The Genocide of Palestinians and the Colonial Imagination.
Yesterday I heard stories of a massacre.
I saw photos of blood and of flour—elements that connect the diaspora across time and space—and the bodies of Palestinian men, women and children, resting lifeless in the street, attacked while in pursuit of sustenance by the same forces that are starving them to death.
In the imagination that we are living in, we are told that this is what must be done in the name of Judaism, in order to “protect Israel’s right to exist.”
In this imagination, we are told that the creation of a religious ethno-state atop the land previously occupied by indigenous Arab and Muslim folks, is required to ensure the safety of a people who were once themselves forcibly removed from their homes and murdered en masse due to the whims of man.
In this imagination, we are told that the indiscriminate killing of 30,000 Palestinian civilians is necessary to quell any resistance to being stripped of their homeland and forced to live under occupation for 75 years. We are told that historical context and power dynamics and scale do not apply here.
I am reminded of words that rest firmly in my own imagination, spoken by John F. Kennedy, and later quoted by Dr. Martin Luther King in condemnation of the Vietnam War:
“Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.”
I am not an especially religious person. But when I was, taking the sacrament of blood and flour symbolized the receipt of a divine grace. (I always thought the practice equally moving and strange; nevertheless I welcomed the grace.)
But on this day, a “Leap Day” (which similar to the borders that separate and subjugate us feels fragile and arbitrary) blood and flour donn a new symbolism of genocide against the Palestinian people.
I am left to ask myself, in the words of @ayandastood, “Whose imagination am I living in?”
COVID and the Capitalist Imagination.
The date is March 26, 2020 and 26 states have just enacted a “shelter-in-place” order, requiring 1 in every 2 people across the so called United States to remain inside their homes for the foreseeable future.
Because I work in healthcare, like the folk who work in food service and sanitation, I am allowed to leave my home as long as I carry my employee identification.
In the imagination that we are living in, “unskilled labor,” a term used to extract production from workers without fair compensation, protection and benefits, reveals itself as the stone upon which a functioning society rests. It’s a miracle that the “unskilled laborers” don’t withhold their work and watch it all to come tumbling down.
By the end of May 2020, nearly 100,000 people have died. Still none of us really know what is going on. There are whispers of a virus with an unknown origin. We are not sure how it is spread, so we clean our food packaging with Clorox wipes. That’s if we are lucky enough to find any cleaning supplies, or food, on the barren shelves of grocery stores with signs hanging on the end of aisles that read: “please take one item per customer.”
I wonder in my own imagination how honor systems are supposed to work in a country created on stolen land, ran by people with no honor, inhabited by folks who refuse to have any honest dealings with their past.
In their imagination, maintaining the appearance of “goodness” is a stand-in for developing what bell hooks describes as a “love ethic” characterized by integrity, care, respect, knowledge and collaboration.
In this imagination that we are living in, employers lay off folks in droves, when they aren’t forcing them back to work without personal protective equipment, all in an attempt to maintain their profit margins. Housing evictions spread like wildfire. Sickness and death linger in the air like an unwelcome guest.
I ask myself, “whose imagination am I living in?”
Building the World in Our Own Image and Imagination
The world that we are living in right now is a manifestation of someone else’s imagination. Knowing that fact grounds me in the possibility that things can be radically different. For that to happen, “we must not surrender our own imagination” to that of racialized capitalism, Zionism, anti-Blackness and anti-Indigeneity, imperialism, cisheternormativity, transphobia, fatphobia, and ableism, “anymore than we would give up on our friends, or on the Earth” (Hayes & Kaba, 2023).
Our imagination is invaluable. In the words of Diane di Prima, as quoted by Kelly Hayes and Mariame Kaba in their book Let This Radicalize You:
“The war that matters is the war of the imagination/all other wars are subsumed by it" (2023).
Adding to the framework of imagination, Michelle Alexander, author of The New Jim Crow, spoke these words at a panel event that I attended back in 2016:
Before we can build the world we want, we must first conceive of it, fully and freely. We must not allow our colorful political imaginations to be hindered by pragmatism.
Whether its COVID, overlapping interconnected genocides, or familial loss, grief has a way of making us long for what we once knew and who we once were as it strips us down and “places us upon new shores” (Weller, 2015).
For the global majority, to return to “normal” for us means returning to what created the conditions for our exploitation, subjugation and loss in the first place: within the imagination of our oppressor. And in the words of Mary McAnally,
“Pain teaches us to take our fingers out the fucking fire” (Lorde, 1984).
So we must develop a radical, future orientation. We must build new worlds in our own image and imagination.
We have to ground ourselves in possibility and in hope (“hope as a discipline,” not simply a feeling—word to Mariame Kaba). We must transmute our anger and fear and worry into care and collectivity. We must do the simultaneous work of building and destroying. We must engage in the small, daily acts of practicing the future (both personally and interpersonally), so that when the world of our own imagination is finally constructed around us, we are ready to inhabit and thrive within it because it has also been constructed within us.
Sources
Let This Radicalize You by Kelly Hayes and Mariame Kaba
Sister Outsider by Audre Lorde (Mary McAnally Quote, pg. 64)
The Wild Edge of Sorrow by Francis Weller
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