5. Next to Nothing

I can’t find the post. I don’t remember the name of the account — maybe I don’t even follow it — I suspect it was one of those accounts instagram suggests to you, then keeps suggesting to you for a while because you keep clicking on the posts. I think it was a young woman’s account, I think she lived in New York, and posted a lot about plants, maybe herbal remedies— there was a soft life feel to the account. Anyway, it doesn’t matter. The point is, it was mid-October, and the line in the post was, “This is my first war as an influencer.”

I wonder what image would have accompanied this statement. Was it a selfie? The rest of the post, to paraphrase from memory, was something along the lines of, I don’t know a whole lot about this conflict, but I feel I must say something, lest you think I’m not paying attention, or don’t care. I feel the weight of my public duty. But I am new to this crown, new to this mantle. Have patience. This is my first war as an influencer. 

Now, of course, I regret not following the account, despite whatever horror accompanied me reading the post I’ve described. How is her war as an influencer going?! I’m dying to know. But all judgment aside, the fact is I’ve thought of this post at least once a month since October. It encapsulates so many things about being a person watching horrific and unjust things unfold from afar over the internet: the genuine desire not to be silent; the difficulty we have not making it about us and our own virtue and right-side-of-history-ness; and of course the question of what there is to do. The question of whether not being silent (especially on the internet) is a thing to do, whether it’s a thing that accumulates weight in the physical world, or whether it’s just one long pile-up of our wailing ineptitude. 

In fact, I recognize the instinct of this instagrammer every month when I sit down to write this newsletter. Not because I believe having a substack elevates me to influencer status (lol), but because writing to the same group of people every month creates a commons of sorts, creates the potential for conversation even if most of the time the conversation is a one-sided one. And so, like other small commons in my life — groups of friends, family gatherings, the work place — I begin to feel the silence of talking regularly with the same group of people and not having the thing get named. 

But — every month I counter — what is there to say? 

Yes, I see it too. 

I wish it would stop.

I don’t know how to make it stop. 

In his essay “Notes on Craft: Writing in the Hour of Genocide,” Palestinian-American writer Fargo Nissim Tbakhi calls craft the enemy of revolutionary writing. In his mind, craft preferences elegance over truth, and also necessitates a certain sense of false conclusion — perhaps tidiness? — a containing of something that should not be contained. 

Craft doesn’t feel like the enemy for me, though I find Tbakhi’s essay useful and thought-provoking. I would name the enemy something more like “having answers,” or even just “having something to say.” The idea that, in a situation like this, my job as a writer or theatre maker is to have something to say on the subject of genocide. That, should I be lucky enough to have an audience, I should be working to spur you to action. Or at least telling you something you don’t know. These mandates, however they got in my head, have been the reason I’ve chosen not to write words like invasion, occupation, starvation when I’ve sat down to write this newsletter over the past months. Because what do I have to say besides yes, I see it too?

And I wish it would stop.

And I don’t know how to make it stop. 

And what would be the point of saying that? 

Sometimes in art school they make you write manifestos. They make you do this in all kinds of applications too, though they usually call them artist statements, or statements of purpose. Some people hate writing these. I generally love writing them, probably because I am particularly susceptible to questioning the point of art making, so I like to have a reason to sit down and make an argument for what I’m doing. It steadies me, at least for a little while.

These manifestos, collected over the years, are an interesting snapshot of what aspect of writing I’m focused on at any given time. Because of course one manifesto never covers all situations. What writing is supposed to do is actually so dependent on context. Unlike Tbakhi, I have not written any manifestos for writing in a time of genocide. But one doesn’t need a manifesto to observe that, at its simplest, a play or a piece of writing is just a span of time during which we are together. And given the kind of death that has been unfolding over the past six months, enabled by the power center where most of us live, might it not just be the simplest and most obvious and most human thing to say, during the span of time when we are together,

yes, I see it too?

I wish it would stop?

I don’t know how to make it stop?

To write those words, or to say them to other people, is next to nothing.

But I wonder, sometimes, whether the line between nothing and next-to-nothing is an important line to hold. 

* *

The few times over the past few months when I have called my representatives, or sent emails, or gone to a protest, my motivation for doing so has felt different than during other wars, other tragedies, other movements. I have felt particularly shut down of late, particularly unable to believe that there’s a chance of making a difference, particularly unable to want to find ways to do more. When I have been driven to do something, it has been out of a moment of such sharp feeling — such a sudden felt awareness of others’ suffering — that to not respond has seemed like turning away, in some small but real sense, from my own humanity. And so I have done a few things — most of them feeling awkward and utterly pointless — as a way of keeping relationship to that humanity. It feels like the absolute bare minimum, just enough to hold the worst at bay. The worst, of course, being that something like this happens in the world and I have no response at all.

I come from a generation of Oberlin College students who were lured to campus by a brochure showing the earth from space accompanied by the line, “Think one person can change the world? So do we.” I’m sure many advertisements have altered the course of my life, but that’s one I can point to, the one that perfectly captured what I aspired to as an activist-y teen fresh off my first stint as an anti-war protestor (Iraq) and full of angst about what I should do with my life. 

It was around this same time that I heard Rachel Corrie’s parents speak at an event in East Lansing. As maybe you remember, Rachel Corrie was an American activist who was killed by an Israeli bulldozer while protesting the demolition of Palestinian homes in the Gaza strip. Rachel was 23 when she was killed in 2003, and her parents took up her work of speaking up against Israeli occupation. Considering that I graduated high school in 2004, her death must have been incredibly fresh at the time I sat in her parents’ audience. I do remember something of that: the feeling of being in the presence of people who had lost a child, tragically, recently. The beauty of them channeling that pain into action. But what I remember more clearly was the feeling that settled over me during the talk and followed me afterwards, and that feeling was something akin to dread. I felt suddenly that a new bar had been set. It’s not that I wasn’t aware, up to that point, of more direct actions being taken by activists in conflict zones. But something about Rachel’s story made it seem suddenly like something I might do — an average American college student. A budding activist. Someone who was average but chose to be brave, and go to where people were suffering, and put her life on the line. And if she could make that choice, why couldn’t I? And if I could, shouldn’t I? And if I didn’t want to… why not? 

I can look now at the urgency that descended on my teenage self and pick it apart. It’s an urgency that preferences swift (and sometimes uninformed) action over careful contemplation or long-term commitment. And it’s an ultimately self-obsessed urgency, an urgency that turns a global catastrophe into a character-defining moment, asking whether, at a time like this, I will be the kind of person who.

But I also understand it. I understand feeling like you better commit to something big, otherwise you’re going to end up doing not much. You’re going to end up as a 38-year-old playwright tinkering away at her own little projects while horrors unfold elsewhere. Someone who watches, feels sad, and mostly turns away, not metabolizing her sadness into anything particularly brave.

I stop to consider whether I feel shame at the present on behalf of my teenage self.

But no — it’s more like anger. Anger at feeling, all this time, that there were two options: brave and ordinary. Two types of action: heroic, or next to nothing. 

* *

You know, I think another thing art can do,

if I were writing a manifesto for writing in a time of genocide, 

which I’m not, 

but if I were, 

I would say another thing art can do is to describe the places that are knotted and unresolved. The anger that is embarrassing anger, that actually is also probably mixed with shame, and also with not knowing. I would say art is a good place for not knowing.

When I get up under the anger and look for shame, the first thought that comes is: I just want to be told what to do. I find this shameful because of course there are plenty of well-informed people telling me what to do, all over the internet, and I am mostly not doing it. I find this shameful because it reflects a life lived in a country with too few revolutions, where the institutions, though bloated and unjust, function well enough for me that I assume there should be a website for everything, a department I can call. When I think about needing to not only find the time to protest genocide but also figure out where and how to protest most effectively, I feel tired and grumpy, and I find that shameful.

And if I get up under the shame, I think what I find is longing. (I mean, yes, of course. I find longing.)

At first I think it is longing for times when I have been more connected to an institution or social circle that made it easy for me to act. Being a teacher or student at a university, being connected to a brick-and-mortar theatre that served as a hub for action, having roommates and friends who invited me to join them at actions or protests. But those situations ebb and flow, and I trust that I will have some or all of them again. The longing, I think, is not actually about being connected to a different set of people. Just about every person I know wants this to end. Regardless of how they vote, regardless of their larger opinions on Israel’s past or future, just about every person I know wants this slaughter of civilians to stop. now. And so the longing, I suppose, is for it to feel more natural for us to support each other in trying to make that happen. Without being in activist or activist-adjacent communities. To feel that being connected to a channel through which to speak out against genocide is profoundly ordinary.

One of the tools I remember being introduced during a wave of BLM activism — whether in the earlier 2010s or in 2020 I can’t remember — is the idea of forming a little group of friends or acquaintances with whom you commit to action, or at least to checking in. A google search reveals that these are in fact not called “action pods” — my first guess — those are for dishwashers. Maybe solidarity pods? The name was nothing special, so that’s not really the point. The point was to have others you were checking in with, sorting through information with, and maybe actually making calls or going to events with. I never had an official one, but I would say my household functioned as an unofficial pod at many times. The nice thing about this type of structure is that it can exist at all levels of action and radicalism. A pod can be a place to work through ideas — a place to bring up things that confuse you, or opinions it seems you’re supposed to agree with and don’t. It can be a sounding board for whether or not to say something at work. It can be a place to brainstorm your own version of what to do, when the actions being called for on the internet feel like both too much and not enough. The establishment of a pod doesn’t promise any particular kind of action, and in that way it is next to nothing. It’s a basic foundation, on top of which other things might happen.

What I notice, in times like this, is how little most of us understand about how things change or don’t change, about how to press on levers that might connect to other levers that might connect to power. Or maybe we have some idea, but we’re not sure. Which is where the hopelessness comes from, and also the urgency. And also the sense that anything I might do as an individual falls into one of two categories: unimaginably insignificant (read: cowardly), or throwing my whole self at it in an act of bravery in which I, alone, change the world. The longing, then, is for any kind of container, structure, foundation that creates the thinnest spider web of a bridge between these two extremes. Because I’m angry at those extremes. They’re no place to live.

I hope this is not starting to sound like a call to action.

My knot of anger and shame and longing led me to something unexpectedly concrete, something that I suppose I could consider doing. But I mean it when I say I don’t think it’s my job to tell you what to do. I don’t know if you should have a solidarity pod. And I am beginning to see what Tbakhi means about craft, because I feel us sliding here towards some kind of resolution. It’s an interesting question: what is resolution and what is just having arrived somewhere? Writing travels; its action is to get us somewhere different than where we began. But can we get there while still holding things ajar? If things are askew, and unfinished, can we leave them that way?

I see it.

And you do too, right? 

And I wish it would stop. And I don’t know how to make it stop.

And I don’t know what saying this does. I don’t know if it does anything at all.

And I don’t know what you should do.

I don’t know what the best way is for our actions, or words, or even thoughts to multiply each other.

And there is no one to tell us what to do. Not really.

But since we’re here together,

I felt the impulse just to say

yes

I see it.