And now's the time, the time is now

I keep wishing this was a more casual tone I could strike here on my writing, but I feel like I’m always trying to prove something, a point, an idea, to be above reproach. I am trying to win. That’s the problem. I’m always trying to make a point, but I don’t always want to. There’s an unravelling that’s happening to me, not in an emotional instability way, well, not yet, but in a consistent unlearning. I am surprised not necessarily at why I am shedding, but what has constructed me, what ideas are harbored in my psyche, influenced by my upbringing, my schooling and most insidious, living in the United States. 

The phrase ‘connective tissue’ has been rattling around my head for months. Connective tissue is our sinew, tendon, membrane, even our bones. It’s what gives us structure, what holds us together, it supports our bodies and protects our organs. I always think of it in terms of animals, their tougher working parts and the techniques to render these cuts tender and delicious. But lately I’ve been thinking about it in regards to my thought process and how I get from one place to another, regardless of how disparate they may seem.

I recently read the book “Small Fires: An Epic in the Kitchen” by Rebecca May Johnson, the first book in Alicia Kennedy’s book club. I don’t know if I would have read this book, at least not right now, without this prompting. I’ve never been a part of a book club, when I say that I mean I have never wanted to, I run from them. Ungenerous, I know, but you can’t control who joins, what they think is a good idea and how much they want to share. But it’s Kennedy’s book club, I trust her, even though like the middle-aged delinquent I am, I didn’t join any discussions. There in spirit, so goes my tombstone.

This book “Small Fires,” it is fantastic. Ostensibly, it is about making the same recipe over and over again. Johnson is a cook and an academic, she writes about process, gender and repetition, genius and intellect, the body, work and home. It’s about everything. It’s about nothing. It is truly about life, and the mind. It’s about a tomato sauce recipe. It is the only moment that has made me consider re-reading The Odyssey. The way it moves, it moves like my brain, the thoughts when I’m in the kitchen, how a kitchen defies the compartmentalization we depend upon, the binaries we live by. And that, amongst a million other definitions, is what I’m talking about when I discuss connective tissue.

In the January 25 issue of the Nation, Palestinian-American writer, human rights attorney and professor Noura Erakat joined four other Palestinian writers about what a day in each of their lives looks like¹. In her January 24th Instagram post about this roundtable, Erakat writes “It was really hard to write and even harder to decide to publish. Ultimately, I did it because memoir is a form of feminist method. And also because I thought about what we are leaving for the future from this period. It is important to know, not only what we thought, but also how we felt.” 

I think the general consensus is that the stories of people’s lives isn’t as reliable as the statements of their government. There’s no greater example of how the lives of people are secondary more than what is happening in Gaza, over 30,000 people killed, over 13,000 of this number are children. The manufactured famine isn’t just because the supplies on the aid truck don’t match the paperwork perfectly, is it? Bureaucracy serves its purpose. I watch the news, listening to AIPAC-funded politicians and their insipid talking points, the same empty language, upholding the same dangerous narrator.

How could this be the same Gaza? It feels like if we were actually listening and paying attention to what is happening to people on the ground, we would realize that nothing would justify this brutality. But here we are, on the precipice of 6 months of this war, and I don’t know what more people need to see to understand it needs to stop. Except, there is a world that requires this disconnect to function and flourish, to diminish the lives of people to gain more power, more resources and more money.

Memoir is a form of feminist method. These words now reverberate in my brain in perpetuity. I keep thinking about the male professors who disparaged the confessional poetry of Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, Sharon Olds, their words, like they were follies. How it always feels like those who talk about history talk about governments, actions, orders, laws, aggressions, but rarely our lives. Like somehow the facts of our existences is not history itself. Our stories, they are the voices, the forms, the styles, especially for those of us outside of the status quo. Memoir is our method, the intersection of the individual and the perhaps invisible policies that shape our world. To think your life is not influenced by the state and its politics is either a privilege or a delusion, most likely both.

We are both the experiment and the conclusion, we are what happens when. There are moments when I think we’re getting there, wherever there is, just somewhere better I think, and then there’s the other moments. But still, we don’t stop.

1. https://www.thenation.com/article/world/what-does-it-mean-to-be-palestinian-now/