Author: thought thinker

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The Doom and Glory of Knowing Who You Are

“You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was books that taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, who had ever been alive.”

James Baldwin, The Doom and Glory of Knowing Who You Are, Life Magazine, May 24, 1963.

This is my favorite quote from James Baldwin and it has resonated with me so deeply since the first time I read it. Although Baldwin was having a larger conversation about the role of artists in our society and I don’t necessarily consider myself an artist or creative, I connect with these words because reading has given me so much in this world. Like Baldwin, books have given me words for what I previously thought was singular to me and undefinable. Anyone that knows me knows that I love reading and writing and I will likely always surround myself with books in some fashion.

The aforementioned quote continues with Baldwin characterizing the artist as a “spiritual historian” whose role is to “make you realize the doom and glory of knowing who you are and what you are”. While reading has provided me a pathway to freedom (spiritual, mental and physical) from the bonds that are placed on so many of us, especially our minds, sometimes I focus more on the doom rather than the glory of who and what I am. At times I find myself wondering if ignorance truly is bliss and if I would be happier with myself if I knew a little less about how the world works. This shows up as me rejecting certain experiences because I know how people who inhabit similar bodies as mine are treated by others. Even though knowledge has allowed for so much personal growth and development, I sometimes let that knowledge turn into fear.

It’s strange, choosing to live freely because I know that the pain and violence I have experienced from others and the world at large is not my own fault yet simultaneously limiting myself for the same reasons. This has been on my mind lately as I’ve been in a rut that I’ve been struggling to get out of for the past few months. Depression and anxiety aren’t new for me and they’ve been with me since I was a child but now, I question how I can have all the words for what is causing this most recent state and still feel so immobile.

I don’t really have much to say but ultimately, I will always choose to reject ignorance and to think/learn about how I and others take up space and move through this world. I believe everyone should read more because I know what it has done for me. At the same time I recognize the difficulty that comes with choosing what to do with new information. It’s not an easy road.

Not an Easy Road – Buju Banton

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Palestine and what happens to Unruly Bodies under Occupation

TW: murder, violence, genocide, guns and death of children, disabled people, women

I believe it is important as those of us living in the United States to be intentional with how we connect what we learn in our respective courses to what is happening in the world because there is always a link. And in the case of Palestine you do not have to look far to find it. The current genocide in Palestine by Israel is the most important disability justice, reproductive justice, human rights issue for “unruly bodies” of our current moment.

Disability Justice. With the targeting of hospitals, rehabilitation centers, ambulances, medics and other resources for medical and physical assistance by Israeli military bombs represent just one way that disabled people’s lives are directly harmed by this onslaught of violence. Thousands of Gazans have also been permanently disabled as a result of bombings and gunfire while protesting. In fact during the Great March of Return where from March of 2018 to December of 2019 Palestinians gathered and protested at the fenced off Israel-Gaza border for their right to return to the land stolen from them, visibly disabled protesters were intentionally targeted by the IDF. The United Nation’s 2019 report of the massacre during 2018 revealed that of the over 6,000 protesters shot by Israeli snipers, 122 required limb amputations (20 of which were children), 21 became paralyzed, and 9 permanently loss their eyesight. 940 children were shot, 35 were killed, many of whom left with permanent disabilities. This was just in the 8 months of the protest in 2018. Children and disabled people are both protected under international law during instances of armed conflict but instead they were intentionally targeted by Israeli forces and continue to be.

Click to access A_HRC_40_74.pdf

Link to the UN Commission’s 2019 report which I referenced above.

Reproductive Justice. SisterSong Women of Color Reproductive Justice Collective defines reproductive justice as “the human right to maintain personal bodily autonomy, have children, not have children, and parent the children we have in safe and sustainable communities.” Since Israel’s October 13th evacuation order over 1 million Gazans were forced to leave their homes (over 19,000 being pregnant women) and faced death as borders were guarded by IDF soldiers and because of the very limited time given to leave before bombing would begin. Prior to October 7 and the subsequent massacre by Israeli forces, Palestinian women and mothers already lacked access to sexual and reproductive resources from sanitary products to birthing facilities due to travel restrictions. Many hospitals are located where Palestinians cannot travel to without permits which are typically denied. Like the stress and fear caused by the forced evacuation, extreme poverty and food insecurity have resulted in many women experiencing miscarriages. Since the October 7 attack by Hamas resistance forces, over 11,000 Palestinians have been murdered, over 4,000 were children, over 2,000 were women, and thousands are missing. It is impossible to know how many pregnant women have died in the past month. With hospitals and reproductive centers destroyed as a result of the nonstop bombings, hospitals are unable to provide the necessary care and resources for pregnant Palestinian women leaving them with very few safe options for themselves and their unborn children. Reproductive justice cannot exist under occupation.

https://www.aljazeera.com/gallery/2023/11/8/no-end-in-sight-to-plight-of-gaza-children-as-israeli-attacks-intensify

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/10/25/how-will-i-give-birth-dangers-of-a-gaza-pregnancy-amid-israeli-bombing

https://www.sistersong.net/reproductive-justice

https://reliefweb.int/report/occupied-palestinian-territory/high-risks-miscarriage-death-many-pregnant-women-forced-evacuate-northern-gaza#:~:text=oPt-,High%20risks%20of%20miscarriage%2C%20death%20for%20many%20pregnant%20women,to%20evacuate%20from%20northern%20Gaza&text=An%20estimated%2019%2C000%20pregnant%20women,safe%20place%20to%20give%20birth.
Sorry for the lack of proper citations but these are a few links to where I got my numbers from. It’s important to remember that these numbers are growing daily.

Palestinians and the construction of Unruly Bodies. Like in the British/European colonial histories in the Americas, Africa, Asia, and beyond, Israel’s colonial movement required the depiction of Palestinians as barbaric, ignorant, and in need of civilization and modernization. This racist rhetoric was used since Zionism’s beginning in the 19th century solidified in the 1948 Nakba where over half of the Arab population in Palestine were forcefully displaced from their homes first by Zionist militias and then by Israeli armies. Therefore, any Palestinian resistance to Israeli occupation renders Palestinians unruly because their self-determination and autonomy are inherently oppositional to Israel’s colonial project. Labeling such resistance as terrorism justifies Israel’s continued genocide of Palestinian people and such imagery and discourse is used in Israeli and western media to promote the occupation.

To connect it back to class, I believe the social model of disability is an important framework for understanding what is currently happening in Palestine. The Israeli occupation physically, socially, and politically disables Palestinian people daily and denies pregnant women the right to deliver their babies safely and humanely. Also, our conversations about neurodivergence are important to note as neurodivergence can result from traumatic experiences. When discussing people who have become disabled as a result of Israeli violence, mental illnesses are also a part of that. Gazans/Palestinians have lived through decades of trauma meaning the siege is also psychological manifesting as depression, anxiety, post traumatic stress disorder, and more.

Despite this, disabled people are still showing up to protests demanding the right to return to the land of their ancestors. Palestinian women are still giving birth knowing that there is a possibility of their child not being able to grow up. Palestinians continue to yell that Palestine will be free. Regardless of Israel’s attempts to destroy youth-led resistance movements, generations of Palestinians refuse to let the fight for freedom extinguish. It is important that Palestinian modes of survival are acknowledged and that we learn from the resistance movements of Palestinian people and connect them to the liberation struggles of all oppressed people across the world.

HUGE trigger warning for everything I listed at the beginning of this post and more but this film is called Gaza Fights for Freedom and it delves into a lot of what I mentioned above. It is free on Youtube to watch.

Free Palestine!

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Desirability is Not a Safe Space but Everybody Wants a Spot

This is pretty long. I started this last week but it took forever for me to get out completely so I’m going to try again today. All capitalization is intentional.

The title of this post is inspired by a tweet I read from Dr. Zalika U. Ibaorimi a few years ago which said “Desirability is not a safe space”. This is one of the most memorable statements that I’ve read regarding desirability. It is such a short sentence but one that made question what I had learned regarding the subject before reading that tweet.

Before then, I understood the politics of desire/Desirability to mean that those deemed desirable (thin, light skin or white, loose hair, able bodied, muscular, etc.) were safer from poverty, harassment, violence, abuse, and more. This was also reinforced by my understanding of a related concept: the libidinal economy. In the same way that the political economy is about the exchange of materials and decisions on their worth and value based on how much capital one can accumulate from it, the libidinal (related to libido) economy is about the exchange and valuation of desires, fears, pleasures, and enjoyments. It is also about consumption both violent and enjoyable. One can accumulate more fears than desires compared to another based on their embodiment. And such accumulation of either desire or aversion reflects in how, when or if others choose to act on a person’s behalf or violently against it.

Now, what I knew about desirability is not wrong because if those who are undesirable, or Ugly as Da’Shaun Harrison often writes, have less access to housing, fair employment, “health” and security. They are overrepresented as victims of state violence and in prisons. But it honestly is not so simple and this is something I am still trying to understand. “Desirability is not a safe space” does not just mean that skinny girls can be insecure about their bodies too but that desire does not mean care or love is present. When I named all of the things that undesirable people lack access to, I did not say care or love. Although I believe that people that are fat and or darkskin for example are denied love, care, affection and intimacy from many (maybe most?) because of antifatness and antiBlack colorism, I’m not sure this means that those are what thin, lighter skin people are finding in all relationships because they are desirable. This is seen whenever a Beautiful celebrity woman is publicly cheated on by her male partner an overwhelming response from the general public is “How could you cheat on [enter literally so many women’s names lmao] !????”

But I don’t want to just focus on Desirable people because even people who are Ugly still experience desire from other subjects or people. So often I have seen or heard fat people attempt to use desire as a reason why they are still valuable and worthy as a person. If I had a dollar for every time I’ve heard a fat woman say “I may be fat but I still get fucked” or something along those lines… Desire is nothing more than a strong feeling of want. A strong corporeal want. Ugly people are not devoid of attraction, seduction, lust, or sexiness but none of those things translate to love and care. Love is a manifestation of continuous intentional support and care not just a feeling and not someone wanting to have sex with you. And on the other side there are people believing that Ugly people should be grateful to get fucked or be in relationships because why would anyone want them anyway? All this does is deny the very real and material issues that Ugly people face because of Desirability.

This came to mind when we watched the Aftershock documentary in class last week. That film was so hard to watch because I could only think of the amount of Black women who did not have men like those featured who loved and cared for their partners to fight for and with them despite the violence they experienced through lack of care from medical systems. Seeing a dark skin, Ugly (please don’t take this as me saying she wasn’t beautiful, I mean socio-politically. But maybe it’s not my place to say that so I’m willing to be wrong here) woman have a safe labor surrounded by people who prioritized her wellbeing and the safety of her baby was one of the most beautiful things I have seen because I know how easy it would be for a woman like to her have a completely different experience.

Despite the reality of Desirability not translating to love and care, so many of us still want a piece of the Desirability pie. Not too big of a slice though.

Why do we work so hard to lighten our skin or lose weight or straighten our hair or contour our noses or be sexy when we are still going to experience violence? So much of desirability is performance and we do all we can to put on a great show.

I’m using the song below and these lyrics specifically as a soundtrack to this post because it is true that these women or people who are deemed more Desirable often do get the “soft life” compared to the reality of so many Black women but what are we fighting to have their life for? In this (libidinal) economy??

“Tired of seeing all these
All these (All these)
Spanish and these white bitches
Living they soft life
With they feet kicked up
And they glass in hand
Bills is paid, thanks to the man” —Summer Walker, “Hardlife”

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New Body

I woke up one day with a new body and it wasn’t the first time.

The earliest memory of my first body was when I asked my father, “if I cut myself and then bleed out, will I get smaller?” He laughed and said that it doesn’t work like that. I remember having thought long and hard before asking him this question because at 6 years old, it just made sense. Perhaps that was the first time I got a new body. Surely I had one before but I didn’t notice it but this new one I saw was too much. Too much of what exactly, I wasn’t sure yet but I knew I hoped it would shrink some to make me feel better. I kept that body for a while, probably until 8th grade right before I went to high school. Throughout that time I began to realize what I didn’t at six. That this body was too big. I was always the tallest person amongst my peers and sometimes I was the fattest too. In middle school I found a way to cope with these feelings of taking up too much space by making that body the punch line in jokes. I saw how others who had bodies like mine were treated and figured it was better to be the one to take charge of my own disparagement rather than be on the receiving end. When we learned about whales having blubber in science class, some students started naming classmates who had “blubber” (i.e. were fat) and I quickly decided that it would be funny to call the fat on my arms blubber and I would shake it to make my friends laugh. For me, it was better for that body to be laughing, not crying even though it felt the same inside.

I got a new body the day I was helping my older sister move into her college dorm and she commented on the size of my butt. I was confused because we all knew to have a big butt meant you were sexy and attractive and everything this body was not. I was suddenly aware that the body didn’t look the same as when I was six but was somehow the exact same. It seemed that the body I gained that day had new forms. It was still Ugly but…? I kept that one until I was 19 years old. I grew to accept the polarizing experiences I had in that body. That body got catcalled while playing volleyball because of the spandex we wore but also was stared out because of how it looked compared to the white, thin girls who dominate the sport. I could go a day with it being the last thing anyone wanted to be around and later that same day it could be the object of someone’s desire. That desire was typically sexual and the person was likely older than me. I always thought that this body had potential but…… At 19, I hated that body. I saw myself going back to the ways of my youth by saying to people, “I’m so ugly. Aren’t I ugly? Tell my the truth, I’m ugly right?” Initially I got the responses I likely was looking for, denying my assertions and telling me no. Then one day after I went through the whole act with my sister she sighed, exasperated and said “Yes!” I think that was something I wanted to hear too. I needed validation for my feelings of hatred towards the body so many other people told me was not the ugly I saw in the mirror.

Since 19, that body changed shape a few more times but really it’s still the same. What’s really changed is how I view it. I enjoy being in this body despite constantly working to change it. This body likely has an eating disorder (LOL) but I don’t remember a time when I didn’t avoid mirrors or taking selfies so I wouldn’t have to look at it so I’m taking that as a net positive. I haven’t decided whether or not my body is my own. I thought I was getting a new body (it’s always either a “good” one or a “bad” one) every time I realized there were different ways that people were perceiving it. In reality, this body may have grown taller, changed shape, or lost and gained weight but it was the same fat Black feminine body in an anti-Black, anti-fat, and misogynistic world. This world both fetishizes and disposes of people with bodies like mine and it’s always confusing to be on the receiving end of such differing responses to it. A question that has always stuck with me in regards to our bodies and positionalities is “How can I live differently in the same world that harmed my parents when I look just like them?”

“Yes, and the body has memory. The physical carriage hauls
more than its weight. The body is the threshold across which
each objectionable call passes into consciousness— all
the unintimidated, unblinking, and unflappable resilience
does not erase the moments lived through, even as we
are eternally stupid or everlastingly optimistic, so ready to
be inside, among, a part of the games.”

Claudia Rankine, “Citizen”

How is this body my own when it holds the history of my ancestors’ first body in a new world? How can I get rid of the negative thoughts that always linger? This current body has never changed but becomes new whenever its beholder has a new use for it.

I’m hoping for just one more body but I want to see it in a new life.

Can’t wait to see your new body
Don’t be actin’ like you don’t know nobody
No body count on your new body
I’ll be the first one to hit your new body, woah

Audio of the lyrics I posted above. The lyrics are of just the first 30 seconds.