notes on grief and allyship re: Palestine
some things I scribbled into my notes app on a subway ride home yesterday
some quick resources—
decolonizepalestine.com which my mutual leen (@vivafalastinleen) - TikTok shared and has been indispensable to me
my mutual Cat’s substack with a digest of good reading material
my mutual Mallorie has been posting useful daily political actions to take (CALL YOUR REPRESENTATIVE!)
Ismatu’s reflections on drugs, fasting, and liberation (among other things) have been really incredible reads for me at the moment
I’ve been reflecting a lot on grief recently. My roommate’s cat Mr. Fitzerman (Fitz, for short, Mister Baby, to me) passed away— he was somewhere between 12-15 years old and diabetic and had glaucoma. He had cloudy green eyes and a pink nose and orange fur. He moved very slowly and didn’t jump very high and didn’t play with many toys, besides a little stuffed pickle toy. Our wifi is named “pickle boy” because of it. We called him Benjamin Button because he had a funny way of being very old and very kitten-like all at once. He loved to press his forehead against my arm while I read on the couch. It’s been a couple of weeks, and I still look for him outside the bathroom door or tucked against my door or under my desk when I’m working. He had a bad habit of dragging his water bowl across the entryway hall, so we were constantly mopping up his drinking water before it would rot our wood floors. Our rug was always collecting enough cat hair to make a sturdy coat, and now it isn’t. It was impossible to sweep and mop effectively enough to rid ourselves of the litter he tracked everywhere. The kitchen always smelled a little, no matter how freshly scooped the litterbox was. I miss all of these inconveniences desperately. Our doormat is a long, skinny mat with a long, skinny orange cat printed on it, and I want to cry a little every time I cross the threshold into our home. I only knew him for a few months, but I loved him very much.
These feelings have pushed all of the other grief in me right to the surface. I wrote about this last summer, but my grandmother passed in June of 2022 and the experience of watching her pass and dealing with her death cleaved me open. Some natural fault line opened in my chest, and every long-concealed part of me spilled out of the seams, exposed for easy viewing, vulnerable to the open air. Since then, I’ve been in a lot of therapy and a lot of grief group sessions and been loved by a lot of wonderful people and the thing I’ve discerned from it all, a year and a half later, is that the grief doesn’t ever really go away. It doesn’t go away and it shouldn’t go away and it shows up right beside me and takes my hand when I am laughing or crossing the street or I hear a Mitski song or am reading or writing or breathing or doing any number of normal human things. In the early days, I would experience joy and then feel the sharp tack of guilt and shame— how callous of me to be happy when someone I love has died, how silly!
I bring this up in the context of Palestine because I’ve seen a lot online from allies about the “burnout” of doing something like bearing witness to a genocide, and the calls after to take care of our bodies by looking away or logging off or taking a break. There’s a flippant, angry part of me that feels called to say that those who risk the least have the most to say about self-care in these moments, and I stand by that. There’s something desperately cowardly about how loudly these people pontificate about shielding themselves from any discomfort from the safety of their homes at the hearts of the imperial core. There’s something unbelievably tiresome about the way that people who risk nothing seek moral absolution from others. But I’m not speaking to them. I am, very intentionally, not speaking to zionists or those complicit in their violence through measured silence. I read Fanon. Seeking recognition from the oppressor, from those who would do our killing, is not a good use of my energy or time.
What I do want to do is explore this feeling for people who are more earnestly and truly engaging with Palestinian liberation. What I’m getting at is that I think bearing witness to suffering and feeling the full mess of grief that comes with it is a deeply powerful, liberatory thing. I think it hurts, and that feeling pain and discomfort is okay, and I think we should keep our eyes open anyway.
I’m reminded of a line by Jasmine Syedullah from an edited volume on the politics of care that a former professor compiled— this is about teaching and abolition:
“At the level of the body, especially in positions of professional academic achievement, I feel how dissociated we are from feeling connected, from feeling ourselves and feeling each other. Privileging fear and competition over fellowship or unity is an act of self-betrayal, one in which we default to practices of abstraction and isolation over the truth that we are all embodied, and therefore, ‘managing’ feelings of harm, internalizing and rationalizing experiences of violence, bypassing opportunities to hold each other accountable, too closed off to lean into generative confrontation or conflict as a collective. To move closer towards a feeling-sense of abolition’s transformative effects, we have to meet this moment from the feet up, grounded by the willful and receptive vulnerability of Lorde’s ‘not knowing what was coming next,’ to show up in professional, intimate, and congregational spaces with an eye towards the possibility of cultivating refuge and repair (Lorde, 1981, p. 726).”
There’s a lot about that quote I find compelling— the reference to “feeling-sense,” and “receptive vulnerability.” In my read, Syedullah is inviting us to challenge our cultural scripts of lofty intellectualism and personal emotional silos. She attends to the uncertainty of liberatory, abolitionist work as the root of transformation. She guides us towards solidarity. The openings that grief, uncertainty, and vulnerability make in our skin are a means of reaching towards others, of slipping towards each other, rather than apart. In her own words, “[abolition] muddies the solid ground of self-preservation and demands we protect ourselves by reaching out for each other, for roots, for rafts, for all of us or none.”
Earlier in the same piece, Sydeullah references Ashon Crawley’s writing on tenderness in response to Ross Gay’s poem about Eric Garner. I think of this piece from that reading often: “In this time of crisis. I want to grow things, to see things flower and unfurl daily, to see buds break from soil and begin to breathe. I want to be open to emerging from this with delight and softness.”
I don’t know where I’m going with this, precisely. I’m thinking about Fitz and I’m thinking about Animal Friends Shelter cat sanctuary in Gaza and what a tremendous act of love it is to care for stray cats even when your own safety is so precarious. I’m thinking of how hard people are working to excavate people they don’t even know from under mountains of rubble. I’m thinking of doctors performing surgeries with phone lights, in crumbling hallways. I’m thinking of the nurse who hugged me in the ICU hallway when my grandmother was taken off her ventilator. I’m thinking of Motaz Azaiza’s Instagram bio.
I’m thinking of how hard this hurts to watch, how profoundly angry it makes me, and how much it is reminding me how good people are to each other when it really counts, how deeply we are capable of loving strangers. I’m thinking of how our attention and care is the very least and, somehow, the very most we can offer people who are experiencing the worst imaginable suffering. I’m thinking about Ashon Crawley’s writing again—
“To tend to and be tender with annuals and perennials and biennials and shrubs and bushes and seedlings and weeds and trees and trees and trees is not only about building the capacity to breathe; it is also about sensual range that the flesh feels and imagines, and being tender thus becomes the occasion for a community to come to gather, to gather around sight and touch and taste and smell and the sound of the rustling of the beautifully planted, gently placed lives.”
I mentioned, earlier, feeling guilt when grief appeared and reminded me of my loss. I don’t entirely feel this way anymore, mostly because I don’t fear the grief anymore, really. It feels more like an old friend that visits me when I’m expecting it least— a little like the beginning of that Dickinson poem:
Because I could not stop for Death –
He kindly stopped for me –
Losing my grandmother didn’t necessarily make me religious or even particularly spiritual, but it certainly altered the way I think and feel on a level I still can’t quite articulate. I think it was the feeling of my second body crashing into my first, the convergence of my porous self into the bordered one, the forcible reminder that we are all knotted together at our roots, and that the pain we feel when one root is attacked or clipped is keenly felt. In this way, grief is also connective tissue. An aching joint that binds me to my body, but to other bodies too.
I think I’m just feeling called to explore this wound that many of us are nervously prodding, to invite us to see grief as an opening towards the world, rather than a demand to close up and shield ourselves. I think I’m feeling like tenderness is the only way through. There’s something necessary about the cleaving of grief, something about how cracking wide open lets the light in.
thx to my friend nineesha who talked me through this newsletter a few days ago, lucky to be loved by people like you
I recently lost my mom and your notes on grief resonated so strongly, particularly the part about the nurse who hugged you. Sometimes it really seems like, no matter how unique our grief feels, it is often a reflections of others'.
gorgeous, gorgeous work ❤️