in palestine, a dramatic reflection

the house sat high up on a mountain, at a strategic point where u could see everything, the road winding up, the town spread out below, whatever was coming before it got to u. a couple of settlements sat close by, a military outpost too, so the danger wasn’t coming from one direction u could keep your eye on. it felt like it was all around u. like being surrounded by israeli settlers with the soldiers folded in among them, and u sitting in the middle of it. every night i was up there i laid there thinking, is this the night they come kill us.

it was a sturdy house. built to last, and old. it wasn’t ours and it was never meant to be a post. it was somebody’s home.

up there at night the whole thing felt haunted, and what haunted it was absence. people were supposed to be here and they weren’t. the wind came across that mountain with nothing to stop it, and the quiet had a weight to it, that eeriness a place gets when it’s been emptied on purpose.

a family had lived here, and they got pushed out. not all at once, that’s not usually how it goes. it’s israeli settlers showing up in the hills nearby, then the threats, then the pressure on the land and the livestock, then the nights somebody comes to the door, then the beatings, each thing making the next one more possible, until staying stopped being something a person could survive. so they left, with hope to return. hope. and the house sat there, emptied, waiting to get swallowed by the settlements that were slowly creeping up everywhere.

that’s where we came in. our task was to “hold” it, alert the town below of settlers were coming.

but before any of the nights, there was that scary ass road. because u don’t just “arrive” at a house like that. u gotta get up the mountain first, and getting up that mountain is its own fear, a whole separate terror from the settlers. some nights i honestly couldn’t tell u which one scared me more, the drive or the israeli settlers who wanted to smash my balls. i will talk more about the ball-smashing later.

so anyways, u can’t take that road in a regular car. it isn’t really a road, it’s more like the suggestion of one, cut into the side of the mountain, and in some places it narrows down to almost nothing, thin and broken and chewed up with divots, and right off the edge of it is nothing at all. a drop. straight down into who knows what. one wrong move up there, one bad angle, one slipped tire, and u don’t get hurt, u go off the side and u probably die or at least break your fucking neck. so u need some real heavy duty shit for it. a jeep, an atv, something built to climb, something that can hold the mountain.

and then, on top of the mountain trying to kill u all on its own, there’s the other thing. because this is exactly the kind of road settlers like to ambush. they know you’re coming up it slow, exposed, nowhere to go. so you’re inching up this cliff already white-knuckled, and the whole time in the back of your head is the picture of them coming out of nowhere, trying to run u off the edge. the mountain and the men, working the same road.

so u sit in that jeep trying to play it cool. and u watch whoever’s driving. the crazy part is that even the palestinians who take that road, up and down, again and again, the ones who know it better than anybody alive, u could still see it in them. every single time. a little anxiety sitting behind the eyes, a tightness, even while their hands whipped the wheel perfectly, even while they handled it like the professionals they’d been forced to become. they were not numb to it. they’d just learned to drive straight thru the fear, because there was no version of their life where they got to stop.

u get to the top and u realize, damn. this is pretty much thier driveway. this is just how they get home. the road itself is a threat, and they take it anyway, every day, because it’s the way to the place they refuse to leave. u meet some of the strongest people you’ll ever meet on the worst road you’ve ever been on.

........

it was so silent. and in that moment it was the silence i was thankful for.

i was thankful because silence meant they weren’t here yet. no truck. no atv. no engine straining up that mountain road in the dark. that’s how it would start, always, with a sound. an engine where there shouldn’t be one, and then you’d know. that engine was the whole warning system. only one we had.

and if an engine did come, u learned to listen for which one. there was only one that meant safety, the jeep the palestinians from the town drove. that engine, u could breathe. i learned to love the hell out of that car for real. any other one meant danger was already coming up the road. so u didn’t just listen for a sound. u listened to tell one sound from all the rest. u lay there in the dark turning into an instrument that did nothing else, separating the engine that meant we’re okay from the engine that meant they’re here. settlers, carrying whatever they pleased, rifles included, and total impunity on top of it.

so that’s what the silence was. it wasn’t peace or nothing like that.

the last time the settlers came, just a few nights before i got there, they methodically tortured people. big men, from what i was told, and they didn’t even break the door down to get to them. they tricked their way in, called out in the dark pretending to be people from the town, friendly voices saying come out, it’s us, until somebody believed it enough to step outside. and like my papa used to say, “their ass was grass”. unfortunately we can guess who the lawnmowers were, this time.

the people that the settlers beat were internationals, like me, there to do exactly what i’d come to do, hold the house down, watch the road, get word to the town if the settlers came. that was the whole offense. they got tortured just for standing watch, and i was about to stand that same watch in that same house behind that same door, stepping straight into the role they’d just been punished for. and i knew that walking in.

i knew what i was agreeing to before i agreed to it. i’d been asked if i wanted to go, and i already knew people had been attacked just days before. attacked pretty fucking bad. somebody in the hospital bad. i’d heard about my canadian comrade before i ever met her, heard what the settlers did to her in that house before i got there. when i finally did meet her, later, she was still fucked up from it. but beyond the bruises, broken ribs and blackened eyes, there was still an inspiring amount of courage and resilience. real talk, she’s a fucking soldier.

so imagine getting asked. hey, u wanna go hold this house. and u know the context. u know exactly what happened to the last people who held it. okay. i want u to really think about that shit. somebody tells u there’s a house on a mountain, surrounded by crazy ass settlers and iof, and the last ones who stood where you’d be standing got tricked out into the dark and beaten methodically by big men who knew nobody was coming to stop them. and then somebody looks at u and asks if you’ll go do the same thing. what do u say? be honest, and don’t forget that u don’t have no weapons. obviously weapons changes the math, but not a whole lot tho. most people, and i mean this without judgment, would find a reason. a good reason. a real one. kids, a job, a life, i’m not built for that, what could one person even do. and they’d be right. that’s the sane answer. that’s the answer a healthy nervous system gives.

and yet there were people who said yes. i was one of them. and when i got up there i wasn’t alone, i was surrounded by others who’d given the same insane answer to the same question. and i want to keep it 100 about what we had in common, because it wasn’t bravery exactly, and it wasn’t a death wish either. it was that something had probably broken loose in us. the grief and the anger over what was being done to these people, the genocide of it, had pushed us somewhere past the point where the sane answer made sense anymore. call it madness if u want. i might. maybe we were people whose rage had nowhere reasonable to go, so it took us here, to a house on a mountain, to stand in a doorway with our bodies and nothing else.

because that was the whole strategy. nonviolence in the face of violence. we didn’t go up there to fight. fighting was exactly what they wanted, the excuse, the retaliation, the reason to do worse. our only weapon was presence. our own bodies, and whatever value the world had decided those bodies held, put deliberately between the settlers and the people they wanted to disappear. u think about that long enough and u realize it takes a certain kind of wacky person to do it. not a better person, just somebody who couldn’t look away no more. somebody already pushed a little bit out they mind by what they’d seen.

but for me it went back further than the news and what i’d seen on social media, further than the grief that was compelling everybody. i wasn’t coming to state violence as a stranger. i already knew it, intimately, the way u only know something that’s been done to your own body. i’d survived things in prison i still don’t have words for, things the state did or allowed or arranged, in a place built to make u disappear quietly and legally. so when people talked about impunity, about men in uniform who beat u and face nothing, about a system that decides in advance whose pain even matters, i wasn’t learning a concept. i’d already been pushed too far, years ago, long before palestine. i came into this whole thing already trippin.

i need to kill the romantic version of this before u get the wrong idea. surviving that didn’t make me tough. it didn’t make me fearless. that’s the myth, that people who’ve been thru the worst come out hardened, unafraid, ready. it’s the opposite. i was and am scared all the time. i’m really just a scary ass nigga. so what it actually did was lower the thing in me that tells a normal person to run. it rearranged what i was afraid of. i wasn’t less afraid of the settlers, i was standing there a bit terrified. it’s that i’d already lived inside a version of that terror for so long that going toward it felt more bearable. that’s not really strength. that’s just what happens to u. every time i’ve been in situations like this, on some life-or-death type shit, i usually wound up there because i rationalized that it’s just what i had to do.

they told us the settlers came between one and four in the morning. that was the window. that’s when they’d come before, so that’s the window your whole body learns to dread. and good lord, something very specific happens to u when fear has a schedule. it isn’t like being jumped out of nowhere. it’s worse, because u can watch it coming. u can see the time. as the clock climbs toward one, your stomach starts to lurch. lurch, lurch, lurch, this low involuntary turning, over and over, every few minutes, your body counting down toward a thing that may or may not come and refusing to let u forget it could.

so u pace. that was the whole night.

pacing.

in and out the house, back and forth, as quiet as i could manage, because sound was the enemy and so was stillness. i couldn’t sit. sitting was worse. sitting meant the anxiety caught up to me, so i kept moving, window to door to window, my combat boots on the floor and then on the dirt and then back on the floor, thick heavy boots, and for hours the sound of them on the dry ground was most of what there was.

i had my flashlight going the whole time i paced, sweeping it up and down that road, watching for whatever might come up it. and one of those nights i looked up from my own dark and saw it. other lights. down the way, not far, where the other palestinian families lived. somebody else’s flashlight moving the exact same way mine was, up the road and back, up and back. another person awake in the middle of the night, scanning the same stretch for the same trucks. and its like, damn… i was up there for a moment in time. for them this was their life. this wasn’t something they were doing, it was something they lived, standing watch over their own home in the dark because nobody was coming to do it for them. i was borrowing their normal for a moment.

my comrades and i talked, but even the talk was pacing. it was all strategy. what do we do if they come from this side. what do we do if they come to the door. what do we do if they don’t stop at the door. we ran the options over and over and every version came back to the same locked room, because we knew the worst case, and the worst case was fire. if they couldn’t get to us inside, they would try to burn us out. burn the house with us in it, from the outside, and wait. so every plan we built had that hole in the middle of it. fortify the house, but not so much that u can’t get out of it. there’s no great answer to that. u just keep talking it in circles because talking is better than the silence where u picture it.

i had my phone in my hand the whole time. back home it was the middle of the day, no real time difference to speak of, so my people were awake while i was up there in the dark. i kept the chat going, kept telling them where we were, what was happening, what wasn’t happening yet, narrating my own night into a little glowing screen and hoping that if something did happen, somebody would at least know. somebody would have the last of it.

and i smoked. let me tell u. i went thru cigarettes up there like everybody did, one lit off the end of the last one, a pack gone faster than i want to admit. i wasn’t even a cigarette smoker before palestine. black and milds, sure. but cigarettes started there, on that mountain, in that window between one and four, standing in my boots feeding one after another into the waiting because my hands needed something to do and the waiting needed somewhere to go.

there were four of us that first stint. two italians, a german, and me. we took shifts, one trying to sleep while the others kept the watch, and some nights we slept outside on purpose, out on the ground with blankets, because being outside gave us a better chance to hear an engine before it got close. so we’d lie in the open, on the dirt, under everything, and the dogs would come sleep with us, curled up against us like they had decided we were theirs now. puppies mostly, in and out the house all night, scared the same way we were, because the settlers beat them too, so they came to us for refuge and wouldn’t leave. two kinds of creatures keeping each other company on a mountain, waiting for the same people to come up the same road.

and it was beautiful up there. genuinely, painfully beautiful. the sky over that mountain at night was enormous, more stars than a city person ever gets to see, the land rolling out dark and soft in every direction, land that’s been loved and worked and lived on longer than any of this. one of the most beautiful places i have ever put my body. and still, underneath all of it, there was this loneliness that hung in the air. ambient. i don’t mean being without people, i had the italians and the german and the dogs right there. i mean something deeper than that. the loneliness of a place that’s supposed to be full and isn’t. the loneliness of lying under the most beautiful sky of your life waiting to find out if somebody’s coming to hurt u. beauty and dread sitting in the same frame, and no way to hold one without the other.

and underneath the pacing my mind kept doing one thing. rehearsing. running the scenario. because i had already accepted that if they came, this was not a fight i could win. four of us, no weapons, and that was the whole point anyway, we weren’t there to fight. the plan was to stick together. protect each other. there was no version of it where one of us went off alone. we stay in a knot, we keep our bodies between each other and them, we take whatever comes as a group while making sure we alerted the town of the settlers’ presence.

and then there was the private plan, the one i worked out for my own body while i paced. if they got to me, i would cover my face and cover my testicles as best i could, curl around the parts of me that mattered most, and take it. take the beating. and that wasn’t abstract. the same men who tortured the internationals a few nights before i got there, one of the comrades they caught, they went for his balls. deliberately. ruptured them. he was still in the hospital while i stood up on that mountain. so it wasn’t a vague fear of getting hurt. it was specific. a known technique. i knew the thing they liked to do, and i was standing in the exact place where they did it, working out how to keep them from doing it to me. bitch ass settlers.

and in my head it went past a beating. in that last attack the possibility of somebody getting raped had been real, and it was still in the air, still circling, and here i was up there with three femmes, and these are large settler men who come in the night, high, drunk, fueled by the fact that they would face zero consequences. and knows what they would try.

nobody told us we had to take a beating. that was never the instruction. what had been made clear was almost the opposite, that if it ever got to where we believed they were trying to kill us, we could do whatever we needed to do. we could fight. the line was our lives. above that line, u defend yourself by any means. so all night your mind is also working that math, at what point do i decide this one isn’t a beating, this one is them trying to kill me. but the taking-a-beating part we put on ourselves. because we understood what our fighting back would cost us, and what it wouldn’t cost us, and what it would cost the town. they don’t retaliate against the internationals who get to leave. they retaliate against the palestinians who live there. so we decided, each of us alone and all of us together, that if a beating was the price of not bringing that down on the people, we would pay it. even a savage one. we made it fine. yeah, what the fuck.

i know how a person is supposed to tell this story. anything past that line, if they were really trying to kill us, i would have done whatever i had to and not lost a second over it. but that is not what i was standing there hoping for. i wasn’t wishing for a reason. none of this was tough-guy shit. i was hoping for nothing. no truck, no engine, nobody hurt, the sun coming up on all of us exactly how we were. that was the whole prayer.

so that was the plan. of course we hoped to also scare them off by making a ton of noise. but if that didnt work, we’d just cover up, take it, stay close to each other, and hope they got tired and moved on. and i had made my peace with it. a beating i could survive, i could live with. escape with my life and my body more or less intact and call that a win. i had gotten myself all the way to where a savage beating was the good outcome, the one i was hoping toward. i think i actually accepted it. that’s what that kind of waiting does.

god, let me keep my life.

i had made that bargain before. not with settlers, not on a mountain in the west bank. the first place i ever learned to take my own life in my hands and talk it down to just, please, let me keep it, was a cell. and the second that sentence formed in my head up there, i wasn’t all the way up there anymore. part of me was nineteen again. or twenty. i can’t even tell u which, that’s how young, and the years run together the way the nights on the mountain ran together.

because i had been here before. this exact animal state. pacing a small space in boots, body cranked all the way up, doing math on my own survival in the dark, waiting on violence i couldn’t stop and had already made my peace with. my body knew it before my mind caught up. the mountain didn’t remind me of prison. for a second the mountain was prison. same nervous system, same crouch, same boy inside the “man” still bracing for the door.

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the empire sent me to high desert state prison. up in the mountains too, a town called susanville, one of the most violent prisons in california and famous for it. i’m not going to walk u thru all of it, the politics of the yard, who runs with who and why, the whole map of it. u don’t need the map to understand the one thing i need u to understand, which is what it does to a body to live inside that, for years, as a child mind.

i can still walk that cell without being in it. i measured it ten thousand times awake so now i could measure it in my sleep. bunk to door was three steps. maybe not even three. three steps, turn. three steps, turn.

it’s a particular kind of pacing, the kind u do in a cage. it isn’t going anywhere. there’s nowhere to go, that’s the point of the room. it’s just your body refusing to be still inside a thing built to make u still, all that fear and adrenaline with no exit, so it comes out your legs.

three steps, turn.

pacing.

the concrete under the boots. the steel bunk. the toilet u can reach from the bed. a door that isn’t yours to open.

and u pace because tomorrow the door opens. yard. chow. a move down the tier. some moment where they crack the doors and you’re out the box and into the open, and the open is where it happens. that’s the whole sick rhythm of it. u live locked in a cage waiting to be let out into the exact place you’re most afraid of. so u pace the cage getting ready. running it. what happens if. who’s on the yard. where the COs will be, which really means where they won’t be, because they clear themselves out the way of certain things on purpose. they let shit happen. that’s the impunity. corn-fed white men, a lot of them, the kind u understood to still fuck with klan-type shit and not work too hard to hide it, and it wouldn’t have mattered if they were any other color because they don’t help u anyway.

three steps, turn.

but somewhere in that cell, tucked where it needed to be tucked (yes, sometimes in my ass), i had a piece. i made it myself, the way it’s done, out of what the cage gives u. mine started as a shampoo bottle. and to work the plastic i needed fire, so first i made a candle, a little one, rigged up out of a milk carton, and i’d hold the shampoo bottle over that little flame to get the plastic soft, socks pulled over my hands so i could fold it and shape it without searing them, doubling it over on itself again and again until it stopped being a bottle and became something dense, something with weight, something hard. i’d worked a screw loose off one of the stools, and i set it into the tip and melted the plastic tight around it, sealed it in, then ground the point down until it was sharp. really sharp. the kind of point that’s made to kill someone.

and that candle threw smoke. melting plastic over an open flame in a closed cell all night, it put off soot, thick and greasy, a haze of it hanging in that little space with nowhere to go, and me right in the middle of it breathing it down for hours. my lungs took all of it. that’s the part nobody pictures when they think about a person making a weapon in their cell. the harsh breathing. the burn in your chest. sitting in your own smoke half the night turning a bottle into something that might keep u alive, and wrecking your lungs to do it. hours of that. and hours was the one thing i had a surplus of in there.

pacing.

i’d pass my hand near where it sat, just to know. just to keep it located in my body. because the plan, if u can even call it that, was already the same shape the mountain plan would take years later. this is probably not a fight i can win, but i am going to be in it, and i am going to be ready.

except what i’d made my peace with in that cell was worse than a beating. i had accepted, all the way down where u actually accept a thing and not just say it, that i might have to use that piece, that i might die using it, and that this was simply my fate now. it is what it is. i’m willing to fight to the death because there was no other move on the board. nineteen years old and already talked all the way down past please let me keep my life to okay then, let me die on my feet with this thing in my hand. that’s a child. that’s a child deciding how they are willing to die, three steps and a turn at a time.

and here is what almost a decade and a half of that does to u. to survive it, u have to leave yourself. u have to detach from everybody u love, because loving them from in there, believing you’ll see them again, is the exact thing that kills u. so u kill it first. u tell yourself you’re never getting out, never seeing your people again, you’re going to die in this place, and u make yourself okay with it, because the hope is what breaks u and the detachment is what keeps u breathing. u cut parts of yourself off and leave them on the floor. u go cold. u go callous. u become somebody harder and smaller and further away than who u came in as, because the whole one, the soft one, the one who misses people, cannot survive the yard. and i don’t mean that as some poetic shit. u make yourself dead to the world of the living so the living world can’t finish killing u. they take u out of it, and then u finish the job from the inside, just to make it survivable.

i’d been out less than three years when i arrived in palestine. so it wasn’t a memory. it was still in me, still loaded. and when the violence closed in up there, the waiting, the impunity, the peace-making with the harm that’s coming, i could feel myself detaching. becoming the person that place built, because that person was made for exactly this, and he came back the second he was called like he’d never been gone.

......

they think prison is a place u leave. it’s not. it’s a thing that moves into u and lies down and waits.

......

i was told not to use the red light on our flashlights outside at night. the iof and the settlers, who never seemed far off, might take it for a rifle’s beam, a provocation, a reason to open fire. that seemed like important information. so my brain filed it away where it files those things, down deep, under important, in the place that doesn’t ask permission before it acts on what it knows. it’s funny how ptsd works. it doesn’t keep the memory where u put it. it keeps it loaded.

one of the nights up in that house we got joined by some more italians and i think an englishman. we slept in rotations, and this time the watch wasn’t mine, the sleep was. sleep up there was never really sleep, but fatigue always won in the end and pulled me under. and i went under the way prison taught me to, with my eyes partly open. i learned that in there, during stretches of being at war, or having cellmates that i wasn’t sure wouldn’t try to kill me in my sleep or something. half under, half standing guard. boots on. fully dressed. a body that lies down but never all the way puts itself down.

so this particular night one of the italians comes into the room to grab something out of his bag. i’m asleep, but the part of me that never sleeps is watching, eyes cracked, taking it in. it’s dark. he clicks on the red light to see. and that’s all it took. my mind reached down into the deep place and pulled the memory up whole. danger. i’m told i came up off the bed yelling TURN OFF THE RED LIGHT. because i wasn’t in that room. i was outside, in the open, back in the exact scenario i’d been warned about, the beam already on us, the shot already coming.

it took me a second to climb back into where i actually was. i remember the german comrade coming over, low and steady, telling me it’s ok, you’re ok.

…

the first time up there had been, luckily, uneventful. we saw settlers. we saw iof. trucks going up and down the mountain, past us. but nobody came for us that time. we got our cameras out and recorded them, and thank god that’s all it was.

so we came down off that mountain to breathe. i went back to ramallah and jericho for a little while. the others scattered too, some of us in ramallah, some in bethlehem, everybody catching the breath u can’t really catch up there. and the house sat empty of us.

but it didn’t sit empty. one of the uncles from ein al-duyouk went up to watch it while we were gone. an elderly man. kind. somebody i had met. no internationals with him, just him and the cameras we’d left running, and the whole theory behind that, that being watched, being recorded, would be enough to hold them off even with no bodies in the doorway.

it wasn’t enough.

that’s when they came. they attacked him, brutally, viciously, an old man alone on a mountain. and the way we found out was a video. the people from the town sent it to us after they found him, the uncle inside the house, on the ground, bleeding from his mouth, bleeding from his face. for real he looked dead. an image of exactly what they do the second there’s nobody up there to make them think twice. our bodies had maybe bought a beat of hesitation. his didn’t. the cameras didn’t. they waited until it was just him, and then they did the thing they’d always wanted to do. and they didn’t stop at him. they destroyed the cameras. broke the glass. forced their way into a house that had been fortified, reinforced, built to keep them out, and got inside anyway. the amount of hatred it takes to break into a hardened house just to wreck it and beat an elderly man. that ain’t opportunity. they wanted to. they been wanting to.

and then the question came back around, the same one as before. do u want to go back to this house?

i decided to go back. no second thought.

and going back meant walking into what they’d left.

they hadn’t just beaten him. they’d destroyed the house. all of it. and not the wrecking that has a reason, not searching for something, not taking something. they broke the place for the sake of breaking it. tore the sinks out the wall. smashed the toilets. like for real, who breaks a toilet. u break a toilet when the damage was never in service of anything, when u want the people who live here to understand there is nothing of theirs u won’t put your hands into and ruin. u don’t do all that to take something. u do it to say something.

his blood was still on the ground when i came back. dried into it. nobody had cleaned it, or nobody could, and so i walked back into that house and the floor still had him on it, dark and dried where he’d gone down.

i found out how it went. he’d tried to lock himself into a room. put one door between his body and theirs. and they broke the door down.

i went to see him in the hospital. more than once. and i gotta walk u into that hospital, because it was its own kind of heavy.

most people don’t like going into hospitals in the countries that they live in. now imagine going into a hospital in a whole nother country. shit wild fr. the signs u can’t read. the language moving around u that u only catch pieces of. u don’t know the halls, u don’t know the rules, you’re a stranger in the one kind of place that’s supposed to feel the same everywhere, and it just doesn’t.

he wasn’t the only one. there were other people in that hospital who’d been beaten by settlers too. u could read it on them. head wrapped in bandages. the specific injuries of people who’d had violence done to them by other people, on purpose, and lived. bed after bed of it. i stood in that hospital and understood that what happened to the uncle wasn’t a one-off thing. it’s a whole category. and there’s enough of it to fill beds.

and standing there something in me just started asking, dumb and childlike and unable to stop. why? why does this exist? why does this happen? how is this shit allowed to happen, out in the open, to a kind old man and to all these other people wrapped in bandages who did nothing but live where they live. how is any of this allowed. i knew all the answers, the political ones, the historical ones, i could give u the analysis in my sleep. and none of the answers touched the question. i wasn’t really asking a question. it was just the sound a person makes when the analysis runs out and the beds are still full.

but i don’t want to leave u in the dread, because that would not be the totality of what it was actually like to be there. for all the terror of the nights, the mornings were something else entirely. the mornings were a gift. the light comes over the mountain, the same mountain that was all menace in the dark, and now it’s just beautiful again, gold laid across all that land, and you’re still here. u survived it. everybody did. and there is a joy in that all its own.

and then u go down. down off the mountain, into the town, and u sit to breakfast with the people. and i have to tell u about these breakfasts, because they undid me in the exact opposite direction from the fear.

it was abundance. a whole table of it. everything fresh, everything laid out, more than anybody needed, because that was the point. the abundance was the whole message. u are welcome here, u are ours now, eat. and we’d sit and eat and it would go long the way a good meal goes long, people talking over each other, laughing, the language moving around me that i hardly understood, and it didn’t matter at all, because u don’t need the words to know what a home feels like. i was a stranger. days before, these were people i had never met. and here they were feeding me like family, like i’d always been at that table, like there was never even a question.

that’s the fam. that’s what i mean when i say it. i don’t mean blood. i mean people who decide, out of nothing, across every line that’s supposed to keep humans apart. i’d crossed the whole world on nothing but good faith and a belief in some shared humanity, and here it was being handed back to me over breakfast. proof. tangible, warm, in my hands.

food was hella good.

.....

eventually the trip ends. eventually u leave, and that was the hardest part, that leaving was even mine to do. i carried all of it out with me, the mountain, the house, the blood dried into that floor, the hospital full of bandaged people. i took it onto the plane and i brought it “home”.

honestly, i hadn’t wanted to come back. there was a small part of me, before i ever left, that had no intention of returning at all. i wanted out of everything amerikkka is, and i had every reason. every time people with power open their mouths about policy, they are talking, in one translation or another, about killing me. about shrinking my life down toward nothing, one restriction at a time, until there’s barely a life left to restrict. i came home angry. i came home sad. and a lot of it was tangled up in people, a whole complicated web of relationships i didn’t know how to stand inside anymore. the anti-blackness came into focus sharper than it had ever been, because now i had a contrast. i’d just been somewhere else, inside a different arrangement of violence, and the contrast was so deep it worked like a lens. u don’t see the water til you’ve been out of it. i came back and saw it everywhere, in high resolution. and proving a thing is there, over and over, when it’s learned to live under the surface of the people around u, will take everything out of u. you’re forced to carry the burden of proving the racism even exists because it’s masked as a million other things.

being black in amerikkka produces a madness all its own. a baseline madness. you’re born into a country that treats your existence as a problem to manage, built to move u toward a cage or an early grave, and then it has the nerve to call u crazy for not being at peace inside it. you’re expected to stay sane in a thing that is itself insane, doing insane things to u and everybody who looks like u, and never let it reach your mind. that was never sanity. that’s just a madness that agreed to behave.

of course u come out of years in a cage with your wiring rearranged. i’m pretty much forced to become more comfortable with the fact of my own schizophrenia or bipolar disorder or whatever the fuck they decide to diagnose me with each time. that’s not some tragic little twist in the story, it’s just me giving a transparent context to my own experience. the only reason it’s even hard to say out loud is the stigma. the way naming it makes people listen to u like your credibility just dropped a notch, like the diagnosis is something wrong with u instead of something done to u. but again, it just is what it is.

this matters because i’m normal. well sort of. abnormally normal, i mean. i’m not an academic. i’m not one of the lifelong-activist types with the résumé and the right word for everything. i’m more like a greta thunberg if she were a highly irresponsible stoner and always late for shit. i’m also poor. i’m not trying to build a career off any of this, i’m not trying to become somebody on the back of other people’s suffering, and i am damn sure not an influencer, i could not care less about that silly shit. i’m a regular motherfucker. i just wanna play doom metal and hang out with my partner and i just want the empire to die. that’s the whole thing. a regular motherfucker who cares about this all the way down, who wants palestinians free and wants my people free and wants liberation for every last one of us, and who would die for that. and that’s not a pose. i already put my body on it.

there’s a reason my life might be useful to u. the simple truth is i sit at the crossing point of a whole lot at once. a whole lot of oppressions, a whole lot of contradictions, stacked and knotted up in one regular person. black, queer, ungendered, decarcerated, underclass. and what that means is not that i’m special. it’s the opposite. it means my one life brushes up against so many other lives that almost anybody can find a piece of themselves somewhere in it. i’m a wide door. u can come into my experience from a lot of directions and leave with something u can actually use, and u don’t have to be anything like me to do it.

there’s a way to tell a story like this that turns into a flex, or worse, into a sermon, and i’m fr not interested in neither. u do not have to be some special person to care about this. u don’t have to be super educated, credentialed, trained, chosen, none of it. if a regular, still-trippin, formerly-caged mentally ill mf can stand in a doorway on a mountain, u can find your own version of standing somewhere you’re needed. this resistance is for everyone. this cause belongs to all of us. everybody should show up. all of us. none of us should be letting this happen.

facing the enemy is necessary. somebody has to actually stand in the way of the thing, with their body, at some cost, or it just keeps happening in the dark with nobody watching. not everybody is going to do it the way i did, and they shouldn’t have to. but everybody who claims this, who says the words, who posts the flag and shares the infographic and calls themselves down for the cause, has to reckon at some point with the difference between solidarity that costs u nothing and solidarity that costs u something. it’s the kind that’s willing to take a real risk, willing to be uncomfortable, willing to step outside the safety you’ve always known, in whatever way u actually can. and i don’t mean everybody has to get on a cliff road and wait for settlers in the dark. for some people the teeth are small, a risk at work, a risk with family, money u can’t really spare, relationships that u are willing to lose. for some people they’re bigger. the size isn’t the point. the teeth are the point. solidarity that can’t bite is just a nice feeling u enjoy having about yourself.

the words for the work itself are slippery. “protective presence,” that term is already falling out of use, and for good reason. it doesn’t describe the whole of what’s happening, and worse, it can trick u into a savior posture, like you’re some outside good showing up to rescue the helpless. nobody up on that mountain needed saving. those were the strongest people i have ever met, running their own defense, making their own calls. it ain’t charity and it damn sure ain’t heroism. it’s just putting yourself where the harm wants to land so it has to go thru u first.

and yeah I got something to say to the critics (that could totally be in my head, some imagined, some real) bitch if u think u got the nuts to live how i’ve lived, go do it. go. don’t tell me what u would have done, anywhere. i promise you’d learn real quick it’s nothing like what u pictured from the couch. and as u can probably tell, i’m still trippin. i’m not gonna pretend i came out of any of this whole or wise the way people want wisdom to look. whatever i managed to pull out of it, i had to go thru my own madness to reach. the insanity wasn’t in the way of the wisdom. the insanity was the price of it.

we don’t know how to disagree all the way down to the root and still hold onto each other. we don’t know how to move thru a difference in a way that leaves everybody’s liberation intact on the other side of it, everybody’s identity treated like it carries real weight and not like something u can spend to win an argument. so disagreement just becomes exile. and people walk away from each other carrying wounds that never needed to be wounds.

and it’s true and it’s ugly and it’s mine too. i’m not standing outside it pointing. i’m in it. this is a messy stage of a messy thing. the whole long work of getting free is in a kind of adolescence right now, all limbs and no coordination, and we’re in there fumbling, hurting each other, learning in real time and mostly learning wrong. i can name the failure and i still can’t rise above it. i’m down in the mess with everybody else, still trippin, still trying to figure out how to stand beside people i’m also furious at, still trying to work out what solidarity is when the version i was handed turned out to be paper.

but paper’s not the end of it, because i do believe in a real version. it has a name, the thing i’m actually working toward, the thing sitting under all of this. abolition. i mean it as the whole reorganization of how we live with each other, because a prison isn’t only a building. abolition, the real kind, has to work thru everything. it isn’t a position u hold, it’s a practice u live, and it shows up hardest exactly where it’s least convenient.

....

there’s no world in which black people are free and palestinians are not. the reverse isn’t exactly true tho. there is a world, and it may be nearer than people want to believe, in which palestine is free and the african isn’t.

the asymmetry is structural, not moral. what holds the palestinian is occupation, a relation of land and sovereignty and settlement, a wrong the world already has words for even when it refuses to use them. there is a before the nakba and a conceivable after it, a return, a state, a single democratic polity, some horizon on the far side of the checkpoint. the palestinian is a human whose land has been taken, and the taking can be undone without the world having to become something else.

what holds the african isn’t occupation. it’s the line that makes the word human mean anything at all. anti-blackness was never a policy stretched over the world like a tarp u could pull off and find the world underneath still fine. it’s the world’s foundation. the original cut. the line that decides in advance who gets to be a person harm happens to, and what gets to be the thing harm gets measured against. so black freedom can’t arrive as reform or return or sovereignty. it can only arrive as the collapse of that grammar, and when the grammar goes it takes every regime built on top of it, occupation included. that’s why the first sentence is true. u can’t free the black without dissolving the ground beneath the settler, beneath the checkpoint, beneath every arrangement of human standing over human.

but palestine can win at the level it’s fought on. the settler and the native can be unmade as a relation while the human and the slave stay intact, because a free palestine is still a nation of humans, and the human still requires its outside. the outside is us. a liberated palestine can be built, could already be being built, on ground that still needs the african in the hold. this is the part solidarity doesn’t want to hear. we owe the struggle everything, and it owes us nothing that can be made to pay, because our freedom was never a stop on its road. it’s the end of the road, for everyone.

palestine winning at the level it’s fought on doesn’t pull up the foundation. but it teaches the whole world that a thing built to look permanent can be pulled down. it calls forever a damn lie. and people who watch one impossible thing get undone are people who can start to believe in undoing the rest.

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i know this rambled, and i know it wasn’t always politically correct. these thoughts are mine. because i have a voice. one that needs to speak against the empire, speak up for palestinian liberation, speak for the whole of humanity, and speak for my own freedom right alongside it.

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