On Hope

& how to foster it

‘Gateway to September’ by Charles E. Burchfield

“The search for reality is the most dangerous of all undertakings for it will destroy the world in which you live. But if your motive is love of truth and life, you need not be afraid.”

— Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj

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It has been impossible for me to write recently.

Words have evaded me… my mind feels empty…

Spinning, grinding, consuming, processing, endless, endless.

*

I started writing this essay a few weeks ago. Then so-called “Israel” launched “Operation Summer Camps” (absorb the name for a quick second) in the largest military invasion witnessed in the northern West Bank in over two decades and I was stunned into silence. What better proof do we need that “Israel” does not want peace or just to destroy Hamas… they want to kill all Palestinians, they want Palestine for themselves. This is, collectively, what we are witnessing.

Every day things get deadlier in a way I couldn’t have possibly fathomed the international community would just allow and accept. You know there were breaking points in the past with other genocides, whether it was an image that catalyzed it, a moment where one statesman remembers the humanity of a people annihilated, but eventually protest for war would travel far into the psyche of the general public enough to finally end it.

Recently, I’ve been re-reading my old man’s copy of Chomsky’s Imperial Ambitions which I first started reading at 13 (almost 22 years ago, still have the same copy) and there’s a part where he writes about Vietnam that stuck:

“The protests came only after years and years of war. By then, hundreds of thousands of people had been killed and much of Vietnam had been destroyed. But all of that is erased from history, because it tells too much of the truth, which is that it took years and years of hard work by plenty of people, mostly young, to build a protest movement.

Then, in true Chomsky fashion, he scorches you with the subtlest, deft sarcasm you can hardly detect, “You aren’t supposed to learn that dedicated, committed effort can bring about significant changes of consciousness and understanding. That’s a very dangerous idea, and therefore it’s been wiped out of history.”

Conservative estimates, like the Lancet Report, a peer-reviewed medical journal, months ago started saying that the death toll in Gaza had most likely surpassed 186,000 but is likely more than that. Writer Susan Abulhawa shared, after a visit to Gaza, that the number could even be closer to half a million. Many of the dead lie underneath the rubble; rotting flesh under the sun.

Just think about this, Gaza is besieged and has been captured by the Zionist entity. 2.2 million people were forced out of their homes and put into refugee camps that “Israel” has been bombing with such heavy artillery that it has formed craters into the Earth, where refugee tents used to be.

International support for Palestine increases as the politicians and elites in power (many of whom are conservatives masked as liberals) think it’s more compelling to fool people to lie to them about who they are and what this nation stands for.

If we needed more proof that there is no difference between Republicans and Democrats… DICK CHENEY (aka man who shot his friend in the face aka former Vice President of the United States under George W Bush… aka the architect behind the Iraq War and War on Afghanistan… aka the spawn of Satan) endorsed Kamala Harris because… she’s a Republican… duh!

But she’s also Brat, and that’s on that!

@ly.as0AMERICA IS INSANEEE #nyfw #kamala

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This TikTok (please watch) gave me hives but it is also a perfect example of how the U.S. Empire is fully cognizant of how it cannibalizes movements. It smirks knowingly as that is exactly what it’s done with representational politics — let’s just slap it on a bumper sticker and call it a democracy — seems to be the American way!

I know people think representational politics matters but Justice Robinson, a 26 year old Black man, was murdered on September 1st (again) by police officers. This morning I woke up to the news from my WAWOG comrades that a Black man was shot by the police last night for “evading” his $2.90 train fee. He’s dead now. There are so many Black people shot by the police every fucking week - we only remember the names of people we are told about. After George Floyd and this international movement for Black life in 2020… I thought people would change, but of course, the inertia of capitalism seduces you back into your own delusion. But, is this a life? I keep wondering: what is it going to take for people to get to enough is enough and to really feel it in their bones? How sanitized have we become if we keep accepting this atrocity as a reality worth investing in?

Kamala Harris won’t save us because the United States of America won’t just as billionaires and all the technocrats won’t.

The delusion of empire continues, but it is allowed, it is fostered because that is the drum of empire, it’s the sound that rings its motion into gears. It lulls you into a sleepy state by convincing you of its inherent goodness, that the only way to exist is for white supremacy and capitalism and heteropatriarchy intertwined to be the main churning gear, but it keeps mutating and changing face; the many faces of evil, like Sauron (LOTR nerd) who shapeshifts between beings, empire does the same thing. The system cannot betray you when it is you, right?

This is how capitalism implicates us. Many of us understand that war is not inevitable, that mass consumption is wrong, that there are better ways of existing with each other, with this Earth, but we are so subdued and so embedded in the system that many of us are unwilling to re-route our destinies, our compulsions… our greed… yet, the ability to do this, is the very ascension many of us also seek, it’s the evolution that we crave. This should feel exciting, rather than daunting, yet capitalist conditioning tells you it’s not on you! You are just but one person… how could you do this all alone?

When capitalism asks for your compliance, as it’s asking you to do in the face of multiple genocides that are occuring due to land and resource theft, (Gaza, Sudan, Congo… are all resource-rich, you do the math) it is asking you to deny your dignity for a better life that’s only afforded you through a hefty cost; we forget that our greed runs the supply chain of capital.

But, when you can come out of your own entitlement to things, to a better life over others, when you realize your humanity, your equality… when you realize supremacy, narcissism and elitism only proliferate a traumatic life standard that relies on others subjugation to you… your desire to protect others as well as yourself kicks in.

Recently (shout out to my dear friend Aparna) I listened to an interview with Bayo Akomolafe, where he perfectly enunciates that what we have been socially told is “modernity” is merely just white modernity. This world we live in is designed by white people’s modernity, for white people in mind. It prioritizes their imagination where Black, brown and indigenous people’s land, resources and humanity must be pilfered for whiteness, for white empire, for white modernity. To continue this engine.

What kind of life is this?

Yet, against all odds. Bayo believes in hope. In fact he’s one of the most hopeful people I’ve ever encountered because his framework is not the one we’ve all been indoctrinated in/by. He thinks for himself, he thinks beyond bounds, he is a futurist. Reading or encountering his work has given me hope in a time where it’s been hard to feel anything but this.

Yet, this is also our work. To quote, Toni Cade Bambara, “As a culture worker who belongs to an oppressed people my job is to make revolution irresistible.” I think it’s important to remind people that it’s possible to change and that it’s necessary to. At any point in your life… you can say: “I was wrong” or “I need to educate myself more on this topic” it’s the fact that people debate without truth, without resources, that continues this imperial charade of knowing when you don’t know. Maybe society would be more compelling if more of us were humble to the fact that we don’t know much and were invested in knowing more.

Maybe, it’s also time to commit to start working outside the bounds of white modernity. What would free internet for the world look like? What would technology not harvested by enslaved Congolese children look like? What if Sudan could enjoy its own gold mines without international theft? Planet Critical writes: “The United Arab Emirates, in exchange for access to Sudan’s gold, gas and ports, has been supporting the Sudanese Rapid Support Forces (RSF) bid for power, supplying the group with arms, holding their bank accounts, and washing conflict goods onto the international financial network.” What does a modernity that holds everyone look like? What does modernity look like when it’s not being fed to hold up and feed whiteness? The ruling class is crumbling despite it’s stronghold and it’s time for us to demand new systems, new ways of being. It’s our right to have a modernity that serves all of us.

Baldwin, who was virulently critical of “Israel,” was always exceptionally on point.

My father is not an optimist.

I always thought he was a revolutionary — and maybe compared to other Bengali fathers he was — principled and stoic, moving with a subdued, quiet integrity that rarely was every acknowledged. As an academic, he is obsessed with reading and learning, gratefully that impacted me very young. We are similar him and I, maybe that’s why I’ve always admired him—I’ve always wanted to be him. So, it annoys me now when we talk now, since October… he just sounds so bleak, and broken, the future is unknown to him and he wears the grief of hopelessness heavy. As he’s gotten older he’s become more weary, more brittle, more deterred by the madness around us. He seems to feel the weight of capitalism, he can’t see anything beyond that.

The other day I couldn’t handle his frustration so I sternly told him that he would have to take his hopelessness elsewhere because I could not hold it. No matter how grave things are, I want to remain looking toward liberation as a marker of what is possible. Nothing less, I owe myself that, we owe it to this time to believe in the possibility of more. Capitalism is not inevitable even though we are told it is.

The late anthropologist, David Graeber, once wrote that capitalism only exists because “every day we wake up and continue to produce it. If we woke up one morning and all collectively decided to produce something else, then we wouldn’t have capitalism anymore.”

What are we willing to lose if a new world is that easy to build?

If the answer is nothing, why do we deem it OK for others to lose things but not us? Why is it OK to watch Palestinians get slaughtered en masse in some of the most brutal ways possible and ever fathomed? Why is it OK for the IOF to shoot an American in the HEAD, as they did with Ayşenur Ezgi Eygi? They shot her point blank in the head - how is this OK?

Why is it OK for Sudanese women to be mass raped and mutilated and we say nothing about these militias paid off by foreign governments? Their gold mines taken for rich Saudis and Emiratis to pilfer more money into their deep pockets. No western feminists are trying to protect these Sudanese women, so who cares about them? Meanwhile, we’ve got Zionists going around saying, “MeToo except for Jewish women” during a time where both Sudanese and Congolese women are being gang raped and terrorized (Congo might just have the most genocidal rapes in the history of mankind) while the most raped and murdered population in the US are still Black and Indigenous trans and poor women. Having no historical analysis and no solidarity is what I guess it means to be Israeli… but why is “modern” development at the cost of other people’s livelihoods? And is this what it means to be “developed?”

Why are we so willing to deny others what we would never deny ourselves?

I recently re-read this quote from Roberto Calasso from an interview he did a few years ago. I liked what he wrote about sacrifice, how the idea of it has become lost in the pantomime of capitalism:

“Maybe it’s simply because sacrifice brings us into dealings with the unknown. In the act of sacrifice, you establish a relation with something that you recognize as enigmatic and powerful. Our collective psyche seems to have lost touch with it, although science is providing countless motives for being overwhelmed by the unknown. The unknown itself is in our own mind as well—our mind is in its largest part totally unknown to us.

Therefore, it is not only a relation to the exterior world, it is a relation to ourselves. We establish a connection with the unknown through the act of giving something and, paradoxically, the act of destroying something. That is what is behind sacrifice. What you offer and what you destroy, it is that surplus which is life itself.”

screenshot from Hirak Raje Deshe

After I told my father off for being hopeless he became childlike and apologetic immediately, telling me about his favorite film, Hirak Raje Deshe, the futurist Satyajit Ray film from 1980. He references it a lot and until recently I had never watched it. Then the other day, I started watching it… but then couldn’t stop crying out of a sadness that the blueprint of who I am was already written but because I come from a colonized tradition, people and lineage—I have not had access to my culture or my people in a meaningful way.

Recently I found out that my father’s father was born in Calcutta, and my father’s ancestral lands are just 280 km north from there, in India, but I’ve never been. Due to partition, religious lines created mercurial state lines and borders that never existed before forcing people to migrate to lands they’d never known before… imagine the separation, what that does to a people… think of what’s happening in Gaza right now.

Hirak Raje Deshe is a futurist comedy but it’s also about information, language, and how people are (or aren’t) educated when a mythical king decides to close down the schools because “Jaanaar kono shesh naai, jaanaar chestaa brithaa taai (Learning is endless, so it is useless).” Yet another famous line from the film, that my dad repeats multiple times in our conversation, is: “Araa joto beshi porhay, toto beshi jaanay, toto kom maanay. The translation is “the more they study, the more they know, the less they obey.” This is kind of how I was raised, even though I don’t think my father ever anticipated that his daughter would become who I am… but as an educator… it makes sense that he raised me to question, to challenge authority… to think for myself.

It brought me to tears when he told me, right after sharing this quote, that his devotion would always be to the students. It made me think of every staff member that has been supporting and defending their students’ rights across US campuses to protest for Palestine. So many professors are being fired - even well-known educators like Stephen Thrasher from Northwestern. The anti-repression is scary but it’s also apart of it. For what else is possible after fascism other than revolution?

In Readings, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, another famous Bengali, reads and deconstructs texts with an eye on social justice. On teaching in a university setting, she writes: “The radical emphasis cannot be simply on explaining the political information or claiming the right to information. Information is not enough. You have to train minds that can deal with information.”

screenshot for Kneecap

Recently, I watched the film Kneecap, a film about the Irish language, but also about the Northern Irish hip-hop band, Kneecap, who started making music in the Irish language a few years ago. There is an incredible line in the film that is repeated, “Every word of Irish spoken is a bullet fired for Irish freedom.”

It reminds me of this poem that I recently read by renowned Bengali Muslim poet and writer, Sufia Kamal, entitled, “Our Language: The Language of Bengal,”

For our language many have died,

drawn from the arms of our mother

but down the road, smeared with their blood

I hope freedom will come to this land:

the simple language of a simple people

Will meet the demands of this our land.

This moves me, maybe because it reminds me how the fight for freedom, self-determination, and the fight for language is universal. This gives me hope because it reminds me that there’s a collectivism, a movement that builds every day, despite how ugly things continue to get, we are unifying in our struggles together—again. They (Western governments, the elites) quashed this in the 60s / 70s during the global liberation movement… but since October, I’ve been feeling it again.

We are beginning to understand, slowly, that our livelihood is about protecting each other. When we fight for not just ourselves, but everyone, we learn how to be better humans, maybe more human.

I want to share a few stories about Kamal that recently much moved me very much, and brought me a sense of hope amidst such hopelessness.

The first is that once, during a meeting with Ayub Khan (the former piece of shit president of Pakistan), in a room full of other social elites, he commented that ordinary people are like beasts and as such, not fit to be given franchise. Kamal apparently stood up and remarked, “If the people are beasts then as the President of the Republic, you are the king of the beasts.”

The second is that when Zillur Rahman, the then regional director of Radio East Pakistan, forwarded a paper to Kamal to sign with the statement “In 1971 no massacre took place in Bangladesh” she refused. When Rahman threatened her with, “If you don't give your signature then it might create a problem both for you and your son-in-law.” She told him she didn't care for her life, “I would rather die than put my signature on the false statement.”

What gives me hope today is other people’s bravery. It is other people’s conviction to stand up and say “No!” This also makes it easier for me to do the same. Apparently, during the liberation war, Kamal actively but secretly helped freedom fighters, collecting medicine and food and delivering them, she used to go to the hospital with food and medicine for injured people. The Pakistani army kept a strong watch on her, but she still helped, ignoring all the risks. Eventually, they did kill her son-in-law, but that never stopped her from speaking.

She was never afraid, despite such atrocity, even though this, Pakistan’s war on Bengal - the people and the language - is reportedly (also) one of the highest records of genocidal rape in the history of the world. Children to elderly women were all raped by the Pakistani Army, reportedly up to 400,000 women in the space of one year.

Kamal’s life was on the line in a very real way—but she still spoke up.

This gives me hope.

This is the lineage of my people. Like Kamal, I am also not afraid.

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I know this newsletter is a bit convoluted. My mind has been everywhere, looping through history and time. During an Astrology reading with my sweet friend Laura Kumi Chung a few weeks ago was a revelation. She told me I was from the future, I guess something I have always kind of suspected (this world is isolating and lonely, I’ve spent much of my life craving love but feeling like an alien, from out of space) here to help the world. Makes sense, this person you see today is the person I’ve been my whole life. But these days I also feel rooted in the past, rooted in my ancestors, in my ancestral lineage that keeps me going.

Something electrifying happened as I watched the Bangladeshi student movement rupture the world — my father’s determination ringing in my ears — these students gave me hope, my own people gave me hope about a future I so desperately want for us. One where we are liberated, where we are free, one where women and children and protected, one where we can speak our own languages or our own profound tongue. One where our resources can be used to feed everyone - not funnel wars and make the elite even richer via our bodily sacrifice. Ayub Khan’s words are just but a reflection of the elites who see the rest of us as sacrificial for their greed, but it doesn’t have to be this way. It shouldn’t be this way.

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Last week I read a story about a fossilized ear bone that was unearthed in a cave in Spain and was revealed to belong to a Neanderthal child who lived with Down syndrome until the age of six.

This is what got me: the find suggested that community members cared for and looked after the child, who lived at least 146,000 years ago. That they protected the child, knowing that they had extra needs, which means that this community adapted to the child’s needs.

I couldn’t stop crying as I read this piece. A moment of hope through all this savagery, this template of the world that’s gone asunder, lost, cold, broken from ourselves, our purpose and the Earth.

We deserve to adapt. We deserve to adapt into societies that care. In Who Is Wellness For? I posited exactly this… that the future is care, it’s the only way that can be sustained. We must adapt to make space for people with needs - disabled folks, refugees, folks escaping war, people with chronic illnesses, trans and queer people, the elderly. A few years ago, my father told me he wanted to make an elderly home in Bangladesh for elderly people to die with dignity, especially for people who might not have families who could take care of them. I think about that all the time.

There’s so much I still need to learn about how to be human, how to expand with love, how to forgive, how to move with more care… strangely, this humbles me and I feel less and less overwhelmed by all the ways I’m not yet the best version of myself, knowing this internal revolution will also mirror the social revolution that we are very much apart of. This work can/will take a lifetime… I know… but I just want you to know, dear reader, that I care… and that the rest of my life will be a pursuit of this. The reality is that we owe so much more to ourselves and each other and it’s time more of us committed to what that looks like, for real.

I keep thinking about the quote I read from Ruth Gilmore Wilson, the prison abolitionist, whose work has had a huge impact on me. When she talks about abolition she expresses that “it is about presence, not absence. It’s about building life-affirming institutions.” Sophie K. Rosa, author of Radical Intimacy, agrees: “Our normative modes of relating and living often fall short — both in meeting our intimate needs and in allowing us to form and build the kinds of relationships that could support our struggles for a future of abundance, rather than recreate the privation of the status quo.” We owe it to ourselves to hold each other to adapt and build life-affirming institutions that are not built on theft, greed and forced enslavement.

Today, I ask you to care a little deeper, a little harder to commit more and more to this beautiful world we all live in. Think of that child with down syndrome. I want to live a world where love like that exists as a status quo.

I recently finished my third book of poems, entitled God of Fruit, and I will leave you with the final lines of the book:

We loved once. 

I know 

we can 

do it again.

love,

fa

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