This Pride Month 2025, Mizna is honored to be republishing selections from Mizna 21.1: Queer + Trans Voices for every week of June. This week, Ghinwa Jawhari teases apart the multiple layers of queer experience of a summer spent in Lebanon.

Use coupon code SWANAPRIDE25 for a discount on Mizna 21.1: Queer + Trans Voices and the special collection I Want Sky honoring martyred Egyptian queer activist Sarah Hegazy, valid through the end of June 2025.

—Nour Eldin H., assistant editor

we find fairuz on the radio. in sleepless tones
newscasters interject with head counts: bodies

—Ghinwa Jawhari

a girlhood summer passes

shouf, lebanon

july war 2006

you curl against me like a burning hair
as airstrikes pock the hillside, bare earth
red as afterbirth. upturned. we knob until
we find fairuz on the radio. in sleepless tones
newscasters interject with head counts: bodies
other bodies have yet to name. the slaughter
a spectacle from your balcony, each missile
a scream of fire & dust. your father’s palestinian
riles in you, wraps your fingers around the rail
like a stone. smoke pillows the heavens black,
gauzes stars away from view. beside me you tear
a weed apart. loves me loves me not loves me loves
until the stem is bare. a girlhood summer passes,
water under the bridge. we are tall & featureless
as the okra crop. we pull cat’s cradles in our hands,
scribble fates in cootie catchers. during the ceasefire
your neighbor begs us to come swim in his pool.
he watches our slim bodies assault the surface
of the water. from his perch he hoots, in english,
bombshell! & we both laugh nervously, thinking
he must be talking about the other. we’ll remember
the brief war this way: dirty water, a man’s eyes
fishing us openly, legs crossed on the wet concrete
as the news drones over fairuz, a list of countries
that have brought warships to collect their citizens.

Ghinwa Jawhari is the author of the chapbook BINT (2021), which was selected by Aria Aber for Radix Media’s inaugural Own Voices Chapbook Prize.

A recipient of fellowships from Kundiman and the Asian American Writers’ Workshop, she is the founding editor of Koukash Review. Her essays, fiction, and poetry appear in Catapult, Mizna, The Adroit Journal, Rusted Radishes, The Margins, Narrative, and elsewhere.

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This Pride Month 2025, Mizna is honored to be republishing selections from Mizna 21.1: Queer + Trans Voices for every week of June. This week, Mejdulene B. Shomali chronicles a revelatory moment of self-realization and tributes the iconic actor Patrick Swayze.

Use coupon code SWANAPRIDE25 for a discount on Mizna 21.1: Queer + Trans Voices and the special collection I Want Sky honoring martyred Egyptian queer activist Sarah Hegazy, valid through the end of June 2025.

—Nour Eldin H., assistant editor

                the bouncer of my road house heart
           my wild Johnny
the first man i thought to love

—Mejdulene B. Shomali

To Patrick Swayze, Thanks for
Everything! Mejdulene Shomali

Patrick Swayze nailed the lift
                baby out of the corner
           into the sky        a rare bird
something beautiful

my VCR rewound & replayed
                to see his smile
           watch her sink down
against his chest        his unbuttoned black shirt

Patrick wore that red dress
                drove queens in the desert
           locks blowing in the convertible breeze
saved Stockard from a bad man

made a whole town believe in something
                in whiteness
           fuchsia sweetheart neckline
lacy black gloves

even as a ghost Patrick moved
                penny up the door i wanted
           to see it again when
he passed too young too gaunt

with what cancer took
                i remember him like this
           tight black jeans no spaghetti arms
twisting hips from tips of feet

Patrick was never a punchline for me
                the bouncer of my road house heart
           my wild Johnny
the first man i thought to love

Mejdulene Bernard Shomali is a queer Palestinian poet and associate professor in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Williams College. She is the author of Between Banat: Queer Arab Critique and Transnational Arab Archives (Duke University Press 2023) and the chapbook agriculture of grief: prayers for my father’s dementia (Finishing Line Press 2024).

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This Pride Month 2025, Mizna is honored to be republishing selections from Mizna 21.1: Queer + Trans Voices for every week of June. This week, Lambda Award-winning trans poet and scholar Trish Salah teaches us about the loneliness of inhabiting spaces beyond where borders demarcate in “Prayer Glitch” and “Blurred Witness”.

Use coupon code SWANAPRIDE25 for a discount on Mizna 21.1: Queer + Trans Voices and the special collection I Want Sky honoring martyred Egyptian queer activist Sarah Hegazy, valid through the end of June 2025.

—Nour Eldin H., assistant editor

When you try to speak of home
What comes out is kisses, birds

—Trish Salah

Prayer Glitch

One sister remembered, one not
One curated voiced in a song cycle
One divides the ocean, a drifter

It is difficult to be molten, alone
Drum the breakers and vanish
Teach the young, without force

Evacuated in silence, not knowing
As readin seed the horizon 
All thought only of glass 

Desired like a monitor nothing 
Hooking up, having had a sex
Arguing with heavy liquor, a mask 

Lonely through the park to the bar
Once could yet be taken up 
The act of only writing poetry

Center halve and childlike report
Sibling questions bred apart
Dare memory’s compassion

River of words, rushing cavities
Claimed seasonal every girl 
In plague, only to repeat

Blurred Witness

What is required by this history? 
A rage muse, it is your body still 

Encircling the city of your lover
Wander the written path

When you try to speak of home
What comes out is kisses, birds

Past, another possible remove, 
How do you become a stranger?

Faces thinly papered over
despite how alike we look

Her past, or his, an awful trust
Without country or reference

To arrive I stay abed for days
Inside a house within another house

Try to retrace what was cast out
quiet 

Born in Halifax, Trish Salah is the author of the Lambda Award-winning Wanting in Arabic, and of Lyric Sexology, Vol. 1. She is widely published in journals and anthologies., and the co-editor of a special issue of TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly, on Transgender Cultural Production. Her research program, Towards a Trans Minor Literature, is an inquiry into aesthetic and political projects of transsexual, trans, genderqueer and two-spirit writers. She recently organized the Writing Trans Genres and Decolonizing and Decriminalizing Trans Genres conferences at the University of Winnipeg. Currently, Salah is assistant professor of Gender Studies at Queen’s University.

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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.

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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.

Raindrops by Mazen Halabi originally appeared in Mizna issue 8.1, in the summer of 2006. In 2025 his work remains one of the numbered works written by or about Syrians to be published by Mizna. While Halabi’s story was first published before the Syrian revolution of 2011 against the Assad regime, and is now running in the aftermath of its fall, his work remains relevant and insightful. Raindrops is a story about youth: its sarcastic and playful moments, as well as the aberrant and painful lessons learned when growing up under a violent regime.

There are two main conditions to storytelling: necessity and safety. We at Mizna hope that 2025 will be the year of safety and storytelling for the Syrian community in all its religions, ethnicities, generations, and identities. We start this hope with Halabi’s story, and extend our hope to all Syrians whose stories are surfacing after decades of extreme violence, censorship, and fear.

—Layla Faraj, editorial assistant

Thunder drummed in jubilation as our tires tangoed with the city’s cobblestones, and we rode like Khalid and Abu Obiedah, banging on the city’s gates, claiming Damascus as our own. We were her boys, and she gently embraced us, pulling the cover of rain over to protect us. Our clothes, drenched and heavy with rain, clung tightly. We were soaked to the last inch of our bodies. We wore soft, innocent smiles. Not a word was uttered.

—Mazen Halabi

RAINDROPS

A winter storm blanketed Minneapolis over the weekend. It painted the city, decorated the trees, and greased the roads. It promised a pretty hectic rush hour come Monday morning. I knew I had to be in the office early, so I left the house earlier than usual. I avoided the main highway and took the city’s side streets. The drive was slow, slippery, but I moved along. I usually spend my commute speeding through the four-lane highway, going through my list of phone calls and mentally recounting my appointments; but that morning I got to see the city waking up, driveways getting shoveled, delivery trucks following their routes, and parents bundling their children up before jettisoning them off to school. Stopped at a traffic light, I noticed a teenager throw a snowball at a friend’s window, yelling for him to come out: “Mikey . . . Mikey . . .” A boy raised the window on the second floor of the English Tudor, poked his head out, and in a half-whisper, so as not to not wake up the rest of the family, answered, “I’m coming.”

These children, painted on a canvas of snow, brought me back to Khaldoun, a boy I met my first year of high school in Damascus. Khaldoun used to come by our tile store every day before school. He would rest his foot on the sidewalk, ring his bike bell a few times till he got my attention, and then tap his watch with his two fingers as he mouthed from a distance, We’re late. I would usually finish up the order with the customer, grab my satchel, and kiss my dad’s hand as he patted my head and murmured, “Allah yerda ‘aleik, God bless you. Come after school—we’re busy tonight.” Then I would jump on my bike, and we would zigzag our way through the dusty city alleys to get to school on the other side of town.

Our school was on the rich north side of town. An old building, like most in Damascus, it embodied history in its columns. It was a boys’ school with a good reputation. Most of the students had to have some kind of waasta, or connection—know somebody high in the government—to be able to get into the school. Khaldoun and I knew the custodian, Abu Mahmoud, an old guy from our neighborhood who told us how to get in. On the day that we filled out our admission applications, he told us to use the address of the apartment in the building across the street instead of our own. This way we would fall within the school district, and they would have to admit us. It wouldn’t matter for any correspondence between the school and our parents. Postal services are not just slow in Damascus—mail is never delivered.

Abu Mahmoud, it turned out, had let too many kids in on his nifty little secret. On the first day of school, the principal called us in. We piled into his office, fifteen of us, not knowing what we had done but knowing we were in trouble. Mr. Khateeb, a short brainiac with big glasses and wild hair, was angry. He was wearing an old wrinkled suit that had seen its best days. His pants were yanked up mid-waist, packing their contents to the side like Mount Ararat. Khaldoun, standing next to me, murmured, “Ouch, if that’s how he treats his own boys, imagine what he’ll do to you.” “Shut the hell up, you little jackasses!” yelled Mr. Khateeb. “Come in here. Fifteen of you living in the same goddamn house . . . fifteen of you! Either your mother is the biggest sharmouta on the face of the earth, having fifteen kids with different last names, or that is one fucking giant apartment. What the hell am I going to do with you now? School’s already started and no one will take your little dumb asses. You’re gonna stay in this school, but I swear to God if I hear one peep out of any you, I’ll send you right back to the goddamn rat hole that you came from. Now get the hell out of my face.” Never having heard language like that, we shuffled our feet nervously as we walked out, breathing a sigh of relief upon reaching the safety of the halls. Khaldoun, with a half-smile, said facetiously, “Welcome to the big league, boys. This is going to be a great year.” Houssam, a short, hyper little kid who was walking ahead of us, turned around and, trying to sound bigger than he was, exclaimed, “Did you see the unit on that guy?” Samer, from behind us with a high-pitched voice piped in, “Why were you looking at his penis, you little faggot?” Houssam, with a gleam in his eye, replied, “At least I have a penis, ya khrenta, you little eunuch. What, do you use a magnifying glass and tweezers every time you have to pee?” Samer lunged at him with arms flailing and for the most part missing their target. Khaldoun and I had to separate them, grabbing each as they were trying to claim a little turf in the new school. From that moment on, the four of us were best friends.

We all had similar backgrounds. We were from large, poor, religious families. Khaldoun and I went to mosques on opposite sides of our neighborhood. Samer was a hafiz (someone who memorized the Qur’an), and Houssam was an altar boy at the Assyrian church. We were boys walking sheepishly through the gates of manhood. We spent lots of time together and we had opinions about any and everything—girls, sports, politics, money, poetry, UFOs (in that order); we knew it all. During recess we usually stopped at Abu Mahmoud, who in addition to performing his custodial duties also operated a concession stand. We would pick up sandwiches and tea before playing our latest pranks or choosing our next argument.

Abu Mahmoud sold all kinds of wrapped sandwiches that he had made, but he never labeled them, so you never knew what you might get. Yet he would always ask with the most pleasant demeanor “What you would like?” just before reaching over to the basket next to him and handing you the closest mystery. As soon as the kids got their sandwiches, a Wall Street–style bazaar began and the trading proceeded quickly and furiously. Loud shouts were fired out: “Lebaneh!” “Zaatar!” “Jubneh!” “Falafel!” Lebaneh was the blue chip of sandwiches—you could trade that for anything. Every once in a while some unsuspecting freshman went back to Abu Mahmoud for an exchange. Not only would this bring the whole operation to a screeching halt and shut down the trading floor, but Abu Mahmoud would hand it to the young guy and calmly say, “Shouf wela hmaar, listen, you little jackass, I’ve had it up to here with your shit. These are the best goddamn zaatar on God’s green earth—you’re lucky you’re getting one today. So take your sandwich and get the hell out of my face.” The kid would usually walk away perplexed, as the trading resumed behind him.

At the end of the school day, Khaldoun and I would usually ride our bikes home together, slowing down by the girls’ school and then traversing the old city’s alleys, picking fruit from trees that spilled over courtyard walls—blackberries, figs, apricots, nanerj, akee dunia. Our conversations would vacillate between the topics of adolescence and those of adulthood, from crude jokes to theological discussions of Ghazali. Khaldoun was witty and extremely intelligent. One day as we left school, the sky started to pour. Never had the parched ground below seen such a hard rain. Kids scattered in all directions, trying to prevent the rain from drenching their pressed school uniforms. Khaldoun and I stood there for a few minutes with our tongues hanging out, trying to catch a few drops. Abu Mahmoud yelled at us to go home as he locked the school gates behind us. The streets were amazingly empty—no cars, no people—as if the rain had just washed everything aside to watch us ride. We got on our bikes, school bags tied behind us, looked at each other, smiled, and rode through the city as slowly as we could possibly pedal. As if in an initiation ritual, Mother Nature ordained us. The rain washed our faces with holy water as other drops crashed and rejoiced in celebration. Thunder drummed in jubilation as our tires tangoed with the city’s cobblestones, and we rode like Khalid and Abu Obiedah, banging on the city’s gates, claiming Damascus as our own. We were her boys, and she gently embraced us, pulling the cover of rain over to protect us. Our clothes, drenched and heavy with rain, clung tightly. We were soaked to the last inch of our bodies. We wore soft, innocent smiles. Not a word was uttered.

Our regular stops by the girls’ high school finally paid off. Khaldoun met a girl whom he quickly fell in love with. Zainab was simply gorgeous. She had long, dark hair that she always adorned with a red ribbon. Her big black eyes would sparkle as she smiled, radiating her whole face, like sunlight reflecting off peaceful waters. She was the only person I knew who was smarter than Khaldoun. She had read books we had never heard of, and she would recite poetry by the qaseedeh (the entire poem), providing us the slightest bit of comfort as she breathed the famous lines that were familiar to us. And she loved Khaldoun more than anything. Her eyes would nervously scan the crowd when school was out, and she would light up with a huge smile when she spotted him. She would wave and mouth the words I’ll see you on the other side. There were so many boys waiting for girls that Mrs. Edelbi, the principal of Zainab’s school, banned the boys from waiting by the entrance.

The boys got a whiff of the love story, and they teased Khaldoun mercilessly. And when I told them she was not only beautiful and smart but also a Communist, the chant went around school about the brother dating the comrade. Samer had the school band play the chant to the tune of a famous song before the weekly national anthem recital. The topic of Zainab took over our conversations. “You know what my cousin in Kuwait told me?” Houssam asked us rhetorically, citing his most commonly referenced source. “That Communist girls wear red panties!” He crossed his arms and nodded his head decisively as he said that, indicating that this was as airtight a fact as you were gonna get. We had questioned Houssam every previous time he cited his infamous cousin, but this time it didn’t really matter. To us it was a fact. Besides, you put four boys and an image of red panties together and amazing things happen. We got quiet, our jaws went slack, and you could almost hear the sound of our brains churning, creating fantasies and processing images faster than a Cray supercomputer. The only thing that brought us back to earth was the sound of Mr. Khateeb yelling his usual “Ya tyoos, mules, get your asses in the classrooms before I make drums out of them!” We all walked to our chemistry class, our minds still aglow with shades of red. Samer, in his usual high-pitched voice, was the first to speak, half an hour into the chemistry session. “You know what, I’ll just have to marry me a Commie.” We all nodded in unison as we returned to our now slightly altered fantasies, while a subconscious “yep” dripped from our lips. I don’t remember a word Mr. Saboni said that entire hour.

That year was tough on the city. The oppositional Islamist movements were putting pressure on the dictatorial government, and the government responded without mercy. Political arrests, disappearances, midnight raids, and gunfights became as common as the issuance of parking tickets. A lot of the opposition came from our neighborhood and there wasn’t a household that didn’t have a missing or arrested member. Khaldoun and I couldn’t avoid the activities around us. We started reading outlawed books and listening to contraband music. And our conversation during our daily bike ride became more passionate, more serious, older.

One day near the end of the school year, Khaldoun missed a couple of days of school. Assuming he was sick, I called his house to give him the class notes and tell him about the chemistry exam. His mother answered and, in a choked-up voice, told me that he had been arrested by the secret police. Not knowing what to say, I just hung up. The boys had plenty to say when they heard the news. They were curious at first about his confinement. How long would they keep him and what would they do to him? We all knew what they did to political prisoners and we had to deal with those thoughts somehow. “You know, they’re going to beat him so hard on his feet, those size-11 shoes that he got from his brother will finally be a perfect fit,” whispered Samer, only half-jokingly. Growing louder and bolder, he continued, “And what about all the electricity up his ass—he’ll have a permanent fucking boner. We’re all gonna wish we got arrested when we’re thirty, fucking old and can’t get it up no more.” We all laughed, the tension softened. Then we got quiet when Houssam said, “God help his mother.” We thought of her, awake in the middle of the night, when the world is asleep, except her and maybe her boy, in her white prayer clothes, with wilted eyes, calling on God to protect her child, in a soft whisper, “Elahi.” The class bell rang piercingly loud, jolting us back to our present situation. Houssam wiped his eyes and said, “At least he doesn’t have to take this fucking chemistry test.”

Zainab would stop by our store every day after his arrest. She would stand just outside the door for a few minutes, hesitating, wanting to hear the best news, but afraid of another crushing disappointment. I would come out and shake my head—not a word. Her face would turn red, her eyes tear up, her shoulders drop, and she would tuck her hair behind her ear and walk away. Two months went by and Khaldoun hadn’t shown up. Zainab stopped by the store that day, angry and agitated. I came out. “Did you hear anything?” she pleaded. “No,” I muttered to the floor. “What the hell do they want from him? He is a young boy!” she yelled, alarming the customers. My older brother came out, turned to her and said firmly, coldly, gently, “Zainab, listen to me . . .” He paused a moment, then, with steady eyes, “He’s never coming back.” Her body shook, her hands trembled, her soft face turned red with an expression of disbelief, anger, and resignation all at once, like an innocent standing before the noose. She bit her lip, wiped a tear, pushed her hair back, and walked away. That was the last time I saw Zainab.

The years went by. We finished high school and went our separate ways. Samer took over his dad’s shop in the city’s old spice market. Houssam eventually moved to Kuwait, teamed up with his cousin and started a software company. I moved to the States. Zainab joined the resistance in southern Lebanon and was killed during the Israeli invasion. She had asked to be buried in the old cemetery in our neighborhood. Her grave is easily identified. It has a tombstone with no name, no date, nor religious inscriptions. It is simply wrapped with a red ribbon and marked with the words I’ll see you on the other side.

It had been a long day at work. I left the office thinking about the items that I needed to pick up for my wife; we were having company over that evening. I pulled into the garage. My son was outside throwing snowballs at his friends. He ran to help me with the bags. I kissed him. He told me that he had done his homework and asked if he could see a movie. “Allah yerda ‘aleik, come home right after the movie. We have company tonight,” I told him. I walked in the house. My wife asked from the top of the stairs if I had picked up the Brie and the pomegranate juice. I told her that I had. I took off my jacket, threw my keys on the table, and picked up the mail and the few faxes that we had received.

That afternoon, a man with a soft, scraggly beard and sunken eyes, holding his hands close to his chest, walked into our family store in Damascus. He was looking around in bewilderment, inspecting the tiles, the columns, the door. My younger brother, who was now running the store, looked at him suspiciously and asked if he could help him. “You used to have a counter over here, with a phone and a leather pad,” the man whispered, mostly to himself. “We took that out more than seventeen years ago,” my brother said. The man continued in a soft, nostalgic voice, “And you used to have a table with a big chair that your dad sat in.” My brother, with a smile, said, “The chair wasn’t that big. We took it out when we redecorated the store, more than ten years ago, after my dad passed away. Did you know my dad?” my brother asked gently. “No . . . I mean, I did, but I was a friend of your brother.” My brother had heard the story of Khaldoun from me, so he knew right away who he was. He shook his hand, asked him to sit down, and offered him some tea. Khaldoun sat down, still looking around, trying to process the images and match them to what had been with him all these years. His hands trembled a little, his hair had receded. He was old. My brother asked how he was doing. He said he was OK. They had released him two days ago, nineteen years after his arrest. Things had changed a lot and he was trying to find his way around town. The government had destroyed his family’s house when they put a six-lane highway in the middle of our neighborhood in an attempt to break up the opposition. His mother had passed away never having seen him again. He asked about me, and my brother told him that I had moved to the States and that I had a family there. He asked if he could write me. My brother told him that he was sure I would love to hear from him, and that he could send me a fax if he would like. He gave Khaldoun a pen and a piece of paper. Khaldoun scribbled a few words, and he looked at the paper for a second or two before handing it to my brother, who promptly sent it to me. Khaldoun finished his tea, thanked my brother, and walked out, gently, curiously, purposefully, trying to claim our city again.

I rifled through the mail, the bills and the offers for zero-interest credit cards and mortgage refinancing. Then I came upon the fax with the few Arabic words scribbled on it. My wife called for me to help set the table. “I’ll be there in a minute,” I said, eyes fixed. I sat down on the steps and read the words in disbelief: 

My Dearest Akhi, 
I hope this letter finds you well
Like Job I endured and like Jonah I was reborn,
the though of raindrops eased the journey.
See you again soon, my brother.
Khaldoun

My heart raced, my hands trembled. I was at once happy, angry, and sad. I imagined the boys’ reactions—jubilant, yet subdued: “Ya sharmoot, you didn’t miss much—it’s the same old fucking town . . . How is that boner? . . . Lucky bastard, you didn’t have to take any of the chemistry finals . . .” And then I thought of his mother—old, gray, with the white prayer head cover: “Waladi, my little boy . . . Thank you, God. You finally heard my prayers . . . are you hungry, habibi?” And the soft whisper to God: “Elahi.”

The next morning I drove to work. When I got to the highway ramp, the cars were lined up, inching forward as the metered light turned green. I pushed in one of the contraband tapes that Khaldoun and I used to listen to—I had spent hours the night before looking for it in old boxes. The cars inched up a little. The sound of the angry poet on the tape erased the silence, but the words were not as sharp as they used to be, the years like rain having softened the edges of those large boulders. The light turned green; we inched forward a little more. “In Kuwait, my cousin told me, there are no ramps. You get your own highway from your house to your office… But in Kuwait there are no Damascene berries and no jasmine.” The bike bell rang. The light turned green. I looked up. He smiled, tapped his watch with his two fingers, and mouthed, You’re late. I pushed on the gas pedal and sped off onto the freeway, surrounded by sounds and images that seemed to ease this journey.

Mazen Halabi, a Syrian-American and community activist, left Syria following the Hama massacre in which more than 40,000 people were killed by the then President, Hafez Assad. He has worked with multiple civil society organizations during the Arab Spring and the Syrian revolution. He holds advanced degrees in computer science and business, and works in the IT industry.

The post RAINDROPS 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.

Leila Mansouri’s brilliant short story, “Flashbang,” inhabits the many scales of catastrophe that inhere in the word. Originally published as part of Mizna 25.1: Catastrophe. Link to order here.

There, the news was on. Somewhere, there was a war. A reel of bombs and bodies played on the TV. A man in a suit droned in front of it. There were soldiers, then boys, then more soldiers, then an explosion. Someone threw a flashbang and lit a house up. The windows got so bright, my eyes hurt.

Soon my mom came out with tea.

Then she brought fruit.

—Leila Mansouri

Flashbang

What you need to understand is this: when the link opened, everything flashed over.

Before I could form a thought, before my eyes could resolve the pixels into dark, taut nipples, hot, bright shock raced through me and spread—out through my nerves, out into the dorm room, out and out into every corner of my world. Understanding was for later. Lungs, fear, air, shame—all for later. My cursor blinked, unmoved, in the reply box as my eyes traced and retraced the subject line.

“You?” the email asked.

I had no answer. I glowed hot, white hot, engulfed.

Behind each nipple, a breast. That much was clear even when everything was still too bright to breathe. There were two of them, the breasts, and skin, and ribs. A torso.

Also sometimes a shoulder. But not always.

The parts, they moved and moved and refused to stay still. Fingers curled. Hands grasped. Now two, now three, now two again. And at the grainy edge, a slack jaw dipped in and out, in and out.

I couldn’t have spoken then, not even if my irradiated brain had had the power to think in words. My fat slug of a tongue sat leaden between my molars, and my parched lips clung fast to my gums. In my silence, the slick, weird image of a mouth parted wide, wider, into a wild, toothy moan, and I understood nothing. Heard nothing. The only noise in me was my own blood. And no matter how hard my eyes strained, no matter how long my fingers hovered ready at the keyboard, adamant that they could save me by shooting Jeff the speedy right answer, the moving parts refused to make a person.

Was I really somewhere in those pixels?

I didn’t know — and also didn’t want to know—or wanted to know only if the answer was one I could live with—one I’d survive. So it was a relief, the beginning of a hot exhale, when, after how long with that video on a loop I don’t know, I admitted—or maybe I decided—that I couldn’t make out anyone except the little stuffed bear—a bear like the one my parents had bought me from the student store the day they’d moved me in, a bear whose neck was ringed with the stethoscope I’d resented nightly as I did my chemistry sets and conjugated Farsi verbs and daydreamed about the other me: the me who had aggressively blue hair and took experimental poetry classes, the me who wanted to jolt you, to make you gasp and say, “this changed my life.”

That me was the real me, I was sure. Or it was going to be.

I would become her just as soon as I finally gathered the courage to tell my parents that I was dropping orgo—that instead of labs and study groups I’d be making mixed media installations, that I’d already made one, in fact, a simorgh lit with kerosene, and that I wasn’t pre-med anymore—I’d never been, actually, not in the way they’d wished for—not really.

The bear, though, was unmistakable.

It was my own Agha Bear, or one just like him. That was obvious even in the bad resolution and dim light. And the desk, too, was familiar. Its dull sheen and thick wooden shelves could have come from any dorm on campus. Which meant the parts in the video could be anyone’s.

Even mine.

So I did the only thing that felt possible from inside my bright hot shock-wave—the only thing I could live with—that felt like it had any hope of being survivable.

I deleted the email, broke up with Bijan, dropped the Farsi class I had with Jeff, and became a doctor.

* * *

“It made sense at the time,” I insisted to my therapist, years later, when we met behind the privacy curtain on the far side of the hospital cafeteria.

The sex tape wasn’t what we were supposed to be talking about. We were supposed to be talking about the victims whose wrists I’d spent half a horrible day tagging yellow or red or green.

The explosion at the refinery had been so massive, all the breaking news segments had ended with ominous questions: Could this be sabotage? Who did the terrorists hate? Were there more explosions to come?

But by afternoon, the story had resolved itself into something more ordinary: a bad safety valve and corporate greed. After that, no one was scared anymore, just filled tight with unleachable anger—the kind that makes your fingers swell and comes out in unfunny jokes about conversion rates between corporate bonus dollars and reattached limbs.

My residency was in oncology, but I’d been paged to the emergency room for triage. I’d gone from body to moaning body checking pupils and asking if anyone felt a sense of impending doom.

No one did, not even the sanitation worker with the metal bolt in his skull. He was the cheeriest of everyone, in fact.

As I rushed him to surgery, he grabbed my hand and said, “Can’t you leave it in, doc? I pick up radio waves now.”

Then he asked where I was from.

And how I liked Michigan.

And if I had kids, or a husband, or a boyfriend, and if I wanted them.

When I said I was moving back to California, his face fell.

“My parents are there,” I apologized. “Plus, I miss the fruit. The nectarines, the apricots.”

Right then, the time Jeff pulled dates from his rucksack flashed back through me. We’d been doing Farsi homework in my dorm room, and I’d looked up from my alif’s and be’s, and there they were, three fat dates. Jeff insisted I try one even though I wasn’t hungry. “Have you ever had a fresh date?” he demanded. “I mean a really fresh one?”

The man with the bolt in his head waved away my apology. Then he said “California,” too slow, his voice bending strangely.

So, I looked again behind his earlobe.

The thread was still buried deep. You could hardly see anything.

That was how I’d almost missed it when I triaged him.

His wound had barely even oozed.

I wanted to say something comforting—to reassure the man that I liked Michigan, too.

But before I could, we were surrounded by the surgical team.

“You should try the sherries,” he told me as my hand slipped from his.

I nodded, not understanding.

“The sherries,” he said. “Promise.”

Then he was gone, and the hallway was bright and not at all quiet, and by the time I realized he was slurring cherries, it was days too late to warn anyone.

The hospital mandated trauma screening for all residents, and I was assigned to Farah. Or, that’s what she told me to call her. I couldn’t, though. Not when her hair was neatly covered, and she sat so prim and straight on her plastic chair.

“Doctor Al Masry,” I tried.

She laughed. She wasn’t even an MD, just a family counselor in training.

I wouldn’t take it back though. “Dr. Al Masry,” I repeated.

“Really? Are we going to pretend we’re our parents?”

I shrugged.

For days, I’d been telling the other residents that these screenings were a waste. My plan was to lie my way through—to run out the clock. I’d even made up a story about a man who’d watched his warehouse collapse. He survived because he had forgotten to turn his headlights off, I was going to say—that’s why he’d been in the parking lot. He’d remembered an hour into his shift and ran back out into the Michigan cold.

Then, boom.

All of a sudden, no building left to speak of.

The clincher was going to be my own story, or really my aunt’s. The one she’d told years ago, in St. Louis, as we circled the Gateway Arch.

One night, my uncle had come home from his pharmacy shift to find their Tehran apartment in rubble. A missile had hit—“a dumb Scud,” my aunt said, as we puttered up I-44 in my parents’ rusty Volvo.

My mother was annoyed. “Look!” she switched loudly to English. “There is arch!”

But my aunt talked over her, sticking to Persian. “Night sounded like this,” my aunt told us, puckering her mouth and spitting out explosions.

That year was endless. Boring, murderous nights, my aunt explained. Again and again, there were blasts and waiting. Then, mostly, nothing. Night after night of it. Loud, distant, terrifying nothings. To the sound of these nothings, my aunt made tea and dreamed of redecorating. She wrote long letters to my mother in America. She set elaborate dinners, and, as my uncle ate, gossiped to him about the neighbor-couples, whose private fights she heard through the walls. My uncle never gossiped back, though, or gave opinions on rugs and pillows. He asked my aunt little about her days. His concerns about her parents’ health were perfunctory. My aunt didn’t understand—not at first. When they’d courted, he’d been chatty and charming. He’d made her believe every word of hers was precious to him. Once he became a husband, though, he turned stubbornly inward. Most evenings all he seemed to want to do was eat and snore. My aunt’s questions about his work at the hospital got only bland, empty answers. Her pleas for a new vase or tea set met with irritable grunts. And when she asked what news the neighbor-husbands had shared when my uncle passed them in the building hallways, he looked at her like she was an irksome child. “Do you think I have time to remember who Mr. Hashemi is angry with today?” he’d shake his head. “Do you not see that I work constantly? Did you forget there is a war?”

For a while, my aunt blamed his stress on bad management at the hospital pharmacy. He’d come to his senses once the shelves were restocked, she told herself. But as the year of booming nothings dragged on, her patience steadily curdled, first into resentment, then into disgust. Soon, every sound my uncle made became repulsive to her. His sighs made her want to scrub his breath from her skin. His snorts made her nauseated. But it was the revolting grooming habits he no longer bothered to hide that became the focus of her fury. The night a missile fell on a busy bread factory, she’d found my uncle’s nose hair clippings in the sink and thrown the soap at him. A month later—the same night a family her cousin’s friend’s brother knew from university was obliterated—she’d lain awake enraged because right next to her in bed my uncle had picked dead skin from his foot calluses.

“Roya-joon, remember this.” She turned to face me in the back seat, her expression so serious I was sure I was in trouble. “If a man cleans his toes in bed, he does not love you.”

“Ani!” my mom screeched, but my aunt waved her off.

“Promise you will remember, Roya-joon.”

I didn’t understand, so I nodded solemnly, and my aunt settled back into the passenger seat.

It was months of this nonsense, she continued, ignoring the arch’s fat, shiny footings. Months of my uncle’s flaking skin in the bed sheets. Months of his soapy hairs in every crevice of the bathroom and his toenail clippings working their way into the living room rug.

Then out of nowhere came the direct hit.

There was no air raid siren—not that night, my aunt insisted. All the neighbors swore it, too—there’d been only the usual nothing right up until the horrible boom.

The building next door was stripped naked, its shattered windows gaping onto disarranged kitchens and bedrooms. My aunt’s building was leveled entirely.

“Pow,” she said, flattening the air between her hands.

By chance, she wasn’t inside. She was visiting a neighbor—but my uncle hadn’t known that. He’d seen the building, or what was left of it, and been certain she was under the rubble—certain her lifeless body would soon be unburied, still sheathed in her white nightgown. He was out of his mind when she spotted him, tearing at the debris with his fingernails. “God forgive me, God forgive me,” he kept saying. “God, God, what have I done?”

As she watched her husband clawing at the wreckage, my aunt’s heart sofened for the first time since the missiles reached Tehran. Maybe she’d judged him too harshly, she considered. Maybe what she’d taken for his disdain was something else. Pride pickled in fear, possibly? At the very least, he seemed genuinely distraught.

She approached where he was kneeling and put a hand on his heaving shoulder. Gently, she raised his dusty face to hers, anticipating he’d collapse with relief.

But, to her shock, the sight of her only seemed to make him wilder.

“Am I possessed?” he cried, stumbling backward. “Have you returned to curse me? Am I so guilty I deserve to be forever tormented?”

That was how his affair came out, my aunt explained.

Or she tried to.

But my mother wouldn’t let her.

“Ani-jan, tell Roya about the beautiful seashore,” my mother jumped in, repeating herself louder and louder, until my stubborn aunt was forced to yield. After that, it was, “Ani-jan, do you remember how we always stop along the road to buy oranges?” We’d driven halfway home by then, but we were still on the freeway, near the Woolworths.

Once my aunt finished discussing roadside fruit, my mother turned to me at a stoplight. “In the mountains, I get always carsick. Do you know that once I throw up on your Khaleh Ani’s favorite shoes?”

“Not only mountains,” my aunt confirmed bitterly. “At home. At school. On my favorite dress. On so many things I can’t list them.” But then she tried to list them, anyway, which bought my mother another five minutes.

And for the rest of the drive home, and that evening, and every remaining day of my aunt’s three-month visit, my mother was relentless. Whenever Khaleh Ani tried to speak about the missiles or my uncle in front of me, my mom would goad her. “I always feel bad for your khaleh, you know, because I am our madarbozorg’s favorite,” she would tell me. Or, “do you know, Roya-joon, that I was best student in school? Top marks. All the teachers say I am genius.”

Khaleh Ani took the bait every time.

“I was the genius,” she’d say. “I was the favorite.”

She spent the summer furious with my mother, the story of my uncle’s affair always cut off just a few words in. That’s why I didn’t find out how she got her revenge until a decade later. By then, we’d moved to California and left the arch far behind us.

Those first years in Gilroy, all my parents did was save and work. They’d bought a gas station out by the produce warehouses. During the day, my mother rang up farmworkers and semi drivers. At night, my father barred the windows, and meth heads skulked at the floodlights’ edge.

This was all for the future, they promised. Only the future mattered, not the farm smell, not the bulletproof glass screening the register. In their future, I would go to medical school. In their future, my aunt would come and stay for good.

By then, we’d been waiting years on my aunt’s visa. My parents had filed the paperwork back in St. Louis, and ever since, every three months, they’d called to remind the lawyer who they were.

Do you have our address?

Can we do anything else?

Will you let us know soon?

But when their application finally made it to the top of the government pile, my aunt balked. She refused to fill out more forms. She declined her Dubai interview. There was no point, she announced, because she’d never move. She had her house, her garden, her tea, and no interest in uprooting herself—especially not to live in her arrogant sister’s half-renovated garage.

My mother told me the news as she was picking me up from my shift at In-N-Out: “Your aunt killed your uncle and now she is killing me!”

I gulped my chocolate shake. The cold turned my tongue thick and numb.

According to my mom, my aunt began this slow murder the night the missile fell on their apartment. My uncle had been having an affair with a pretty nurse. That’s what had sealed his fate. Each Tuesday and Friday, he met this nurse in the hospital supply room, and after, as she basked in their illicit glow, he’d detail his private unhappiness. My aunt henpecked him constantly, he’d complain. Some days all she talked about, it seemed, was their small apartment and noisy neighbors. And even when she was quiet, their hand-me-down furniture silently taunted him. He resented every last scrap of it—every last fussy table and dusty rug. It reminded him of just how much else his in-laws had given him all the other things he could neither repay nor afford to give up. Money for his father’s doctors. Tuition to finish pharmacy school. Proper suits. A respectable watch. Without their generosity, he’d have ended up a poor and friendless orphan. Now, he was trapped by his modest comforts and was determined never to forgive them for it.

“Let’s run away to America,” he begged this nurse every Friday. “We’ll buy a ranch in Montana. We’ll eat nothing but Big Macs. We’ll grow happy and fat.”

Usually, the nurse ignored him. “Saeed, you talk too much,” she’d shush. Or, “Saeed, can you move your elbow? It’s on my chador.”

But the Friday of the Scud missile strike, she’d at last given a tepid, “Do you really mean it? Could we really go? Just the two of us?”

“Yes,” he’d told her. “Yes yes. We can. We will. I promise.”

So, when my uncle came home to the flattened apartment building, he’d concluded that this must be God’s punishment. He had been unfaithful and now he’d lose everything, even the dishes and rugs he’d hated, even the nagging wife whose wealthy parents he’d been ungrateful for.

That’s when, like a hellish miracle, my aunt had appeared before him. And at the sight of her, he admitted it all, weeping in the dust at her feet.

To my aunt, the affair was unsurprising. Weeks before, she’d smelled perfume on his collar and guessed another woman—guessed it was a nurse, even, and felt so little besides disgust for him that she’d washed his shirt and let it go.

But, ever keen, she sensed power in my uncle’s public confession.

God was merciful and she could be too, she told him. But, she added, loud enough to be sure the neighbor gossips heard, she had her honor to think of, and her family’s honor, too. So, her faithless husband would have to make it up to her.

And he could do that with a house.

A nice one. One with a garden and tall walls. A fountain, too, maybe. Not here. North, by the mountains. In a better neighborhood.

My uncle knew this mercy was a death sentence. He could not afford such a house, not even with her parents’ help. His job at the government hospital didn’t pay well, so to get the money he’d need a second job, then a third. He’d have to take midnight house calls. He’d have to work straight through Friday prayers. He’d probably also need to start smuggling. Western eye creams, maybe. Or, more likely, wine and European spirits. Hash, too. “Medicine,” his records would say. “For palsy. And insomnia.” But every client, every supplier, would know the truth. And even if the smugglers didn’t kill him, even if he stayed out of jail and managed to keep his dealings quiet, he’d never get to linger in his own prized garden—he’d hardly ever see its blooms by daylight. No, he’d have to work and work until even his bones were exhausted, his too-brief dreams stalked by men who could ruin him. He’d work until his liver groaned, until his heart gave out. He’d work until he labored himself into an early grave.

Still, how could he say no to my aunt with all the neighbors watching? How would he ever face them, and his in-laws, too, if he refused?

I took a hungry swallow of chocolate shake.

“So? What did he do?”

My mother shook her head.

“What could he do? He said, ‘Yes, my beloved. Yes, of course. Anything. Anything for your forgiveness. I’m at your service.’”

The cruelest part, my mom told me, was that my khaleh Ani, too, had been having an affair—hers was with a dissident poet. For weeks before the missile strike, she’d been sneaking her secret lover into the apartment on nights my uncle worked late. Barely an hour before the missile hit, this poet had left my aunt dozing in her marriage bed. He’d given her two soft kisses, then departed by the back stairs, leaving behind only her pining sighs and a dozen whispered promises to die for her, should she ever want that.

Once my aunt heard the door close after him, she’d risen, like always, to brew some sumac tea. She needed it to settle her stomach—despite the poet’s flattering reassurances, her guilt over the affair was gut-twisting.

But she’d found the tin empty—that afternoon, my uncle, unbeknownst to her, had had a guilty stomachache of his own.

So, she’d gone to beg more sumac from a friend three blocks over. She was returning home, pockets bulging, when she found my uncle digging at the rubble.

My mother’s eyes burned, mean and gleeful, as she spoke.

She took my shake and sucked in a long drag.

“Your uncle is fool,” she went on. “He works until his eyes bleed. He works so much his bones ache. Then he dies, less than one year after he finally gets your aunt this house, and—do you know—she weeps not for him but for her poet.”

I reached for the shake, but my mom didn’t give it back to me, didn’t even seem to see me.

“Now your aunt will die in her garden,” she said. “She will die drinking tea, all alone. And this poet, they put him in Evin prison. He is still in there, you know.”

When I tell my aunt’s story, Americans rarely ask if I saw her again. They don’t wonder much about my uncle, either—not if I liked him or what he died of. Not even whether he ever learned about my aunt’s secret love. If they want to know anything, it’s about how he made his money. Or about the pretty nurse and her chador. Or maybe, if they’re humanitarian types, what the jailed poet is in prison for. That’s why I was going to tell my aunt’s story to the cafeteria therapist. I could tell it and not tell much else, I figured. It would fill our half-hour well enough.

But I never got the chance to.

After Dr. Al Masry explained what she was screening for, she asked what I’d been doing right before the refinery explosion. And I was so thrown I’d told the truth.

I’d been Instagram stalking my ex-boyfriend’s wife. “Instagram stalking?”

“It’s stupid, Dr. Al Masry.”

“It doesn’t sound stupid, Roya.”

“It is. I mean, I’m a doctor.”

“You’re saying doctors can’t be human also?”

That’s how I ended up explaining about the cakes. Cupcakes. Cheesecakes.

Chocolate cakes. Spice cakes. Marbled mirror glazes.

“She just keeps posting them,” I told Dr. Al Masry.

And other things, too. Their redecorated townhome. The themed birthdays she put on for their two love dumplings, now five and eighteen months. But mostly it was the cakes that kept me coming back to the Instagram of the girl that Bijan, my college boyfriend, was married to now, I explained. “Or, woman,” I corrected myself, the bleach smell thick at my nostrils. “The half-Cambodian optometrist from Reseda Bijan started dating three and a half months after I’d called things off and blocked him on Facebook.”

“This man, Bijan—you two were serious? And you broke things off ?”

“Yes. Well, no. Not exactly.”

“Not exactly?”

“There was a video.”

“A video?”

“A sex thing. I didn’t know what to do.”

When I said those words, I was in four places at once. In the cafeteria chair.

And also at my dorm room desk, with Jeff ’s link. And in the redwood grove, too, as Bijan’s face twisted and soured. And in my Farsi class, with Jeff, the day he sent the video.

But before he sent it. When we were learning food words. Sobhkhaneh. Sabzijat. Gojeh farangi. Miveh. Angur.

Jeff had searched me out that day, as usual. The whole semester he’d been relentless. He asked about my weekends. He asked what sports I followed. He asked whether I’d tried the dates he’d left. He asked if I’d ever dated a Marine. But the day of the video was different. He didn’t ask anything. He just looked. At me. Like I was a pit. Stripped and sucked clean.

And right after class, he sent it.

“The video of you?” Dr. Al Masry asked.

“I don’t know if it was me.”

“What?”

“In the video. I don’t know who it was. It could have been me. But I wasn’t sure, and I deleted it.”

“You didn’t try to find out?”

I blinked, confused that she was confused. “How could I? It would’ve blown everything up.”

I felt sure that would settle it.

But she asked, “What do you mean?”

So, I changed the subject to the refinery explosion.

But she changed it back.

So, I changed the subject to the man with the bolt in his head.

But she changed it back.

So, I changed the subject to Evin prison. Did she know there were poets jailed there right now? I demanded.

But she changed it back.

So, finally, I said, “You, of all people, should know there would have been no good answer. I mean, let’s say it wasn’t me. Maybe the video was a fake, or someone else’s porn. So, what then? I go to Bijan and try to explain it to him? What could I say? That a guy, an older military guy in my Farsi class, was sending me this stuff? Porn that looked like me? Porn that had my Agha Bear in it? And that I’d done a whole class project with this man, and he’d insisted I eat his dates? How would Bijan see me, then? What if he thought I’d cheated on him? What if he told his parents? Or mine? No matter what, he’d still probably break up with me. And if he didn’t, how would anything be okay? How would we go back to watching movies and playing foosball?”

“I get it. I do,” said Dr. Al Masry. “I mean, I’m from Dearborn. But are you sure it would have been that bad? He doesn’t exactly sound like the traditional type.”

I shook my head. She only half understood. “But what if it was me?”

“What, then?”

“Then, I was with Bijan. There hadn’t been anyone else. So, did that mean Bijan had filmed it without telling me? Probably, right? That’s the only reasonable conclusion. So, then what? I tell the school? I show the video to some sweaty administrator and file a case? And what if Bijan went and told his parents? They knew people who knew mine, you know. I didn’t want to be that person, the one everyone whispered about when they saw my mom in the grocery store. I didn’t want to live with that. I didn’t want my mom to live with that. So, I said nothing.”

Dr. Al Masry took a deep breath and smoothed her long skirt. There was something in her face I couldn’t read. “OK, but what about a friend or a roommate?” she asked, softly, hesitant. She took a breath, then another. “Did you at least tell someone?”

I wanted to lie and tell her I had. I wanted her to believe I had my shit together. I could have told someone back then, if I’d thought to. It’s not as if I had been friendless. Plenty of people would’ve listened. Plenty would have hugged me and let me cry. But I had never tried. I had kept it in. Staying quiet had seemed so natural, I had made the decision without realizing I’d chosen it.

I shook my head slowly. “Everyone assumed it was a normal breakup. I never told them the rest.”

Dr. Al Masry leaned forward. “And if you had? What would you have said?”

That’s how I discovered the thing that had been buried so deep I hadn’t known it was there, the thing that had been lodged in me all these years—the thing that had held everything in place even when I hadn’t known there was anything to hold. What I really believed—believed even though it made no sense, believed even though I was sure it meant I was crazy—was that it was me and Bjian on the tape, and it was somehow Jeff who filmed it.

“But that’s too far-fetched,” I said. “I mean, yes, Jeff could have planted something. A camera. The day he was in my room for our class project. It was absurd but not completely impossible. He was military after all. A Marine. He could have figured out the tech. But how could I look anyone in the eye and say that that was what I suspected? That I was sure of it to my core even though it sounded like a conspiracy? No one would have believed me. They shouldn’t have believed me. The story didn’t hold together. Some guy in my Farsi class films a secret sex tape after I refused to eat his dates? Who would listen? Who could take that seriously? It was easier to say nothing and forget.”

Dr. Al Masry was quiet for a while. Across the cafeteria, someone sneezed. Bleached air burned in my throat.

“It doesn’t sound crazy to me, though,” she said, finally.

“What?”

“Really. I’m not saying it’s true. But I’m saying I could believe it.”

I was sure she was mocking me and couldn’t say so. Not when she’d been so patient. Not when I’d been calling her Dr. Al Masry all this time.

I wrinkled my nose and raised an eyebrow. “What does that mean?”

She looked away, toward the privacy curtain.

“My mother was born in Ein el-Hilweh—that’s a camp in southern Lebanon,” she said. “My mother grew up around guards and soldiers. And what she always told me was to watch out most for the friendly ones—the ones that offer help and candy. They were the most dangerous.”

I reminded her that this wasn’t Lebanon—that I’d been in college, not a refugee camp.

I had missed the point, she told me.

“Listen, when I was a kid, one year my mom took me to the state fair. Me and my brothers. We’d been asking, I guess. Maybe someone at school went. My mom had her hair covered and people were staring, but she didn’t care. She took us to the Ferris wheel. She got us fried ice cream. She even let us pet the goats. She wanted us to enjoy it—to feel like we were normal. And we did. We rode the rides and played those whack-the-whatever games. I won a stuffed shark. My brother won a stuffed donkey. The whole day was great, perfect, really, until we got in line for the spinning teacup ride. That’s when this guy started talking to us. To me, mostly. He had a woman with him, too, but she didn’t say anything, not at first. And he kept asking me things, like what was my favorite subject, and what kind of ice cream did I like, and did I want to be a pop star or a movie actress when I grew up. He hardly spoke to my brothers and wouldn’t even look at my mom. And he kept bringing up that he was a soldier—that he’d met girls like me before, in Iraq. He fought for those girls, he kept saying. Little ones. Some that didn’t go to school. Some that didn’t have toys or electricity or shoes. I didn’t like him and didn’t like his stupid questions and really didn’t like how white curls peeled up all over his sunburned nose. So, I was relieved when the line moved, and my brothers and I got in our teacup, and the man didn’t get on with us. He disappeared while our teacups spun. I thought it was over. I forgot about him. But after the ride, he found us. He had ice cream cones now, for me and my brothers. I didn’t want one, I was sick from the spinning and the heat and the elephant ears. But I thought I had to eat. When someone offers you food, you take it—that’s what my mom had always insisted. So, I reached my hand out and felt the cone in my fingers. And then, all of a sudden, my mother slapped it away. It fell and splattered. The ice cream went everywhere. The ground. My brother’s shoes. My ankles. I didn’t understand. I didn’t know what I’d done. I started crying. It was my fault, I was sure. I couldn’t see how, but that didn’t matter. And then the girlfriend started ranting about how my mom was a bitch, and we were all ungrateful. We should be sent back, she screamed over and over. We hated America. We hated freedom and God. My mom was walking us away by then, walking us out of the fair, but all I could hear was the girlfriend. ‘That’s right,’ she screamed after us. ‘Go back to where you came from.’ And when I turned to look behind me, the soldier was just standing there, staring at us, like he didn’t know what to say—like he didn’t understand what had happened either. I stared back at the ice cream cones in his fists, at the two he hadn’t given me—the ones he got for my brothers. They were melting already. They were losing their shape in the sun. I remember watching as they dripped, watching as the white ran down his knuckles. My mom waited until we were out of the parking lot to start yelling. ‘You don’t let these people give you things,’ she shouted over and over. ‘Never. You don’t take anything from them. Not money, not ice cream. Nothing.’ Back then I didn’t understand. My mom must be a little crazy, I thought. I mean, it was just ice cream. I couldn’t see what the big deal was. Now, though, I think she was right. I think she knew exactly what she was doing. I think she understood more than she knew how to tell us.”

I took a slow breath.

“So, you’re saying I was right to suspect Jeff?”

“I don’t know. Maybe. Maybe he was dangerous. Maybe Bijan was, too. What I’m saying is, you didn’t know. You still don’t.”

“So?”

Dr. Al Masry looked like she wanted to shake me—like she wanted to grab me by the shoulders and rattle something loose. “So, why didn’t you ask for help? Why did you try to handle it all on your own?”

The question landed in me like a mortar shell. “It would have killed my parents,” I said. “They came all this way for me. I couldn’t let them find out it was dangerous here, also.”

Dr. Al Masry looked at me so kindly that I hated her. “Did you ever think they might already know that?

I never saw Dr. Al Masry again. Twice, she called to set a follow-up, and twice, I ignored her voicemails. The third time she begged me to talk to someone even if it wasn’t her. “You can’t start rebuilding until you clear the rubble,” she said.

But I didn’t answer that voicemail, either. I needed to get on with my life. Or that’s what I told myself.

So, I finished my residency and moved back to California.

I went to work at the hospital, got groceries, had bad dates.

I didn’t tell anyone else about the video. Not boyfriends. Not roommates. Not my mom, either. Not even after she found Agha Bear and tried to give him back. That day, I’d driven to Gilroy with my aunt’s chemo pills. I’d been trading the hospital pharmacist for them. A month of chemo for a legal benzo script. The pharmacist gave her pills to her undocumented brother. I gave mine to my parents. Then my parents packed them into film canisters. They shipped the canisters inside thermoses wrapped with sweatshirts.

The chemo wasn’t working, though. All that effort and still Khaleh Ani’s cancer had grown. And now, she was refusing to travel for more intensive treatment, my mom explained as the tea brewed—refusing, once again, to fill out the visa paperwork.

“She wants to die in her garden,” my mom sighed. “The one my uncle got her?”

“What?”

“At her house? The one he worked himself to death for while she pined for the dissident poet?”

I was just asking—just thinking out loud, really, too tired and hungry to catch myself.

But my mom was furious. “This is how you talk of your khaleh?” she demanded. “Is this how you speak of me when I’m dead also?”

I wanted to defend myself. I wanted to point out I’d only repeated what she’d told me back in high school. Besides, I’d risked my medical license to get Khaleh Ani better cancer drugs. Shouldn’t that count for something? I wanted to say. Couldn’t I get a little slack for once?

I didn’t, though. My mom’s eyes were wet at the corners. I didn’t want to make it worse. I didn’t want her to start crying.

So I mumbled an apology.

Then, I went to the living room.

There, the news was on. Somewhere, there was a war. A reel of bombs and bodies played on the TV. A man in a suit droned in front of it. There were soldiers, then boys, then more soldiers, then an explosion. Someone threw a flashbang and lit a house up. The windows got so bright, my eyes hurt.

Soon my mom came out with tea.

Then she brought fruit.

Apricots. Cherries. Nectarines. Plums.

She and Baba had stopped on the way back from the gas station, she said. It was an apology, I knew.

I took a nectarine slice, and she took one also.

Then, as more explosions flashed, my mom ran through the usual questions. Was I seeing anyone? Did I know her friend’s son was single? Did I want her to set me up?

No, I sighed. No, no.

But that day she was persistent. She asked about what had happened to that nice boy from college, the engineer whose parents lived in San Jose.

“Bijan,” I said, as the living room fractured in the white light. “He was Bijan. He’s married now. Two kids.”

A blast threw her frown into relief. Still, she didn’t give up. I should find someone like him, she said. Kind. Thoughtful. Like Baba.

She grabbed my hand. “I want you to be happy, Roya-joon.”

I was annoyed. “I thought you wanted me to be a doctor.”

On TV, bullets flew.

I expected a fight. I was ready for one.

But instead my mom got up and left—and when she came back, she had my Agha Bear.

“Look what I find! He hid in your closet! All these years!”

She placed him on the coffee table, next to the dates and nectarine slices. His white coat brushed against the cherry bowl. His stethoscope puffed out proudly.

I blinked.

He was still there.

I touched his fur. It felt different than I remembered.

“You love Agha Bear,” Maman said, looking at me.

I wasn’t sure if it was a statement or a question.

I could have told her then that Agha Bear was never lost, just hidden away.

I hadn’t been able to look at him after the video, but I couldn’t throw him out either, not when he’d been a gift from Baba. Not when none of this was his fault.

So, I’d put him in my old closet.

He’d been there this whole time, wearing his useless stethoscope.

All these years I’d known exactly where he was.

I didn’t know how to say so, though. Not when my aunt was still dying. Not after I’d said nothing for so long.

So, instead, I told Maman about the man with the bolt in his head.

From the refinery, in Michigan.

I explained how I’d held his hand until his surgery. How he’d told me to try the cherries. How I’d forgotten his name—or maybe never learned it—and never found out what happened to him.

“What is bolt?” she asked.

I didn’t know how to explain it.

“It joins two things,” I tried.

But this confused her.

“It’s metal,” I said. “You twist it.”

But she had no idea what I was talking about.

So I looked up “bolt” on my phone.

But the word the translation app showed didn’t make sense to her either.

Finally, I reached under the coffee table.

I’d guessed right. Bolts held its legs on.

The cold nub of one protruded beyond its nut.

I took my mother’s hand and guided her fingertip to the thread.

“This,” I said.

“Ah!” She smiled, saying the Persian back to me.

I smiled, too.

Then, I pointed behind my earlobe.

“No,” she gasped. “In his head? And he is alive?”

I nodded.

“He was,” I said. “Before his surgery. I was talking to him.”

On TV a fighter jet flew by, low and hot.

In a flash, my mom understood.

Her eyes got wet again. She covered my hand with hers. She looked at me, her face very serious.

“You are good doctor, Roya-joon. He is okay now. You help him then. I believe this.”

“I hope so,” I said.

Then she ate more fruit.

And I ate more fruit.

And, together, we watched more of the war, the light of faraway explosions slicing through us.

Leila Mansouri is an Iranian-American fiction writer, essays, and literary critic. Her creative work focuses on the Iranian-American and SWANA-American diasporas and has appeared in the Offing, The Believer, Rowayat, Nowruz, and elsewhere.

The post Flashbang appeared first on Mizna.

We are honored to publish Aurielle Marie’s “Now, for the Weather,” published as part of Mizna 25.1: Catastrophe Issue. Link to order here.

here: here: here: here: take what I have in exchange
(but what do I have?) just this:

—Aurielle Marie

Now, for the Weather

Before that she flips the hair over her shoulder
says they are storing the dead in ice cream trucks and 
every violence has been like this, an innocent image gutted 
A thousand pairs of feet, bloody 
beating a path in the dirt in the name
of a freedom they have never known 

For six months this year alone
I march my body in circles
in search of it, trying to create distance between
| the people I love| and |the men who built a killing field
in Weelaunee forest
martyred our sibling for opposing it
then blamed that death on the trees| 

while tortuguita’s body bloomed with 60 places for air
to escape
the State made quick work of mythmaking—first it was
only 14 shots then they wonder if it was just one errant
bullet
volleying between the wood as if an accident
finally, we just fired 57, only 57
The evening pundits speculate that maybe
Manuel Esteban Paez Terán shot all those guns at
themself, by themself

so when a so-called-news woman 
tells me (on behalf of Israel) that Hamas was under
the bridge so they burned the bridge or Hamas was
driving
the car so they must bullet the car
or cry there! Hamas there! underneath
the bed! where seven toddlers are sleeping before
leveling
the last standing hospital, I know I am again meeting a State at its splintering 

my sister, on the phone as we sit vigil, weeps 
when she realizes she has
been speaking to me in Arabic
her mouth beseeching god
in a language it can name its fears by 
I have not prayed since Ferguson. 
Tonight, I tell her, I must try 

every violence is like this, a wail escaping my mouth like a lost tongue
prayers segregated from the dialect that birthed it and each god I meet
allows horrors done in his name 

Maybe if it ever ended, the summers of
death cooling into autumns of disappearance, bodies piling like leaves. . . 

If there was ever any reprieve I wouldn’t be
            so angry,
                            so exhausted
                                                  so willing to become
                                                                       what my enemy says I am
                                                                                           so I might (finally) end him
                                                                                                             if that ending wouldn’t be
                                                                                                                                the start of another so-called war
                                                                                                                                with only one side

                                                                                           But that is a lone prayer unanswered

                                                 this world is what it is
                           And justice is a poem
           that has hung me too often
across where the line breaks

Inaction is
not my birthright,
is  not my job is 
not, even now, my choice 
But what to do with the impenetrable loss?? 
                               what to do about the damned weather, 
                               mundane and always having some little fit 
                               shifting to satisfy the tide or eat away at the land 
The seasons change lalalala 
And from behind the clouds, a fighter jet
Simple and regular, so the state tells me 

No. No. 
No. No. 
No. No. 
No. My god, my heart
                                  no. every violence wants me 
                                  to remove the humanity from my blood 
                                  so politicians and corporations 
                                  can devour me
& like the man driving an ambulance
full of the nearly-but-not-yet-martyred
through his ruined city on my phone’s blue screen,
I refuse to be consumed anymore than I might already have been

I don’t know what kind of human absolves themself to the end
of a world but habibi, I too count children and the seconds
between the dead falling from where they once were
to where they’ll never move from again 
and so how, on a night spilling saffron and sorrow
could I not sit vigil, useless though I may be 
against the mortar and phosphorus and soldiers—God 
what meaning are we to make of a world where the poem is only a container
for the despair that would consume me if I 
didn’t have a line to break or a pitiful lil
image to make meaning of, to give my hands something to fucking—

END IT ALL, GOD! 
end the whole damn twisted mess! but save the sliver of land between the river and the sea! I demand!
bring back the children and mothers and the uncles, the beloved queer librarian, GET TO IT! the doctor
who stayed when they told him to leave SEE TO IT! the people bleeding, waiting, not gone yet beneath
homes older than a fraud State. find the pregnant nail technician GET TO IT! the teenager who was, RIGHT NOW, in flight school AND MAKE IT SO
return them all I REQUIRE IT 
yes give back breath to even 
the men who did a hard thing in a desert 
in the name of possibility ESPECIALLY THEM! ESPECIALLY! 
GLORY TO THE WAY-MAKERS! 

here: here: here: here: take what I have in exchange 
(but what do I have?) just this: 

In 2014, one of us was slaughtered every 28 hours and I could have murdered every white pig with my rage from Gaza, from beneath another nakba, a girl my age shows me how to cool the tear gas from my eyes how pebbles
can disarm goliath, how to run sideways when they weaponize noise with their machines and—I survived.
she must have, too. she is alive, that girl. please?
she must be. if in my mouth. no—our mouth. let it be so. asé o.

Gaza you are not mine, but you are mine 
we, a minefield, beloved and belonging 
I am here I am here I am here I am here I am here I 
I with you I with you I with you I with you, with you 
how dare I feel so alone this little room 
not in pieces my hands clasped together my 
one crooked tooth drawing blood from a chasm it has ushered unto my lip, and I apologize
that I am so whole otherwise, disabled by old wars in mundane ways, considering 

Beyond these empires
Beyond a storm’s swift chest 
there is another world (if only the poem could build it mo’ quicker, beloveds)
lemme use my hands lemme use my guns 
lemme use our body, our useless money 
Our sex our scum our spit, the fires we stoke

beyond these empires there is another world 
And
I am running—finally!—toward one 
in which we only know how cold the night 
is because we gathered in it 
our death absent 
our joy as ordinary, as the changing 
of breeze a young sun 
none of our aliveness coming to an end 
                                  this poem breathing on and 
                                  on and on until 
                                  you meet me 
                                  there 

Aurielle Marie is an acclaimed poet, essayist, and storyteller. The author of Gumbo Ya Ya (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2021) and winner of the 2021 Furious Flower Prize, the 2020 Cave Canem Poetry Prize, and the 2022 Georgia Author of the Year, Marie lives in Atlanta, Georgia, on unceded Muskogee land.

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