This is an excerpt from Sherene Seikaly’s Nakba in the Age of Catastrophe, which definitely deserves to be read in its fullness. The wild thing is that this piece was written five months before October 7, 2023.

In the age of catastrophe, Palestine is a paradigm. It can teach us about our present condition of the permanent temporary: we are all unclear about what the future holds. We are all suspended in time with no end in sight. We are all uncertain if there is any “normal” to which we can return.  For some, this realization is a rupture.  For most, violence and dispossession are not interruptions. They are markers of the temporal and spatial suspension that make up the everyday.  

Palestine is not a laboratory. It is not a site of sympathy. It cannot be reduced to a sterile problem. Palestine is a place of abundance, an abundance of lessons about persisting in the looped and looping time of the present. Like many other struggles, Palestine reminds us, in the words of Jodi Byrd that the “post has not yet arrived.” There is no postcolonial, postracial, postZionist.  We cannot await a secular salvation or a messianic apocalypse. We are in the apocalypse. 

We might dig deep into various historical traditions, training, and habits to cultivate a response to catastrophe. We can hold close the lessons of scholars like Rosemary Sayigh who taught us about storytelling as fugitive historiography. We can read her alongside Deborah Coen, who reminds us that in the nineteenth century, scientific descriptions of earthquakes were synthesized from eyewitness accounts of ordinary laypeople. These sources were called “felt reports.” We can –and must—once again “listen for the stories in the information and the information in the stories.” 

We return, first and foremost, to the Palestinians of the present, holding ground under immense duress, living life amidst the relentless force to destroy them. We return to the elderly shaykh making his way to fajir prayers as the Israeli arsenal rained down on Gaza City. We look to families breaking their fast in the Aqsa compound, the ones celebrating Easter, and to the children playing in, through, and despite the brutal realities of settler governance, shaping fugitive joy. In the words of Indigenous scholar, Kyle Whyte “Indigenous peoples already inhabit what our ancestors would have likely characterized as a dystopian future.”  When we imagine the future, we do it from a place that is already dystopic. 

In these ruins of general catastrophe, we can find arenas of shared possibility across difference. We can undertake eclectic and fearless dances of defiance. Together in our age of catastrophe, we just might survive to tell the story.