– by Ghiwa Sayegh
It was on a September afternoon that my therapist, freshly back from the summer break, broke the news to me: we would see less of each other because I was, it seemed, doing fine. For years, I had had regular encounters with histories in the shape of ghosts, misplaced in their geographies and erring at random corners of a European city. Sometimes, I would find them hiding in the walls of the apartments I occupied, and we could pretend the year was 2000 and I was still in Beirut. I did not find it weird. I was aware that I was the reason they were there in the first place, but in Europe, it is never a good thing to attend to ghosts (see my interview with Johanna Hedva). So, I looked for and found my therapist on a list of ‘safe’ professionals, and I sat in that same office years ago, asking where they stood on carceral psychiatry and the mental health industrial complex, before deciding to do any work with them at all. I, too, have been an on-and-off traveller (yasamin ghalehnoie). But on that September afternoon, I left the office in a haze; I couldn’t see any ghosts left and right of the building, so I checked my phone. News of pagers exploding, somewhere, elsewhere, invaded my screen. It was the place I still called home, despite how estranged we had become. And just like that, ghosts swarmed across the street once again. Yet, there I was, doing fine. How was that possible? How strange. How dizzying. A ‘colonial vertigo’ of sorts (Myriam Amri).
I tried to wrap my head around what had just happened. Electronic devices had exploded at the exact same time. That also meant thousands of body parts that looked like mine had been pulverized in thousands of locations at the exact same time. It was nothing short of abject horror. Here in Europe, they hailed it as technological advancement. They made appearances on national TV and posted tweets to express detached excitement towards the ‘precision’ of yet another version of ‘colonial toxicity’ (Samia Henni). And it made me wonder, when has an act of killing not been precise to them when it comes to bodies that look like mine? In the hands of whom is technology always a prowess? Whose use of it suddenly makes it dirty and ‘secret’ (Keto Gorgadze)? The dystopian future is now, and we are living in it.
When I agreed to take this issue on as a guest editor, I was fully aware that I would be doing so from a different locality than what I am used to. Throughout my four years in Europe, I have been frustrated, over and over again, by conversations that were, by and large, catered towards ‘soothing’ imperial forces, even in many of their decolonial iterations. We let the forces in power define the landscape, discursively and linguistically to begin with. We find ourselves playing their game, which largely follows an ‘either with us or against us’ logic that then translates in ‘justified’ military operations, ‘civilizing’ invasions, and the occupation and annihilation of entire ecosystems, body part by body part, organ by organ. Since the genocide in Gaza, and Palestine more generally, has intensified after October 2023, a general state of terror around what can or cannot be said has eaten at radical circles. People have been arrested under terrorist charges for protesting or using words like ‘genocide.’ Some were fired from their jobs over a tweet, others were ‘exposed’ and canceled on a mass scale. And so, countless people engaged in active self-censorship, or backtracked under large-scale pressure. You want resistance and you glorify it, just not this way, and not by ‘these’ people. You want victims, but you want them relatable. And it is in this economy of relatability that I, and many others, stood still in alienation.
I found myself missing home terribly, and the depth and nuance of conversations I would have had, about resistance, the urgency of the moment, and the necessity of persisting in imagining an otherwise. Here from within Europe, the stakes are not the same. Yet, a few dissenting voices persevere in protesting and organizing (Nikita Sena), and publications like this one still see the light of day. With this issue, I have not attempted to portray, to its full extent, the complexity and world-building aspect of the discourse on resistance from elsewhere. Without falling into generalizations, or worse, romanticization (our histories of resistance back home, and how they were orientated, are forever-carved on my body and in my political imaginary), I am thinking of my interlocutors and accomplices, who are queer feminist leftists from the south, and who understand their/our politics to come from a different genealogy so we could strive towards an other trajectory. What I aimed to do, however, is rupture a comfort zone, disrupt the conversation which has been held captive by the very same colonial forces we are trying to dismantle – making this issue become ‘more hammer than nail’ (Ada M. Patterson). Violence from below does not happen in a vacuum; its larger context is that of colonial-capitalist dispossession and extermination (Lama Abou Kharroub). It seems evident, but let us consider it a starting point against the fear of speaking up.
When Irene and I started to conceptualize this issue ‘from the muscle’ in the Fanonian sense, we had not anticipated how pertinent it would be at the time of its publication. To resist from the muscle is to spur it into action, to transform its jolt into reflex and memory.[1] Far from the myth of resistance as able bodies organizing with military discipline to successfully and efficiently fight back, to resist from the body is what crip theory tells us is a matter of need (Johanna Hedva). It is a body that no longer fears deviation, specifically because of how cheap our lives are considered and how dangerous our futures are treated (Mridula Sharma). It is about finding community and kinship when we are told we are alone (MaxX • ماكس). Over the past few months, the policing and tactics of terror employed by the occupiers and their allies have significantly slowed down knowledge production that is meant to resist and bother. We are out of funds, out of means, out of circulation, and the resources available to us are insignificant in comparison to the unforgiving machine of capitalist production. It has dawned on me that the stillness and alienation we experience are but an extension of the ongoing genocide. The killing machine is in our means of production, in our writing, in our very thinking – we are paying the price anyway, the least we can do is go against it.
* This editorial was written before the occupying forces intensified their massacre and assassinations in Lebanon, in a regional extension of their settler genocide.
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[1] Elsa Dorlin, Self-Defense: A Philosophy of Violence, trans. Kieran Aarons (Verso Books, 2022).