at its essence, understood to be defined as the genre which directs its mimesis toward the performance of the mind in solitary thought (see these useful theses from Wendy Lotterman), the lyric “I” of Joudah’s […] directs its mimesis toward becoming an anti/mirror of sorts, refracting and reflecting the many ways that Western living’s unspoken assumptions are predicated on the annihilation of Palestinians. To be a “you” here, is to be not merely an annihilation of the “I” but to be unable to imagine, let alone build, an otherwise. Never have I seen a book so unapologetically unafraid to love Palestinians on our own terms, however il/legible to this world, from the river to the sea. Similarly, Tuffaha’s book, which ends with the lines, “I have no idea what hope is, but our people have taught me a million ways to love,” lingers in the details of our land, our love, and the space between. Here, “love is paying attention,” and also “the father who plants an olive tree for every newborn,” and also “a story we never tire of telling.” Whereas Joudah’s lyric “I” made generative space of the unexplained and unqualified, Tuffaha’s makes generative space of every act of naming: every poem made me research histories of Palestine I had never known, through names that cut through every settler mythos like a vector I never knew I needed. Here, to read Tuffaha’s work is, itself, to return to Palestine, however im/possibly. 

To commemorate this historic moment for our community and hold its grief alongside anger at the failures of the US publishing industry, we are honored to publish these works, in hopes that they may inspire and embolden our community in this impossible hour. With this, echoing the words of Abdelrahman ElGendy, we offer our heartfelt congratulations to the National Book Foundation for being lucky enough to carry the names of Palestinian poets in a time like this.

—George Abraham, Mizna Executive Editor

Are you in solitude with market or in solidarity 
with spectacle? Which part of you 
isn’t a human shield? Whose body parts
are mine? Do you understand that I am 
a national liberation movement?

—Fady Joudah

What is upon us
will require mercy. Let the plural be
a return of us.

— Lena Khalaf Tuffaha

Letter to June Jordan in September

by Lena Khalaf Tuffaha

I cannot pass the anniversary of that first news event of childhood without returning to your poem. How from my house I watched. And watching, watched my grief-stricken parents unable to speak. How I leaned into the screen, the chords of the cries, searching for what was recognizable of fingers and thighs, of bracelets and moustaches. Macabre arrangement of bodies with names like our own. I cannot pass without your words. Something about witnessing twice removed. About distances magnified by the shift into language. Of dailyness and my own children’s vernacular and the machine. Grinding us all in its jaws. I met a girl from the camp at a reading in Beirut. She asked if we could talk about the life of poetry. Our families are hauled off to the world of the dead, and every day it is on screen. In Gaza, we’re watching Ferguson, and in Atlanta we’re watching Jerusalem watching Minneapolis watching. Their weapons and their training programs indistinguishable. The word almost flickers for a nanosecond. Here I note the shelf-life of self-censorship, legacy of our era. Some days poems are scrawled on pieces of cardboard and carried on our shoulders at the protest like martyrs. Here I should say something about hope. Here I should say something about living.

On the Thirtieth Friday We Consider Plurals

by Lena Khalaf Tuffaha

At the border, a flock of journalists.
A sacrifice of tires burned behind us.
Beneath the picnic tents, a funeral of families.
What else will we become in Gaza if we gather,
if we carry our voices to the razored edge?
We were met by a gallop of prayers,
clamoring recitatives puncturing the shroud
of humid air. We were met by a delirium

of greetings, peace-be-upon-us surreal
between embraces, the horizon locked
and loaded. What is upon us
will require mercy. Let the plural be
a return of us. A carnage of blessings—
bodies freed from broken promises,
from the incumbrances of waiting.

Inimitable

by Fady Joudah

Is this the banality of evil reconvened?
Are you gen G?
Did you vote to make it great again 
or was genocide never genocide to you?
Is there a light inside you dying 
to go out? Who will you mine 
to keep your night bright? How are you
always unprecedented 
even as echo? Am I, a Palestinian, ever not 
an analogy whose progenitor you are? What  
makes your common decency heroic?
Why are you so often the baby 
and I’m the bathwater? 
Will you judge me if I reply Allahu akbar?
And when you forever hold my peace at your altar
is it with or without Salamu alaikum? 
Or, if I say Free, free, will you fill in the blank 
from the river to the sea? 
What do you remember
of Iraqi memory? What if Palestinians 
love their freedom more
than you love their unfreedom?
Did you know this about the way you love?
Did you convert my ashes to your gold dust?
“Horror beyond the reach of psychology,”
have you heard this expression before? 
Are you in solitude with market or in solidarity 
with spectacle? Which part of you 
isn’t a human shield? Whose body parts
are mine? Do you understand that I am 
a national liberation movement? 
Can we hear it for tiny Lebanon 
fighting off the mother of all crimes 
as the laws that made you king said 
one should? Have you been to Yemen 
or just bombed it? How full of emissions 
are you about your emissions?
When did you first export your wisdom
to those you destroy? 
Do you really think I’ll forgive you 
without you asking for forgiveness?
Why should you wait 
until asking is synonymous with your defeat?
Wasn’t tragedy always there 
before you sequenced it?
Is your methylated double helix 
an individual or a corporation? 
For example, when I say, “Horror 
beyond the reach of genetics,”
will you give me or yourself a standing ovation? 
Does Gaza come to mind? 
Wouldn’t you agree 
that Palestine today
is the empire of the human heart?
Have you thanked me or are you worried 
I’ll charge you interest?
What about Sudan? Congo? 
What have you done to the earth?
When were you in love last?
Was it any good?
What have you done to the remainder of my life?
Has it occurred to you 
that you are a childhood robber?
Do you remember that game? 
Was it ever a game? 

Fady Joudah is the author of […] and six other collections of poems. He has translated several collections of poetry from the Arabic and is the co-editor and co-founder of the Etel Adnan Poetry Prize. He was a winner of the Yale Series of Younger Poets competition in 2007 and has received the Jackson Poetry Prize, a PEN award, a Banipal/Times Literary Supplement prize from the UK, the Griffin Poetry Prize, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and the Arab American Book Award. He lives in Houston, with his wife and kids, where he practices internal medicine.

Lena Khalaf Tuffaha is a poet, essayist, and translator. She is the author of Water & Salt which won the 2018 Washington State Book Award; Kaan and Her Sisters, a finalist for the Firecracker Award; and Something about Living, winner of the 2022 Akron Prize for Poetry and the National Book Awards 2024 for Poetry. Her writing has been published in journals including the Los Angeles Review of Books, The Nation, Poets.org, Protean Magazine, and Prairie Schooner, and in anthologies including The Long Devotion and We Call to the Eye & the Night. She was the translator and curator of the 2022 series Poems from Palestine at The Baffler. She is currently curating a series on Palestinian writers for Words Without Borders entitled Against Silence.

Toward a Free Palestine: Resources to Learn About and Act for Palestine

We are proud to present this text as part of a list of resources to take action for and learn about Palestine, as well as works by Palestinian artists, writers, activists, and cultural workers.

The post Honoring Palestinian Poets in a Time of Genocide: Poems from National Book Award Winner Lena Khalaf Tuffaha + Finalist Fady Joudah appeared first on Mizna.

Executive Editor George Abraham’s introduction to Mizna 25.1: Catastrophe contemplates the work of editing in a time of genocide. Link to order here.

Love takes the form of rain clouds: we accumulate despite our im/possible wounds, gather even in miraculous conditions. We join our kin in the swarm, all of whom gathering, like us, as waters from unknowable sources. And then the flood.

—George Abraham

Toward an Apocalypse of Letters

Challenging the colonial world is not a rational confrontation of viewpoints. It is not a discourse on the universal, but the impassioned claim by the colonized that their world is fundamentally different.

—Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth

Palestine is not a laboratory. It is not a site of sympathy. It cannot be reduced to a sterile problem. Palestine is a place of abundance, an abundance of lessons about persisting in the looped and looping time of the present . . . There is no postcolonial, postracial, postZionist. We cannot await a secular salvation or a messianic apocalypse. We are in the apocalypse.

—Sherene Seikaly, “Nakba in the Age
of Catastrophe,” Jadaliyya.com

This does not seek a remedy

this does not need a balm
this needs an ending

—Dionne Brand, Nomenclature for the Time Being

What does it mean to edit in a time of genocide, or moreover, a time when the many ongoing colonial catastrophes that underpin our current world order are hypervisible for the communities we claim to serve? The job of the editor, in one view, boils down to keeping the publication machine going. We check in on writers to keep timelines synced toward a publication deadline. We read pieces closely to move them through content editing and copyediting, layout, and proofing with as minimal potential setbacks as possible. A question I have been grappling with over the course of the past eleven months is, how can the material and ideological implications of this job translate to serving a community that is, intentionally, trying to stop this horrific genocidal death machine; a community making art that, as Mizna beloved Rasha Abdulhadi says, can be thrown like sand into the gears of empire? How does one reconcile these opposing orientations in space-time, making room for the long, deep, slow, relational thinking our movements need, while the world accelerates in its insistence on unmaking us?

One answer, of course, is that communally-focused editors can serve as ambassadors, working to break down imperially-imposed barriers for their authors and build possibility-generating avenues during a time of catastrophe. I cannot introduce this issue of Mizna without naming the ways much of its construction was inspired by listening to poets at explicitly pro-Palestinian gatherings: Aurielle Marie’s pieces which came to us after a Poets for Palestine event organized by Claire Schwartz in October 2023; Olivia Elias and Yahya Ashour who came to us from the immense labor of love that went into organizing Palestine Writes in September 2023 against the wishes of one of the wealthiest institutions in the world; the constellation of conversations that emerged from Mizna+RAWIFest 2023. 

But this is only part of the answer. How do we reach our people, by which I mean continuously go out of our way to find and welcome our people, in a world whose catastrophes are set on tearing us apart, from our land and from each other, isolating us into silos to make us vessels of pure imperial domination? What is a politics of listening (or the dangerous charades masquerading in the name of listening¹) if not backed by an anticolonial politics of rigorously working to break borders as we expand the circle, to accept the infinite unknown implicit to all community-building? In this way, the job of the editor is not merely to be a listener but to be a cultivator of relations: to provide the shelter necessary to keeping each other, let alone each other’s artistry, alive. In this way, I return to the original classical Arabic meaning of the word mizna: a desert cloud that brings needed shelter, perhaps the possibility of rain, in a world insistent on the catastrophe of otherwise.

Having taken on an executive editor position in July 2023, I have, over the past few months, had to learn the beauty and terror of working to build a real-life mizna. At every turn, I have been reminded of just how difficult this position can be. When institutions canceled events with us last-minute because of racist fears of hosting Palestinians in a time like this, I learned and relearned that to be a mizna is to pivot on a moment’s notice, responding to whatever catastrophes the day may bring us. When our insistence on decolonial language and framings were watered down by institutions who cannot see us as more than a “cultural heritage” space, or who cannot tolerate words like “insurgent” or “intifada” or any other gesture toward resistance, I learned that to be a mizna was to embody a kind of collective-oriented sumud: one that knows no other name for future than the collective, the eternal becoming of us as Palestinians and lovers of Palestinians. When, again, board after board of institution after failed settler institution, engaged us in bad faith, gaslit our people, and could not even virtually look us in the eye, I learned that to be a mizna was to be an im/possible wound: to know that many are unwilling to meet us in the depths of our catastrophe, and thus, possibility emerges when confronted by the miracle of finding our people and becoming more radically ourselves together.

This is the ethos I have inherited, from the generations of (predominantly non-male) SWANA artists, editors, laborers, dreamers, and intellectuals who built Mizna. I remember visiting the Mizna office in summer 2023, when our executive director Lana Barkawi filled a box with every single issue the journal has ever published, including our now out-of-print first issue from 1999. As we paged through issue after issue, she recalled the tiniest details: how Ahimsa Timoteo Bodhrán, who graces our pages still today, used the term SWANA in our first issue, decades before it became popularized as a less Eurocentric term for the region; how a flyer from Suheir Hammad’s legendary Poetry for the People reading, presented by Mizna in March 2004 at Open Book in Minneapolis, fell out of a 2003 issue of Mizna, bringing back memories of the packed room that resonate to this day; how the words of contemporary beloveds, from local legends like William Nour to icons such as Naomi Shihab Nye, Susan Muaddi Darraj, and Joe Kadi, consistently appear in our pages, carrying the many trajectories of our writing community through miniature snapshots in time. At every moment, Mizna held the im/possibility of the time in which it was being published, responding to events we now know as history, such as 9/11 and the Arab Spring, and memorializing deceased giants in our community from Edward Said and Mahmoud Darwish to Etel Adnan, in more recent memory. Listening to Lana talk through page after page, I came to understand that this is the nature of our work: love arrives in the attention to even the most minute details. Love takes the form of rain clouds: we accumulate despite our im/possible wounds, gather even in miraculous conditions. We join our kin in the swarm, all of whom gathering, like us, as waters from unknowable sources. And then the flood.

Carrying the entirety of Mizna’s print history, I headed to the airport the next day to board my plane to Chicago, only for the box to set off the TSA scanners. An officer extracted the box of journals from my suitcase before proceeding to inspect every single issue, flipping through every page, testing the surfaces with a chemical swab, and even shaking out some of them to be sure nothing more than the occasional flyer was tucked away in its corners. I didn’t know it, then, but I was, indeed, carrying a weapon that none of us had the capacity of imagining in that moment: I was holding a sheer force that would keep me and many of my loved ones going through the months of genocidal escalation to come, after sustaining itself for such a history for twenty-five years; a force, at once, in/visible to our enemy; a force escaping the margins of imperial terror or colonial anxiety. I was carrying a flood.

* * *

April 2024, seven months of escalating genocide in Gaza. While cowriting EVE with my good friend Fargo Tbakhi at an Arab American National Museum residency, I began venting to him one particularly stressful afternoon. I was juggling our project alongside my editorial work, and more broadly, the work of demanding better from literary institutions in this moment of genocide. Although Gaza deserves our endurance was a running throughline in my head, the burnout was catching up to me. It was the result of months of stalling and bad-faith engagement from the Poetry Foundation, during a boycott that, as I came to see, was popularly supported more out of fear of potential criticism than from a place of actual care for and commitment to Palestinian liberation. At the time, I was also months-deep into conversations with Kundiman’s founders over their (now former) board’s wavering stance on Palestinian liberation—something that, in the months that followed as the Kundiman board proceeded to betray their constituency and fire their ethical staff, I would come to see as a small moment within a broader pattern of bad faith engagement, stalling for self-protection, and downright manipulation of Palestinian generosity. These moments culminated in my venting to Fargo, and eventually my outburst, “Why can’t these people just do their jobs? Why are they so bad at the work they so proudly claim to be doing?” To which Fargo replied something like, “Habibi, you’re having these difficulties and conversations with them precisely because they are doing their jobs.” 

At that point, it all clicked for me. What I was witnessing with these institutions, amid the broader landscape of horror stories from academia and literary nonprofit work, was just a microcosm of that terrible fact: this stalling and antirevolutionary manipulation of politically activated writers was these people’s jobs. They had aligned themselves with empire the second they stepped foot into the executive board or foundation or tenure-track or whatever function they played. They had signed an invisible contract with the ruling class to join their project of producing the right kind of literary citizens: writers who know not to bite the hand that feeds them; literary nonprofits (including the many marginalized identity organizations currently wavering on PACBI) engaging in corporatization, political sterilization, and otherwise joining a united front to insist on silence and apathy in the face of imperial genocide; editors who operate with an assumption of scarcity, neoliberal diversity and inclusion politics, and reform-centered ideologies that are deradicalizing in nature. The types that respond to genocide by reposting Darwish quotes and decidedly not by listening to Palestinian demands of our cultural moment and joining the cause. The types who, on one hand, solicit writing from Palestinians and claim to make space for us, knowing full and well they’ve ignored us for the decades when we had less cultural capital to lend them. The types who, on the other hand, can only stomach Palestinians when we are dead but have no ability to support us while we are still living, to say nothing of insisting on our aliveness.

This is the nature of the neocolonized literary citizen: a term I’m using to name the imperial collaborators who, while often not directly employed by colonial governmental administrations (though PEN America’s former CEO and the Poetry Foundation’s former president are disturbing exceptions) are willing accomplices to empire, upholding values that implicitly morph into, and otherwise fail to challenge, imperial lines of power. These values include but are not limited to implicit anti-Palestinian racism, normalization of Zionism and the occupation, and superficial, corporate DEI policies that hide the underlying elite capture of identity politics writ large. 

The neocolonized literary citizen is a slant rhyme with what Fanon terms the colonized intellectual in The Wretched of the Earth: the kind that seeks to become the exact colonized elite that the colonialist bourgeoisie seek contact with in moments of potential anticolonial insurgence and liberation.² The kind that “learned from his masters that the individual must assert himself” and prioritizes individualistic, representational wins at the expense of collective-oriented structural repair.³ The neocolonized literary citizen is the kind of il/literate that finds value in projects like Poets for Harris or Renga for Obama; the kind of liberal that engages in a daily performance of becoming the ideal representation of themselves, and furthermore, works to service, repair, and otherwise maintain the imperial death machine that produces such a regime of neoliberal representation. In other words, they are (often) not the literal CIA, but they’re comfortable uncritically supporting the new DEI-washed faces of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, the Paris Review, the Stegner program, and other spaces with such histories of statist infiltration and political sanitization.⁴ They are not literal workers of the political establishment responsible for maintaining the genocides that underpin our current world order but are more than willing to accept material support from, and mold their politics to implicitly service, such regimes. As such, the neocolonized literary citizen ultimately proves to be fundamentally incapable of thinking (or acting) structurally or responsibly. 

The problem is im/material. Material, on one hand, in the sense that all money is blood money, and no one, including us at Mizna, can consider themselves exempt from the horrors of the nonprofit industrial complex. It would take an entire essay, or more, to unpack these material implications.⁵ The problem is also one of imagination—or rather the ways in which these material realities implicitly hinder our imaginative potential. What would it mean for culture workers to orient ourselves not by a politics of scarcity but by one of abundance: to live and embody a praxis that knows the job of the editor, instead of selecting representative literary citizens to uplift, is one of dreaming and building structures capable of holding the sheer mass and magnitude of our people’s brilliance? What if instead of participating in the reproduction of an imperial mentality of hoarding wealth and putting our heads down out of fear of backlash from the ruling class, we engage in the harder work of liberating and redistributing such resources that have been stolen from our communities, in whatever sphere we are able to occupy, however small our impact? In this way, the task of countering an idea of literary citizenship boils down to the question of how capaciously, how im/possibly, we can love our people. Love, understood via Etel Adnan and Franz Fanon, as a kind of violence that destroys world orders and death machines of empire. Love understood in all its impossible hijackings, in all its necessary excess. 

Palestinians have shown us this kind of love: in their political actions from the homeland to the diaspora, and also in the ways their literary works join (but do not replace or impede) resistance. Suppose US-based poets were to shed their egos—their allegiance to imperial Craft⁶ as described by Fargo Tbakhi, their fixations on representational wins. Suppose we were to take inspiration from our kin in Gaza, all of Palestine, and the Palestinian diaspora, instead, who have survived under im/possible conditions beneath the bombs we paid for, at the checkpoints we funded, within institutions whose inclusivity we applaud as they pave over our corpses. What kinds of relations—to each other, to marginalized people in our communities, to the planet we’re actively murdering—might we build toward by taking the lead of the dispossessed as we fight alongside them for liberation? What kind of world is possible if we, as artists and culture workers, model a more responsible listening, a more insurgent response, appropriate to the kinds of catastrophes that underpin our colonial world order? How might we take their lead to build a world where—instead of upholding the normative trend of pitting Sudanese and Palestinian folks against each other in a colonially-mediated audition for empathy, as pointed out by Safia Elhillo⁷—we are able to unpack the structural entanglements of our shared struggles with rigor and integrity; to say, we cannot fight for a free Palestine without fighting against states like the UAE who are complicit in Sudanese, Gazan, and many other genocides that structure this world order?

The question, again, is one of imagination. How might we better encourage structural-oriented thinking, highlighting the interconnectedness of our movements, instead of selling out to a scarcity myth that people cannot hold more than one struggle in their minds at a given time? Isn’t this the exact imaginative il/literacy that the elite need of neocolonized literary citizens? Suppose our response, instead of isolation, was one of the hard, rigorous, ongoing work of relation-building through catastrophe and editorial work therein. Suppose this was the Nakba that made organizers of us all, academics and editors included? Suppose this Nakba inspired the kind of love that comrades like June Jordan, Etel Adnan, and other radical writers of past generations worked so hard to model for us? Suppose we took seriously the words of Black queer Southern organizer and poet Aurielle Marie who, in a heart-stopping poem that meets Palestinians at the depths of our catastrophe, insists, “don’t you run from me. love me back. let us all be together beneath this green sun.” Suppose we were to finally break the cyclic catastrophes induced by the villanelle that has become of western empire that, as River 瑩瑩 Dandelion reminds us in their poem, will end “only in ashes.” Suppose we were to take seriously the stakes Mohammed Zenia articulates when saying, “in a political poem, you write like a suicide bomber or it’s not political.” How might these poems offer us, if not a balm, a brief ending; if not an answer, the questions that will get us there? What relationalities are waiting for us on the other side of empire?

* * *

The works of this issue, brought to us by gatherings in a time of catastrophe, are but a small portrait of the ways our community embodies the kind of decolonial love that resists the closures and boundings of neocolonized literary citizenship. As the US faces a rising fascist right wing, proudly invoking legal canon that deems Black people subhuman, alongside an increasingly fascist democratic party that dismisses catastrophized Palestinians as just another single issue, this edition of Mizna assembles work insisting that we make catastrophe empire’s urgent issue, and furthermore, models the kinds of relationalities possible beyond the current power configurations plaguing our literary landscape. As PEN America responds to principled writers who boycott them for continued silence on Palestine and a long history of entanglement with the Zionist entity with accusations of flattening nuance or inhibiting free exchanges of ideas, the authors in this issue offer, instead, a lexicon of abundance: the kind of abundance that, in a poem by Alan Semerdjian dedicated to Artsakh, ends in the insistence on Armenian aliveness; the kind of abundance that holds more than thirty years of Arab American history, as Summer Farah does in her epistolary poems to Etel Adnan, in a poem written after our Mizna+RAWIFest gathering in October 2023, where Palestinian love for each other looks like “leena’s hand in mine three days straight”; the kind of abundance capable, as Michael Lawrence Payne has done, of translating poetry from eleventh-century Gazan Palestinian poet, Sulaymān al-Ghazzī, with a grief that’s as heavy, relevant, and instructive today as it was then; the kind of abundance that ties together the geopolitical and intimate scales of catastrophe, as Leila Mansouri has done in her short story “Flashbang.”

Although this issue is heavy with many griefs, especially with Sudanese, Armenian, and Palestinian writers at the center, the process of editing it has reminded us of how we are not alone in this struggle. This issue would not have been possible without our comrades from RAWI, who occupy an unique position in the literary landscape as a grassroots organization building community from the ground up and modeling inclusivity and repair beyond what is capable of literary institutions. Long-time Mizna family, such as Leila Abdelrazaq, Ruba El Melik, leena aboutaleb, Mejdulene Bernard Shomali, and Ahimsa Timoteo Bodhrán, join with many writers making their first appearances in our pages: elder Nakba survivor and Francophone Palestinian poet Olivia Elias, alongside critically acclaimed writers Noor Hindi, Nadia Shammas, mónica teresa ortiz, Danez Smith, and Arthur Kayzakian, alongside Sudanese writer J Omer and Palestinian American Ghazzawi writer Sarah Aziza. Together, with the staff laboring to make this issue and every beloved contributor across the world, we stand in steadfast solidarity with our kin, and everyone around the world resisting the many colonial catastrophes that underpin this world order.

Together, the mizna of this issue is a rare accumulation in today’s literary landscape. The literature of empire will never have what we have between these pages; they will never, truly, know love. They who only know how to murder each other, in and beyond their words, for the sake of that failed love: the kind that only knows names like hoarding and borders, and never abundance, liberation, unboundedness. They who cave to illiterate executive boards, who allow cops to lead their foundations, who make promises to our community that they are incapable of fulfilling because they are incapable of loving anyone, including and especially their own selves.

We will not mince words: the moment we are witnessing is nothing short of apocalypse. And so, in response, we demand nothing short of an apocalypse of letters.

May we gather.

May we swarm.

Then, the flood.

1. 1. Fargo Tbakhi, “Being Listened to: On Philip Metres’s Shrapnel Maps, Colonialism, and the Violence of Conversation,” The Poetry Project (Fall 2020). Retrieved from https://www.poetryproject.org/publications/newsletter/262-fall-2020/being-listened-to-on-philip-metres-shrapnel-maps-colonialism-and-the-violence-of-conversation ︎
2. 2. Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (New York: Grove Press, 2005), 9.  ︎
3. 3. Fanon, 11. ︎
4. 4. For further reading, see Eric Bennett’s Workshops of Empire: Stegner, Engle, and American Creative Writing during the Cold War (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2015), which, amusingly, was published by the University of Iowa Press.  ︎
5. 5. For further reading, see INCITE!’s The Revolution Will Not Be Funded (Durham: Duke University Press, 2017).  ︎
6. 6. See Fargo Nissim Tbakhi’s “Notes on Craft: Writing in the Hour of Genocide” Protean Magazine (December 8, 2023). https://proteanmag.com/2023/12/08/notes-on-craft-writing-in-the-hour-of-genocide/ ︎
7. 7. Subscribe to safiamafia.substack.com to read Safia Elhillo’s article, “we shouldn’t have to compete for empathy: a war that defies summary, that defies soundbites,” which is also excerpted on her instagram @safiamafia.  ︎

George Abraham (they/هو) is a Palestinian American poet, essayist, critic, performance artist. Their debut poetry collection Birthright (Button Poetry, 2020) won the Arab American Book Award and was a Lambda Literary Award finalist. They are the executive editor of Mizna, and co-editor of HEAVEN LOOKS LIKE US: Palestinian Poetry (Haymarket Books, 2025). They are a graduate of Northwestern’s Litowitz MFA+MA program, and teach at Amherst College as a Writer-in-Residence. 

Toward a Free Palestine: Resources to Learn About and Act for Palestine

We are proud to present this text as part of a list of resources to take action for and learn about Palestine, as well as works by Palestinian artists, writers, activists, and cultural workers.

The post Toward an Apocalypse of Letters—Foreword to 25.1: Catastrophe appeared first on Mizna.