Today, here in Boston, I received a call from one of my people in my Indigenous village in the West Bank.[1] My people called me to cry together, to be present to the genocide in Gaza, to hold each other and all the pain and horror we feel in our bones. During this same phone call, we celebrated the birthday of an adored member of our community. Even in this time, we were present for the anniversary of birth, loving Palestinian life, remembering and honoring our intergenerational perseverance. Over the phone, we spoke together about how we can find the expansiveness of spirit to be present for children’s lives, for birth, for each other, in times genocide. We cried for all our Palestinian babies massacred and our families facing annihilation by Israeli colonial violence. We remember the words of Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish, who wrote: “Love is born a living creature before it becomes an idea…”
What does it take to love our babies, our living, and our dead in the midst of Israel’s genocidal colonial conquest? How do we care for our massacred bodies and all the collective residues of horror as our people are so violently thrown out of human consideration? When can we release our tears and let them fall free? This is not grief. This is our revolutionary, Indigenous love fighting against the apocalyptic violence of genocide. And when we love like this, anchored in Palestinian feminist praxis, we live and die with dignity, and we become the freedom we are demanding.
