A writer looks to the land for another way of understanding the Anthropocene and finds in Palestine's elements an intifada of their own.
I wrote about the river and the sea, about tomorrow and the sun,
and nothing came of it.
I wrote about oppression and depravity—purity too.
I slept without a bite of bread.
I dreamt without dreams.
I woke up not missing my hands or feet or reflection in the mirror
or the thing I call my soul.
I died and lived. I lit myself on fire. I put myself out with my own ashes,
and nothing came of it.
I am all these elements, O God: fire, earth, wind, and water.
Their fifth is a pain that blind songs can’t see, their sixth is this immense
loneliness, and their seventh, since my slaughter, is blood.
When I burned, I inhabited the letters of my free name like a butterfly:
P A L E S T I N E
—Ibrahim Nasrallah, “Palestinian,” translated by Huda Fakhreddine
The land is the only archive I reach for, and it dwells in my body. It speaks through me in fire, in Arabic, in absences, in stone, through daughters and flowers sprouted from the blood of martyrs. I have been to Palestine only twice in my life. The last time, I put into practice what I had learned from other Palestinian women about the art of carrying a homeland. I smuggled two small vessels of Palestine into my luggage: one container of soil gathered from Ein Karem, anointed with water from the natural spring I reached through a sea of babbling bible tourists—out of place and out of touch—for my chosen brother in exile, who should have been there instead of them. The other, from Burqa, was for me. When I delivered a few handfuls of Ein Karem to my dearest friend, he buried his face into the earth and breathed it in. Through its scent, he returned.
I stored the soil from my village under my bed for the following few years, where Palestine took root in the small plot I planted beneath my pillow. It remained there until a few weeks ago when my husband, knowing both me and exile well, suggested that we marry upon it. On earth gathered from the land where the stone house my grandfather built by hand now stands vacant, waiting—we made our vows. On soil, collected from beneath the almond tree that hangs over the domed roof, where my cousins spent many summers devouring its green fruit—we were married. The earth from Burqa became a portal, bridging our union in Baltimore back to Palestine.
The scattered and displaced, the shatat, with every breath inhabit new ways of returning.
We imagine our way home.
THE first time I went to Palestine, in 2019, I watched my father grieve for the Dead Sea. He stood by the shoreline as I waded into the salty water. When I beckoned for him to join me, he remained anchored in place. He told me the Dead Sea was dying and pointed back toward the road from which we had approached. He remembered from his childhood how the sea had felt close enough to touch from the window of the car. The waters had withdrawn enough to dissipate my father’s thirty years of absence. The ecological mourning lingered between us in the heavy air; the grief diffused, like salt in water, and became mine too.
I learned soon after this encounter that the Zionist occupation was depleting the Jordan River to feed Jewish-only settlements on stolen land, and that this extraction was causing the Dead Sea’s waters to recede by a meter each year, collapsing structural salt caverns beneath the surface of the sand. And so, as the shoreline recessed, sinkholes began erupting across the exposed land, swallowing Israeli settler-only roads and resorts. From my father and the sinkholes, I began to understand that grief does not remain below the surface indefinitely; it can erupt and alter the world. I learned how to measure years of absence, generations of the displaced, not only in meters of receding shoreline, but through the implosion of property-destroying sinkholes.
My focus on a grain of sand, a shrinking shore, a whiff of earth might appear small and inconsequential to some, pedantic or nostalgic, even, given the enormity of the environmental and political horrors we face. But I have seen and known the capacity of the Palestinian elemental to radically transform the world: to move time differently, to transport us home, provide refuge, and deliver justice. How the elements themselves revolt against the Zionist settler colony and its raging, genocidal machinery: through fire, sinkholes, sabbar, and pollen, through the smoke from burning tires used to shield bodies in revolt, and the earth giving way to the imprisoned and besieged tunneling through the Palestinian subterranean towards freedom. These earthly uprisings, these elemental intifadas, have wrought forms of accountability, defended the land and its people, and laid truths bare.
Writing through ecocide and genocide is not an obligation carried alone, nor the burden of witnessing how nothing comes of it, as Nasrallah states. We know we must write anyway, even if just to be reassured, to go on record together as those who did not idly accept the elimination of Palestine, who refused silence at the threshold of the last sky, to paraphrase Mahmoud Darwish’s agonizing line. Or to know that we are not alone in waking up every day wondering how many times the world will end and has already ended for the wretched of the earth. We are also, much more crucially, its original keepers, ahlu al-ard, its beloveds: the survivors and their descendants, the us for whom I write.
To write from the land as my archive requires reimagining and contending with the racialized ecologies and disaster geographies we have inherited beyond the imperial lie of their inevitability. What is the Anthropocene, the age of “human” impact on the earth, to those cast in the shadow of the European invention of the human overdetermined as Man, as Sylvia Wynter puts it? What is the Anthropocene to the human-animal, to the less- and almost- and more-than- and non-human, the becoming human, the sub- and in- and ante-human, to those who have always required qualifiers to be extended just a fraction, if any, of the protections hoarded by this categorical rupture?
When I read and inhabit the land as archive, with Palestine as my elemental anchoring, all of our kin—including Palestinian men and women, babies and children, grandparents, militants, and youth taking direct action, planting and foraging, making seed libraries, engaging anticolonial militancy, sabotaging pipelines, remembering where we come from and how we remain—together act as a networked ecology of land defense.
Palestinian militancy—across a century and more of anticolonial struggle—becomes the most important form of environmental protection.
IN November 2023, one month—and seventy-seven years, in fact a century—into the Zionist genocide in Palestine, a statistic circulated that the explosive scale of the millions of tons of munitions Israel had dropped on Gaza were equivalent in destructive force to two nuclear bombs. Then it became six. Then thirteen. And still the weight of the bombing continues to accrue during the treacherous lie of a killing spree they call a ceasefire. To put things into perspective, to grapple with the magnitude of the devastation, some headlines have used Hiroshima or Nagasaki as the metric by which to measure the carnage. Two, six, thirteen Hiroshimas detonated in Gaza. How many Hiroshimas can one people, one land, take?
Watching the horrors unfold from the center of empire as a Palestinian exile means feeling the weight of those tons bear down on you. Every child, mother, father slain, every olive orchard and home set ablaze, every city block reduced to rubble indexed in your own flesh.
But it is, of course, not just Palestine to which we owe our obligations. The destruction, as studies of the Anthropocene often get right, is planetary. During U.S. and Israeli strikes on major oil refineries and storage depots in Iran, toxic “black rain” was made to fall over Tehran; the soot and petrochemical emissions from the burning oil facilities was seeded into the clouds. The genocide in Sudan has devastated the country’s green shield. Enough forest has been cleared to make visible from space the blood staining the streets of el-Fasher after a brutal advance by the Rapid Support Forces in October of last year. In southern Lebanon, environmental authorities warn about the ecocide Israel is committing. The toxic impact of the bombing and the long-term effects of white phosphorous linger. The Zionists poisoning of the soil in southern Lebanon is a tactic mirrored in Gaza and throughout Palestine, where settlers weaponize raw sewage and industrial waste by routing it into the wadis of villages below the colonized hilltops. The cancer, the infertility, the miscarriages and birth defects, the assault on all the most fundamental infrastructures of life continue unabated.
And because such violence is always at once political, ecological, and bodily, refusal has, as it must, taken multiple, interconnected forms, just like the violence it confronts. So, what does the Palestinian elemental intifada make possible when understood as resistance praxis? What happens when we think and act with rather than against the sinkholes erupting around the Dead Sea and their implosions, their safekeeping of every handful of soil we embody and become?
The pluralities of the globalized environmental nakbas we face demand that we think the elemental intifada planetarily. Rather than beginning with the human, or the anthropos of the Anthropocene, as the force acting upon the earth, elemental intifada demands that we suture the human back to the earth. The body that revolts, the land which refuses, the colonized and occupied and all others who fight for liberation from the world-destroying expansions of racial capitalist imperialism, do so from the position of not just being in this world, but of it. In other words, there is no environmentalism that doesn’t oppose imperialism in the same breath. And there is no form of existence impervious to the land upon which all life depends. Rather than subscribe to the total agency of the human acting geologically on the earth, or the anthropos of the Anthropocene, elemental intifada asks us to attend to the agency of the land and the Palestinian elemental, to a different form of being human as inseparable from the land.
Elemental intifada is a shaking off of the violent, contrived human-nature divide; in that sense, it unmakes the Anthropocene.
Elemental intifada is return.
I am not interested in the elemental as a path towards repair or redemption. Even though—and perhaps because—environmental devastation, fires, floods, and atmospheric violence are so cruelly weaponized against us, the land remembers, articulates, refuses, demands our dedicated study. It reminds us of where we come from, of what we are made. Every expression of climate collapse demands that we dwell in the openness of the wounding of our ecologies to think with how an altered landscape might—like a captive body, a colonized people—might follow the imperative: qawim thumma qawim, resist and then resist again.
To unmake the Anthropocene is also to intervene in the colonial grammars of race and gender that render lands and bodies conquerable in the first place. The land, gendered feminine, non-agential, terra nullius, operates and is operated on in similar ways to colonized, gendered bodies: invaded, seized, privatized, extracted, exploited. Elemental intifada is the incremental and planetary uprisings at every scale that confront and reject the atmospheric violence of imperialism suffocating Palestine, and therefore, the planet. It attunes us to the granular, unexpected, and beyond-human assemblages of refusal that sustain the horizon of Palestine as the inevitable homeland to which all those dispossessed will return.
Climate catastrophe knows no impassable borders. As certainly as the effects of climate change are being disproportionately shouldered by racialized and colonized communities, it is just as certain that no one will escape unscathed. Our solace: the lands upon which colonies are built carry memory and agency more potent than the fragile settler edifice can control.
In Palestine, settler pine forests planted over ethnically cleansed villages erupt into flames. Indigenous comrades and colleagues taught me to understand “wild” fires across the Americas similarly. Thinking about floods as water returning,1 a heating troposphere as a metric of extracted land and labor,2 and the land as an agent of resistance3 transforms our orientations towards environmental catastrophe and opens pathways backwards/towards modes of life capable of sustaining livable futures beyond colonial regimes, border walls, gendered violence, and racialized extraction.
Amidst the wounding and wounded ecologies of the ongoing, global Nakba, there remains the possibility of reinhabiting the injured environment, dwelling in its ruins, breathing life back into the land. From Palestine to Mapuche lands, to the Palisades of Los Angeles.
A shored-back shoreline can always return. A discerning land can always resist. And alongside it, we, too, resist, by all means necessary, even with a handful of soil smuggled from home, from every river to every sea.
1See Toni Morrison, “The Site of Memory.” Inventing the Truth: The Art and Craft of Memoir, edited by William Zinsser, Houghton Mifflin, 1995.
2See Denise Ferreira da Silva, “On Heat,” Canadian Art, October 29, 2018. https://canadianart.ca/features/on-heat/.
3See Munira Khayat, A Landscape of War: Ecologies of Resistance and Survival In South Lebanon, 1st ed, (Bielefeld: University of California Press, 2022),
