Focus. On. The. Day. After. The words are not complicated. Their soft arrival masks the blade they wield. Perhaps this is why it takes time for me to feel the cut – to realise that something has been severed. To be more precise, I have been severed. The speaker is a surgeon; precision is an occupational requirement; for him, incision is an everyday craft. I imagine that he is used to looking at life in the raw and not being distracted by the dramas of blood. Likely he has a clear eye on what can and cannot wait; on which locations can be let alone and which require pressure, now now. I am in Gambia as I write this, where the expansive time called now (leygi, sine) is made more precise – or narrowed perhaps – by its doubling. Leygi leygi, sine sine, now now; an urgency. Whatever urgency the surgeon is with, he keeps to himself. Again he repeats, in response to all the urgent questions about what people can do now now to help; I need you to Focus. On. The. Day. After.
The surgeon’s name is Dr Ghassan Abu-Sittah and he is speaking from a hospital in Gaza. He has been operating, sometimes in darkness and without anaesthesia, on children whose bodies have been smashed by bombs. I feel, at best, like an eavesdropper. At worst I am an imposter who should not be here in this virtual space full of medical professionals asking specific, technical questions about what is needed and what they can do. I joined this zoom call to satisfy my own curiosity – a yearning to find out and to know more about what is happening on the ground. Instead, I find out more about the ground on which I stand, where what is needed is what I do not have and cannot do. I am a London-based therapist. I do not have the skills that might save imperilled and rapidly deteriorating lives. All that I can do – because this is not the time to resort to wishful thinking, or indulge narcissism, or slink away in shame – is to go on listening. Listening is not enough. Listening is not easy. Dr Abu-Sittah is calm but the content is terrible and horrifying. It’s as if my brain is constantly trying to zoom me out – convincing me that it is a film I am watching; seeking to refuse reality by making it unimaginable. The poor sound quality adds heft to the dissonance. The call keeps dropping out and every time the doctor’s voice vanishes, I feel my body, and hundreds of unseen others, freeze. That silence – which may or may not return him to you – is hard to listen to and impossible to leave. We hang on. The doctor’s voice returns, crackling but also clear – an even tone that could have us forget that he is one of millions under siege, without fuel or adequate food or water, surrounded by bullets, bombs, and death. He listens to a stream of questions coming at him from people and places that he cannot see; ‘How can we get fuel to you to power the incubators? How can we get injured children out? What about getting supplies in via aid agencies operating in the West Bank? They seem like good questions. I notice how the doctor’s first move, much like a good therapist, is to take care to communicate his understanding of what is being asked. Only after that does he point out that the question cannot be answered; that it is not the question to which we might best apply ourselves right now. I listen and wait – waiting to hear what the doctor knows that I need to know. He is after all, someone who knows things about how lives are lost and saved; who knows where to apply pressure; who knows where to cut and where to stitch; who knows the difference between now and now now. He needs us, he says, to Focus. On. The. Day. After. I notice how much I really do not want to do this.
I do not want to accept what the doctor knows – that after this part ends, however it ends, it will be worse; that when the bombing ends, it will not be an end. Even if this siege ends today – now now – there will still be tens of thousands of dead and hundreds of thousands injured. There will still be more than a million homes destroyed. The infrastructure will still be smashed and the supplies exhausted. The people will still be traumatised. And those who we love and who would be love – the medics and teachers, the healers and helpers, the keepers of family and friends – will have already given everything they had and more. If I, far from the terror on the ground, am teetering on the edges of what I cannot imagine, the day after calls me to move further in; towards an epicentre, a place where there is, the doctor says, nothing left. Do not come expecting anyone here to guide you, he says, or to direct you to where you will find what you need. Know that everything that is needed will have to be brought in.
I joined this call in search of something but not anticipating surgery. I was not prepped; not ready to be operated on; not expecting that kind of change. It is Layla Saad who reminds me in a conversation about Black Joy a few weeks after this, about the absolute necessity of this change. You must let this change you, she said. Yes, I must.
There is ongoing death. There is witnessing of genocide. There is grief and rage and despair; there is crying myself to sleep and awake again; there are conversations with friends that can no longer be cohere without the word unbearable. There is feeling diminished by the inadequacy of my individual response. There is the sense of powerlessness and the fear of not being enough. And then there is the surgeon’s blade-less incision that stops and restarts my heart; that resets its’ pace. There is seeing that the needs are urgent – now now – and there is knowing that urgency alone cannot meet them. There is knowing that our individual responses to this urgency are crucial and understanding that what we do alone will never be enough. As much as I feel inadequate against the terrors of this moment, I also recognise that I, and We, are also each part of making a collective hold with which to meet the now — where the day after is both now and every day after now. Now now. I am thankful that I get to experience this hold in many ways; in conversation with friends and therapeutic collaborators, in reading and writing with others, and in an always emergent engagement with the creative and intellectual offerings of Black Feminisms. In these spaces I get to bring grief, rage, and weariness; I get to feel seen and met, which is to say I feel possible, which is to say I feel loved.
‘You Are Who I Love’ is a poem by Aracelis Girmay which has been chosen as a study-write-with text for the first session in a Black Feminist Friends series that I will be facilitating beginning in January 2024. These reflective writing sessions (available live and/or as recordings to registrants) are for those who we love and who we need to be love(d). In other words; for the carers and helpers; for the therapists, healers, teachers and activists; for the family and friends; for all of us who offer support to others and understand that keeping our breaking hearts open is vital to our work; for we who witness violence and genocide and say enough already while also knowing that we must sustain ourselves through its’ ongoing-ness and in the days after. Each month I will be joined by special Black Feminist Friend (BFF) – and their chosen texts – to offer guidance for writing activities from and with those texts. The aim of this writing practice is to bring ourselves into closer contact with our hearts, with Black Feminist thought, with what we know and where we know from. These sessions, grounded in a black feminist ethic and centring the creative and intellectual production of black women, are open to all. All proceeds from the event will go to a cause chosen by the guest for the month. Click here for more information and to register for the first session, where I will be joined by Dr Eiman Hussein. Eiman has nominated two charities – Medical Aid for Palestine and Sudan Emergency Relief Fund – to receive all proceeds from this event.