Let us unbegin. In the newsfeed, any newsfeed, the images of you are interrupted by an advertisement for: Lifta Boutique, come see Jerusalem from the other side of…and suddenly, it is 2017. I am small, touching the remnants of the ethnically cleansed village of Lifta. The images are all expected: buildings half-standing, grave markers erased by the sewage, rubble of what was once a bakery, a home, a…a man, a Palestinian Indigenous inhabitant of the village, is explaining how his family is fighting the Zionist state in the courts, but they are insisting on building settlements to swallow even the wreckage. As I touch my phone screen, my memory of Palestine dies image by image. Instead, a filtered photograph of a luxury boutique resort. A hot tub overlooking a hillside overlooking a Mediterranean sunset. My post-memory of the image forgets its details, remembers only that terrifying tint, that glimmering gold. The image that cuts through your thousand images not only lingers loud enough to interrupt you, but shimmers in your place. 

Winter 2022. I am on my way to campus, having just finished Archive Wars by Rosie Bsheer for a class on archives. The book, a scathingly brilliant examination of the politics of history in Saudi Arabia, characterizes erasure as a state-mediated process comprising not merely the redaction of texts, bodies, objects, and entire looted archives, but the overwriting thereof into the physical space of the state and its institutions. Erasure, understood this way, is not merely the process of disappearing an entire history; it is the process of speaking over it. Not just the bulldozing, nor the paving over, nor the building over, but the very act of curating, shaping, and actively aiding the expansions of entire livelihoods of settler citizens over such wreckage. In this framing, the erasure we know as Nakba—which you know all too well habayeb, you who were displaced more than doubly before becoming Gazan—is not merely event, not merely disappeared space, not merely disappeared timelines, but the act of curating a state in place of our disappeared ghosts, or the act of replacing our Palestinian lives with livelihoods within Western colonial states. What is this thing I call a life, moving through this fresh-countried space of the U.S., the curation of it, trampling over another unknowably vast mass of victims of colonial slaughter, if not the exact afterlife of the Nakba intended by our colonizers all along? 

These thoughts consume my mind as I walk to campus. I want to challenge myself to be more present with my surroundings. I talk to a brown uncle, who is kind to me until he starts denying COVID, prompted by my mask. I do not filter the ambient noise of Evanston with music and noise-canceling headphones. The snow is starting to thaw. I can think of no image more American than uncleaned shit on a sidewalk, revealing itself after several months of snowfall. I see another, I think, only to realize I am mistaken; it is the corpse of a mouse. After class, I notice the mouse again as winter comes back to take the night. And again the next day. And again. And again, every day thereafter, for at least three weeks, but I cannot remember the exact length, just the casual absence of it. As if to say, it’s spring. 

In a digital age, one might think of filtering as an aesthetic coating for an image: a performance of self and space and self-in-space, hence a vector of legibility, dare I say, marketability. But in another life, I was a student of engineering, learning the often-beautiful mathematics of signal processing. In many ways, signal processing is the language of all modern electronics, communication, and systems engineering. Filtering takes on a different valence in this context. To filter is to smooth out noisy signals, to eliminate undesired frequency modes from a signal’s entire timeline. The filters we know on images operate with the same mathematical process, extrapolated to higher dimensions. The very mathematical basis of our technological landscape is a language of frequency instead of time—entire modes of being, disappeared for all time, with the donning of a filter. 

My point is coming; I haven’t forgotten you, habayeb. Something about the filter as a metaphor seems apt for this moment of Palestinian erasure. Our lives are testament to the fact that our displacement in space itself cuts through time. I think of my father, who is among you now, beloveds. How, in life, he’d cling to remnants of rotting objects from his parent’s generation: a lamp with a rusted plug from his decades-dead mother’s nightstand, a broken rocking chair from that which he called the old country. As I begged him to let us dispose of these objects, piling up in his basement that had become barely walkable, he clung harder to them. I understand it, now, as an insistence on unfiltering: To dispose of these objects would be to eliminate not only spatial tethers to his parents, and hence Palestine, but entire timelines. 

As I write to you, the dead whom I cannot compress into mere number, the ruling settlers are cleansing even their illiterate quantifications of you. We who know your weight have seen through their manipulations all along, I am reminded, as Susan Abulhawa writes of settler-sterilized and media-filtered death counts weeks before The Lancet publishes a peer-reviewed article with projected death toll estimates over 180,000. Behind each number, there is a universe, wholly unknowable to us. Settler society dissolves beneath the mathematics of infinity: A countable number of uncountable infinities is still, itself, uncountable. This is the problem with Knowing. 

Put another way: The question is no longer if they’ll let us live but if they’ll even let us die. We have long held these histories of martyred corpses, suspended mid-death, held hostage in freezers within the Zionist state, and used as bargaining chips in collective punishments. Of cemeteries of numbers, private zones where martyred bodies are buried by the Zionist state and identified not by name, but by a number linked to a file within a settler institution. Of our Indigenous burial sites paved over to build parks, hiking trails, playgrounds, even, for settlers. What afterlife is possible when we haven’t even your traces: you who could not die cohesively, you whom our murderers disrespect even in death? How can anything I write, attempting to mourn you whose un-mournability underpins an entire world order, become anything more than a cemetery of numbers? 

The first and only time I was able to visit Jaffa—the city of my grandfather’s nostalgia—what haunted me most was its performed opulence. The marble streets, gentrified jewelry stores with hamza displays overlooking a view of the sea, non-native plant life performing assimilation. And yet, enough of the old city had been preserved, as if frozen, to make it a marketable tourist destination, where settlers can live within an intentionally curated performance of history, eating sea bass cooked traditionally, whole, head intact. There’s a museum in Jaffa which is an architectural hybrid of a modernist design implanted into the remnants of an older, formerly Palestinian, building structure—the original owners and inhabitants filtered out. The building can be read along several lines: of modernity, symbolized by the “progressive” Zionist state taking over the “backwards” Palestine; of hybrid design which, in optimism, praises the museum’s fluid design as a triumph of modern architecture in a vacuum that does not acknowledge the coloniality of such ideas. This is not mere superimposition: One mode of geo-spatial being is accentuated at the expense of another’s attenuation. Where is the vector along which this building can be read in a way that makes my family’s return to their land more possible? The vector of a rocket’s trajectory? The vector of a tunnel’s swallow? The vector of a body suspended, mid-death, and put on display? The vector defined by the event horizon of its own un/knowability? A vector that allows us to die in space as easily as we die in time?

Frequency domain thinking assumes a certain stability in time. The constraints are mathematical in one sense: Where there is discontinuity, there is leakage and failure of approximation. But the constraints are also practical. They rely on the uniformity of the sampling frequency, the stability of the data capture. Here, I recall Ariella Aïsha Azoulay’s theorization of the imperial shutter as the colonial counter captured and frozen into a temporal regime of insistent unending imperial progress that paves over Indigenous peoples in its wake. Perhaps what I call the imperial filter, and its entire logic of frequency thinking, is merely the techno-capitalist evolution of the shutter. In other words, if empire thinks, acts, erases, violates, and dispossesses using an operational logic of frequency thinking, it is only because empire can uphold a stable temporal regime. Productive time. The rhythms of settler capitalism, the business-as-usual flow of life within the Western academy, the afterlives of extractions from the (exploited) laborers and (colonially) dispossessed. Nakba as not just an ongoing present that spirals, loops, and repeats before our eyes but, as Adam HajYahiya puts it, an entire regime in time. Our lives have never been stable in time. You know this most of all, habayeb, because our time cost your entire lives, no livelihoods, no spectra of living potentiality. 

The first time I read Refaat Alareer’s “If I Must Die” was not hearing Brian Cox’s devastating reading of the poem; it was years ago, as Noor Hindi and I read submissions for our forthcoming Palestinian poetry anthology. We insisted on living Palestinian poets, but you are all over the anthology, beloved ones. Immediately the poem shook us to our core and became one of the anthology’s central poems in a chapter on resistance poetry. I thought I knew the stakes behind Alareer’s claim, thought I understood just how quickly our kin, especially our Gazawi cousins, can be stolen from us. I thought I understood the poem. 

Until I didn’t. I was on the way to a poetry fundraiser reading for Gaza when I logged into social media to see Refaat’s face everywhere. I knew instantly that he had been stolen from us. I learned, in that moment, that Palestine is a metaphor…until the exact moment it isn’t. 

I wept, reading stories from his former students, from his poet and academic colleagues, from our global community all around the world who had been touched, through impossible distances, by Alareer and his work. I spent the entire night texting other Arab and Palestinian poets—many of us who only knew him through emailed correspondence, Zoom readings, and being mutuals on social media—and immediately canceled my speaking event. That night was not the time for words, I said to a friend. That night was the time to make a kite to fly for Refaat Alareer, for all of you. 

In the days that followed, the Zionist state attempted to slander Alareer, filter the palpable grief and rage into an impossible position to defend. They know just how terrifying martyred literary icons are to their movement. They know we will lift Refaat Alareer’s spirit up like Ghassan Kanafani’s, like Heba Abu Nada’s, like Shireen Abu Akleh’s, and all of the more than hundred Palestinian journalists in Gaza murdered in the past several months. Even in death, this country cannot help but disrespect your every name. 

I was recently approached by some of Alareer’s former students in Gaza, each of whose precious lives constitute the afterlife of our beloved martyred poet, and was asked to host a virtual event centering Palestinian youth. Days later, I heard indirectly through another friend that our Gazawi kin were requesting to cancel the event due to safety concerns. I immediately recalled how, just weeks before his death, Alareer made major virtual appearances in the U.S.; how, days before his death, he received warnings from Zionist intelligence; how, in his diaries through the genocide, he writes of the way the Zionist state had made war a “brutal normality” for Gaza, a filtered rhythm of life that makes possible settler living. 

In truth, every Gazan has the right to abandon all hope and faith in inhabitants of the West. As Mohammed El-Kurd says, “Gaza has the right to forsake us, to never forgive us, to spit in our faces.” In truth, we have failed you, we have failed all of Gaza. How are we still in this was the question we were asking ourselves months ago. This is the new regime of time; no, this is time itself. 

I have so many tales of being filtered in real time. A lifetime ago, I was an American poet, publishing my debut into the black hole of the COVID-19 pandemic’s onset. I saw my book get filtered from the U.S. publishing industry, as it was erased from publicity lists full of my non-Palestinian poetry peers, as it was ignored by outlets although my press had sent galleys over six months in advance, as my cross-country tour was attenuated into Zoom-fatigued rooms. I knew that publishing an expansive, hybrid genre, experimental work—let alone one about Palestine—would make my book indigestible to many. I was proud of the way it took up the shelf space of a small novel, counter to the poetry industry norm of thin, clean, sterilized books, many of which were uninteresting or out of touch, to put it lightly. Daring to publish a book like Birthright was its own experiment in filtering and excess, a litmus test of what the American imagination could bear to witness within its arts and letters.

In the years that followed, the book has experienced many afterlives. A few major awards and nominations helped, but much more importantly, it was being circulated, foremost, by its intended audience: queer/trans and SWANA book clubs, spaces where folks are organizing for Palestinian liberation, anti-colonial literature syllabi, and in the gifts of many comrades. In the summer of 2021, when many of us were in the streets protesting Zionist ethnic cleansing in Sheikh Jarrah, I was tagged in dozens of posts of people carrying my book—sometimes literally, sometimes in quotes painted on signs—at rallies and actions. This meant more to me than any award ever could.

And then, October 2023 came. Many of us mobilized, refocused ourselves to pressure literary institutions into adopting the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (PACBI) as a non-violent resistance tactic that was inspired by the movement against South African apartheid. Many of us considered moves like PACBI as a bare minimum first step of material support for Palestinian liberation. What followed, instead, was a wall of silence: the literary establishment, including most of the largest BIPOC and queer identity literary organizations, uniting in apathy. What followed, as these organizations faced increasingly intense backlash as this genocide accelerated, were in my opinion, performative gestures intended to appease public opinion more than support Palestine: PEN America, after months of delays calling for a ceasefire, posted a promotion of my book, which they had been ignoring for years.

Some of the world’s most prestigious literary institutions and journals, with vile, decades-long anti-Palestinian histories, reached out with reading requests and solicitations with pitiful honoraria marketed as reparations to the Palestinian people. Literary organizations that have been silent on PACBI, who can only digest our voices when presented in normalizing juxtaposition to our occupiers, suddenly wanted to publish me and many in my community. When I responded to some of these requests, asking them to add zeroes to the end of their honoraria and donate them to the Gaza Poets Society instead, I was met with, at best, lukewarm rejections.

Nearly every other day, I get a request from a fellow Palestinian writer, asking for advice in navigating these performances of representation that structurally change nothing in a world that continues this genocide. How many slaughtered children did it take for the U.S. public to start paying attention to us? Why did it take a news appearance discussing dozens of slaughtered family members in Gaza for some of you to start taking poets like Fady Joudah seriously? How is your devastation today, Joudah asked in a recent poem I published with Mizna. To his question, I add one for Americans specifically: how is your performance of our devastation today? 

In truth, my stomach turns every time I get tagged in a post about my book these days. I want to tell most of them, well-meaning as they are, have you read anyone from Gaza? Have you looked at the unfiltered reality of it? What horrors are being masked or filtered here? What conversations needed to happen to elicit even a performance of care? Occasionally, a small interaction over my work will break through the noise: a creative direct action that took inspiration from my Markov Sonnet poetic form, a friend tagging me in a picture of my book, displaced and rain-soaked after an encampment police raid. But even what little hope I touch is a reminder of you: my growing dead, you whom I’m trying to love, what unimaginable hopelessness you had to witness. 

I want to make, of hopelessness, a tunnel. I want to dig through these words in hopes that, somewhere in Gaza, our kin will see the sky again without becoming it. I want to stop the world of this country, to stop every citizen in their tracks, force them to see the impossible debt to Gaza that we collectively owe. I want anyone but an American to have the last word. 

In the briefest Palestine-related email I’ve received since last October, a beloved anthology contributor from Gaza withdrew their poem, saying, “I no longer have interest in publishing it.” The poem was titled, “Gaza, Hope Is an Option.”