Dear God. Dear Bones. Dear Yellow

Biting and unapologetic; angry and haunting.

I’ve been thinking more about language these last few weeks, precisely since October 7th, about the power that language invokes, whether we fully realise it or not. That language—its curious, wondrous complexity—could feel as visceral as cutting into a watermelon and seeing the fresh, resilient red of a nation which refuses to disappear; but language could also be the clinical slicing into flesh, falling silent and resting unaccountable where the blood flows out. Sharp and urgent, DEAR GOD, DEAR BONES, DEAR YELLOW pushed these boundaries of the way we think about language and witnessing. Thus begins my interrogation into language and what conscious choices pose, that absence of language is language in different forms, that language is not only oral and written but pictured, textured, even silent. Mistranslation of testimonies and the headlines which made the unethical editorial cut, shows me how language burns. How words seem futile, like threads painstakingly woven only to collapse at a single pull, how words can seem so useless if they were just that.

The words ‘killed’ and ‘died’ to describe deaths caused by a state with disproportionate military power and disproportionate tolls, cracks open a chasm between what anyone would think as merely synonyms of each other, thus the connotative power each contains and by relation of each other is something dismissed with a bat of an eye and a scroll to the next headline. There’s more. The omission of ‘alleged’ in phrases of (falsely) committed crimes; the decisively deadly days between publication of unchecked facts and withdrawal of article, a too little-too late retraction of harm that has wounded far too deep, that has deceived the world so much it believed the other side to be true, it has swallowed, digested and reproduced the sentences, phrases and words used. ‘Clashes’ opted instead of ‘assaults’, ‘prisoners’ instead of ‘hostages’, ‘conflict’ instead of ‘apartheid’.

I discussed with my tutee about diction for two hours long, about the connotative chasm between ‘odd’ and ‘nonconforming’ when describing men who do not fit the patriarchal norms of masculinity. I may seem so severe and strict for something easily replaced with a glance at a thesaurus. I used to be that kind of person. However, now, I am terrified and enchanted by words. To utter a word is to decide where you stand. To pen a line is to break a space that doesn’t want or see you. To be silent is to consent.

When words fail, that’s when videos become ‘clichéd trauma’, ‘ordinary grief’, ‘something you see on screen’, untouchable, removed from any innate immediacy. It becomes endless consumption appealing to the world’s empathy, to convince it of one’s humanity, to be hypervisible and invisible at the same time. Maybe words should be more disruptive like the bloody spray laint on glass walls suggesting illusory transparency.

I hate that journalism has made me fear words. Are words the master’s tools? But what about poetry? What about songs? Black Indigenous radical poetry has been my sources of power and hope that words still have use in this world. But can we still use words to dismantle the master’s house if they are also the master’s tools?

Trauma to BIPOC and the Global South is ‘a thing named empty’ by the quiet tempo of clicking, swiping, algorithm based on engagement (doesn’t matter if it’s harmful), an expiration date, The Guardian saying that this article was from 13 years ago you should check its validity but nothing has changed since then, the desensitisation of the general public, life moving on because you have to someday, but cash cash cash / blood blood blood keeps flowing in / out. The whole internet is the master’s house that has been segmented to offer the illusion of space. But data is our archive. We refuse to be erased. The frightening digitisation of our entire lives possess this sort of (albeit still disproportionate and questionable) ambivalence about master’s tools and master’s house as they blur. I’m thinking of reclamation of names, of land back, and how they were once the master’s tools and houses, but now we’ve reclaimed some of them. I’m wondering about trampling over fear and charging with bamboo roencings in guerrilla spirit, of making our own weapons of what we have (which is sometimes what might seem like their tools). Yet we must show that these can and will be used against them.

Noor Hindi writes ‘Reporting is an act of violence — poetry is one of warmth.’ We need to define and practice alternative ways to witness. Witnessing should never be just consuming and processing what is happening to others on screen, bound to what the news feeds you. Her series of poems with the same title ‘Breaking [News]’ expose the twisted ethics behind reportage, in processes of interviewing, recording, documentation, crafting scripts, delivery, what we all thought was an act of witnessing but has always been dictated by a colonial metanarrative.

Reimagining it in some way, which I’m still navigating with curiosity, is a sort of poetic witnessing that enacts on the discomfort, pain and anger with space-making, archiving, and care networking. Counter the rest of the propaganda with knowledge production. And I feel like that starts with our conscious choices of words. [Here I’m going to refer to the notes from the panel held by @purplecode_id with Olive, a Palestinian feminist activist.]

Thank you to Edelweiss+ and Haymarket Books for the e-ARC! When morning came, one of us spent hours washing her hands in an ocean of bleach, the other stumbled into a mosque for the first time in years and howled at Allah for creating appetites and tongues, for lungs that inhale so much of this world. I've encountered lots of great poetry-collections, all of them provoked emotions and moved me. But none like this. This is the first poetry-collection that made me cry of heartache, of rage. Each and every words poured in this collection wrenched my heart. This is a very important collection, a must read.