a collectively owed debt

& pain we are built to bear

How much can a heart take? How can it be so broken, so heavy, yet also so buoyantly full? I wake up often with chest pains from the sorrow of losing Gaza; it feels sharp, like glass shards jostling about under my sternum. But then, sometimes I wake up overcome with an immense hope that things are finally changing, that there is no going back, and Zionism’s days are numbered. That feeling of hope also resides in the heart space, it feels like an expansion. 

Maybe what I’m feeling in my heart is growing pains — a newfound ability to hold sorrow and awe, depression and inspiration, all at once. 

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I am so certain that collective liberation is the work of our lives, and that the only way to it is through personal liberation. If we believe and settle on the idea that the world is a cruel place, then we let that thought corrupt our minds, words, actions, and relationships. Cynicism isn’t just bleak, it’s harmful. It aids and abets violent ideologies such as Zionism by bubble wrapping it with the thought: This is just how the world is; some people lose and some people win. Life is unfair. 

I’ve been working to define personal liberation more concretely. What is it that the self needs to be liberated from? Today, my co-worker based in the West Bank spoke of the experience of becoming self aware of having a colonized mind. She said, everywhere we look, there are constraints. Literal constraints in the form of apartheid walls and checkpoints, and intangible constraints caused by decades of hopelessness of our situation as Palestinians. We internalize those constraints and let them police our minds.

How can we envision or build a better world without freeing ourselves from limiting beliefs? How can we build a fulfilling life without freeing ourselves from limiting beliefs? How can we internalize that we are worthy of big, expansive love without freeing ourselves from limiting beliefs?

Pose this question to yourself — what fulfillment have you denied yourself purely because you believed your mind when it said: no.

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I’m seeing now a pattern I have to settle for relationships where I give without receiving, a tendency to let selflessness become self-abandonment. When I think about the kind of love I want in my life, romantic or platonic, the word egalitarian comes to mind. In a world so rife with inequality, I want to be someone’s equal. I want to reject my own exploitation the way I do when I see it done unto others. I want to embody a type of love that rejects the cruelty of this world, that has a shared commitment to building a microcosm of a liberated world in the space between two bodies, hearts, and minds. One where we are committed to freeing each other from limiting beliefs. 

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I learned recently that the word solidarity traces its roots back to the ancient Roman Empire and roughly translates to a collectively owed debt. I can’t stop thinking about that definition, how it might be applied to Gaza. The people of Gaza are being crushed under the weight of every form of oppression converging in the avatar of Zionism. How do we be in solidarity with the Palestinians of Gaza without physically enduring genocide alongside them? How do we collectively assume the debt they are unjustly abandoned to pay on their own?

I’m reminded of Palestinian poet, journalist, and writer Mohammed El Kurd’s words in his piece Are we indeed all Palestinians?: 

The rallying cry that [in our millions, in our billions] we are all Palestinians must abandon the metaphor and manifest materially. Meaning, all of us—Palestinians or otherwise—must embody the Palestinian condition, the condition of resistance and refusal, in the lives we lead and the company we keep. Meaning we reject our complicity in this bloodshed and our inertia when confronted with all of that blood. Because Gaza cannot stand alone in sacrifice. 

But the task is difficult. Can we defeat Zionism and end its monstrous reign? It is even more difficult to define: fragmentation means that different things are asked of us in different locales. We face disparate challenges and circumstances. Can we reverse the effects of fragmentation? Collective struggle seems impossible in a hyper-capitalist, hyper-surveilled world. Unscrupulous logic tells us political discipline is an ineffective weapon. And personal sacrifices (quitting a job, self-immolating, the thousands of things in between) might feel futile, because they crush the doer while barely leaving a dent in the status quo. 

Mohammed’s words remind me of the power of the collective that we’re seeing play out so magnificently on college campuses across the United States. When thousands of students simply gather together and collectively refuse to move until change happens, they make a dent in the status quo in a way that an individual cannot. This feels like further proof that when we reject capitalism’s assertion that life is meant to be a solitary slog, we expand into realities that once felt impossible.

In the earlier months of the genocide, it was a no-brainer to call out and condemn supporters of Zionism. Now, six-plus months into this brutal catastrophe, I feel compelled to take pause and feel disappointed when it comes to passive allies of Palestine. Quiet sympathy no longer feels like enough. Because when we stay silent, we deny ourselves connection with the collective and the opportunity to make a dent in the status quo. And when we deny ourselves that, we are choosing to sit out of the struggle, sit out of embodying the Palestinian condition of resistance and refusal. We are sitting out of solidarity. And that feels like betrayal.

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The awakenings of these times are so profound, so character-defining, so life-affirming. I see many of my diasporic Palestinian friends accessing an existential depth within themselves. What could be a more fulfilling gift — to feel certain of who you are and what really matters in this time we share on Earth.

My friend Sonia said something beautiful to me in a text message to me the other night: It feels clear to me what is an earthly thing and what is a soulful thing. What we leave behind when we pass from this earth is commitment, duty and passion. The growth that comes from committing to a cause is what shapes our souls.

I am reflecting on my own ancestry as a South Asian Muslim, my own legacy as a colonized person, my own connection to land. I am angered by the fracturing of the Indian subcontinent, the way the colonizers violently pitted our people against each other by religion and caste, exploited our natural resources, and left us to become strangers and enemies to one another. Fighting for Palestine feels like a way to time travel and resist the violent and traumatic injustices that my people faced in an era when global solidarity was inaccessible.

I recently had an astrocartography reading that maps a birth chart to the earth’s coordinates to understand which astrological energies are personally present in different geographies of the world. When looking at Palestine, the mystic told me: Palestine is a conduit to unpack your ancestral work.

Palestine makes me seek my own connection to land. I think about my Punjabi ethnicity. The word punjab translates to five waters, referring to the convergence of the five rivers: Sutlej, Beas, Ravi, Chenab, and Jhelum. I look at my features, my skin tone, the shape of my nose and think about how I am a daughter of five rivers. While I lived in Palestine, I was very often assumed to be Palestinian. I haven’t fully unpacked why, but the convergence of these thoughts feels healing.

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There is something freeing in believing in destiny. To cope with the immense grief I feel over losing Gaza, I remind myself that I was destined for this pain because I was destined for my life to unfold in a way where Gaza became a loving, transformative home to me.

In Islam, it is said that Allah doesn’t burden us with more than we can bear. That reminder helps me do away with the limiting belief that this grief is unbearable. Instead, I feel the freedom of believing that the pain I was destined for is a pain I was built to bear.