In A Time of Endless Provocations

One horrible fact about human cognition we have been forced to learn over the last ten years is that terrifying and traumatic news, events and facts tend to crowd one another out, and if they come fast enough remembering the crimes and outrages of this week becomes impossible to remember during the next. Like a web browser drowning under pop-up windows, each new atrocity and absurdity appears, filling some part of our attention, eventually overlapping and displacing the previous story. It induces mania, confusion, depression, forgetting, despair. Eventually you give up.

This effect, reified as an intentional media strategy fascist creep Steve Bannon called "flooding the zone with shit", has become a military and foreign relations principle for the IOF. Over the last 11 months, beyond the ongoing and unbearable genocide in Gaza and increasingly the West Bank, Israel has fired missiles, carried out "targeted" assassinations, mass casualty bombings and various other acts of war on Syria, Iran, Iraq, Lebanon and Yemen, and not just attacks on isolated military outposts but strikes on civilian dense capitals of Tehran, Damascus, and once again Beirut.

Almost any of these events alone are provocations that would lead to the declaration of war, were it not for the looming threat of the US' military force being fully committed. Like a schoolyard bully who knows his older brother will come in if his victims ever fight back, Netanyahu and the IOF continue atrocity after atrocity, taunting and begging their neighbors to respond. From their perspective it's win-win. If the "regional war" begins in earnest, then the Likkud regime will be extended and the situation will finally change in a way that might prove advantageous, not to mention it will have the space to complete the ethnic cleansing of the Strip. But if they are not responded to, then Israel seemingly re-asserts its dominance over the region.

Each action makes anything like regional piece or coexistence more impossible, brings the collapse of Israel closer and closer, while each failure to induce out and out retaliatory warfare from their victims deepens the feeling of stalemate and impossibility. Surely this outrage is too much to bear. Surely this atrocity is a line too far. When it proves not to be, it normalizes.

The mass death and terror of the pager-bomb attack is yesterday's news. Today the IOF has carried out an airstrike in Beirut, hitting a residential building in a densely populated suburb where they claim Hezbollah leadership resides. In the meantime, Netanyahu, unable to achieve the impossible official war objectives (the complete defeat of Hamas, the return of all hostages [most have now died under Israeli action and bombardment], and the incredibly vague and ominous "guarantee that gaza will not be a threat") has added a fourth: the return of residents to the northern Israeli borderlands with Lebanon. This is, implicitly, a demand that Hezbollah surrender and stop fighting for Gaza, something that is at this point as unlikely as the surrender of Hamas.

Watching all this happen I feel a rage that sometimes morphs into a desire, I imagine yours may too, the desire to see this provocation responded to, to see someone strike back. Someone needs to do something! This bully needs to be punched in the fucking mouth, made to bleed. And then I play out the tape, the tit-for-tat and escalating declarations, the US and its aircraft carriers lurking in the Mediterranean, begging for a reason to scramble jets over Tehran.

I am glued to the news, uselessly, meaninglessly. Watching each impossible and unrecoverable trauma quickly summarized, headlined, consumed in the giant maw of social media discourse and the next news cycle.

What good is my analysis? Why do I even bother paying attention, when I don't even know how to go on as an individual? I am in this moment, (in all moments,) so grateful for Christina Sharpe, whose "The Shapes of Grief: Witnessing the Unbearable" has surfaced a way to write and think and struggle without pretending away the moment's impossibility, without posturing that we have more power or knowledge than we do.

I keep returning, over and over, to the couplet here, this moment we have been living through Sharpe captures in such few words:

Unbearable.

Unbearable, and entire populations are being forced to bear it anyway.

How do you bear the unbearable? You witness others doing it, admit that you don't understand how it works yet affirm that it does seem to occur, and then set to doing what we can do beside them, in solidarity and support. You destroy all polite fictions, all lies and easy solutions and self-seductions. You admit that you are in grief and that you can not bear it. But you reject and destroy everything you can that makes this unbearable for others, you do what you can to share the burden, the burden none of us can bear.

We should rid our writing of the domestication of atrocity, rid our writing of the tense that insists on the innocence of its perpetrators, the exonerative tense of phrases like “lives were lost” and “a stray bullet found its way into the van” and “children died.” We should rid our writing of this dreadful innocence. We should refuse the logic that produces a phrase like “human animals” and a “four-year-old young lady.”

Trans people know how to carry out this destruction of innocence, this anti-domestication. We do with our bodies what Sharpe calls on writers to do with our words. We're born of the knowledge and power and community of people who refuse the unbearable, we create joy and beauty and community and freedom in defiance of a social force that claims it is unreal, impossible, perverted, immoral. We abolish the people the world once named, and in doing we often destroy our material position, lose families and relationships and careers and so many other things that life is supposed to be about, we do it because if something is going to be unbearable at least it wont be a weight we put on ourselves.

This is hardly enough. Many of us don't make it. It remains unbearable. And yet we turn to one another, reach out and try to bear it. And in the trying we begin to glimpse what bearing it might look like.

We are living through seemingly endless epochs of grief, of horror. Many things in history have seemed endless; Nothing yet has proven to be. As long as it remains speakable, writable, imaginable, our freedom is realizable. This war will end, this regime will fall, this world cannot go on. We practice the new world now, a world where we can live, that we might begin doing so, and, from there, continue.