Truth is in the parentheses, and it is inked in blood and tears (We are all going to die.)

a draft

Parentheses: a word or phrase inserted as an explanation or afterthought into a passage which is grammatically complete without it, in writing usually marked off by brackets, dashes, or commas.

I call myself a writer (only because I know where to place my commas —and I have occasionally used the semi-colon semi-correctly.) I chose “writing” as my Instagram tagline  category (even though I have yet to write, “public figure” is unabashed vanity and I am annoyingly abashed, and “business” implies some kind of ability to handle money.)

I am a writer who is averse to cliches (but uses them shamelessly.) I don’t like rules, which is  ironic coming from someone who lives militantly and celebrates discipline and people-pleasing above all. My brother called me a rebel recently. I rebelled in defiant objection. Then sat down to write this reflection.

All in all, I am a mess of fragmented identities and contradictions. (Human?) And my friends are worried (really, really worried.)

I “taught” writing in a past lifetime. I facilitated workshops on drafting and editing (yes, semi-colons featured heavily.) I gave endless sermons on the writing process (sometimes even to an audience.) The last workshop I facilitated was inspired by a quote by Jeff O’Neal* I came across in John Warner’s Why They Can’t Write. Killing the Five-Paragraph Essay and Other Necessities: “You are going to spend the rest of your life learning how to write, and then you are going to die.” Admittedly, it was not the most inviting of titles, but a few curious brave souls showed up (and only one signed out after I spoke a few words.) As far as I know, we are all still alive —and learning to write. (Of course, six months of genocide later, I question my reference choices. Have these two white Americans used genocide, ethnic cleansing, and occupied territories in a sentence?**)

I watched the sun dive into her bed in the bosom of the mountains of Palestine yesterday with dear (very worried) friends. We sipped sage tea waiting for Jerusalem to light up the dimming skies —and our grieving hearts. We picked up where we left off every conversation over the past six months (going on a century): faith (surrender —for the love of God already), hope (awakening), and the future (any future where humans compete to affirm life —before they die). I confessed to them that I had written approximately a hundred books —in my head. I watched their faces contorting in confusion mixed with worry when I started to tell them about the editing committee that resides in my head. It is ruthless and has killed (burned) every manuscript. (Jerusalem lights faded behind flying bubbles of “She needs professional help” and “She has lost the plot [pun intended].”

Did I mention my friends were worried about me?

I was introduced to the great scholar/educator/activist/human-with-a-beating-heart bell hooks not long ago (when I thought my life ducks were finally arranged in a straight line all the way to academia’s ivory tower and the ultimate validation. My ducks turned out to be giraffes (they cannot swim) and have emigrated to Mars; the line sits at the bottom of the ocean of blood and tears; and academia and its ivory tower are frozen in time with our stolen history in the emperor’s museums, proudly on display by the “nature exhibit.”) I was inspired by hooks’ work on the margin as the site of resistance, of radical possibility, and painful deprivation (life?).

“I was not speaking of a marginality one wishes to lose –to give up or surrender as part of moving into the center –but rather of a site one stays in, clings to even, because it nourishes one’s capacity to resist. It offers to one the possibility of radical perspective from which to see and create, to imagine alternatives, new worlds.”***

I won’t lie, it was comforting to learn that even the glorious hooks grapples with a fragmented identity. And boy does she create! (Did she have friends who worried about her? What did she call her committee?) She searches for belonging, a quest that brings her back to her beginnings and her “holding tightly” on to those very margins of her identity (identities?) as a “‘politics of location’ [calling] those of us who would participate in the formation of counter hegemonic cultural practice to identify the spaces where we begin the process of re-vision.”****

I am not re-visioning. I am visioning, likely for the first time in my life, with my progressive lenses and heavy frame. (It has burrowed crevices in my temporal bone.)

I see. Unabashedly. And I am choosing to describe what I see, from the margin I proudly claim, in parentheses. For now.

When I lost my father 17 years ago + 72 hours, I met grief for the first time. It was breathtaking. My roots took a massive hit and I lost my ground. My knees could not hold me up for years. So I sat down and willed the roots to heal. (Understatement.) But I missed the branches.

Until one evening watching Jerusalem light up the world, I saw my head was high.

I confessed to my friends that my greatest fear was to die before I got a chance to write.  (Instagram declares I am a writer. O’Neal reminds me I am going to die. The editing committee refuses to give me a break. bell hooks brings to life the agony of radical possibility and painful deprivation. And peace is martyred, every minute, on the land of peace.***** It is not dramatic tension. It is an inferno.)

How can I write of surrender while I laud resistance? Belonging is rooted and branches want to fly? Margins imply a centre and the centre is genocidal? How do I honour the lives taken too soon while my committee and I are granted another sunset into the sacred lap of Jerusalem?

How do I convince those few (white) men with the nuclear codes that they too are going to die?

My editing committee is happy I have surrendered to the fact that I am going to spend the rest of my life learning to write. And it is in agony over my choice to also use the breath I am gifted unlearning —to live. I am fighting the tongue of the white man because I don’t know where to place my semi-colons in the language of my roots. My branches grow despite struggling with shame.

And so, for me, for now, it will be in parentheses.

Incidentally, did you know giraffes have no vocal cords? (Ironic, yes. Poetic? Absolutely.)

* Jeff O'Neal is the executive editor of Book Riot and Panels. He also co-hosts The Book Riot Podcast.

**I am committed to using these three terms in everything I write because The New York Times is a genocide/occupation/ethnic cleansing -enabler.

***hooks, bell. "Choosing the Margin as a Space of Radical Openness." In The Feminist Standpoint Theory Readers. Intellectual and Political Controversies, by Sandra Harding (ed.), 152-159. New York and London: Routledge, 2004.

****hooks, “Choosing the Margins.”

*****An immortal verse from a song titled Zahrat Al Mada’in by the Lebanese legend Fairuz.