Good morning dear ones,
As always, grateful that you’re choosing to open this email and spend some time with my words. It’s been a hard week, one of those times where I sharpen my ability to hold the paradoxes.
Sharing with you some of the trivial things that have sustained me, before moving to a piece dealing with trauma, war and displacement. Hoping you’ll be gentle with yourself in choosing to interact or not.
until next time,
<3 noam
WHAT HAS NOURISHED ME THIS WEEK
TV: I’ve been hate watching the Gilded age on HBO, and love to talk about all the reasons it’s terrible. I’m also spending a lot of time watching basketball, as my two absolute favorite players in the whole league are now playing for the Sixers. If you know me, you know I’ve been a James Harden guy from day one, but let me tell you about my absolute favorite random player that people don’t care about: Deandre Jordan. I miss watching games in bars, and going to live games but for now bootlegged streams will do the trick.
PODCASTS: This episode of Dare to Lead where Brene Brown interviews Debbie Millman is amazing. A really inspiring convo about bravery and regret that I’ve been sitting with. Also love the Bad Table Manners podcast that uses food to delve deeper into big questions in South Asia.
READING: Mostly the news, on repeat. Thinking a lot about the banality of evil, and Eichmann’s trial
Sustaining myself with a Queens don’t burn out essence blend, chewing on cardamom, outdoor time with friends.
What about you? what sustains you in this moment?
EACH DEMOLISHED HOUSE IS A MEMORY LOST FOREVER
I can feel the trauma bubbling up in the body. I know it’s here, awakened by images of war. Destroyed houses, fired guns. I notice whose sovereignty is affirmed. I notice how empathy becomes a function of the world order and try to swallow my rage. I talk with my friend D. via text, and they tell me that they are reliving the trauma of becoming a refugee.
In the last month, I have been practicing noticing what feelings in my body are actually mine and which ones are inherited. Not that it matters, inherited feelings are still feelings. But in times of war, I can feel the choir of ancestors crying in my spine. I can feel their anguish in my dreams (nightmares, really) and it accelerated when they realized they were bombs in Ukraine, the birthplace of a great-grandfather of mine.
Impossible times.
On Sunday, and Monday and Tuesday I watch Route 181 Part 2. It’s a difficult movie for my nervous system. People speak in my native language (Hebrew) and my ancestral language (Arabic), and they all look like me. They talk about a sovereignty that is vilified; the story of a Palestine eaten bit by bit by genocidal colonizers haunted by their own lineages’ brushes with genocide. They talk about the ways the Zionist project weaponized land, planted trees on Palestinian land to justify the theft. They show us how the Zionist project progressively erased all traces of former villages and orchards. Life. Route 181 was filmed during the Sharon years; dark days that made room for darker days.
The movie spends time talking to the children guarding the made-up border, who delight in showing the camera their forbidden tongue piercings. And then they show us the bombed-out house of a Palestinian freedom fighter, a collective punishment inflicted on his family in the aftermath on his suicide attack.
An older man tells the camera “Every demolished house is a memory lost forever”. That sentence haunts me because it brings me back to my own experiences of digging through Yad Vashem records and shtetl maps to understand where my great-grandfather was born. The wound of seeing your ancestors’ life completely wiped out is breathtaking. House razed; records burnt.
A house demolished by occupation forces and with it, all belongings. The rug where the family sat for meals, the bedroom where they dreamt, the bathroom that held private thoughts. All transformed into a mangled pile of cement and wires, that children in the village use as an ad hoc jungle gym.
A graffiti announces in English, “This is the price of Isra[e]l”, that reads like a desperate plea for us to witness the destruction, death, and ecological disaster. I wish the graffiti and the images of destruction somehow opened floodgates of empathy too, like the images of Ukrainians living in bomb shelters. That there was a way to chop up a 6-hour long movie into a few popular soundbites that’d go viral on Instagram before being picked up by mainstream media. I wish there was a way to manufacture empathy that didn’t rely on white supremacist hierarchies.
So that we could all hold what it means to lose your home, your memories, your lineage. The corner of the house where you cooked and made tea. The blanket that made you feel safe at night. The patch of flowers grown for beauty alone. The photographs, trinkets, clothes, mementos. The joy of time spent in laughter with loved ones. Memories that live outside of the nervous system, that aren’t just the trauma of ancestors surfacing when the bombing comes close.