the times i do not feel grief
The only times I do not feel grief are when I am at work or when I am in solidarity. Standing arm-in-arm with my friends blocking a highway, chanting in my American-inflected Arabic with no self-consciousness for the first time in my life. Min al mia lil mia, from the river to the sea.
These are the only times I do not feel grief because I am my father’s daughter, and because I am the daughter of diaspora.
My father’s hands were knotty, worked with perpetual motion and made rough from years of working with caustic chemicals in factories. He took me to his workplaces on occasion. One near Memphis held an office which overlooked a factory floor. Huge metallic tanks held roiling baths of acids with complicated names. Hydrochloric and ferric and others I can’t pretend to remember. They were used to fuse softer, more expensive metals like zinc and copper to cheap steel.
Dad was apparently very good at this work. He got fired for doing it too well when he called out bad management decisions — or because a handful of white bosses and line workers found him too objectionable. Which may have been true; he wasn’t not an asshole. In one factory in Ohio, graffiti etched into a dusty steel beam: “Lotfy is a camel jockey”. Dad was either too tall to see it or was too unbothered to care.
In May 2023, I lay in a room bathed in white sunlight in Cancun, trying to nap, already wanting to go home from a long trip. My sister called in hysterics, cursing a truck. Dad was dead. Killed on impact with a tractor trailer. His Honda Accord was unrecognizable as a car at the tow yard. It resembled a crescent of scrap metal and glass, the rejects from his job, chrome plating bumpers and twisted into place by industrial artists using bulldozers and earth movers. There was no blood, humdullah. The only red was the glue used to secure the side airbags, which tried their best.
Then came the bureaucracy of death, the church service in Ohio, the entombment in California. I kept my head down and worked. Filled out the paperwork, booked the flights, read the legalese and acted as a mediator and the Virgo — a level head because I was the one with the most remove from my father. At the viewing, with the slideshow scanning through hundreds of pictures, I only featured in a few. When I came out as trans, he cursed my name and I retreated from him. We had reconciled somewhat in the ensuing years, but that distance granted me an uneasy composure upon his death. As a partially estranged daughter, I became his de facto executor.
I kept my hands moving for months, telling myself that working honored him. This was a partial truth. The man was committed to work as a core virtue. At his funeral, a common word used was khidma, or service to the church. But he also worked as a means of escapism. In the months prior to his death, he had taken on a job as an associate at a hardware store. He didn’t need the money, but it was a way to leave the house and get away from arguments with my mother. In a way, we share that trait: work as service, and work as escape from dealing with each other.
Several months later, October 7th. The day was unrecognizable and dark, like a shadowy amoeba. A hijacked bulldozer tearing open an Israeli fence looked like an opening. We know the reality was much more grim and complicated. Later, a video of Gaza City burning in the dark. From a stationary camera in the tower where Al-Jazeera once had its offices, you could hear the high-pitched screams of women.
It is hard to reiterate the death of Gazans, the social media feeds littered with horror, dismemberment, and repeated scenes of the worst of humanity. The horrors were (and still are) matched with insult from the smirking faces of Biden, Kirby, Sunak, Netanyahu, and Ben Gvir. We became intimately familiar with novel terms of destruction: domicide, ecocide, urbicide. The reality that whole families could be wiped off a government registrar. We were (and still are) gaslit by media and politicians about the truth of the imperialist project, dripping head to toe in Palestinian blood and anguish.
What meaningful words remain to be said when the project of Western civilization continues apace, abetted by bombs built in Colorado and Arkansas?
I don’t have nightmares or even dreams. I just can’t sleep. Images don’t haunt me, or they haven’t yet. But I sleep in later and later. Arab dismemberment, death, and despair has been grist for the mill since 9/11, after which 300,000 Iraqi civilians have been killed and who knows how many Afghans. I rub that old ache like a metal plate attached to a shin bone, groaning when a storm is about to come through.
Like so many others, I’ve been taking to the streets with other Arabs, anti-Zionist Jewish people, and people of conscience who have been organizing for years. We yell at Senators, Congresspeople, mayors, celebrities, funders of those commiting the genocide, tech companies supplying the server space for a state that evades any accountability and has absolutely no red lines. We yell at anyone with a modicum of social power to stop trafficking in the machinery of death.
In the protest crowd, in the movement planning, in the safety training, the din of depression fades. It does not do so to the point of offering silence, but it composes a chord. A harmonic rhyme.
Coptic Christians are the largest Egyptian Christian minority, and those of a certain generation raised their kids to assimilate. Dad taught Mom English and refused to speak to me in Arabic. When he spoke the language, it was unrecognizable to me. A gruff, clunky cadence that didn’t dance on his tongue like when it came out of the mouth of the classical Egyptian singer Um Kolthom or Palestinian poet Darwish. `ayns with a rasped harshness, impeded by a wide nose and a glottis that rippled when he snored.
The summer before I went to college, when I was staying in our overheated ranch house in St. Joseph, Illinois, I worked as a door-to-door salesman for a company that sold overpriced vacuums. The company sent me to poor, majority Black houses in Urbana and I offered demos to bored people who just wanted their houses cleaned. They were disappointed when I only vacuumed one room. I remember only three households: the one I managed to sell to, a white woman who yelled at me and said I was being deceptive, and a Black woman whose husband had just been shipped off to Iraq. I felt like a heel trying to sell a $1,300 vacuum to this person who didn’t know when or if her husband would return. Inspirational posters about salesmanship were plastered around our office, but selling felt less like a legitimate vocation and more like full-throated deception. Selling overpriced cleaning products to those without means was theft, a ruse. Salesmanship and hawkishness were someone one-and-the same, a toned-down version of the pitch for war made by George W. Bush and Colin Powell in front of the United Nations.
We watched the initial salvos of the “precision” Tomahawk missiles hit their initial targets in Baghdad. Dad approved of the War on Terror because they’d kill the Islamists. I felt incandescent with my tiny knowledge and kicked the clunky CRT TV that sat on the ground in the living room, playing CNN and Wolf Blitzer as the first bombs lit up the sky, minarets and residential towers pressed darkly against a horizon of amber fire. Mom and Dad fumed at me; they couldn’t understand the fury from this little brown kid who didn’t know the half of it. The reality of war was not lost on them.
Maybe my father’s grief started in 1973, when he was forcibly enlisted into Nasser’s army to take back the Sinai from Israel. The October War, the payback for six days in 1967.
According to him, the war was unremarkable. They stared at their hands and shot snakes and rats in the desert. They shit out behind the barracks. They played cards and the waiting game.
According to my mother, the war was devastating. In ’67, her friends died in cold blood, stationed in the desert and killed execution style. In ’73, Dad came back with his uniform in tatters, covered in dirt, blood, and tears. His whole platoon was killed by US bombs supplied to Israel by Henry Kissinger. To the Butcher of Cambodia, soldiers like Dad were “dumb, stupid pawns” to be used in the service of foreign policy.
Grief forces us to tell certain stories to make the present bearable. While a younger me was sore that I rarely got more information about his war days, his omission may have been one of self-preservation and grieving in solitude.
Dad wouldn’t make the mistake twice. When my eldest sister flirted with joining the US Army, he hounded the recruiter out of the house with a vengeance reserved for ex-boyfriends. America may have been a land of opportunity, but the States were not worth shedding any blood over.
The aversion to dealing with or talking about death aloud seems like a uniquely white, Western perversion. Sitting shiva in Judaism, homegoings in the Black church, wailing for the dead in the Arab world. Death in America is clinical, a personal interaction between the next of kin and their funeral director.
My friend Sameerah, a Palestinian-Irish death worker, introduced me to the deathwork, which refers to practices of dealing with the material aspects of death: burials and the rituals around them, as well as the financial and legal dimensions. More importantly, deathwork includes the navigation of grief and grieving. She observes how her father, Chef Hosam, the owner of a restaurant in Indiana, is a death worker: “Over the years he has been on call to serve dozens of funerals and, no matter the time or day, he will pour his heart and soul into his cooking in honor of the community member who died as well as their grieving family.”
What I’ve learned in the past several months is that political organizing is deathwork. Mobilization against grotesque forces, forcing them to shut down, attempting to shame them into any semblance of conscience is only one part of protest. How can one hope to deal with mass death on our own? These griefs must be shared, and that sharing itself is prefigurative for a world that is a little less isolating and violent, a little more grounded and intertwined.
No one beguiles you when you grieve the singular, accidental death of an Arab man. Lotfy Hanna did his work, his khidma for church and family. This grief is appropriate and tolerated, the kind that cushy jobs will allow bereavement leave for.
Many will hound you if you dare to grieve the mass, intentional death of Arab men. They will say that Khaled — the man with gentle eyes and a keffiyeh wrapped around his forehead, holding the kissing the lifeless body of his granddaughter Reem — deserved it. They will blame Refaat Alareer for his own death, for making a joke of a piece of Israeli propaganda. They will walk out the men in their underwear, like they did in 1967, to be called Hamas or terror sympathizers. These Arab men are born to be blamed.
But these two griefs are cousins in the way that one opens the door for the other, ushers them in with smiling eyes to the ornate couch, asks the kids to put on tea, and sits with them to regale the time which has passed and to prepare for the time which is to come.
I put off writing this because my fingers are itching to work. To work wood with a file, to fasten wood beams together for a makeshift table, to pull on the ropes connected to tarps serving as the makeshift roof for a leaky warehouse.
Work is sometimes an act of honoring someone. Sometimes an escape. Sometimes khidma for a community.
These are griefs which must be processed together, over tea or over drying paint on signs, on a grassy hill or on fenced-in asphalt, over hearths or before brutalist federal buildings. These are griefs in which we find each other.
