Here everyone is a coward and no one is free
Even that which is calcified remains soft and penetrable at its core.
I have an intimate relationship with cowardice.
There are many definitions of cowardice, but there is one that resonates with me, presently: a trait wherein excess fear prevents an individual from taking a risk or facing danger. Typically, cowardice is pejorative, indicating a failure of character but let me be clear that I don’t understand courage in the American sense of the word, in which one uses dominance over vulnerable others to appear brave or strong.
I don’t believe cowardice is a matter of strength or weakness— cowardice is a result of atrophy, of inertia, I think.
To be a coward is to be ontologically resistant to change.
In the American context, cowardice is, perhaps, the dominant way of being and understanding the world. Americans are invested in a culture of cowardice that tells us what one owes to the world is a constant backing away from one another; backing down from challenge because challenge is discomforting.
My intimacy with cowardice lies in navigating a world atrophied by backing away and backing down.
Throughout my life, I’ve witnessed people around me — family, friends, and partners — back away from my bravery. I’m not talking about heroism, here. I’m talking about being abandoned in pursuit of risk by those who were supposed to meet me halfway towards challenge; to be changed alongside me, to experience alchemy, together.
Cowardice is an unwillingness to take a necessary risk—‘risk’ in this case being a revealing of oneself to others, the risk of being seen in one's fullness— being imperfect and flawed and made of meat, and not fearing the challenge of being meat. When I say meat, I mean to evoke flesh, sinew, and viscera, — the literal stuff that makes us vulnerable—how being soft and easily exposed is part of our existential conundrum. We can be harmed, physically and emotionally. And, eventually, we will experience harm.
Trauma is evidence of the various ways in which humans can be psychologically harmed, and seeing as though all of that meat in our skulls is largely tasked with building the realities we operate in, the fear of harm, of being crushed physically and spiritually, is always lurking in our spongy bone marrow.
Even that which is calcified remains soft and penetrable at its core.
For the last fifty days, I’ve had a front-row seat to cowardice on display.
I’ve witnessed, through my various digital screens, people revealing in the state-sanctioned murder of men, women, and children; of the elderly and the disabled; of the displaced and dispossessed. Equally, I’ve seen perhaps too much cowardice parading around as toxic positivity as folks passively re-blog and retweet about the boundless bravery and joy of Palestinian people in the face of settler colonist destruction and ongoing catastrophe.
I’ve seen this same cowardice on parade whenever a Black person is murdered by state paramilitary forces.
I don’t know how to tell you that bravery isn’t exactly a choice in the face of the impending destruction of everything you are, and I don’t mean to diminish or belittle Palestinians who are, every second, fighting for their dignity and their right to exist when so much of the world will not—or cannot—come to their aid.
Colonized people are not in a position to lay down and die, to give the colonizer the pleasure of our easy deaths. If our lives are made impossible under colonization, then we have to make our destruction impossible, too.
If you wish to see me erased from the face of this Earth, I too will grin in your face until a bullet or a missile reveals the sinew, muscle, blood, and guts I am made of. I will, and I should, spite you in both my living and my death. You should, and you will, be haunted by me, by all the generations of us who have been murdered, and all the generations that will have to survive the cruelty of life under occupation.
Do not belittle the people who have to be brave to survive with your amazement at their joy and perseverance.
Instead, let us focus our attention on the cowards amongst us who, while watching other human beings be torn to shreds by shrapnel or disembodied by missiles, find themselves afraid to give up the comforts of being aligned to the colonial system. It’s these motherfuckers who should concern us most. It will be these motherfuckers who sell you out in order to keep themselves safe one more day under dictatorship.
Know your enemy.
Ariella Aisha Azoulay reminds me that one’s citizenship is conditional, because “citizens are, first and foremost, governed. The nation-state creates a bond of identification between citizens and the state through a variety of ideological mechanisms, causing this fact to be forgotten.”
One of those ideological mechanisms of the nation-state is how your silence and complicity as a citizen is bought by your hourly wage, by your salary, and the “benefits” (health insurance, primary amongst those benefits, but also a means to wealth-building via the retirement contribution system) connected to your job. To keep it a buck fifty, I have purposefully avoided becoming a wage slave, not only because it is morally reprehensible to me that I should allow myself to be exploited by way of my labor to secure my basic needs but also because I find it equally reprehensible that my moral compass should be oriented towards my employer instead of oriented towards my fellow citizens.
Do you not find it appalling that we are taught to anticipate reprisal and censorship and, ultimately, lose the means of securing our basic needs if we have decided against echoing the cowardice of a capitalist, colonial system that requires silence and support of morally reprehensible behavior?
Are you comfortable knowing someone else’s blood and captivity makes your ACH deposit possible every two weeks?
I do not believe in behaving as it is a pillar of cowardice.
I am childless, by choice.
I do not have family members who rely on me for support, nor I do not have a spouse whose family I need to behave for. I do not believe in behaving as it is a pillar of cowardice. I know these are some of the very common concerns that help engender cowardice as a substitute for moral clarity, which, is really what courage is about—having moral clarity.
I couldn’t look children in the face knowing I co-signed, quietly or vociferously, to the murder of other children in another part of the globe, and I couldn’t justify my cowardice by using the existence of a child or a partner or a family member(s) as my primary excuse for being a coward.
I have challenged the support of the white supremacist colonist structure as a working artist for years now. I have lost out on checks that I needed, frankly. I’ve been shadow banned and blacklisted. I’ve faced reprisal at every single juncture of my career and that was before I wrote this newsletter and before this genocide.
I’ve survived, even when my material reality felt as though it might be at risk and my material reality is always at risk.
As a Black person living in a settler colony, I am not guaranteed an easy life. I’m not guaranteed that my basic needs will ever be met. I’m not even guaranteed citizenship. Historically, generations of people like me have been terrorized by the state apparatus. As such, I have no allegiance to the nation-state. My allegiance, first and foremost, is to the total liberation of the human species and to all colonized and occupied people — to my human community.
Money has never moved me.
Status and clout, like money, are simply more ideological mechanisms that tie us to the state. Every day I am choosing to be tied to the people around me. To invoke Ariella Aisha Azoulay once more, “…political duty is first and foremost a duty towards one another, rather than towards the ruling power.”
I wish to be ungovernable.
I want to be wild, unruly.
Liberation is about being ungovernable. Liberation is not for the cowardly, so do not seek evidence of an allegiance to freedom from those to do not wish themselves to experience liberation.
I have always been brave, and in being brave, I’ve deepened my intimacy with cowardice.
I thought for far too long that my bravery was a specific failing in my makeup: I run head first into everything, I wait for my fears to catch up to me, and then, I wave them out of my face like the annoyance of cigarette smoke wafting near my nose.
I can smell the fear, I can see its corporal form, and still, it means nothing to me.
I used to believe this came from an entire life of having been beaten, assaulted, bullied, and belittled by my dictator of an abuser. With time and perspective, however, I recognize that would be giving a coward too much credit. Cowards don’t deserve credit. For whatever reason, be it the ways the stars aligned on the evening I was born, or some kind of heritable trait passed onto me by various ancestors past, I have had guts and I have used them, because what else are guts for?
I’ve committed myself to engaging in acts of courage that have changed the course of my life. Primarily, becoming estranged from basically all of my family in my mid twenties. While the list of reasons for the estrangement is too various and numerous to list, my decision came down to being bone-tired of suffering being the primary landscape of my life.
I was beginning to see glimpses of my life’s terrain dotted with sublime moments of understanding, affection, acceptance, and liberation because I was brave and bold enough to seek out those sublime moments, foolish enough to know I deserved the sublime despite being thrust constantly in to the dregs. Courage made it so I could no longer justify clawing myself out of the valleys of despairing, despising, and loneliness I’d become accustomed to by way of familial love.
Even still, I found myself living with cowardice and I sought to examine why exactly this entity had followed me for so much of my life. The heavy weight of my childhood loneliness entombed my limbs as I watched my partner, over several years, become a whisper I could barely hear anymore.
In the suspended animation of a viral pandemic, I found myself being haunted.
When I am being harmed, I feel it first in my guts. There’s an undulating inside of me, like the ocean, unsettling me completely, feeling the threat of being undone.
My stomach wasn’t quite right for several years.
I couldn’t get my intestines to settle down. I could feel them wriggling, wet and eel-like, within me. I had been for several years contemplating the dissolution of my marriage but I found excuse after excuse to prolong the inevitable. I told myself I was being brave, working towards this bond even though there was so much evidence in front of me that what I needed and what I wanted I could no longer find within the confines of that relationship.
Much like with my career as an editorial photographer, I also fabricated excuses.
The primary excuse was a good one: I refused to let white supremacy have any say in the outcomes of my life, especially in my relationships and in my work. Focusing so deeply on this particular excuse caused my life to become enmeshed with symbolic victories and actions, instead of becoming a reflection of a love and justice-oriented practice in bravery. I was oriented away from my political duty to myself and my community, and instead oriented it toward the ruling power.
The inability to bond intimately with others is a byproduct of white supremacist, colonialist culture.
The problem has never really been about a lack of empathy but instead, a learned practice to reject fostering deep bonds with other human beings. This rejection makes it impossible to see one’s self reflected in others—if you think you are superior to all humans then there is no common ground in which we are ever able to meet. And if you are unable to bond intimately with other human beings, the byproduct of that lack of necessary bonding means a lack of community, a lack of relationships, and ultimately, a culture that breeds malignant loneliness.
I wanted to prove the racist white family I married into wrong more than I wanted to demand to be loved the way I deserved. I wanted to prove to my industry that they could traumatize me over and over again, lock me out of opportunity, interfere with my capacity to escape generational poverty, and prove, just by continuing to exist and make work, that the constant racism wouldn’t break me even though it broke me down over and over again.
I was failing myself and, subsequently, failing those around me who I wished to be in community with.
I won’t do that again. Not this time around. Too much is at stake.
“Nothing in my view is more reprehensible than those habits of mind in the intellectual that induce avoidance, that characteristic of turning away from a difficult and principled position, which you know to be the right one, but which you decide not to take. You do not want to appear too political; you are afraid of seeming controversial; you want to keep a reputation for being balanced, objective, and moderate; your hope is to be asked back, to consult, to be on a board or prestigious committee, and so to remain within the responsible mainstream; someday you hope to get an honorary degree, a big prize, perhaps even an ambassadorship. For an intellectual, these habits of mind are corrupting par excellence. If anything can denature, neutralize, and finally kill a passionate intellectual life it is the internalization of such habits. Personally, I have encountered them in one of the toughest of all contemporary issues, Palestine, where fear of speaking out about one of the greatest injustices in modern history has hobbled, blinkered, muzzled many who know the truth and are in a position to serve it. For despite the abuse and vilification that any outspoken supporter of Palestinian rights and self-determination earns for him or herself, the truth deserves to be spoken, represented by an unafraid and compassionate intellectual.” — Edward Said
When I am in love, I feel it first in my guts.
It isn’t a discomfort, or a flopping sensation, in my stomach. It’s not even happening in that system of tissues and mucus and tubes but it’s in what is known as the sacral chakra — located below the navel, associated with our kidneys and guts, this energetic space is the seat of which our courage and our fears lie.
When the sacral chakra is blocked, it is said to cause extreme fear, especially that of death.
Here in this death colony, the collective primary drive is the avoidance of death, specifically, social death. It is what has allowed the United States to function as a harbinger of genocide since the colony’s inception — the fear of being treated as non-existent.
I experience social death as a surviving descendant of chattel slavery in, arguably, one universal way: settlers regularly claim to ‘not see’ me in public spaces.
The experience of being rendered an object, of being so far removed from humanity due to chattel slavery, makes it so that despite being a living, breathing, human being, settlers experience me primarily as an object, a thing— to be ignored, to remain unseen—until they are startled by my human presence, typically upon me yelling at them for running into me as though I do not exist and as though they cannot see me.
It is this experience of social death that makes genocide possible: you cannot kill that which cannot be seen and does not exist.
We should not project innocence onto the settler. In an attempt to reason through the violence we navigate daily, we often assume wrongly that the settler is unaware of the systems and ideological mechanisms that work on their behalf to secure their citizenship.
Feigned ignorance—willful ignorance, to be sure—is not the same as not knowing or not having the facts. Pretending to be shocked by or not understand the conditions of colonialism is an ideological tool welded by settlers against the occupied. Further, just because a settler cannot articulate intellectually the ideological tools they weld, does (and should) not absolve them of welding those tools in the very first place.
Every day humans engage in behaviors we don’t fully understand or can’t always name, and yet that doesn’t render those behaviors null — it doesn’t mean harm isn’t or can’t be done.
Anyone who has experienced abuse, especially as a child, can confirm that even without adequate language to describe the experience of abuse, once the language was found, once the behaviors were named for what they are, these tools only reiterated the internal knowingness of one’s experience: a great harm occurred and that now must be survived.
When people are punished for rightfully naming these systems and tactics of colonial violence and abuse, the punishment only serves as evidence of guilt by those who are benefiting from the violence but are too cowardly to stand in the truth of that fact. Every reprisal, every retaliatory firing, every effort to censor those with moral clarity, every name added to a blacklist, every half-assed, half-hearted forced response or ‘statement’ that comes too late, every single denial of genocide and collective punishment, and every academy surveilled is evidence of the moral failure of the colonialist system.
We don’t have to wait for history to prove who was on the side of humanity and who wasn’t, because it’s being proved in real time, right now. You may not ‘believe’ in the settler colony, and you may not want proximity or claim to whiteness, but you are a benefactory of these systems and that implicates you in the subjugation of your species.
Admitting there is a genocide occurring is also to admit that you might be implicated in those deaths, but more, that your soft and fragile body made of nothing more than meat can and will also one day be under the threat of colonial violence that governs you for now.
Cowards fear being implicated in their humanity, above all else.
Cowardice is the fear of losing all that which shields you from the human experience everyone else is forced to navigate, knowing that when people are slaughtered, when communities are ethnically cleansed from their ancestral land, when people are displaced and made stateless, when humans are seen as nothing more than ‘vermin’ or ‘infectious’, it is because the settler has made the quiet agreement to trade in their humanity for cowardice if it means protection under the nation-state.
On the one hand, we revere our status as human and our supposed higher intelligence (what we seem to think as ‘knowing better’). On the other hand, we deeply fear our humanity because we’ve all witnessed how insidious, how cruel, how detached our species can be. We live in these bodies that are not made to surpass time. As time wanes, so do our bodies. They fall apart. They become burdens.
The body is born in preparation for death and death, it seems, is the state of being we’ve not yet found a way to manipulate, defeat, or conquer using colonial means.
What the settler can never escape is the inextricable reality of being a thing created to die, and so, we see the settler revel in the premature death of others, as if it may prolong their lifespan; as if someone else dying—a person deemed lesser typically because of their proximity to Blackness—might act as a blood sacrifice to allow the settler just one more day in the hell of their own making.
Palestinians are brave because they know their destruction is founded on delusion of the settler’s ethno-nationalist fantasy — a reality that has never existed, and thus, never will. It behooves each of us to take up a practice of bravery in these terrifying times and learn that sacrifice is necessary for maturation and growth because when you can face the reality of who you are and when you can accept that which makes you flawed and imperfect, the ability to sit in the discomfort of one’s humanity becomes bearable, especially when you can share that discomfort with others around you who can ease your fears by embracing you as you are— that is how we find liberation.
We have witnessed countless generations of those aligned to colonality attempt to erase countless groups of indigenous people off the face of the Earth, only to fail every single time. We’ve witnessed the settler be deeply haunted by their cowardice in the face of colonial violence, to the point of revising and erasing their histories of domination and subjugation, of occupation and theft, of cruelty.
Those who are still pandering to the colonial system in the hopes of retaining their social position, or their jobs, or what little power they believe they have as subjects of the colonial power will be disappointed to know that Palestine and Palestinians will survive.
Just like the Congo and the Sudan will survive. Just like Haiti and West Papua will survive.
Knowing cowardice with deep intimacy, having seen its various faces, and the many roles it plays, and knowing that cowardice is a specter that lingers in the air encourages me to take the necessary risk of bravery, especially when I’m being encouraged by the state apparatus to fold into being my smallest, coward self.
I’m enticed by the challenge of remaining true in my political duty towards you, towards us.
It is easy to remain silent.
It’s easy to try to ‘rationally’ and ‘logically’ justify state-sanctioned mass murder — the state is so generous as to even provide arguments for you to parrot off when challenged — but what is not easy, what will always be worth losing friends, jobs, social status, and ‘power’ in a settler colony is fostering the kind of moral clarity that allows me to see what is worth protecting isn’t a job or a friendship with a genocide supporter or a potential future where my success has been predicated on the catastrophe of others, what is worth protecting is us.
When we cast aside our individual aspirations to fulfill our duty to one another, we create a new world in which the colonial power structure begins to fall apart, threatened as it is by joy and justice, by gentleness and intimacy, by community support and reliance.
Any regime that can be threatened by the mere existence of the joy of the occupied is a regime that should and will be toppled.
When I began this draft in September, I didn’t imagine I’d be witnessing a genocide by the time I completed and published this essay. Here we are. I’m not shocked or appalled anymore. I am heartbroken but also heartened to see folks stand up and speak out for what is necessary for our collective survival.
We are precious and we are worth protecting. Please don’t forget that when they try to tell you otherwise.
you are so sharp & once again dropping so many gems which resonate through all parts of me. thank you for connecting the dots. FTP.
"When we cast aside our individual aspirations to fulfill our duty to one another, we create a new world in which the colonial power structure begins to fall apart, threatened as it is by joy and justice, by gentleness and intimacy, by community support and reliance." hell yes. thank you as ever, O.