Moments like this—they seem to cluster faster and faster, at varying intensities, the press of one barely seems to lift before the press of another and another and another. And it’s difficult to know where sentences should start, or if they should. Listening sounds like silence. Or cowardice. Or complicity. And one—I?—struggles to find the right order of consonants. The right pitch to mourn. The correct volume to wail: to chorus, but not to drown.
It all feels like language always does: inadequate.
Yet.
Is yet the right word? The proper transition? The inevitable one.
It’s difficult to map what those of us without positions to influence and direct state and international actions should do. Kenya’s president voiced his full and unconditional support for Israel. Because of how these things work, Kenya has voiced its full and unconditional support for Israel. And those of us against that voicing stand beside or outside of that particular Kenya. I learn from Dionne Brand to refuse the fiction—and violence—of attachment to state and nation.
But one writes from somewhere. I write from somewhere, and this is not ground I am willing to cede.From somewhere into many somewheres and elsewheres.
(I do not have the standing to say not in my name; and our complicities are more entangled than we dare examine or admit.)
Yet. That word again.
If I dare: not in my name.
One has to believe that such gestures act on the world in some way. That the histories and presents of ongoing struggles toward freedom resonate. And move something. Especially those of us—which is most of us—who do not sit in those offices where supplications land, where petitions are sent, where real decisions are made.
Moments like this—clustering, gathering, intensifying—produce demands. Demands for responses. For actions. One wants to say and hold a prolonged no. One wants to imagine that no will have the force to hold life as precious. The force to refuse harm and enable repair.
(I keep wanting poets to find the words and then I wonder what I am demanding from them, what acts of witness, what encounters with harm, and what it means to care for poets, not simply demand they process what I dare not)
A question circulates: What were you doing when this atrocity happened? (The atrocities multiply.)
To be clear: I am always on the unceded ground of we who imagine and pursue freedom. I am always on the unceded ground of those who struggle for freedom. I understand that ground to be unceded. Always.
And because I must believe in that unceded ground—a ground that is speculative and real, here and to come, created from millions of daily practices that live aslant to political common sense, a ground from and to which I write. Because I must believe in that unceded ground and in all the ways we make that ground ours and possible, all the ways that grounds makes us possible.
Again, the sentences refuse to cluster into particular forms, and I am longing for poets.
For now: to hold on to the unceded ground of freedom. To believe, despite all evidence—freedom dreams cannot be tethered to the common sense of evidence—that Palestine will be free.