Allowing Our Hearts To Break: Poetry, Our Embodied Method of Resistance
Sanah Ahsan
What is the role of the poet or artist in times of great cruelty? Will we risk a brave sound? Will we craft space for illumination, for revolt, for truth-telling?
We are alive in a time of unfathomable cruelty. I write this from the safety of my bed, inside the imperial cloud. I write this whilst attempting to feel the overwhelming grief in my body. It folds itself into the tight passage of my throat. Censored by the state and society, grief has become used to hiding in unlit corridors of the body, almost undetectable to the observing eye, remaining afloat in blood-cells and breath. I feel my heart turning like a lighthouse, as a way to stay awake and attuned to the past and anticipatory loss.
Grief is more of a public than private event, though Western capitalist myths might have us believing otherwise. Grief demands we expose love, and its immortal, disobedient direction of travel. Poetry, like grief, also risks loving in public. Poems form fascia between the individual and collective body, showing us how we are inextricably bound to each other. Rather than hold grief in isolation, each word pulsates tiny particles of sensation through a shared network of nerve fibre, cord-like tendon and bone. The poem not only operates to embody public revelation, it can reorient us towards the reality of this moment, fizzing our consciousnesses into what we have been refusing to see.
In this, the poem becomes a place where we are no longer the centre of the universe, and another’s heart becomes our own. Nadine Murtaja, a 20-year-old Gazan poet, bravely pens her grief, not as an audition for empathy, nor proving her humanity. Her 2021 poem, ‘We walk on the shattered glass of our broken windows’, written in response to another brutal Israeli attack on Gaza, is a grief-filled shape of revolt, inviting us all in:
time changes, hours pass, and it gets darker,
the sky takes off its dim dress, then the morning arrives,
but here where I live, and breathe, life wears its black dress constantly,
to mourn the labour of my land
The work of remaining close to our heart and body is a central lifeline throbbing through the veins of any meaningful resistance. The body, fleshed from its context, is rich with information about the hurting world: every day the churning gut cries Palestine, the knotted back blurts Palestine. The body’s language offers more accurate knowledge of this moment than the lies of corporate media, if only we listen to its discomforting truth. Our own searing muscles mock our absurd attempts to control the body and refuse its cell-splitting data. Which messengers of the interconnected body will we deny?
What we are witnessing in the West is a collective denial — the incapacity to bear and feel uncomfortable embodied truths, and what they reveal to us about ourselves. Meeting the de-idealised self is uncomfortable work, especially for those who have spent lifetimes swaddled in comfort. If we remain attached to false ideas of comfort, disconnected from the body’s wisdom, we can’t meaningfully reckon with the racial hierarchy and domination at play, nor can we confront our part in them. Sensing into this queasy world through our bodies, we might feel it beckoning us towards an urgent renewal, pleading us to relinquish our self-involved individualisms, daring us to act and speak whilst knowing we will be misunderstood. In an attempt to resist this necessary and sweaty discomfort, emotional and behavioural manoeuvres (e.g. silence, denial, further violence) are being made.
And as we in the West grapple with these contradictions, the unrelenting massacre continues: Palestinians are not just robbed of their homes, their land, their loved ones, their right to speak, but also their right to mourn. Those of us afforded the space to feel and name, are perhaps given the task of meeting the wild edges of grief, rage and heartbreak — for those who cannot. Feeling our shared heartbreak is one urgent posture of protest.
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As a poet I am conscious of language, of how a world can be made in a word. Language is a vehicle in which power is gained and maintained, and is currently being deployed as insidious weaponry, steeled in lies, detonating smoke over the eyes of masses. Black-feminist therapist and writer Foluke Taylor reminds us that re-wording is a reworlding. How might we as poets use our craft to re-word and re-world? In this state-sanctioned silencing, how might we use language as a pathway of return to our shared humanity, to our collective, beating heart?
At such times, the writer is asked to not only utter bravely what is true, but to practise refusal; saying no to the wretched arrangements of the ruling class. The current madness-inducing arrangement is bursting with deleterious language like ‘war’ or ‘self-defence,’ as well as media headlines that are clinical, numbing and devoid of feeling. To trouble this wretched order, the poet must craft space to feel, reclaiming abandoned emotion, foregrounding the body and inviting us to touch into our arterial entanglements. In her essential 1995 essay ‘Poetry Is Not A Luxury’, Audre Lorde writes: ‘The white fathers told us, “I think therefore I am.” The Black mother in each of us – the poet – whispers in our dreams: “I feel therefore I can be free.”’ The poem may serve as a permission-giving device to feel the freedom of madness, the defiant nature of grief or fury, and reawaken our tethered and tingling bodies.
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But poetry itself is not fundamentally good. Like all forms of language, it can be misused and abused. Deep cracks traverse language, where intended meaning falls through, tumbling into a faint echo of itself. Poetry sits within such cracks; a terrain full of complex inquiry, alternative metaphoric realities and radical systems of evaluation. Poetry harnesses the endless potentiality and ambiguity of words, which means it also risks being co-opted for nefarious ends. In 2014, during another fatal bombardment of Palestine, Netanyahu misrendered the lines from Hebrew poet Hayim Nahman Bialik to incite violence: ‘Vengeance … for the blood of a small child, / Satan has not yet created.’ A rhetoric similar to the blatantly racist and genocidal language he and those in his circle are using now to justify cruelty towards so-called ‘human animals’, adopting well-known tactics of Whiteness [1], such as dehumanising and demonising the non-white other. As we often see with Whiteness, there is no desire for self-examination or accountability, as the goal is to preserve control, domination and power. To use Netanyahu’s own racially-laden words: ‘This is a struggle between the children of light and the children of darkness, between humanity and the law of the jungle.’
Psychological violence, ridden with extreme polarities, is being imposed on us. Whiteness thrives by deadening the heart: it keeps us engaged at a disembodied intellectual level, debating ‘both-sides’ or ‘what-aboutery’. Racism functions through distraction [2]: it feeds fear-mongering tactics, fuelling both islamophobia and anti-semitism, as well as a state-supported censorship of any critique, protest or resistance to mass-murder. The imperial politics of the Israeli occupation, driven by the UK and the US, are founded on Whiteness and capitalism: where extraction, genocide and land-theft are justified through the warped logics of racial hierarchy. When white life and white pain are repeatedly asserted as exclusive and paramount, we must remember we are not dealing in territories of reason, and urgently cling to our madness. Our unruly emotions: despair, rage — even hopelessness — are indicators of health.
This pain is evidence that we are in touch with a barbaric reality. We are fleshed from the worlds we live in, our bodies are in conversation with this unfolding genocide – shouldn’t our hearts be breaking? Staying connected to our bodies, our riotous grief, is one way we resist becoming numb or unshocked by this cruelty and astronomical scale of murder. In using our instruments; our sapped bodies, our trembling voices, our pounding hearts, we contest not only this genocide, but all inextricably linked oppressions.
I have written previously about how we live in cultures which cannot tolerate any prolonged expressions of despair or grief. The understandable human pain and rage that black and brown bodies express in response to systems of oppression is persistently pathologised and criminalised. For example, the APA has designated a psychiatric diagnosis named ‘Prolonged Grief Disorder’ for people experiencing the tireless haunting of grief. This genocide-induced distress, experienced on a global scale at differing severities, is not a symptom of mental illness — nothing is wrong with anyone for feeling completely broken by mass murder. Our rage and heartbreak are begging to be felt, to be witnessed and heard. Allowing our hearts to crack, is an insistence on remaining open, remaining human. It forms a pathway of return to the hearts of our mothers, our brothers and children of Palestine. The tenderness of grief allows us to humanise and hold the contradictions of this moment. It is also a place where we might touch into the wounding and histories of oppression which continue to inform Israeli violence. Any cruelty or negation of life is rooted in a disconnection from one’s own heart, and unattended suffering.
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As a psychologist, friend and human, I am concerned about viral online content which suggests naming despair or heartbreak is a distraction, or even a separation, from Palestinian suffering. This heart-hardening ideology risks shaming and isolating each other from generative feelings of humanity, which are key ingredients for revolution. Our collective heart-smash is a form of errantry, refusing the capitalist demand of carrying on as normal. According to liberation psychology, there are profound psychological benefits that come when oppressed people gain a sense of their shared grief and power. To truly feel that we are many; that we are all Palestinian, is also to reveal our collective unbridled emotions in response to this mass destruction. Systems that are anti-life operate by disconnecting us from our messy hearts, and our messier heartbreak.
Giving ourselves the permission to experience our heartbreak, may be accompanied by feelings of guilt or self-indulgence, especially as the numbers of Palestinians murdered keeps rising every minute. We may fear paralysis, or a despair that immobilises us. At times, I have had thoughts of wanting to die – a shame-soaked admission amidst survivor’s guilt. The systematic cruelty and domination of Palestine, has momentarily dressed death as an exit-door from an unloving world. Death looms, but we insist on life, and it is the unwavering faith of the Palestinian people which must propel us into another posture of protest. Despairing feelings visit, and it is through feeling them, giving them to the page, or naming them with resourced loved ones, that we might arrive at aliveness again — returning the isolated I to the hurting We. We draw on grief to mobilise, rather than debilitate us.
Acute states of despair can often be psychologically interpreted as unexpressed anger turned inwards. Our anger and deep-seated grief therefore, if felt fully, can resource us to be more choiceful and fruitful in the work of protest and resistance for Palestinian freedom. This embodied feeling work is done most meaningfully in company: we might also ask for the care of the land, of our ancestors, or The Divine. Allowing ourselves joy, connection and life-affirming relationships is vital to the long-term sustenance required for this work.
But without feeling our unruly emotions we risk burn-out, dissociation and even acting our hurt out on others. Stuck in hyper-vigilance, we perceive another as our enemy, re-enacting hierarchies of moral superiority, righteousness and perpetrator-victim binaries — replicating the very systems we are trying to break free of. This awakened care for heartbreak is not hyper-individualistic, it is fundamentally rooted in care for all beings. Cultivating spaciousness to feel is of course a privilege, but it is one that resources collective action.
Feminist writer Arundhati Roy calls us in our heart-smash, to rally our fragments. We are already witnessing the rallying of fragments at a global scale, with millions attending protests world-wide. In turning towards our unattended hurt, we can respond with renewed focus in direct action: BDS, fund-raising, striking, writing to MPs, sit-ins or enacting tangible care with our communities to transmute our despair. We can learn to use energy wisely, practising discernment as to whether we solely fight online battles, or invest our bodies in other means of resistance.
This is important, because while social media can undeniably serve as a critical tool of mass mobilisation and truth-telling, as an apparatus of platform capitalism it also holds space for egoic performance, consumerism, reactive hot-takes and projections of the curated self. Our social media use may provide some semblance of agency and impact as resistance on the ground is increasingly shadow-banned, or feel like a means to defend against the grief and powerlessness felt by many in this moment. But after hours or days scrolling on a platform designed to addict and oppress, reposting images of decimated children without consent, soaked in self-neglect, self-flagellation and disembodiment, we might ask ourselves: is this the only meaningful form of support for our siblings? Have we experimented with other shapes of freedom? How might slowness, the land and moments of quiet bear watermelon-like fruit?
There are many shapes our support can take – all have value. Poetics, in the most radical form, is a licence to interrupt; a playground of freedom and imagination. Not last, on the page and the stage, a poet also has an opportunity to invite participation in direct action.
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A poem, however, cannot be launched at a uniformed sniper, nor at the Western war machine. As the poet Aria Aber has noted, human emergencies expose the ‘appalling and humiliating ineptitude of art’, and when the inimitable and fierce Palestinian journalist Mariam Berghouti recently re-shared a post that read ‘stop sharing bad poetry and attend a sit-in’, the futility of poetry and social media for those on the frontline was made clear. Our priority, of course, must be to listen to what Palestine needs from us, and the ways these needs might shift shape.
And yet, if poetry may seem insufficient and futile in times like these, it clearly poses some threat. Israeli occupation forces recently kidnapped the poet Mosab Abu Toha, and murdered poets Heba Abu Nada and Refaat Alareer, as part of a persistent attempt to erase Palestinian culture and creative dissent which has included the targeted bombings of cultural institutions like The Freedom Theatre, Gazan universities and the press. Devastatingly, Rafeeat and Heba had preempted their own murders under the occupation in their poems. For all Palestinian poets and civilians, there is a consciousness of one’s own martyrdom. In the immediate aftermath of his killing, Alareer’s poem ‘If I Must Die’ has shifted beyond testimony, into shapes of prophecy and remembrance. The poem’s life has persevered through spontaneous translation since Alareer’s murder, as a form of alive textual proliferation, carried out collectively:
If I must die
you must live
to tell my story...
During these days of endless besiegement and attempts at erasure in Palestine, actions in the West must reclaim space for, and nurture Palestinian testimonies. In the UK, poetry presses like Out-Spoken, Hajar and 87Press have collectivised, centering Palestinian voices and raising over £24K in aid support, despite facing an onslaught of criticism and accusations of anti-semitism. Looking back on this moment of history and world-(re-)making, we might ask ourselves: where did our hearts dwell? How were we generous? How did we risk ourselves?
Much of the poetry world is doing nothing at all. James Baldwin coined the phrase ‘the death of the heart’ to describe the moral apathy, neutrality and deafening silence plaguing our worlds. Those once branding support for white life in Ukraine, are nowhere to be heard, or actively silencing others. It is, of course, difficult to extricate poetry from the hyper-individualist, capitalist, prize-driven and careerist industry in which it lives – an industry founded upon a history of elitism and hierarchical logics which grant the luxuries of silence we’re witnessing today. I wonder what is moving in the hearts of poets, publishers and arts organisations with pursed lips, as more Palestinians are slaughtered.
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Some days, the poem may function merely as a balm, to soothe the detonated psyche and spirit. The poem not only contains the poet’s excavated joys or wounds, it is simultaneously a device to attend to the reader’s known or unknown injuries, and a way to be held by the reader’s gaze, all at once. There are many layered offerings of care, inquiry and connection in a poem, which are much needed antidotes to the violence of this moment. In the face of astronomical numbness, death and complacency, poetry awakens the body and enlivens what is inside us — a vast interiority of complexity, beauty, and imaginal capacities, which threaten the heartlessness of the state.
Tuning into our capacity to show up meaningfully is important, pushing back against a politics of abandonment or ruthless individualism. The heart is a compass I turn to in navigating the prickliness of this cruel moment. My heart is turning itself over, as the world makes similar movements; ‘Qalb’ in Arabic, the physical and spiritual heart, literally means to turn. Though these times feel unbearable, we are turning towards the truth of this unveiled moment, so we might make freedom possible.
According to the Quran, the stone or heartened-heart, is always open to softening towards hope: ‘Indeed, there are stones out of which rivers gush forth, and indeed, there are of them (stones) which split asunder so that water flows from them.’ [Quran 2:74]. Rabbi James poetically describes the heart as a dwelling-place or Mishkan: ‘We can build the Mishkan of our hearts, making space for every human to dwell there, and so become filled with the generosity that comes from transforming the other into the beloved.’ But how might we become beloveds to each other? Perhaps we can bear witness to another’s suffering, without it derailing our own. Our Jewish siblings who speak out against the violence are an example of this, risking themselves to become love amidst the lovelessness. We desperately need each other in this work – Christians, Jews, Muslims.
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Grief can feel never-ending. Any one of us who has been in apprenticeship with grief, will know the journey is long, painstakingly wayward, and irreversibly transformative. Like grief-work, resistance work requires a similar endurance and shared trust, with belief that collective transfiguration is in process. The writer Fargo Nissim Tbakhi, recently described this political moment as, ‘the long-middle;’ not a condition of time, but more of a dance-like movement, nearer the end of revolution than the beginning. The long-middle of grief is a thick, chewy, womb-like place — where loss is birthing another freedom. If we fix our gaze in search of yesterday, folding ourselves around the ruinous despair, we might miss what freedom is to come. What is coming, and what we must actively seek, is another rearrangement of our world where Palestine and its people are liberated.
I invite you to take a moment here to pause. To feel your heartbreak as you read this, refusing this article to become another intellectual consumption that can’t enter your pores. In gathering our fragments, we can creatively reassemble a new reality. When considering the practice of poem-making, it requires our bodies’ attunement, an upending of order, a rehearsal of freedom, leaping off ledges, courageous dedication, and creative imagination. To birth a new world on the page, we reorganise and re-position words in liberatory and unexpected ways: the same critical and creative techniques employed in freedom work.
Through practice, we are learning that Palestinian solidarity is less hard-work, more heart-work: ceaseless beating, like the fist of solidarity, pumping care to different organs in this fleshy system of resistance. The tissue is tender, porous and ferocious in its protection. Its chambers are big and room-like, valves like swinging windows, to let collective care flood in and out. This reddened site of endurance is the vital centre of bearing witness. We can watch from here, the shared pounding place where perhaps the poem returns us, not only through wet-eyes fixed upon a screen.
Palestine is urgently calling us into a different way of being. Being that trusts freedom is possible, and recognises the sacrality and poetry of every human life. Palestine is demanding we touch the cellular grief and loss which binds us all. Our tethered bodies are begging us to attend to our interconnected hurt in Palestine, Congo, Sudan, Kashmir, Haiti, and act accordingly, with the collective carotid artery as our compass. If we can bear to listen to the discomfort, heartbreak, and our inextricably linked humanity, we will hear the beating need to end not only this violence, but the occupation. I read a post by Bisan, a beloved and brave Palestinian journalist, ‘On the inside, my heart has been impaled.’
Her heart is my other heart. It is your heart.
[1] ‘Whiteness is the systemic rules, norms and discourses that produce (and reproduce) the dominance of those socially racialised as white (DiAngelo, 2018). Whiteness is often invisible to its benefactors yet remains as an oppressive reality to PoGM. Nevertheless, systemic whiteness is not synonymous with white people (who are not an homogeneous group), and PoGM are also capable of reinforcing whiteness.’
[2] ‘The very serious function of racism is distraction. It keeps you from doing your work. It keeps you explaining, over and over again, your reason for being.’
Sanah Ahsan is an award-winning poet, writer, liberation psychologist and educator. Sanah works in the cracks, revering our messy emotional landscapes, and the wild edges of falling apart. Their psychological practice is rooted in liberation and community psychology, drawing on embodiment, therapeutics and poetics as life-affirming practices, to support racialised and marginalised people. Sanah's work centers compassion and embracing each other's madness; they have written regularly for The Guardian and presented a Channel 4 documentary on the over-medicalisation of people’s distress. Some of Sanah's media work includes delivering a TEDX talk and giving a keynote for Google and ADCOLOUR in LA. Sanah is the lead psychologist at several healing justice-led organisations, such as Art Against Knives and Beyond Equality. Sanah is working on a non-fiction book about the politics of distress, and society’s relationship with unruly emotions. Sanah’s debut poetry collection I cannot be good until You say it is forthcoming with Bloomsbury in March 2024.