Hello there. I’m writing to you from my heart and from a place inside history where my heart, like so many of our hearts, is shattered. In the time since my last newsletter went out, I have composed many essays. I keep writing and writing you. And on each occasion, my words felt not ready, not right, not enough.
Words fail. Words feel inadequate especially in the space of enormous pain and suffering. Words are also a tool we have to see and be seen. Words matter.
So I am here with you with these words.
I know I am not alone in waking up every day with Gaza on my mind. I wake up to witness the fresh horrors against fellow human beings–horrors that I am fortunate to experience through the tiny screen in my hand instead of all around me.
Like you, I have watched the destruction, death, and genocide of the Palestinian people unfold from the corners and safety of my own home. We have watched as an entire people–their homes, their cities, their culture, their history, their families–have been wiped out. Current estimates place the loss of human lives around 40,000*. That is a small city. That is 40,000 names. 40,000 worlds. 40,000 storytellers, memory-keepers, dreamers of dreams, hand-holders, forehead-kissers, mothers, fathers, daughters, sons, sisters, brothers, grandmothers, grandfathers, uncles, aunts, neighbors, friends, children, children, children.
In these months, I have learned more about the history of Palestine than I ever knew before. I have watched as headlines carried inaccurate or misleading information. I have understood the ways in which we as Americans have been lied to, because those in power benefit from those lies.
We have watched Palestinian mothers continue to make food for their children, in ovens made from earth or over cookstoves meant for camping. We have seen children play near the rubble of shelled-out buildings. We have watched pregnant women seeking healthcare being killed by snipers on their way to the hospital. We have watched as hospitals and universities were bombed. And we have seen brave Palestinian journalists who, in the midst of their own devastating losses and trauma, continue to report on the unfolding of harm there. On bombings and bombardments of hospitals. On areas declared “safe” by the state of Israel that then become the targets of their bombs.
Reports from journalists have told us about doctors are performing amputations on their own children on kitchen tables and inside tents without access to pain meditation, mothers being cut open for emergency caesareans with no anesthesia, and Palestinian girls and teenagers salvaging scraps of tents to use for their periods. Ninety-three percent of people face “crisis levels of hunger.” With no access to nutrients or medical care, disease is spreading.
The horrors feel too much to bear.
And for those of us watching, we have the privilege of merely witnessing these atrocities–not living through them. Those of us without family in Palestine can imagine our families in such danger, but our heartbreak does not compare to the Palestinians and Palestinian Americans who are living with the real threat to their lives and the lives of those held dear.
What if we held everyone dear?
What if we truly understood the preciousness of each life?
What if we ordered our world by that understanding?
In New Orleans, we just finished Carnival, a months-long celebration full of ancient traditions, ceremonies, and rituals that overlap and expand outward. As a native New Orleanian, what I have always loved about Carnival Season, about Mardi Gras, is the way it reveals the endless creativity of human beings. We have this enormous capacity to do amazing things with our minds and hands, especially in collaboration.
This Mardi Gras season, I felt a bodily disconnect, a cacophony inside, as I tried hold two truths at the same time–the innate capacity of humans to create beauty and joy and community and the distortion of this creativity when used to cause harm, destruction of lives and culture and entire neighborhoods and cities. This distortion happens when we don’t value other lives as much as our own. This fracture comes from a belief that we must possess something–land, objects, power–in order to live well.
One of the most powerful experiences I had this Mardi Gras was participating in the Krewe of Chickpea. Led by local Palestinian Americans, the Krewe of Chickpea was meant to provide New Orleanians with an opportunity to use their creative energy, so embodied by Mardi Gras, for resistance to the genocide and solidarity with Palestine.
The organizers of the Krewe of Chickpea said that it drew on the energy and spirit of pre-colonial Palestinian festivals, called mawasim, which honored different prophets and were celebrated by Muslims, Jews, and Christians. One of the festivals, the Nabi Rubeen Mawsim was described as a zaffeh, a betrothal ceremony. This festival took place in the coastal city of Jaffa (in present-day Israel), and involved a procession of festival-goers and musicians and flag bearers through the city and then beyond the town limits.
On Lundi Gras, hundreds of us walked from the Mississippi River through the streets of the Bywater and Marigny and French Quarter. Donning watermelon masks, clothed in dark blue (referencing traditional Palestinian pottery), green, red, black, and white, and led by a giant watermelon-headed puppet, we shouted chants that became songs. Flag bearers waved silk-screened flags carried images of traditional Palestinian bands and oranges (another fruit symbolizing Palestine). Processors held paper dove puppets that mimicked flight. Brass bands played into the air. Frequently, a trumpet player or trombone player would run ahead of the group to play into the crowds from a perch on a set of stairs or atop a bench. Stilt-walkers danced to the rhythm of the bass drums. People waved Palestinian flags and signs. At the end of the procession, cradled under trees, singers sang Palestinian songs while vendors offered hummus and pitas to procession walkers. In that moment, we were grateful to be in community, with so many examples of the beauty humans are capable of, and we were also aware that, in Palestine, the sounds filling the air are of bombs falling and that, without aid allowed in, Palestinians are starving, are being starved.
While our procession that day did not stop the violence, it did remind us that we are not alone. It did remind us of our power together.
I believe the way we resist despair is by remembering the world as we want it–a place where we can all thrive, a place where we take deep care of one another. We resist despair by devoting ourselves to the people and places we love, being devotees of our own creativity, being companions to those around us who also want to create a world that belongs to us all. And by remembering what we owe one another–those we love, those we have never met.
Musician Abigail Bengson recently posted a song on Instagram reminding us that:
Despair is a tool of empire
if they exhaust us, they can keep us down
If you feel hopeless, that’s on purpose
So honey, look around
At all of the love that’s been poured into you that
Got you this far, yes
The love of all of your ancestors and the light from every star
All human beings have the right, every bit as much right as we do, to live a life where they are able to do way more than survive. Palestinians deserve much more than survival. They deserve not only the absence of harm but to live out their lives in community: telling stories, dancing, singing, making art, making meals, doing all the things that matter most to them.
As we advocate and speak out and resist, we can remember to create and express joy. Whenever we remember what makes us come alive and whenever we access the joy of creation that comes with our humanity, we are reminded of what it is we are fighting for.
*The confirmed account is over 30,000. The overall estimate is no fewer than 40,000 given how many people are missing and burired under rubble.