Mental Health & Wellness Program Series 2024: Lena Khalaf Tuffaha Essay
Published: October 21, 2024
Categories: Artists | Mental Health & Wellness
Embracing Refusal: One Way of Writing in a Year of Genocide
by Lena Khalaf Tuffaha
I am writing this essay as the one year anniversary of Israel’s genocide of Palestinians approaches. This year, the scale of violence directed at the bodies, lives, land, and memory of Palestinians has magnified at a rate that is hard to absorb or comprehend. Even as Palestinians, who have been enduring a Nakba punctuated by massacres, home demolitions, extrajudicial assassinations, and administrative detentions in which torture is the norm, this year’s catalogue of horrors has shocked and devastated us. Most days, writing has seemed absurd at best, a practice ill-suited for the speed and monstrousness of the escalation swallowing us all into its abyss. What can a poem or an essay offer in the face of real-time annihilatory violence? I am irritated by this question even as I type it, its thinness, the possibility that any discussion of such feelings will encourage a kind of individualistic performative grief.
For most of my adult life in the US, I have wrestled with words and their gatekeepers, frequently in vain. American news editors and producers and their (mostly) corporate bosses dictate a language for Palestinians that intentionally eliminates any evidence of our humanity.
For most of my adult life in the US, I have wrestled with words and their gatekeepers, frequently in vain. American news editors and producers and their (mostly) corporate bosses dictate a language for Palestinians that intentionally eliminates any evidence of our humanity. This language is evident in the headlines of esteemed publications like the New York Times and the Washington Post, and on cable news channels like CNN and MSNBC. And, as it always does, it has trickled into spaces of literature and art, rendering Palestinians ungrievable, and shrinking history, writing all of our lived experience and the violence enacted upon us into the margins. Every day for an entire year, Palestinians have been mysteriously dying in the passive tense or so, Americans are told, the “Hamas-led Health Ministry claims.” Never mind the bodies the entire world can see on every social media platform, or the shreds of them scattered all over the rubble of Gaza’s cities and towns decimated by Israel’s bombardment. Everything about Palestinian life in Gaza is “Hamas-led” or Hamas-sheltering or Hamas-infected and so Americans are inoculated against caring for a captive population of 2.2 million human beings, 82% of whom are refugees of the Nakba. The only sentiment that might be given oxygen is a “free Palestinians from Hamas” pseudo-concern steeped in the belligerent white liberalism of the colonizer.
The extreme of this past year that is still unfolding, still, somehow, escalating has rendered Gaza a place which psychologists describe as traumatogenic, a medical term that means the entire environment can trigger trauma impacting the body, the brain, human beliefs, and behaviors. Every part of us and our homeland is injured. Caring for our mental health in the diaspora in such a sustained emergency has been a very low priority. There are daily massacres, and our extended families, if they survive, are in desperate need of every imaginable kind of support. This reality has forced us all to consolidate our lives in order to remain steadfast and show up for our people. In my own practice as a writer, the changes I have made have often expressed themselves in a kind of refusal.
Like every single Palestinian I know, my refusals to sing the official line have cost me opportunities and relationships. I share this without pride or sadness. It is a privilege to be alive and to lose opportunities. I have done some of my own writing this year, but I’ve preferred to curate and introduce the work of fellow Palestinians, inside Palestine and in diaspora, and to build and secure spaces worthy of our voices. Otherwise, I have mostly clung to my refusal. There are articles I refuse to write—it is long past time for explanation. The resources are available everywhere and my patience for the pantomime of “complexity” and “not knowing” has reached zero. There are journals, institutions, and organizations with whom I refuse to engage. Spaces that still cannot speak up for Palestinian life, that gently suggest edits of words like “genocide,” that still need us to be perfect unimpeachable victims so we can earn a spot on their seesaw of empathy. But these are all small refusals.
But there are many others whose names I do not know and who I will never know. Poems I will never have the privilege to read nor translate.
The larger refusal is still taking shape in me. I feel it in the way I chose to spend the time I have. I feel it in the way my own language is shifting. This past year, the world has had a tiny glimpse into the beautiful, resilient spirit of Palestinian writers from Gaza, and all of Palestine. The names Refaat Al-Areer and Hiba Abu Nada and Walid Daqqa, among others, have become part of the world’s consciousness. But there are many others whose names I do not know and who I will never know. Poems I will never have the privilege to read nor translate. The refusal growing in me, day by day, is for the entire system that wishes to live alongside such catastrophic loss as if nothing of note is happening, as if the entire culture-making system weren’t complicit in the loss. The magnitude of the loss is beyond the mind’s capacity to hold.
About Lena Khalaf Tuffaha
Lena Khalaf Tuffaha is a poet, essayist and translator. She is the author of Water & Salt (Red Hen), which won the 2018 Washington State Book Award, Kaan & Her Sisters (Trio House Press), finalist for the Firecracker Award, and Something About Living (University of Akron, 2024), a finalist for the 2024 National Book Award and winner of the 2022 Akron Prize for Poetry. Her writing has been published in journals including Los Angeles Review of Books, Michigan Quarterly Review, the Nation, Poets.org, Protean, and Prairie Schooner and in anthologies including The Long Devotion and We Call to the Eye and the Night. She was the translator and curator of the 2022 series “Poems from Palestine” at The Baffler magazine. She is currently curating a series on Palestinian writers for Words Without Borders entitled Against Silence. For more about her work, visit lenakhalaftuffaha.com
Mental Health & Wellness Program Series 2024
This essay is part of our 5th annual Mental Health & Wellness program series. Check out the recent interview with Artist Trust Board Member Ginger Ewing and stay tuned for mental health and wellness resources, as well as a writing workshop led by prose writer and 2023 Fellowship Award Recipient Jordan Alam.
Lena Khalaf TuffahaMental Health & Wellness Series
