Author: mara.ahmed

“I am tired, my friend”

Ismail Al-Ghoul was a Palestinian journalist and Al Jazeera correspondent in Gaza. He was born in 1997 in Al-Shati refugee camp, north of Gaza City. A brilliant journalist who refused to leave, his reports became a mainstay of the news from the north of the Gaza Strip. He was assassinated along with his cameraman, Rami Al-Rifi, in Gaza City today. He was younger than my son.

“Let me tell you, my friend, that I no longer know the taste of sleep. The bodies of children and the screams of the injured and their blood-soaked images never leave my sight. The cries of mothers and the wailing of men who are missing their loved ones never fade from my hearing.

I can no longer bear the sound of children’s voices from beneath the rubble, nor can I forget the energy and power that reverberates at every moment, turning into a nightmare. It is no longer easy for me to stand before the rows of coffins, which are locked and extended, or to see the dead people more than the living who are fighting death beneath their homes, not finding a way out to safety and survival.

I am tired, my friend…”

More than 165 journalists have been killed in 10 months by the Israeli occupation.

a garish spectacle in paris

i will not watch the olympics when an apartheid state in the process of exterminating palestinian children is allowed to participate and flaunt its genocidal talents. but the images i’ve seen so far are from a dystopian novel, full of garish spectacle including a bloody, guillotined head. so disorienting/ nauseating when i’m also watching footage of medics in gaza collecting the soot-covered head of a little girl and placing it gently into a body bag next to her tiny beheaded body. this and then reading ridiculously servile posts from fb liberals about joe biden’s shining legacy and patriotic sacrifice. what a violently racist, warped world we live in folx. the west is a lurid collective death cult. ceasefire now.

i am with sonya

i am with her. sonya massey, a 36-year old black woman who called 9/11 for help and was shot in the head by a cop. she’s not the only black woman murdered by police in her own home. so were breonna taylor and atatiana jefferson not too long ago. and before that charleena lyles, korryn gaines and deborah danner.

did it matter who was in the white house when they were killed?

white supremacy is a bipartisan project. the death cult that applauds a war criminal fresh from butchering children in gaza, is the same racist system that slaughters black people in america. the utter dehumanization of palestinian children, so that their bodies become receptacles for untold savagery, means that brown and black bodies here at home are also stripped of rights and protections and will be equally open to incomprehensible brutality. not only that, they will be blamed consistently for their own extermination.

people of color in high places will not guarantee our safety. vote ur conscience, but pls look beyond mercenary politicians (of all skin tones and anatomies) for long term change. our survival depends on it.

i am with hind

i am with her. hind rajab, a 6-year old palestinian child who was trapped in a car with the bleeding corpses of six family members, all killed by israeli occupation forces. she was able to call for help before being shot by israeli soldiers with more than 300 bullets.

i am with the children of gaza who are being incinerated, shredded, and shot deliberately in the head by israeli snipers. see comments for more details.

of the 186,000 people killed in gaza (according to a lancet study), a disproportionately large number are kids. mountains and mountains of dead brown children.

how to describe the cringe-inducing tributes to genocide joe except as american exceptionalism? how to grasp the enthusiasm for top cop harris except as more of the same bipartisan imperial/ capitalist bs that has brought us to this ignominious place in history. there is a holocaust going on right now funded directly by our dollars.

end the genocide in gaza. isolate israel and throw it in the trash can of history for making a joke of international law. vote for candidates who articulate this as their priority. otherwise, who are we?

dialogue: a personal exploration of trauma related dissociation through song

so happy to attend my friend rene bouchard’s ‘dialogue: a personal exploration of trauma related dissociation through song’ at @industrymakers, a fantastic space for the arts in huntington, new york. rene writes songs and music, creates short films and animated collages, produces gorgeous artwork, and has the courage to talk about complex post traumatic stress disorder openly and visibly. brava rene <3

This is not the sun

Mariam Barghouti: Israel is using the American made (NY manufactured) bomb known as the “GBU-28”

This is a 4,000-pound (1814.3 kg) laser-guided “bunker busting” bomb. It is used by the US (was used in Iraq) and Israel

It is almost double the size of what Israel used in the beginning of the aggression the “BLU-109” – US bombs which weigh 1,927 lb (874 kg)

After 9 months of starvation and near complete destruction of Gaza, of killing some 186,000 Palestinians (according to new figures published by the Lancet) tonight Israel is dropping even HEAVIER and more destructive bombs

Do you register? Do you register the sick role the US is playing in perpetuating this genocide, while passing bills denying the American people transparency on how many are being killed with their tax dollars and on their behalf?

Photo from Nour Naim: This is not the sun, it’s a bomb being dropped on families in Gaza right now

More Whitney Biennial

3 more artists from the Whitney Biennial that I loved. The last artist in particular has truly moved me to think about our current apocalyptic times in a different way by subverting colonial language and the limited, dismal visions it embodies.

Kiyan Williams, born 1991 in Newark, NJ: In Williams’s outdoor sculpture Ruins of Empire /I or The Earth Swallows the Master’s House, the north facade of the White House, which is composed of earth, leans on one side and sinks into the floor… The labor history embedded in the dirt points to a fragility in our political foundations, while the earth’s erosion embodies a critique of institutionality at a moment when institutions are toppling.

Rose B. Simpson, born 1983, Santa Fe, NM: In Rose B. Simpson’s Daughters: Reverence, four figures gaze at one another, creating a kind of force field of protection and solidarity that stands in contrast to an unstable world. “My lifework,” Simpson has explained, “is a seeking out of tools to use to heal the damages I have experienced as a human being of our postmodern and postcolonial era-objectification, stereotyping, and the disempowering detachment of our creative selves through the ease of modern technology.”

Demian Diné Yazhi’, born 1983 in Gallup, NM, we must stop imagining apocalypse/genocide + we must imagine liberation, 2024: As a poet and activist, Dine Yazhi’ has thought about how to use a colonizer’s language against colonialism, noting that they “want to see more poetry at protests.” Written in red neon, the text in this work emerges from the artist’s reflections on Indigenous resistance movements. Diné Yazhi calls on people working toward liberation to avoid predicting futures rooted in a Euro-Western “romanticization and addiction with apocalypse,” speculating that accepting catastrophe as a given leads to “writing our own demise or prisons.” Instead, they advocate for writing stories of liberation, finding alternate ways to work through oppressive moments as a collective.

Whitney Biennial 2024

So I went to the Whitney Biennial in NY and what I liked most was the work of Indigenous/ Asian/ South American artists. Here are some examples

-Cannupa Hanska Luger born 1979, Standing Rock, ND: “This installation is not inverted… our current world is upside down.” For the artist, upending our grounding in time and space makes way for imagined futures free of colonialism and capitalism, where broader Indigenous knowledge can thrive.

-Takako Yamaguchi, born 1952 in Okayama, Japan: Her recent seascapes use meticulously rendered zigzags, tubes, and lines to suggest weather and other natural elements. They reflect Yamaguchi’s experimentation with what she calls “abstraction in reverse,” or taking recognizable forms, like clouds or waves, and abstracting them to the point of pattern.

-Clarissa Tossin, born 1973 in Porto Alegre, Brazil: Clarissa Tossin’s film appears alongside 3D-printed replicas of pre-Columbian Maya wind instruments. Tossin had the replicas made so that they could be played in the film, which traces the movement of Maya people and culture across multiple spaces and temporalities, real and imagined, cosmological and colonized. The fact that the ancient instruments are not available for use-isolated from their original context and kept behind glass in museum collections-can be seen as a distillation of the themes of dislocation and tradition that Tossin works to reconcile in the film. Featuring the Kiche ‘Kaqchiquel poet Rosa Chávez and the Ixil Maya artist Tohil Fidel Brito Bernal, the film looks at ways in which contemporary Maya culture is activated by means of both reclamation and re-creation.

More in next post :))

south asian weddings

why south asian weddings are the best! so much love, loud music, nonstop dancing, and good food at mehndis. a lot of the songs and colorful rituals come from the beautiful province of punjab, the land of five rivers, which extends beyond and across the pakistan-india border and for centuries has been the center of music, literature, art, and sufism. nothing sets the tone of a wedding better than the double-headed dhol or noisy drums that signal the arrival of the groom’s family.

meetings with roc friends

ran into missy by chance this morning as she was picking up coffees for herself and her husband at the village bakery. another serendipitous meeting in roc, and then a vibrant discussion with my fam (rajesh and muna) about activism and palestine. got interrupted by a white lady sitting nearby who tried to police our convo and left in a huff. white fragility and tears are the flip side of white privilege, trust me. should write more about this.

in rochester for a wedding

in rochester for a wedding and oh, how beautiful it is here. not as hot as on long island, with gorgeous blue skies and greenery so abundant it takes one’s breath away. a walk in cobbs hill park, dinner at sinbad’s, and best of all randomly running into our friend johannes as he was taking a turn on his bike – what are the chances, right? only in roc.