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"May all words turn to ash in your mouths"
reading and writing and reading and writing and reading and writing
To be frank, I’ve been making this newsletter quite hard on myself—expecting quite complex essays during quite complex times. I’ve been floundering: writing thousands of words that don’t quite come together. What I call the “art monster” is hungry—demanding production, demanding completion, reminding me I’m going to die and I have to make the art make the art make the art.
This is also a moment where sharpening contradictions force me towards the writer I want to be (or the coward I do not). Ben Ehrenreich tweeted recently, “Writers who are silent now: stay silent. May all words turn to ash in your mouths.”
The art monster is righteous and full of longing. But like many wounded “parts,” bullies me relentlessly. This newsletter is, in part, a kind of altar of sacrifice towards her. If I revere her and feed her, she might allow my tender parts to emerge, quivering, from their caves. And I believe, with increasing resolution, that we will all need our tender fearful parts—well-loved, well-cared-for, not alone—for the struggles ahead.
After my last missive, a friend said that they had enjoyed reading snippets of different articles because their ADHD made it hard to read a whole one: “I would totally read a digest from you.” I loved writing it and it came together with an ease that had previously eluded me. I’m reading more than I ever have; I’m really proud of that.
So, starting today, I will begin publishing a series of curations. This is (I hope) an act of service. It is a public notebook of my (often nascent) learnings. It is a gratitude list for these writers of conscience. And it is a goat slayed on an altar to this motherfucking (but beloved) art monster.
Finally, this is an invitation: I long to hear what you get from these readings, what they feel like in your body, how they change you, or where they take you next.
Gratitude, love, and courage to you all.
“Two portraits in resistance: Abu ‘Umar and Mahjub ‘Umar” by Jehan Helou and Elias Khoury (from The Palestinian Youth Movement’s reading list)
Abu ‘Umar was critical of academics who used complex terminology as a badge of erudition; in line with his conviction that knowledge is “the most important tool for liberation,” what mattered to him was conveying ideas with clarity and simplicity. He was able to summarize and analyze (for example) the history of the Palestinian Resistance from the Mandate period onward in a few pages. He had a talent for simplifying the most complex political theories to make them accessible, and he often used popular proverbs, jokes, and puns in colloquial language and peasant dialects to make ideas easier to remember. His ambition was to simplify cultural material to make it popular and easy to grasp, lest it be restricted to the elite.
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[Mahjub Umar] invited me to lunch, and instead of taking me to the Shumu’ Restaurant, the favorite eatery of the intellectuals of dispossession who grazed at the trough of the Palestinian Revolution, he led me into the kitchen. There he prepared a feast consisting of four hard-boiled eggs. Seeing the look of disappointment wash over my face as he finished peeling the eggs, he burst out laughing, and reassured me that the dish he had in mind was really quite special. He filled a skillet with oil, placed it on the stove, and proceeded to deep-fry the eggs. That day, I had one of the best meals in the feda’i repertoire, as Mahjub’s conversation, peppered with humor, ranged from political analysis to poetry, from personal reminiscences to questions about me.
“The Abolitionist Logic of ‘Everyone for Everyone’” by Dan Berger at Jewish Currents
In this urgent plea of people desperate for their loved ones to be returned, we might locate a protean abolitionist vision, a way out of the zero-sum framework where the safety of some is mobilized as justification for the harm of others. From within a colonial system that insists that life is disposable, the proposal set forth by the families of the hostages contains the seed of a radically transformed society—one which grants, in the words of prison abolitionist Ruth Wilson Gilmore, that “where life is precious, life is precious.”
On Endurance, with Hala Alyan and adrienne maree brown on How to Survive the End of the World (Podcast)
If you build that foundational approach for yourself: “This is my value system, this is my north star, this is my internal compass and it’s always going to be in the direction of everybody being liberated” […]Then, it does something in terms of clarity, I think, and it does something in terms of steadiness and rootedness.
In 2023, Twitter crumbled like an empire, its X-iles shuffling off to their own corrupt kingdoms. They went to BlueSky, Threads, Mastodon, and other social media networks, where they spent most of their time bitching about Twitter.
I am still on Twitter. Even if I were not, I would keep my account, because it is a chapter in an archive of humanity. That is one reason Elon Musk is manipulating and murdering the site. An archive of history -- in particular a time-stamped chronology of state corruption -- has power beyond what money can buy.
Chronology is the enemy of autocracy. Twitter shows who knew what and when, and gives some insight into why. Twitter is where dissidents organized and politicians confessed their crimes. To alter Twitter is to alter history, and that is the appeal to autocratic minds. Voices can be silenced, witnesses disappeared, and history rewritten.
“If you are silent about your pain, they’ll kill you and say you enjoyed it,” wrote Zora Neale Hurston, an underemployed anthropologist and muckraking journalist who received only belated recognition for her searing, scathing, idiomatic prose.
In the 21st century, you can be loud about your pain. You can weep to millions of witnesses. And then tech lords can kill you and replace you with a digital doppelganger who declares that yes, you did enjoy your pain, and what’s more, you deserved it.
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Dictatorships murder poets because poets convey the feeling of a people. They heed Zora Neale Hurston’s warning to document your pain. They are the ultimate witnesses, and as such, are priority targets.
I have so much to say but I am often out of words these days. I write because if I don’t, they may say I enjoyed this time.