“In dark times…let’s be crazy enough to be called crazy like the Argentinian Madres de la Plaza del Mayo, the locas, the nuts, who refuse to forget in times of obligatory amnesia.”
—Eduardo Galeano
Matanzas, Cuba, where both my abuelo and the rumba were born, is a strange and beautiful little city of bridges and winding streets, and its name means ‘massacre.’ Whose blood, in a region soaked in it, warranted such a tribute? Colonizers, of course — about thirty of them. They were crossing a river to attack a local indigenous camp — which is to say, to commit more genocide — and wearing heavy Spanish armor for the occasion. In an act of resistance and, let’s be honest, tactical brilliance, the fishermen taking them across tipped the boat, and all that armor pulled the conquistadors to the depths. War crimes averted, for the moment, anyway. Ultimately, the Spanish conquest of Latin America claimed 8 million indigenous lives, but it’s the thirty drowned genocide bros that got a city named to commemorate their deaths, all to make sure we never get the chance to forget them, and, more than that, to remind the world that their lives are priced at a far higher value than any of their victims.
And we see this same cruel arithmetic of empire, race, and memory play out over and over to this day. Immediately after 9/11, there was no escaping the endless state-sponsored, media-regurgitated insistence that we never forget. How could we? The propaganda machine refused to let us. It’s not that we should forget the people who died that day, it’s that that degree of mandated remembering pretends to be about the victims, about grieving, about honor, but is always, always a thinly disguised call to arms, a demand that we grieve so our grief can be manufactured into consent, and that consent is for the worst wars to be waged in the name of our grief. Indeed, the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan came soon after, and brought the deaths of millions.
This enforcement of memory comes at a cost, and that’s the part of it we must never shut up about. The first, most pressing price is in the lives destroyed by the wars waged in the name of these national mythologies. Memory, according to the state and systems of capital, is a finite resource. We can’t keep track of all the mountains of dead whose bones our cities are built upon, so we better pick a few useful ones that fit the narrative and toss the rest into oblivion for good. It’s not just that the US lays claim on who remember, it makes sure to tell us who we also must forget.
There was no oil rich country to invade four years later, in the aftermath of Katrina, and most of the victims were Black, so the state and media didn’t insist we remember. We had to do that ourselves. And so folks here did and continue to do what communities of color have done throughout US history — commit to the radical act of remembrance in the face of obligatory amnesia. With songs and stories, murals, and dance parties and documentaries and parades and dinners, we celebrate the ones we lost — to violence, floods and fires, catastrophes more man-made than natural — knowing if we don’t, no one else will. If we don’t tell their stories, they’ll become numbers, or nobody, or — worse — cartoon villains in the ongoing origin story of this broken country.
In Israel, it wasn’t enough to ethnically cleanse Palestinians and set up an apartheid state to oppress them. There, the price of memory has been legislated: organizations that commemorate the Nakba — the forced removal of Palestinians from their land — are subject to loss of funding, a form of social control Yifat Gutman and Noam Tirash call “forced forgetting.” A related law appropriated the term nakba for use in reference to Mizrahi Jews, legally mandating that their plight eclipse the Palestinians’.
And today, as the genocide in Gaza grinds on, pundits in the West chortle and pat each other on the back for demanding that Palestinians “forget their historical grievances and move on” in order to progress toward peace.
Again and again, over and over, the most powerful demand the rest of us cherish their memories at the cost of our own.
We see it in the censuring of Rashida Tlaib over a willfully misunderstood phrase, while the very direct unambiguous language of genocide from Lindsay Graham calling for Gaza to be turned into a parking lot goes ignored, along with the very clear language of genocide from the government committing the genocide.
This hit home in a personal way the other night:
It is not for us as Jews to insist Palestinians make us feel comfortable with their demands for freedom while bombs fall on them in our name.
Palestinians have explained this phrase over and over, with great depth and thoughtfulness, and the still the lies persist. Even as bombs fall, as they worry about who in their family has survived the night, as entire bloodlines are wiped out, they’ve been forced to pause their grieving to explain it. This is, once again, the policing of memory, the reconfiguration of a founding myth to suit imperial demands. We must say no.
And for those of us who live in the US, a country literally built on a foundation of mass murder, a country that sings from sea to shining sea every chance it gets in obedient praise of that ongoing massacre — who are we to lecture anyone on genocide and geography?
It’s not just “the state” that mandates memory and forgetfulness, of course — it’s also we the artists who carry that charge. We love to imagine ourselves as rebels, outcasts, free thinkers, but so much of our cultural output in the US has reinforced the narrative demands of empire, dictated whose memories matter and whose get twisted into villains, vixens, and clowns. Edward Said, who changed so many lives with his brilliant work, including mine, and must be watching over this moment solemnly, traced the inextricable ties between the European literary canon to conquest and destruction in Culture and Imperialism, and the throughlines continue to today. Accordingly, Hollywood has largely united behind Israel through funding, normalization, and blacklisting, even as it commits atrocity after atrocity in full public view.
As a historical fantasy writer, I search for inspiration where the archival record ends. Sometimes, when empire obligates amnesia, all we are left with is imagination. It is a heartbreaking kind of reach into darkness, but it’s also an antidote to silence, to forgetting, to giving in. And anyway, imagination is a muscle that requires constant exercise, especially now, with so many tanks rolling, white phosphorous in the skies over Palestine, tear gas in the skies over Atlanta, the propaganda machine working overtime to dictate exactly who we mourn and how.
From the besieged streets of Gaza, the journalist Bisan urges us to imagine what victory, what freedom looks like: “You are changing the world, restoring the balance of power, and rejecting colonialism and occupation, and if you continue to demonstrate and reject, you will be able to punish the criminals, writing history in a fair way for oppressed peoples..”
We are so much bigger than the forces of forgetfulness. Our imagination knows no bounds, and together we can envision a future where the slaughter in the Congo, Yemen, Sudan, Armenia, Palestine, cease to be. We can imagine a free Palestine, and so it shall come to pass, and the price of that freedom will not be—never has been—the safety of Jews, but rather the collapse of global systems of oppression, which are already racing headlong toward the dust.
We’re living through a tectonic global shift. It’s not just a readjustment, it’s a shatter-point. There is no turning back. It is, as Arundhati Roy told us about the Pandemic, a portal: the world we left behind is gone forever, and it’s up to us to imagine and create the one we’ll enter into.
Imagination is a muscle that requires constant exercise. We’ve all spent entire lifetimes ingesting that spiraling sense of destiny and doom that so many mainstream stories insist on; if we let it, that spiral becomes a cage, and hopelessness settles in. It takes courage to believe in the powers deep within us — not the ones that garner capital or clicks, but the true currents of creativity, genius, connectivity that unite us across the make-believe borders of nation states.
It takes practice, discipline, to imagine a future beyond empire, beyond oppression, beyond apartheid and forced amnesia. But it exists — not just in the realm of the imaginary, yet-to-be, but in the present and pasts that we’re not supposed to hold tight or discover. It lives in every act of resistance, the rallies breaking out across the world, every struggle for survival and freedom, all the long hidden histories of rebellion and joy even amidst destruction. We don’t need to conjure from scratch — the world beyond empire is all around us if we look for it. All we have to do is open our eyes, and remember, and rise.
LINKS:
Guante’s resource for artists who want to speak out on Palestine but aren’t sure how: https://racketmn.com/for-artists-and-musicians-who-want-to-speak-out-about-palestine-but-arent-sure-how
A moving open letter from Jewish students at Brown: https://www.browndailyherald.com/article/2023/11/an-open-letter-from-jewish-students
Writers Against the War on Gaza:
https://www.writersagainstthewarongaza.com/
And more links from
:SupportPalestine Action:
https://www.palestineaction.org
/
Dissenters against the War Machine:
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Apply pressure for a ceasefire now:
Take action with Jewish Voice for Peace:
https://www.jewishvoiceforpeace.org
/
Take action with the Palestinian Youth Movement:
https://palestinianyouthmovement.com/
Take action with IfNotNow:
https://www.ifnotnowmovement.org/
Support Boycots, Divestmest, and Sanctions: