Grief Suspended in Explosion

Karachi is underwater. They say the flooding is devastating. They speak as though it is constitutive of the people of Karachi to suffer, that they just can't imagine another way of being: hardship, plight, poverty. 1948 is all that comes to mind. Partition. Colonialism. But nineteen years and counting: Afghanistan, that is how Pakistan exists to them, a mere association.

1948. Gaza is without power, ten days and counting. Israeli warplanes, drones all day. They speak of “terrorist balloons.” Balloons. All your might and power, you clowns, you're scared of balloons. The balloon, so symbolic of all that your imperious ego cannot control. The wind is also your enemy now.

Oh, wait. This is about Libnan—Lebanon. The explosion happened twenty-seven days ago. August 4. My mama's birthday. After living through fifteen years of war and multiple Israeli invasions, she says it's the worst birthday she has ever had, even though she loved the flowers we sent her through the coronaverse.

Being Lebanese—at least, being an antinationalist, antisectarian, radical leftist Lebanese—means being in a perpetual state of non-grief, suspended. No space to hold for Lebanon as it catapults into the limelight of the white “Western” gaze as an emblem of progressiveness in a swamp of “shithole [Muslim] countries.” Any space I hold for Lebanon is poisoned by the Orientalism, the racism, the xenophobia, and Eurocentric onanistic fantasies of what Lebanon is, should be, would be, will be.

Any space I hold for Lebanon is space that contends with the kafala system, holding countless domestic workers from Ethiopia, Phillipines, Sri Lanka and more, as modern-day slaves in the homes of their benevolent, and sometimes outright malevolent, “owners.” Any space I hold for Lebanon is space that contends with Zionist aggression, pitting our Palestinian siblings against us

(and one another), as though they are/were the harbingers of a decrepit feuda