Pictured: A woman in Palestine planted a garden full of flowers using Israeli tear gas canisters after one of them killed her son.
All day long, I scroll through news of Palestinians digging through rubble for their dead. Holocaust descendants calling for the end of genocide in their name (“Never Again… for anyone”). Then this video of young Sudanese women calling for revolution and I think, my god, it’s love that’s keeping all of us from extinction. We are studying coloniality at Harvard, but we should be studying how love has persisted through the violence. What outlives the horrors? I look to history: our commitment to our communities and our care for the people around us. There is footage circulating on X of a young Palestinian man comforting an infant in the midst of bombs falling overhead. In the midst of gruesome death, here is love prevailing.
I will not speak of Palestine in past tense. They will survive. They are surviving.
“all this time i told myself we were born from war—but i was wrong, ma. we were born from beauty. let no one mistake us for the fruit of violence—but that violence, having passed through the fruit, failed to spoil it.” — ocean vuong
Love has been on my mind lately. Or rather, how uninteresting nihilism is to me. It is a crude, selfish privilege to sit back while the world falls apart. Who are any of us to throw in the towel, when Indigenous people (here in the States and abroad) have been holding tightly onto each other to survive for eons? Loving is painful—it is excruciating to witness the United States fund a genocide with our tax dollars. It is devastating to see antisemitism be weaponized for war when it is on the rise (and has been, due to White Nationalism). It is unthinkable to think we are experiencing the same tide of post-9/11 Islamphobia when it was not that long ago.
But what is that, compared to what Gazans are facing? Who are we to turn our backs to them because it is to too much for us? In my last essay, I wrote about how terrible it is that people in the Global North are centering their own well-being. This week, I’m urging my readers to go beyond decentering themselves by actively loving Palestinians. Whether that means attending a protest, calling representatives for a ceasefire, or boycotting companies supporting the IDF, there are ways to engage in radical acts of love, even when despair feels tempting.
Love is the antidote to extinction. And we must practice it everyday.
In Other News:
November 1st marks the first day of Nanowrimo. For those unaware, Nanowrimo is the annual challenge for writers to pen a 50,000 word manuscript for their novel. Heretics Club, my literary salon for creative writers, is hosting our own support group slash boot camp for participating writers. If you’re going to do Nano, don’t do it alone.
I went on the Relationship Type podcast to talk about why self-care is making us feel bad. (Short answer: capitalism, baby!)
I’ll be co-hosting a poetry circle on November 12th with my friend, Ella St. Hilarie. You can RSVP by donating an amount of your choosing. Ella will lead us with a somatic meditation first before we dive into writing. I hope to see you there!