for those having trouble finding the words
nothing justifies genocide.
this is not debatable.
it disturbs me that it requires mass death to ripple awakening and revelation.
all we are seeing has always been in plain sight.
it is much harder to look away, distract, disassociate.
let us stay in this place, let us see together.
put your hand in mine.
let us taste how bitter some “joys” are when they come at the neck of fellow humans who only wish the same.
to love, to be nourished, to be with the land.
to live, to live, to live.
notice how fear inhibits the voice. forms a thick resistance in the throat. stops us from speaking.
ask what lies beyond it.
ask what it is hoping to transform.
pull that up and out.
tone, tremor, speak.
remember the histories that have been buried, denied, rewritten.
look around you.
notice how the death cult of amreekah is a paradigm that is unsustainable.
so many of us feel this.
sometimes it’ll feel like my feet are walking away from me.
as if grounding into the sharp, false reality projected on these lands severs me from the fullness of my materiality.
it’s not possible to go on, to live in this vision.
imagine what happens when we all walk away?
we carry these weights together.
our freedom is bound together.
when fear makes itself known before saying what you truly feel —— imagine the power your voice has.
imagine the ripples that emerge out loud from no longer swallowing in silence.
it only takes an ounce of resistance to upset c0l0nial fragility and usher the psychological breakdown in their minds to be deemed violent, whether your voice be soft or full of fire or somehow all of it at once.
trust that we are strong and solid enough to hold each other in the unraveling of these paradigms.
that what could be “lost” from speaking through the fear is mostly being asked to be transformed. to be let go.
🌕
References
“The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas” by Ursula K LeGuin - from The Wind's Twelve Quarters
Further Reading
The Stenographer Party by Mohammed El-Kurd
On Sharpening Contradictions by Fariha Róisín
Grief as Revolutionary Resistance by Aisha Mirza
I Grieve the Ways the West Has Won With Our Tongues and Our Ties by Neema Githere
To Listen
Nijmet El-Subeh by Sanaa Moussa