a year starts

genocides continue

A way of seeing, knowing, being, and living with and against sedimented devastation.
—Hugo ka Canham, Riotous Deathscapes

Don’t skip, my friend. Don’t skip.
Don't skip, my friend.
We need you.
Please come to the link.
Don't skip.
—Palestinian on TikTok

i.

I open the publication And Still We Write: Recent Work by Palestinian Poets & Actions You can Take to Stop Genocide Now.

I am drawn to the white spaces in the poems.

I think of the soundscapes that surround and suffuse those white spaces.

A fragment of a report returns: white shrouds are no longer available for the dead.

ii.

A fragment from a (colonial) education: start as you mean to go.

iii.

Start as you mean to go.

What should be the words with which one enters the year. What sounds should usher in what we hope to unfold. What sounds should usher in what we hope to cease. What words can be written to hold space for what we need to hold.

I have no answer. I cannot use question marks.

iv.

I am out of eloquence. I have abandoned craft. I want white space to be scream and grief. To be rage and riot. To be what undoes and holds. Holds. Even now, we must tend to each other. In our screams. And in our grief. Perhaps more than ever.

Again, I say. I am out of eloquence. What eloquence can live alongside genocide? I mean to ask if language—how dare I speak of language, but it is what we have, what I have—can fracture enough to register the crack of the world. A year cracks. And cracks. And cracks.

And cracks.

I am out of eloquence.

Grief exhausts language. As does rage.

What kind of world is this that we now count in genocides. Our registers overflow with genocides.

(But I know the spew of language that is also grief. The spew of language that is also rage. Which is repetition. Why. No. No. Why. No. No. No. No. No.)

I am out of eloquence.

v.

they ask sometimes, who could have lived,
							each day,
who could have lived each day knowing

some massacre was underway, some repression
why, anyone, anyone could live this way
I do, I do
—Dionne Brand, “Ossurary XV”

vi.

If keening from a place of fungibility is a form of sociality at the graveside, what can we learn from black screams?
—Hugo ka Canham, Riotous Deathscapes

I linger here: What can we learn from black screams?

I linger at what black screams demand that we cannot possibly give. I linger at what black screams demand that we cannot learn from. I linger in the sonic space of those screams. From then. From there. From now. From now. From now.

I linger on what those black screams might attune us to now.

(We do not all hear those screams. We do not all respond to those screams. We do not all attend to those screams. Many of us cannot bear their pain. Some of us cannot bear their noise. Some of us turn our music louder to drown those screams.)

vii.

I’m sick of writing history
I’m sick of scribbling dates
of particular tortures
I’m sick of feeling the boot
of the world on my breast
. . .
I’m sick of writing new names and dates
of endings.
—Dionne Brand, “For Stuart”

viii.

For the past 435 days, I’ve seen a dead body every single day. I’ve heard the screams of parents every single day. I’ve seen the flesh of children every single day. All this horror will change you, and I will never be the same.
—Hossam Shabat, Palestinian Journalist

ix.

How do we live with the now that is not yet after?

A voice from DRC: Our lives do not matter. You do not hear about our massacres. You do not hear about our displacements. Millions and millions and millions.

How do we life with the afters we call now?

x.

At first, I wanted to start the year differently. By marking the promise of a turning. In Kenya’s school calendar, public school students move up a class. Something changes. In the U.S. school calendar I lived for a long time, the new year marked a continuation after a short break. We entered the spring term tired, the sprint energy of the fall transformed into the endurance of marathon. I wanted to write something about how it feels to shuttle between these two calendars, both institutional, but more than that. A friendship might turn into a crush in the move from standard 4 to standard 5. Friendships might transform as one encounters new classmates.

Perhaps there is something about remaining suspended between two calendars. But I am not sure it’s worth writing about. Not now. Not yet.

xi.

Not when time is being counted in genocides and ecocides and what I’ve heard described as speciescide.

Not when time is being counted from the graveside and at the graveside and from the mass graves and at the mass graves and through the dispersal of bodies so violently that there is nothing left to inter.

How to think of this not as turning, but undoing. How to think of this.

xii.

On tiktok, Palestinians ask that we try to be human. That we listen. That we witness. That we donate. On tiktok, there is little of the eloquence that lives on instagram. None of the poetry. None of the monographs and novels that we are now being told to buy and read to demonstrate—I’m not sure to demonstrate what. I’m wary of all the “ten books by Palestinians you should read in this moment.” (Perhaps unfairly. Should we not be reading? Except, were we not also told about all the books we should read in the wake of Black Lives Matter.)

On tiktok, Palestinians say, “I’m sorry if I am boring you.” On tiktok, Palestinians repeat scripts: “save us,” “show your humanity,” “link in bio.”

I have been trying to think—if thinking matters—about the ineloquence of these pleas. About their repetition. About their impossible, necessary demand: stop this genocide. Stop it now.

How useless I feel.

xiii.

But we are here.

We are here. At this turning that provides another moment to be differently.

We are here. At this turning, and so much of what we know as recent history teaches us that our being here was not inevitable, that we were birthed in struggle and survival. As miracles.

And that we are here, means that a turning is always more than another tick on the genocidal clock.

xiv.

A year starts.

Genocides continue.

xv.

Struggle persists.

We continue to imagine and make freedom.