Volume 3, No. 41: Hand on my stupid heart

On living inside 'Meditations in an Emergency' & dreaming of a free Palestine

Oct 18, 2023

Greetings, book and treat people! Many of you are new here, thanks to the shoutout Elizabeth gave me in the wonderful What to Read If. Welcome! There are a few things you should know about this newsletter:

It’s extremely queer.
It’s about books and baking, although the focus is gently shifting away from the baking part.
It’s also about whatever is singing and raging and breaking in my heart. Today what’s raging and breaking in my heart is Palestine. So today’s newsletter won’t be a regular one. If you’re curious about what regular newsletters look like when what’s in my heart gets tangled up in them, here are two examples. But this isn’t the first time I’ve swerved away from the regular. Sometimes swerving is the only thing that feels possible.

The text ‘Hand on my stupid heart’ appears above small cover images of four poetry collections by Palestinian authors: Birthright, Rifqa, Hijra, and Dear God. Dear Bones. Dear Yellow. Text below reads: On living inside 'Meditations in an Emergency' by Cameron Awkward-Rich & dreaming of a free Palestine.

On Sunday night, when I opened my journal to write, as I do every night, no words came to me. Instead, I copied the extraordinary poem Meditations in an Emergency by Cameron Awkward-Rich into my journal. It’s one of my favorite poems. I’d already read it several times over the past week. So I copied the lines onto the page, and then I said them out loud. I repeated the poem over and over again until I’d memorized it.

I wake up & it breaks my heart.

Israel is an unconscionable colonial project, an apartheid state currently carrying out genocidal violence against the Palestinian people. If what you hear when I say this is, “all Jews deserve to die,” you are not listening to me. The United States is an unconscionable colonial project, one that, to this day, runs on white supremacy and imperialism. If what you hear when I say this is, “all white people living in the U.S. are evil and irredeemable,” you are not listening to me. The British Empire was, and continues to be, a global catastrophe, responsible for seemingly uncountable deaths (though they are countable) and seemingly unimaginable devastation (though it is imaginable). If what you hear when I say this is, “nothing good or beautiful has ever come out of the UK,” you are not listening to me. This world, our world, a world in which I live a safe and comfortable life, is full of unconscionable settler colonial projects and brutal fascist governments that have committed, and continue to commit, genocide. None of these life-shattering, world-ending atrocities are comparable to each other. None of them are equatable. One is happening now.

Listen to me: I wake up & it breaks my heart. This is why.

I draw the blinds & the thrill of rain breaks my heart.

The poem’s speaker wakes up brokenhearted. They do not specify why. They do not need to. What emergency are they living in or on the edge of? What horror are they watching unfold, in their city or across the world? Being alive in the world—which, if you’re paying attention, if your heart is big enough to hold more than just yourself and your beloveds, is an act of witnessing atrocities—is enough to wake up cracked.

I know this waking-up-in-my-ordinary-life-broken feeling. But then the speaker draws the blinds, and sees the rain, and this is where the poem begins to split me open, because—how is this possible?—now it’s the thrill of rain that breaks the speaker’s heart. The thrill of rain. There is only one way I can read this line: the speaker, living their small life, their everyday life, is still soft enough to receive beauty. To notice it. To be broken by it.

Beneath that, a piercing honesty. This is not a poem about someone living through the worst thing that has ever happened to them. It is a poem about someone reckoning with the dissonance between dailiness & ordinary structural violence—which is not ordinary, which is never ordinary, except in its continued existence: it keeps happening.

I go outside.

This entire poem makes me weep, but this is the line that kept breaking me when I was memorizing it. I kept not being able to get past it. I don’t think I can translate it, but what beats in my heart as I say these words is something like this:

I go outside as in: genocide is happening, and I go to work because I have to pay my electric bill. I go outside as in: children are dying and I refuse to look away. I go outside as in: this is not about me. I go outside as in: each moment of my life is about me. I go outside as in: I use my little voice. I go outside as in: the red and gold leaves along the road, driving to my best friend’s house for dinner, fill me with incandescent joy to be alive. I go outside as in: what is happening now has happened before. I go outside as in: what is happening now is unprecedented. I go outside as in: our grief, our pain, our liberation are endlessly intertwined.

These sentences feel cragged, dangerous, wrong, not enough. I go outside.

I ride the train, walk among the buildings, men in Monday suits.

I’ve seen a lot of variations on “your silence makes you complicit” on Instagram. I understand the grief, anger, and radical praxis that underpins this idea. But I’m wary of the way people use it on social media. Silence is silence. Sometimes it’s protective. Sometimes it’s a form of violence. Sometimes it’s revolutionary. Sometimes it’s neutral. Sometimes it is, absolutely, complicity. Sometimes it is, literally, death. All of this depends on who you are, where you’re being silent and where you aren’t, what you’re saying. I cannot be silent in this moment. Silence is not always simple.

We are all complicit. I am a white American woman, which makes me more complicit than most. If I post something to my Insta stories about Palestine, will it absolve me of my complicity? I pay taxes to the U.S. government, which funds the Israeli military. What do I have to do to absolve myself of that complicity? I’m currently wearing a shirt I bought in a thrift store and typing on an Apple laptop. I do not know the exact provenance of these items, but I’m certain that the companies that produced them did so with exploitative labor. Does writing these words—which are, honestly, uncomfortably flippant—wash away the stains of my complicity?

Riding the train, watching the men in their Monday suits—it’s about as banal, as ordinary, as a line of poetry or a moment can be. The speaker is moving through their regular life. They’re in a city. Maybe they’re going to work. Whatever has happened—whatever emergency the title references—the speaker is safe enough to get on the subway, go about their routine. They are complicit, and they know it, and they’re not trying to hide it, and their heart is breaking, still.

I feel my heart breaking, most days. More so these days. But I am not suffering. Bombs are not dropping on me and my family. To pretend otherwise is a kind of complicity. To pretend that what is happening to Palestinians has nothing to do with me is another kind of complicity.

The flight of doves, the city of tents beneath the underpass, the huddled mass, old women hawking roses, & children all of them, break my heart.

What breaks me here is the closeness between “children” and “all”, the lack of a comma. My analytical brain, which I try to ignore while reading poetry, wants to interpret this simply: the speaker is mourning for all children, everywhere, who are suffering—whose childhoods are stolen by war, displacement, climate catastrophe, racism, abuse. Children: all of them. But my heart does not read it only this way. My heart reads “children all of them” as a description of the preceding images. The doves, the houseless, the huddled mass, the old women scraping by with their buckets of roses—all the endless human stories, the muck and joy, despair and desire, injustice, exhaustion, connection, mess—that exist in these city goings-on: children all of them. As in: deserving of consideration, wholeness, safety, all of them. As in: inextricably linked, all of them. As in: look. All of them.

There’s a dream I have in which I love the world.

I’ve been turning this line over and over in my mind for days. Holding it between my fingers. Reaching toward it and jumping back. The thing is, I know the speaker of this poem loves the world. Their love for the world is stitched into the DNA of the first line. I believe in it absolutely. You do not wake up brokenhearted if you do not love the world. So what is this dream, then, of loving the world? What are they reaching for in the weird and potent possibility of their imagination? Why must they dream of loving the world when they’re already walking around overflowing with the grief that comes with living in it, looking at it, being a part of it?

For me, it’s this: the love, in the dream, is a verb. There’s a dream I have in which I love—fight for, bear witness to, promise to transform—the world. The dream, I think, is where the speaker goes to breathe, to fuel up, to get ready. The dream might be what makes the loving possible.

I run from end to end like fingers through her hair.

Or perhaps it is not this at all. Perhaps it is much simpler. There’s a dream I have in which I love the world—not as it is, but as I imagine it will one day be. As I dream it into existence. There’s a dream I have in which my love is only tender, only soft. There’s a dream I have in which the world is easy to love, as easy as my unthinking caress of a beloved’s hair.

There are no borders, only wind.

There’s a dream I have in which the world is easy to love, as easy as my unthinking caress of a beloved’s hair.

Like you, I was born.

I am already sobbing when I get to this line, always. There is not a way to make it plainer. There is not a way to make it hurt more. Like you, I am human. Like you, I am human. Like you, I am human. And we know what dehumanization leads to, don’t we? We know. We are looking at it. We’ve been looking at it.

Like you, I was raised in the institution of dreaming.

I am not writing any of this because I believe in my own power to make a difference. I do not have the power to stop a genocide. I, too, was raised in the institution of dreaming—a strange, muddled, contradictory place—and I have been shaped by my sense of responsibility to speak, to act (aka tikkun olam, repairing the world), and by my despair that the world is not repairable.

I called my representatives, though I do not think it will change U.S. foreign policy in Israel. I’ll do it again tomorrow. And tomorrow. I was fifteen on 9/11 and spent most of the next two years protesting the Iraq War. Did it stop the war? It did not. Did it mean something? Yes. During one of those years, I compiled a Haggadah for my family’s Passover, which I called To Speak of Trees, from the lines in Bertolt Brecht’s 1939 poem ‘To Posterity’: “Ah, what an age it is / When to speak of trees is almost a crime / For it is a kind of silence about injustice.”

1300 of you read this newsletter on a good day. I am not powerful, nor am I powerless. I write in order to live with myself. Writing does not absolve me of my complicity. It does not end the occupation. I do not buy into the nihilism of: "we’re all fucked so let’s ignore genocidal violence and go about our days.” I do not buy into the nihilism of: “the world is doomed and nothing I do matters.”

Beloveds, I do think the world is probably doomed. This does not stop me from acting as if the world of my dreaming is possible—winking bright and sharp and clear as starlight on the horizon. These words from Ta-Nehisi Coates are always with me:

I don't ever want to forget, even with whatever personal victories I achieve, even in the victories we achieve as a people or a nation, that the larger story of America and the world probably does not end well. Our story is a tragedy. I know it sounds odd, but that belief does not depress me. It focuses me.

I wake up & it breaks my heart. The thrill of rain. The flash of maple red. Lake water on my skin. Sometimes speaking is about taking every action you can take, however small. Sometimes it is not about taking action but about being a human in the world. Sometimes it is about bearing witness through the ordinary smallness of your days. I am living my little life, finding joy where I can. I have lived alongside and not through many atrocities. Alongside and not through because they have not derailed my life. Structural oppression and the unrelenting violence that stems from it is always happening somewhere. None of it is comparable. None of it is equatable. I do not have words for the crimes Israel is committing in Gaza right now. I do not have words. I don’t know how it is possible not to see it.

I am complicit. To be human is to be complicit. I write in my complicity and my grief. I write to make my dreaming—for a free Palestine, for an end to settler colonialism everywhere—visible.

Hand on my heart. Hand on my stupid heart.