Collective Reading Session #1: to attend to
28 January 2024
Some reflections by Staci Bu Shea
On Sunday evening, 29 January we gathered at Manifold Books for the first collective reading session to consider perceptions of time and qualities of attention during a crisis or acute stress. Reading about the situation in Palestine (from texts written in 2015 and 2002), and with the dire reality now in Gaza, the immense privilege to gather calmly around texts to read and talk together was elucidated. The intention was to oscillate between scales of experience, that individual death and grief is happening at the same time as this mass, violent death (and as Dagmar said, we’re not talking just death but, Destruction) and grief we cannot fathom, but it’s really too much within a short time to touch on the immensity of this. The necropolitical scene of genocide via colonial occupation or austerity of destiny-of-death by covid narrative for vulnerable populations are both examples of “deaths pulled from the future,” as Death Panel has described. The reality of these bad deaths fuel our activism.
We silently read “No Time to Mourn,” a section from Alice Rothchild’s “Condition Critical: Life and Death in Israel/Palestine,” which points us to the impossibility of engaging mental health of survivors on the ground during a siege. Rothchild documented her conversation with Dr. Yasser Abu Jamei, director of Gaza Community Mental Health Prorgamme, who described the severity of the situation for the people they help: how people have no other chance but to go on, that their desire for life inspires any chance to become productive in that moment. Yasser also said they wait a little bit before showing up to the surviving family after a traumatic death because it is simply too raw to touch. Rothchild only later found out via the organization’s website, not from her conversation with him, that Yasser himself had lost 28 members of his family in a single Israeli missile strike.
We then read the living memoir, long-form poem “A State of Siege” by Mahmoud Darwish out loud together, popcorn style, staying with the charged silence of pregnant pauses between stanzas. Sensitive already from my identity/legacy position to read him out loud, and then to do so was a whole other level of bearing witness to heartbreak and resistance. It took us an hour to read the poem as a group. I thought, when is this going to end? It hurts. That minuscule in comparison but real pain bringing tears to read and hear “the martyr is the daughter of a martyr who is the daughter of a martyr and her brother is a martyr and her sister is a martyr…” It is so fucked, you just want to get out of your skin completely. The very least we could do is read that entire thing and all of his stinging metaphors and refusal of status quo and fixity.
At some point in the evening, Flora brought up how challenging it is to even touch on death and grief because so many of us are not even thinking about our mortality [in the death phobic West]. It’s not far fetch to say that death phobia leads to more harm and suffering. Again, the individual and collective is different but inextricably tied.
Pretty exhausted, we then briefly touched on individual but interdependent experience, absent of violence and ill intent though grief-ridden and painful nonetheless, through Moosje Moti Goosen’s text about the long arc of time being a stone before becoming alive. To me, the key event in the text is that eventually the author, as a stone, exercised a willfulness to transform into cell matter so that they could finally become alive in order to be able to die. As a group we reflected about the many perspectives and symbols of the stone, and returned to the symbolic gesture of stone-throwing by Palestinians.
In closing, no matter what situation you are in, especially one that you do not choose, there are much fewer choices but there are still choices and you (we) have to decide what to do next, moment by moment. Now how do you carry this over into non-crisis moments, when you are privileged to not have to deal with what others are dying from? A deeply lived life might simply mean that you get serious about what it means to still be alive, and strive to be as life-affirming as possible in the face of all you will lose. In this respect, in closing the session, I asked the group (and myself) to think about how we slow down time, listen to the signals of the body to illuminate a need or boundary, and to consider what it is that we know we must do, in our aliveness, however small, that we can no longer defer. Different forms of BDS, for example, and a refusal to normalcy.
At the start of the session, I created a salt water bowl to hold any excess grief that the group itself couldn’t hold. This salt water bowl (pictured, photo by @katjamater) will be present for all collective reading sessions at Manifold this year. Each session will also close with some shared food, a bowl of salt, fat, water and heat :) This time we had pasta and fava bean soup (1992 vintage Martha Steward recipe) and shared bread. Many thanks to all who participated and for minimizing risk of covid by wearing masks.