The Journal of Multimodal Rhetorics

Jennifer Nish, Michigan Technological University

 

Perhaps sadness is the most important step. The thing that makes it possible for us to see each other and the world and what has been and is being done to us all. 

Gargi Bhattacharyya, We the Heartbroken (2023, p. 8)

I have been thinking over and over and over about what to write here, particularly about what value my voice could possibly add to the many, many words that have already been written about Palestine and solidarity with Palestinians as this genocide continues. As I have attempted to follow news about Gaza and the repression of solidarity movements working to resist the indiscriminate violence (and so many forms of complicity with it), I have been overwhelmed with emotion, oscillating between different feelings and experiences. When I feel pulled in so many directions like this, sometimes the only way out is to pay attention to those states. Compulsion: to speak and act; to crawl into a ball and hide from the world. Desire: for local political community; for the ability to make a difference; for some universal arbiter of joy and pain that would eliminate the massive inequities in trauma and grief and despair and things that I cannot even adequately convey here. Horror: at the incredible cruelty that humans are capable of inflicting on one another and casually excusing. Terror: at what else is possible if we can all witness this violence unfolding and yet be unable to stop it. Guilt: for the comfort in which I live while others are experiencing so much suffering. Anger: that so many people are unaware, unconcerned, and/or accepting of the state of our world; that such blatant, violent dehumanization continues unchecked in so many conversations about Palestine and Palestinians. Frustration: that so many people with so many different intentions are trying to stifle and suppress conversation, knowledge-sharing, and resistance.

As I began drafting, I also kept thinking about my rhetorical situation. I am not an expert on Palestine, nor on war or genocide, and I can’t become one in the time I have to write this piece. So many people have shared brilliant, moving words; a wealth of information and resources; and deeply moving art that speaks to and about Gaza and Palestine. As I reflected on what to write, I kept thinking about myself as a voice on this topic: what can I say, based on my experience and/or expertise? Who might be interested in what I have to say? Of course, published writing often has many more audiences than its author(s) can anticipate, but instead of giving in to the inner voice that was trying to tell me I have nothing to contribute, I tried to think about how I might use my specific position and experience to reach people and who those people might be. I cannot claim to be necessarily making or building new knowledge here. Instead, what I have tried to do is dedicate time and attention and energy toward thinking about what it has been like to process and attempt to engage with news and activism about and in solidarity with Palestinians from the location I am currently in, where I have not yet met any Palestinian colleagues or friends or neighbors. Most of my engagement has been with news and updates on social media. I had so many ideas about what I could do with infinite time and energy, but what I have chosen to do is to share some feelings and thoughts that have been swirling in my head these past nine months, in the hopes that they might resonate with someone somewhere and foster some spark of connection, thought, or action.

Alongside the complex mix of feelings in the opening paragraph that are directly related to Gaza, I’ve recently moved to a new place and started a new job. I’ve been surrounded by some of the most beautiful natural landscapes I’ve ever encountered. Spending time in nature is a source of great joy, wonder, and awe for me; I can pore for hours over a pile of rocks looking for new colors and patterns; devour a plant identification book in one sitting as I try to recall what I’ve seen on recent walks; leave for a “hike” and spend an hour on one tiny stretch of trail looking at mosses, mushrooms, flowers, berries, colorful leaves, snowflakes, animal tracks, insects, or whatever the season provides. I’ve met and gotten to know wonderful new colleagues, friends, and students. I’ve visited old friends that I have rarely seen in the past four or five years due to the pandemic, job changes, moves, and health issues. I’ve been energized by collaborations with friends and colleagues on many kinds of projects. I have been living my life with the ups and downs of an unpredictable chronic illness. At times, these experiences have been a source of guilt and dissonance as I think about the massive separation between what my everyday life looks like and the images and videos I see coming out of Gaza. For example, as I browse scholarly articles and social media threads and website fora for ideas about how to care for my disabled bodymind, I think about how I would not be able to access many or most of the things that I need to function and feel okay if I were in Gaza. Likewise, as I have watched Bisan Owda’s reporting (2023, 2024), learning that she must walk 25 minutes to reach a bathroom or walk for hours at a time in the hot sun while carrying belongings in order to follow evacuation orders, I have thought frequently about how someone with the disease I have (myalgic encephalomyelitis, or ME) would experience continuously declining health under those conditions.

I have looked at many, many photos and videos; at other times I couldn’t look at them, and so I read captions, alt text descriptions, text-only media, or looked at illustrations of the scenes of trauma, loss, sadness, and grief. My social media feeds are so filled with Gaza that I can’t avoid thinking about it, but I am trying to find the balance between witnessing and understanding the gravity of what’s happening, on the one hand, and ensuring that I am not immobilized by despair or feelings of powerlessness, on the other. I learned about the concept of vicarious trauma. I have spent a great deal of time and energy thinking about what to look at, what to read, how to engage with what is happening in a way that balances the need to be aware of what’s going on with the literal impossibility of keeping up with the massive amounts of information circulating about this catastrophe and the limits of my nervous system’s ability to cope with this witnessing, options I understand Palestinians in Gaza now do not have.

In June, I started reading this book by Gargi Bhattacharyya (2023) called We, the Heartbroken, quoted in the epigraph. A dear friend gifted it to me last summer and I moved shortly after. Since I am slow at unpacking, it took me a year to find and open the book. It’s small; the perfect size to stick in a carryon for reading on the plane. I opened it as I sat down to reflect on this piece you are now reading; it was in so many ways the perfect thing to be reading as I tried to process the preceding months, though the book itself is not directly about Gaza. It’s a beautifully written book about heartbreak, racial capitalism, and collective grief: in Bhattacharyya’s words, it is “a book about how the experience and anticipation of grief sit within and alongside a registering of collective sorrow—and how there can be no remaking of the world without ways to allow for our collective sorrow” (p. 3). In the book, Bhattacharyya uses the concept of heartbreak to think about how our individual emotional experiences—such as those that we often imagine when we talk about grief as a set of stages like denial, anger, and so forth—are deeply interconnected to others’ and how sorrow is an unavoidable and utterly ordinary aspect of human experience. Reading and reflecting on heartbrokenness helped me understand part of what I was struggling with as I tried to write: the tension between my own individual feelings and the desire (but also political, existential need) to connect those feelings to collective experience. I have spent so much of the last nine months processing things in a way that feels very individualized: in part because of where I am and in part because of how I tend to experience the world as an introvert who’s always reflecting and overthinking.

My social media feed has been filled with videos of shrouded bodies; mothers, fathers, brothers, sisters, sons, daughters, friends, spouses crying and keening over their loved ones; shell-shocked children and babies covered in dust; medics, community members, and anyone else around shoving through rubble, moving bodies, caring for injured people. Journalists who were reporting on Gaza until their death (Committee to Project Journalists, 2024). The words of Palestinian academics whose deaths are part of a pattern of “scholasticide”[1] in Gaza (United Nations, 2024; Scholars Against the War on Palestine, n.d.). One of the videos that’s clearest in my memory shows children in a refugee camp, with rosy cheeks, curly hair, and beautiful eyes, smiling, looking shyly at the camera, and shaking the photographer’s hand as the caption tells me their tents were bombed. This devastation is collective, so much bigger than me as an individual, but watching from so far away and with so few opportunities to resist it led me to focus inward, to think too much about my own feelings and actions. I can only imagine, as I read and listen, how awful it has felt for my Palestinian friends and colleagues who watch this happening to their loved ones, their family members, their home(s), and then proceed to live life while so many people around us say nothing.

I should pause here to note that I do know that in many places, people are saying a great deal, and the struggle is over ways that the speech and action of Palestinians and their supporters is being distorted, silenced, attacked, and repressed. Where I live, though, there has been a great deal of silence. Being new to my institution and my local area has meant that my most consistent source of political community has been through social media. As I watched stories and videos of friends attending protests in major cities, my heart ached. In times of crisis, community is such an important source of strength and motivation. In October and November and December of 2023, I felt helpless and powerless as I watched the mounting deaths of thousands upon thousands of people, the destruction of communities and homes. (It feels like an insult to refer to numbers, to casually list examples of these losses as though their breadth and depth and complexity could possibly be represented by words, whether in one sentence or a thousand.[2]) At the RSA conference in May, I finally found myself sitting in a group of people talking about Palestine and realized how isolated I had felt in my small community where only a handful of people even mentioned Gaza or Palestine at all. Watching massive protests happening on other campuses and in city streets via social media amplified that silence, emphasizing the disconnection between different places, groups of people, and spaces in the US. The silence was so viscerally present I wanted to give it a new name, to try to convey the weight of absence more fully.

I follow a lot of justice-oriented mental health practitioners on social media, and one of the things that I remember encountering that helped me as I tried to figure out whether I should be attempting to detach or numb myself from the news was the idea that our pain is also a form of openness to one another and our collective humanity. As Bhattacharyya puts it, “grief cannot be tucked away or managed, because without the consciousness of grief, we cannot remain open to each other and to the implications and possibilities of our profound interdependence” (2023, p. 4). Of course, there is no one right way to experience this, so please, reader, do not take this as a statement about what you should do or feel. But if it helps you to be open to your own pain and grief by thinking about how closing yourself off from it is also to close yourself off from the things that are good about recognizing and feeling with others, then perhaps I am writing to you.

Of course, what is helpful to me as a remote witness who is trying to ensure that I connect my feelings and experiences to a collective struggle is likely very different than what others in different circumstances need. For example, I know that what I’m experiencing cannot compare to the experiences of people who have a closer connection to Gaza. People with friends, family, or even experiences of having been in Gaza are experiencing this in ways that I cannot possibly know in my body and heart because the connection and stakes are not the same for me. My support of Palestinian liberation and opposition to the annihilation of Gazans, their homes, and their land is not tied to my own home, family, or identity, not in the same way.

In their introduction, Bhattacharyya writes that “Human broken-heartedness longs for two things: ways to feel better and ways of believing our pain is meaningful” (2023, p. 5). As I first read these words, I paused to reflect, and wrote:

What would it mean, though, to make meaning out of someone else’s pain, when the pain that I feel is connected to theirs (for me) but it feels like an exercise in privilege to step back and draw a “lesson”? When others’ pain is unequivocally not something I can possibly understand fully from my own position? What could I even possibly think or say that would be useful or worthwhile in this context?

I do not have a grand and beautiful answer to that question of what to do or say. In fact, my first urge is not to speak. Perhaps this is a strange urge to have as a rhetorician. At a minimum, I should be able to acknowledge that the specific intersection of my positionality and experiences with this topic might help me reach someone similarly positioned, right? I am also aware that power affects who people listen to and what they hear or act on. People with power that comes from privileged positionality are often more likely to be listened to in conversations about social justice for a variety of reasons. Most people are probably not looking at me or seeing my name and making assumptions about my perspective on Palestine, whereas my Palestinian and Arab American colleagues are likely encountering others’ assumptions about who they are, what they believe, and why. In addition, we need many different communities to pay attention to Palestine, and most of us have a better chance of reaching our own communities than outsiders do. On top of all of this, though, what feels most urgent is the pressure being placed on academics, activists, and other people to not speak about Palestine or to not say certain things. This warrants our collective refusal to be silent.

I have these Instagram collections of activist posts, which I think I save in part because I find the act of saving things satisfying, in part because I occasionally find it useful to look back through and refer to some of the posts for various purposes, and in part because I know that saving things affects how they show up in the algorithm. The collection that includes most of the posts about Gaza and Palestine has ballooned so much in the last nine months that it's hard to use, but I scrolled through hundreds of posts as I was drafting and thinking about this collection, this “gathering,”[3] and trying to find a way to make my scattered thoughts and notes and feelings cohere. One post (@IntersectionalEnvironmentalist, 2023a) quotes a 1982 speech by Audre Lorde about Malcom X’s legacy: “To refuse to participate in the shaping of our future is to give it up. Do not be misled into passivity either by false security (they don’t mean me) or by despair (there’s nothing we can do). Each of us must find our work and do it” (Lorde, 1982). I have decided that it is part of my work to find something to say, however difficult it may be to put all of this into words.

How can we not be heartbroken, both personally and collectively, when so many of our collective resources are being used to destroy, kill, injure, and traumatize an entire people? This is such an overwhelming situation to sort through. So much has happened. So much continues to happen. So much of the world is moving along as though this is not happening. However, turning towards others helps me work through this complexity. Even when those others are technically strangers, their words and ideas help me process my own experiences. For example, another Instagram post from my collection, this one by author and activist Caroline J. Sumlin (2024), reads,

“Please don’t allow your inability to carefully craft an eloquent dissertation about the crisis we are bearing witness to stop you from using your voice. You don’t have to form the perfect analytical think-piece or find the most poetic way to express your lament. We are witnessing the unthinkable – a genocide in real-time. Our carefully crafted responses are not what is needed right now.

Our outcry is.

Our lament is.

Our service is.

Our protest is.

Our action is.”

I have been thinking about the ways I have tried to use my voice (despite my lack of eloquence) and the ways that my location has shaped my experience and the actions available to me. Part of what I have learned from this experience is that doing something – the “action” Sumlin refers to at the end of the quote – serves many functions. Although this is (perhaps appropriately) not the reason we often focus on it, action (which I interpret broadly to include a wide range of possible actions) can shift us into a different state. Through action, we can engage with our feelings and/or overwhelm in a way that shifts our relationship to those feelings and to one another.

Before I moved to my current home in Michigan’s upper peninsula (UP), I was warned that it was a conservative place. I read blog posts about local politics that narrated community clashes over elections and COVID-19 protections. I heard stories: one piece of lore was that local students in the 1970s were the only ones in the nation to protest in favor of the Vietnam War. As I was writing this piece and thinking about how my location has shaped my thoughts and experiences, I looked this up. Not only did I not find any documentation of this story in my own town, I actually found evidence of the opposite: a blog post sharing archival photos and stories from 1970 of student strikes and student government resolutions inspired by and connected to other protests across the nation, particularly the violent repression of student protestors at Kent State (Schwiebert, 2018). Local students even built a park as a memorial to the Kent State protestors. The only evidence I found of protests in favor of the Vietnam War was actually from another town about two hours away, and even in that case, as I’m sure you can guess, the narrative is more complicated (Peterson et al., 2015a, 2015b). Of course, it’s possible that the story I was told is documented elsewhere. However, this discovery led me to wonder: who and what are these stories for? Where do they come from and why do they spread? What function do they serve, politically and rhetorically? How might these stories shape the behavior of students and faculty?

Although the idea that this place was conservative wasn’t something that thrilled me, necessarily, I was not particularly intimidated by it. I am accustomed to conservative places and people, both from being in relationship with people (such as family members) whose worldviews are very different from mine and from having been surrounded by those worldviews for much of my early life. Although my own politics have diverged substantially from the ideas I grew up around, I have not completely left that world behind, but rather have been in changing relationship to it as I think about what it means to be who I am and what kind of work I can do in my communities from my position in the world. (And, of course, my positionality affects my experience of a place or group of people and my assessment of the risk of living in a conservative place.) However, it was because of this narrative about the UP being a conservative place that I was surprised when, very early in the spring semester in a section of my upper-level undergraduate composition course, my students did what, so far, most faculty in my university had not: they brought up bias in media coverage of Gaza (Khazaal, 2024; Youmans, 2024). My course uses a writing about writing approach and if I’m remembering correctly, it was only the second or third class, so we had basically only discussed the syllabus, the grading system, and the first chapter of a textbook that introduced students to some threshold concepts in writing studies. In fact, although I didn’t write it down (and therefore can’t be certain), I suspect the students were providing an example of the concept that “rhetorical choices shape our worlds” (Wardle & Downs, 2023, p. 14). Oh, how this filled my heart with hope!

This story brings me back to the idea of refusal: refusal to participate in the dehumanization of Palestinians, refusal to believe that we must numb ourselves to violence, refusal to let our emotions close us off from political community and solidarity, and refusal to believe that a particular group of people or a particular place is beyond the reach of that community and solidarity. This is something I learned a lot about in my previous home (Lubbock, Texas), too, as I reflected with friends and colleagues on the political environment in which we were living and the way it shaped our work. When people want to write off an entire state or group of people as too far away (ideologically) to connect to or work with, what happens to those who stay? There are so many reasons one might choose to stay or be unable to leave, from wanting to be where home and family are to being unable to switch jobs or pay for a move.

How, then, can we keep all of this in mind as we cultivate or foreclose political community and solidarity? Some of the patterns I have noticed on social media have not been particularly helpful in this regard. Sometimes, people’s anger and despair show up on social media—in conversations about what to do, about accountability and collective responsibility—in rhetoric that shames people for how they are showing up. Bhattacharyya writes that sometimes when so much collective attention is focused on pain and trauma, we alienate each other by talking “in a way that offer[s] no solace, that [breaks] the connections between us, that [says], everything you feel is nothing like what I feel and when I speak about my grief I want you to doubt your own because even the sharing of grief feels like a belittling of my pain and loss” (2023, p. 33). How can we feel that feeling, acknowledge it, and move past it toward connection instead of isolation?

Even more prevalent have been social media posts and other media (such as email newsletters) in which people insist that the only way to show up right now is to focus on tragedy. That to allow ourselves other feelings, to show up in “normal” ways with our usual photos is cruel. I understand this perspective; for months, I felt that it would be disrespectful to post photos of my cats, or my smiling face, or a beautiful view. But then I also thought about the activists who write about the importance of nurturing and caring for ourselves in ways that contribute to our ability to show up for the collective. Another post that stood out to me as I reflected on this situation, from a writer, podcaster, and influencer, Whitney Alese (2023a), reads:

“There are people counting on you to lose hope. They are counting on you to be so overwhelmed with grief that it stuns you into a bitter silence.

Speak out anyway.

Through the grief. Through the tears. Through the frustration. Find reassurance in community. Stay in the fight.”

I follow the link to her profile, scroll through some recent posts, and another catches my eye: “A reminder that joy is a MAJOR part of liberation. Joy is the conduit, the connectivity, and the culmination of liberation. If your liberation work has no joy, shows no joy, or experiences no joy, it’s time to revisit what you believe true liberation is” (2023b). In the caption, she writes, “That is the place we are trying to get to. The road we are traveling on. The inspiration for our destination.” And this made me think about other scenes, the ones that have helped pull me out of despair. Alongside the images and videos of trauma, loss, injury, and death, other, more joyful and energizing things circulate: videos in which Palestinian men create gigantic, nourishing meals out of canned provisions to feed starving people; groups of people joyfully dancing, sharing Palestinian dabke; photos and videos of traditional recipes and food (like za’atar), art (such as Palestinian tatreez), painting, photography, and more. Beautiful fiction and nonfiction and poetry created by Palestinians. I am in no way saying that we should be focusing exclusively on joy. However, we need to remember it exists and find ways to share examples of the culture and people and world that we are fighting for.

Another of my saved Instagram posts shares a short poem by Marwan Makhoul: “In order to write poetry that isn’t political, I must listen to the birds, and in order to listen to the birds, the warplanes must be silent” (@IntersectionalEnvironmentalist, 2023b). I recognized these words; I’ve read them before, but this most recent encounter resonated differently because where I live now, outside of town in the middle of the forest, I listen to the birds every day.

I pay a lot of attention to the ways that people talk about divisive topics and the ways that people talk to one another (especially when they listen and hear one another) when they hold very different political commitments and worldviews. This is something I’ve been thinking about a lot because my perspective on Palestine was deeply shaped by my experience living and working in Beirut, Lebanon for four years. That experience, along with other differentiators such as education level and type, are part of why my perspective on Palestine is very different from many people in my current and previous communities. I wanted this piece of writing to offer something more than my reflections, though I hope there is something of value there. As I was thinking about what I might have found useful at a different moment in my own life, I came across a toolkit created by the Community Justice Exchange (n.d.) that is focused on the ways that people unintentionally replicate carceral logic in conversations about protest and social movements. I see the toolkit as a set of questions that might help people analyze their own and others’ rhetoric, though I believe its purpose is more about the former. As I read the questions, I couldn’t help but think about how people who want to learn more about Palestine might need tools for identifying the ideologies that come up in discussions of Palestine and Israel. Here is one attempt to craft some similar questions, very much inspired by the Community Justice Exchange’s work. It is also indebted to many Palestinian thinkers, journalists, influencers, and activists, as well as people who are committed to solidarity with Palestinians, from whom I have learned about common patterns in rhetoric about Palestine. Please consider the questions a starting place for thinking about the kinds of literacies that you or others might need as you think about how to engage with the genocide in Gaza and foster solidarity with Palestinians:

1. Does this text or argument dehumanize an entire group of people? (For example, by using racialized labels such as “terrorist”?)

2. Does this text or argument erase, ignore, or legitimize ongoing systemic violence? (That is, violence that is widespread and institutionalized?)

3. Does this text or argument either (a) ignore the history of Palestine and Israel or (b) claim that history is too complex to understand?

4. Does this text or argument pretend that Palestine and Israel (or, more accurately for this situation, Hamas and Israel) are entities with equal power, political representation, and resources?

5. Does this text or argument repeat unverified claims that are used to legitimize ongoing violence? (Violence that cannot be undone when those claims are later proven false?)

6. Does this text or argument make claims about safe zones, humanitarian aid, and democracy that (a) pretend that violence is “just” or (b) that all countries or political entities are held equally accountable for violating international law?

Of course, these questions are not exhaustive. Media bias against Palestinians involves everything from mentioning Palestine less often (or out of proportion with the scale of casualties), to using the passive voice to avoid identifying who has caused Palestinian deaths, to not using Palestinian sources in reporting (Khazaal, 2024).

If you are embarking on your own self-education, I can also point you toward resources that can help. There is so much knowledge, art, and media of various kinds that has been produced about Gaza and Palestine in the last nine months alone that I couldn’t possibly sort through it all, so this is a list of some organizations and sources that I have found particularly insightful or helpful due to things like scope, approach, creators’ perspective, etc. There are lists of recommended resources listing scholarly books, popular books, fiction, nonfiction, essays, poems, posters, podcasts, illustrations, speeches, videos (Cable, 2024; Matthis, 2024). Organizations like the Palestinian Feminist Collective (2023) have created action toolkits, children’s stories, calendars filled with beautiful art, statements, and calls to action. Mizna (2023), a woman-led contemporary arts organization focused on Arab and SWANA[4] culture, has published resources such as “Toward a Free Palestine: Resources to Act for an Learn about Palestine” and “A Liberatory Demand from Queers in Palestine” (2023) as well as poetry, photography, creative nonfiction, and more. Venues like Jadaliyya have an entire section of the website dedicated to Palestine and host written and video reporting, analysis, media clips, and events; one example is a collection of peer-reviewed articles about Gaza published between 2005-2021. The Middle East Research and Information Project hosts, “Palestine, Israel, and the Arab-Israeli Conflict: A Primer” by Joel Benin and Lisa Hajjar (2014). You can learn more by engaging with or following the work of scholars, journalists, activists, poets, fiction writers, visual artists: people like Susan Abulhawa, Lila Abu Lughod, Hala Alyan, Suheir Hammad, Maysoon Zayid, Bisan Owda, Mohammed El-Kurd, Motaz Azaiza, and so many others who have created and shared so much knowledge and art about Gaza and Palestine. There are so many resources, reader.

Ultimately, I hope that you will consider, to paraphrase Lorde, what your work is in this moment and what you need in order to be able to do it. Our world needs you (yes, specifically you), to be well enough to participate, to refuse these conditions in which we are living, and to help us imagine how to reach something better: “Heartbreak is at the heart of all revolutionary consciousness. How can it not be? Who can imagine another world unless they have already been broken apart by the world we are in?” (Bhattacharyya, 2023, p. 115). Pain and sorrow and grief connect us all. How, then, can we use that interconnectedness to support one another and find ways to move from despair to action?

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Jennifer Nish is a rhetorician whose research focuses on transnational feminism, disability, activist rhetoric, and digital media. Her book, Activist Literacies: Transnational Feminisms and Social Media Rhetorics, was published in 2022 by the University of South Carolina Press. Her work has also appeared in CCC, Peitho, and several edited collections. She is currently an associate professor of humanities at Michigan Technological University and has held previous faculty positions at Texas Tech University and the American University of Beirut.