spaces of grief, spaces of exception

Some spiritual, organizing and film insights

I can’t believe it’s already February. This year seems like it’s off to a flying start, moving faster than I expected.

There are so many things that I want to fill you all in on, and I’m parsing out what will be now and what will be for later, what is sacred to me and shouldn’t be shared, and what feels right to share.

I’m gonna divide this newsletter into sections, for clarity.

ORGANIZING

I was really lucky that I was able to go to Sundance this year as an ISF and Doris Duke fellow. I really fell in love with my cohort of fellow Muslim storytellers, and it felt like one big sleepover where we had so many conversations that will shape me and stay with me for a long time. Especially with the current rise of Islamophobia, it felt really special to be able to have a moment to convene together, gather together, and really just be able to BE with each other.

(my little Muslim cohort)

There was a Zionist panel that was at Sundance, so a Pro-Palestinian response that was organized in response. The film industry has been horrifically regressive around this, so it feels important to disrupt these spaces of privilege by organizing protests here. During the protest there were a few (ie, 5) Zionist people who stood across from us and kept chanting things like “ceasefire tomorrow; bring them home today.”

When I watched them chant that, I found it a bit mind boggling. One of the Zionist protestors kept coming up to us and saying that signs that denounced Zionism were antisemitic. I know many of us have been feeling this—the baffling response of witnessing people being genocided and then having people try and argue about semantics, as though that’s the most important thing.  

It reminds me of a quote by Mohammed El-Kurd:

“In situating the Holocaust outside of history, in placing it not just in the past but in an eternal future, Zionism today has created a status quo in which the possibility of a second holocaust is given primacy over a holocaust happening in the present. I am certain some readers will find those previous lines uncomfortable or even incendiary, but that is precisely the point: Language comparing Zionists to Nazis is scrutinized—even penalized—more than the government policies and military actions that beg for the analogy to be made.

Distracting questions—“Can Zionism mean different things?”; “Is anti-Zionism antisemitism?”—feed the discursive loop that prioritizes a conjectural “day after” over the material present. But here, in the present, there are more pressing questions: What are the mental and muscular consequences of being forced to transform a taxi into a hearse? What becomes of the nurse whose shift is interrupted by the arrival of her husband’s corpse on a stretcher? What about the father carrying what remains of his son in two separate plastic bags? What happens to him after all of this death, once he is alone and away from the cameras? What kind of man will the boy carrying his brother’s limbs in a bag grow up to be?”

This is what was so mind boggling about the chant, “ceasefire tomorrow, bring them home today”.  How many atrocities do you have to ignore to make a statement like that? Whose lives matter and whose lives are thought of as throw-aways, not important, less than? How much do you have to overlook to stay committed to the idea that this violence is okay for even a day longer? When people are starving out, when people are fleeing their homes, when we’re getting countless stories of incomprehensible violence—what allows you, from the safety of your privileged Airbnb at Sundance, to say something like that?

I was talking to my therapist about the idea of who do you expect empathy from. She was saying we all need empathy from those close to us, no matter what our identities are and what we’re facing. However, WHO you chose to get empathy from and who you ask for empathy are critical. And not everyone can be given empathy equally by all.

This was coming up in the context of identities and community: ie, why should indigenous people be expected to hold and give empathy to settlers when they are being extracted from, displaced and stolen from? Why should Black people be expected to give empathy to white people around the fragility of whiteness when there have been such destructive systemic racial systems of subjection and inequality? Why should Palestinians be expected to give empathy to occupying Israeli military or Israeli settlers? And if people are asking for or expecting this—isn’t that a bit delusional? Why are the people who are oppressed always expected to have to be more ‘moral’ or more empathetic as a default stance?

If we take this on an interpersonal level: if we hurt someone, we will inevitably need someone close to us to empathize with us, to hold space for us as we process these feelings, even if they are sticky or short sided. We need those things to be validated so that we can heal from them, show up for ourselves with compassion, and move towards repair in a way that doesn’t diminish ourselves or keep us stuck in a cycle of shame. However, what happens when we expect or demand the person who we harmed to be the one to hold empathy for us? Is that fair? Can’t we ask for empathy for someone else so that we can show up to the harmed party with grace, love and accountability?

There is a need that is begging to be met: empathy. There are so many places to fill that need other than asking the people who have been directly hurt by these systems of violence to be the one to give it to you.   

SPIRITUALITY

I spent New Year’s night and the turning into the New Year in a moment of deep grief around Palestine. I am lucky that I was able to be in a space where I could fully collapse, where I could grieve in a way that I didn’t know I needed, where I could actually feel the deep feelings that I had instead of just operating with the fast-paced energy of organizing, of needing to respond, of going and going and going.

I spent hours screaming into the earth, into the patch of grass that I was in, of crying. I actually just allowing myself the space to be broken. Broken by the world, broken by humanity, broken by my utter heartbreak of humans who can allow—and perpetuate—these cycles of violence. There are so many concurrent genocides happening right now. I speculate that has been true forever—all of the concurrent genocides that have existed in the world, some recorded and some not, some given more weight and some silenced by the history books. All of these have happened, and the Earth has born witness to and held all of it, absorbing the pain. Transmuting some of it. But some scars take thousands of years to heal, some land becomes unlivable. And the Earth holds all that too.

By the time I was done, the sun had set, the night had taken over, midnight was breaking into a new day, a new year, a new cycle. I didn’t even realize how much I needed that: a space to just be with my feelings, to let them out, to process.

When that happened, I realize that there’s a bit of a shadow being inside me, the Not Enough being. I felt how much I had been feeling under feeling like I wasn’t doing enough, that I could spend every minute of every day organizing and resisting what was happening in the world, and that I still felt like it wasn’t enough. I was seeing about how my own Not Enough being was also being projected onto others—how much I was judging others for not doing enough about all of the concurrent genocides that we’ve been witnessing and experiencing.

But there was another voice too: a loud clear one that was there too: a voice that felt more truthful, the one that was saying that I was doing as much as I could, that it was witnessing that, and that I was enough.

I felt the shadow being come up again, and I just turned to it and looked at it. Very gently, I thanked it for being there, but said that I wasn’t going to feed it anymore. And it slowly dissolved, and let the other voice take over.

There is so much pain in the world right now, and so much grief. And we do need the empathetic places that we can cultivate for ourselves, outside of the visibility of social media, outside of our day-to-day routines. We need the space to be able to grieve fully, to not just put a bandaid on our feelings, to give them space to be heard and acknowledged so we’re not ruled by them, and so we can show up with our full selves. We need space to cry into a patch of grass, to be honest with a tree about what we’re feeling and how sorry we are for how much harm we’ve done as a species to them. We need it. It’s not self-indulgent. It’s necessary.

I’m wishing you all the safety of someone who can provide empathy for you, and who you can provide empathy for. I’m wishing you the beauty of a good conversation. I’m wishing you the love of a blade of grass holding you, a patch of Earth that wants to care for you.

FILM

I want to highlight two movies that I’ve seen that I think are really beautiful. One is called BYE BYE TIBERIAS, directed by Lina Soualem, and follows the journey of her mother and her mother’s family. Her mother left home when she was young, moving to France and creating distance between her and her family; her mother’s family left Tiberias during the Nakba in 1947. It’s a beautiful story about family trauma, leaving, returning, and the kinds of cyclical wounds that are created in different generations of family due to forced displacement. It’s showing in New York for a bit—if you are in the city I would HIGHLY recommend that you watch it as soon as you can.

I also watched a movie called SPACES OF EXCEPTION, which is a documentary that juxtaposes Indigenous reservations on Turtle Island with Palestinian refugee camps in Lebanon and the West Bank.

The film brought up a lot of questions around indigeneity, specifically around: who gets to be indigenous? What does indigeneity look like when you’ve been forcibly displaced from your land? What do these spaces of exception—ie, reservations, refugee camps, spaces outside of the sight of the nation state—allow in terms of freedom of identity, thought, and relational practice?

According to directors Matt Peterson and Malek Rasammy,

These are spaces where the outsides and excesses of the nation-state are clearest, where Indigenous and refugee communities force us to confront the meaning of democratic governance and the distinct reality of the metropolitan spaces where we grew up and lived. In both cases, these spaces were the results of settler colonialism.

Giorgio Agamben’s work on both the state of exception and refugeehood was a beginning for us, but our project was to expand his concepts towards indigeneity, and using a multimedia documentary practice. Agamben speaks of areas of life that exist in the gray zone at the end of law, which for him is the beginning of politics. It is at this edge, just outside the visible norms, that we can observe where the political becomes enshrined in law, and this is what we were looking for in Spaces of Exception.”

Again, I think this is a film that people should try really hard to watch if they can. It’s a really beautiful insight into what exists beyond and outside of the settler-colonial nation state, and the conversation about refugees, indigeneity and who is allowed to belong is incredible.