Across my father’s death there is a curtain
past which I can’t write, my own words
can’t carry and I must rely on others’
I believe in the graves of those I’ve buried.
They are the doors I’ve walked through
into greater bravery, into fury.
Believe the Graves, by Rasha Abdulhadi
sift (verb): to go through to sort out what is valuable; to pass or scatter; to separate and retain; to examine thoroughly.
This is the first post I’m releasing through the substack’s shift toward its new title, sift. something about the action of shaking my fingers through material. something tender and painful about this action.
I've been trying to write something longer for a while now but it’s been real hard. Over the months, there have been soft starts, rough notes, fragments; nothing worth the effort. I’ve been sitting with the pieces of world falling through my fingers, been talking to all these sticky, sticky feelings.
Mostly, I have been caught in this painful moment of reworlding, bearing witness to the immense act of communal labour it requires. There is the tearing down that is daunting and immense. There is the getting people together along the way that feels impossible. There is the resting that feels undeserved, the work being worked through and the songs being sung. There is the rhythm of four claps after the choral shout of “Gaza”. There is an unending stream of video and audio that is still not enough. There is unspeakable grief at the unjustifiable violence against a people on their land.
In an earlier draft, swollen with anger, I had begun responding point by point to language I’d heard and wanted to quarrel with, but as I wrote, my words dissolved into petty sounds. emotion too snarled for any meaning. fury dissolving and blooming fresh in my heart.
I am trying again in the cover of the night. gathering words that have stuck with me over the last few months that speak to the small and painful noise of those turning their backs.
Over text, somebody shuts me down with, “I think part of the deviation is what you believe prayer is.”
So I have been thinking about prayer. obsessively. incessantly. like a splinter, the word prayer has burrowed its way into my heart. thorn in my flesh. sore on my foot.
he was wrong.
here is the sift:
Nassim reads Taha Muhammad Ali in a basement classroom, “At times… I wish I could meet in a duel the man who killed my father and razed our home…”
Refaat lies to his daughter, “No sweetie. They can’t see us in the dark.”
Over tea, Katarina says, “I have been afraid thinking how this will also be the future in the climate crisis. Nations turning to genocide.”
Over livestream from Bethlehem, Munther Issac preaches, “They sing about the prince of peace in their land while playing the drum of war in our land.”
My father sends a short reply on Christmas morning, “Stop genocide now. Amen.”
On the street, green and red smoke drifts overhead. My toes start to go numb from the cold rain.
I have been dreaming of a sky full of kites. It has been so many years since I flew one over the reservoir with my family.
here are my prayers. here is the prophetic.
in the words of Ben Ehrenreich, “may all words turn to ash in your mouths.”
of Fred Moten, “are you one of these motherfuckers?”
of Audre Lorde, “What are the tyrannies you swallow day by day and attempt to make your own, until you will sicken and die of them, still in silence?”
of June Jordan, “I SAID I LOVE YOU AND WANTED. GENOCIDE TO STOP.”
of Aurora Levins Morales, “Another world is possible.”
of Gwendolyn Brooks, “that we are each other’s harvest. we are each other’s business:
we are each other’s magnitude and bond.”
of Mahmoud Darwish, “I have a million nightingales on the branches of my heart singing the song of liberation.”
words like a fist beating repeatedly on my chest.
in lieu of amen, i shake dust off my feet and spit.
Look, I am reckoning with rage and grief sinking into bone and what this means for every tomorrow I must wake up to again.
Look, there is no way I can imagine what it is like to live where the bombs fall like rain but I do not need the proximity to move. Distance does not have to stop me.
Look, there is no way to parse through every fact to reach a balanced conclusion (fuck your balanced conclusion), but I do not need to know in full to begin. What I do not know, I commit to learning on the journey.
Look, there must be no option to not be wounded by the world.
In other words, look; be wounded by the world.
In other words, stop being a coward.
If there is no end to fury, perhaps there is no need to denounce it either. may it compromise me all the days of my life. may it be a painful and precious tether to the world that wounds me. it is sublime. it is all we have.
I will grow that joy with teeth. I have space to hold all this. If not now, then tomorrow.
If not tomorrow, then someday.
Oh, I said, this is going to be.
And it was.
Oh, I said, this will never happen.
But it did.
from Genesis, by Mary Ruefle