In the second month of the Zionist genocide in Gaza, I read a text by Abdaljawad Omar that I have been carrying with me everywhere and when since. Omar’s piece took its title from Can the Subaltern Speak? by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, considered one of the founders of postcolonial studies, who rose to fame with this essay published nearly 35 years before the now almost 8-month-long catastrophe began. The text asked, unrethorically: Can the Palestinian Mourn?[1]

Omar wrote that the resistance has been fighting for the Palestinians’ right to mourn. That until liberation—which can only be achieved by decolonization—genuine mourning is made impossible for Palestinians, and that, under colonialism, to grieve is partly a betrayal of this fact. It is not only life that is impeded by the occupation, but the afterlife as well, whether through the systematic withholding of slain Palestinians’ bodies, or the violence that breaches every mourning ritual after death, from the funeral to the grave.

“The long middle is…” as Fargo Nissim Tbakhi defines it, “…the state of the dailiness, oppression so pervasive as to form an atmosphere we move through.”[2] If these 8 months of ineptitude and denial have demonstrated us anything, it is the extent of our willing conscription into this “daily life,” where silent consumption of another’s pain has been rendered the most common form of “witnessing,” and where it is so often the mediated witness—often kilometers afar and hours behind—who is allowed to speak of the violence, and only then in terms of their conscience and their responsibility, if at all.

If anything, we will owe Gazans for our liberation, and not the other way around. I do not mean to reduce the Palestinian struggle for self-determination to a mere device in our movements, but rather seek to challenge the glaring lack of humility in our discourses on solidarity, the not-so-subtle savior complex, the very blatant hierarchy disguised as comparison between the here and there.

I have had many conversations since October last year, conversations that could not be had in September—regarding the imminent expulsion of Artsakh-Armenians from their homeland, or in February—about the uninterrupted bombings targeting earthquake victims on the other side of the border in Rojava. We finally have begun talking complicity, and I welcome it despite its lateness.

As I write this, the Palestinian Youth Movement and its allies are calling on everyone to surround the White House and other major cities in the US, wearing red to form a red line for Rafah. “We are your red line!” is the slogan for the June 8th action. This may register as a mere discursive subversion of the “red line,” whose function seldom goes beyond that of a mainstream demagogic tool used to assert the supposed inviolability of an often arbitrary boundary. Anyone who has been on the other side of such a red line knows of its cataclysmic impact on marginalized communities, or at least of its utter inefficacy. What use is the red line to someone who has been deprived of the right to draw it in the first place? Will there be anything left to reclaim once we have stripped it of its colonial reasoning and machinery?

We have betrayed Palestinians by way of normalcy. Trying to define a new normal, however revolutionary, seems counterintuitive to me. We must reject the sedative quality of what is deemed mundane as opposed to being “unprecedented.” Our refusal must draw its conviction not only from what is unfolding in front of our eyes, because the effects of oppression are vastly distributed across multiple geographies and times that risk overlapping, contradicting, and obscuring one another. The scale of all this should not intimidate us, lest we become trapped in what Walid Daqqa called the “big prison,” that is, life under occupation, which closely mirrored the “small prison” he was kept in for 38 years before being killed by the Israeli state in April of this year through torture in the form of denying him cancer treatment. Over the past 8 months there have at least been sustained attempts to locate and breach the walls of this inverted prison, a site of disempowerment and constant pain that many of us already knew intimately.

When Rezzan invited me to contribute something to her work, we talked about the gaping rift we both felt between what was materializing before us—in words and actions of solidarity—and what had long been missing—from a simple outcry, to strategic alliances that should be built over time. This rift has made our state of damnation to the “long middle” bitterly obvious. Rezzan’s red lines descend onto the streets of Ankara, a city where political mobilization has been strangled by laws of exception to impose the everyday violence of normalcy. Ankara, “the heart of Turkey,” whose existence is owed to the murdered and dispossessed millions targeted for centuries by Ottoman and Republican rule. May these red lines not reveal the inconsistent borders of moral clarity for the sake of clarity, but the frontiers of a multiplicity of big prisons, built both by the state and its people. May we not hide behind simplified narratives as our oppressors take various forms and scales—may we not fall into the trap of opacity and “complexity” when our persecutor has one name. May we collapse the prison—the big as well as the small—onto itself by betraying normalcy.

NOTES:

[1] Abdaljawad Omar, "Can the Palestinian Mourn?", Rusted Radishes, 2023.

[2] Fargo Nissim Tbakhi, "Notes on Craft: Writing in the Hour of Genocide", Protean Magazine, 2023.