I'm going to start by reading the epigraph.
I want to wake every morning into love,
where love is the question of how
I'm going to help you get free, where that means whatever
it needs to mean.
And beneath that, there's a second epigraph
which I wrote in just for my personal copy from an essay
by the writer Fargo Nissim Tbakhi and his piece
"Notes on Craft: Writing in the Hour of Genocide."
It's an essay that begins with a question, "What does Palestine
require of us as writers writing in English
from within the imperial core in this moment of genocide?"
I usually don't read these also.
But I will today because I have so much time.
The essay is organized in sections.
And I've written all the section headings down.
And so I'm going to read those two.
One.
Craft is a machine built to produce and reproduce
ethical failures.
It is a counterrevolutionary machine.
Two.
To write in solidarity with Palestine
is to write amidst the long middle of revolution.
Three.
The long middle is the state of orderliness.
Oppression so pervasive as to form
an atmosphere we move through.
Four.
We must ask, what does this require of us then
to write amidst the long middle of Intifada?
What might it mean for how we approach the page
as a front of the long war?
Five.
The facilitation of this genocide
is contingent upon the great discursive and material
weapon of the West, the ontological categories
of terrorist and terrorism.
Six.
We should betray craft by replacing it
with political thought.
Seven.
The craft of the long Intifada is made and remade each day
by resistance.