Dehumanization and Divestment
On rejecting the manufacture of consent
I was two drinks in at a rooftop party in Crown Heights on Sunday when I compulsively opened Instagram. The video of a man in a displacement camp in Rafah holding a charred, beheaded baby burned itself into my brain. I looked up to a sun-kissed evening and a circle of friendly strangers offering me food and drink, enjoying Memorial Day weekend and the gentleness of early summer.
Over the last three days, I kept looking for evidence that it was false, staged, or that I had seen something incorrect. Sadly, I only found corroborating evidence.
U.S. and E.U. news media did not make any reference to the video, citing Netanyahu's claim that it was a “tragic mishap.” There has been no further comment, and limited analysis on the transparency with which this is a retaliatory attack after the ICC’s warrant for investigation into war crimes and apartheid. (How would the response be different if the children being burned alive were white?) In her new Substack moonseed, Hala Alyan writes about the slow process of dehumanization. How each of these moments constitutes a wearing away of a moral center that finds such atrocity unacceptable. Slowly but surely, the idea is to normalize the indiscriminate massacre of Palestinians.
We now live in a world where the U.S. feels entitled to using our hard-earned money to behead and burn infants despite global outcries, and continue to justify unspeakable acts as legitimate forms of defense. Meanwhile, we are meant to carry on doing our little email jobs without reaction or comment. Many of us risk being fired or otherwise professionally reprimanded for private social media activity in support of Palestine at a time when thousands of families like our own suffer before our eyes.
I am holding tight to any silver lining I can. “The Palestine Exception” is starting to cut both ways in arts communities. Poets and writers are rejecting the institutional support and credentials from institutions like PEN/America and Kundiman that have been silent on Palestine or whose statements made in response to criticism have been woefully insufficient. Major news organizations like The New York Times’ failure to report in good faith, to put it mildly, is growing into an expectation. The United States and Israel are growing increasingly isolated on the world stage as more and more of the global community formally recognizes Palestine and supports the ICC’s warrant for investigation of war crimes and apartheid. Collectively, we are beginning to know that we cannot and should not rely on our major institutions due to their complicity with power, and instead trusting one narratives of those on the ground who show us their plight with the use of e-sims. I am deeply grateful to Camonghne Felix for drawing specific attention to PEN/America and the proud financial sacrifices she and her peers are making to ensure that institutional silence cannot remain invisible.
I have written little of late, unable to work out what I can say that has not been said, but have found myself mostly stunned into a meditative silence. I’ve been reading Rashid Khalidi’s The Hundred Years War on Palestine alongside Jen Soriano’s Nervous: Essays on Heritage and Healing. Soriano’s research and experience pivots on Resmaa Menakem’s work on the inheritance of intergenerational trauma in descendants of peoples who have survived colonization, apartheid, slavery, and other major historical violence and dislocation.
Teaching Hala Alyan’s beautiful novel Salt Houses, which follows a family through multiple generations and locations oriented by proximity or distance to violence helped me understand how central Palestinian experience is to understanding human diaspora and the way stories and cultural practices are precious containers of our ancestral rights. Properly re-learning Palestinian history and context through Rashid Khalidi’s exceptional work of history and putting it in conversation with the science of somatized trauma as described by Jen Soriano has allowed me to deepen my solidarity with Palestine as the survivor of two generations of genocide and apartheid through the Partition of India and the Bangladeshi Liberation War.
These books help me validate my inability to eat comfortably since I saw the video and explain why my otherwise recently dormant fibromyalgia flared to make all of my skin hurt upon contact. Why wouldn’t it? Why have we not all erupted in response? The obligation and expectation that we will show up to work bright-eyed and bushy-tailed and throw barbecues for long weekends should be leaving us all dissociated. The gravity of damage to our psyches and souls should not be underestimated, let alone diminished. We must continue to educate, edify, and sensitize ourselves so that we do not lose our souls as we are conscripted daily into heinous complicity. Keep reading. Keep watching. Keep talking. Be that uncomfortable person at the party. Let it hurt because it should.
Resources:
How to donate to GoFundMe pages and purchase e-sims to make material difference in the lives of Palestinians in the Gaza Strip
Announcements:
SAVE THE DATE: Priyo@Parlay on Sunday, June 9, 2024
Sean Devare and I are so excited to come to share in poetry, music, and community at the next Priyo@Parlay! Come join us to partake in Parlay’s wonderful food and drink (I can now personally vouch for the hype around their sweet potato fries) while basking in the brilliance of MC Hyland, Hunter Hodkinson, Sierra Lancaster, and Turza. This one is extra special to me for the opportunity to feature MC, who no longer lives in New York City, and is one of the two people responsible for making a poet of me. You’ll just have to come through to hear the whole story! This is also the first time we are going to offer livestreaming for greater accessibility in solidarity with those not located near us or otherwise unable to attend. Eventbrite link forthcoming! (I’ll send out an invitation on Substack.)
Recommendations:
Poems I’ve Recently Loved:
If I Ever Should Have A Child With a White Person by Fatimah Asghar
Crystal Fisticuffs for Messy Mystics Who Like Rings by Rita Mookerjee
An Affirmation by Christian Aldana
Water-Owl, Cuvier’s Beaked Whale by Rajiv Mohabir