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| The Nine of Swords tarot card from Druid Craft Tarot. A person sits up in bed, their face buried in their hands, their knees drawn up to their chest. The blanket that covers their body is dark, royal blue. The bed they sit in is the color of gold, and features a head- and side-board that resembles a throne. Nine swords, each with a different hilt, hang on the wall behind the stricken figure. |
What are the truest stories we are sharing in the dark that keep empire up at night?
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On May 31, 2024, the Sun moved into the second decan of Gemini, that which is ruled by Mars. When the planet of war, activation, and conflict enters the sign of knowledge-sharing and communication, the iconic objects of this suit are at their least metaphorical on the page. Swords in tarot may evoke the topic ideas/concepts--which I often evoke as a major Swords theme--but a sword is, first and foremost, a weapon that belongs to a warrior. The keywords I associate with the Nine of swords are anxiety, suppression, and the power of organized knowledge. Thus, for this decan, the text I read is "Peril" by Toni Morrison, an essay which is quoted in its entirety below.
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"Peril" by Toni Morrison
"Authoritarian regimes, dictators, despots are often, but not always fools. But none is foolish enough to give perceptive, dissident writers free range to publish their judgments or follow their creative instincts. They know they do so at their own peril. They are not stupid enough to abandon control (overt or insidious) over media. Their methods include surveillance, censorship, arrest, even slaughter of those writers informing and disturbing the public. Writers who are unsettling, calling into question, taking another, deeper look. Writers--journalists, essayists, bloggers, poets, playwrights--can disturb the social oppression that functions like a coma on the population, a coma despots call peace, and they stanch the blood flow of war that hawks and profiteers thrill to.
That is their peril.
Ours is of another sort.
How bleak, unlivable, insufferable existence becomes when we are deprived of artwork. That the life and work of writers facing peril must be protected is urgent, but along with that urgency we should remind ourselves that their absence, the choking off of a writer's work, its cruel amputation, is of equal peril to us. The rescue we extend to them is a generosity to ourselves.
We all know nations that can be identified by the flight of writers from their shores. These are regimes whose fear of unmonitored writers is justified because truth is trouble. It is trouble for the warmonger, the torturer, the corporate thief, the political hack, the corrupt justice system, and for a comatose public. Unpersecuted, unjailed, unharassed writers are trouble for the ignorant bully, the sly racist, and the predators feeding off the world's resources. The alarm, the disquiet, writers raise is instructive because it is open and vulnerable, because if unpoliced it is threatening. Therefore the historical suppression of writers is the earliest harbinger of the steady peeling away of additional rights and liberties that will follow. The history of persecuted writers is as long as the history of literature itself. And the efforts to censor, starve, regulate, and annihilate us are clear signs that something important has taken place. Cultural and political forces can sweep clean all but the 'safe,' all but the state-approved art.
I have been told that there are two human responses to the perception of chaos: naming and violence. When the chaos is simply the unknown, the naming can be accomplished effortlessly--a new species, star, formula, equation, prognosis. There is also mapping, geography, landscape, or population. When chaos resists, either by reforming itself or by rebelling against imposed order, violence is understood to be the most frequent response and the most rational when confronting the unknown, the catastrophic, the wild, wanton, or incorrigible. Rational responses may be censure; incarceration in holding camps; prisons; or death, singly or in war. There is, however, a third response to chaos, which I have not heard about, which is stillness. Such stillness can be passivity and dumbfoundedness; it can be paralytic fear. But it can also be art. Those writers plying their craft near to or far from the throne of raw power, of military power, of empire building and countinghouses, writers who construct meaning in the face of chaos must be nurtured, protected. And it is imperative not only to save the besieged writers but to save ourselves. The thought that leads me to contemplate with dread the erasure of other voices, of unwritten novels, poems whispered or swallowed for fear of being overwhelmed by the wrong people, outlawed languages flourishing underground, essayists' questions challenging authority never being posed, unstaged plays, canceled films--that thought is a nightmare. As though a whole universe is being described in invisible ink.
Certain kinds of trauma visited on peoples are so deep, so cruel, that unlike money, unlike vengeance, even unlike justice, or rights, or the goodwill of others, only writers can translate such trauma and turn sorrow into meaning, sharpening the moral imagination.
A writer's life and work are not a gift to mankind; they are its necessity."
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It has been two hundred and fifty-five days since the state of Israel cut off water, food, and electricity to Gaza in collective punishment after October 7 and began a bombing campaign that has dropped over 70,000 tons of bombs (this amount is more than two nuclear bombs) on a 141-square-mile patch of land enclosed by a concrete wall, a city that was, last October, populated by over 2 million people, over half of whom were children. By March 2024, the number of Palestinian children killed in Gaza after five months had surpassed the total number of children killed in the entire world during the last four years. Despite the unspeakable horrors that Palestinian people are suffering, and the global public's unprecedented ability to view thousands of primary accounts of this genocide from civilian and journalist testimony 24/7, widespread knowledge of the suffering of Gaza has been met consistently with mainstream suppression and punishment.
Here are nine instances, sourced from the last nine months, of a suppression enacted by the most wealthy state actors in the world, including first and foremost the United States of America, whose citizens' tax dollars are directly funding the Palestinian death toll that our government would command we turn away from. In other words, here are nine written/spoken bodies of work that have the power to keep oppression up at night.
1. The life-writing of Gazans living through a genocide. Here are Google search results of documented internet outages in Gaza since October 2023. Internet outages suppress Gazan voices by prohibiting them from sharing their experience with the outside world, and also prohibit coordination of aid deliveries within Gaza.
2. The work of poets like Refaat Alareer who refuse to silence themselves in the face of empire. "Remembering Refaat Alareer, in the words of his student (Al Jazeera, Alia Kassab)
3. Palestinian journalism. "103 journalists killed in 150 days in Gaza: a tragedy for Palestinian journalism" (Reporters Without Borders)
4. Statements of collective solidarity. "An Open Letter from Concerned Kundiman Fellows & Community Members"
5. Student protest. "More than 2,100 arrested during pro-Palestinian protests on US college campuses" (AP News)
6. Anti-Zionist writing by Jewish writers and culture workers. "Over 2000 poets and writers are boycotting the Poetry Foundation" (Lit Hub, Dan Sheehan)
7. The historical record of the loss of human rights, the historicity of which is rendered unnewsworthy through the normalization of occupation. “Protection of Civilians Report, 5-18 September 2023” by the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA)
8. Our voice. Mine. Yours. Our voices together. "On Speaking Out" (Daniel José Older)
9. From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free. "From the River to the Sea": Palestinians Resist Erasure (In These Times, Maha Nassar)
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Closing questions:
May the grief we carry like armor become a guardian of our willingness to speak out on behalf of our most vulnerable.
What words do you wish to release, but have not yet wielded?
What is a truth you would speak to power if you did not have to fear retaliation?
What is the relationship between your grief and your power?
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