Dear Souseh: Existential Advice for Third World Problems

In this first edition of The Markaz Review’s monthly advice column, Souseh answers a letter from a Palestinian reader, wondering how to talk about the struggle for liberation with her non-Palestinian partner.

 

Dear Souseh,

My partner and I have been in a relationship for seven years. I’m Palestinian and he’s from North America (where we are both living). When we first met, he knew very little about the Palestinian struggle and admitted to not having a strong interest in what he calls politics. Despite this, I’ve made it a point to teach him about Palestinian history as it is an inextricable part of my own identity. It took my family ages to accept him, but I fought hard for us and he stood by me even though there were times when they were not very nice to him. He was always polite and never held it against me or them. Since then, they’ve come to like him and see that he really loves me. My mom even sends back extra food with me sometimes for him because he loves her cooking. So he knows my family, and he also knows that my extended family is scattered all over the world because of the Nakba and he knows that my aunts and cousins are living under curfew now in the West Bank, and he knows a lot of other ways that we’ve all been affected by almost a century of dispossession and displacement. He knows so much more now about the Palestinian struggle for liberation than he ever did when we met. He was always willing to listen and allowed me to explain things to him without interrupting or arguing.

And yet, after October 7, it’s felt really difficult to talk in any detail about the genocide with my partner. He watches the news with me and I know it makes him upset but he still struggles with accepting certain things like acts of resistance. When I push him to talk about it, he shuts down and makes it impossible to engage. Then I get angry, because I’m already so angry, and I find myself lashing out at his lack of understanding when I need him the most. I’m so utterly heartbroken and I’m finding it very difficult to explain with a level head why Palestinians have been given no choice but to resist in whatever ways are necessary. He’ll tell me over and over that he doesn’t like to talk politics. I don’t know how to have these conversations without further building resentment. He is otherwise loving and kind and very sympathetic when I’m down. I already feel so alone because I’ve lost several friends over this. I don’t want to lose one more person I love.

Signed, 

Broken but Not Defeated

 

Dear Broken but Not Defeated,

Last night I finished reading a book, a very bleak and depressing (but in some ways beautiful) book about a fascist takeover in Ireland that eventually devolves into brutal civil war. Toward the end, there is a long, breathless passage that reads partially thus: “…the world is always ending over and over again in one place but not another and […] the end of the world is always a local event, it comes to your country and visits your town and knocks on the door of your house and becomes to others but some distant warning, a brief report on the news….”

You are experiencing a local end of the world. He (thinks he) is not. To him, despite the fact that he lives with it in the form of his partner, he sees it as “a brief report on the news.” To you it’s personal. To him, it’s “politics.”

That the “personal” and “political” can appear separate to some people seems the essence of privilege, if we take privilege to mean being accorded the luxury of not having to negotiate your humanity with the world. And having less to negotiate means you have less on the line. But you have everything on the line here.

Of course you feel alone. This scythe reaping endless death in Gaza has also severed so many relationships and cut down so many illusions about the world. As an Arab, especially as a Palestinian, I’m imagining you had less illusions than most — about justice, about international law, about media and reporting. Hell, even about common decency. But one of the illusions that so many of us carry regardless is that love will, if not conquer all, then at least help us negotiate some generous treaties to maintain peace in the intimate realm. In the grand scheme of things, sure, an expansive, world-embracing love is the only path forward. But in the day-to-day particularity of our relationships, especially the ones that we choose, and not the ones imposed on us by biology, love, too, is something we choose. Or at least something we can choose whether or not to practice (as the saying goes), as a verb.

This is a tough assessment for you to have to make in such circumstances, and I feel for you. The world is closing in. Not to be overly dramatic, but yes, the world is closing in. Especially on people like us, who come from countries and cultures deemed “lesser than,” whose homelands, whether ancestral or adopted, are being rendered more and more uninhabitable (if they weren’t already forbidden to us altogether). Therefore, now more than ever, we need home — that is, the private space we build for ourselves out of our intimacies and communities — to be a place of safety. A place where we are free to be who and what we are. To express our sexual, political, moral and ethical affiliations without fear of reprisal or rejection.

For it is exactly rejection that you’re dealing with. If one’s partner is a Palestinian, whose immediate family tree has been hacked at, uprooted and transplanted by collective catastrophe, and yet one refuses to truly engage with the Palestinian struggle, then this is effectively a rejection of one’s partner in the fullness of their humanity. There’s this quote that’s been going around social media for quite a while now; I’m sure you’ve seen it. It’s often misattributed to James Baldwin (while it is fact by a Twitter user named sonofbaldwin). “We can disagree and still love each other,” it says, “unless your disagreement is rooted in my oppression and denial of my humanity and right to exist.”

I’m assuming that your partner doesn’t wish for your oppression and doesn’t think he’s denying you your humanity or your right to exist. He’d probably be horrified if you even hinted at such. But if he denies you, or your people, the right to resist, then what does that really mean? If you accept my people’s right to exist, you might ask, then how are they supposed to do so in the face of an ongoing annihilation?

I think, before anything else, you owe it to yourself and to your seven years together to try and probe why he might be shutting down. As well as to assess whether this is something that can potentially be overcome. You don’t mention this, but how does he make it “impossible” to engage? Does he get angry or scary? (Unacceptable and potentially physically dangerous). Does he turn petulant and give you the silent treatment? (Unacceptable and emotionally draining). Does he physically walk away and shut himself up somewhere until it’s all “blown over”? (In theory a more mature way to handle conflict in the moment but as good as the silent treatment if, once he’s back and calmer, he still refuses to engage).

See, in one way… I don’t blame him for shutting down. In the way that this reflects a facet of us all: that total impotence in the face of obscene destruction. We stand there reeling in horror, unable to summon any kind of response commensurate with such a shattering. Overwhelmed, we cease to function. It is clear from what you say about the way that he loves and respects you enough to have stood by you despite your family’s opposition that he’s not doing this out of meanness or malicious feeling. It seems more like he doesn’t know how to process it all and so he just… doesn’t. He turns a blind eye to avoid the emotional cost of seeing.

Again, he can afford to do this. But really… can he? When his partner is Palestinian and directly affected by what’s going on, which in turn implicates him? When his partner is openly asking, again and again for support and for him to engage? Can he really afford to turn away? At this point, eighteen months into a genocide, can anyone?

You need, we all need, now more than ever, people who have our back. People we can depend on during this “local” end of the world, in which the knocks are coming harder and faster on so many people’s doors. Is he someone who will take your hand gently and stand beside you firm and strong, ready to face together whatever hardship or nightmare comes through that door? Is he someone who will help you forage for beauty in the gloom and hold you when you need a break from that difficult work? Hold the entirety of you: your grief and your terror and your history and your distant, longed-for geographies. I really don’t think that’s too much to ask. I think it is, in fact, the bare minimum to ask. For any of us.

To be “sympathetic when you’re down,” simply isn’t enough. He needs to be able to help lift you up. We all need to be able to take turns carrying one another across the rubble of the crumbling world. In our intimate relationships above all. But because we need that so badly (and, let’s face it, because we also need to be perceived as being “in a good relationship,” and don’t wish to be judged as “selling ourselves short”), we don’t want to embarrass our partners — or ourselves — when we know they aren’t up to the task. As a result, we expend much of our efforts trying to make ourselves as weightless as possible to avoid facing that simple fact.

Am I right in guessing that part of the reason you don’t want to face it is that, after having defended him to your family it feels especially damning to stop defending him, even to yourself? And of course, there is love. Sure, it might best be practiced as a verb, but let’s face it, it’s also a noun. There is the love you feel for him and the love he shows you, as well as the comfort he provides simply by being familiar (nothing to scoff at, ever), and by being “otherwise loving and kind.” And of course, you feel a sense of loyalty. He’s “stood by you.” But… can he carry you? Again, with the full weight of your history?

Only you can evaluate whether he’s eventually up to such a task. But assuming things remain the same, that he keeps refusing to engage, I’ll have to ask you to think on the following question. If, after you’ve explained to him time and again what your family has gone through and what you’re feeling; if after watching eighteen straight months of savagery and genocide by slaughter, torture, forced exile and famine; of watching the lengths to which the West is going — obliterating journalistic integrity, eroding civil rights, jailing, disappearing, deporting people on the flimsiest of pretexts — just to silence any critics of that genocide; if, after all that and doubtless worse yet to come, he’s still calling what’s happening “politics,” distancing himself from it, behaving as though it were something he can shut out, might you not already have the answer to your question? Is this relationship not somehow compounding the feeling of being “angry and alone,” rather than mitigating it?

To “de-politicize” or “universalize” the above: if your partner continues refusing to face up to an issue, any issue, that cuts to your core and affects the integrity of your sense of self, especially after seeing the pain this refusal has caused, then there is something fundamentally lacking in the relationship.

I won’t judge you if you decide to stay and you shouldn’t judge yourself either. There may be any number of reasons why you decide to do so. Things absent from your letter, or things I failed to read into it. But please don’t let the desire to avoid the emotional difficulty of a breakup be the only reason you stay. Your future is far too high a price to pay in order to defer present trouble or embarrassment. The world might be ending, but your life continues.

 

Dear Souseh is a new monthly feature at The Markaz Review, an advice column that tackles personal questions inflected by our greater social, cultural, political and historical contexts. Do you have such a question for Souseh? Send your letters to DearSouseh@themarkaz.org. A new letter will be answered every month.