Eluding illusion and treading warily around “the blank falsity of day,” Palestinian poet Ahmad Almallah’s recently-released third collection of poetry, Wrong Winds, presents us with an enduring suspicion of the apparent and the seeming. Purchase a copy of Wrong Winds HERE.

—Nour Eldin H., assistant editor

I don’t know mainly how
to save myself from my
words: I would want them
all, alive and well, or at
once, all at once, burning.

—Ahmad Almallah

AFTER AL-SHANFARA

ولكنّ نفسًا مُرة لا تقيمُ بي                 على الذأم إلا ريثما أتحولُ

◆

الشّنفرى

◆

• but this proud bitter self
• has no place in it
• for injury;
• it scorns
•        till eyes turn
•         toward an
•                   other
• beyond those places
• in the past I’ll leave—
•              setting out in me.

WOOK

When the world ends
—as in the now—we’ll
have to turn books to
their source, and use
them as burning wood.

For now: I look at my
stack—of scrap books?
Mostly wood on wood
doesn’t burn on its own.
What will I part with
first to keep warm, or

cook my self something?
Because you can’t eat a
book, not for sustenance
anyway! Or could I make
a structure out of all my
books—what would wood

look like in that form?
Would the words stick
out facing the sky, or
would they be dripping
in, on my head, on my
everything. I don’t know

how to save myself, any
how? most of the time?
I don’t know mainly how
to save myself from my
words: I would want them
all, alive and well, or at
once, all at once, burning.

PURE&LOVE

1/2

the object
doesn’t
exist—

thus: no
one is
drawn

to another;
but what
if two

are drawn
together—
will this mean

you’ll be wait-
ing for me in
the after-

life, where
figures
don’t

have to touch?

2/2

benefit-cost-ratio
demands that the
canvas be as wide
as can be drawn

like an expansive
golf field confront-
ed by all the love
cliches: dawn, sun

etc. everywhere
every color is made
invisible by another
color; because the
heart can’t pump love
all day, it takes it away
for matters of living—
isn’t it sad to let go of

chance, for the sake
of the design, the
already given
              structure?

LIFE&DAWN

Both are drawn. This
is the blank falsity
of day. This: I take
as reality. Eyes can
or not. Look in or
out. There. Death
announcing itself
in squares, balanced
on the corner. Boxes,
like boxes that turn
out to be simple fact:
boxes, and more
boxes against
the sun, which I start
to draft, beginning
and brushing its light-
lock. Everywhere, the
mind is a god. Misstep
and you’ll fall prey to
illusions. So: carry on
without starting. Be
the cause to be, because
one has to misstep in
order to defile, because
one has and one has not:
                                                           etc.

Ahmad Almallah grew up in Palestine and currently lives in Philadelphia. His newest poetry
collection, Wrong Winds, is out with Fonograf Editions (2025). His other collections include
Border Wisdom (Winter Editions 2023) and Bitter English (Chicago 2019). He is currently artist-in-residence in English and Creative Writing at UPenn.

The post Wrong Winds—Excerpts appeared first on Mizna.

Essayist Farah Abdessamad contemplates the layering of history atop history in a small Tunisian town on the Mediterranean coast, and the poetics of how memory and recollection sediment to become the future of the past—what we call our present. This Mizna Online exclusive feature is published as part of Mizna 25.2, Futurities, link to purchase HERE.

—Nour Eldin H., assistant editor

While omniscience is often equated with divinity, to forget is to be human—it is to die a human death. Remembering, then, works to resist the natural course of decay and extinction. We excavate our mind like we fumble in a wild garden; we scratch underneath family stories, tales, poems, books. To remember is to take an unknown journey and sometimes we come across special objects.

—Farah Abdessamad

Tunisian Afterglows, Chronic Collision

Twelve miles south of Tunis, I inspect the graffiti on the decrepit house. Spray painted in black against a wall the color of young apricots, are the words “Naro” next to “H-Lif”—an abbreviation for the town of Hammam Lif. In capital letters these two words float. Naro, Hammam-Lif’s Carthaginian past; Hammam Lif, Naro’s Tunisian future. In a shadowless street off the polluted beach, they exist simultaneously and become something else: a world-image and a new spatial realm. These two names won’t leave me alone.

Unlike more elaborate mural art, this graffiti contained no signature and no date. The unknown artist strolled, stopped, and appraised the abandoned house’s surface in near collapse under the weight of bygone halcyon days. Everything here is in a state of near-collapse. It must have happened at nighttime, when the beach’s laughter, made of discreet courtship near the wave breakers and hard liquor drunk by the bottle, subsided. Lulled by the rolling waves, the young man—let’s assume a young man—looked around. Silence. Next, he took his can of spray paint and gave it a vigorous shake, muffled by a second-hand sweater he wrapped around it. Without much thought, he tattooed the names of his town. Hammam Lif first, then Naro, a spontaneous but necessary addition as if one couldn’t be inscribed without the other. A quick outburst. Intentionally or not, he mapped a sensory grid: that of the living and the dead. I stare at the evocation, just like he did. As quiet as a cat, he left the scene toward the train station and farther west, joining the towering shadow of Jebel Boukornine. 

Graffiti is a public language; it captures a visual and symbolic mood when not a scream. Yet “[l]anguage is never simply a language, a tool, it is a reservoir of a people’s soul,” wrote Albert Memmi in The Impossible Life of Frantz Fanon (1973); this prompts recognition. The young man who spray painted the words Naro and Hammam Lif didn’t do so to show off his drawing skills or compete with others over matters of style or engage in obvious social activism. H-Lif and Naro, by their two-word minimalism—the drawing holding the finality of a signature—conveyed something of a different order. It brought to mind another mural I had noticed two years ago at Hammam Lif’s train station after a decade-long absence. That one shows a teenager with headphones listening to a cassette that reads “please don’t kill yourself” in English. Nurturing and supportive slogans on this anti-suicide campaign include “Stay 4 the strangers that will love you” and “Life is always worth it.” A loving whisper to counter a desperate, silent scream. It hurts to think that for some young people the train linking Tunis to its southern banlieue might be an attractive final destination, a relief to end a painful existence. The mood of inevitable capitulation is challenged in this anti-suicide graffiti by the station that appeared after the Revolution, commissioned by a local youth organization. I wondered why they elected to write these messages in English as opposed to our dialect if the intended audience was local youth. The image carried a distinctive American feel with its textisms and Walkman from the 1980s and 90s, which brought to mind a third graffiti by the beach promenade depicting the American hip-hop icon Tupac Shakur on the sides of a run-down kiosk. English is a social language, an elsewhere, an abstract country, a narrative landscape, much like Naro is to Hammam Lif. A Hammam Lif graffiti resurrects Naro like others vow to avenge the death of Tupac: these alternative spaces exist only in our subjective longing, but their entanglement doesn’t end there. More than a mass of archaeological fragments, Naro is the site of powerful dreamscapes, upon which a graffiti artist extends the affective urge to hold onto the memory of the dead through time. Naro and Hammam Lif etched like the romantic blanket protecting  a lover’s embrace; I got pulled in to examine what kind of longing they conjure.

It’s hard to chart with precision Naro’s timeline. The village and its people were part of Carthage’s expanding empire, which Rome razed to the ground in 146 BCE after three devastating wars. This genocidal campaign brutally erased most traces of Carthaginian culture, literature, and lifestyle, a sprawling civilization that stretched across the central Mediterranean for centuries. Victorious Rome incorporated and administered the territory as a province. The country, to which the Amazigh people are indigenous, changed hands countless times until being ruled by the Ottoman Empire and France before gaining independence in 1956. Hammam Lif, famous for its hot spring reputed to cure nasal ailments, sits where ancient Naro was and has grown from a modest fishermen’s village to a town of more than 40,000 people. At what point did the city cease to be Carthaginian, Arab, Ottoman, Vandals, or French to become something else entirely in our imagination?

Jebel Boukornine, the mountain of “two horns” in Tunisian Arabic, looms over Hammam Lif as it did over Naro. The twin peaks crown the Gulf of Tunis, belonging to the topographical memory of Tunisois today, of Carthaginians yesterday. In the times of Naro, Boukornine’s limestone gave a pink hue to syncretic statues prized by Punic and Roman patrons. On its western peak, where animals were sacrificed and votive stelae placed to honor the gods and commemorate the animal offerings, rested a sanctuary consecrated to the cult of Punic divinity Baal, later assimilated to the Roman god Saturn. There, worshippers overlooked Carthage and the small villages around it. I imagine them, not more than five or six climbing the mountain with their loads to visit the temple’s attendants. Upon reaching Boukornine’s western summit, they rested on small benches made of wood and rocks. The breeze cooled their burning cheeks. The supplicants shared a piece of bread between them before washing their hands to proceed with the rituals. And when nighttime descended, they lit terracotta lamps and stargazed, huddling against the shadows. 

I wandered near Jebel Boukornine one winter day. I went to visit the green and red painted sufi shrine of local saint Sidi Bouriga. A fire destroyed part of the building a few years ago. The zaouia had been renovated since, but it was closed that day. I followed the path leading to the mountain’s slopes that remain green despite the abundance of concrete and dust everywhere around it. The incessant car traffic muted; I paused to admire the expanse of the sea’s changing blue—a blush so warm and tranquil. Amid piles of plastic trash and unpleasant smells, I carried on the forested slopes until confronted with several young men who immediately hid their hands in their pockets when they spotted me. The mountain’s new guardians, I thought. I turned my feet and left visiting the old sanctuary for another day. 

Like the graffiti artist’s infatuation, I too have often thought of Hammam Lif and Naro. I could not roam Hammam Lif without roaming Naro and this spatial collision created an illusion of permanence, the existence of a vague continuum giving way to a love of legends and a mythological resonance. Several months after my walk to Boukornine I encountered ancient Naro when I least expected it in New York City. The Metropolitan Museum opened a show devoted to medieval Africa. Among the exhibition’s stunning objects were Jewish mosaics from Naro excavated in the late 19th century. They testified from a place where multiple faiths coexisted from the 3rd to the 6th century. The floor mosaics represented several potent images including a menorah, a lion framed by floral motifs, and a large-scale date palm tree. I came to know that they had been unearthed in 1883 by Ernest de Prudhomme, a French Army Captain who proverbially dug his backyard and found a treasure: the most complete evidence of ancient synagogues in Roman Africa. Men under his orders unfortunately damaged many pieces due to inadequate excavation techniques and handling. The Brooklyn Museum acquired these historical objects in 1905, around the same year of the Young Tunisians’ founding, a decisive political movement mobilizing indigènes, promoting Tunisian emancipation and equal political consideration under the French protectorate. 

In New York, I admired these vestiges and noted their familiarity despite not sharing the faith for which they were designed. I recognized in the lion the tales of the extinct North African Lion which once populated Tunisia’s forests and mountains up until independence. I visualized the many date palm trees lining the beachfront promenade of today’s Hammam Lif in their various states of desiccation, and in the mosaics the colorful tiles of our family home as well as the ostraca of a surviving past that pokes and gasps through the ripples of time.

That de Prudhomme found the remains of the Naro synagogue in his garden is rather uncanny. It emphasizes that soil is a stratum holding infinite secrets. History’s layers often mingle and argue like the daily pensioners glued to their plastic chairs in smoky, idle cafes amplified by the noise of a TV playing somewhere. These deposits sediment and superimpose, elbowing eras and events out of sight until they stubbornly spring back to view. 

The ancients distinguished between memory and recollection. In the same way, we differentiate History from collective and mythological narratives, and all of these from personal histories. According to Saint Augustine, born in Romanized North Africa, “the time present of things past is memory.” In other words, memory is the present of the past. Recollection, on the other hand, entails the act of piecing together fragments, a determination that leads to a form of realization. Collective and primordial memories may not concern our existence directly but they frame a mental geography. I, as the embodied form of the present, was not present during the birth of oceans and the sky, nor during those cataclysmic events—plagues, wars, natural disasters, famines—that still haunt the collective human consciousness. Yet as a historical being, I live through my personal memories in addition to those I have inherited, what German scholar Reinhart Koselleck referred to in Sediments of Time as a tension between “experiential space” and “expectation horizon”. And crucially, memory cannot be apprehended without forgetfulness and erasure. 

Little has survived Roman wrath to teach us about how Carthaginians philosophized history and human existence. They believed that the soul survived from its physical incarnation. In other societies not too distant from Naro, the dead underwent trials to be accepted into an afterlife; a moment often recounted as a voyage, a crossing of rivers. Forgetfulness grants passage to a new life in exchange for the past: the dead must relinquish the memory of those that attach them to the material world. Historian of religions Mircea Eliade wrote in Mythologies of Memory and Forgetting that “the dead are those who have lost their memories”—or, perhaps more accurately, traded. While omniscience is often equated with divinity, to forget is to be human—it is to die a human death. Remembering, then, works to resist the natural course of decay and extinction. We excavate our mind like we fumble in a wild garden; we scratch underneath family stories, tales, poems, books. To remember is to take an unknown journey and sometimes we come across special objects. 

* * * 

After encountering the laconic graffiti signage of H-Lif and Naro, I head back to the beach. The sea is calm and the scent of rotten garbage tickles my throat. Public benches have been smashed into pieces. Sea-facing restaurants and kiosks have shut, except for one with an empty freezer placed like it were part of a garage sale. Wild grass and trash have covered the area where sand used to be. I tiptoe between shards of glass and plastic bottles, baby clothes and broken toys, and dry balls of Posidonia oceanica, a common underwater seagrass, rejected by the sea. Famished flea-infested dogs and litters of emaciated cats haul leftovers of leftovers. Sand was harvested to embellish touristic beaches south, as if this place’s constitutive components were destined to elect one of two imposed choices: to leave or surrender. Following a heavy storm in 1981, ill-advised authorities installed large wave breakers which trapped marine currents, occasionally turning the sea a dangerous tint of green. Stagnating waters have mixed with sewage; it is too toxic to swim there now. When I was little during summer visits, my family rushed to secure a spot on the beach before it got crowded. This was before the sea turned into an irreversible poisonous pond where harassed and beaten-up asylum seekers go to die, trading their own memories for a one-way passage. At night, we would gather on white plastic chairs sinking into the cold sand, drinking sodas drunk on our stupid happiness. 

From the beach on a clear day, I can make out the Byrsa Hill of old Carthage and the elevated village of Sidi Bou Said, the Tunisia of social media influencers and hashtags, a vista that often feels like it belongs to a different country. Located north, both of these spots twinkle at night. Wish you were here, they tout to me, from my there on the other side of the Gulf of Tunis. Large ships anchor in the port of La Goulette—to France, Italy—they pass by until they make a turn and disappear in the far distance. Sometimes I think the ships and their passengers might pity this neglected town and its people who dream of visas they can’t obtain to travel abroad and escape (is visa-fantasizing an early form of memory-trading?). Work, lack of work, life is ghali—expensive. The Tunisia I know, the one of Hammam Lif, is left to old people, kids, and women, to it-was-better-before and look-at-these-young-women-now (always young women). A dirty dot, a stain on the polluted coastline along with Rades’ eyesore of an industrial zone. The old casino is collapsing despite multiple renovation announcements. The empty mansions have stayed behind while patrician families have opted to live elsewhere. The Bey’s winter residence is crumbling, the site reeks of urine. Cinema Oriental closed a while ago and the bakeries are sometimes half empty amid cyclical flour shortages, which have worsened in recent years. And not just flour: lines of caffeine-deprived people in front of the few shops selling ground coffee. But there’s fricasses, pizza, lablebi, and more and we’ve blessed a new dictator to replace the one we had deposed. The town’s characters ignore that they live on borrowed time as each new day starts following the same musical score. The streets bask in nostalgia, a dangerous affliction that infects people sitting, waiting, queuing in between a constitutional coup, an economic crisis, and news of arbitrary arrests. Those working in Europe and Canada front their exchange rate-enabled wealth. They don’t share stories of racism and hardships beneath their hard-won euros and dollars. 

“A remembrance is in very large measure a reconstruction of the past achieved with data borrowed from the present,” noted French intellectual Maurice Halbwachs in The Social Frameworks of Memory. I find this helpful to approach Naro’s shape-shifting nature. Naro’s ability to stimulate a reflection on the concept of time—both a physical place and a delineated periodicity—and the poetics of time. Naro has become a salve to soothe daily humiliations, an incantation to fight the static of the present. Naro is not a door for cultural supremacy or racist genetic theories. Rather, it is a revolution in the sense of circling back to a rumination—a poking question mark that gives way to mysterious ellipses. 

In our mind, the graffiti artist’s and mine, Naro is enveloped in a magnetic aroma of fresh fish, baking ovens, and a sticky, generous sea. The village enjoys stillness during napping hours once men have returned to shore with their morning loads of tuna, octopus, and cuttlefish. Children play on the beach and admire the boats going and leaving the port of Carthage. They dream of trading across the Mediterranean Sea one day in these agile ships, of encountering different lands, of worshiping Melqart in the various temples dedicated to him in Gades and Malta. Borders are malleable here. A grandmother scolds a child, who dirtied their cotton robe when drawing fish on the wet sand with his friends. A little girl shrieks and runs away from bees. 

Naro means “fire” in the old and extinct language of the Carthaginians, a connection also found in Arabic today. Fire is light, an emergency signal, a symbol of arrivals and homecomings at sea. It brightens crevices, fear, and human ignorance while projecting diffused shadows against the walls of our caves. Fire is a sun, a raging luminosity, an abundant summer and the warmth of a home during winter. Uncontrolled and unchecked, fire turns aggressive, tempestuous, and incandescent. As such, its cathartic release produces alchemical alterations. Intimate fire nourishes the feeble glow of candles one brings to vigils to remember the dead, to honor their memory, and to stay alive, together, through the night.

Gaston Bachelard had warned about fire’s magnetic allure and dangers in Psychoanalysis of Fire (1938). “In itself the flame is a major presence, but being close to it makes us dream of far away, too far away.” But fire is an avatar of Tunisian pleasure and pain; we feel it in the burning of our tongue induced by our spicy cuisine and acknowledge its presence in the combustion that killed fruit seller Mohamed Bouazizi, which has since left us feeling a little lost. Maybe it can guide us out of our maze. 

On the pale apricot wall, the unknown artist—a warm presence by now—drew an invisible bridge between Naro and Hammam Lif, two interconnected worlds that exist within and for each other’s eyes. The gesture might be brushed off as an insignificant spasm, yet the suggestion of this portal is the mark of someone who longs, dissents, and resists. The beach’s sand glimmers under the sun, the trees stretch their opulent palm leaves, parasols dot the vista with wondrous colors. Every able-bodied resident has donated a day annually to clean the city. Giggles rise from the emerald sea. Fresh seafood grills on the promenade and ice cold citronade refreshments. A ferry bound for Carthage, Sidi Bou Said, and La Marsa arrives at the pier. Those who disembark head for the casino, where children and adults listen to a captivating old storyteller. They will spend the rest of the day at the new spa at the bottom of Boukornine. In the city center, cinemas show the latest arthouse and experimental films in the mornings. Art galleries opened in two of the old seaside mansions. One of them, Africa House, specializes in contemporary art from the continent, offering year-long residencies to African artists who play chess and dominoes with residents during lazy afternoon hours. During winter, a fashion show takes place inside the casino with a dedicated prize awarded to the best fripes. Secondhand clothes sellers pick their models long in advance and compete for the best tailors in town. The bells of church Sainte-Marie sound on Sundays. The synagogue that was transformed into a children’s library has reverted to its former status and the children’s library has moved to a large annex. The children gather there, then volunteer on the public farm to take care of the horses, donkeys, and sheep. They tease the plump cats on their way. The trains come on time and service Tunis and other destinations every seven minutes. One season follows another—marked by scents of geranium, jasmine, orange blossom, roses, and verbena. Herbalists have set up kiosks near the spa. The market is buzzing with gossip and well-wishes. Couples cruise the sea in sail boats while others hike Boukornine for a more panoramic view. There’s a concert later tonight. I stand by the pale apricot wall and strike three knocks against the house’s blue door. 

Farah Abdessamad is a French Tunisian essayist and critic writing at the intersection of art, heritage, and identity.

The post Tunisian Afterglows, Chronic Collision appeared first on Mizna.

trans. Sara Elkamel

Translated by Sara Elkamel, Palestinian poet and playwright Dalia Taha builds a refuge for a poetry exhausted after millennia-long encounters with pain and conflict. Special courtesy to The Dial, where the poems “Enter Wrist Pain” and “Enter Poem” were originally published .

—Nour Eldin H., assistant editor

Protect the head, where the algae grow,
and the sun screams from the summit. 
The head that has stared for centuries 
into the sea as it closed its eyelids,
and never blinked. 

—Dalia Taha, trans. Sara Elkamel

Enter Writing

I would like to thank books. Magazines, articles, 

poems, even the advice column, and the arts and culture section.

Thank you to philosophy books, 

and dictionaries too; massive and silent, as though apologizing 

for the work they’re trying to do.

I would like to thank words. 

When we put them side by side, they become declarations of love

or war, and everything that falls in between: 

poems. 

Thank you to the pamphlets and leaflets, exchanged in secret,

that have shaken kingdoms;

to the newspapers printed clandestinely in dark rooms, before blowing up the world. 

To speeches written in sweltering, overcrowded rooms, to letters smuggled out of prisons, 

and to words scribbled into the margins by faint light.

Thank you to the first word a child draws; broken and distorted, like a puzzle piece.

Thank you to cave paintings—these letters from another world. To the memoirs

of death-row prisoners,

and the words teenagers inscribe inside abandoned houses. 

Thank you to the sheets of worker signatures stitched together into a roll so massive, 

the Parliament’s doorframe had to be excised to let it through. And thank you to graffiti, 

flashing brighter than billboards, in cities that devour their residents.

Thank you to writing under genocide.

Enter Poetry

Like men and women,
poetry must shield its head with its hands in times of war. 

Take the bullet to the foot,
or to the hand. 
And answer “Yes, I can,” just as Akhmatova answered
when in the queue outside the prison in Leningrad,
a woman whispered: “Can you describe this?”

But make sure to protect poetry’s head.

Protect the head, where the algae grow,
and the sun screams from the summit. 
The head that has stared for centuries 
into the sea as it closed its eyelids,
and never blinked. 

Only then can you transmute 
your sorrow into an idea, 
and hand it over like trees 
bequeath their shade to the walls and the sidewalks. 

Poetry must keep eternity 
from slipping through its fingers; 
it should carry its bite mark shamelessly on its neck. 

Poetry should run around with nothing but a head, 
two crazy eyes, 
a love bite,

and Akhmatova’s answer. 

Enter Poem*

The last poem you read 

On your phone 

Its light cast across your face 

Standing up 

On the bus from Jerusalem 

Leaning against the door

Your bag between your feet 

The phone in your hands

The poem you’re thinking about right now 

Crossing Manarah Square

Your hands in your pockets 

Your scarf obscuring half your face

The poem you read first thing in the morning

Before fully waking up

Before the world assaulted you 

The poem you read in bed 

During the second intifada 

While the tanks besieged the Muqataá 

When you knew very little about the world

The poem you read on a hot summer 

In a strange city

Where you spoke to no one

The poem you read while reading another book

The poem you read on your mattress after your cellmates had gone to sleep

The poem that knows something you do not yet know about yourself

The poem you don’t fully remember

But remember walking in Nablus after reading it

How the world seemed then

A mystery 

The poem you read during the war

And though it did not comfort you

It did, for a few moments, distract you

The poem you found wearily flipping through a book 

At your friend’s house 

Because you had nothing to say

The poem your grandfather kept reciting even after he lost his mind 

The poem you read thousands of times 

The poem you wanted to share with everyone you know 

The poem you are thinking of right now

Crossing Manarah Square

Your hands in your pockets 

Your scarf obscuring half your face

Suddenly 

You are captivated by the trees 

And you don’t know where you’re going

Like the frost 

Drifting and alone 

With every step

You swallow the fog

Enter Wrist Pain*

While people were dying in the thousands during the Black Plague, Petrarch, a thirteenth century poet, prowled monastery cellars looking for ancient manuscripts that had stayed silent for hundreds of years. When he came across a manuscript by Cicero, a Roman poet, he copied it for weeks on end until his wrist ached. I will be thinking of this as I cross the Container checkpoint, as the soldiers construct roads and erect fences, littering our hills with bulldozers. I will be thinking of how Petrarch’s trivial wrist pain has traversed centuries, like a bulldozer, only because he turned it into a sentence on a page. And that’s why this image of a scribe, copying a book in full—to give to dwellers of the centuries to come—as a plague races people to the villages they have fled to, will always remain my idea of the road. And that wrist pain will be the bulldozer I scatter over the hills—the hills above which soot continues to rise.  

والآن، تعالَيْ أيَّتُها الكِتابَة

شُكراً للكُتب؛ للمجلّات، المقالات

للقصائدِ، حتى عامودِ النّصائح، وقِسمِ الأخبارِ الفنّيَّة

شُكراً لكُتُب الفلسفة 

للقواميسِ أيضاً، ضخمةً وصامتةً

كأنَّها تعتذِرُ عمّا تُحاوِلُ أن تقومَ به

شُكراً للكلِماتِ، نضعُها جنباً إلى جنبٍ وتصيرُ إعلاناً عن الحُبّ، 

تهديداً بالحرب، وما بينهُما: قصائد

شكراً للكُتيِّباتِ، والمناشيرِ التي تبادَلَها الناسُ بالسِّر 

وهزَّتْ ممالكَ

 للجرائدِ التي طُبِعَت بِصَمتٍ في غُرَفٍ مُعتِمة، قبل أن تُفجِّرَ العالَم

للبياناتِ التي كُتِبَت في غُرفٍ مُكتَظَّةٍ ودَبِقَة، للرسائلِ المُهَرَّبَةِ من السُّجون

لما كُتِبَ في الليلِ على ضَوْءٍ خافِتٍ في هوامشِ الكُتُب

شُكراً للكَلِمةِ الأُولى التي يَخُطّها الأطفالُ، مُكَسَّرةً، ومُتعرِّجةً، كأنَّها أُحْجِية. ولآخِرِ كَلِمةٍ

يَكتُبُها المرءُ، مِثلَ آخر وَرَقَة على الأغصانِ الباردة

شُكراً للنُّقوشِ على الحِجارة، رسائلَ مِن عالَمٍ آخَر

لمُذكِّراتِ المَحكومينَ بالإعدام

لما خَطَّهُ المُراهقونَ في البُيوتِ المَهجورة

للعرائضِ التي حَمَلَت تواقيعَ العُمّال، تلك التي أزالوا إطارَ بابِ البرلمانِ حتّى يُدخلوها

شُكراً للكتاباتِ على الجُدرانِ في مُدُنٍ تفترِسُ سُكّانَها: 

مُتوهِّجةً أكثرَ مِن لَوحاتِ الاعلاناتِ التّجاريَّة

شكراً للكتَابَةِ تَحْتَ الإبَادَةِ.

ولا أعرفُ، لا أعرفُ، كيف يُحاولُ أحدٌ أن يوقِفَ الجريمةَ بأن يُعيدَ الدُّموعَ إلى أصحابِها. العدالةُ لَيسَت أنْ نَرسِمَ الدُّموعَ على صناديقِ الشَّحن. العدالةُ أن تُغرِقَ صناديقُ الشَّحنِ السفينةَ، أن تَكسِرَ رُفوفَ المكتبات.

والآن، تعالَ أيُّها الشِّعرُ

مثلَ البشَرِ

على الشِّعرِ أن يُغَطِّيَ رأسَهُ بِيَدَيْهِ في الحَرب.

خُذ الطَّلقةَ في القدَمِ

أو اليَدِ.

وأجِبْ ”نعَم، أستطيعُ“ كما أجابَتْ أخماتوفا

حينَ وَقَفَت في طَابُورٍ أمامَ سِجْنٍ في ليننغرَاد

وهَمَسَت امرَأةٌ هل ”تَستَطيعينَ أنْ تَصِفي هذا“؟

ولكنِ احْمِ رأسَ الشِّعرِ

احمِ رأسَهُ التي تَنمو عليها الطَّحالِب

وتصرخُ الشَّمسُ على سَطحِها.

رأسَهُ التي منذُ قُرونٍ تُحدِّقُ بالبَحرِ وهو يُغلقُ أجفانَهُ

دونَ أن تَرمِش.

هناكَ تستطيعُ أن تُحَوِّلَ

حُزنَكَ إلى فِكرةٍ

وتمنَحَهُ للآخَرين كما تمنحُ الأشجارُ

ظِلالَها للجُدرانِ والأرصفَة.

على الشِّعرِ ألّا يُفلِتَ الأبَديَّةَ من يَدِهِ

أن يحمِلَ عَضَّتَها على رَقَبَتِهِ بِلا خَجَل.

أصلاً على الشِّعرِ أن يَعدُوَ برأسٍ فقَط

وعَينَيْنِ مَجنونَتَيْنِ

وعَضَّةِ الحُب

وإجابةِ أخماتوفا

والآن، تعالَيْ أيَّتُها القَصيدة

القصيدةُ الأخيرةُ التي قرأتِها على هاتِفِكِ المَحمولِ

-وضَوْؤُهُ يُنيرُ وجهَكِ-

في الباصِ القادمِ من القُدسِ

واقفةً، تستَنِدينَ على البابِ

حقيبتُكِ بينَ قَدَمَيْكِ،

وهاتِفُكِ في يَدِك

القصيدةُ التي تُفكّرينَ بِها الآنَ

وأنتِ تقطَعينَ دُوّارَ المَنارة

يداكِ في جَيبَتَيكِ

ولَفحتُكِ تُغطّي نِصفَ وَجهِكِ

القصيدةُ التي قرأتِها أولَ شَيءٍ في الصباحِ قبلَ أن تستَيقِظي تماماً

قبلَ أن يُهاجِمَكِ العالَم

القصيدةُ التي قرأتِها في سَريرِكِ في الانتفاضَةِ الثانِية

 بينَما الدَّبّاباتُ تُحاصِرُ المُقاطَعة

وأنتِ لا تعرفينَ شيئاً عن العالَمِ بَعد

 القصيدةُ التي قرأتِها في صَيْفٍ حارٍّ

في مدينةٍ غريبةٍ لم تتعرَّفي فيها على أحد

القصيدةُ التي قرأتِها وأنتِ تقرَئينَ كتاباً آخَر

القصيدةُ التي قرأتِها على بُرشِكِ في الليلِ بعد أن نامَ جميعُ الأسرى

 القصيدةُ التي تعرِفُ شيئاً لا تعرفينَهُ بَعدُ عن نفسِك

القصيدةُ التي لا تذكُرينَها تماماً ولكنَّكِ تذكُرينَ كيفَ مَشَيْتِ في نابُلْسَ بَعدَها

وكأنَّ العالَمَ سِرٌّ هائِل

القصيدةُ التي قرأتِها في الحَربِ

ولم تُواسِكِ ولكنَّها شتَّتَت انتباهَكِ للَحْظات

القصيدةُ التي وجدتِها وأنتِ تتَصَفَّحينَ بِمَللٍ كتاباً في بيتِ أصدقائِكِ

لأنكِ لا تجِدينَ ما ستقولينَه

القصيدةُ التي ظَلَّ جَدُّكِ يُردِّدُها حتى بعدَ أن فقَدَ عقلَه

القصيدةُ التي قرأتِها آلافَ المرّات

 القصيدةُ التي أردتِ أن تُشارِكيها معَ كُلِّ شَخصٍ تعرفينَهُ

 القصيدةُ التي تُفكِّرينَ بها الآنَ

وأنتِ تقطعينَ دُوّارَ المَنارَةِ

يداكِ في جيبتَيْكِ

ولفحتُكِ تُغطّي نِصْفَ وَجْهِكِ

تستَوْقِفُكِ الأشجارُ

ولا تعرفينَ أينَ ستَذْهَبينَ

تُشْبِهينَ الصَّقيعَ

هائِمةً ووحيدةً

تَمشينَ وتَشرَبين الضَّباب.

والآن، تعالَ أيُّها الوجَعُ في الرُّسْغ

بينَما كانت الناسُ تهلَكُ بالآلافِ في الطّاعونِ الأسوَدِ، كانَ هناكَ في القرنِ الثالثَ عشَرَ شاعِرٌ، بترارك، يدورُ مِن قَبْوِ دَيْرٍ إلى قَبْوِ دَيْرٍ، يبحثُ عن المخطوطاتِ القديمةِ التي ظلَّت صامتةً لمِئاتِ السِّنين. حين وجَدَ مخطوطةً لسسيرو، شاعرٍ روماني، ظَلَّ ينسخُها لأسابيعَ حتّى أوجعَهُ رُسْغُه. وسيكونُ ذلك ما أفكِّرُ به وأنا أعبُرُ حاجِزَ الكونتينر بَيْنَ رَامَ الله وَبَيتِ لَحْم بينما يشُقُّ المستعمِرونَ الطُّرُقَ، ويبنونَ الأسوارَ، وينشُرونَ الجرّافاتِ في تِلالِنا. كيفَ ظلَّ ذلكَ الوجَعُ الصغيرُ في الرُّسغِ يعبُرُ مثلَ جرّافةٍ من قَرْنٍ إلى قَرنٍ كما الكتابِ الذي أنقذَهُ فقَط لأنَّهُ صارَ جُملةً على صفحةٍ. ولهذا، ستظلُّ هذهِ الصّورةُ لِمَن ينسَخُ كتاباً كامِلاً -حتّى يُهدِيَهُ لِمَن سيَمشونَ على هذا الكَوكَبِ في القُرونِ القادمة- بينما كانَ الطاعونُ يسبِقُ الناسَ إلى القُرى التي يلجؤونَ إليها هي فِكرَتي عن الطّريق، وسيكونُ ذلكَ الوجَعُ في الرُّسغِ جرّافاتي التي أنشُرُها في التّلال، التلالِ التي يتصاعَدُ مِنها الغُبار.

Dalia Taha is a Palestinian poet, playwright, and educator. She was awarded the 2024 Banipal Visiting Author Fellowship, and the 2025 Norwegian Writers Guild solidarity award. Taha has published three poetry books, a novel, two plays, and a children poetry book. Her plays have been staged at the Royal Court Theatre in London and the Flemish Royal Theatre in Brussels, among others. Her forthcoming poetry collection, Enter World, will be published in 2025 by Almutawassit Publishing House, and in English translation in 2026 by Graywolf Press. Taha taught at Brown University, Ramallah Drama Academy, Birzeit University and Al-Quds Bard University. She lives in Ramallah.

Sara Elkamel holds an MA in arts journalism from Columbia University and an MFA in poetry from New York University. A Pushcart Prize winner, she is the author of the poetry chapbook Field of No Justice (African Poetry Book Fund & Akashic Books, 2021). Her translations include Mona Kareem’s chapbook, I Will Not Fold These Maps (Poetry Translation Centre, 2023) and Dalia Taha’s collection of poetry, Enter World (Graywolf Press, 2026). 

The post Four Poems appeared first on Mizna.

Forwarding a praxis of radical antifascist activist-scholarship, activist and University of Minnesota-Twin Cities scholar Sima Shakhsari follows the example set by Angela Davis, Kimberlé Crenshaw, and bell hooks in interrogating the academic detachment pervading their milieu.

—Nour Eldin H., assistant editor

We are flesh measured in kilograms,
my Palestinian colleague says in desperation
But you are a thinker not a doer 
So you do nothing

—Sima Shakhsari

The Thinker

On the other side of this screen 
heads line up in squares
a collage of talking heads

You sit posed
surrounded by books curated on a shelf 
academic rigor de rigueur 
gravitas a self-respecting scholar must display

Your head heavy with thoughts
ponderous air of self-importance
So heavy
its weight 
demands support
hand under chin
eyebrows pulled together 
a pensive gesture
a serious scholar
comrade, compatriot, colleague
Full of contempt
driven by competition 
No chance of a haptic connection here
No chance of commune across this disembodied screen

I am a thinker, not a doer, you say 
I am a theorist, not an activist, you insist
body split from mind 
Theory above praxis
The rational academic
Cold and collected
Never vulnerable
Never weak

Keep your pose, dear colleague
Do not shed a tear
Do not burst in anger, even in the face of genocide
You think therefore you are
The Man with capital M
Or perhaps a derivative 
Mimicry at its worst
The Brown academic’s burden: 
To Think and not to do
To Think and not to feel
To strive to climb the ladder of Man
Alienated
Colonized mind split from Brown body
You are a thinker, not a doer
You have a lot to prove 
You tell yourself that
your brown body on the streets
protesting, shouting, angry
your brown body, a doer
cannot possibly be a thinker
They told you so
so you choose to think. You choose not to do

* * *

On the other side of the screen
a father holds his child’s headless body 
no talking heads here
Literal forced separation of decapitated body and mind
A boy in shock holds his little brother’s corpse in his arms
Bodies without organs 
Dead without shrouds
A little girl tells her cat
I beg you not to eat us when we die
please . . . if you stay alive after we die, 
don’t eat us, our scattered flesh.
Our Ashlaa
What to make of the human/animal split? 
of human/animals
of hungry animals eating human flesh in the rubble
What to make of the Human?
of rights?

A father carries two plastic bags, one in each hand
 أيها الناس
هَذِهِ هِيَ أَوْلَادِي
People! These are my children 
Flesh dumped in bags
Enough to match the weight of a human child
after starvation
Organs without bodies

We are not even numbers
We are flesh measured in kilograms,
my Palestinian colleague says in desperation
But you are a thinker not a doer 
So you do nothing

A 20-year-old man burns alive 
with an IV tube still attached to his body 
Shabaan’s screams fade
in the loud roar of fire collapsing the hospital tent
Ya allah Ya allah Ya rab Ya allah 
Silence
Smell of burned flesh permeates the cold computer screen
Ya allah Ya allah Ya allah
But you are a thinker not a doer

Dear colleague,
Hearts are aching
bodies restless
Mind the body
Maybe you can feel the rage
Maybe you can feel the grief
Embody your theory
Write in flesh
Maybe you can shut down your screen
Maybe 
Just maybe we can shut it down
Step out
Join hurting bodies on the street
soulful, thinking, hurting bodies 
Ya allah Ya rab Ya allah
Yallah, be a doer and a thinker
SHUT. IT. DOWN.

Sima Shakhsari is a professor at the University of Minnesota and a member of the UMN Educators for Justice in Palestine.

The post The Thinker appeared first on Mizna.

Mizna, a founding member of the Poetry Coalition, is accepting applications for a paid Poetry Coalition Fellowship position. This position is 20 hours per week from September 2, 2025 to June 30, 2026. The total stipend is $20,000 plus $1,100 toward healthcare. 

The Poetry Coalition is a national alliance of nearly thirty organizations dedicated to working together to promote the value poets bring to our culture and the important contribution poetry makes in the lives of people of all ages and backgrounds.

Mizna presents contemporary, critical, and experimental art, writing, and film centering the work of Arab and Southwest Asian and North African artists. For twenty-six years, Mizna has promoted experimental approaches to art, literature, and film; work that questions and expands the forms and conceptual frameworks of Arab and SWANA culture. We publish a biannual print literary and art journal, Mizna, and Mizna Online, a digital platform for literary and multidisciplinary work reflecting critically on the current realities of the SWANA region and beyond. We produce the Twin Cities Arab Film Festival, the largest and longest-running SWANA-centered film festival in the Midwest. Mizna also offers readings, film series, performances, public art commissions, and community events that have featured 1000+ local and transnational writers, filmmakers, and artists.

POSITION OVERVIEW With this Poetry Coalition Fellowship, we seek a candidate who will work to increase the readership of Mizna: SWANA Literature + Art and Mizna Online by increasing and broadening the circulation and distribution of the print journal. The Fellow will strategize and implement grassroots distribution and visibility campaigns to expand national and international distribution, with a priority on independent bookstores. This role involves becoming familiar with Mizna’s current subscriber and distribution systems and helping to develop more streamlined approaches. The ideal candidate will have experience in creating and implementing a nonprofit business strategy, be current on the state of literary journals, and will be steeped in Arab/SWANA–American literature and culture.

FELLOW RESPONSIBILITIES 

• Committing to 20 hours per week for the entire ten-month fellowship
• Adhering to rules and policies of Mizna as appropriate 
• Assisting with any of the following:
  • Increasing readership
  • Distribution of the journal
  • Management and improvement of databases & inventory systems
  • Reviewing subscription models
  • Developing/maintaining bookstore and library relationships
  • Community outreach
  • Marketing and promotion
  • General administration
• Attending and participating in meetings, including ad-hoc meetings with other Poetry Coalition fellows and with leaders to foster community, professional development, and create a peer learning group
• Participating in the Poetry Coalition’s professional development sessions
• Completing evaluations at the end of the fellowship year

FELLOW QUALIFICATIONS 

• Passion for connecting literary journals with ideal readers
• Deep familiarity with the current landscape of Arab/SWANA–American literature
• Interest in nonprofit administration and management 
• Experience with database software and Airtable
• Excellent written skills in English
• Creative problem solving
• Big-picture, visionary thinking
• Collegial, kind, good humored, enthusiastic, collaborative
• Prioritization, multitasking, and project management
• Demonstrated experience in the areas listed above

NOTE: We welcome all applicants, including those who are enrolled in or have recently graduated from academic programs. 

TO APPLY: Please submit a brief (no more than one page) cover letter, resume, and two references to Ellina Kevorkian at ellina@mizna.org. Mizna is an equal opportunity employer committed to reflecting the diversity of the Twin Cities community in its staffing, programming, and partnership decisions. We strive to create a dynamic work environment that values inclusion and respect, entrepreneurism and innovation, community and service. 

The post FELLOWSHIP OPPORTUNITY appeared first on Mizna.

Part manifesto, part scholarship, part extended poetic engagement, Umniya Najaer makes a radical bid for a better future in a singularly peerless transdisciplinary work. Desktop viewing is recommended to preserve the original formatting of the work; a PDF version of this essay is available here for non-desktop users. Published as part of Mizna 25.2: Futurities, link to order here.

—Nour Eldin H., assistant editor

IF THERE IS AN UPPER LIMIT TO THE HUMAN CAPACITY TO COMPUTE MASS ATROCITY THEN THERE MUST BE A HARD LIMIT ON LETHAL TECHNOLOGIES BECAUSE THE IMPLICATION IS THAT AS VIOLENCE ESCALATES IT ALSO BECOMES INCREASINGLY INCOMPREHENSIBLE. THEREFORE, TO PROTECT THE HUMAN COLLECTIVE, WE MUST DISARM HUMANITY.

—Umniya Najaer

disarm humanity: meditations from the third decade of the third millennium

Dedicated to Aseel Hashim Hamdan
& all the children on earth
& in the infinite beyond¹

So many have died for us to
live at the beginning of the end.
—Hiba Elgizouli.

You were created out of love
so carry nothing but love
to those who are trembling.²
—Heba Abu Nada.

// heaven is crowded with children //
in the playground of the hereafter // they arrive tattered
& sprout new limbs // & practice cartwheels
across this chapter of human history
they flip the page // & we // the living // awaken
into a world with no blood on our hands

in the new world
no shackles // no hungry children
no limbs locked beneath rubble // no rubble
no human spirits tracing the depth of the sea
no drowned search for new country
no hungry child // on the side of the street
or in the belly of the mine // chipping away
the earth’s precious stones

in the new world
children bejewel the glistening earth

& every living being
already speaks the same cellular language

life seeks life seeks life seeks life

The year is 2025. On planet earth there are today 8.1 billion human beings. Two billion are children under the age of 14. More than 473 million, or more than 1 out of every 6 children, live in a conflict zone.

We have crossed 6 of the 9 planetary boundaries.³ We share this breathing planet with approximately 8 million species of animals. Together we are living in the most sophisticated and technologically advanced system of global domination to ever exist. Although wolves, lions, spotted hyenas, and bottlenose dolphins are known to kill their own kind, humans are the only species known to exterminate our own children en masse.⁴

In the third decade of the third millennium, the human-made world reflects the dominant consciousness of our times: accumulation-through-annihilation and power-as-deathmaking. There are on earth today an estimated 12,100 nuclear warheads—enough to destroy the world many times over—and 1 billion firearms, 85% of which are in the hands of civilians. There are 120 million people displaced by violence, hunger, and environmental catastrophe and 43 million refugees. By one metric, 281 million human beings face acute food insecurity. By another metric, it is closer to 800 million, about a tenth of our species. The words hungry, malnourished, starving, and emaciated fail to capture the experience of constant hunger, searching, worry, exhaustion, headaches, of being unable to sleep due to the abdominal pains of famish or due to comforting a child who is crying from and into the emptiness.

Of those starving people, more than a million are inside Gaza, where an alliance between global powers brutally exterminated between 45,000 to 300,000 people in just fifteen months.⁵ Engineered their starvation. Wounded and maimed 100,000 human beings. Eclipsed tens of thousands by the debris of cities turned to deathscapes.

In Gaza, a toddler is pulled
from the rubble, crying:

am I alive?
am I still alive?

he is wide-eyed
trembling &
soaked in blood.

* * *

a boy, about four years old
plays at the ocean’s frothing lip

his two feet amputated
to nubs at the ankle

both arms amputated
above the elbows

the waves wash over him
he caresses the sand

he is teaching himself
to walk, to kick into the waves

a yellow ball
to glimmer like a galaxy

twinkling at
the horizon’s edge

Must we lose our own limbs to understand the disarray of a global system built on endless cycles of destruction? Must our own neighborhoods come under siege? Must we burn to death? Must all the birds change their migratory patterns to feast on corpses before the hairs on our necks stand up in protest?⁶ Must the dogs eat us? Must our own children be crushed beneath the rubble of pulverized cities before we recognize that our collective humanity and futurity is on the line?

In the third decade of the third millennium, in the wake of harrowing crimes against humanity, at this juncture in history when life in the present is denied to hundreds of thousands, how can we orient toward the future?⁷ How can we cultivate attunement to the totality of this world while resisting hegemonic narratives of normalized brutality? How can we exit the repeating cycle of bloodshed, annihilation, and atrocity in order to build a world in which every life, and every child, is protected?

The year is 2025. Of those starving, 25.6 million are inside Sudan.⁸ There, in the bid for regional domination, an alliance between global powers conspired to corrupt the aims of the people’s popular revolution. To this end, they have extinguished 150,000 lives and counting⁹ and have forcibly displaced 12.4 million—130,000 of whom are growing new life in their wombs. The dead are too many to count.¹⁰

the ones I knew personally
the little ones I held in my lap
the aunties I kissed on the cheek
are just a tiny fraction of the whole

Igbaal waited in a line for bread for two days before succumbing to heatstroke and dehydration. Aseel perished in the grips of a curable infection, unable to reach the decimated medical center. A car full of relatives, en route to my cousin—nine months pregnant with her first child—were executed by the militia in broad daylight. The ones I knew personally are tiny drops in humanity’s hemoglobin sea.

The quality and value of life is incongruent with numbers. A number is essentially an abstraction processed in the occipito-temporal and parietal cortex. When grief’s vulture shuts her eye, in the dead of world’s night, there is clarity: to the elite class of war criminals and politicians, our countries are a strategic territory to be riddled with conflict. Emptied of life, it will be easier to occupy, to excavate resources, to construct military and naval bases, to feign diplomatic relations between war criminals who call annihilation by various names: “diplomatic relations,” “globalization,” “security measures.” In this neoimperialist ploy, the slow and sudden deaths of our loved ones are a small price for suppressing self-determination by scattering the millions who dared to pursue the dream of a civilian-led democracy, a nation free of military rule.¹¹ To the most elite class of tyrants, the scenes of our loved one’s annihilations are proxies anchoring their vision of a future in which those with the deadliest weapons and the lowest threshold for committing crimes against humanity will steer humanity’s forsaken, fettered ship.

In Gaza, in Sudan, in all the centers of militarized obliteration, the drone’s demonic hum pummels dawn. Each dawn arrives after an impossible night. Month after the month, the school is a blister, the mosque is a crater, the church is ash, the ash is patient, the patient is fully awake, and I begin to wonder: is there a limit to our comprehension of mass atrocity? Is there a threshold to the annihilation of life, after which even the tyrants and warmongers will tremble with the epiphany that our greatest need is the need for each other? And if, as I suspect, there is no threshold to annihilation—if the only line is the line we draw, if our ability to draw this line makes us human—then what is holding us back?

What will it take for human beings to organize the world in accordance to our highest potential as a species? What will it take to live upon the earth as if all beings have an equal and unequivocal right to life and the world’s abundance? What will it take to share resources equitably between all 8.1 billion or more of us? To repair what has been decimated? To lay down every last weapon and negotiate outside the language of annihilation? After annihilation, after brute power has run its course, once we exit the blood epoch, what language will we speak? How will we express power? Will there be a desire for othering? Are there limits to human consciousness? To collective learning? To our ability to fathom our twenty-first century reality? To our capacity for empathy?

Manifesting a solution to violence of epic proportions, to the fact that never again has become again and again and again, obliges us to contend with the scale of the whole. To reclaim our autonomy, let us face the whole world, each irreducible life, the entire human species. All of history. The sea of trepidation and possibility swirling in each of us: the living, the deceased and the unborn, the borderless unknowns.

How do we do this?

The year is 2025 and information travels almost as fast as light.¹² This is the age of genocide livestreamed by the besieged. The age of gloating torturers. Of soldiers who sign their children’s names on missiles sent to annihilate more precious children. To scatter and shred the children so they are uncountable and difficult to recognize. In this neoliberal hour of imperial domination it is possible to watch a barefoot Congolese child mine coltan in the rain from within the screen of a highly advanced artifact manufactured in part by the labor of that child’s enslavement.¹³ It is possible in the same minute to watch a video of seven-year-old Sila Husu, who was sheltering in the Khadija school when an airstrike fractured her skull. In the video, Sila says, “my wish is to be like a doll, to be the most beautiful princess, and to travel outside for treatment. I want to live like all the children of the world who are happy.” Sila runs her hand along the staples in her head, over her right eyelid, blanketing a detached retina.¹⁴ In the age of livestreamed genocide, complicity runs much deeper than ignorance.

HOW ARE WE STILL JUST WATCHING WHEN THE CIRCULATING IMAGES AND CRIES OF MILLIONS MERIT A GLOBAL STATE OF EMERGENCY?

One day I come across several experiments in the field of human cognition and psychology that suggest humans struggle to comprehend mass atrocity.¹⁵ There are all sorts of terms to describe this phenomenon. Psychological numbing is the desensitization to large scale suffering. Scope insensitivity is a cognitive bias, a failure of humans to adjust our emotional response to mass atrocities. With diminishing marginal sensitivity, each additional death is perceived as less and less significant. Some cognitive scientists go so far as to speculate that perhaps we experience cognitive overload because human brains evolved in the context of small-scale social formations. I don’t want to endorse the perspective that humans struggle to comprehend mass atrocity, and, under different circumstances, I would think it an excuse for complicity, but, in observing the callous indifference of some of us, I wonder if perhaps this proposition can also be an invitation to move with renewed creativity and vigor against the interior and exterior forces that sustain brutality by limiting the capacity of some to perceive the present scale of obliteration empathetically.

If our bodies, our literal lives are sewn into the fabric of a sophisticated system of global domination that feasts on life, and if some of us are not processing the excruciating scale of annihilation taking place on earth, how would this require us to orient differently to the tasks of peace and worldbuilding?¹⁶

IF THERE IS AN UPPER LIMIT TO THE HUMAN CAPACITY TO APPREHEND MASS ATROCITY, THEN THERE MUST BE A HARD LIMIT ON LETHAL TECHNOLOGIES, BECAUSE THE IMPLICATION IS THAT AS VIOLENCE ESCALATES IT ALSO BECOMES INCREASINGLY INCOMPREHENSIBLE.

THEREFORE, TO PROTECT THE HUMAN COLLECTIVE, WE MUST DISARM HUMANITY.

The first quarter of the third millennium is marked by radical intensification of the methods of warfare, including the use of sophisticated autonomous weapons against civilians. Today’s “unprecedented” scale of violence against people and the planet is precedented by a surplus of weapons stockpiled by the murderous global elite of mega-empires whose goal is not to manage the affairs of their own nations but to expand the sphere of their authority over more human beings and territories.¹⁷ As long as we allow military leaders and autocratic politicians backed by militaries to rule the world, there will be no peace on earth. A sophisticated flow of lethal technologies keeps the most powerful politicians and their armies in power by foreclosing the possibility of nonmilitarized politics. The excess of militarized conflict is orchestrated by multibillion dollar weapons manufacturing industries that work hand-in-hand with “liberal” and “democratic” superpowers to set a highly antagonistic tone for global relations. This lethal mode of checkmate relationality puts all of us and our future descendants at risk of experiencing violence, war, or annihilation. Every shipment of military equipment, every bomb dropped on civilians, every country invaded, every incinerated hospital, ambulance, and school brings us incrementally closer to the possibility of insurmountable loss.

The year is 2025 and we are at a point of inflection.¹⁸ Each dawn bears witness to more bloodshed. Uranium-tinged earth. Families cremated instantaneously. International organizations are unable to maintain peace, security, or human rights. War criminals roam with impunity, each one lending the other a hand or a veto. There is no order. No checks. No balances. Tyrants transform cities into mountainous deathscapes, starve children, target civilians, demolish archeological sites, and disrupt ecological processes. What took millennia to flourish incinerates upon contact.

AT A MATERIAL AND SYMBOLIC LEVEL, THE EMPIRE INTENDS FOR VIOLENCE TO BE AN INSTRUMENT OF COGNITIVE RECONDITIONING: TO BEND THE ARC OF HUMANITY FURTHER TOWARD FATALITY, DESPERATION, AND MORAL DEPRAVITY.

THE NORMALIZATION OF BARBARITY REINFORCES THE FAÇADE THAT ALL OF HISTORY IS A SET OF REPEATING STORIES AND THERE IS NOTHING LEFT TO IMAGINE.

As we witness internationally orchestrated atrocities in Sudan, Congo, Palestine, Lebanon, Syria, Yemen, and Ukraine, let it be with the understanding that every war, every genocide, all militarized violence, and all crimes against humanity double as symbolic gestures to normalize epistemic brutality, to disintegrate human autonomy, and to numb our imaginations.¹⁹ The empires of death aim to expunge the plurality of human history from collective memory, bloodwashing history so that this profusely violent present can stand in contrast to no other.

It is up to us to preserve the creativity, diversity, and humanity of our species’ past, present, and future with the understanding that the destruction of unquantifiable human life and civilization is just the outward facing function of militarized violence. The greater objective is to entrench the myth that malevolence, warfare, murder, annihilation, and alienation are natural extensions of the human condition. The propaganda that our diverse beliefs and origins obstruct harmonious coexistence sustains “wars without end” as a coverup for the centuries-old progression of imperial control, resource extraction, and life-siphoning cycles. The legitimacy of the current world order as a political sphere comprised of territorial militarized nation-states depends on the mass delusion that the human world is violent beyond repair and that it is therefore reasonable for empires to conduct the world through war, antagonism, annihilation, and bloodshed.

Peaceful negotiations, ceasefires, and arms embargoes threaten this narrative. Civilized relations between nations of equal diplomatic status jeopardize the skewed hierarchy of imperial supremacy. It is precisely because violence cannot deteriorate the core of our collective humanity that foreclosing the possibility of humane politics and civilized nonviolent conflict resolution requires a constant production of brutality and dehumanization. The empire strains to fabricate unequal power relations between nations, seizing power and territory through brute violence—but this does not amount to legitimacy. Since legitimacy cannot be taken by force, the empire deploys force to shape consciousness, to manipulate our ideas of what is possible and what is acceptable. Empires manufacture horrific deathscapes and wage endless wars in an effort to standardize their own impunity. Their allies get the benefit of the same legitimacy and impunity extended to them. Therefore every war criminal has among his allies a cohort of war criminals who masquerade as political leaders.

And yet, empires, like their figureheads, are temporary formations. For every war criminal there are millions of us who reject the propaganda that the way things are is how they will always be. For each person desensitized by the conspiracy of brutality, there are a hundred more invested in building a harmonious future that diverges from the gladiatorial present. Together, we dream and manifest a world unencumbered by bloodshed.

DECADES AND CENTURIES OF SURVIVING ORGANIZED DEHUMANIZATION TAUGHT US THAT FREEDOM DREAMS ARE STRONGER THAN DEATH MACHINES.

OUR COLLECTIVE HUMANITY, LOVE, EMPATHY, AND INGENUITY THREATEN TO UNRAVEL THE NARRATIVE OF NORMALIZED BRUTALITY, THE SEAT OF MODERN POWER AND EVIL, FROM ITS CORE.

While empires and military governments deploy brutality to shape human consciousness, to manufacture complicity, and to render democratic processes futile, the truth is that violence does not inevitably beget more violence. Even under the most extreme forms of degradation, the besieged in Gaza are planting tomatoes, eggplants, and peppers, knitting sweaters, and baking sweets to hand out to the children who invent songs, write poems, raise kittens, and carry their siblings all while pleading with the world to draw a line in the sand. Faced with the collapse of the state, Sudanese people are organizing grassroots “emergency response rooms” in the form of community kitchens, youth education centers, puppet shows for displaced children, surgeries performed in underground shipping containers, and critical psychological services for victims of militarized sexual violence. Whenever and wherever our governments, institutions, and civil liberties may come under attack, let the power of these mutual aid networks serve as a potent reminder that dignified life is made possible by the cumulative actions of those who step up and take care of their communities. However brutal the present may be, it does not foreclose the possibility of more humane futures. Brutality does not necessarily fortify the agenda of cruelty. Impunity cannot extinguish the seed of humanity. This means that we have a choice to live, act, and intervene with the certainty that despite extraordinary displays of violence, the future of our species will not be determined by the savage politics of militarized empires.

While experiencing or witnessing dehumanization and annihilation can engender numbness, despair, and imaginative foreclosure, it can also revitalize our investment in humanity. Black Studies scholar Nicholas Brady wrote, “paradoxically, the most hopeful people are those who have no hope in the system.”²⁰ The Lebanese anthropologist Munira Khayat put it like this: “When you’re looking at it from the perspective of the empire, the war machine appears totalizing. But when you’re in the crosshairs of the death machine, you always have hope, because you’re living it.”²¹ It is historical moments like ours, when brute power is at its apex, when, in the delirium of impunity, empires neglect to cover their bloody tracks, that a hopeless-hopeful alchemy takes root. All the veils fall away, the fragility of life is palpable, the criminality of our political leaders is apparent, the stakes of disarmament and peacebuilding are stark, and dehumanization, the seed of our collective suffering, becomes the source of a shared clairvoyance.

TO BREAK THE REPEATING CYCLE OF BRUTALITY WE MUST ORGANIZE THE WORLD AROUND THE SANCTITY OF LIFE.

The year is 2025. From inside the bloodiest center of empire, no task is as urgent as averting the acceleration of warfare. This is the year to declare every life worthy of life. Together, we, the living, must draw the line and usher in an era of human history in which power and defense are based in the sanctity of life, rather than the ease of ending life. For this to become possible, we will need to unilaterally disarm our species, defund our militaries, and demilitarize our borders. Otherwise, we may all, sooner or later, find ourselves or our loved ones in the crosshairs of a death-machine. Beginning with a rejection of narratives of normalized domination, the unilateral disarmament of the human species hinges on the collective’s ability to unequivocally value all life. Therefore, the call to disarm our species implores a metamorphosis in human consciousness and relationships.

If disarming humanity seems absurd, let us begin by naming and imagining it. Let us imagine a world without Aviation Thermobaric Bombs. Without GBU-43/B Massive Ordnance Air Blast bombs. Without Lockheed AC-130 gunships. Without AH-64 Apache Attack Helicopters.²² Without quadcopter drones which increase targeted attacks and lower the threshold for the use of force while crying out in the voices of vulnerable newborns and injured women. Let us imagine all children living without the threat of FGM-148 Javelin antitank missiles, which the RSF militia in Sudan uses against human beings. Imagine succumbing to a weapon made to destroy a tank or an aircraft. But more urgently, imagine a world without F-22 Raptor fighter jets or the Advanced Precision Kill Weapon Systems or the MK-84 general-purpose bomb or Hellfire AGM-114 missiles or landmines or nuclear weapons.²³

If we must begin somewhere, let us begin with the consensus that, in a global system built on perpetuating endless cycles of death and deprivation, nothing is more important than protecting all life unequivocally. The sanctity of life is the center of gravity around which everything and everyone must orient, each in our own way, orbiting life, traversing time, harmonizing our expressions. To exit the cycle of bloodshed, we cannot allow a single life to be taken in the bid for power or in the name of “defense.”²⁴ Let us vigorously contest normalized brutalities, especially murder, no matter the pretense.

Our species will enter a new era of human history when we collectively and consciously ban the production, stockpiling, trade, and use of militarized weapons by all state and nonstate entities.

Now, amid escalating violence, it is imperative to advocate for what has been deemed impossible:

a world without massacre.

a future without weapons.

land rematriation.

reconciliation.

world peace.

* * *

WHAT IS THE MEASURE BETWEEN THE WORLD AS IT IS & THE WORLD AS IT COULD BE, IF WE DECLARE THE PRESENT THE LINE?

As conflict and militarization escalate, amid increasing impunity, rising geopolitical instability, and an arms race for AI-powered autonomous weapons, I urge the people of the world to reclaim the possibility of peace. To pursue peace beyond its connotation as a pacifying conceptual tool of neoliberal murderous empires. To reclaim peacebuilding from international governing bodies whose efforts are rendered futile by the simple use of a veto. The evolution in consciousness that will enable us to exit the cycle of violence is also an evolution in our collective values, language, and praxis of peace, armistice, nonviolence, reconciliation, and harm reduction. If inner peace is a seed, then planetary peace is the forests; for these forests to flourish, we must protect and nourish the seeds and fruit of peace across time and space, among the newborns and the elderly, among the soldiers and the wounded, and especially in the bloody cores of empire. To exit the cycle of bloodshed, let us sow peace in ourselves, nurture peace in our children, practice peace in our classrooms, cultivate peace in our communities, disseminate peace in our media, and model peace in the relations between our nations.

The year is 2025. We are alive at a critical point in the history of our species and our planet. Our actions and inactions carry profound impacts beyond our own lives. While the long-term aspiration is a future without weapons, a world where all life is protected, we are today alive in the meantime—in the breach between the epoch of bloodshed and the world as it could be. In this meantime let us do everything in our power to protect those who may not make it to the future if we do not act immediately and decisively to deliver arms embargoes, humanitarian relief, and life-saving medical support. If the cost of our inaction is death, injury, and the degradation of our human kin, then let us not wait on the bureaucracy of transnational governing bodies. Let us resist militarization and tyranny everywhere. Let us provide direct financial aid to the vulnerable, prevent the deployment of weapons, deliver medical care to the wounded, care for the children traumatized by war, grief, and starvation; let us advocate for besieged journalists and boycott the war machine, regardless of who is in its crosshairs—we all belong to life. In this meantime between carnage and cohesion, let us shatter the deception of normalcy, let us speak openly and piercingly about human rights violations, about our complicity in them, about the need to hold war criminals accountable. In the breach between injury and vitality, let us speak the names of those brutally torn from this earth, let us amplify the messages of the besieged, let us say never again and let “never” mean not even today, not tomorrow, not anyone, anywhere, ever, not even the sharks. Let us take every action we can toward protecting life and pursuing peace on earth. Let us stop at nothing until we stop the world in its tracks. Let us stop the world long enough to sojourn the missiles, to honor all we have lost, to cleanse the blood from the earth, to dare to dream to start anew, orbiting love.

* * *

THE FUTURE IS AN OPEN INTERVAL, UNREQUITED BY THE PRESENT.

to exit modernity’s matrix
we witness-dream with open eyes

* * *
in my dream a boat sails toward Gaza
& reaches the shore unharmed
a universal ceasefire holds grief’s
ceaseless memory, softly

we reroute
the trajectory of our species

the world is becoming conscious of itself
through our most audacious freedom dreams
& the bravest among us are not even yet alive

* * *
imagine
we are points
along the continuum of life
& this is not our final form

we are the threshold
bridging timelines

the world as it is
cries out for
the world as it could be

with the memory
of a toothless child, her rapid moods
and clumsy feet, her panicked cries

as the interior landscape
catches fire, modernity glitches
knowing we cannot go on like this
smoldering, we jump the line

& we are every child
& the ceasefire is eternal

* * *
imagine

a mass exodus
from the blood epoch

we enter a new era in the human record

humanity disarms itself
soldiers neutralize every weapon
before burying their uniforms

a tender root system
germinates

from the formerly drenched earth
our species awakens trembling
with love

* * *
fragile
plural
human

insist
every life is worth living

to preserve life

to manifest a new relation to
life–&–death–&–the–world

abandon modernity’s deathtrap
pursue harmonious coexistence with all living beings
redistribute resources

protect life
provision nature to heal itself

manifest from the inside-out a metamorphosis
in the collective awareness of our species

* * *

THE ROOT OF ALL DEHUMANIZATION IS THE ACCEPTABILITY OF HARM BASED IN THE ILLUSION OF SEPARATION.

THE SEED OF HUMANIZATION IS A PRAXIS OF CARE BASED IN THE IRREDUCIBLE INTERCONNECTION OF ALL LIFE.

THEREFORE, LET US TRANSFORM THE CONSCIOUSNESS OF OUR SPECIES, UNIT BY UNIT, FROM THE INSIDE OUT.

The extraordinary brutalities, the genocides and ecocides of our present are ruptures in the fabric of the modern world. We are living at ground zero and every break is an opening for a metamorphosis in human consciousness.

Ground zero is defined as:
1) the point directly below, above, or at which a nuclear explosion occurs
2) the center or origin of rapid, intense, or violent activity or change
3) a starting point, the very beginning

The year is 2025. The world is ablaze. At ground zero, the earth glistens with human blood. The wind is a cradle for families dismembered in cataclysmic explosions. The sky sheds tears over spirits wandering among the debris of shattered cities. In the third decade of the third millennium, the lives of 8.1 billion human beings are shaped by the worldviews of an elite global minority who rely on millions to remain passive in the face of endless cycles of senseless murder, brutality, looting, and destruction. Passivity relies on an imagined partition, a phantom bifurcation, a rupture between the bystander who observes brutality and the person or population subjected to atrocity.

The artifice of separation is central to reproducing the internal justifying logics of othering, exclusion, exploitation, extermination, enslavement, and annihilation. Our twenty-first century system of global domination is fueled by various shifting illusions of individuality, which we may experience in an embodied sense as separation, isolation, aversion toward the “other,” or estrangement from oneself and the world. The first danger in all this is that it is possible to experience the illusion of separation as reality. The second danger is that the interplay between illusion and reality can breed pessimism and imaginative foreclosure as many are no longer able to envision a way out of this mess. At times, it is difficult to conceive that the collaborative future which is now deemed impossible will one day have seemed inevitable. This is the paradox of dehumanization and it is the reason we cannot begin the process of disarming humanity in boardrooms.

To disarm humanity, we must first transform the consciousness of our species. To resist the hegemonic illusion of normalized brutality, let us begin to cultivate species double consciousness: an empathic attunement to the reality of the world as it is now alongside a speculative and experimental knowledge of the world as it could be if we prioritized the wellbeing of all life. Looking with this double sight at the rift between the two worlds, the space between them is not hollow. From the rift between the world as it is and the world as it could be emerges the ancient, flickering force of human autonomy. One by one, the spark catches in the interior landscape of millions, an ancient and timeless momentum awakens, rousing us to action. To “unmake then consciously now remake the world,”²⁵ we must shed our old skin as mere participants in another man’s system and emerge as autonomous worldbuilders mutually shaping the present and future trajectory of our species based on the principle of life. Life is inherently free. Unfreedom is fabricated and ephemeral.

Cultivating transpersonal empathic consciousness to the collective reality of life on earth begins with a choice to decenter the singular experience of being in order to perceive the world through the stimuli and perspectives of those whose suffering has the capacity to renew the contract between all human beings—and between humans and all living beings.²⁶ To be humanized by our species’ brutality, we must be fully attuned to witness the entirety of our present world transpersonally. In his Treatise on the Whole-World, the Martinican poet and philosopher Édouard Glissant offers the following reflections:

“We do not always see, and usually we try not to see, the destitution of the world, in the forests of Rwanda and the streets of New York, in the underground workshops of Asia where the children do not grow up and in the silent heights of the Andes, and in all the places of debasement, degradation, and prostitution, and so many others that flash before our wide open eyes, but we cannot fail to admit that all this is making a noise, an unstoppable murmuring that we, without realizing it, mix into the mechanical, humdrum little tunes of our progress and our driftings.

Each one of us has his own reasons to listen to this cry, and these different approaches serve to change this sound of the world that we all, at the same time, hear where we are.”²⁷

Glissant depicts a polysensory empathic mechanism of echolocation and metaphysical transmutation. To “hear where we are,” to position ourselves in relation to the whole, and to perceive the collective condition of humanity within the longer arc of our species’ existence, we must become profoundly attuned to one another’s lived realities. To witness the entirety of the world does not require that we directly hear or see; we can be attuned to what happens behind closed doors—in the boardrooms of the billionaire political elite, in military torture chambers, in sweatshops, in the underground mines, amid the media blackout, in the deathscapes beneath the rubble—without hearing or seeing any of it. Glissant suggests that transpersonal attunement is a catalyst for metaphysical transformation. By tuning in to the whole world, we begin to transform it, similar to the way that the observation of quantum occurrences alters the phenomena’s behavior. Transpersonal empathic attunement begins with the aspiration to give up the comfort of anesthetized existence and the illusion of separation in order to absorb with our own body, mind, and spirit the totality of what is taking place on our living, breathing home.

Let us listen to the 117 million refugees, in tents, in immigration detention centers, where children are ripped from their parents rarely to be reunited again, in the metropolises straddling borders, searching for dignity in a country that is a stranger, crossing deserts, thirsty, hungry, cold. Let us feel the desperation of the women and girls raped and gang raped by soldiers. Let us be transmuted by the ricochet of exhaustion in slaughterhouses, in the textile factories, of the children crawling and coughing inside mines, digging for precious metals, hoping to afford a meal. Let our metamorphosis center the 50 million human beings trapped in modern-day slavery whose freedom necessitates a reformulation of the global order. Let us tune in to the discordant clatter of the saw mills plucking the Amazon bare and the melancholic quiet after the burn, when even the insects and macaws have turned to ash. Wherever we may be, let us hear the gentle whimpers of the panther whose paws are raw blisters.²⁸ The child who is fully awake during amputation. Inhale and hear the exhale of the polar bear who must swim for days on end because there is no ground to walk on.²⁹ Exhale and feel the sharp pains in the limbs of the infant in the long hours before cold stops her tiny heart. Share the heartbreak of the parents who cry into white bundles of gauze.³⁰

When we feel what each other feels, the transformative force of brutality permeates from the epicenter of the singular human experience outward into the collective, expanding the field of awareness, interweaving the syncopated lives and dreams and sufferings of 8 billion rare beings into a web of empathic awareness. To disarm our species and rehabilitate our planet, we must be willing to take into ourselves the abrasive timbre of it all and allow the fragility of all living beings to catalyze us into action, to initiate a praxis of empathic care, and unleash a landslide of solidarity with those deemed unworthy of life.

TRANSPERSONAL ATTUNEMENT TO COLLECTIVE SUFFERING AND EMPATHIC CARE FOR ALL LIFE TRANSMUTES MODERNITY’S ILLUSION OF SEPARATION, DECOMPOSING THE FOUNDATION OF ALL DEHUMANIZATION INTO THE FERTILE SOIL OF A NEW WORLD ORDER.

Awareness of the interconnectedness of all living beings and cognizance of the inherent value of all life are incompatible with the modern agenda of death. Scaled to the measure of the human species, transpersonal empathic consciousness has the potential to relegate the modern neoliberal necropolitical milieu to relics of a bloody human past. And yet, in the midst of genocides and neoimperial wars without end, it is not enough to be attuned to the reality of the world. We must act. Transpersonal and interspecies empathic consciousness are stepping stones for perceiving a gap between the world as it is and the world as it could be. The praxis of species double consciousness is yet another stepping stone for action. Action transmutes consciousness into autonomy and vice versa. Therefore, let us witness and not give in to despair in order to assert with the force of our entire living beings the basic reality that another world is possible. Our actions are the condition of its possibility.

In this world of possibility, we who inherited the epoch of bloodshed collaborate to formulate conditions where all beings can thrive. We engineer a global network to distribute resources based on collective needs and ecological sustainability, rather than profit. We ensure all people have access to safe housing, nutritious food, and quality healthcare. Freed of the need to earn the right to live, all 8.1 billion of us have more time to spend with our loved ones, to study, to celebrate the diversity of our species and planet, to innovate, to rest, to imagine and manifest even better worlds. In a world made to the measure of empathic intelligence, health is a universal human right. Hospitals are healing temples for the body, mind and spirit. Once knowledge is disentangled from competition and profit, collective learning accelerates. In this new world, wealth cannot be concentrated by denying others their right to life. Without the highly disproportionate accumulation of wealth, it is not possible to corrupt politics. Leaders are chosen for their humility, ingenuity, and ability to maintain peace through disarmament, dialogue, and collaboration. Armies are replaced by interdisciplinary teams of volunteers who specialize in crisis management—they address natural disasters, pandemics, environmental emergencies, and trauma. Former military budgets are reallocated to fund sustainable architecture, public transportation, education, and open access research. Schools are sites of exploration for diverse forms of knowledge. Rote memorization is replaced with critical, creative, and collaborative learning, and everyone has lifelong access to education. Diversity and invention flourish, elevating the human experience. People gather at festivals to celebrate cultural and religious traditions, to dance, to sing, to eat, and to marvel at the beauty of our brief time as miracles on Earth. All people are free to move, live, and work wherever they choose, and protected wildlife corridors ensure safe migration for animals. We collaborate to prevent extinction, restoring endangered species and ecosystems through wildlife rehabilitation, reforestation, reindigenization, and ocean-cleaning projects. The generation who inherited a noxious world lays down their weapons to detoxify the land, water, and food systems, improving the quality of life for all living beings. With collective human ingenuity directed toward sustaining life, the unnecessary suffering that defined the blood epoch is overtaken by a sense of possibility rooted in our interconnected capacity to care for one another. Once we cease to live in a competitive hand-to-mouth death-cycle, it is not only our time that will be freed up, but our very life force, the seed of all autonomy.

Between the world as it is and the world as it could be are our actions and inactions. It must not be up to the most vulnerable among us to elevate the systematically decimated consciousness of our species. In the centers of empire let us insist that our “comforts” are not worth the decimation of life. Let us refuse to make house within the depravity of this killing machine.³¹

Building new worlds begins with our resolve to form new connections and cultivate sites of possibility that center the value of life.³²

If there are no alternatives to modernity, then there is no possibility for us to consent to it. Generating alternatives to the hegemonic order is the basis of liberty and the condition of collective autonomy. By weaving new webs of relation and possibility, we begin to transmute our witness-dreams to action. We recover our human identity as active conscious agents shaping the present and future trajectory of our species and our planet.

Empathy is a historical force of unknown proportion which we can cultivate by “listening to the cry of the world.”³³

I invite each of us, as Bob Marley implored, to hear the children crying with the conscious knowledge that this sound initiates a transformative, empathic, worldbending process. I invite us to declutter our inner eyes, unveiling the connection to the inner child. Inside each of us lives an inner child who connects us to all the children, all over the Earth. We are the children of the world and the guardians of the children who will inherit the world from us. To guard them, to usher in a new era of politics, to terminate all territorial battles, to end the bid for global domination, to begin the process of global disarmament, to ensure that the children will one day grow up, let us hear the children crying, let us begin to feel what each other feels, and let us act on our visions of the world as it could be. Let us teach the children that this is not our final form, therefore this human chapter, this epoch of carnage and bloodshed, is a historical stepping stone: The third millennium is the beginning of the end of brutality. The time to leap the line is now.

For all who have crossed over, protecting the future of our world, like every form of love put into action, requires courage, stamina, and creativity. Abolishing modernity’s interlinked death systems is not a prerequisite to building new worlds. It is the afterglow. Transpersonal attunement, species double consciousness, and witness-dreams transmuted to autonomous actions are worldbuilding and worldbending tools beyond the master’s toolbox.³⁴

as life seeks life
on a blue jewel

let us be seeds
of peace’s forests

let us build a world
where children grow up

let us mold our lives
into tender cradles

for a future where we
carry nothing but love
to those who are trembling.

1. I dedicate this essay to my cousin Aseel, a young girl, one of tens of thousands, who was plucked from life in the first year of the counterrevolutionary war in Sudan. I dedicate my witness-dreams to every child denied a fair chance to experience life on Earth unencumbered by the threat of brutality.

2. This line is from the poem “Not Just Passing,” one of the last poems written by Heba Abu Nada before she was ripped from earth by an Israeli airstrike on her home in Khan Younis on October 20, 2023. The poem, translated from the Arabic by Huda Fakhreddine, is structured as a conversation between a star and the little light in the poet’s heart. On October 8, Heba wrote, “Gaza’s night is / dark apart from the glow of rockets, / quiet apart from the sound of the bombs, / terrifying apart from the comfort of prayer, / black apart from the light of the martyrs. / Good night, Gaza.” Then on October 18, she wrote, “Each of us in Gaza is either witness to or martyr for liberation. Each is waiting to see which of the two they’ll become up there with God. We have already started building a new city in Heaven . . . In Heaven, the new Gaza is free of siege. It is taking shape now.” Like Heba, I imagine heaven as the liberated meeting ground of all the innocent besieged. I imagine the children of Palestine, Sudan, Congo, Lebanon, and Ukraine playing games amid glimmering starlight.

3. Scientists at the Stockholm University Resilience Center quantified nine processes that regulate the stability and resilience of the Earth system. They are 1) stratospheric ozone depletion, 2) atmospheric aerosol loading, 3) ocean acidification, 4) biogeochemical flows, 5) freshwater change, 6) land system change, 7) biosphere integrity, 8) climate change, and 9) novel entities. Novel entities are defined as “new substances, new forms of existing substances, and modified life forms,” including “chemicals and other new types of engineered materials or organisms not previously known to the Earth system as well as naturally occurring elements (for example, heavy metals) mobilized by anthropogenic activities.” As of January 2025, planetary boundaries 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, and 9 have been crossed.

4. In the thoroughly critiqued book Demonic Males: Apes and the Origins of Human Violence, the biological anthropologists Richard W. Wrangham and Dale Peterson compare the propensity for violence in chimpanzees, bonobos, and humans, arguing that while the capacity for aggression may be biologically rooted, the expression of violence in human societies is heavily influenced by cultural norms and institutions. The question of whether violence and territoriality are “natural” obscures the fact that, as the philosopher and social critic Sylvia Wynter argues, humans autoinstitute the social codes we use to govern ourselves. We are the creators of our cultures, beliefs, norms, and world orders. From this perspective, violence is cultural. The forms of brutality, dehumanization, and oppression that define the twenty-first century are learned behaviors which, over time, become culturally and historically engrained. In her book Extraordinary Evil: A Brief History of Genocide, Barbara Coloroso demonstrates a continuum of dehumanization, from classification, to bullying, to extermination, and denial. The point is that humans are able to collectively guard against the possibility of mass atrocities by cultivating empathy, respect, and peaceful strategies for handling conflict. Our capacity to end the endless cycle of brutality and create in its stead a harmonious world hinges on resocialization in an ethic of empathy and the nonhierarchical value of life.

5. In July, 2024, The Lancet published a report titled, “Counting the Dead in Gaza: Difficult but Essential,” that states that, “applying a conservative estimate of four indirect deaths per one direct death to the 37,396 deaths reported, it is not implausible to estimate that up to 186,000 or even more deaths could be attributable to the current conflict in Gaza.” In December 2024, Dr. Ghassan Abu-Sittah estimated the true death count to be around 300,000 or 10%–12% of Gaza’s population. This figure takes into account people whose bodies were “pulverized” by bombs, those who died of infectious diseases, starvation, hypothermia, and lack of access to medical care imposed by the siege. Meanwhile, Reuters reports that “more than one million of Gaza’s inhabitants face the most extreme form of malnutrition—classified by the IPC as ‘Catastrophe or Famine.’”

6. According to witness accounts, vultures and other carnivorous birds have veered from their migratory paths, lured by the sheer mass of unburied corpses in Sudan. According to a Haaretz article, Israeli soldiers established an open killing zone known as the Netzarim Corridor. Any Palestinian who crosses this imaginary line separating the north and south of Gaza is considered a legitimate target. A commander in Division 252 told Haaretz, “After shootings, bodies are not collected, attracting packs of dogs who come to eat them. In Gaza, people know that wherever you see these dogs, that’s where you must not go.” According to vast archeological research, humans have been burying our dead since the paleolithic period. In fact, the oldest human burial sites, dating 80,000–100,000 years old, are the Es-Skhul and Qafzeh caves, located in present day Nazareth, or al-Nasirah, a mere 93 miles north of the Netzarim Corridor. And yet, in the year 2025, human beings are exterminated en masse and denied the basic human dignity of having their corpses laid beneath the earth. The world watches carnivorous birds and canines feast on our kin while empires expand their military budgets and deploy autonomous weapons to annihilate civilian populations.

7. According to the Hebrew calendar we are in the year 5785. According to the Chinese calendar we are in the year 4722. According to the Buddhist calendar we are in the year 2569. According to the Hindu (Shaka Samvat) calendar we are in the year 1,946. According to the Islamic calendar we are in the year 1446. And according to the Igbo calendar we are in the year 1025. Chronological accounting is relative, however, the current hegemonically accepted Gregorian calendar places us in the year 2025, where the year 1 AD represents the estimated birth year of Jesus Christ. This accounting of time takes as its starting point a story of occupation and forced displacement that continues in the present. In a recent speech, the Palestinian theologian and pastor, Reverend Dr. Munther Isaac reminded us that Jesus was born in Bethlehem, under the Roman occupations of Augustus Caesar and Herod, the ruler of the occupied Roman province of Judea. According to the New Testament, Joseph and Mary were forced to leave Nazareth and travel to Bethlehem so that they could be counted in a census enforced by the Roman occupation. After their forced displacement and upon arriving in Bethlehem, Mary gave birth to baby Jesus. When Herod ordered the massacre of all male children under the age of two, Joseph, Mary and baby Jesus fled from Bethlehem to Egypt. Reverend Dr. Munther Isaac draws parallels between the past and the present, stating, “The Christmas story is actually a very Palestinian story. The circumstances of Palestine 2000 years ago were not very much different from the Palestinian circumstances today.” Located a mere 6 miles north of Bethlehem, the city of Jerusalem, one of the oldest centers of human civilization, has been captured and occupied 44 times, starting in the Bronze Age and continuing into the present. At the 2025th annual Gregorian mark, it is high time to end the repeating cycle of occupation and brutality.

8. According to UNICEF, as of June 2024, of the 25.6 million facing “high levels of acute hunger” (IPC phase 3+), about 755,000 are experiencing the most catastrophic classification of food insecurity (IPC phase 5). According to the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC), approximately 24.6 million people across Sudan will likely experience high levels of acute food insecurity (IPC Phase 3 or above) between December 2024 and May 2025. This includes 8.1 million people in IPC Phase 4 (Emergency) and at least 638,000 people in IPC Phase 5 (Catastrophe).

9. Sudan’s humanitarian crisis is the result of a counterrevolutionary proxy war which intends to scatter the millions who dared dream of a country free of military rule and a democracy run by civilians rather than military dictators. Given Sudan’s strategic location and plethora of natural resources, at least fifteen countries are directly and indirectly supporting the two armed groups wreaking havoc on the country. The genocidal Rapid Support Forces (RSF) are supported by the United Arab Emirates, Russia, Israel, and indirectly by the US, UK, and European Union. The Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) have received support from Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Iran, Qatar, Turkey, Eritrea, Djibouti, and Russia, although the latter switched its support to the RSF. The US cannot rein in the UAE’s role in perpetuating war, famine, ethnic cleansing, weapons trafficking, human trafficking—the humanitarian crises in Sudan—because it is heavily invested in normalizing Arab-Israeli relations and achieving the aims of the Abraham Accords. The RSF and the SAF are part of the same coercive military apparatus. Despite their rivalry, both armed groups, much like their funders, share a total disregard of international humanitarian law.

10. In both Gaza and Sudan, there is no exact record of the deceased. In the case of Gaza, the United States banned the use of the Gaza Health Ministry’s death count, even as it has been corroborated by The Lancet and the World Health Organization. In Sudan, conservative estimates state that 16,800 people have been killed, but according to the US special envoy Tom Perriello, the death count is closer to 150,000 (as of June 2024). When there are too many dead to count, let alone to grieve one-by-one, that is a clear sign that the covenant of life has been breached. The year is 2025 and the balance of the life-and-death continuum is endangered.

11. Note on the aims of the Sudanese Revolution: Starting in December 2018, millions of Sudanese people mobilized under a united call for civilian rule and a peaceful transition to a democratic government, with three branches of government. One of the slogans was العسكر للثكنات والجنجويد ينحل, which is a call for the military (the SAF) to return to their barracks and for the dissolution of the “Janjaweed” militia (the RSF). The Sudanese people’s revolution is opposed to military leadership and foreign interference in Sudanese politics by nations, such as the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt, who have historically stood against democracy in Sudan. The idea of a fully civilian-led government did not sit well with the UAE and Saudi Arabia since they depend on military leaders who can be bribed to do their dirty bidding. Moreover, the UAE and Saudi Arabia viewed democracy in Sudan as a threat to their own authoritarian monarchic systems and therefore conspired to form within Sudan a government ruled by the military with minimal civilian participation. They took it upon themselves to corrupt the transition to democratic rule by funding two sides of a brutal counterrevolutionary proxy war that has cost 150,000–200,000 human lives, displaced 13 million people, left 19 million children without access to education, and put 25 million people at risk of famine.

12. Light travels at about 300,000 kilometers per second, while digital communications travel at about 200,000 kilometers a second. The speed of human processing is about 10–20 bits per second, with a maximum of 60 bits.

13. Minerals are the raw material of militarized power. The death machine depends on a constant supply of high-grade aluminum, beryllium, bismuth, cadmium, chromium, cobalt, copper, dysprosium, ferrochromium, ferromanganese, lead, lithium, manganese, mercury, molybdenum, nickel, niobium, tantalum, tin, titanium, tungsten, uranium, vanadium, zinc, and zirconium to manufacture various instruments of war, including nuclear weapons, missiles, helicopters, surveillance technologies, and AI-based autonomous weapons systems. Every quest of global or regional domination hinges on acquiring these minerals. Mines, therefore, are some of the least regulated and most degraded places on earth.

14. Another day Sila says, “I want to be a doctor when I grow up, and I want to treat little children.” To what degree is this dream conditioned by the catastrophe of thousands of injured children in the context of a genocide that targets medical staff, doctors, surgeons, and hospitals including the neonatal wards? Untouched by violence, what would the children dream?

15. Political analysis gives limited insight into the issue of human brutality. To understand not only the origins but the continued prevalence of violence requires a polydisciplinary approach to the study of our species. Studies in human psychology and cognition offer one of countless avenues to pursue insights into violence amongst humans. In his paper, “‘If I Look at the Mass I Will Never Act’: Psychic Numbing and Genocide,” Paul Slovic, a professor of psychology specializing in studies of human judgment, decision making, and risk analysis poses the question: “Why, over the past century, have good people repeatedly ignored mass murder and genocide?” He draws on research that suggests the affective responses that motivate human moral intuition and judgements—like empathy, sympathy, compassion, sadness, pity, and distress—diminish as the magnitude of the stimulus increases. Thus, as the loss of life increases, psychological numbing sets in, “diminishing sensitivity to the value of life.” Slovic concludes, “we cannot depend only upon our moral feelings to motivate us to take proper actions against genocide . . . It is time to reexamine this failure [of the genocide convention] in light of the psychological deficiencies described here and design legal and institutional mechanisms that will enforce proper response to genocide and other crimes against humanity.” In this essay I suggest that rather than abandoning the role of feeling in motivating transformation, we can work to transform the consciousness of our species by resensitizing ourselves to the inherent value of life. We can prevent mass atrocity by disarming humanity.

16. In his 2003 article “Necropolitics” and the 2019 monograph of the same name, the Cameroonian philosopher and social theorist Achille Mbembe characterizes modern power as “necropolitical.” Necropower describes a mode of governance in which modern states deploy direct death, terror, and neglect in order to kill members of populations that are already systematically marked as subhuman or “enemies of the state” by legacies of racial hierarchy and colonial violence.

17. The issue of whether the present scale of annihilation is precedented is subject to ongoing debates, generally privileging comparative logics. Contrasting one era, massacre, war, or genocide, against another neglects the constitutive nature of violent historical events and obscures the staggering scale of the whole. Considering all acts of organized brutality as interconnected points in the arc over our species’ history, reveals an alarming, trans-scalar pattern of escalation, spanning from the Iron Age to the modern period. Today, in the Anthropocene, brutality against human beings converges with brutality against the planet, threatening the wellbeing of the unanimous lifesystem. If nothing else, the planetary scale and impact of annihilation is unprecedented.

18. In 2024, the world faced 56 international conflicts, with 92 nations involved in conflicts outside their borders. A United Nations report states that “the world is facing the highest number of violent conflicts since the Second World War and 2 billion people—a quarter of humanity—live in places affected by such conflict.” The Stockholm International Peace Research Institute reports that in 2023, world military expenditure reached “an all-time high of $2,443 billion.” Meanwhile, the Global Peace Index 2024 report states that, “expenditure on peacebuilding and peacekeeping totaled $49.6 billion, representing less than 0.6% of total military spending.”

19. As the Jamaican social theorist Sylvia Wynter teaches, the malleability of human consciousness has been instrumentalized for millennia to uphold various epistemic orders and to consolidate and legitimize power. Writers including Noam Chomsky, Franz Fanon, Michel Foucault, Walter Rodney, and Sylvia Wynter have written about the ways that violence conditions consciousness. While some of these works focus on the effect of violence on oppressed peoples, it is in fact the Western liberal subject whose consciousness and worldview is most thoroughly conditioned to accept the degradation of human rights and large-scale destruction of our planetary home. Western education systems, media, and political propaganda instill ideological superiority and exceptionalism, enabling citizens of military empires like the United States to perceive the annihilation of human beings outside their borders as necessary expressions of progress, democracy, and defense. This worldview legitimizes the empire’s acceleration of warfare, crimes against humanity, and the degradation of international relations and human rights, while allowing Western(ized) subjects to maintain a moral high ground. Subjected to dehumanizing propaganda, these imperial citizens become complicit in crimes against humanity. But complicity is spectrum, from those who are reluctant yet systematically coerced participants in a criminal economy, to those who are deliberate propagators of dehumanizing ideologies and acts of domestic and international aggression against those deemed threatening to US homogeneity or US supremacy. As a result of the empire’s systematic instillment of ignorance, poverty, illness, despair, and compliance in its own citizens, a subset of the American public understand their position vis-à-vis the rest of the world as potential victims of imagined or projected future acts of aggression, rather than as participant-victims of their own government’s criminal and dehumanizing agenda. Therefore, when the Commission on the National Defense Industrial Strategy urges a “bipartisan call to arms,” and increases Pentagon funding from $5 trillion to $9.3 trillion to support the new National Defense Industrial Strategy, as it did in July 2024, few raise an eyebrow and fewer still protest.

20. Nicholas Brady wrote this in a public Facebook post on August 18, 2020. Link here.

21. This quote is from Munira Khayat’s research talk “A Landscape of War: Lessons on Resistance and Survival from South Lebanon,” presented on December 3, 2024 at Stanford University’s Center for the Humanities. Khayat is a visiting associate professor of anthropology at NYU, a clinical associate professor of anthropology at NYU Abu Dhabi, and the author of the academic monograph A Landscape of War: Ecologies of Resistance and Survival in South Lebanon.

22. The US military has a tradition of naming its helicopters after Native American tribes and leaders including Apache, Black Hawk, Cheyenne, Comanche, and Lakota, all of whom it massacred and continues to subjugate.

23. A single, modern nuke carries the power of 100,000 (or more) tons of TNT and could kill more than half a million people if detonated in a densely populated area. The Aviation Thermobaric Bomb of Increased Power, nicknamed “Father of All Bombs” (FOAB) was developed for the Russian military. The GBU-43/B Massive Ordnance Air Blast (MOAB, Mother of All Bombs) is a large-yield bomb, developed for the United States military. The AN/SEQ-3 Laser Weapons System (LaWS) is capable of unleashing 30,000 watts of laser power. The F-22 Raptor fighter jet carries an assortment of bombs and laser-guided missiles. The Advanced Precision Kill Weapon System is a low-cost, semiactive laser guidance system. The MK-84 is a 2,000-pound general-purpose bomb. The US transferred more than 50,000 tons of weapons to Israel including 14,000 MK-84 bombs, 6,500 500-pound bombs, 3,000 Hellfire precision-guided air-to-ground missiles, 1,000 bunker buster bombs, 2,600 airdropped, small-diameter bombs. These weapons, along with thousands of others, demarcate the reality of life on Earth. Weapons of war serve their purpose, whether they are detonated or not, by upholding the specter of death via instant annihilation. They empower nation states and their paramilitaries to actualize their aims through brute force, including the massacre of entire populations. The proliferation of weapons threatens the future of our species and the integrity of life, setting a deathtrap we must exit.

24. In the epoch of bloodshed, all of us are either covered in the blood of the innocent or the blood of our open wounds. Or both. The point is not that we are equally culpable, but that we are equally susceptible to shedding blood.

25. This is Sylvia Wynter’s formulation, from her essay, “Human Being as Noun? Or Being Human as Praxis? Towards the Autopoetic Turn/Overturn: A Manifesto.” In my view, the process of unmaking and remaking the world consists of three states of conscious embodiment: transpersonal attunement, species double consciousness, and autonomous action.

26. A note on suffering. There are multiple forms of suffering. There is suffering that is natural to the human condition—for example, the infant’s painful bowel movement, the grief of losing a loved one to old age. And then there is gratuitous suffering; suffering that would not exist if it did not benefit an external party who is its catalyst, as in the case of engineered poverty, famines, and droughts, modern day slavery, modern warfare, weaponized rape, ethnic cleansing, and genocide. By suffering, I mean unnecessary but externally mandated suffering.

27. Édouard Glissant. Treatise on the Whole-World. Translated by Celia Britton. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2021.

28. I am haunted by the image of an Amazonian panther’s paws burned down to the flesh. This critically endangered animal ran for its life through smoldering forest fires. Ninety percent of the fires in the Amazon rainforest are intentionally set by people to clear land for cows to graze on in an attempt to satiate a bottomless hunger for slaughtering and eating this highly conscious, social, and empathic animal that is known, much like humans, to mourn its loved ones. The combination of logging and burning annihilates the ecological habitat of countless plants, animals, and Indigenous people whose survival depends on their home not being razed.

29. When scientists account for all the mammals on planet Earth by biomass, it turns out that only 4% are wild mammals, 2% live on land, the other 2% are marine mammals. Humans comprise a whopping 34% of all mammals. The remaining 64% are “livestock,” animals like cows, pigs, and sheep who are bred—often in captivity—for the sole purpose of being slaughtered and eaten by humans. To create space for captive “livestock,” precious ecosystems are destroyed. How can a single species be so insatiable? How have we become so numb to the systematic destruction of our only planetary home? This discrepancy of biomass between humans, wild mammals, and captive mammals is an anthropogenic event of planetary proportion. The incessant slaughter of nonhuman mammals is also kin-shed. Blood and suffering spill over species distinction. Like the slaughter of animals, the incessant massacre of humans is normalized as a game of political, economic, and libidinal sport. Every act of violence is interconnected. Blood and death are the common denominator of our kinds. Life is incredibly fragile. All flesh is subject to atomization. According to various human cosmologies, an intangible dimension of being, called “the spirit,” transitions onward, whereas the body disintegrates in the mouths of millions. From this atomized form, our flesh continues the molecular metamorphosis of planetary life. Our bodies return to the elemental state of nature as soils, mosses, and flowers who feed the insects who feed the birds and reptiles who feed the mammals, and so on along the continuum of life-death-reformulation. The experience of embodied singularity is temporary, whereas life is eternal, inherently free and unencumbered by form.

30. According to a United Nations report, eight newborns and 74 children died of hypothermia in the besieged Gaza strip between December 9, 2024 and January 9, 2025.

31. These words are taken from a photograph of a person wearing a kuffiyah, holding a poster that reads: “I will not quietly nor politely sit and make house within the depravity of this killing machine.”

32. These new connections can be internal to our own minds, such as emerging thought patterns and belief systems, or they can be externally reflected in our relationships with one another. In most cases, one begets the other. Relationships are at the core of the human fabric because they have the power to elevate our awareness and diminish fear of the unknown. If dehumanization thrives on disconnection and separation, then twenty-first century technologies provide us countless modes to connect with people across vast distances, to transmit our voices across borders and thousands of miles of ocean, to befriend and support people surviving in the harshest conditions. One of the simplest ways to resist the illusion of separation is to talk to people and form new relationships. To ask: How did you sleep? Was it cold? Did you eat today? Are your children okay? How can I support you? While I cannot single-handedly stop the war machine, I can befriend and support many who are surviving in its crosshairs.

33. A note on empathy. Empathy has and continues to be a catalyst for social change. Empathy, or the capacity to understand and share the feelings of another person or being, has deep evolutionary roots and is not unique to humans. From a neuroscientific perspective, several areas of the human brain, including the anterior insula, the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex, and the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, are activated when individuals perceive or imagine the emotions and pain of others, suggesting that empathy involves both cognitive and affective processes. Empathy is related to the mirror neuron system: cells that fire both when an individual performs an action and when they observe the same action being performed by another. These neurons help individuals “mirror” the emotional and physical states of others. Research on neuroplasticity reveals that empathy is not a static trait and can be developed and enhanced throughout life. With this in mind, let us sow upon the blood-drenched earth the seeds of empathy.

34. Audre Lorde, “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House,” in The Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color, eds. Cherríe Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa (Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press, 1983), 98.

Umniya Najaer is an interdisciplinary poet, essayist and Black Studies scholar completing her PhD at Stanford’s Modern Thought and Literature program. Sudanese by way of Germany and Turtle Island, Umniya’s writing is invested in activating the human ability to feel what each other feels. Her work is guided by a profound reverence for our planetary home, a duty to protect all lifeforms, and a humanitarian commitment to oppose all systems of dehumanization, brutality and deathmaking. Umniya believes that peace is possible and that we are alive at a critical juncture in our species’ trajectory. We are tasked now with de-escalation, demilitarization, disarmament and with crafting an alternate world system.

Umniya’s recent publications include “Dear Alice: for the Murder of {your} Bastard Child of the Starry-Eyed Tribe Born to Children,” and “Spinning: Zuihitsu Fragment on Ecological and Cosmic Consciousness.” Her poetry chapbook Armeika was published by Akashic Press as part of the First Generation African Poets series.  Her work has received support from the Cave Canem Foundation, the Sacatar Institute, Stanford VPGE’s Diversifying Academia Recruiting Excellence (DARE) Fellowship, the African American History Mellon Dissertation Fellowship at the Library Company of Philadelphia, the Advisory Council Dissertation Fellowship at the University of Pennsylvania’s McNeil Center for Early American Studies, the Susan Ford Dorsey Innovation in Africa Fellowship, among others. Umniya will be serving as the Chancellors Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Colorado, Boulder with the Department of Ethnic Studies and the Center for African and African American Studies (CAAAS) starting in the Fall of 2025.

The post disarm humanity: meditations from the third decade of the third millennium appeared first on Mizna.

trans. by Nour Eldin Hussein
Image by Walid Daqqa, produced during his imprisonment

Thinker, freedom fighter, and political prisoner Walid Daqqa describes the systematic colonization of time in Zionist prisons in a letter to a friend. The original Arabic can be found here. This Mizna Online exclusive feature is published as part of Mizna 25.2: Futurities, link to order HERE.

—Nour Eldin Hussein, assistant editor

We are a part of history, and history—as it is well known—is a condition and an action in the past. Except us: We are a past continuous and neverending. We address you all from it presently, so that it does not become your future. 

—Walid Daqqa, trans. Nour Eldin Hussein

On Parallel Time

My dear brother, Abu Omar,¹ greetings. 

Today is the twenty-fifth of March, the first day of my twentieth year imprisoned. Today is also the twentieth birthday of a young comrade. Such an “occasion”—the anniversary of my imprisonment, the birth of the comrade—reminds me of a question I posed to myself: how old is Lena today, who has become a mother of two? How old is Najla, mother to three? And Hanin, mother to a girl? And Obeida—traveling to America for his studies, bidding farewell to his youth, yet without my bidding him farewell? And my brothers and sisters—either kids when I left them on the day of my arrest or born after the fact—how old are my brothers and sisters, those “children” who have since married and become mothers and fathers to kids themselves? 

I had not asked this before. Time in the broad sense, how much of it passes—that had not concerned me as much as the minutes do when they would fly by during those short family visits. Too brief a time for me to lay out for them all the notes I’ve recorded on the palm of my hand; all the missions Sanaa² will need particular effort for—not just to carry them out, but to simply remember them, as they have barred us from the use of pen or paper during our visits, and so it is only memory that remains as the sole faculty available for recollection. And so I forget to ponder the lines that have begun to dig in the face of my mother for years now, and I forget to ponder her hair that she has begun to dye with henna to hide their gray from me so that I would not inquire after her true age.

Her true age? I do not know my mother’s “true age.” My mother has two ages: her chronological age, which I do not know, and her prisonological age. Let’s say her age in that parallel time is nineteen years. 

I write to you all from Parallel Time. In Parallel Time, where there is fixity of place, we do not use the standard units of your time like minutes and hours, not unless the two lines of our time and your time meet at the visitation window, whereupon we are forced to interact with your chronological formulae. It is, anyway, the only thing that has not changed in your time and that we still remember how to use. 

It has reached me on the tongue of the young delegates of the intifada—indeed, this was told to me personally—that many things have changed in your time. The phone no longer has a rotary dial, no longer works via coin slot but requires credit to activate; and also that the frames of car tires do not have another inner, internal structure, but are tubeless. 

I was quite impressed by such a system! One where the tire is made of a material that closes in on itself, plugging up any holes spontaneously and immediately, stopping any air from leaking out of it. I’m quite impressed, as it seems to resemble the prisoner who resists the tacks laid down by the prison guards by way of that self-contained system—the tubeless system. Generally, there is no escape for the prisoner save for relying on such a self-correcting regime, as our driver or drivers cannot see a tack on the road except that they drive over it or a bump in the road except that they trip on it, supposing that they are taking a short cut—shortening the distance, reducing the effort. It’s not just that our drivers have been reckless, they have simply been relying on that inner tube as if it’s not made of flesh and blood—as if there is no end, no goal. Until we become like cash passed around on the market, the market of political maneuvers: 

“Take this tire and permit us some of the vehicle.” 

Of what value is the tire without the vehicle? 

I do wish for the Palestinian and Arab leadership to improve. I do wish for our people and for their political power to take up such an internal, self-reparatory system without having to resort to those who call themselves “roadside assistance”—the Americans and their ilk who today corrupt all the earth in Lebanon. And if it is unavoidable to speak of politics—despite the fact that I have decided, today especially, not to speak of politics—then we, in Parallel Time, see you, while you all do not see us. We hear you all while you all do not hear us. As if glass, tinted just on your side, stands between us, like the kind for cars carrying important people such that some of us behave arrogantly as if they are, in fact, an important person. They have convinced us that we are important people. 

And why not! The prestige of the situation calls for it. In all the world, there are states and governments who have prisoners except for us: We are prisoners who have a ministry in a government that does not have a state!³

We—for those who do not know—have dwelled here in Parallel Time since before the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union and the communist bloc, before the fall of the Berlin Wall and the First and Second and Third Gulf wars, before Madrid and Oslo and before the eruptions of the First and Second intifadas. In Parallel Time we are as old as that revolution and we precede the genesis of some of its factions; we precede the Arabic satellite channels and the proliferation of the culture of hamburgers in our capitals. Indeed, we are before the invention of mobile phones and the propagation of those new telecommunications systems and the internet. We are a part of history, and history—as it is well known—is a condition and an action in the past. Except us: We are a past continuous and neverending. We address you all from it presently, so that it does not become your future. 

I have said that, here, our time is not your time. Our time does not proceed on the axis of past and present and future; our time that flows in the fixity of place ousts from our language typical concepts of time and place—or say that it confuses them, according to your standards. We do not ask “when?” or “where shall we meet?” for example, rather we have already met and still meet at the same place. We proceed here flexibly to and fro on the axis of past and present, and every moment after this present one is an unknown future that we are no longer capable of interacting with. Of no control to us is our future—a condition quite similar to that of all the Arab peoples, with the fundamental difference that our occupation is foreign and their jailers Arab; here we’re imprisoned for searching for the future, and there the future is buried alive. 

In our Parallel Time, most of us haven’t given an answer to that question posed usually to children: What do you want to be when you grow up? I, even now—even though I am forty-four years old—have no idea what I would like to be when I grow up! 

If it is the case that time as a concept is inherent to matter—if it is its moving aspect—and if place is the fixity of matter, then we in Parallel Time have come to represent the units of that time. We are the time that wrestles with place and in a state of internal contradiction with it. We have become units of time. We have come to define points on the axis of time by the arrest of so-and-so, the arrival to the prison of such-and-such or their release from it. Such things are important chronological events for lives in Parallel Time. We know how to define the hour and the day and history by your units of time, but they are units that go unused; what is used is: X happened on the day so-and-so came, or before or after such-and-such was liberated. And because we do not know when so-and-so will be arrested in the future or when they will be moved from one prison to another, we have nothing by which to define a future event. So, when we talk of the future, we borrow your chronological units.

Your time is the true time. Your time is the time of the future. 

In Parallel Time and in the controversy of the relationship between us and place, we develop relations with objects that are strange; relationships that nobody besides those imprisoned in Parallel Time would understand. How is it possible to understand the emotional relationship between a prisoner and the undershirt that was the thing he was wearing the moment before his arrest? How is it possible to explain the depth of our relationships with predefined objects, the loss of which may lead to sorrow and even weeping. Things like a certain lighter or a specific box of cigarettes acquire deep emotional significance because of their distinction as the last thing we had in the “future,” as if they affirm that we, one day, had been outside of Parallel Time—proof of our membership to your time. Such objects are not simply consumable materials to be thrown in the trash following their use: they are the drowning man’s last life preserver in the ocean of Parallel Time. 

In the year 1996, I heard the honk of a Subaru for the first time in ten years and I wept. In our time, a car horn is used for more than simply alerting passersby; in our time, a car horn is liable to stir the deepest of human emotions. 

Through their relationship with place, the people of Parallel Time develop relationships no stranger than those with objects. There you are suddenly, developing a special relationship with specks on the ceiling of your cell brought about by leaking water and the humidity. Or you might develop a relationship with a hole or crack in the door. Who would understand that dialogue replete with fervor, with emotion, with interruption and description as if it were a conversation on the topic of heaven and its door and not on the cell and its holes?

The first prisoner: “There’s nothing better than department four . . . Oh, to be back in the days of department four . . .” 

The second prisoner: “Sure, but the best thing about department four was cell seven.” 

The first prisoner—expelling all the air from his lungs in heartbreak over those days—interrupts: “I know, I know, but what can you say? From this cell you can hear the precise crack of dawn—the sound of cars on the highway.”

The second prisoner, also interrupting: “But that’s not it—you know the cell door? Between the cell door and the wall, right at the hinges, is an entire two centimeter-crack so wide you can see through it while lying in bed. You can see through to the ends of the earth.”

The first prisoner: “Man, why are you saying this? Department four is the best.” 

How simple the dreams, how great the human, how small the place, how grand the idea. 

I did not plan to write on a day like today—not about time, nor about place, nor about our Parallel Time, nor about anything: not about politics, not about philosophy. I actually had an inclination to write about what worries me—what I love and what I hate—but my unplanned writing resembles my unplanned life. I will even admit that I have never planned for anything: not to be a resistance fighter, nor a member of a political party or faction, nor even to participate in politics—not because all that is a mistake and not because politics is an objectionable, detestable matter as some like to see it—but because, in my view, they are huge and complicated topics. I am not a politician nor a resistance fighter despite previous insistence and observation. I very simply could have continued my life as a house painter or gas station worker as I was up until the moment of my arrest. I could have married one of my cousins early as many do, and she could have borne seven or ten kids; and I would have bought a truck and learned the business of car dealing and the going rates of hard currency. All of that was possible, until I saw what I saw of the atrocities during the Lebanon War and the massacres that followed it—Sabra, Shatila. It inspired in my being shock and astonishment. 

To stop feeling shock and astonishment, to stop feeling the misery of people (any people), the blunting of emotion before scenes of atrocity (any atrocity), was, in my view, a daily anxiety, and the measure of the extent of my steadfastness and solidity. To feel for people and the pain of humanity is the very core of civilization. The intellectual core of the human being is intention; the corporeal core is work; and the spiritual core is feeling—to feel for people and the pain of humanity is the core of human civilization. 

It is this core especially that is targeted in the life of the prisoner every hour of every day of every year. You are not targeted as a political subject in the first degree, neither are you targeted as a religious subject, nor are you targeted as a consumerist subject to be punished by deprivation from the pleasures of material life. You may adopt whatever political conviction suits you, and you may practice whatever religious observance, and you may even be provided with much of your material needs—but it remains that the targeted entity of the first degree is the social, human entity within you. 

What is targeted is any relationship outside of the self, any relationship you value with other people, with nature—even your relationship with the jailer as a human being. Truly, they do it all to push you to hate. What is targeted is love, your sense of beauty, your sense of humanity.

I profess now, in my twentieth year of imprisonment, that I am still no good at the hatred, nor the crudeness, nor the coarseness that life in prison imposes. I profess now that I still rejoice at the barest of things with the glee of small children. I am still filled with delight at a kind word of encouragement or compliment. I profess that my heart skips a beat at the sight of a flower on the television, at a scene of nature, at the sea. I profess that I am joyous despite it all, and I yearn not for any pleasure of the many pleasures of the world save for two: the sight of children, sent off from all corners of the village to their schools; and the sight of workers in the early hours of the morning as they proceed from the alleys of the neighborhoods in a dusty, wintry morning, toward the town square—vital, prepared to travel to their place of work. And I profess now that all these feelings, all this love, would not have remained if not for the sole and solitary love of my mother, the love of Sanaa and my brother Hosny, the support of my people and my dearest friends who surround me on all sides—I to them, and they to me. 

I profess that I am still a human being holding onto his love as if it were a flaming torch. And I will remain steadfast in that love—I will continue to love you all, for it is love and love only that remains my sole victory over my jailers. 

With regards, Milad.

1. 1.  
   Refers to Palestinian political science scholar Azmi Bishara. This letter was sent from Daqqa to Bishara in 2005 and is translated and published here with permission, with special thanks to assistance from Mazher Al-Zoby. Ed .
   ︎
2. 2. Refers to the journalist and activist Sanaa Salameh who was married to Daqqa. Ed .
   ︎
3. 3. Refers to the Palestinian Authority’s Ministry of Detainees and Ex-Detainees Affairs. Ed . ︎

Translator’s note: Born in 1961 in the town of Baqa Al-Gharbiyyah in occupied Palestine, Walid Daqqa was a Palestinian philosopher, political theorist, playwright, and armed resistance fighter. Despite evidence to the contrary, Daqqa was accused, charged, and convicted of involvement in a 1984 PFLP operation that captured and killed an Israeli soldier, for which he was sentenced to life by the Zionist entity in 1986 and subsequently languished, imprisoned until his death on April 7, 2024 (al-Shaikh 2021a, 276). The text presented here was penned in 2005 in Gilboa Prison, on the first day of his twentieth year behind bars. 

Despite his captivity, Daqqa remained politically active. As hinted here, he maintained regular contact with the cultural intelligentsia in colonized Palestine, enabling him to conduct a lively political life from within. Notably, Daqqa served as a member of the political party Democratic National Rally and headed the Palestinian Prisoners’ Movement. 

Perhaps the most significant of Daqqa’s activities in this respect are his intellectual pursuits, for which his comrades in captivity nicknamed him the Prince of Culture, Amir al-Thaqafah. Pursuing and successfully graduating with an M.A in political science, Daqqa produced a prolific—and largely untranslated—intellectual output that was transdisciplinary in form, taking the shape of screenplays, musicals, novels, nonfiction memoir, children’s books, and works of political and philosophical theory. Situated in the context of a post-Oslo status quo, his body of work proceeds from the urgencies marked by the transmutation of the PLO into the PA, the subsequent official renunciation of armed resistance as a political method, and the “dis-memberment” of the 1948 Palestinians from the national body (ibid., 274). In particular, Daqqa’s intellectual concerns revolve around the peculiar ontology of the post-Oslo Palestinian, a subject who is increasingly forced to exist in a state of a prospectless, futureless infinite present—the parallel time of Palestinian political existence. The text presented here is an early but foundational instantiation of this central intellectual project.

Daqqa leaves behind a legacy that demands dogged belief in a willful, agentic future. Indeed, at every turn Daqqa refused to capitulate to that hallucination of the infinite present induced by the apartheid state. In 1996, an imprisoned Daqqa met and became involved with journalist and translator Sana Salama. Though initially blocked by the Zionist entity, the two married after the intervention of Azmi Bishara—the addressee of the letter translated here and a member of the Knesset at the time—in 1999. Save for exceptional instances like their wedding and a single incident in which Sana managed to steal a hug in 2015 (ibid., 280) the couple conducted the entirety of their marital relationship separated by the steel of prison bars. The couple conceived via liberated seed, nutfah muharrarah, and Milad—birth in Arabic—was born on February 3, 2020 (al-Shaikh 2021b, 84-5). As in other texts, Daqqa concludes his 2005 letter to Azmi Bishara by hailing his future child: Ma’ tahiyyati, Milad.

—Nour Eldin Hussein

References:

1. 1. Al-Shaikh, Abdul-Rahim. 2021a. “Al-Zaman Al-Muwazi Fi Fikr Walid Daqqa [Parallel Time in the Thought of Walid Daqqa].” المجلة العربية للعلوم الإنسانية. 39 (155): 271–308. https://doi.org/10.34120/ajh.v39i155.2889.
2. 2. Al-Shaikh, Abdul-Rahim. 2021b. “The Parallel Human: Walid Daqqah on the 1948 Palestinian Political Prisoners.” Confluences Méditerranée N° 117 (2): 73–87. https://doi.org/10.3917/come.117.0075.

Walid Daqqa (July 18, 1961–April 7, 2024) was a Palestinian philosopher, political theorist, author, and armed resistance fighter who was imprisoned for thirty-eight years, the longest serving Palestinian prisoner in Israeli jails. From prison, he wrote a number of books including, The Tale of the Secrets of Oil, Fusion of Consciousness, and A Parallel Time. Daqqa died in prison, succumbing to a rare form of bone cancer which was exacerbated by medical negligence and torture of the Israeli Prison Service. He has not been given a proper burial as his body continues to be retained by the Security Cabinet of Israel at the time of this publication.

Nour Eldin Hussein is an Egyptian essayist, researcher, translator, editor, and enthusiast of the written and spoken word. He holds an M.A in Arab media and culture studies, and he lives, works, and studies in Minneapolis, MN where he serves as assistant editor for Mizna. He maintains lightedroom, a small blog on Substack where he writes about digital culture, life online, and the Arab world among others.

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In these three poems by academic and poet Mohja Kahf, Syria is written not only as the site of violent abduction and imprisonment, but also as a diverse country suffering from Arab and Sunni supremacy.

—Layla Faraj, editorial assistant

If you know anything, tell Maimouna

if you met someone who’s been in prison

and may have seen them, tell Maimouna

You can’t mourn; to mourn is to desert them.

They might still be alive, they are.

—Mohja Kahf, Tell Maimouna

Tell Maimouna

They weren’t on the list 

They weren’t on the list of the dead,

the one released July 2018 

of thirty-seven hundred prisoners killed 

years before, without notice to their families.

Maimouna’s brothers were not on the list— 

Iqbal and Suhaib, early twenties

when they were detained November, 2012 

About yay tall. Thin. Thick brown-black hair.

Lifelong intentional nonviolence gives their faces

a certain innocence

If you know anything, tell Maimouna

if you met someone who’s been in prison

and may have seen them, tell Maimouna  

You can’t mourn; to mourn is to desert them.

They might still be alive, they are. 

Suhaib will need that notebook with the clasp

I’m saving for him. I’m stowing the Racine

volumes; Iqbal will need them when he starts teaching

French literature. Their place is saved.

Lives wide open. Unfinished. 

You keep talking to them in your head, 

bargaining against the gnaw,

against mass graves, 

before the spinner in your brain 

yields to sleep. You banish the thought. Banish it. 

Meanwhile, another round of search.

Some bureaucrat may finally talk. 

Some new prisoner released to ply for information. 

The mind repeats, there could be explanations, there could. 

Mazen spent seventeen years inside, and he came out. 

It happens. It could happen. It’s only 

been six years. Seven now. Nine. Twelve. 

Searching. Grieving. Guilt for grieving. 

Coping with guilt, and the cycle repeats,

a wound that won’t close. Mustn’t close. 

Search with us. Hope for us 

when we no longer dare to hope.

And tell Maimouna.

Bibúre

We Arab Syrians could learn a word or two in Kurdish

Say, “Sere Kaniye,” or “Mem ú Zin,” or “biji Kurdistan”

Kurdish Syrians already speak two tongues of endurance,

long ago decoded a regime 

that fires on funerals and calls it “counter-terrorism,”

long ago learned the difference between a soccer match

and a march for rights on land their ancestors furrowed

Kurds already knew the difference between a protester and a terrorist

before it dawned on Arab Syrians getting shot for shouting “azadi”

at the only protest we dubbed with a Kurdish name

We could learn to say s’pas

We could learn to say bibúre

Hidebound in Diaspora

Slowly, you forget the stone church where your great-

grandmother murmured Aramaic blessings for the Virgin,

and you start to think all Syrians are like

the Sunni Arab ones at your Manchester mosque 

In the Chicago Syrian doctor’s club, 

Black Syrians too poor to emigrate slip from sight

Post-1965 the U.S. filtered you by class, welcomed

your light-skinned college-boy dad, but left behind

Kurdish farmers in Sere Kaniye—which

you think is only called Ras al-Ayn. You overlook

that Assyrians might feel out of place

among your exiled Ikhwanji neighbors

at your corporate compound in Riyad

Living in Mecca, how often do you face-

to-face Yezidi Syrians? You start to imagine

that Alawites have horns, forget

your teen crush on the coastal girl beach-bred

You no longer daily see ‘Uqqal of the Jabal 

born and reborn. Your kids 

and Syrian Turkmen kids 

in diaspora keep separate kitchen-table languages

It slips your mind that Armenians are home in Syria too

Your grandkids mistake singer Omar Souleyman for “khaleeji”

but think Asala “looks Syrian”

Together, you watch Bab al-Hara over fajitas

from the Dallas superstore, and misremember 

a Syria filled only with people like you

Mohja Kahf is a professor of comparative literature at the University of Arkansas since 1995 in the English Department and Program in Middle East Studies. Mohja, author of a novel and three poetry books, was exiled from Syria until 8 Dec 2024.  Kahf is a member of the Syrian Women’s Political Movement, Radius of Arab American Writers, and Syrian Nonviolence Movement. Mohja serves on the board of Canopy NWA, a refugee resettlement agency in northwest Arkansas. 

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As we reflect on Syria’s last fifty-three years under the Assad regime and look to the future of the country in the aftermath of it’s fall, Mizna shares two poems from Syrian poet Banah Ghadbian which speak on past moments of joy and present moments of confrontation and reconciliation.

—Layla Faraj, editorial assistant

Banat Ishreh*

I look at the photograph of banat ishreh, the 

secret oud circle my city grandmother held

while my country grandmother tilled the earth

and think “is this me?” Two unseen,

invisible rivers in time reverse, spin

me to into alleyways and low hanging grapevines

in courtyards, where friends smoke clove cigarettes

kiss pomegranates and suck them open

play tableh, fry loqmet al qadi,

drink sweet cold karkadeh in the summer

by the stone fountain 

I transport to the wet, red clay

of the field where a village of women

press seeds into earth

with the power of their holy palms 

and recite “grow, grow, grow.” 

I peer into the dark eyes of a 

woman in the photograph and I know, in my

heart, her hair smells of jasmines 

* Nihad Sirees’s wrote and researched about banat ‘ishreh — women in Aleppo who had intense relationships with each other and who met in music circles where they danced, sang, and socialized.

Sacred

in the Temple of Jupiter,

a young child slips

his fingers into my bag

& steals a wad of money

while I translate for two

released prisoners from Sednaya

doing a street interview with a foreigner.

The prisoners’ eyes hurt from seeing sunlight

for the first time in seven years. My English

is simple & my Arabic is bulky. The gods

stand as judges & interpret

the situation. The child runs away,

money in hand, & I am not angry,

standing in a house of grief.

“The ancient harps of the

temple strike the beat

of a sorrowful song.”

Later, a man brings meals

to the square for the swarm of 

hungry children & in a terrifying

haze, fourteen people

are trampled. The city is

filled with blood. 

 Dr. Banah el Ghadbanah teaches Comparative Women’s Studies at Spelman College. They are the author of La Syrena: Visions of a Syrian Mermaid from Space, which the Independent Book Review called one of the best books of 2023. They are published in Afghan Punk Magazine, Poetry Northwest, the Women’s Review of Books, and more. 

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The Cyprus Pavilion at the 2024 Venice Biennale

Over the past eighteen months, the genocide in Gaza has laid bare the state of world, showing us the true brutality of neoliberal values and institutions, and the unadulterated depravity of settler colonialism. While much of the world has persisted in a state of complicit blindness, a blindness that tolerates the erasure and ghostification of Gaza, students, artists, writers, filmmakers, cultural workers, have been on the front lines of speaking out against genocide and imagining new forms of resistance and solidarity.

On a wildflower-lined gravel track off a quiet thoroughfare…, the exhibition which represented the Cyprus Pavilion at the 2024 Venice Biennale, invokes formal and conceptual notions of ghosts, always contextualized in relation to technology and power in Cyprus, specifically the country’s historic and current geopolitical role in the Levant region and in the genocide on Gaza. The artworks in this exhibition show us how ghost can be properly attended to and examined in order to develop a new sensory mode and thus a new way of engaging with the world around us. It was my pleasure to interact with and review this complex exhibition as my own form of digital ghost.

— Lamia Abukhadra, Art and Communications Director

Gaza is the ghost of the world, the persistent presence that, despite all efforts to erase it, to make it disappear, remains and resists. It is Gaza that has shown us the impossible: the horrors of settler colonialism at its most extreme and brutal, the ways in which resistance is possible in the smallest of gestures, and finally, the triumphant acts of return and reunification following the now-broken ceasefire agreement. The ghost of the world has shown us the world for what it is and what must be done, what alliances must be drawn in order to resist it. 

—Lamia Abukhadra

On Which Side of the Screen Lies the Ghost? The Cyprus Pavilion at the 2024 Venice Biennale

My notification doesn’t go off as planned; I log in to the Instagram live tour fifteen minutes late. By the time I am able to join, I have missed the explanation of the exterior of the space as well as much of the first room. No matter, a record of the tour is saved and uploaded later, acting as a trace of the last days of the exhibition. Apart from a detailed press kit and the virtual conversations I had with some of the artists, this is the only way I encountered On a wildflower-lined gravel track off a quiet thoroughfare…, the exhibition which represented the Cyprus Pavilion at the 2024 Venice Biennale. 

My initial meeting with some of the artists who collectively conceived, produced, and invigilated the 2024 Cyprus Pavilion—comprised of the Lower Levant Company (Peter Eramian and Emiddio Vasquez), Haig Aivazian, and the Endrosia Collective (Andreas Andronikou, Marina Ashioti, Niki Charalambous, Doris Mari Demetriadou, Irini Khenkin, Rafailia Tsiridou, and Alexandros Xenophontos)—took place on Zoom a few days before the exhibition was set to close. During our discussion, Andreas Andronikou mentioned that as the artists explored the varying intensities and materializations of the ghost in the machine, a key theme throughout the exhibition, the question “On which side of the screen lies the ghost?” was pivotal in conceiving the pavilion’s conceptual framework. Defined by the artists as the persistent, excessive presence of that which is repressed while paradoxically and simultaneously actively withdrawing, ghosts become the material in which speculative forms or methodologies can emerge. Within these alternative modes, that which has been repressed can be properly attended to and examined; a new sensory mode is developed. Through the process of “vigilance,” or the act of keeping vigil, the ghost in its many manifestations becomes a collaborator in sensing, imagining, and building new worlds from the one currently crumbling around us. 

On a wildflower-lined gravel track off a quiet thoroughfare… invokes notions of ghosts, ghosting, and haunting through several formal and conceptual approaches, always contextualized in relation to technology and power in Cyprus. The exhibition title is extracted from the opening lines of a 2019 Forbes article¹ which details a Cyprus-based spyware operation run by Israeli tech millionaire Tal Dilian and the Intellexa consortium. The article describes a wildflower-lined street in Larnaca where an unassuming black van is parked, inside of which exists an arsenal of technology capable of hacking into nearby smartphones with the purpose of gleaning and intercepting all of the private correspondences within. The Intellexa consortium as well as other companies associated with or owned by Dilian were found to be involved in several scandals, including the selling of spyware to the oppressive regime in Egypt and a paramilitary group in Sudan, mass unregulated internet surveillance in Nigeria, the surveillance of the murdered journalist Jamal Khashoggi by the Saudi government, and, most recently, receiving US Treasury sanctions for “developing, operating, and distributing commercial spyware technology that presents a significant threat to the national security of the United States.”² In referencing the black van scandal, the artists critically engage with the larger positionality of the nation of Cyprus as a covert or complicit ghostly presence in relation to the Levant region both historically and recently; a thoroughfare in which European, American, and Levantine geopolitical interests and dynamics meet. A mere 45-minute plane ride from the Levantine coast, Cyprus has long been a site for British and American military surveillance posts. The Treaty of Establishment of the Republic of Cyprus, signed in 1960 to grant Cyprus its independence from British colonial rule, includes several clauses granting the British government the right to maintain sovereign military bases in Akrotiri and Dhekelia, both of which remain active. More recently, Cyprus’ proximity to the Levant manifested through Cypriot residents hearing the 2020 Beirut Port explosion;³ in June 2024, the now-deceased Secretary General of Hezbollah, Hassan Nasrallah, threatened the nation, saying that it would be considered “part of the war” if it allowed the Israeli military to use its air or maritime spaces;⁴ and in January 2025, a report from the British Palestinian Committee laid out the extent of British military involvement in the genocidal war on Gaza, specifically mentioning the use of British RAF bases on the island of Cyprus for cargo transport to Israel and nightly surveillance flights over Gaza.⁵ Digging into the fantastical anecdote of the black van and the geopolitical associations it invokes, the artists collectively decided to create a framework for the entire exhibition to be the site of a speculative agency, Forever Informed. The aims of this agency, whose slogan is “smart solutions to weak signals” are left intentionally vague, but we are told that they gather information. The framing of the entire exhibition space as a parafictional surveillance company in disarray, in between setting up (appearance) and abandonment (disappearance), creates a space ripe for haunting. Each individual artwork is a complex examination of Cyprus’ geopolitical position that doubles as an exploration of this mysterious organization’s mythologies and imaginaries. The space itself existed as a satellite exhibition outside of the Biennale’s Giardini, an unassuming yet proximate presence haunting the main space of the 2024 Biennale. Rather than hiring the traditional gallery watchers to monitor and police the space, the artists themselves as well as invited residents took part in the practice of invigilation, drawing from the British use of the word invigilator: Those who look after a space. The practice of invigilation meant that the artists themselves stayed with their works and welcomed people into the space. Residents who took part in the Vigil Workspace were invited to perform and create discourse in relation to the exhibition as they sat vigil. Key to the practice of invigilation was the tours that the artists regularly gave of the space, thoroughly explaining the conceptual framework of the exhibition and the significance of each artwork in their own ways. 

Below is an abbreviated description of my experience attending a virtual walkthrough of the 2024 Cyprus Pavilion, partially embellished with additional information available in the pavilion’s press kit. 

**** 

I am sitting on one side of the screen, about to watch the tour of On a wildflower-lined gravel track off a quiet thoroughfare… on Instagram Live, facilitated by the Lower Levant Company. 

The phone camera is fixed on a view of an LED screen mounted vertically, like a phone screen, inside the facade of the Cyprus Pavilion. For a few minutes, we watch as the video looping on the LED monitor appears to glitch, fragmenting clips from a 2019 Forbes documentary which contains footage granted by the spyware dealer Tal Dilian of his black van conducting surveillance on a wildflower-lined street. The ambient noise of footsteps—assumed to belong to exhibition viewers drawn in by the screen’s alluring advertisement-like brightness—continue around the camera holder. In the darkness of early evening, the LED screen emanates light so strongly that it is the only thing the camera is able to capture, the surrounding environment is too dark and thus underexposed. 

The camera-holder, Peter Eramian, a member of the artist duo Lower Levant Company, backs up and Emiddio Vazquez, the other LLC member, appears in-frame and welcomes us to “the last ever tour” of the Cyprus Pavilion at the 2024 Venice Biennale. 

In addition to LED Screen (by Forever Informed), Vazquez points us to the other piece of the pavilion installed along the canal, Organ (by Rafailia Tsiridou and Emiddio Vasquez), a network of bright orange pipes which could be mistaken as part of the building’s infrastructure. As they come into contact with the vibrations created by the canal and its surrounding environment, the six PVC pipes create a feedback network of amplification and transmission. Organ is an eavesdropper or a spy, turning the sounds of the canal and the conditions of its surroundings into harvestable information. Rather than record or analyze data points, Organ simply transmits the vibrations that it encounters, feeding them into other pieces inside the space as live, unreproducible material, calling into question the purpose of the fabulated company Forever Informed. I recall the common cliché of when horror film characters first begin to suspect that a place is haunted, reassuring themselves that the strange noise they heard was “just the wind.” In this case, the wind and other natural or man-made elements create a haunting, gathering environmental elements to create an excessive force in which the tensions between information gathering and art are brought together. Yet, Organ does not gather, store, or organize any information, instead leaving us with purely sonic experiences available to us only in the present. On camera, the tour guides tell us that this particular artwork received a lot of attention and curiosity while it was being installed. 

We are led inside and after explaining the conceptual premise of the exhibition, Vazquez turns our attention to the first room which he describes as the “reception room” for Forever Informed. Among the pieces we are shown in this room, all of which engage with histories and materialities of information gathering and transmission, are Tyre Track by Lower Levant Company and Beacons and Pillars by Haig Aivazian. Sitting on the middle of the cement reception room floor is Tyre Track, a low rectangular mound of concrete with stones, gravel, seashells, and other detritus embedded within it. The indentation of a car tire track has been left diagonally across the rectangle. We learn that this trace was made by Forever Informed’s own surveillance van which has eerily similar capabilities as Tal Dilian’s infamous black van. The mesh peeking out from the edges of the object gives us the impression that this mound was not extracted from another location but cast. Upon closer inspection, the tracks appear to be a negative imprint, suggesting that the object itself may be a false or implanted trace of this covert operation. While holding the camera, Eramian adds that the dubious and archeological qualities of the piece leads one to question what other traces have been left on the island of Cyprus, especially those of a ghostly or clandestine nature. 

Nearby, hanging on a wall is Beacons and Pillars by Haig Aivazian, a Lebanese artist invited to contribute to the Cyprus Pavilion. Eramian tells us that recently Aivazian has been working on the dualities of light and darkness; light always associated with truth and enlightenment, as well as the Promethean myth where light and thus knowledge was passed on to humans, and darkness associated with criminality and unproductiveness. For Aivazian, we are told, this duality is not as clear as we may think, as the rise of modernity and neoliberal capitalism has meant that the materialities of light have been used or involved in the extraction of resources, policing and control of movement, and surveillance, while darkness could serve as a generative, fugitive space outside the watchful gaze of power. In this diptych of etched copper plates, Aivazian works with found etchings of torch bearers, which one could assume originate from representations of revolution or freedom, but are actually sourced from images of colonial expedition. As the camera approaches the etchings, Vazquez and Eramian as well as some of the other artworks in the space are reflected back. While the plate on the right consists of a small, isolated etching of a hand holding a torch surrounded by negative space, we are told that the plate on the left is a closeup of the texture of smoke from that a lit torch emits. In engaging with the analogue printing process, Aivazian invokes the mechanism of information and image circulation at the height of European colonization—where foreign lands, bodies, and ecologies were often imagined, represented, and reproduced through the medium of etching and lithography. But Aivazian edits this methodology of circulation, showing us only the matrix; the possibility of producing a large number of prints lingers as a ghostly suggestion. Copper itself, a resource in which Cyprus is rich, is an essential material in the contemporary battle over control, progress, and information, extracted for use in computing, electric conductivity, and signal transmission. The choice of cropping and zooming in creates an obfuscation. What could the texture of smoke hide? Are the torch-bearers leading the masses towards freedom or, as colonial entities, will they use their torches as a tool for mass destruction? 

As we move into the second room, we see AVRION PROIN EN NA DEIS, which translates to “TOMORROW MORNING YOU WILL SEE,” a sculptural work by Alexandros Xenophontos, member of the Endrosia collective. Sixteen tiles—three of which emit fluorescent white light that never turns off and one of which is missing—constitute a drop ceiling in the center of the space. In lieu of the missing tile, a subsea cable, usually used to transmit telecommunication signals across large stretches of ocean, descends and begins to make its way across the floor. As the phone approaches the severed end of the cable, a low, ominous, and irregular droning can be heard. We are told it is the sound of the activity of and around the canal being transmitted from the outdoor sculpture, Organ. The cable is wrapped in several tight fitting leather corsets, contrasting with the corporate office aesthetic of the ceiling and referring to the fetishistic nature of information ownership and transmission. As the phone is pointed into the opening in the ceiling, we notice a light flashing or glitching rhythmically. Perhaps this is the same flickering light one would see in the event of a haunting, or perhaps it is an infrastructural malfunction. We learn that the light is flashing the message “tomorrow morning you will see” in morse code, inspired by the message of a found telegram sent from Cyprus to Alexandria in 1955. Informed by the geopolitical history of Cyprus as a thoroughfare for telecommunications in the Mediterranean as well as a neocolonial command point within the Levant, the sculpture creates a foreboding atmosphere. In transmitting this message to us, is Forever Informed promising us enlightenment, or are they communicating a threat? 

Just outside of the second room is an enclosed courtyard where the sound installation Crossover Frequency Spectrum by Lower Levant Company also transmits some of the vibrations from Organ. Other sounds broadcasted through the six mounted Iwata horns include local bat chirps, whistles and cracks from the ionosphere near military antennae, and field recordings taken near the UK airbase in Akrotiri, all of which constitute sounds that Vazquez says are “very loud” but usually go ignored as we are not attuned to them. Atop a bedding of black copper slag, the mouth-like horns—some functional and mounted on a truss emerging from the slag, and others ceramic replicas placed directly on the black substrate—amplify and draw viewers to attend to new frequencies, thus imploring us to develop a new sensory mode.

Unintelligible sounds leak out from the room just ahead, named SOUNDR* after a codename for a joint British/American surveillance station in Cyprus exposed as a key site for surveillance in the Middle East. Darker in tone and in lighting, this last room in On a wildflower-lined gravel track off a quiet thoroughfare… is populated by video installations by Lower Levant Company, Haig Aivazian, and some members of Endrosia and serves as a cross section of the relationship between Cyprus and Lebanon. Their sounds overlapping, the three animation-focused video works in SOUNDR* explore the ghostification of cities through gentrification and real estate speculation, haunting and ghost hunting through digital materialities, and the generative, insurgent possibilities that spaces of darkness, often inhabited by ghosts, can have. 

The tour closes with a brief explanation of the practice of invigilation which took place throughout the duration of the Biennale and the multilingual publication produced in tandem with the exhibition. 

Vazquez and Eramian thank us for watching, the live video ends. Like a ghost, I rewatch the tour a few more times, retracing its path, attempting to glean as much as I can from it. 

*** 

I am on one side of the screen. 

On the other side, the acceleration of ethnic cleansing of Palestine through the eighteen month-long live-streamed genocide in Gaza. I am on one side of the screen of my phone witnessing unimaginable atrocities. On the other side, Gaza is living it. My notification goes off on January 18, 2024 and Bisan Owda is wearing a press vest, live streaming through the night of the Israeli siege and bombardment at the Nasser Hospital. My notification goes off October 13, 2024 and Saleh Aljafrawi is unable to describe the scene as he films Shaban al-Dalou burning to death in a tent in the Al Aqsa hospital courtyard after Israel committed one of many “tent massacres.” For months, Anas Al Sharif is on camera giving us tour after tour of the ruins and conditions of life in the besieged Jabalia refugee camp, unrecognizable from its pre-war photos. On one side of the screen, the killing of hundreds of thousands of people through bombing, sniping, blockade of all food, water, and medical supplies, besieging and destroying all medical infrastructure as well as entire neighborhoods; Israel’s attempt to exterminate all life in Gaza, to make it withdraw. Hundreds of thousands of Palestinians forcibly turned into martyrs, into ghosts. 

Often, as a civilian or a journalist would film an instance of forced displacement, the aftermath of an Israeli airstrike on a home, a car, or a group of tents, the influx of injuries or martyrs in a barely functioning hospital, someone looks into the camera and screams, “Who are you filming for?!” 

I am on the other side of the screen.

On my side of the screen, life goes on, and the genocide continues; we go to protests, we boycott, we occupy university property, we try to raise funds for mutual aid; concrete, political action is often stymied; international law is ignored. Every institution is complicit: From international human rights organizations and legal bodies, to western democracies and electoral politics, higher education, and to art institutions, we witnessed an expansion of fascism, an unwillingness to act justly in the face of extreme violence, an unwillingness to divest from systems of surveillance and arms manufacturing, an increase in policing of students, censorship of artists, and dismissal of professionals across all fields. Gaza is the ghost of the world, the persistent presence that, despite all efforts to erase it, to make it disappear, remains and resists. It is Gaza that has shown us the impossible: the horrors of settler colonialism at its most extreme and brutal, the ways in which resistance is possible in the smallest of gestures, and finally, the triumphant acts of return and reunification following the now-broken ceasefire agreement. The ghost of the world has shown us the world for what it is and what must be done, what alliances must be drawn in order to resist it. 

The ghost of the world has also exposed the hypocrisy of neoliberal institutions and their values. The 2024 Venice Biennale, unfortunately, was one of them, preferring to maintain its conventional format rather than acknowledge the genocide in Gaza in any meaningful way. It was artists and cultural workers, notably the Art Not Genocide Alliance (ANGA), who took the initiative to “haunt” the Biennale and center the ongoing ethnic cleansing in Palestine. For much of the Biennale, the alliance staged several interventions and protests in order to disrupt business-as-usual while calling to exclude the Israeli Pavilion from participation. The group also co-hosted or brought attention to several satellite exhibitions and events featuring Palestinian art and literature.⁶ This form of haunting, which took place within the Biennale, around the city of Venice, and through various digital campaigns, aimed at recalibrating the sensory attunement of one of the largest global art institutions and events, and create an alternative experience for artists, attendees, and cultural workers in extraordinary times. 

While ANGA intervened in the Venice Biennale’s actual and ethical positionality, the artists in the Cyprus Pavilion engaged with the ghost of the world on a formal and conceptual level, critically immersing themselves in all aspects of “representing” a country actively yet covertly engaged in the genocide in Gaza and the surveillance of the surrounding region. While Gaza shows the world for what it is, the artists at the Cyprus Pavilion present us with formal and discursive interventions—ghosts—which allow us to engage with our surroundings and to imagine worlds anew.

1. Thomas Brewster, “A Multimillionaire Surveillance Dealer Steps out of the Shadows . . . and His $9 Million WhatsApp Hacking Van.” Forbes, Forbes Magazine, 9 March 2020, www.forbes.com/sites/thomasbrewster/2019/08/05/a-multimillionaire-surveillance-dealer-steps-out-of-the-shadows-and-his-9-million-whatsapp-hacking-van/. ︎
2. David Kenner, “Notorious ‘predator’ Spyware Firm Intellexa Hit with New US Sanctions – ICIJ.” International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, 24 Sept. 2024, www.icij.org/investigations/cyprus-confidential/notorious-predator-spyware-firm-intellexa-hit-with-new-us-sanctions/.  ︎
3. “Beirut Explosion: What We Know So Far.” BBC News, BBC, 11 Aug. 2020, www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-53668493. ︎
4. Paul Raymond, “Hezbollah’s Threat Caught Cyprus off Guard, What Are the Issues at Stake?” Al Jazeera, Al Jazeera, 25 June 2024, aje.io/hrf0tx.  ︎
5. Oscar Rickett, “New Report Lays out Full Extent of UK-Israel Military Partnership in Gaza.” Middle East Eye, 28 Jan. 2025, www.middleeasteye.net/news/new-report-lays-out-full-extent-uk-israel-military-partnership-gaza. ︎
6.  A list of which can be found here: https://anga.live/venice.html ︎

Lamia Abukhadra is a Palestinian American artist currently based in Beirut and Chicago.

Her practice studies how disasters can resurrect and generate new forms of perception, collectivity, and resistance, often using the Palestinian context as an urgent microcosm. Within her drawings, prints, sculptures, texts, and installations, she embeds speculative frameworks which bring to light intimate and historical connections, poetic occurrences, and generative possibilities of survival, mutation, and self-determination.

Lamia graduated from the University of Minnesota with a BFA in interdisciplinary studio art in 2018. She is a 2019-2020 Home Workspace Program Fellow at Ashkal Alwan in Beirut as well as a 2021–2022 Jan van Eyck Academie Resident in Maastricht. Her work has been exhibited in Minneapolis, Chicago, Beirut, and Berlin. Lamia is a 2018–2019 Jerome Emerging Printmaking Resident at Highpoint Center for Printmaking, a 2019 resident at ACRE and the University of Michigan’s Daring Dances initiative, and a recipient of a 2017 Soap Factory Rethinking Public Spaces grant. She is currently an MFA candidate in the Department of Art, Theory and Practice at Northwestern University.

Abukhadra is also a cultural worker and currently holds the position of Art and Communications Director at Mizna (St. Paul, MN).

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