The Passive Voice of Light: On Grief and Imperial Grammar

My sister, Reham, used to make the best orange cake when oranges were in season.

She was older than me in the way older sisters are older. She would catch a glimpse of me during our school break and rush to fix my hair, shaking her head. She knew where Mama hid the chocolate, what adults meant when they lowered their voices, how to fold a school uniform so it would not crease, and how to make a room feel less hostile simply by being in it.

Reham was also the first to teach me about the passive voice in English.

“The object becomes the subject,” she told me. I must have been young enough to find this miraculous.

“The boy broke the window.” became “The window was broken.” The window, suddenly, had the sentence to itself. It had been acted upon, and now it held the center of the grammar.

I did not know then that Reham taught me the grammar that would later be used to erase her.

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I keep forgetting how not to move through the world like a well-structured argument. When our lives in Gaza were split open one morning, I was still an English instructor with a brutal schedule and lesson plans built with comic faith in structure: how to avoid run-ons, fragments, and sentences that defy unity. One night, I went to sleep, and in the morning, nearly two million of us had lost loved ones, friends, neighbors, homes, balconies, routes to work, routes to schools, routes back home, or our lives altogether.

You get one evacuation backpack ready, just in case. Two days later, it is everything you own.

And then your displacement keeps multiplying, mutating, morphing into more brutal distances. Until one day you no longer hear the drones. You no longer feel the tremor of a warplane about to strike. Until one day, somehow, you survive.

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Language can be something you learn for years, and grow around, and move towards, and spiral into. You abstract the tangible and give flesh to abstraction, before you notice some of its structures have been built around an absence. The neighborhood was carpet-bombed. The family was forced out. The bodies were recovered. Later, you understand that whole cities, whole people, whole sisters, could be placed inside the passive voice.

“Reham was killed.”

She wasn’t lucky enough to be killed in a way the news would call tragic. She left us no moving last words, warranted no rescue operation, and no photograph of her traveled far enough to wound a foreign conscience. Israel killed her the way it would kill most of us: suddenly. The passive voice was inflicted upon her in the middle of a life she had not finished living, and the sentence moved on.

In Arabic, the passive voice is called al-mabni lil-majhoul, “that which is constructed for the unknown.” I have always found that phrase more honest than the English one. There is dignity in a grammar that admits that something has been withheld.

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There was a time when light meant visibility. When visibility meant safety. A lit house was once open and full and whole, never wounded by absence. There was a time when light belonged to revelation in the gentlest sense. To warmth, to presence, and, perhaps, to God.

You crave a morning light because you want the world restored, however briefly. You want a “good morning” uttered softly because you want language to behave, to embrace, to reassure, and to tell you that you are seen.

There was a time when language simply meant being met.

Too many homes away from home, a billboard appears before me above the highway, a mother holding her child inside an impossible flood of light, and underneath:

“أنت ومن تحب.”

You and your loved ones.

Some advertising agency somewhere believed that people exhausted by traffic and rent and heat might look up for a second and feel held. They’re selling the concept of home; this much is obvious. But my body is startled by the brightness, and for one suspended second, I am thrown back into the mathematics of surveillance. This is what happens after living under machines that watched before they murdered.

Paul Virilio once wrote that every military advance is translated into an advance in how bodies are observed, tracked, and rendered legible to power. I remember when I was reading this in a university library with good lighting; I only understood it intellectually, the way you understand that humans share most of their DNA with bananas, or that the sun is a dying star. What I did not understand then was that the passive voice and the targeting system are the same instrument. Both remove the agent. Both leave the object, the body, the home, the family, hung alone in the sentence, alone in the sky, illuminated and exposed, observed and tracked and rendered legible to power. Stripped of the grammar that would name who did this and why.

Light is no longer innocent. Light is never innocent. The nervous system becomes so obedient that even well-photographed tenderness is questionable.

You and your loved ones. Who managed to stay alive long enough to answer the phone; who was retrieved whole; who was retrieved at all?

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I was teaching thesis statements when the passive voice returned. On the board, I had written the usual instructions: specific, arguable, focused. A good thesis, I told my students, does not merely announce a topic. It takes a position. It gives the reader direction. It risks something. It promises a way through without getting lost.

The world asks for a better source than the mother holding her dead son’s shoe.

Outside the classroom, whole families were lost under the rubble. But loyalty to form is one of the cruelties of life. Someone asks whether the essay needs three body paragraphs or whether two would be enough if the second one is really strong. I answer carefully because I believe in carefulness. I have spent years teaching my students that language is a sandcastle, and a sentence can collapse if it carries too much weight in the wrong place. I have spent years convincing them that clarity is not the enemy of depth.

Palestinians know the academic curriculum too well. Support your claim. Use reliable sources. Maintain an academic tone. Do not appeal only to emotion. In academic writing, evidence strengthens an argument. In our life, evidence often humiliates the wound. We are asked to make claims about the obvious and then support them with images no one should have to see. We provide dates, names, maps, medical reports, satellite footage, before-and-after photographs, interviews with the bereaved, interviews with the injured, interviews with the orphaned, interviews with the few who survived long enough to be asked whether they are sure. But the world somehow still finds the time to lean back in its comfy chair to demand linearity. It wants context. It wants balance. It asks for a better source than the mother holding her dead son’s shoe.

The essay I want to write begins to betray me. Because although evidence is what power demands from the wounded, it is also what the living owe the dead.

It now costs much more to look at light and feel God. It now costs hours of speechlessness to write one clear sentence and trust that clarity is innocent. I pay this heavy price anyway, every morning. Because the alternative is to let the damage be total. And I am not willing to let the damage be total.

I owe this language things I resent owing it. When Arabic held the fresh wound and waited for its rawness to fester, English pulled up a chair and taught me how to sit with it. I cannot reject evidence. But to be seen is not yet to be held, not yet to be saved. The lit world can watch, and the watching can be yet another form of abandonment, another way of consuming devastation without being changed by it, another chance to feel moved but not far enough to act.

I want to say to my students: use the tools, but do not become the tool. Learn evidence, but remember that some stories are still true before they are documented. Learn coherence, but do not let anyone convince you that what happened to you must be narrated smoothly to have happened at all. Learn the passive voice, but ask who has been removed from the sentence. Interrogate it. Was it the work of mercy, craft, cowardice, or power?

Instead, I say: “Good. Now try to make your claim more precise.”

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My sister, Reham, used to make the best orange cake when oranges were in season.

I write this sentence and immediately feel the essay waking up around it, hungry. It wants to turn the cake into a theory of domestic archives, the orange into Palestine, the season into return, the kitchen into gendered memory, and the recipe into resistance. All these readings are available. Some of them are even true.

But Reham was not making an argument. My sister was making a cake.

She stood there in the kitchen because she loved me, because oranges had returned, because some people have a genius for making tenderness practical. She did not say: “here is a bite of Palestine” or “taste this edible archive of our endangered world.” She said, in whatever ordinary way sisters say such things: “here, eat.” And when the orange season returned after her death, the world did not pause for her. Cakes were made in other houses by women who had not died.

What I want, more than anything, is to write about my sister without making her serve any essay. To write about my ADHD without turning it into a clever metaphor for familial or national fragmentation. To write about displacement without the need to place it into a neat arc of loss and adaptation. To write about the light that terrorized me on my way home without turning it into an argument. To let the orange cake be an orange cake. To let Reham be Reham. I am tired of writing around her. I want to write towards her.

I am terrified of being praised for sentences that were inspired by the damage. I am terrified of the smooth paragraph, the elegant ending, the small detail placed perfectly enough to make devastation feel inevitable rather than manufactured. I am afraid of poeticizing the rubble. I am afraid of the essay that makes peace with the passive voice rather than criminalizes it. And I no longer feel safe around sentences that aestheticize the flare and call it home.

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At the end of class, a student stays behind to ask whether her conclusion should restate the thesis exactly or use different words. I tell her different words are better. A conclusion should return to the main idea, but not mechanically. It should leave the reader somewhere slightly changed.

She nods and gathers her things. She leaves, and I think about what it means to teach this in good faith, to believe in the impact of conclusions, that arguments arrive somewhere, that the reader can be left in a place that is different from where they began. And I think of all the conclusions our grief still refuses to reach.

I believe in letting the broken choose its own place in the language. Let it limp to the margin, if it must. Let it climb to the center, if it can.

Outside this attempt at a sentence, the world continues with its enormous machinery. Borders, bombs, headlines, courts, algorithms, agendas, statements, denials, threats, delays, agreements. Inside the sentence, a woman stands in a classroom and cannot bring herself to leave. This is not a metaphor. This happens multiple times a day. She stands in the doorway and tries to move, to transition. She has to grab her keys first.

The keys are under a stack of ungraded essays, on a table in a city that is not home. The city is in a country that is not the one her body first learned. The body is heavy with a people, a sister, a war, a lost motherhood, a girlhood, a language, a light, a list of tasks, and the impossible expectation that it should still know how to move lightly from one thing to the next. She is looking for her keys. The person she used to be believed light revealed the world. The body she inhabits now knows that light also searches it. Both are true. Both have to be carried. This is the cost.

She still wants to write. She wants to write from the threshold where the particular begins to reveal the structure that has been pressing on it all along. She wants to read a world that is legible through the throb of the small thing without crushing it into metaphor. She wants a language that does not rush the intimate to the political as if the intimate were merely a pretext or a decorative wound. She wants her keys.