21 July 2020
Dearest Fazal,
Thank you for an engaging text conversation this morning, where we could be candid about our concerns regarding the police state Donald Trump is creating under the guise of “law and order.” I appreciated you sending me the actual “Executive Order on Protecting American Monuments, Memorials, and Statues and Combating Recent Criminal Violence” signed on June 26, 2020. This is indeed terrifying, as you say, and it pays to read the actual language. I wonder if the gutting and desecration of Bears Ears National Monument from Trump’s actions on December 4, 2017 would fall under his criteria of violence? Particularly this clause:
Sec. 2. Policy. (a) It is the policy of the United States to prosecute to the fullest extent permitted under Federal law, and as appropriate, any person or any entity that destroys, damages, vandalizes, or desecrates a monument, memorial, or statue within the United States or otherwise vandalizes government property. The desire of the Congress to protect Federal property is clearly reflected in section 1361 of title 18, United States Code, which authorizes a penalty of up to 10 years’ imprisonment for the willful injury of Federal property.
What we are witnessing right now in Portland, Oregon, is a government takeover of the streets and a violation of our constitutional rights as citizens to assemble and to peacefully protest our government. Unidentified federal agents dressed in camouflage trolling the city in unnamed vans are arresting people, detaining them without cause, interrogating them, and then returning them to the streets terrorized.
As reported in the Washington Post, “Portland Mayor Ted Wheeler twice called the federal police in his city President Trump’s ‘personal army’ and said that he is joining a chorus of Oregon’s elected officials in sending a clear message to Washington: ‘Take your troops out of Portland.’”
The poet Jorie Graham tweeted this afternoon, “Be outraged. Be terrified. Wake up. It’s a coup. What part…do we not grasp. This is not really really really bad government. This is a hostile takeover…A plot against America. It’s a bloody internet-fueled civil war & images of violence in streets r porn to many.”
I feel like we are a country of frogs, slowly being boiled alive without realizing what is happening to us. It took a “Naked Athena” to get the nation’s attention and confront the madness of this violence. An unidentified woman wearing only a black knit cap and face mask approached an armed line of federal soldiers in downtown Portland. As she walked toward them holding their gaze, she then sat down in the center of the street, raised her knees to her chest and struck a yoga pose the goddess Kali would be proud of. The federal troops were defenseless against one naked woman who sat before their wall of munitions and spread her legs wide open. The gunmen in army fatigues could do nothing but look—and remember where they came from.
There are many forms of resistance. I believe in disobedient women.
The two women you introduce me to today, Fazal, were born in 1955. So was I. You know this is a shared year among us, and so you provide me with a mirror. Although we live in worlds apart, I believe much unites us. Over tea, we would come to see our hearts open to the truths of our lives. These women are unnamed. I will call them my sisters.
Let me move closer. You tell me one woman is from Israel; one from Palestine. One has dark, short, curly hair; the other wears a white hijab that frames her face. One has light eyes—I imagine hazel-green; the other has dark eyes, brown. They both have down-turned mouths. I cannot call them smiles. These women know sorrow. I can see loss lodged in their eyes.
In 1955, the year we were born, Palestinian Arabs were still being engaged in the forced exodus from their homelands that began during the 1947–49 Palestine War. History tells us that between 400 and 600 villages were destroyed. The “Nakba”—or the “catastrophe”—refers to the height of the war in 1948, when more than 700,000 Palestinians fled or were expelled from their homes. In May 1948, the Independent State of Israel was proclaimed. The conflict between these two adjoining states continues as does the Israeli occupation of Palestinian settlements.
As an American, I have unwittingly contributed in inexplicable ways to the stories of political and physical separation between Israel and Palestine. The United States has a long track record of supporting the Israeli military. Everyone says the conflict between Israel and Palestine is “complicated,” in other words better left alone. There are strong feelings on both sides. But most people I know, such as yourself, Fazal, are pro-Palestinian, believing they have a right to return to their own homeland.
In a strange series of events on September 13, 1993, some friends and I who were in Washington, D.C. for “Wilderness Week” to lobby Congress on the importance of Utah wildlands, were invited by our Congressman Wayne Owens, who had worked for decades on issues in the Middle East, to attend a reception for the Israel–Palestine Peace Accord signed by Shimon Peres and Mahmoud Abbas that afternoon with President Bill Clinton overseeing the historic agreement. Congressman Owen feared the turnout might be low. We went and I remember on a visceral level the hope that infiltrated that occasion.
I can’t help but wonder what the conversation would have been had I met my sisters under that tent twenty-seven years ago when we were thirty-eight years old. Would they have shared a vision of hope? Or would there have been tension and resentment between us?
Now, in 2020, as we are all confronting a global pandemic, with Israel and Palestine experiencing lockdown conditions as we are in America, I wonder what our conversation would be if the three of us were to convene on our patio in Castle Valley? Perhaps we would begin talking about our relationships to the desert over cups of tea, yes, we could begin there as sisters, with a shared affection and understanding of what it means to live in an arid landscape. I would like to ask them what acts of resistance they have participated in starting in their own homes. I would want to know what binds them together; perhaps water, lemon trees, and children. I would ask them if the lines that determine their homelands are the politics that define them as women or if they denounce the occupation and settlements as the divisive work of the patriarchy? What would their thoughts be regarding a two-state solution? Or can they imagine another kind of alternative in pursuit of peace? Where would they agree and agree to disagree?
I keep thinking what forces shaped our identities by being born in 1955. Culture? Race? Class? Politics? What were each of us born into—as an Israeli child, a Palestinian child, and a child from the United States?
I was welcomed into an era of unprecedented prosperity where the weight of World War II had lifted and the “Big Buildup,” especially in the American West, was paving the way for dams and suburbs alongside a revolutionary court case named Brown v. Board of Education that would create a threshold of equity within the civil rights movement. Born female into a politically conservative Mormon family, my acts of resistance would come later in acts of civil disobedience at the Nuclear Test Site and with my body and my pen.
I suspect the woman from Israel comes from a middle-class family, her earrings are a hint of luxury or taste, a gesture of confidence. Was she raised with a sense of belonging in Israel, as a Jew, having never known physical displacement and yet holding a history of persecution and diaspora in her blood? And the woman from Palestine, what are the stories that move inside her since her people’s sense of home is a history of exile, even of physical erasure? Was she brought home to a settlement in Gaza or the West Bank? Was she a child in perpetual motion and fear? Does she wear the traditional embroidered thobe as a senior woman with a renewed pride and fervor in her identity, as one who has lived and fought for her homeland knowing the uncertainty and violence associated with being seen as Other her entire life?
These two women know war. These two women know heartache. They are women who have held the space of mourning for their families where the deaths of those they loved seemed unbearable. These women come to know how to be alone.
When these women sat for you, Fazal, and agreed to have their portraits taken, did they know you would create a diptych where the lines between political differences would be challenged and we would be invited to see their humanity first and their identities later? Did they understand the nature of your inquiry and critique?
And if they did, how might it change them? I know it has changed me simply by reflecting on their portraits and a shared point of time when our lives began.
One day, Fazal, perhaps you will take my portrait and place it beside my sisters and create a triptych of three women’s faces that honors our sixty-five years and together adds up to almost two centuries of lived experience, a collective wisdom of adaptation and resistance. I believe one of the narratives we might share is that we have learned how to live and love with a broken heart; that we are women who understand the power of land; and that each of us continues to grow in our capacity to stay with the troubles as we navigate our days with a sanguine sensibility.
Within this dance of living inside the heated conflicts that dwell in the desert, we as sisters born in 1955 have become fearless. I would like to believe that each of us in our own way has entered the ever-expanding circle of unruly women, now free to exercise our power as “elders in training.” We can use our voices to cry and cry out the injustices that have ravaged our families, murdered our children, and shattered peace on the planet in the exploitation of the place we call home, including our bodies, our communities through the aggression of men who forgot where they came from—their mothers.
When I look into my sisters’ eyes, Fazal, I see them asking through their indignation (unspoken, but felt) for a different way to embrace the world—daring to ask, “What does the work of non-violence look like when placed in the hands of women?”
I suspect it looks like Naked Athenas staring down lines of the patriarchy all over the world, or a “Wall of Mothers” with linked arms singing into the night unafraid of the love and labor required for change in the name of ongoing injustices. It is the living mosaic of heartfelt acts of courageous vulnerability in the face of violence that make the dream of peace possible.
In solidarity, so grateful for the depth of your witnessing,
Terry