If you are silent, they have already taken your body away from you.
Dispatch #42: One ask for Palestinians
Dear friend,
I write to you from my desk on an inarguably gorgeous Sunday. But I wonder: who is it exactly that writes to you? Due to our world’s escalating disregard for genocide & its moral & ecological collapse, I feel a fissure in my cognition. I feel, as Jia Tolentino aptly wrote in The New York Times “as if reality were becoming illegible, as if language were a vessel with holes in the bottom and meaning was leaking all over the floor.” Daily it feels as if my wounds are being dressed in more wounds. So I wonder, who is reaching out across space & time to you this afternoon? Which one of me? Which part?
Is it the Shira who whistled, pouring herself a 2nd full glass of iced coffee this morning, the ice clinking in a pleasurable way? Is it the Shira who has been witnessing photograph after photograph of dead Palestinian children on a small screen in her hand? Is it the Shira who brushed her orange tabby, Deuces, for nearly 25 minutes on the bathroom tiles, swaths of his fur clotting the brush, the elderly cat purring louder than ever? Or is it the Shira that screenshots useful reminders at midnight thirty (“No amount of regret changes the past. No amount of anxiety changes the future. But any amount of gratitude changes the present1) ? Is it the Shira that worries too much? Or the Shira steadying her own sails with a taut rope? Am I my care? Am I my aghast-ness? Who do I show up & speak as?
When I write, I am scratching the cosmos with a long stick. I am trying in my own effortful & honest way to get the residue of holiness onto me.
To be a writer is to have a contract with vastness. It is to do your part (show up) (with integrity) so that the truth may want to do its part (come out of hiding) (to change you).
I want to be outside today. That’s the truth. It’s sunny. It’s the perfect kind of windy. But I am listening to the Shira that wants to connect with you, right now, in this way, from my desk. Carl Jung says, “A person is not a fluid process, not a fixed and static entity; a flowing river of change, not a block of solid material; a continually changing constellation of potentialities, not a fixed quantity of traits.” That’s a very hopeful perspective. You are not one thing. I am not one thing. It’s why this zine was started in the first place; Freer Form is purposefully not free form. The “r” is important. My priority is verb-ing, the process, getting ever freer. To reach for my freer form means that I’m always alchemizing, learning, shapeshifting, & hopefully humble enough to grow. It means that all of my Shiras are invited, that they belong. The Shira whose heart is filled with hope & purpose watching beloved children’s content creator Ms Rachel2 double down after backlash for supporting Palestinian children by simply saying, “It’s sad that people try to make it controversial when you speak out for children that are facing immeasurable suffering…I think it should be controversial to not say anything.” & The Shira who dances in the living room with Angel. & The Shira who cries in a Chinese food restaurant alongside her dear friend as they both grapple with what it means to try to speak truth in this moment.
Who are you right now? How many selves do you contain? Who is speaking the loudest? Who can you make more room for? What does the body know first? How does the body speak?
Empire, capitalism, the state’s violence – they all attempt to erode our sense of ourselves, our connection to our bodies, our interconnectivity with other bodies. Their agenda, daily & ultimately, are pro-death, pro-annihilation – whether of bodies, language, histories, futures, or all of the above. To be a Jew means to understand the old teaching: Whoever destroys a single life, the Torah considers it as if they destroyed an entire world. And whoever saves a single life, the Torah considers it as if they saved an entire world. Yet I look out at the media landscape, at culture at large, & I hear Jews saying that anti-Zionism is anti-semitism; that to critique Israel is to be anti-Jew. This tactic is utterly see-through to me. It’s a joke. Yet it holds great power over our world right now. Palestinians are being obliterated. When they speak of their people’s obliteration, they are forced to prove that they are human beings worthy of life – of their present, of their histories, of any future.
When recent Pulitzer Prize winner Mosab Abu Toha, a poet & writer who escaped Gaza as well as an Israeli torture camp, was interviewed on MSNBC, the anchors both congratulated him and requested that he clarify (@ the 2:50 minute) past comments regarding an Israeli hostage. Abu Toha goes onto clarify that he was speaking to the media’s racist discrepancy in language: Israelis are “hostages” while Palestinians are “prisoners” & that this is a larger issue of dehumanizing Palestinians which then leads to a normalization of their extermination. Hold for a moment the fact that this anchor asked for this “clarification” from a Palestinian poet & writer (1) who was explicitly being interviewed about his recent Pulitzer Prize win, an enormously high honor (2) who has himself been held hostage - beaten, blindfolded, & denied medical aid by the Israeli army (3) who has members of his own family that were kidnapped from checkpoints, from schools, from shelters (& were then named “prisoners” instead of “hostages”) & finally (4) who has lost, & keeps losing, family members to a seemingly endless genocide. The gaslighting is astronomical. All the talk that these talking heads do serves one aim: centralize the experiences of Israelis & of Zionist jews. It’s a distraction. Rightfully angry, Abu Toha addresses her, “Am I less human than anyone else?”
This writer has been awarded & platformed explicitly for his body’s actual lived experience. & What does this talking head do? Seek to diminish his body’s history, primacy, & agency. With the fraudulent claim of compassion AKA “humanizing everybody.” But there is someone real in front of you, I want to yell at the screen. Start with him. Listen.
What we are witnessing is the United States & Israel leading the world in an utter desensitization & erasure of the body - not just in the actual martyred bodies of Palestinians, but in the demand for a co-sign from all of our bodies.
Silence on the atrocities in Palestine: that is what is asked of us. Or your job will be taken away. Your diploma revoked. Your citizenship ignored as you are kidnapped off the street in broad daylight to be detained & threatened deportation.3
You may not have had any of these things happen to you, yet. But if you are silent, they have already taken your body away from you. They have already mangled your agency.
As I write this to you now, a DM pops up on my Instagram. It’s from Isabel, an acquaintance of mine from high school, who has become a friend.
Since October 7th I’ve watched this person who I knew only in an Instagram-friends sort of way go from posting about her kids, friends, & life as a doula to slowly & exclusively creating relationships with 12 families in Palestine, specifically families with young children. She started using her Instagram as a platform to raise money for their basic needs. Hers is a humble, consistent, & honest endeavor to do something. To form relationships. To say yes to bodies & to spirits, to infants & to mothers, to whole families hanging on by a thread inside a violent border that keeps closing in & displacing them.
In the video she sends me, Ahmed plays soccer with little Maryam in Shujiya4 . A yellow ball. A blue one. The body of a father, the body of a toddler, the laughter of a mother, Remah, just outside the frame, enjoying their playfulness. Play, as I wrote in my last dispatch, is not just a way to pass them time. Play is how we love each other. Play is how we survive. It’s how we remember who we are, who we really are, against all circumstances. We are joyous bodies, alive, filled with possibility & goodness.
I have been changed by watching Isabel change. Not only change, but put her whole heart to use. I asked her to tell me, & to share with all of us, a bit more about what brought her here:
“Hi! I'm Isabel and I advocate for families with really small kids surviving the genocide in Palestine. My work before this was as a doula - for 18+ years. Which by its nature is advocacy work and political.
Through my birth work I also started to find myself more and more in mutual aid, advocacy and liberationist circles. I had taken a large break from social media, but as soon as October 7th happened I felt called to do....something. Anything that I could. I watched as my birth community abandoned Palestine. However, I also noticed people creating GoFundMe campaigns rapidly, so I started resharing the ones that had pregnant mothers, babies and young children. I had no idea what I was doing and mostly operated by gut alone.
One day in March of 2024 a young new father messaged me. His newborn baby girl Maryam was 5 weeks old and was suffering from recurring lung infections and fevers. His wife had had a terribly traumatic birth and was having a terrible time recovering. They had no shelter. We started messaging back and forth regularly, and I would give him advice for his recovering wife and baby girl. We've been through everything together. Thinking and fearing the worst, weeks without communication, illness, bombings, shootings, displacement after displacement, loss after loss after loss.
It's difficult to quantify what loving them and having the honor of being by their side has changed in me. What watching Maryam grow through has changed in me. She is my Queen and My God and the seed of my faith. Ahmed and Mary and Remah are. They were the first family [I started working with]. Helping them gave me the idea to keep trying to help other families as much as I could, and here I am.”
…And where am I?
…And where are you, dear reader?
Today’s missive has a simple ask: use your body to connect, wherever possible, to a Palestinian. One way I’d like to offer is to directly give to Ahmed’s family. His family includes his wife Remah & Maryam but also, since his brother was recently martyred, his brother’s 4 kids & pregnant sister-in-law, & his father who is currently disabled & in a wheelchair. The donations will ease day to day living, including paying for food, diapers & rent on their one room (which Isabel told me is “in a partially bombed building”). Eventually, the hope is that the family will try to flee Palestine for safety.
Bodies, not ideas, are what’s at stake. So my humble ask is that you try to find a way to connect to other real bodies, just as Isabel did; not by knowing what you’re doing or being perfect or unclumsy, but by trusting & following that urgency in your gut, that feeling that connects you to every being on earth. Palestine, & Palestinians, need us.
While media endlessly churns dehumanization, we can choose differently. We can breathe, feel, & give.
In the few hours since I’ve started writing to you, the sky has greyed. I’ve been gifted, & burdened in some ways, with being a writer. It means that I must engage. It means that language is my method, that “beauty is my method.”5 It means I was given a strange stick; it is always in my hands; it is not long enough, but it is long enough. That’s the paradox. Owning what you have, using it, knowing it is limited, knowing in our finite days we must act as if we have infinite reach. We do. The generations ahead of us will listen only where we’ve spoken, will heed only what we foreground. So on this gorgeous, changing Sunday, with that long strange stick I scrape the cosmos. I feel the breeze through my open window & I know, without a doubt, the breeze that touches me touches Palestinians.
May your body, & all bodies, know peace.
May your body, & all bodies, play.
May your body, & all bodies, be generous.
May your body, & all bodies, be an instrument of truth.
& Remember! Grieve, hurt, feel - you are a body!
With maple syrup,
Quote attributed to Ann Voskamp
Quote attributed to Christina Sharpe
💜 I feel so grateful to have read this today. Thank you.
Thank you, Shira.