“The disasters numb within us.” -- Denise Levertov
The flash of black and white and rusty orange caught my eye as I drove the winding road on an April morning. It took me a moment to register that what I was seeing was a dead Fox lying in the brown grass.
I pulled over and got out of my car. Kneeling down, I placed a hand on her still soft fur, telling her my sorrow that I could not be with her in her moments of pain, and willing her spirit to feel my love now. Then, speaking words in an old language not my own, I opened the gate of death for her to pass through.
Returning to my car, I saw that I had parked beside an old family cemetery. There was a clean, bright flag by one of the graves, no doubt the grave of a veteran. I was in a place of remembrance. And so was the Fox.
---
Every day I pass by the dead on the side of the road. Usually I say a silent prayer in passing. Sometimes I forget. Does it matter to them?
The culture around me tells me it doesn’t. But the spirit I felt lingering with that Fox, and the way I felt that spirit’s departure when a death rite was given tells me otherwise.
---
So it is, too with the mass slaughter unfolding in the world. Especially in Gaza.
I thought of this all this morning when I was sitting with the news that a woman named Shima and her son Abdel were killed by the Israeli Defense Forces (along with Shima’s husband/Abdel’s father, whose name I do not know. Shima was the daughter of Palestinian poet Refaat Alareer. Abdel was born this month, not long after his grandfather was assassinated.
These four deaths stood out to me among the 34,388 that have occurred since Israel launched its offensive in Gaza in the wake of the horrific attacks Hamas and others launched against Israeli civilians on October 7. What was different? The quality of attention.
---
(I am transported back now to a room in Bogota in the early 2000’s, sitting with a delegation of human rights activists, listening to the testimony of Hector Mondragon, an economist working with unions and indigenous communities who had suffered permanent nerve damage when he was hung by his hands by Colombian soldiers who had been trained at the U.S. Army School of the Americas. Hector recounted that more than a hundred of his friends and relatives had been murdered by soldiers and death squads – it was the first time I ever encountered the level of loss that is now common among Palestinians and the Palestinian diaspora.
The exact words Hector spoke have faded, but their essence is burned into my heart: “My murdered compañeros were killed twice. Once by bullets, and once by a world that refused to acknowledge their lives and their deaths.”)
---
I do my best not to be complicit in the second killing of the tens of thousands dead in Gaza – and try, truthfully with less success, not to let the ways I speak of their deaths become a tacit participation in the second killing of 1,400 Israelis. But just as with the dead by the side of the road, the ubiquity of the suffering makes it hard for me to be truly present, even when I share individual stories relayed by those who witnessed the killings.
Many people I know tell me that they have stopped watching the news from Gaza because they feel powerless to do anything in the face of the horror.
I understand that feeling of powerlessness. It is especially amplified in the United States where our November election will pit President Biden, who continues to send 2,000 pound bombs to Israel while occasionally expressing some degree of sorrow for the children those bombs are killing, against former President Donald Trump and popular eugenicist* Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. who both say the U.S. should be backing the Israeli government even more strongly (thought the mercurial Trump has his moments where he halfway begins to say otherwise.)
I know something about that sense of powerlessness myself. I dedicated more than half my life to confronting my country’s war machine head on. When lobbying and electoral politics failed, I put my own body and my own freedom on the line -- pouring ashes at the entrance to one weapons plant to symbolize the rubble its weapons would make of homes and bodies, blockading another with friends holding a banner declaring it “closed for disarmament,” attempting the citizen’s arrest of the CEO of Raytheon, carrying Hector Mondragon’s words on a banner over the fence at Fort Benning – time and again being arrested and a little over a half dozen times going to jail.
What stopped me wasn’t the threat of longer imprisonment – I do not enjoy incarceration, of course, but I learned profound and important things from listening to the stories the mostly poor men in jail will tell to someone they feel like they can trust (something that I think resulted from a combination of a humble willingness to listen, an imposing stature that made me a little less prone to being messed with, and the fact that as a political prisoner I was not seen as either a potential snitch or an ally of anyone’s jailhouse enemies.) What stopped me was a loss of the faith that sustained me. As long as I believed that I was being a “holy fool” for a Christ who was coming at the end of time to bring perfect justice, I felt a certain invincible hope. When that eschatology (and all eschatology) vanished from my world, I was left with the question of whether my actions held any meaning at all. Facing that sense of futility was more than I could bear.
It is a daily struggle to keep that futility from turning into despair – one that is now accomplished by faith in the living world to continue flowering even if our civilization collapses and takes countless other species with it. But I cannot be present to that flowering if I am not also present to death.
---
Erasure and numbing are, of course, the purpose for mass graves. From Vinegar Hill to Sciobarín to Wounded Knee to Dachau to Putumayo to Iraq to Gaza (and hundreds of places in between) mass graves exist to make the dead invisible to the living.
(I think they serve to make the dead invisible to their killers too. I remember standing on a military base at the edge of the rainforest with a General who was proudly showing the priest and the bishop I was traveling with the image of Our Lady of Guadalupé that he carried in his wallet, speaking of what a good Catholic he was. I later learned that death squads operating from that base had buried 211 people in a single mass grave not far away. Diplomatic cables revealed that the U.S. was fully aware of his connection to the death squads the entire time that we were arming the units he commanded.)
---
The reality of the presence of the unremembered dead is present in an element of folklore that emerged in Ireland in the generation after the genocide of An Gorta Mór (The Great Hunger) – an féar gortach (the hungry grass.)
During the Great Hunger, many people fell down dead from hunger and disease and were carted away to be buried in pits. (Some 10,000 were buried in the pits of Sciobarín alone.) In the years that followed, the story emerged that in the places where these people died, there was “hungry grass.” Crossing a field at night, if you stepped among the hungry grass, you might be paralyzed or you might be cursed to waste away from insatiable hunger. The only protection was to carry with you a bit of food for the dead.
It strikes me that especially in North America, so many of our houses, our businesses, our schools, our churches are built over places where people died anonymously in the onslaught of genocide. Where this is not literally true it is figuratively true – we live in an economy based on the process of looting that Marx called “primitive accumulation.” And we are indeed, collectively stuck amidst the hungry grass, unable to move from a position that keeps us spiritually wasting away.
The only solution is to feed the dead our attention, our prayers, our love. We do not need to know their names to do this. We only need to honor their lives and their deaths.
And to stop turning our world into one gaping, unmarked mass grave.
_________________________________________________
*-- Kennedy has, on numerous occasions, called the existence of Autistic people (like me) a “tragedy” tantamount to the Holocaust. He has apologized for seeming insensitive to the families of those murdered in the Holocaust, but has doubled down on his views about Autistic people. He speaks of the moment when someone “becomes Autistic” (something that does not happen – Autism is a genetic variant in the human population going back to the dawn of our species, so we are Autistic from the moment of conception) as the moment when “their mind is gone.” Likely Green Party Presidential candidate Jill Stein espouses similar views in a less crass way.
So much here - thank you. It puts more behind the food I try to leave for the dead. And wow, was I unaware of Kennedy's statements -
Powerful writing. Thank you for your activism and for the connections you make as a writer.