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My heart and brain are breaking over what is happening in Gaza right now. And the weird thing is that to cope with it, I've found myself wanting to play old songs from my Christian past on my guitar, these last few days. This was low-key confusing to me because a) I am not a Christian anymore, and no longer believe the Zionist-leaning teachings that I once used to, and b) I haven't gone to a church in over 10 years, so my knowledge of popular Christian music is probably quite lame to current Christians (stuck at Hillsong).
Anyway, at first I wasn't sure why I kept feeling the compulsion to sing these old songs. Also, I felt a twinge of residual weirdness/embarrassment about it because my husband - who I only met after I stopped being religious - had not really witnessed this side of me in full. And I was like... do I really want him to see how many 4-chord songs I know by heart?? But anyway, after a few days of getting into the music, I feel like I've arrived at an explanation of why I needed to do it. I needed to sing the old songs to remember - in a time where my feelings are running particularly high - that the Other is not out there in the world, as a thing to reject and smear and direct immense amounts of hatred towards. No. It feels uncomfortable to admit this. But the Other is in me, actually. In some ways, it IS me - is a part of me that I can bring up every once in a while, and still have genuinely strong feelings of connection and gratitude towards, even though I no longer identify with it. I feel like when there is so much heat and strong feeling in the news/on social media at the moment, it can feel easy for me to forget this principle more generally. That Others - other people who I disagree with - are people, and not just names... not just figures, not just their worldviews, or their cultures, or even their identities. As long as someone is speaking authentically from their body and their heart - rather than from overidentification with a self that they were told they should have - then there is something there that it is possible to connect to. There is something there that is an "I", that I can reach out to and touch with the "I" that is within me, too. The Other is inside all of us, I guess. Maybe that's what I'm trying to say, at a more abstract level. And not to put too fine a point on it, but as I've been reading the news these last few days, I keep thinking about how forgetting that is the first and last step towards terrible atrocity. That move that can happen so gradually and quietly - where the "I" gets stripped from another person's identity, in your mind - it can be a source of such unspeakably great evil, no matter what direction the gesture is pointed in. It's been pointed at so many other human beings before, in the past. In the region of the world where I come from, too - e.g. the anti-Chinese massacres that drove my grandfather out of his village in Indonesia, as a young boy. But it's happened to Jewish people, especially. And I have many close friends who are Jewish - and now, in this time, I continually feel amazed and inspired by the emotional courage they have gathered up inside them, to sidestep and call out the lure of humanity's oldest wound. To be able to say that it's being pointed at someone else too, and I see it, I am not okay with it. Please stop. Truthfully, I feel too sad and angry to really articulate my thoughts as clearly as I could be doing. I'm going to go to the Ceasefire Now march this Saturday, in London. And will probably cry in the crowd again as I did last week, while thinking of my friends who live in the region - many of whom are Christian Palestinians. And who - even if they survive this conflict - will almost certainly still have to suffer in different ways for many, many years going forward, from the unchecked violence currently being perpetrated against Gaza by a military, apartheid state, with the support of the world's leaders. What a terrible time it is to be alive.
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It makes me so happy to be able to write this post: I have a book coming out next year!!! THE STORY GAME: A MEMOIR, will be out in the US and Canada from Tin House Books on 21 May 2024! Although I'm only able to announce it today, I've actually been on this journey for a couple of months now. Since the start of August, I've working really speedily and intensely behind the scenes with my amazing editor, agent, and the Tin House team - polishing up the book, brainstorming publicity strategy, selecting a beautiful cover, etc. Sometimes when I have a free moment, I still catch myself thinking that I can't believe this is all happening, and so quickly too. I can't believe the rate at which I'm having to learn and transform - in my career, but also just generally as a human being. Trying out new ways of relating with others, moving through fear, taking new risks. What a wild thing it is to publish a book, man. What an act of pure and scintillating hope. To take something so deeply private and give it a face, a voice, a personality - to insist that it deserves to take up all the space it needs, and be seen and known by many other people. For me, it feels like having to hold my breath, and take a leap of faith over and over again. Believing that I will be met with love there, in the world outside the room of my own mind, and outside the controlled environment of the pages I have created. In the flurry of the last few weeks, I've often found myself coming back to this Pau Vallvé cover of Bjork's song, and singing the words aloud to myself as a kind of reminder:
You'll be given love / You'll be taken care of You'll be given love / You have to trust it Maybe not from the sources you have poured yours Maybe not from the directions you are staring at ... All is full of love. In many ways, this book represents a series of risks I am taking, in search of the love and connection I've always believed must exist. There's a lot of fear there, but also a lot of joy in discovery and having old instincts proven wrong. I wonder if this is what it feels like for other authors too! Like the path to somewhere new is here - somewhere different, somewhere I've always heard stories about, but never seen with my own eyes- and I want to keep walking down it to see where it goes. |