The original publication of this essay omitted a passage. I feel the essay is incomplete without it so here it is — the full essay. I’ve included the additional passage below in bold. I hope it is resonant.
Two nights ago, I dreamt of Gaza. Not the Gaza of my memories, but the Gaza of now. I saw buildings collapsing, I saw humans getting vaporized by bombs. I saw the streets I once knew turned into rubble. I saw soldiers and I saw death. I saw Gaza, and it ripped me from sleep, forced me out of bed at 3AM and onto the street to breathe fresh air and collect myself.
In my dream, I saw my friend Mahmood who is still in Gaza. I put my hand on his back and he turned around and we hugged. He towers over me, my head resting on his chest. He looked deeply exhausted. I don’t think we exchanged any words, but my frightened dream self found some peace in finding familiarity in an unrecognizable Gaza. I texted him when I woke up. They say reality starts in the imagination and I wanted to share that little imaginary moment with him.
It’s hard to comprehend we are coming up on a year of genocide that’s now expanding into Lebanon. I think about the physical and psychological trauma that’s been pounded into the Palestinian people and how that will reverberate for generations. I think about the physical and psychological trauma that’s been pounded into diasporic Arabs and Muslims as we watch our people get systematically dehumanized and exterminated. How we’re being pressured to vote for an administration that’s unleashed an apocalypse on a population while feeding us insulting platitudes about “saving democracy.”
This year has been one of utter horror. It’s also been a year of resistance. For me, it’s been a year of ebbs and flows of energy and exhaustion. It’s been a year of being forced to learn that resistance is not a singular act, but a way of life, one that requires an inside out transformation to build the stamina for the long haul fight of having an unwavering stance against injustice and oppression.
In the earlier months of this genocide, resistance for me had a more external quality—marches, protests, disruptions, social media, mutual aid, organizing. Resistance was loud. It was dynamic. Until it drained me, physically, mentally, and emotionally, and I was forced to take pause and rebuild my health.
Now, resistance is an internal process for me, one that is intrinsically linked to self-care. It’s been a process to shed the guilt and luxury that self care represents when Gaza is always on my mind. I see myself as an avatar, a representative, of the people of Gaza as I live my life here in DC. To be the most impactful version of that person, I have to be alive and well. I have to have the energy to move through each day of head-splitting dissonance and orient my thoughts and actions towards what I know is true. To not succumb to the forces of censorship and pressure to surrender my morality for status and assimilation into a society that’s okay with sacrificing a captive population for the sake of maintaining the status quo of empire.
Deepening my resistance has taken many forms. It looks like building a stronger relationship with spirituality. I see what’s happening in the world, I see maimed child after maimed child, and it feels so unholy. This war is for no one, it makes no one safer. It is the opposite of sacred. To resist that, I want to move closer to what is sacred. Each day, I spend ten minutes studying one of the 99 names of Allah, 99 aspects of divinity, qualities such as compassion, mercy, peace, magnificence, justice. These contemplations root me in qualities I wish to exhibit in my life through my relationships, my deeds, and how I relate to myself. They help me resist succumbing to the ugliness of our world order.
I’ve also begun a course taught by my yoga teacher that explores the archetypes of goddesses from the obscure and indigenous Hindu tradition of Tantra. I think about my own ancestry as a colonized person, a South Asian Muslim, whose lineage and relationship to land, culture, and philosophy has been interrupted by colonialism. Exploring divinity through many angles reminds me that there are many ways to express one truth. This re-membering of myself through my relationship with a higher power, one that is free from dogmatism and is syncretic and shaped by my own callings, makes me feel powerful. It wards off despair.
I’ve changed how I consume media. I no longer partake in corporate media’s soundbites that parrot tired talking points of an apartheid state’s right to defend itself against an oppressed population. I take in longer form conversations, ones that feature Palestinian writers and thinkers, who are offering deep insights as to how we change the narrative in a way that centers Palestinian humanity. As a writer, I feel my work is to write Gaza back into existence, to affirm its history and its people, and to make an offering towards the noble cause of liberation.
This isn’t to say that I’ve replaced outer acts of resistance with inner ones, or that I’m seeking inner peace and stillness for the sake of coping alone. Rather, it’s inner resistance that fuels outer resistance and vice versa. There are those who look at Israel’s relentless actions and disproportionate power and say resistance is futile, and while I admit there have been moments I’ve felt that, I have now grown to disagree wholeheartedly with that notion. Here is a mapping completed by the Palestine Institute for Public Diplomacy that lays out all the concrete actions taken by governments, local authorities, civil society, the private sector, courts and academia to hold Israeli colonial entities and interests accountable. Actions such as cutting or downgrading diplomatic ties, divesting from businesses, and imposing sanctions on settlers and their organizations. None of these actions would have happened had it not been for sustained public pressure, had it not been for people power. We have endured so much loss of Palestinian life this year. It is our work to make these losses sacred by committing to personal and collective resistance.
As the war escalates, it’s clear that things will only get worse before they get better. In the words of Burkinabe teacher Sobonfu Somé, “I believe the future of our world depends greatly on the manner in which we handle our grief.” Grief is such an overwhelming force—without proper inner fortification, it can deteriorate into apathy, cynicism, ignorance, paralysis, and defeat. I refuse to let my grief wilt into those things, because whose agenda does that serve? There’s still a lot of life to figure out, but one thing I know for sure is that I’ll always strive to be loyal to the oppressed, who as Arundathi Roy says, are not voiceless, but purposefully unheard.
The goal is not to eliminate my grief, or even subdue it. The goal is to learn how to live alongside it and alchemize it into a fuel source for my highest self. Grief is one of the most uniquely human experiences, and in a time of such inhumanity, my grief reminds me that my soul is intact.
So I move forward, one day at a time, with a prayer that I will continue to see Gaza in my dreams, even in all its pain. A prayer that my soul never becomes numb to the suffering of others. May Gaza continue to rip us all from sleep, continue to haunt our collective humanity, until she sees the justice all humans deserve.
Powerful! There are certainly pieces that were quite resonant for me, particularly around the necessity of inner and outer transformation. It is my hope that collectively we all come into this knowing and engage in the hard yet necessary inner work. I’m also holding onto your reflections on grief.
Thank you for allowing us to witness you here.