Libra 2 - Three of Swords - Recognizing the Stranger: On Palestine and Narrative by Isabella Hammad

       

The Three of Swords card from the Wild Unknown tarot deck. The tarot card is centered on a green fabric background. The illustration on the card features three black-and-white swords, each with a different hilt, crossed over each other and bound by many intersecting wrapped cycles of red ribbon. The bottoms of each sword are dripping with blood.

To open, three questions:

Reflect on a day in the recent past when learning about a catastrophe that impacted a total stranger brought you to intense sadness, rage, or grief.

Did you take an action to distance yourself from the emotional experience of grieving another’s suffering?

After distancing yourself from grief, where did you arrive?

What is one reason you might choose to return to the place where you grieved another’s suffering?

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Writing here, again. If you’re reading this, thank you for being here.  This blog is important to me because my self-publishing practice helps me continue to write more honestly, which requires that I write about the things that matter most. Therefore, continuing to write about Palestine in public is also of central importance to me.

The most important book I read this year was Isabella Hammad’s bookRecognising the Stranger: On Palestine and Narrative.

The book cover of Recognising the Stranger: On Palestine and Narrative by Isabella Hammad. The cover text is in black and red, and the central image on the cover is of two keys, joined at the handles.

What I had previously been taught--by authority figures, canons, and hierarchies of award/reward/power--about narrative was that every story has a beginning, a middle, and an end. I was taught that meaning is a shape that forms between these three crucial milestones, and most crucially, I was taught that it was not only possible to correct to embrace what meaning can be generated by a book without regard for the material impact the work generates in the actual world beyond its pages.

Crucially, Hammad’s work in Recognising the Stranger: On Palestine and Narrative grounds our focus beyond the easily-centered topic of narrative sequence. Rather, her writing reminds us that if art is to be meaningful, we must reckon with narrative’s actual consequence, and specifically the consequence that exists in the “moment of recognition”, which she writes of as a “turning point”:

“In the language of both law and literary form, then, recognition is a kind of knowing that should incur the responsibility to act for it to have any value beyond personal epiphanies, or appeasing the critics of the one doing the recognizing.” 

Here is the first paragraph of the second part of Recognising the Stranger: On Palestine and Narrative, a part titled “Afterword: On Gaza”:

“Someone once told me she had interviewed an elderly Palestinian woman during the second intifada as part of an oral history project about Palestinians in the diaspora. This particular woman, she said, pointed at another woman wailing in distress on the television screen in her living room in London and cried: “That’s me! That’s me!” I found this story quite moving. Then I was told the woman’s name, and learned that it was my own grandmother. I suddenly laughed, because my grandmother is very dramatic. Reflecting on this now, however, I find myself moved once more. What a pure relation, to see herself in the woman on the television, to experience the distance between them not as numbing but as another component of her pain.

The present onslaught leaves no space for mourning, since mourning requires an afterward, but only for repeated shock and the ebb and flow of grief. We who are not there, witnessing from afar, in what ways are we mutilating ourselves when we dissociate to cope? To remain human at this juncture is to remain in agony. Let us remain there: it is the more honest place from which to speak.”

The empathy of a woman seeing and claiming her self in another woman viewed on a television screen is a crucial grief that binds the past to the present.

The call to reject hegemonic forms of mourning, to reject any false implication that the genocide enacted upon Palestinians has ceased–is a grief that binds the present to uncertainty, and therefore to the future:

“I began the lecture claiming that we can only identify turning points in retrospect. Given the speed and violence with which the cogs are presently rotating, it does feel like we might be in a turning point now: still, we don’t know in which direction we are moving.”

Grief, its downpour, outpouring, and rupture. Let us remain there: it is the more honest place from which to speak.

One of the possibilities that Hammad names at this turning point, this uncertain future-now, is that of a decolonial future.

A decolonial future.

When you repeat those three words in your mind, body, and heart, what is the taste of the weather in the air? What birds do you hope will be flying over the river? How passionately does the rain fall upon the horizon beyond the sea?

In the decolonial future, may we resist catharsis. May I resist the urge to orient my heart towards conclusive certainty in the effort to rescue myself from the pain of open, honest grief.

Palestine is in all of us, in all time, in every space we can sense each other’s absence and presence. We are bound together by spirit, responsibility, and care. If moral humanity is to have a chance of being salvaged, we must devote our daily lives to the heartbreaking, lifesaving reality that none of us are free until all of us are free.

Please join me in keeping close the fundraising campagins of The Sameer Project and The Municipality of Gaza, both linked below:

The Sameer Project is a donations-based aid initiative for Gaza led by Palestinians.

The Municipality of Gaza provides essential services for the people of Gaza, including the Artificial Limbs and Polio center and water treatment services for the city of Gaza.

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Closing questions:

Reflect on a time in the past when you centered your responsibility to act in caring response to a catastrophe, and prioritized this action of care over how the event made you feel.

What is one way that experience hardened you (as a sword hardens in a deluge of cooling water to become useful)?

What is one way that experience softened you (as a sword softens in the crucible fire to become changeable)?

What can the memory of that experience teach you (and others!) about the heart's capacity to resist genocide?