Pause—Don’t Look Away

It’s the first week of December and classes have just resumed after a ten-day break occasioned by Thanksgiving. In addition to being the mostpopular holiday in the United States (according to Yougov Public Data), Thanksgiving is also the most widely recognized holiday in the workplace (U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics), with more than 97% of workers across the private and public sectors getting a paid day off. These two pieces of data are not unrelated; the one is made true by the other in a country where our value is so often determined by our labor and our labor is so rarely rewarded with health insurance or paid time off.

A word and occasion like Thanksgiving might be worth pausing on, lingering over. It might help us think about our failures in language and in living, which, as Toni Morrison and many others have pointed out, are inextricably linked. Our language and our living. How we do language together as an element of how we do life together. Or to invoke June Jordan, “You cannot write lies and write good poetry.” Thanksgiving is one such lie—this word welded of two words, a linguistic joining that might be beautiful if it weren’t for the violent history it elides: the forced displacement, the attempted extermination, and the ongoing deracination.

In 2023, the spectacle of American Thanksgiving coincided with the declaration of a six-day “humanitarian pause” of “hostilities” by the Israeli military against the population of Gaza. It checks out that the Biden administration would encourage Netanyahu to implement such a “pause” at precisely the moment when many Americans gather to celebrate a sanitized story of cross-cultural connection and exchange, otherwise understood to be the ethnic cleansing of Indigenous communities by colonial settlers in North America. The irony here shouldn’t escape us: pausing (looking away from) the current U.S.-backed genocide of Palestinians to celebrate (look away from) the genocide this country was founded on. Pause.

Pause is a button we press on the remote control so as not to miss anything when we’re watching a film and stop to boil water for tea or let the cat back inside or relieve our bladders. Sometimes it’s what I say to my students when I realize the bell is about to ring and we haven’t finished our work for the day: “Let’s pause here and we’ll come back to this tomorrow.” This sort of pause—saying the word, doing the pausing—is offered up as reassurance, an act of care, because it suggests continuation. Whatever disruption we experience is temporary: Fear not, we will be able to finish what we started. (Finish: a word haunted by Ezra Yachin’s voice as he addressed Israeli troops before the ground invasion of Gaza on October 14, 2023: “Finish them off and don’t leave anyone behind”).

It occurs to me that we might also invoke a pause during a moment of difficulty, for example when we feel stuck during a hard conversation with a loved one. A pause here can be understood as a measure of de-escalation to prevent further conflict or harm and to ensure room for repair. “Let’s pause this conversation, I’m feeling overwhelmed and need to reset. Can we come back to this later?” Here the pause serves as a mechanism of comfort, and comes with a promise that we will resume. The pause invokes spaciousness, patience, a willingness to shelve something for a more resourced future moment, an ability to recognize one’s own limitations. “I love you and I want to come back to this, can we do that?”

But how are we to understand this word in the first context, the humanitarian pause amid attempted annihilation? When the pause was declared, more than 14,000 Palestinians had already been killed. Today, the official death toll exceeds 62,000—this figure climbing all the time. How are we to practice our language and our living while we exist within and alongside this deployment of the word, alongside sentences seeming to suggest that one can temporarily suspend atrocity and that this is a perfectly reasonable suggestion, a right course of action, even a generous peacemaking gesture, which after four or five or six days will come to an end, at which point the destruction of life by land, air, and sea will resume as if inevitably?

I don’t need to enumerate the ways: the 2,000 pound bombs, the obliteration of essential infrastructure in the besieged Gaza strip—medical, educational, residential, commercial, agricultural. The deliberate starvation, the obstruction of lifesaving aid. The first polio outbreak in a quarter century. The very existence of the word scholasticide, a term coined by Professor Karma Nabulsi during the 2009 Israeli assault on Gaza, referencing the pattern of Israeli attacks on Palestinian scholars, students, and schools dating back to the Nakba of 1948. Behind the words I type are teenagers and grandmas and two-year-olds and newborns and neighbors and grandfathers and godparents and middle-schoolers and widows and newlyweds and lovers and gardeners and poets and bakers and brothers. Their hands, their hair, their eyes. Their spit. Their teeth. Their first and final words. Their games and crushes and secrets. May they rest in eternal power and peace. May our murdered loved ones live on in memory indestructible, and illuminate the path for us to follow toward life, may—after Lucille Clifton from “Blessing the Boats”—the wind love their backs, as they go from this to that. And with the clarity of Fadwa Tuqan in “Enough for Me,” may we remember the physical Earth as our principal repellent against the violence of the State, the land being a final sanctuary:

Enough for me to die on her earth
be buried in her
to melt and vanish into her soil
then sprout forth as a flower
played with by a child from my country.

(trans. Naomi Shihab Nye with Salma Khadra Jayyusi)

And what of those who survive the State, those who are surviving daily? What do we say to the child who has, in an instant or over many months, lost her entire family? Correction: the State has obliterated her family. What is the safety plan for the terrible category of survivor that has emerged since this onslaught began: the WCNSF—Wounded Child, No Surviving Family? The real material of catastrophe is absent from this shorthand. Are we meant to accept this engineered result of disaster, to shake our heads and carry on? Wounded Child, No Surviving Family.

Nothing here is inevitable, nor is it abstract. The losing, breaking, maiming, and wounding are thoroughly preventable, each of the victims worthy of utmost protection from the start. Over 1,200 lines—that is, entire families—have been erased from the civil registry. Multigenerational trees, memory, gossip, storytelling, eight centuries of tending to the grove. Gardens, libraries, spoons, bird’s nests, seedlings. Here is the banality of evil. What will we tell the children? That we made up sets of initials to label conditions we created for profit? What exactly is the function of a humanitarian pause for the child who wakes to this “wounded” world without her siblings, parents, grandparents, her aunts and uncles and cousins? Who will tell her the story of her name? I make a wish for her comfort and protection. For her courage and safety. May we live to join our hands around her. May we fathom for her a refuge and a family, the “nonnormative notion of family” that Roger Reeves describes in his essay “Intimate Freedoms, Intimate Futures”: "one that widens as needed." Let the impossible be real.

To pause, finally, I think, suggests relief. Implies stopping, even if temporarily. But there’s no end to what has been done since October 8th and long before. There will be no relief from the difficulty of bearing this. Not for those who live presently at the hands of the brutal Israeli regime. Not for the immediate victims and perpetrators of unspeakable violence and cruelty. Not for their kin. Not for any of us who bear witness to the depravity of so-called war from afar, who see what is being wrought upon language and life, body and earth, breath, bread, and water; who work daily in American institutions, publish in American literary spaces, teach in American schools, pay American taxes. No one gets out of the empire unmarked. Each one of us is implicated in the machinery of this destruction, and the destruction of this machinery requires each one of us.

When I say there’s no end, I don’t mean that atrocity is inevitable or that we should resign ourselves to the violence of imperialism, powerless to stop it. Nor am I suggesting that the endlessness of this horror eclipses the tenacity and brilliance (the life, fight, sex, dance, quiet, and song) in our struggles. None of this will outpace our commitment to the sanctity of life or the restoration of wonder. I don’t believe that our capacity for wounding and being wounded supersedes our capacity for repair, or care, or beauty. I just mean, endless. As in, interminable, in the way Christina Sharpe asks in In the Wake: “How does one mourn the interminable event?” Or as the narrator on the last page of Toni Morrison’s Sula reminds us: circles and circles of sorrow. Sorrow without end. Even as we create another possible world, even as we help get each other free. Finding that release only in the interstices and imagination, in the unsayable and uncapturable and unseen, we will have to learn again and again to live in our sorrow. How will we comfort ourselves there? What will it look like to bear our suffering well?