In October of last year, a few weeks into the genocide in Palestine, I wrote this post as a way to process what I witnessed. I used this prompt:
“Recall the last few weeks, and observe the moments, mental pictures, scenes, or objects that pop up. Choose ten, and write them down.”
I wrote it out of overwhelm, an inability to write in any other way than fragments. A year later, it still often feels that way, and so today on the anniversary, I wrote again using the same prompt.
- Each week, I have become educated about things I wish I never had to know. I hate that I now know what white phosphorus is, what a missile looks like that expels six blades upon impact to literally slice its targets dead. I hate that I know what “double-tapping” means, a tactic used so much by the IOF, that Palestinians wait to recover bodies from the rubble until after the second bomb. I grieve this, the education I am getting in terror, in learning about things I wish never existed.
- I see this photo-essay published in an Israeli magazine of Israel’s soldiers cooking elaborate recipes with ingredients they found in the kitchens of Gazans who had to flee their homes.
“We understood that it is possible to fight and take part in campaigns and yet eat well, and this became the story of our unit,” says one soldier.
The specific cruelty of publishing a lifestyle food article about the delicacies you can make through the mass displacement of Palestinians stays with me for months, the photos of the soldiers smiling and eating appetizers made in stolen homes.
“Bruschetta alla Gaza,” one caption says.
- In February, I log onto Twitter and experience the extreme dystopia of seeing my feed switch back and forth from Super Bowl jokes to Palestinians pleading for their lives, the Rafah massacre timed at the exact same time as the game. Suzanne Collins wrote The Hunger Games after having a similar experience: flipping between channels televising the bombing of Iraq, alongside channels showing episodes of cheesy reality television.
The next morning, I watch the clip of Travis Kelce push his coach on the sidelines, and scream into his face. As a survivor of domestic violence, I know this is an obvious warning sign, but afterwards, I find mostly joyous headlines celebrating Kelce’s relationship with Taylor Swift, romantic photos of him kissing her on the field after his win. America’s sweetheart dates a violent man, and we do not care. Somehow, the normalization of this feels connected to the violence we’re normalizing everywhere else.
- By March, we’ve marched so much, many friends start asking deeper questions about the art of protesting.
“I want to see protests that, for lack of a better word, are pleasurable?” a friend writes in a group chat, “that are simultaneously building worlds while releasing rage? that offer as much creation as they do destruction?”
Sometimes, I see glimpses of this: the gorgeous altars made at many protests to honor the dead, the folks lighting incense and waving it above people’s heads as they march, the songs we sing that have been sung at protests for centuries. At its best, a protest feels like a kind of ceremony, a somatic experience connecting us to a lineage of resistance. Other times, they can feel somewhat empty, in a way that feels worse.
- On the day of the tent massacre, the image of a decapitated child flashes at the top of my Twitter feed, and for the first time, I experience what it’s like to nearly vomit from seeing an image of war. I feel the vomit quickly rise in my stomach, and up my throat, and I put my right hand over my mouth, and begin to walk towards the bathroom. I straighten my posture, take deep breaths, and instinctively know to whisper in my brain:
“It’s not real It’s not real Just pretend it’s a movie and it’s not real…”
Denial is the only way to keep the vomit down. It’s the only way I continued that morning writing my emails, doing my freelance jobs, going about my day. I am terrified of this part of me, how disassociation has become something I practice for months in order to function. The part of me that needs to vomit feels like the most human part of me, and so a part of me wishes I could not stop myself. The part of me that stops myself feels the most like a monster.
- I watch University of California Irvine tenured professor Tiffany Willoughby-Herard get arrested at the university encampments. As the cops handcuff her and take her away, a journalist tries to interview her.
“Aren’t you worried about jeopardizing your job?” the journalist asks. Willoughby-Herard immediately yells back in response, her voice hoarse:
“WHAT JOB DO I HAVE IF THE STUDENTS HAVE NO FUTURE”
I think about her rage for weeks. In fact, I’ve noticed every single time I watch a video of a protester yelling while interrupting a speech, or getting escorted out of an event, I burst into tears. Something about their rage – its clarity and resolve and groundedness, expressed so loudly and bravely in front of hundreds — shines a light on my own, reminds me that I am perhaps more angry than I have ever been, but unlike them, I do not know how to stand up and hold it without falling apart.
- In July, I watch more people than I ever would imagine cheer on Kamala as she announces her candidacy, and congratulate Biden as a “brave” and “selfless leader”. Another kind of hopelessness hits me, of just how committed so many still feel to the leaders of this system, how genocide was not a dealbreaker.
- I watch Michelle Kim explain on a podcast why other people’s silence feels so activating, and I keep thinking about a quote I saw floating on the internet weeks before:
“Love is not an everlasting performance in which you attempt to retain the attention of your significant other, but rather a release of control and putting faith into them and trusting them to choose to stay with you no matter what you have to offer. To love and be loved is to rest.”
I’m thinking about what this means for oppressed people, people who have to constantly “audition for empathy,” which really is an audition for love. How being a nonwestern person in this world means an everlasting performance of gaining the attention of those with all the power, the money, the bombs that may be dropped on your family.
So much of the pain of this time has come from witnessing folks I never could quite trust show up in this moment exactly how I suspected they would. It confirmed what I had hoped to be wrong about: that even in relationships I thought were loving, I never really could rest.
- I keep thinking about that doctor who wrote in black marker on the whiteboard of a bombed hospital:
“Whoever stays until the end will tell the story. We did what we could. Remember us.”
Each week, I read tweets from Palestinian journalists, doctors, teachers who have begun to feel like these are their final days. I think about my own lineage, consider my family now as those who survived to tell the story. I grieve every single story this genocide killed, every single story we have lost. I grieve how empire is a tool of systematic forgetting.
When asked her biggest fear, Bisan said:
“Not death, but not being remembered.”
- Mostly what helps is singing Gracias a la Vida to myself, a protest song written by Mercedes Sosa, and banned by the Pinochet dictatorship, and used afterwards by social movements across Latin America. It’s a protest song that says nothing about violence or struggle but instead uplifts the tiny, beautiful minutiae of everyday life: the lands our feet have walked on, the sounds of our city, the stare of a lover.
When this genocide started, one of the first poems I listened to was Rafeef Ziadeh’s poem “We Teach Life.” After rediscovering Gracias a la Vida, Ziadeh’s poem makes so much more sense, this innate connection between fighting against oppression and teaching life, this idea that how deeply you feel the beauty of life is directly linked to how angry you get at those trying to take life away. There is a strange reassurance in this idea: we are fighting so hard against state-sponsored death because we have already felt so deeply how beautifully alive life can be.
***
Still more ways to help:
A close friend of mine is helping fundraise for a family they are in contact with in Gaza. Any amount helps: https://www.gofundme.com/f/from-war-to-hopehelp-move-my-family-to-safety
Best essays I’ve read this year on Palestine:
The letter exchange between George Abraham and Sarah Aziza, Letters from the Apocalypse
https://www.thenation.com/article/world/apocalypse-letters-palestine-george-abraham-sarah-aziza
And “Palestine is Everywhere and it is Making Us More Free”
Fargo Nissim Tbakhi, “Notes on Craft: Writing in the Hour of Genocide”
Isabella Hammad, “Recognizing the Stranger,” in the Paris Review:
https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2023/10/27/recognizing-the-stranger
Hala Alynan, “I Am Not There and I Am Not Here,” The Guardian:
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/jan/28/gaza-palestine-grief-essay-poetry
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Amanda E. Machado 