What is possible, but currently unimaginable?

What is possible, but currently unimaginable?

This series of poems emerged from a cross-generational conversation about the US-backed Israeli military assault on Gaza following Hamas’s attack on Israel on October 7. In that conversation, we asked how we might process thoughts and emotions and respond to unfolding events from spaces of political, spiritual, and existential accountability, while recognizing that the current violence did not begin in October 2023, but rather emerged in a context of ongoing colonialism, intergenerational traumas, and the complex histories and competing narratives that inevitably shape human lives.[1]

Throughout this conversation, it became clear that, in addition to urgent calls for an immediate ceasefire, four simultaneous calls were necessary: 

• A call to expand our collective capacity to recognize multiple, incommensurable layers of reality as a way to prevent binary thinking, tunnel vision, and the weaponization of empathy and grief, while avoiding the traps of depoliticization, ahistoricism, and bothsideism;
• A call to orient ourselves and our communities away from mass death and toward respect for the sacredness of all life, both human and not, while recognizing the need to challenge the systems and structures through which certain lives have been deemed less valuable than others;
• A call to invoke politicized compassion by evoking the Earth and its labour and vulnerability as the metabolic binder of our collective entanglement, interconnectedness and interdependence, while recognizing that this entanglement comes with joys and beauty, as well as pain, loss, grief and death; and,
• A call to see different forms of violence as symptoms of the same collective dis-ease of colonialism and to name the illusions of separation and superiority as the forces driving humanity and other species into premature, agonizing extinction.

Given the weight and complexity of these calls, we concluded it was not possible to do all this in a single poem, and instead, multiple interventions were needed and “cooked” over a period of time. The series of poem-responses that resulted, and that are still emerging, is an imperfect and inherently insufficient attempt to issue these calls and invite other human beings to join a collective inquiry about how to respond to the violence that is unfolding in Gaza and in many other places around the world, and that has been unfolding for centuries under the colonial banners of civilization, progress, prosperity, freedom, reason and religion.

This inquiry is guided by an ethical imperative towards emotional sobriety, relational maturity, intellectual discernment, and intergenerational responsibility, which together make up what our collective calls the “SMDR compass”. If you would like to join us in this collaborative inquiry, we invite you to respond in a po-ethic manner that seeks to embody this compass and attune to our collective accountabilities.

We note that the 4 first poems that follow were collectively authored by Jewish, Black, Indigenous, and racialized members of the GTDF Collective. The first poem is specifically written from the perspective of a Jewish person. Palestinian friends of the Collective could not be reached to comment on the poems, and we believe it is important to note their/this absence. We have nonetheless sought to honour Palestinian voices through our citations/ footnotes. The last poem was the first response received after we published the first three poems.

Response 1: Is it possible?

Is it possible 
to refuse to drop bombs in the name of self-defence,
bombs that devastate sacred lands 
and steal Palestinian futures,
and to call for a ceasefire instead?

Is it possible to choose life over revenge?
To step back and ask how we got here
and why we’re stuck?
To ask about our own role in oppression, and when we forgot compassion,
and who is protecting “the victims of the victims, the refugees of the refugees”?[2]

Is it possible to interrupt
The denials that allow colonialism, apartheid, occupation, and imperialism to continue:
the denial that we are all part of the same organism (whether we like it or not); 
the denial of our responsibility to the mundane sanctity of all life; 
and the denial of our complicity in the pain of other beings, both human and not?

Is it possible to dissent from one’s government
To disagree with one’s family
And instead to agree with “What we are not allowed to say…
if you want the violence to stop
you must stop the conditions that produced it”?[3]

Is it possible “To face our contributions to the systems 
that reproduce inequality and consequential cycles of violence” [4],
and to accept the call to accountability that this truth implies?
Is it possible that “Every person has to face their own complicities and we start by listening
to whoever is suffering. Even if it is by our own hand”?[5] (Especially if it is by our own hand.)

Is it possible for “Never again”
to also mean no to a second Nakba?[6]
Never again for anyone,[7] 
Not just for some families,
But for all?

Is it possible that perceived enemies
are not “monsters,”
that they are just as human as we are,
just as complex as we are,
just as capable of doing both terrible and amazing things as we are?

Is it possible to un-numb
to the fact we are also doing this violence to ourselves 
that their pain is also our pain
(and vice versa) and that we are killing ourselves, too[8]

If it is possible
Then we must refuse the premise
“that Jewish lives must be valued
over Palestinian ones
in order to keep the former safe.”[9]

Response 2: It is possible

It is possible, at the same time,
to be compassionate towards victims
of terrorisms
of settler-colonialisms
of imperialisms
of senseless wars
of dispossessions
of destitutions
of displacements
of forced starvations
of ecocides
of holocausts and of all other forms of genocide

It is possible, at the same time,
to denounce and call for an end
to systemic and structural violence
to racial and ethnic violence
to gender and sexual violence
to ecological and economic violence
to border and military violence
and to state-sponsored violence
that feeds terrorist violence

It is even possible to have compassion
towards those, on all sides, who are dis-eased
by the mentality of war and revenge

It is also possible to have compassion for the land
that is bearing the brunt of the violence –
and for humanity as a whole shooting its own foot

It is possible to be a settler on the side of those under your government’s occupation[10]
to be a civil servant challenging your nation-state’s dispensation of “lethal assistance”[11]
to be the grandchild of Holocaust survivors chanting “Not in my name”[12]
to be a former IDF soldier breaking the silence[13]
to be an Israeli survivor of the Hamas attack urging a halt to war crimes in Gaza[14]

It possible to refuse to measure and compare 
the worthiness of human lives 
to refuse to choose between horrors
or between vengeance and complacency 
and to insist that there are other ways forward
and to create the conditions for these other ways to come into existence

Response 3: It is not only possible, but necessary and urgent

Is it possible, necessary and urgent to step away,

from the illusion of the individual self

from the fantasy of separation

from the human constructs of identity, culture, religion and nation

and into the consciousness of the land,

other-than-humans, the planet

To see ourselves through their perspective

to begin to sense and to feel in our flesh and bones

the pain of what we are doing

to each other, to other species,

to the air, to the water, to Earth

Domination, subjugation, exploitation

Occupation, expropriation, appropriation

Binary thinking, either, ors, tunnel vision

Separation of “man and nature”

Supremacy of nation, race, gender, religious or secular dogma

Chosen peoples, manifest destinies, civilizing missions

Land as property, promise, commodity, possession

Insatiable desires for comfort and consumption

Growth, profit and capital accumulation at any cost

The ranking of species, cultures, peoples

The single story of progress, development and civilization

Are symptoms of neuro-colonization

The neuro-colonization of humanity as a whole

leads to agonizing mass extinction

in slow motion.

Agonizing

Mass Extinction

In Slow Motion

Refusal to demonize and to dehumanize

does not mean that

one agrees with illegal occupation

of Palestinian lands,

or with anti-Semitism,

or Islamophobia,

or with targeting civilians,

or with apartheid,

or that this war is fair

It means only that

the young, the sick,

parents, grandparents,

siblings, cousins, friends

are being killed

while people look for reasons

to justify their murder

And it is possible

to refuse to endorse these reasons,

and mourn with families,

whose displacements, deaths and pain

are weaponized through the collective illness

of colonialism

In Palestine, and Israel, and Ukraine, and Libya, and Sudan, and the Congo, and Afghanistan, and Iraq, and Syria, and Myanmar, and Haiti, and Yemen, and Iran, and Nepal, and Ethiopia, and Somalia, and Pakistan, and Mali, and Burkina Faso, and Mexico, and Venezuela, and Brazil, and Peru, and Colombia, and Canada, and the United States, and Russia, and…, and…, and…

Agonizing

Mass Extinction

In Slow Motion

(Which sometimes, like now, is actually not that slow)

Response 4: What I can no longer not see

[this response was received from an author whose family is in Israel]

With gunshots still ringing 
in my shattered ears,
I look down 

at our bloody shoes
and bloodstained souls

In shock
For a moment
I am forced to stop pretending
That I am not also you

And the pain floods in

The pain of seeing
What I have never wanted to see
And what I can no longer not see

That we have shat and vomited
And dropped bombs
And unleashed terror down

On ourselves. 

To know that this violence 
is unnecessary
Is more than I can bear

It would be so much easier 
To analyze
To argue
To hate
To blame
To deflect
To cite
To defend
To justify vengeance 
To rationalize violence

But I can’t.
My heart cannot pretend anymore.

It is even less bearable
To continue on this way
When I know deeply
That your blurry eyes
Your bloody shoes
And bloodstained soul
And leveled homes
And murdered children
And lost sanities
And feelings of rage
And endless griefs
And desires for revenge
And tears and wails and torn out hair

Are also mine.

I love you more than I love being right.
I love you more than anyone could ever want revenge.
I love you more than I can say.
I love you more than my words could ever do or undo to even begin to repair our harm.

I offer you my broken heart
I offer you my tear-stained shirt
I offer you my repentance
I offer you my presence

I will learn to hear you
To grieve and mourn with you
To stop pretending that I am not also you

I will learn and un/learn as long as much as I can.
Because your loves and losses and longings
for a different, better world
Are also mine.

---

[1] https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/10/9/whats-the-israel-palestine-conflict-about-a-simple-guide

[2] https://www.nytimes.com/1999/01/10/magazine/the-one-state-solution.html

[3] https://www.nplusonemag.com/online-only/online-only/no-human-being-can-exist/

[4] https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2023/10/israel-gaza-war-manufactured-consent.html

[5] Ibid.

[6] https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/10/14/a-second-nakba-echoes-of-1948-as-israel-orders-palestinians-to-leave

[7] https://www.jewishvoiceforpeace.org/2023/10/statement23-10-11/

[8] Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study (Automedia, 2013), 140-141.

[9] https://www.thedriftmag.com/turning-the-tables/

[10] https://x.com/MiddleEastEye/status/1714991010726461574?s=20

[11] https://www.huffpost.com/entry/state-department-resignation-gaza_n_65306079e4b00565b622b1fb

[12] https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2023/10/18/dc-protest-israel-gaza-ceasefire-jewish/

[13] https://www.breakingthesilence.org.il

[14] https://www.readtheorchard.org/p/meet-the-surviving-hamas-massacre?r=1juh2p&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web