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 Jaljuli & Aiya Sakr

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

—Nour Eldin H., Mizna assistant editor

Should I tell you a secret?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Baraa, my brother, let’s play a game.

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

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

An international call comes through.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Should I tell you a secret?

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

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

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

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

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

“Israel targets an UNRWA school sheltering refugees.”

“Israel buries children alive under the school rubble.”

“Israel kills entire displaced families inside the school.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

This basket of sorrows is too heavy.

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

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

Mohammad, let’s play a game.

When we hear the bombs, we run.

Whoever gets tired loses the game.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

As we celebrate a ceasefire and renew our commitment to fighting alongside our Gazan kin toward a free Palestine, Mizna shares a new poem by Randa Jarrar that insists on a future of Palestinian aliveness. This piece will be published in Mizna’s forthcoming Futurity-themed issue, edited by Barrak Alzaid and Aram Kavoossi.

A Palestinian Tomorrow

after Jotamario Arbeláez

For us, all of us, part of our resistance to the erasure of genocide is to talk about tomorrow in Gaza, to plan for the healing of the wounds of Gaza tomorrow. We will own tomorrow. Tomorrow will be a Palestinian day.

—Ghassan Abu-Sitta

not the day after the war but a day after
the day after the war,
—that day—
the men will sleep for the first time 
without fearing death or its thefts
and for days after that day they will rest
but only a little bit after everyone else 
especially the children 
and the days after the day after the day 
after the war because there is always a war 
the mothers will sleep for two weeks
in shifts
and after that they will start a school
but only after the day that they lie
on the bare earth to say,
I will hold you and only you
in my lungs and heart one day, 
but thankfully not today.

Because today there is still a war and 
maybe after the war there will be a day,
if after the war I have a drum or even a mouth 
to fix to say that we will dance 
and laugh so hard a day 
after the day after the war
and after that we will sleep some more
if after the war there is more 
than a day if after the war
there is a ghost
of a heart or of a lung
if after the war we meet
by each other’s graves 
after we crawl out
on that day, the day
after the day after the
day after the war

Randa Jarrar is a Palestinian artist, author, professor, and actor based in Los Angeles.

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 A Palestinian Tomorrow—A New Poem by Randa Jarrar appeared first on Mizna.

Mizna is honored to share an excerpt from Gazan poet Mosab Abu Toha’s heartbreaking collection of poetry, Forest of Noise. For readers in the Twin Cities area, see Mosab Abu Toha speak at the Palestine Festival of Literature on Dec. 9, 2024, link to purchase tickets here.

Before I Sleep

Before I sleep,
Death is always
sitting on my windowsill,
whether in Gaza or Cairo.
Even when I lived
in a tent,
it never failed
to create a window
for itself.
It looks me in the eye
and recounts to me
the many times
it let me live.
When I respond, “But you
took my loved ones away!”
it swallows the light in the tent
and hides in the dark to visit next day.

Mosab Abu Toha is a Palestinian poet, short-story writer, and essayist from Gaza. His first collection of poetry, Things You May Find Hidden in My Ear, was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry and won the Palestine Book Award, the American Book Award, and the Walcott Poetry Prize. Abu Toha is also the founder of the Edward Said Library in Gaza, which he hopes to rebuild. He recently won an Overseas Press Club Award for his “Letter from Gaza” columns for The New Yorker.

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The post Before I Sleep—Poem from Forest of Noise appeared first on Mizna.

This poem is published as part of Mizna 25.1: Catastrophe Issue. Link to order here.

A year ago, Gazan poet Yahya Ashour left his home to come to the United States for the literary conference Palestine Writes. Yahya has been exiled in the US ever since, waiting for the genocidal war to come to an end. In the year since then, Yahya wonders what is there left to say but “Gazan Despair”?

Ashour is currently a fellow at Mizna, and we have published his debut book online, A Gaza of Siege & Genocide. Proceeds of book sales as well as the sale of other items go directly to supporting Ashour and his family who are trying to survive genocide in Gaza. Links below:

+ A Gaza of Siege & Genocide
+ Sumud letterpress print
+ From the River to the Sea letterpress print
+ It Matters letterpress print

—Nour Eldin H., assistant editor

Gazan Despair

Dear sky, 
where were you
when our homes were being
bombed?

Dear sea, where were you
when our bodies were being
charred?

Yahya Ashour | يحيى عاشور is an exiled Gazan poet and awarded author, born on April 22, 1998, based in the US. He is a Mizna fellow and an honorary fellow at the University of Iowa and the author of the ebook A Gaza of Siege & Genocide (Mizna, 2024). Ashour’s portfolio also includes poetry collections, children’s books in Arabic, and contributions to global anthologies and journals, including MQR and ArabLit. He has received multiple scholarships and fellowships and has read poetry at more than fifty U.S. organizations and universities, including Princeton, Stanford, University of Pennsylvania, and UCLA. His poetry has been translated into several languages, including Spanish, French, Japanese, and Bengali. Ashour studied sociology & psychology and he has worked as a creative writing mentor.

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

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The post Gazan Despair appeared first on Mizna.

This poem is in honor of two young martyrs killed by Zionist forces while they fought for Palestinian liberation. Ayşenur Ezgi Eygi and Rachel Corrie both called Washington, lovingly nicknamed “The Evergreen State,” home. As we continue to demand the United States enforce an arms embargo on the Zionist entity, we must recognize Washington generates over $70 billion in business from the aerospace industry. For Washington comrades, state weapons and their resistance are homegrown.

In March 2003, twenty-three-year-old Rachel Corrie from Olympia, WA, was repeatedly run over by an Israeli soldier driving a Caterpillar D9 bulldozer. She was wearing a neon traffic vest and peacefully defending a Palestinian home in Gaza from being destroyed, and was crushed to death. Israel investigated itself, found itself inconvenienced but inculpable, and the Bush administration left the issue alone.

Over two decades later, twenty-six-year-old Ayşenur Ezgi Eygi was shot in the head by Israeli forces while protesting the occupation in Nablus. Israel has already called her death an accident, despite an autopsy finding the cause of her death was a sniper shot to the forehead. She was volunteering with the International Solidarity Movement (ISM), the same organization Rachel Corrie was part of when she was killed. Eygi was one of the organizers of the Liberated Zone encampment for Palestine on the University of Washington’s Seattle campus, and graduated from UW in May 2024. Biden or Harris have yet to speak to Eygi’s family.

In their names & in the name of every martyr: we’ll see an end to state-sanctioned terror within our lifetime, from the river to the sea, from Turtle Island to Palestine.

—Raya Tuffaha

Ayşenur and Rachel

Ayşenur and Rachel lived 
separately. They were executed 

in foreign heat, with tools 
assembled at home. Today we paint 

their names on recycled cardboard,
march the same laps downtown— 

how evergreen.

Header image: Ayşenur Ezgi Eygi at her graduation from the University of Washington in 2024.

Raya Tuffaha is a Palestinian writer, fight director and actor from Seattle. Poetry collections: To All the Yellow Flowers (2020), apocalypse blues (2022). Words with Seattle Opera, Phoebe
Journal, Ms. Magazine, Button Poetry. Her BA is from Swarthmore College, and she has had additional training at the British American Drama
Academy. rayatuffaha.com. “Let it be a tale.”

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They say the father refused
to be a collaborator. And the mother,
a physician, a specific kind of witness,
had looked at her killers the wrong way.

— Fady Joudah

How Is Your Devastation Today?

Did a particular morning birdsong visit it?
Did innocent grumbling
about a meaningless desire
that has become the meaning of all desire
from one of your kids distract you from it?
Is your espresso machine working fine?
Did a photo or video
of a father sculpting
the rigor mortis of his murdered twins
and their mother sink you?
They say some NGO had helped
throughout her high risk
pregnancy during a war of extermination.
They say the killers had been following
her progress to eliminate her
ninety six hours after C section,
on the day the birth certificates were issued,
a day after the twins were given names.
They say the father refused
to be a collaborator. And the mother,
a physician, a specific kind of witness,
had looked at her killers the wrong way.
She thought they were shit.
They say she hails from my hometown
as does her mother who was also killed.
They say the twins were fraternal.
And the building had sixteen apartments
but only theirs on the top floor was hit.
They say the killers are unconcerned
with your forensic evidence
since they made partner in the archive.
And when my mind drifts
to the Burghers of Calais, they say,
at least those had their lives spared
after guns to their heads
fired blanks. Which changes nothing
of what has become of their faces.

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

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 How Is Your Devastation Today? appeared first on Mizna.

Mizna is honored to publish long-time contributor Andrea Abi-Karam’s first online piece. For their most recent print publication, see “DOCUMENTARY OF AN OUTLINE PT I / PT II” in Mizna 24.2: Cinema Issue. Link to order here

ATMOSPHERE OF GLASS

i sit in the dark, faced with powerpoints typed out in comic sans. some attempt to teach us something. about how science & research are holy. the assumption therein being that language is a means to some other greater purpose. i mean someone else’s end. the professor likes to do magic tricks & i hate him for it. he uses tricks to get out of needing to explain the mechanistic truth behind reactions. we’re supposed to be learning chemistry. the lexicon of life has its own linguistic logic. letters and symbols that confer to the reader the identity & possessions of an element. carbon has 6 electrons, (2 core, 4 valence). the backbone of life, carbon patternistically forms 4 connections with others, the maximum # of connections possible for most elements to reach the golden octet. a feeling of stability. it’s all about electrostatic attraction & repulsion. push &  pull. give & take. some elements want more than others. the more electronegative an element, the more it will steal electrons (share unequally) from another. when i tutor, i tell my students those elements are greedy, unwilling to share. as part of his bit, the pseudo magician pseudo professor shows us lots of youtube videos when indirectly explaining the different personalities. or behaviors. of certain elements. he’d plunge the room further into darkness & click play. i see 2 men on the screen in lab coats surrounded by a density of glass bulbs. their faces obscured by protective eyewear. i slouch in the dark, i seek anonymity. i see two matches, red & white, inside glass vacuum chambers. breathless. one of them turns a nozzle to let air into the chamber with the red match. nothing happens. he says, these are red phosphorous matches, like what you get at a bar. he releases air into the other chamber. a short moment of smoke before combustion. he sucks the air back out to choke the flame. lets air back in. combustion again. out. choke. in. singe. he repeats until there’s nothing left but ash coating the curve of the glass bulb. it doesn’t take long. they have this tone like, did you know that? so proud and smug behind their goggles. imagine if they gave you a matchbook of white phosphorous instead of red after you left dinner? ha ha! it would fuse the inside of your pocket to your thigh! ha ha! you would be holding a fireball in the palm of your hand! ha ha! like a super hero! ha ha! if you order white phosphorous off the internet make sure you keep it stored in water! on skin, white phosphorous causes severe 2nd degree burns & 3rd degree burns by fire & continues to chemically burn skin as phosphorous pentoxide hydrolyzes on and in your skin forming phosphoric acid, post flame. most patients can survive superficial burns over 95% of their body. most patients can survive partial thickness burns over 70% of their body. severe morbidity occurs in patients who sustain full thickness burns covering 40-50% of their total body surface area. as in, they do not survive.

ANDREA ABI-KARAM is a trans, SWANA, punk poet-performer cyborg. They are the author of EXTRATRANSMISSION (Kelsey Street Press, 2019), Villainy (Nightboat Books, Sept 2021), and with Kay Gabriel, they co-edited We Want It All: An Anthology of Radical Trans Poetics (Nightboat Books, 2020). They are currently writing a poet’s novel.

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trans. by Fatema Alhashemi

Perhaps it is simple to describe what makes a home: a witness to one’s childhood, time with family, a wish goodnight gifted in the twinkling of a star or the crash of the sea. Perhaps it is describing the loss of a home that is far more difficult. Nadine Murtaja, author of the poetry chapbook Ash & Air, writes on this loss with skill and sincerity. A writer living in Gaza, Murtaja’s poetry is a poignant yet painful description of watching one’s home be redefined, stolen, or destroyed.

In Murtaja’s work the world around her is not just a warzone, it is an artificial landscape. The stars are warplanes, the sea is ripped to pieces, the fog rises with the stench of the dead, the earth quakes from bombs, the rain melts tents into the ground… The natural world she references is only seemingly familiar, hiding horror behind its deceptive exterior. Her poems teach us that the siege on Gaza extends beyond homes and cities. The siege also has its spindly fingers wrapped around the warmth of the sun; it has ripped the sea from Gaza’s horizon. 

Ash and Air is the poetry of a young woman who is both writing through and in resistance to a very tangible fear of death. Since the recent escalation of the Zionist genocide in Gaza, I have found myself wondering what role writing has to play in such a moment. Murtaja’s poetry reminded me. To write is to both stay alive and to live on. While Ash and Air is full of uncertainty and pain, it will live on to see a liberated Palestine and as such, is a chapbook that perfectly captures the flame of the Palestinian spirit, Sumud, and resilience. 

Murtaja’s chapbook is available for purchase from Amygdala Books. The volume includes both the English translations by Fatema Alhashemi and the original Arabic poems. All sales go to Nadine to support herself and her family in meeting their basic needs in Gaza.

—Layla Faraj, Editorial Assistant

I might turn
              twenty
              next month
I might not. . .

—Nadine Murtaja (trans. by Fatema Alhashemi)

from Ash and Air

Let us
reinvent
war
as a lie.

War                        the creed
of the red sky
choked                  with ashes. . .

Suns                        enshrouding
souls that prayed
for the quench                    of rain. . .

War                         the path
of an atheist.

I was never
an atheist
but I renounce                      war.

Let us
not lie
this time.

Rise above the limits

of fear
and scream.

Embrace the trembling child
and comfort him
with truth.

Tell him

the key he found
in his grandfather’s drawer
was not for a museum
but his stolen home.

Tell him

his uncle
did not travel
not once
yet he is gone
and will never return.

Tell him

the sea is vast
but they tore its chest
and left
but a tiny piece
for us.

The twenty third earthshake…
The twenty fourth…
              Breathe.
              Breathe
so your chest makes room
              for air
              for sorrows. . .

I might turn
              twenty
              next month
I might not. . .

              Twenty years
                             from which wars
                             stole the largest
                             fragment

                             of memory.

It pains me truly that
               once this pain
               comes to an end

I must return
        to a previous life

but now
               to streets
                             without
                                           their colorful rocks
                             without
                                           lovers
                                           who sewed love
                                           on sidewalks.

A Return
               to eyes
                             with
                                           more lines
                                           more melancholy.

How sad is it to wait
for my father’s embrace
               once this pain
           comes to an end

               to congratulate us
               for remaining alive. . .

. . .دعنا نخلقُ الحربَ كذبة
. . .الحربُ عقيدةُ السماء الحمراء المختنقةِ بالرمادِ
. . .شموساً. . . تحملُ بينَ أكفانِها أرواحاً قد صلَّتْ لاستسقاءٍ المطرِ
.الحربُ طريقُ المُلحدِ. . . وما كنتُ يوماً ملحداً… لكنّي كفرتُ بالحرب
. . .دعنا لا نكذبُ هذه المرةَ، ونتمردُ على حدودِ الخوفِ ونصرخُ
نقبِّلُ الطفلَ المرتجفَ ونُطبطبُ عليه بالحقيقةِ
نخبرهُ بأنَّ المفتاحَ الذي وجدهُ في درجِ جدِهِ لم يكن لمتحفاً بل كانَ بيتَهُ
. . .المسلوب
. . .وأنَّ عمَّهُ لم يسافرْ قط وأنَّه لن يعودَ
. . .دعنا نخبرهُ. . . بأنَّ البحرَ كبيرٌ لكنَّهم قد مزَّقوا صدرَهُ ووهبوا الجزءَ الصغيرَ لنا

الهزة الثالثة والعشرون. . . الرابعة والعشرون
. . .تنفسي تنفسي ليتسع صدرُك للهواء والأحزان

قد أبلغ العشرين من عمري في الشهر القادم وقد لا أبلغه، عشرون عاماً سرقت الحروبُ منها الجزءَ الأكبرَ من الذاكرة، ما يؤلمني حقاً بأنني مجبرةٌ بعد أن تنتهي هذه الأيام ان أعود لحياتي السابقة، ان أذهب إلى الجامعة، أن أدرس، أن أخرج للشوارع وأن أرى العيونَ التي ازدادت خطوطاً وازدادت ظلمة

. . .كم من المحزن أن أنتظرَ حضنَ أبي بعد أن ينتهي كلُّ هذا الوجع وأن يبارك لنا بأننا مازلنا على قيد الحياة

Header photo taken by the author and used with her permission.

Nadine Murtaja, twenty-one years old, is a Palestinian poet. She writes poems, short stories, and novels, in Arabic and English. She was studying dentistry but the war prevented her from completing her studies. She believes that the purpose of being alive is to fight and defend the Palestinian cause. 

Fatema Alhashemi is a writer, translator, and researcher based in NYC.

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The post Ash and Air: a Poetry Folio from Gaza appeared first on Mizna.

trans. Sara Elkamel

November 12, 2023—Farah Barqawi’s written account of the early embodiments of witnessing the genocide on Gaza dates some eight months before Mizna’s publication of her text. It suffices to say that it could have been written yesterday—as if time itself refuses to look away. Free Palestine.

—Nour Eldin H., assistant editor

The massacre has reinstated a school-like system, where my mother is the teacher and I am the only student. I await her daily dispatches so I can edit and publish them. I get this homework done quickly, afraid any tardiness would disappoint the teacher.

—Farah Barqawi, trans. Sara Elkamel

New Habits

November 12, 2023

My mother was not the only one to pick up new habits as a massacre unfolded in Gaza, her beloved city, over the past month. I too was forced to acclimate to new activities in my distant exile in New York City. First: daily acrobatic leaps between two time zones, separated by seven long hours. Sleep is restless, and waking hours are tinged with sleep: I exist in limbo. Nothing but her survival, and the survival of those sheltering with her, will allow me to escape. No light can enter this void until the sun rises where she is. Only then can I fasten my eyes, briefly, before waking back up to be with her.  

Second: disarray and destruction. In other words: a clear lack of demarcation between where I eat and where I sleep, between my outside and inside clothes, and a deliberate carelessness towards the state of my room, my closet, my kitchen, and my backpack. The destruction I witness across the screen, and which continues to assault my mind and heart, has prompted a newfound apathy towards any and all appointments, plans, and details.

Third: a new morning routine. The massacre has reinstated a school-like system, where my mother is the teacher and I am the only student. I await her daily dispatches so I can edit and publish them. I get this homework done quickly, afraid any tardiness would disappoint the teacher. When I complete the task, I eagerly await a gold star on my forehead, or a “God bless you,” or “Bravo, onwards!” inscribed in my notebook. 

But on days like today, when there is no contact or communication—no writing, no editing, no homework, no gold stars—I am overcome with the nagging feeling that I must have forgotten to do my homework. If only my mother could cover for me; keep the teacher from knocking off any marks. To console myself, I remind myself that it is the weekend, and that the teacher is my mother. Once she returns to the classroom, there is no doubt that she will assign me more homework, which I will break my neck to deliver by the deadline.

برزخ

١٢ نوفمبر/تشرين الثاني ٢٠٢٣

بقلم: فرح برقاوي

ليست أمّي وحدها من ربّت عاداتٍ جديدةً في شهرٍ وأكثر من المجزرة في مدينتها العزيزة غزّة. مثلها أنا، اضطررت إلى اعتياد أشياءٍ جديدة في منفاي البعيد في نيويورك. أولها القفز البهلواني بين توقيتين تفصلهما سبع ساعاتٍ طوال، فلا يكون النوم نومًا ولا الصحو صحوًا، بل أعيش في برزخٍ؛ لا خروجَ منه إلا بنجاتها هي ومن معها، ولا ضوءَ فيه إلا عندما تشرقُ الشمسُ عندها، فأغمضُ عينيّ قليلًا قبل أن أواصلَ الصحوَ معها

ثانيها كان الكركبة والدمار؛ فالدمارُ الذي أراه على الشاشة، هو ذاتُ الدمار الذي يضرب ذهني وقلبي، ليخرجَ منّي بعدمِ اكتراثٍ مفاجئ لأيٍّ من المواعيد والخطط والتفاصيل، وبإهمالٍ مُتعمّد لمواضعِ الأشياء في غرفتي وخزانتي ومطبخي وحقيبتي، وخلطٍ واضحٍ بين مكان النوم والأكل، وثياب المنزل والخروج

ثالثها روتين الوظيفة الصباحية. أعادتني المجزرة إلى نظامٍ مدرسيّ، أمّي فيه المعلّمة وأنا التلميذة. أنتظر رسالتها اليومية – وظيفتي اليومية – لأحرِّرها، وأسرع في حلّ الواجب حتى لا أتأخّر فأخيّبَ ظنّها، وحين أنتهي أنتظرُ منها نجمة ذهبيّةً على جبيني، و “رعاكِ الله” أو “برافو، إلى الأمام” على دفتري لأتأكد من تفوُّقي

لكن أيّامًا مثل هذا اليوم، حيث لا اتّصال ولا تواصل، ولا كتابة ولا تحرير، ولا وظائف مدرسية وأنجُم ذهبية، أشعر بأنني لا بدّ نسيت واجبي اليومي وأريد من أمّي أن تشفع لي عند معلّمتي كي لا أخسر بعض العلامات، ومن ثم أقول لنفسي بأنه الجمعة، يوم العطلة الأسبوعية، وأتذكر بأنّ معلّمتي ذاتها أمّي، وأنه لا بدّ وأن أتلقّى مهمّةً جديدةً حين تدخل إلى الفصل مجدّدًا، وأنني سأحاول قدر المستطاع أن أسلّمها بحلول الموعد النهائي

Farah Barqawi is a Palestinian writer, educator, performer, and feminist organizer. Her work has appeared in multiple languages, both online and in print. She holds a master’s degree in public policy from University of Chicago and an MFA in creative nonfiction writing from New York University. Farah lives between New York City and Berlin.

Sara Elkamel is a poet, journalist and translator based in Cairo. She holds an MA in arts journalism from Columbia University and an MFA in poetry from New York University. She is a Pushcart Prize winner, and is the author of the chapbook Field of No Justice (APBF & Akashic Books, 2021).

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 New Habits appeared first on Mizna.