On Restlessness
Diaspora’s Nervous Energies
Yasmin el-rifae
There is no calculus of the terror that can make a proper calculation without reference to that which resists it.
— Fred Moten
I haven’t really been able to write since my last visit to Palestine, to the West Bank. It was just after the Israelis killed Hassan Nasrallah, and before the anniversary of Hamas’s October 7 attack. The accelerated expansion of the violence into Lebanon had also accelerated my nervous system—I was in New York, wild with restlessness, fighting a bodily drive to move, to go. To go where? I had already planned the trip, but it seemed there was a response that my body wanted or needed to enact that it was unable to. What it could no longer accept was the imbalance of the forces in this fight—and it is a genocide, but it’s also a fight. I couldn’t accept that the lone fighter on a hill could be incinerated by a drone remotely operated by an army backed by the world’s military superpower. That these cities, these ancient and living cities, could just be attacked or destroyed from above, one by one, while we in this shared world scroll, scroll, scroll.
My nervous system broke after that trip to Palestine, where I was grateful to hug friends, to sit together with them even for one meal, to stand in a crowd on the street looking up, traffic stopped, people bending their bodies up out of their windows, a few seconds of confusion before we all understood that what we were seeing in the sky were batches of Iranian missiles.
I came back to London, walked into my local coffee shop, and walked right back out. What world is this that we share?
I can’t remember what I read first, but one of the books I picked up in the compulsive reading I did after that visit was Gabal Al-Raml (Mountain of Sand) by Randa Shaath. She is the daughter of Nabil Shaath, one of the PLO members who negotiated the Oslo Accords, and who has been heavily criticized and attacked for that, as we all have lived Oslo’s failures from the moment of its creation. But Shaath is also a daughter of Gaza’s diaspora, through Cairo, where I am from, and her memoir is a treasure chest of lost fragments of this once continuous, now severed geography between Egypt and Palestine. Randa writes about the Israeli siege of Beirut in 1982 which lasted 88 days. When an agreement was reached to release the fedayeen from Lebanon out into further exile, hundreds of them were put on ships to Yemen and Sudan. People in Cairo realized that those ships would be passing through the Suez Canal and, overnight, hundreds of them decided to meet in Tahrir Square and started moving together to go and salute the fighters from the seashore.
Shaath writes,
When we made it to the highway the scene looked like it was in a Kurosawa film. We stopped for refreshments. Tens of cars and buses parked on either side of the highway, desert sand all around us, flags raised up to the blue sky. We chose Suez as the location from which we would salute the fedayeen who were arriving from the Battle of Beirut, who had made it through three months of Israeli bombing. We had tea and sandwiches by our cars and trucks, and the radios all played resistance songs as we prepared to sing to the passing fighters: Fayrouz, Sheikh Imam, Marcel Khalife, even some Egyptian revolutionary songs with Arafat’s name swapped in for Nasser’s. In the village of Qantara an old Palestinian man came out onto the street to catch a ride. He thought, from seeing all the flags and hearing all the music, that Palestine had been liberated, and he started dancing in front of the cars. We tried to explain to him that no, Palestine had not been liberated, but we failed, and so we took him along with us anyway.
She writes about being stopped by Egyptian state security, who sent an official to ostensibly protect—that is, to monitor—the convoy. They made it to Suez, but the ships were delayed, and as night fell the group worried about how the fedayeen would see them in the dark, see the crowds standing there on the shore with their banners and their flags, welcoming them. The group negotiated with their chaperone security force so that they were able to obtain a large spotlight, connect it to electricity, and set it up in a tree to illuminate the crowd. They end up spending the night waiting, this large group of Egyptians, Palestinians, Lebanese, surely people of other nationalities who’ve come from Cairo just to catch a glimpse of the fighters, to make some kind of contact, to let them know that they recognize them. Kids fall sleep in their parents’ arms. People lie on blankets or in the backseats of their cars. Suddenly a blast of sound—a ship’s horn—and everyone jumps up; the ship is passing by them on the water but the crowd runs along the shore after it, screaming “Thawra, thawra 7atta el nasr”: Revolution Until Victory.
Shaath writes: “They heard us on the ship and they started whistling, and they lit hundreds of lighters on the ship decks, joining in our salute in the heart of the night. They passed in three minutes and disappeared, we kept running in the same direction as the ship, in our state of infi3al, and our chant of Thawra 7atta el nasr reverberated and came back to us in echoes, in the breeze. Everyone broke down crying.” Infi3al here refers to an emotional or impassioned state, a kind of being worked up. At its root is the three-letter word f3l, which means act, do.
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This is an astonishing history for an Arab, an Egyptian, to learn about these days, nearly two decades into Egypt’s complicity in the Israeli siege on Gaza, in the grip of a boundless, extractive, comprador dictatorship. Zooming out, perhaps it is astonishing for any of us to imagine a time in which Arab militants would be deported together on ships rather than just bombed to death, along with anyone and anything around them.
What I’m most interested in is this movement of the people from Cairo, the suspension of everything in order to catch a glimpse of the fighters and the survivors, to see and be seen by them, to communicate. I think this is the same propulsion I’ve had in these different moments of restlessness, most recently in January, after the ceasefire, when once again the images flooded.
In this video I can’t see her face, but it’s a child’s frame and I’m told that she is female. She is wearing a baggy grey sweatshirt and baggy grey sweatpants and her head is wrapped in some kind of black material, maybe a makeshift hijab. What I see is the back of her as she falls into her father’s embrace, this child just released from an occupation prison. She falls into the embrace like she wants to disappear but there is also a force from her onto him, in her arms which are around his neck, in her wail. She transfers from him to her mother with the same double drive—to be enveloped but also envelope, to consume. Her wails are muffled but persistent and around this colonized family that is touching and holding and containing one another is the crowd, their society, al i7tidan al igtima3y, an idea that Palestinians have written about extensively. Igitima3y means social and i7tidan comes from the three-letter root 7-d-n, which means hug or embrace. It is also the root from which we get the Arabic words for nursery, and for incubator.
In the frame I see hands reaching in from the crowd to touch them, the child, the mother, the father, and— remembering this as I write—now I remember seeing the political prisoner Alaa Abdelfattah as he was being escorted into the courtroom in Cairo in the fall of 2021. The most pressing part of the memory is how important it felt to try to touch him, just his shoulder, whatever part of him I could reach.
Back to the prisoner releases in Palestine, and the video of the child being held, clambering back to her parents. She is returned to her family and her family is held by the society around them. That same day, the beloved Palestinian politician Khalida Jarrar will dye her hair back to black to meet her audience, her society, after months of solitary confinement in the occupation’s prison.
Over decades Freud changed his ideas about the origins of anxiety. He moved from thinking it was the result of repression, to a signal of imminent threat, of danger. Anxiety, he came to realize, is the precursor to repression. It is the target of repression, not its symptom; we organize our minds and our defenses to repress that which makes us anxious, that which might be painful. If I take Freud seriously, and read my spiraling at certain moments during these genocidal months as being about a sense of danger, a sense that I need to act in response to this danger, it becomes clear what happens next. Shut-down, anesthesia, blocking out what I can no longer take in, what I cannot respond to.
I watch the footage from London, sick with restlessness. Can there be a discipline, an art, or a way of being made from this constant, touchless witnessing and one-sided recognition, on these platforms that enable us to normalize anything, any image or piece of news or statistic, in a system that seemingly can metabolize anything? Is it possible from this distance to understand the experiences in these videos? Is it important to? The people documenting the atrocities of the genocide are doing so, in great part, to elicit a response.
One response is to want to fight, to smash, to scream, to run. On some days I can only imagine directing this energy towards fire. In that moment of inner feeling, it doesn’t really matter what it is that takes the flame; I’ll find the right target, that thinking would be part of what the energy does, what it catches. I think, here, about touching the brave, young heart of Aaron Bushnell.
My restlessness towards Palestine is often paired with homesickness for Cairo. It matters that the tens of thousands of children who have been killed and orphaned spoke the same language as my kids do, or as they did before I moved them north. It matters that the prayers of the people grieving and fighting and looking for strength or release or comfort in faith, in recitation, say the same prayers that my mother said as she was burying her own mother, or sometimes when she is simply in need of light. It is not to claim some depth of feeling that can only come with kinship or geography. But it is to say there is a plane and a language in which the pain and transformation we witness resonates, a plane that has to do with our personal and political histories. It’s a plane that is brought to life, animated, one that wants to be channeled outwards. It is infi3al.
“What does it take to resist pacification, when the psychological agonies of the genocide—the scale of our grief, our shame, our anger—are what they are? When capital drives us to disavow these feelings, or to turn them inwards, against ourselves?”
In their writing about language as a vehicle for return, a way to come closer when “there is no world outside of Gaza, and we are not there,” Amany Khalifa and Alia Al Sabi refer to “a fighting grief.” They quote the late Lebanese writer Hussein Mroue: “Your grief is the fatal kind. It kills you first, and it is, first and foremost, one of the murderers standing in enemy lines. It aims its bullets, psychologically, towards us in the battle of sumoud, now the pillar of our national struggle. But the grief of the young man standing his ground in that same battle is the fighting kind. It is a sacred grief.”
What does it take to resist pacification, when the psychological agonies of the genocide—the scale of our grief, our shame, our anger—are what they are? When capital drives us to disavow these feelings, or to turn them inwards, against ourselves? The Palestinian scholar Abdeljawad Omar writes about the ways that the Palestinian Authority’s collusionist governance of the West Bank has driven society towards prioritizing consumption and normalcy over resistance. In this context, he writes, “[T]he shameless no longer apologize, and those who feel shame act as if shame itself were the only remaining form of political engagement.”
The question becomes how to protect our ability to respond, even if it means protecting a physical and psychological symptom like restlessness. Perhaps, even, how to attend to the symptom in ways that shape our political action.
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After they salute the fedayeen from the seashore in 1982, the group from Cairo hears that the ships will dock in Suez for two days. Shaath and a few others decide to stay nearby, in Port Said. They convince the owner of a pensione that their co-ed group are all related to one another, so that he would agree to rent them some rooms. Some people sleep on the floor. They manage to negotiate with state security once more, so that a little dingy could take them out to the ship.
When they get to the deck the welcome is intimate and warm. Each fidayee has messages they would like sent to their loved ones. A young man gives Shaath a tour of the ship, and she collects hundreds of little notes and messages from the fedayeen. Afterwards he gives her a cartridge of his bullets and says: “We will meet in Jerusalem.”