thinking about when rage felt too much, when fatigue flattened, finding forever for liberation, becoming a river, in its wholeness
rage and fatigue..
Several days ago I felt like I only felt rage. I started this post a few days ago but was also very fatigued.
I am still so deeply angry. And also sad.
And it interrupts, disrupts, periodically erupts, disrupts, labor, relationships, sleep, conversations, everything, except maybe what needs to be disrupted, which is the cause, and what I mean is that rage by itself cannot do that, not without action, not without empathy, not without love.
Nor action focused only on peace. Not when actions or words that criticize Israel are taken to be antisemitic rather than anti-Zionist. If Zionism can be a thing, an idea, an ideology, a conquest, then being against it must be anti-Zionism. Anti-Zionism is NOT antisemitism.
And genocide committed for any reason is still wrong. Ethnic cleansing committed for any reason is still wrong. And yet both have been widely practiced for centuries, mostly by those countries that were building empires, colonizing people, and/or settling in land where people were already living.
I started to write more about the last point, but that will be in another post..
Last night I looked at my phone, and it was filled with israel's bombing of tents and the incineration of the children and other people who lived in them.
We cannot normalize the bombing of tents, the burning alive of people, the burning alive of babies. We cannot. We cannot.
Prior to the latest bombing of tents, I was sliding between rage and sadness and an effort to contain, and in that containment, I lose my connection to emotion, it's a place I'm very familiar with, but also one I don't want as the response. For part of my life, I was able to cry easily. As I might have written elsewhere, with my injury, I lost connection between my brain and names for emotions and how they feel in the body. I'll one day write about that more, but for now, crying doesn't come easily and so sadness manifests in other ways, and gets mixed in with anger too. And sometimes, I am able to cry too, as I did two days ago, which helped me back to writing this.
community, struggle, and study
I want to be in community, but to be in community with people that understand..
that genocide of anyone is wrong,
that indigenous land dispossession anywhere is wrong,
that debilitation of anyone is wrong,
that exploitation of anyone is wrong,
that ableist language to describe horrifying behavior hides the behavior itself and hurts disabled people,
that settler violence has a long history,
that people learn from each other, whether ways to hurt, hate, humiliate, ways to kill, violate, debilitate, ways to steal, incinerate, incarcerate, exterminate
When I'm on the streets in protest, depending partly on who or what group I'm with, I feel like I'm in community, with many people, and perhaps not all, who understand that all struggles are interconnected, entangled, internationalist, because no one is free until we are all free. Depending on the people, the group, I think it is also how marches can be more than parades, or protests that aren't direct action can still be more than caged and controlled chanting with noise, more than where the energy can feel squeezed, squished, squashed, when it can be more expansive, more liberatory, that it can be part of what it carries beyond the action, how small actions can feel like a jail break, and other small actions can feel like resistance, refusal, and still others, like courage, tenacity, commitment, and through these feelings, it can feel connecting, steadfastness, rootedness. I am grateful to be learning among these people, as I was in former communities I was in.
But that still isn't my day-to-day community.. not yet. But one day, the community I am part of will grow, much as writing will become easier for me, much as one day all will be free.
overturning turbulence, freeing each other
Reflecting on the image I shared above, I wonder, what if we can be the rocks, the trees, the roots of trees, each adding to the turbulence, the disruption, the interruption, the power, the stream power, the power of our stream, of our river, of our streams feeding the river, of the river braiding, breaking into streams, folding into braids, braided channels moving, motion, moving our rocks, the rocks that are thrown in resistance to occupation, in Palestine, in Kashmir, and as climate change changes glaciers, creating retreat, ablation, snow melting to find and form rivers, forming braided rivers, exposing more rocks, moving rocks, what if we can be the rocks, the trees, the roots of trees, each adding to the turbulence of the struggle? I wonder, can we visualize, imagine, how when we become the rocks, the trees, the roots, how we can protect the rivers, the springs, how we can practice mní wičóni (water is life), and in that how we can protect life, protect each other, fight for each other, hold each other close, as together we create the turbulence needed for the fight for liberation, by any means necessary?
If my anxiety is turbulence, what if that turbulence can also feed, can also fuel the anger, the love, the overwhelming sense of overturning that we need to liberate each other? I saw or experienced something that felt like this in the gentle, generally uncontained but still connected spread along a street of a protest last week, a Nakba protest. What can't be captured in video, but what can be experienced on the ground, among and with the people, and by the people who see the river moving past, who hear it moving past, an endless river.
And then isn't this another way in which we can become a river, and all the ways that rivers can change the environment, their boundaries, the terrain of the land?
And isn't this another way in which we can be in the puddles, to be the puddle, and also the waves and the causers of waves, the turbulence, the eddies, the energy, to be water, to be like water, so that more people can live?[2]
books
At the end of each post, I will share books I referenced and recommend unless the post itself already contains recommendations with book covers or the book is not part of recommendations, but was related to a quote or passage I shared. Some books, I will touch on again, but in case that doesn't happen, I will try to include each.
nonfiction
Pursuit of Revolutionary Love: Precarity, Power, Communities (2022) by Joy James.
The Undercommons (2013) by Fred Moten and Stefano Harney
Get any/all of these books wherever you get your books.
Please support libraries however you can. Find out many ways to get involved in supporting libraries at Libraries for the People.
Please consider purchasing books when they are available from Workshops 4 Gaza's bookstore: Noopiming (2020) by Leanne Betasamosake Simpson. When I share books that are available for purchase there, I will list them here.
📚🌱 Books I was reading when I wrote this post: Kashmir: The Case for Freedom (2011) by Tariq Ali, Hilal Bhat, Angana P. Chatterji, Habbah Khatun, Pankaj Mishra, and Arundhati Roy, Noopiming (2020) by Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, Living Room (1985) by June Jordan, There Is No Place for Us: Working and Homeless in America (2025) by Brian Goldstone, Drinking from Graveyard Wells (2023) by Yvette Lisa Ndlovu, The Right to Maim: Debility, Capacity, Disability (2017) by Jasbir K. Puar (re-reading), The Undercommons (2013) by Fred Moten and Stefano Harney.
Thank you for reading.
notes
In The Undercommons (2013) by Fred Moten and Stefano Harney, the authors are discussing the concept of study and Stefano Harney shares,
"A speculative practice is study in movement for me, to walk with others and to talk about ideas, but also what to eat, an old movie, a passing dog, or a new love, is also to speak in the midst of something, to interrupt the other kinds of study that might be going on, or might have just paused, that we pass through, that we may even been invited to join, this study across bodies, across space, across things, this is study as a speculative practice, when the situated practice of a seminar room or squatted space moves out to encounter study in general."
I appreciate speculative practice and also have years of experience engaged in the practice of walking and discussion with my partner, it was part of helping me practice communication and was a way to discuss what we were reading and thinking about, so when I include study here, this is what I'm thinking about. I had an experience earlier today with my partner that was beautifully this type of study, and I am grateful for it.
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I also wanted to write that we will be in the puddles, we will be the puddle, also the waves and the causers of waves, the turbulence, the energy, we will be water too. And that we already are. I’m not meaning that everyone is or might be all of these things, only possibly what fits or feels like part of oneself, in the fullness of these ideas, or even that we currently means everyone, it cannot. I think any or all of these versions, in the possible, the potential, and the positive, can or might be true.
I’m thinking of kinetic energy, of potential energy, of what we can or might do together, of what so many of us are already trying to do, of what so many people have been trying to do for so long. Joy James writes about the “wild card,” and I think about that a lot, it gave me a way to think about the wild card that I became, and not forget about it in my actions.
In Pursuit of Revolutionary Love (2022), responding to a question related to the "extreme state repression" that organizers face compared to celebrities, she shared,
I don’t think people consider celebrities to be much of a threat, particularly if they reiterate the norm. The only thing that is threatening is radical deviation. I talk to students about the “wild card.” People always struggle in different ways. Elites don’t live in those communities of struggle.
[...]
Showing up and learning how to live by and with others, learning how to reinvent ourselves in this increasing wasteland. That’s the good life.
Being present to the struggle without trying to reduce the struggle into containable objects means understanding that all of this is wild.
—In Pursuit of Revolutionary Love (2022), Joy James, (from the chapter "Captive Maternals, the Exonerated Central Park Five, and Abolition With Chris Time Steele of Time Talks, 2019")
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supporting each other..
Please support this campaign if you are able and copy & share the link with your community.
The South Gaza: Tents, Cash Aid, Food & Medical by The Sameer Project - South Campaign is purchases and distributes tents, food, and cash aid to displaced Palestinians in southern Gaza and supports "critical medical cases with treatment, medication, and clinic referrals to those who would otherwise not be able to afford medical intervention." The Sameer Project is "a grassroots aid organization led by four Palestinians in the diaspora."
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