I can find you in the wind
*NOTE: Why am I posting my journal entries? See my inaugural post: Beyond journalism
(*artwork by Incé Husain)
My morning should be exactly this: to cry over my breakfast egg, lathered on toast and mayonnaise and cheese, because of Ghassan Kanafani. I always fled to him whenever I needed stamina, I fled to his interview in Beirut, 1970, “the conversation between the sword and the neck”.
This is not why I’m crying today. Today, I’ve found his short story “Letter from Gaza”, written in 1955, narrated by novelist John Berger in 2008 in “an address to the inaugural Palestine Festival of Literature.”
I cried before the narration began. I cried when Berger introduced the story - “written in 1955, seven years after the Nakba”. I cried when he said Kanafani was assassinated, by the Israeli secret police, at 36 years old. I’m almost 24.
The story opens:
Dear Mustafa,
I have now received your letter, in which you tell me that you've done everything necessary to enable me to stay with you in Sacramento. I've also received news that I have been accepted in the department of Civil Engineering in the University of California. I must thank you for everything, my friend. But it'll strike you as rather odd when I proclaim this news to you -- and make no doubt about it, I feel no hesitation at all, in fact I am pretty well positive that I have never seen things so clearly as I do now. No, my friend, I have changed my mind. I won't follow you to "the land where there is greenery, water and lovely faces" as you wrote. No, I'll stay here, and I won't ever leave.
I drift in my kitchen, doing dishes, eating this egg, listening, and thinking dimly of the Arabic meaning I’m losing to English translation. An hour earlier, I’d been harsh and rigid from insomnia, telling X and Y I don’t know how to salvage a day that begins at 2pm. Y said “Have breakfast first. Have an egg. Have two eggs. On toast. Have protein”. I wasn’t sure I’d manage it, nauseous with insomnia, head unruly and pounding.
Berger’s British English is insistent, pulls me out. I cut my egg on its toast, the yolk sloshing. He narrates this line and I preserve it in screenshots:
I found Gaza just as I had known it, closed like the introverted lining of a rusted snail-shell thrown up by the waves on the sticky, sandy shore by the slaughter-house. This Gaza was more cramped than the mind of a sleeper in the throes of a fearful nightmare, with its narrow streets which had their bulging balconies...this Gaza! But what are the obscure causes that draw a man to his family, his house, his memories, as a spring draws a small flock of mountain goats? I don't know. All I know is that I went to my mother in our house that morning.
I boiled water, made chai, hand against a bulging mug, found a teabag, squeezed honey, poured, watched the colour swirl to smoke. The marbled cheese has melted against the toast.
I preserve another line:
At that moment I was watching your rapidly moving lips. That was always your manner of speaking, without commas or full stops. But in an obscure way I felt that you were not completely happy with your flight. You couldn't give three good reasons for it. I too suffered from this wrench, but the clearest thought was: why don't we abandon this Gaza and flee? Why don't we?
I am not a blank slate listening to this narration. I have read Kanafani’s poetry, I have read about his life, I have read descriptions of his office and desk, full of art and beauty and posters of revolution, in “I saw Ramallah”. I am trying to learn his mother tongue. I have watched his face, over and over, when he was asked in 1970 Beirut, “Why won’t your organization engage in peace talks with the Israelis?” and he answered easily, solemnly, impassioned: “You don’t exactly mean peace talks, you mean capitulation, surrendering… that kind of conversation is between the sword and the neck, you mean.” I’ve thought so much about him and what he would do, about the origins of his eloquence, about the burden of his clarity, the feel of it, the air around him. I imagined him wandering the streets of Beirut and writing. The story I listen to is enmeshed with my sense of him. It has an intimacy that is more like reading something a friend wrote, more a confession than a story, tied with things already shared and known.
And here Nadia was lying on her bed, her back propped up on a pillow, over which her hair was spread, like a thick pelt. There was a profound silence in her wide eyes and a tear always shining in the depths of her black pupils. Her face was calm and still but eloquent, as the face of a tortured prophet might be. And Nadia was still a child.
I didn’t finish my egg or the chai before the twenty-minute reading ended. I knew how the story would end. I could sense its unfolding, the momentum it built. I predicted it almost word for word. I predicted Nadia’s leg. Is this because I knew of Kanafani, because I’d listened to him on a loop for five years?
The first time I listened to him, in September 2020, the 1970 interview in Beirut, I wrote:
This is raw power. This is legacy. Without legacy, we forget.
Desensitization is evidence of normalization - the degree of injustice in the world has reached such a climax that its prevalence is absorbed more than it is questioned critically with the acute motive of extinguishing it.
I consider this absorption a form of submission. If you are in a position of consistent mental, financial, and communal stability, it is a form of succumbing to the mass desensitization of violence to make yourself the centre of your life as a way of life. I would absolutely consider it immoral.
Identity is a right: to investigate one's self-concept is a right; to stretch the limits of one's potential is a right; comfort is a right; stability is a right; personal ascension is a right - at core, the way we define ourselves to ourselves is the only actual control we have over the value and meaning of our life, and that is what we use to construct a foothold in the world for ourselves that seems likeable and worthwhile. Everyone has the right to an investigation of the world they live in, to compartmentalize it and interact with it so that they can live their lives to the absolute fullest. In the wake of imminent death, life is all we have. There is nothing else to cling to, so by definition, there is nothing else to fight for - at the most fundamental level, humanity is by definition on the same side.
Do you see how simple this is, at root? All else is ultimately a distraction. Do not forget this. Life is not political.
Read as extensively as possible. Acquire knowledge. Grow your mind in every way possible.
Don't underestimate people and their ability to think. Disorient people to make them think; it is possible to be confrontational and also delicate, gentle, and considerate. Inform people; keep yourself open to being informed in turn. Question things and think critically. Prompt others to do the same. There is strength in numbers. There is strength in logic and empathy. Nurture it in yourself and in others. Nurture sensitivity - that is the literal antidote to desensitization. It is a moral responsibility.
Think carefully. Feel freely. Fear next to nothing; conviction does well to eradicate fear.
Do not be idle.
The next day, I wrote:
The fibre of my being is a commitment to an idea that will outlast me. Legacies are not human, they are made of human: I am an energy source for my conviction, nothing more. Tears, isolation, sweat, blood, fear, stagnation - it is all fuel. None of it will be wasted if it is all bounded by this fundamental clarity: to consider all that I am a means to an end that is finally, justice.
If my insomnia last night was the stagnation phase of this ritual of fuel, I accept it.
My biology does not allow for routine. Some weeks I don’t sleep for days, and my journal entries begin with “My body is ruined”. Some days I have a flow, and everything is effortless - not easy, but effortless - and I feel so certain, so alive, so immersed and fused with nonverbal directions, that there is no question that things will get done, it is only a question of if I’ll remember how I did it. Almost every article is written like this, and almost every piece of research progress.
Maybe this flow has a biological price. Maybe the cost of these highs is to burn the states away in ravaging insomnia. Maybe it is my body’s ritual of purification, a purge to give life to the next flow. If the last two weeks of restlessness are the price, I’ll take them. People say often: “how are you doing a PhD and journalism? You must be disciplined. You must have good time management. You are a machine.“
I am manic, not disciplined. I have method but not order. I most definitely do not have the consistency of a machine. I am what Z would call “mercurial”. I am grounded by ideals and family and some friends; the cold hard practicality comes only when I don’t have the stamina, the physical stamina, for doing things my way - with flow, vibrancy, life, freedom.
My trick to becoming non-stagnant is to do nothing. The trick is to let the flow come and to ride it, and to embrace, not punish, its hibernation.
I find a written version of “Letter from Gaza” on a site called marxists.org. I reread some of the passages. I replace, in my head, the English with the Arabic I‘ve learned from Duolingo, the original words Kanafani would have written. “My life” - hayati. “My house” - beiti. “My friend” - sadeeqi. “University” - jamia. I try to untranslate him.
Last week, I wrote:
A symbolic bond is still a bond. It is tighter than a literal bond. Symbols can span generations. They can defy time and space and blood and betrayal and grief. They can defy anything if you’re attentive, if you’re needy. They can open new ways to share life. When I write “I can find you in the wind”, it’s because I can. Symbols are like prayers. Come back to me.
I’m surprised, now, that I had to write this down to convince myself it’s true. Somehow, after reading Kanafani, it’s obvious to me.
A symbolic bond is the feeling of a bond - without the literalness of shared time in which the feeling would like to grow.
The symbolic bond is not shared. We cannot say “I have a symbolic bond with…” . There is no “with”; you’re all alone, bonding into muteness.
But the feeling - its genuineness, depth, carefulness, sensitivity, complexity, curiosity, excitement, evolution, hopefulness, longevity - cannot be called nothing. Every act of consistent care, for anyone, anywhere - spoken or unspoken, seen or unseen, requited or unrequited, in urgency or in rest - is to make room for them in your life.
What else is the feeling of a bond, at root? ♦