Alejandro Heredia

This Essay was written October 16, 2023

I am in between one sentence and another, that’s how small my world is when the war begins.

The characters in my novel are fighting a corrupt landlord. I try to imagine that level of oppression at the scale of millions of people, now and for over half a century of occupation. But my imagination is limited. So I check social media compulsively. I read articles. I watch videos, though not all of them, just the ones I can survive. I write to my friends. Sometimes I call them. I tell them about who’s not thinking hard enough. About the people so blinded by their grief they can’t see too far beyond it. I say things like, “we have to hold multiple truths at once.” I say, “we have to do the difficult thing, now and always.” I have very clear political views, which always align with the dispossessed. I have my big ideas about peace. But that first week of the war, I don’t post on social media. I don’t call my very catholic grandmother, who I’m sure has very strong ideas about who is the victim and who is the victimizer. In class, I ask my students to share their perspectives, but I barely share mine beyond something hackneyed and useless like, “read widely, this is a very complex issue.”

What useful thing could I say, anyway?

I think about June Jordan, who said in an interview once, “life is action. Inaction is death.” She might say, we all have something to contribute, even us writers paralyzed by pathological doubt. 

Here is what I see:

Screengrab One

A group of Palestinians leaving the north of Gaza with their bags on the back of a truck. The truck is in the middle of the road. They are going, going. In the center a woman puts her palm to her cheek. She is contemplating grief or she has a headache. We forget how the body becomes undone under severe stress. Next to her, another woman holds both hands over her eyes. Is she crying? Is she so grief stricken that she doesn’t want to see the ruble made of Gaza all around her as they go? On the back of this truck there is also a man, in the forefront, pointing toward something outside the frame. Maybe a building falling apart. Maybe a friend he forgot to say goodbye to. Maybe they’re passing the corner where he had his first kiss or the corner he saw his first bomb go off. A kiss or a bomb. He’s pointing to something of significance. In the back of the truck among children and men another two stand out. A boy, maybe 8 or 9. He looks directly at the camera, smiles, and holds up a peace sign. Another boy, older, maybe in his late teens or early twenties, does the same. Smile, gaze, peace sign. I think, could I manage a smile in the middle of war? I tell myself, forget what I can do. The point is that they can.

Screengrab Two

A group of people hold up a black sign with a phrase painted in white: cease fire. They are men and women, young and old. A few of them wear masks. They are risking everything to be there. The caption tells me most of these people are Jewish American. They are in the capital of their country, a particular country who has given billions of dollars for many years to fund the Israeli military. The protesters are mid-chant. Their smaller banners say, “Jews against genocide.” “No to war no to apartheid.” And, “My grief is not your weapon.” There they are, exercising their first amendment right, which is supposed to be so precious, so so American. In another clip a few seconds later these same people are getting arrested by the police officers their tax dollars fund. But in this particular photo they are standing together.

It is so easy. To hide behind the slogan of nation states. To choose one’s pain over clarity. To use one’s victimhood to subjugate another. Yet there they are, those Jewish American people, doing the difficult thing and demanding justice, even when they’re hurting.

My student suggests I’m being sentimental. “They more than anyone should know what the Palestinian people are going through. Why should anyone get a pat on the back for doing the just thing, when a whole people are being wiped off the face of the earth?” She might be right.

Screengrab Three

No people, just a map. At the top of the image, the website’s name, “Queering the Map.” The website is “a community-generated mapping project that geo-locates queer moments, memories and histories in relation to physical space.” In the backdrop, a flirty-pink map of Gaza. In the foreground, a message, which partially states:

“If I had known that bombs raining down on us would take you from me, I would have gladly told the world how I adored you more than anything. I’m sorry I was a coward.”

My mind has been so steadily trained by the media to think only of women and children, these archetypes of innocence. There is a particular version of oblivion for queer people. I forgot. I’m afraid of being sentimental again. Some people online suggest it could be fake, this post. So I dig around online and find a bit of clarity. Queering the map says they do not “take any user data, such as a contributor’s location or email address, so as to keep everything posted to the site completely anonymous.” Ostensibly, this means that anyone can write a message from anywhere. There is a possibility it could indeed be fake. This makes me feel good. I like that I’m not falling for everything I read online. Misinformation and propaganda are everywhere.

But then I think, fact or fiction, what does it matter? There are queer people in Gaza. That is the only thing that matters.

When I go to look for new messages theoretically coming out of Gaza, the website is gone. I get an error page. Where do the queer people of Gaza go, when they stop existing on a pretty pink map?

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At the end of the first week of the conflict – what people call a war, what others call a genocide – I finish a novel. I don’t know what the point of writing is, but when I finish I cry at my desk. I’ve worked hard for two and a half months, sacrificing time with family and friends and a host of other responsibilities to write with more focus and intensity than I ever have before. I’ve done something momentous. I’ve done nothing of consequence. I wonder, sitting at my desk, will I ever be courageous? Will I ever say something worth the privilege of these hours I spend filling up a blank page? I don’t know.

My student reminds me, there’s little time for feeling sad and small about one’s perceived lack of power. I have the immediate impulse, then, to make myself clear, if ambivalence is just as bad as siding with the conqueror. Power and freedom to the Palestinian people, I want to shout out from the rooftops. I change my curriculum to center Palestinian voices. I make space for my students to have difficult conversations. I do my best to do what June Jordan suggests: I take action.

I might even post something on social media one day soon, to prove to myself and others I’m participating. Not because a social media post changes anything. But to fulfill that childish need in me and all of us, to be seen doing good deeds.

But I end on a quieter, more complex truth, though we grow tired of that word:

Our governing bodies are failing us. Be they feigned democracies or “extremist groups,” here we are as a people, still led as a species by the most foolish, reactive, the most vengeful among us.