Down to the day, fifty-five years ago, on November 19, 1970, James Baldwin wrote Angela Davis a letter now published in an online forum called History Is a Weapon. At that point in history, Davis was arrested and held in the Women’s House of Detention in New York City. In his letter, Brother Baldwin writes to Sister Davis, yet I hear him speaking directly to future—gathering the past, forging a way forward. History is a weapon, and so is future. In his letter, Baldwin writes:
… we have all been mercilessly brutalized, and have been told nothing but lies, lies about ourselves and our kinsmen and our past, and about love, life, and death, so that both soul and body have been bound in hell. The enormous revolution in black consciousness which has occurred in your generation, my dear sister, means the beginning or the end of America.
A few years after Baldwin sent his timeless letter to Davis, the visionary leader of the black consciousness movement Steve Biko wrote: “We reject the power-based society of the Westerner that seems to be ever concerned with perfecting their technological know-how while losing out on their spiritual dimension.” In this essay, I respect Brother Biko’s radical rejection. We know that genocide is not interrupted by a ceasefire. The psychological and spiritual warfare continue, both soul and body have been bound in hell, with ongoing attacks against our most cherished lineages of affection.
I theorize future from within Palestinian lineages of affection and inspired by transnational Black and Indigenous revolutionary thought and traditions. From here, I see future as collective desire. When I say “future is a weapon,” I’m talking about desire. I’m talking about our Palestinian insurgent love, grief, and beauty. These infrastructures of healing and desire are already present in the liberated future where Palestinians have already won.
My colonizer, on the other hand, desires something much more sinister. In fact, I diagnose Zionist futures as shaped by sadistic desires. I’m not talking about individual pathology or the sadism of a single leader or prime minster. Future is never individual. Future is always collective. After all, there are no individuals alive in the future. And no individual can survive the past. The present alone houses individual human beings. There are only collective futures. And the sadism of the settler is rooted in their collective desire for a future of unending colonial domination. From this site of sadistic desire, the settler wages what I am calling their weapons of mass de-humanization. For generations, decolonial scholars, poets, and activists have theorized these genocidal weapons as spiritual attacks against the very soul of the human. As Aimé Césaire wrote:
My turn to state an equation: colonization = thingification…I am talking about societies drained of their essence, cultures trampled underfoot, institutions undermined, lands confiscated, religions smashed, magnificent artistic creations destroyed, extraordinary possibilities wiped out. They throw facts at my head, statistics, mileages of roads, canals, and railroad tracks….I am talking about millions of men torn from their gods, their land, their habits, their life–from life, from the dance, from wisdom.
These weapons of mass de-humanization are waged against Palestinians on a daily basis. We see medicide, or the intentional incapacitation of the healthcare system. We see scholasticide, the systematic attack against Palestinian knowledge systems, education, and wisdom. The colonizer points their weapons of mass de-humanization at Palestinian futures, attacking our intergenerational growth, killing our children—our extraordinary possibilities—in the tens of thousands. This is connected to what Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian has theorized as “unchilding,” and to what Sarah Ihmoud and other Palestinian feminist scholars are examining and challenging as “reproductive genocide.”
Yes, the colonizer sadistically seeks to destroy Palestinian healing, knowing, and growing. But the Palestinian people have already succeeded in ripping off the governing tape of the world. Palestine exposes the fact that racism is not undefeatable. That colonialism is not inevitable. We grip future as a weapon. And our intergenerational trauma is always surrounded by our intergenerational triumph.
Palestinian healing is a victory because from the depth of our wounds can rise the critical infrastructures for our liberated futures. In this essay, I attempt to articulate two healing praxes in particular, both of which I see as part of our critical psychological and spiritual infrastructures. In doing so, I am inspired by Palestinian theorists of resistance, like Ashgan Ajour, who sheds light on the embodied resistance of Palestinian political prisoners who engage in hunger strikes while strengthening their souls in the process that she calls “spiritualisation of struggle.”
In this essay, I strive to look deeply into this spiritualization of struggle through two praxes that I am calling “I thirst” and “I hunger.” Both examples are rooted in the soul’s expansive tenderness, inspired by my relationships with two different Palestinian men of Gaza: Issa and Abu Khalil. (Both names are pseudonyms to protect privacy.) Grounded by my year-and-a-half-long connections with these two men, I strive to honor these men’s stories from afar as I interrogate genocide as a sadistic accumulation of strategies of the colonizer that seeks to destroy our unbreakable vitality. The attempt to kill our food systems, our health care systems, our family systems, our reproductive systems, our water systems, and our knowledge systems are together part of the lie that there can actually be an end to the truth of us. But as the Palestinian poet Fady Joudah reminds us, “truth is never finished.”
In this light, I conceptualize “I thirst” and “I hunger” as two unending truths that we wage against a lying, dying, genocidal world. Together, they say: I cannot be reduced to a thing. In the face of your weapons, and unrelenting severing of our relationships, we wage future—and our futures are rooted in collective desire for the persistence of love. The persistence of Palestine.
I myself am a Palestinian man born and raised in the shataat (diaspora). My roots go back to family trees in Beit Jala and Bethlehem. I begin with “I thirst” as tethered to a story of one of our ancestors—to a story of Jesus. As this story goes, one of the seven last words that Jesus uttered, while he hung upon the cross, was: “I thirst.” When articulating this praxis, I anchor my theory not in a Christian theology, but in a Palestinian psychology—which I explain now, through the story of Issa, a young man from Gaza City.
I Thirst
I am a young Palestinian man from Sheikh Radwan, Gaza City. It has been completely wiped out. But I remember everything. It lives in me. Like the sea. I love swimming. Especially at sunset. Just flowing in the waves, surfing with only my body. Afterwards my friends and I would sit on a huge rock near the beach, resting from an afternoon in the surf. Watching blues become pink, eventually red, so vibrant that the sky seemed to finesse itself into a different way of being, like showing us how real peace can be. This was my childhood, swimming and resting afterwards surrounded by my friends. I often dream of being back on this rock, feeling that peace, shoulder-to-shoulder with my beloveds.
In fact, I have a recurring dream where I am heading towards this rock. It always starts with me in a car. I am stuck in a long line of traffic because a new checkpoint just spawned out of nowhere. There is a sense of urgency rising within me to get to the beach, to meet my friends before it is too late. I jump out of the car and move quickly towards the beach. I turn a corner and see the checkpoint right in front of me. I’m terrified. I say to one of the soldiers in Hebrew, Anilo set shalom, “I need peace,” but they don’t understand. Suddenly, they start firing and bombing everywhere. I run. Fire is everywhere. People start lining up cars, trucks on the road to block the soldiers’ tanks. I turn a corner, and run into a dark alleyway. I wake up, and think to myself: am I home? I look around in the dark, and see all my family beside me, huddled together, sleeping like a school of fish. I realize, no, we are not home—we are in southern Gaza. Displaced. In genocide. Sheikh Radwan is already destroyed. We are swimming in something much bigger than the sea.
I begin with this part of Issa’s narrative to show how the praxis of “I thirst” is a reminder of the power of human relationality. Issa defends his last moments of childhood, his desire to reach the sea, to be with water, to be with his friends, protecting his cherished lineages of affection—guided by the beauty of all that what he loves, his dreams, and the courage to defend his peace–even in the face of the sadistic cruelty of the colonizer who seeks to destroy it all.
Now, let me tell you the story of my injury. It starts with my best friend, who wanted me to go to the mosque with him. I didn’t really want to go because it didn’t feel safe, but I went anyway. I remember the sun in the window of the mosque. It was so beautiful. It felt like the light was finding its way into my soul, like the sun in a cave where no one knows its source. When we left the mosque, I felt real peace, even just for a moment. I walked my friend back to the tent where he and his family were sheltering. One hour later the mosque was bombed. We just barely escaped our certain death. In my friend’s tent, we started searching for ways to evacuate Gaza. I was talking to a contact from a relative in the West Bank who had connections with the Russian embassy. I was still processing the bombing in the mosque, when the man on the phone shared with me that he may have a way to help me evacuate. I would have to agree, however, to fight for the Russian army in Ukraine. My first thought was, “How cheap is Palestinian life to this world? As a young Palestinian man, just beginning my twenties, am I good only for dying?” The choice was mine: die in Gaza, or die in Ukraine. Why should I go colonize another people? I refused and hung up the phone.
After I hung up the phone, I felt like I needed to get back to my family. My friend decided to walk back with me. On our way, bombing began. Black and gray everywhere. Huge slabs of concrete crashing all around. Before I could think, my friend and I were already running. We couldn’t see where we were going. Only people running past us, injured and shouting. In a moment of bombing, I realized that the terror I feel is that I might lose someone I love. I don’t fear my own death; I fear the loss of love in life.
As I was running, I started to panic that my friend had been killed. I shouted his name and looked all around. This is when a huge slab of concrete fell on my foot and shattered it completely. Somehow, I survived. My friend did too. Too many did not. That night, at the hospital, the pain was excruciating, but I was not going to die from my wounds, like so many around me. In my darkest moments, I would close my eyes and imagine that beautiful light, sneaking in the side window of the mosque. It had already been completely destroyed, erased from this world. But somehow, still standing strong, in my soul’s infrastructure, within.
Issa fights against the colonizer’s weapons of mass dehumanization. He fights with his mind, theorizing Palestinian worth and death as sadistically tied together by a colonial, governing tape of the world from Ukraine to Gaza and beyond. He fights with his soul’s infrastructure, defending the light of the mosque and his deep affection for his friend. He fights with his dignity against colonial sadism, characterized by the desire to inflict extreme pain and humiliation on victims for gratification while bolstering a sense of superiority—moral superiority in particular, rooted in the belief that the colonized are not only inferior, but they deserve and require punishment—they need to be pounded into their place—into agony, or into oblivion. The Israeli sadistic nation-state is seeking not only the eradication of Palestine, but that Palestinians remain stuck in lineages of excruciating loss, pain, and injury.
The colonial wound, by design, is supposed to be forever festering instead of healing. As Dr. Khamis Elessi, a neuro-rehabilitation and pain specialist in Gaza explains, many patients suffer from maggots and worms coming out of their wounds because of the lack of clean water and hygiene. This sadistic cruelty is designed to inflict maximum suffering and to cause the psychological wounds of the colonized to be rotting and unhealed. As water cleans our physical wounds, our psychological healing can be like water for our spiritual wounds.
Once I was back at the house in Southern Gaza, things got even more difficult. I was stuck sitting on a damaged wooden chair, while the host people (my cousin’s relatives), were so hurtful to us. This is when they almost killed my older sister. One of my cousins became so angry when my sister took a chair to sit on, he snatched it from her, took out his gun and stuck it in her face, yelling: “I will kill you!” I was about to watch my own cousin murder my sister, over a chair. There was nothing I could do. Finally, he raised the gun from my sister’s head and shot into the air. Then, he ran out of the house and my sister fell to the floor. What will become of us, if our love doesn’t survive this genocide?
The one thing that got me through this period was my grandmother’s sister. My khalto. When possible, we always sat together. She was old, and I was injured. She was my sanctuary. I told her that one day I would make her pancakes, after the war. Sometimes, the men of the house would be sitting around us, drinking tea. I don’t know where they got the tea from, but they would not share it with us. We were so thirsty. I understand if they didn’t share with me—let me thirst. But Khalto? That feels crazy. To have something to drink and not share it with an old woman. This is cruel. After several months passed, my parents, siblings, and I left that house. It was so difficult to say goodbye to Khalto. As we parted, she said to me: “Don’t forget to visit me after the war, when you are no longer injured. You better cook me those pancakes.” I cried when she said this. I think she was trying to tell me: “Thank you for sharing your humanity with me, as we were thirsty, broken, and mistreated. Many people around us had lost their way, but we didn’t. Don’t forget you know how to be strong and to make others strong beside you. You protected love. And your love, protected me. Together, we protected love’s survival.”
Issa and his khalto teach us how the colonized are not only supposed to disappear, but to be perpetually chained to lineages of dis-affection, to be grief-stricken, to be attacking one another, for our wounds to fester, to become wretched. And eventually, to become wicked.
I envision “I thirst” as critical infrastructure in the face of such sadistic cruelty, which risks ruining our own relationalities. Settler colonial genocide seeks a past, present, and future where Palestinian souls and bodies are bound in hell. Here, our fight for ongoing healing is a psychological and spiritual battlefield. And as we fight, we remember that the wretched of the earth can become the wicked. After all, as Palestinians, don’t we often ask: “How did our colonizers forget to protect love’s survival, somewhere along their way, from the inside of the wall of a German concentration camp, to the outside of an Israeli one?”
I Hunger
Abu Khalil, a Palestinian father who lives with his wife and children in southern Gaza, shared with me several X-rays of his five-year-old son, Khalil. He texted me the X-rays of his son’s legs, asking for help interpreting the images, hoping to find ways to better support Khalil, who had been having trouble walking. I immediately reached out to trusted friends, family, and colleagues, and within hours, three different physicians responded, sharing with me statements such as: “Findings on X-ray suggestive of problems with mineralization” or “showing signs of early osteomalacia, which can cause bones to weaken, increasing risk of breaking.”
For the past seven months, Abu Khalil’s family had been eating one meal a day; sometimes they would share only one can of garbanzos, split among their entire family. After Abu Khalil received confirmation of his five-year-old’s possible early-stage osteomalacia and the importance of accessing vitamin D, he risked his life to find these critical vitamins. Once he secured the vitamins, we spoke about his act of protecting his baby, his love. We talked of Palestinian fatherhood, and what “protection” even means in a time of genocide when colonialism creeps so grossly into the body, attacking the most tender branches of Palestinian life: our children.
Palestinians in Gaza are not only being starved to death but are being starved to disappear. The settler starves the Palestinian, in part, from a psychological perspective, to make visible the loss of the body’s mass. To weaken and wither the bones. Making people slowly materially disappear is a sadistic weapon, and includes the genocidal intent to watch people becoming reduced materially, morally, and spiritually.
As Abu Khalil said to me over the phone just last week, on the second anniversary of October 7th: Everything En-tahaa, انتهى. Everything finished. He said, “we don’t love this life, but we insist on life, so our children will have a chance someday, in the future. I keep fighting for vitamins, for food for my children as our final message.”
If food is a love language, then what is the language of famine?
Looking into baby Khalil’s X-rays is to interpret this language. It is translation. It is listening across boundaries, in between body and the beyond. These images are bridges, and they shatter a strange silence. Yes, the sounds of drones and warplanes may have paused for a moment, but make no mistake: racist silence continues to kill. Into this silence, I share a poem, dedicated to Abu Khalil and his son.
***
I Hunger
For a related discussion, see a recent episode of the podcast Liberation Now featuring the author.
Cover image: Devin George Atallah, El Khader.
