* I would like to say that I have gone back into this text, 3+ months into the ethnic cleansing operation and genocide in Gaza, to edit it - particularly the section about the universality of genocides across humanity's recent history, and the need to challenge Israel's narratives of exceptionalism. My feelings are constantly evolving, and I am trying to keep the writing as true as possible to what I feel, as I learn.

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. 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. And it's been pointed at many human beings before, across time and space. 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. Under the postcolonial New Order government - a few decades after the round of massacres that my grandfather survived - up to 2 to 3 million more Chinese people were ethnically cleansed by the Indonesian state and its actors, over the span of 2 years.

And on the one hand, it's true that something of a similar scale, intensity, and brutality has happened to Jewish people within Europe. But with all due respect (and without minimising anyone's tragedy, my grandparents' or theirs), I believe that the emotional turn that needs to happen from this terrible historical experience is not for any one group of people to then feel unusually at-risk and exceptional. This way of thinking - which Israel and its supporters are currently leaning on heavily - is A) painful and lonely for the soul to bear, and B) lets us excuse ourselves for becoming the perpetrators of similar dehumanization, towards the most vulnerable sub-groups in our midsts. It lets us think "I could never do that. So what I and my people are currently doing - it must be something else."

No. The message to take from our ancestors' immense suffering is that genocides are universal - cutting across all races and religions and cultural backgrounds. And they have happened to many, many people. Stories about genocide from outside Europe are deliberately underreported when they don't align with the US' imperial interests, and hence dangerously (I would say) underrepresented in the West's imagination. But the fact of the matter is that if you open your eyes and expand your worldview even a little bit, you will see that countless people's grandparents across all cultures and continents have been subjected to this same kind of dynamic in recent history - of being othered and slaughtered mechanically, indiscriminately, and terrifyingly based on the colour of their skin. Or their surnames, or their religion, or their culture; the languages they spoke, or the food they ate or didn't eat at home. In Asia alone, I can think of the Burmese under Ne Win and the local Indians, the Indonesians and the Chinese, the Laotians and Hmongs, the Cambodians and the Chams, the Hindus/Sikhs and the Muslims on either side during partition... mass murders and forced labour and designations of "human animals" all round. I'm sure that the list would go on endlessly into ten paragraphs, if I continued - for all continents and all races of people around the globe.

Genocides happen. For all their evil, they are a part of the human experience; almost no one's lineage is exempt. And any culture, at any given time, can play the role of the perpetrator or the victim - nobody is too good or pure to lapse into the role of domination, and no one is too strong or unassailable to end up being the one under persecution. And you know what - I feel like it's SO important for me to keep talking about this, even if it offends certain people and makes them deeply uncomfortable. Because the point is that we are all one humanity standing together, united in our experiences of fear and pain as potential victims - but also united in our potential capacity to do harm ourselves, under bad leadership. We have to accept that the both these potentials - to dominate and be dominated - lie dormant in every single human heart, including our own. And when I look at the Zionist rhetoric that is currently flooding our news channels, what I see is a group of people who have been completely unable to accept the presence of this duality within themselves. 

It's difficult to accept that one (or the people one loves) could be genocidal. But it's a necessary turn we will have to come to, for this absolutely evil extermination of the Palestinian people to stop. Several of my close friends and acquaintances are Jewish, if not Israeli. And now, in this time of absolute necessity, I feel deep hope when I look at those among them who have been able to stand with the collective experiences of humanity around the globe - rather than buying into this false narrative that any one person or community's pain makes them isolated and unique. It is so important to be able to sidestep the lure of pure victimhood like this - to be able say that right now, the dehumanization that human beings periodically inflict on one another is being pointed at someone else, and I see it, happening at a truly horrifying intensity and rate. I am not okay with it. Because we are one across all cultures, and we feel for each other; we must help to carry each others' pain.

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.

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.