Here I am with my love, Mojo, last week at the Kirkus Awards, but all we had on our minds: Free Palestine 🇵🇸.
Dear Ones,
Hello from Dubai! I’m en route to the Ubud Writers Festival in Bali. Last week, I survived a packed week, acting like a 25 y/o again and damn, it felt good when I reached the finish line. I finally got to celebrate my Kirkus Award at the 10 year ceremony (Of the 90% white crowd I am sure 1% knew who I was, alas this is Amerikkkan literary culture! I’m not too pressed because truth be told, I don’t want to be perceived although I did get some cute compliments on my Laquan Smith dress 👅). This past week, I returned to my performance art roots with my dear friend and muse Nova, in an event entitled Shakchunni: Unveiling the Patramyth. Being honored by a younger Bengali nonbinary femme as the creator of this word patramyth—the foundational lies recorded in history to protect the powerful—first written in my book In Sensorium: Notes For My People, reminded me why I keep writing despite how exhausting it is to keep swimming against the dominant culture’s tide. It’s my way of mothering the world, a world that in some ways, felt too dangerous for me to imagine raising a child. I don’t have the guts for the beautiful and difficult work of raising a child, but I do have the guts to write, and to mother all the young twenty-somethings navigating this frightening, crumbling late capitalist world.
Our performance art piece imagined me, the writer, in conversation with the vengeful Bengali entity, Shakchunni, a spirit of a dead woman who lives in the forest, vengeful and raging against lecherous, abusive high caste men. We even cast a young Bangladeshi Brahmin man who took on the role as The Man Who Escapes…Tonight, a target of Shakchunni’s vengeance, who narrowly escapes.
Yes, so, this past week culminated in another gorgeous, albeit rain-swept artisan market with No Borders, a lifestyle and shop curated by Kanika Karvinkop—a space for artisans to sell their handmade goods, representing not only South Asian diaspora but other artists and business owners of color.
Super Libra Eclipse energy for me, y’all. Relationships I need and want to grow with my community are feeling vibrant, and I’m about to be in conversation with writers and thinkers in Bali, with 4 panels devoted to decolonized writing practice, memoir writing, and truth-telling in a time of mass disinformation and witnessing a genocide unfolding before the world’s eyes.
I am so grateful to be in life partnership with a man who feels exactly as I do about Palestine. We are in forever solidarity with the people of Palestine, mourning the loss of innocent children in this senseless, brutal war and occupation. We are heartbroken by the death of Wadea Al-Fayoum, a six-year old beautiful boy murdered in Chicago by his white suprmacist landlord, a monstrous, evil man who learned nothing in his 71 years alive. We are Bangla, Algerian & Irish & Muslim. Our people fought fiercely for their right to live free from colonizers, conquerors and genocide, and the the tragedy of death and loss of humanity is a long memory. Liberation work is complex. It is the utmost and sacred privilege to use my writing and art to imagine a decolonized body and a free future— a privilege and gift I never, ever take for granted.
Here are some of my thoughts.
As Palestinians face their annihilation and the rageful brutality of the Israeli state, as innocent people die fighting for their right to these occupied, stolen lands, we cannot stay silent, we must keep sending our money and our prayers and our continual solidarity, but we must also remember our own inheritance of colonization, and what those struggles entailed.
When will enough be enough? It’s beyond an eye for an eye, now Palestinians face total annihilation. Innocent Palestinian people are paying the price for deaths of innocent Israeli poeple, but we cannot be naïve as to why the violence happened in the first place.
Palestinians living in a constant state of trauma, as strangers and criminalized subjects on their own land, are facing colonial violence they have a right to resist. You can’t truly stand for a Free Palestine, if you can’t see how poor Muslim people have been forced into a pact, ensuring their slow, painful death. Too many are fine justifying the unjust deaths of poor brown-skinned Muslim people, whether in Israel, India, the U.S. or China, but when a group of these people enact violence in the name of freedom as a response to their oppressor, there is a call for non-violence, both by leaders of government and liberals alike. If you’re not living in Palestine, condemning Hamas doesn’t preclude a reality check, we, globally, must confront the sheer magnitude of what occupation since the post WWII, 1948 Nakba has meant for Palestinians.
After decades living under settler-colonial rule, are the people being oppressed never to reach a tipping point?
How do you think our nations decolonized their lands of European conquerors, who extracted labor and resources with no regard to human suffering? It was not by asking nicely, peacefully or protesting without arms. I’m a writer and have the privilege to live as a pacifist. I ask myself often: would I be able or willing to enact violence, in the name of freedom if I reached a tipping point?
I think of my own people, Bangladeshi freedom fighters who took up arms against the Pakistani Army; or my partner’s people, including his grandfather, Algerian freedom fighters who liberated themselves against the French — at the cost of innocent lives. At the cost of hundreds of thousands of women and femmes and queers and people of marginalized genders being harmed by cisgender hetero men, who hailed their nation as their Mother, even as scores of mothers died at its birth.
Women and children, queers and trans and gender nonconforming people will always be the ones who pay the price for violence enacted by men in the name of nation. And yet, we simultaneously must acknowledge that when an oppressor will not remove their chokehold, protest and written words have not been the only acts that led colonized people to their Liberation.
There were fatal acts of violence from the colonizer and the freedom fighters to make it so. And today, standing in this long, postcolonial shadow, we know that forming a nation-state under a flag with a dominant culture ruling the society is not true liberation.
This Palestinian decolonization movement and revolutionary struggle is happening in our lifetime. We need to take all of our work as students of history to put abstract ideas about decolonization or revolution into practice.
We must see this moment for what it is—a continuation of interdependent, cyclical historic events that are rooted in hatred.
As a kid growing up in New York, I learned about the horrors of the Holocaust that European Jewish people survived at the hands of European German Nazis. My heart broke seeing these images and reading these narratives, but in those years, I never learned about my people’s genocide or any other genocide in the Global South. I’m a brown-skinned Muslim South Asian person whose people survived a genocide, whose people have brutalized Adivasi and minority groups on land that has been hastily and chaotically partioned multiple times by the same prolific colonizer, the British. The bloodstained hands of a crumbling empire brokered the deal for a Zionist, white supremacist, ancestral claim to Palestine.
Since the horrors of the Nakba, Palestinian people have been violently uprooted from and massacred on, their own land. And now, with the full on siege on Gaza, there is no water, food, shelter or medical care for the innocent people being killed simply for being Palestinian. These are war crimes. We must name this moment for what it is—a genocide.
Indigenous people the world over have been ravaged by settler-colonizer violence and theft, and as we, most of us people living on stolen land, our work and our writing and our protest must draw connections between all of our liberation struggles and lessons from the horrors our ancestors and those who perished faced.
Reckoning with exclusionary, caste-hierchical and religiously closed societies rooted in privileges for “chosen people” is inevitable. When you oppress others, you demand their submission and their silence, their devotion despite their total dehumanization. When a people have lost everything, the sorrow and desperation for home can make the power that comes from dominance feel like protection. As if becoming a strong, militaristic and powerful person, no one can harm you. It is the sheer violence to maintain that power, which will ultimately unravel the Oppresor.
Yes, it is painful and uncomfortable to face reality. It is painful and uncomfortable when beloved people in the Jewish diaspora are hurting. But we need to be really honest about what’s unfolding, and how the oppression of Palestinians today is a continuation of a painful historical arc.
We need to be honest about why there’s this expectation of a perfect, non-violent, oppressed Palestinian person.
There will always be people among our own people ready to die and be violent for freedom. Freedom fighting is a constant, continual, and profound myriad of unsettling acts using every single form of knowledge and movement to articulate the freedom we are fighting for. Words, writing, art, how we dress, speak and adorn ourselves, migration, agitation and violence all happen simultaneously, across a population ready to fight and even die, for their freedom.
When we shout Free Palestine! we are addressing the root cause of occupation. Understand that we don’t all relate to whiteness, dominant culture, power and nationalism in the same way, our dissidence is formed by the histories we’ve inherited.
Recently, the beloved Asian American literary organization Kundiman posted and deleted several posts about Palestine, backtracking their support of liberation because they ignorantly and incorrectly worried the timing would indicate somehow they didn’t care about Jewish Israeli lives. This false conflation positions Palestinian freedom as antithetical to Jewish life, a deeply disrespectful stance, not only to Palestinians or Muslim diasporic artists, but to Jewish thinkers and writers who’ve critiqued Zionism and believe in a free Palestine at great cost to their own lives.
Too many artists and writers today are implicitly aligned with the imperial project of the United States, even as they harp on about their conflicted identities and postcolonial blues. They’re ready to be one of Obama’s favorite books, ready to celebrate with Kamala Auntie in the White House, or shake hands with a U.S. president or a fascist Prime Minister versed in war-mongering and thirsty for brown-skinned Muslim blood. Not only do these artists and writers lack the shame having their art tied to imperial power and culture, these artists and writers have no right to tell Palestinian people how to fight for their freedom. If you can’t unequivocally and wholeheartedly support the Palestinian freedom struggle, if your imagination does not consider human rights to freedom, love, food, water and shelter and land for all human beings— then why should we trust you, or your art? You’ve got nothing to say.
One of the gravest forms of delusion, which keeps us far, far away from enlightenment, is the false belief that any people is distinct, superior, or separate from other human beings.
We are going to spend lifetimes undoing the harm of war, genocide, enslavement and militarized, bordered nation-state. We must unlearn the falsehood of origins, purity, or divisive hierarchies based on caste, religion, race, ability or gender. May we never forget what we could’ve had— an unpartitioned Earth—one where all people roam and migrate freely. May we one day have the consciousness to be free of all this man-made suffering. Wishing you all strength as you weep, reflect, rage and love to the very end.
Love,
Tanaïs
thank you for the depth and nuance you captured throughout this 💕 it has always been and will always be Free Palestine