Beginnings

For things to reveal themselves to us,

we need to be ready to abandon our views about them. 

—Thich Nhat Hanh

“…Karim and I are planning to meet tomorrow…to see what we might do together. I’m guessing we’ll have some ideas. I—we—will be in touch.” —Eyal
“…We need a new language, a new ideology, a new analytic praxis… The responsibility to help move in this direction is on our shoulders. Who is going to do it if not for us? And yet, it is like trying to build the pyramids of Giza. Unimaginable.” —Karim

As kids, Karim Dajani and Eyal Rozmarin grew up within hours of each other, one in Beirut, the other in Tel Aviv—to parents who were born in what had been Palestine/Israel. From an astute understanding of the unconscious process, they have written, separately, about belonging and unbelonging and about the interpolation of culture on our beings. Now they meet, for the first time, to write about the impact the current catastrophe in their homeland is having on their souls, about the trauma and resilience in their families’ histories, and about the relevance of psychoanalytic thinking today. In a profound illustration of “analytic action,” Dajani and Rozmarin are embarking together on a project that they hope will culminate in a new angle from which to understand our human condition.

“It is very hard to find a beacon in such dark times. I am glad we have decided to talk to one another while acknowledging how impossible it might be,” begins Karim Dajani. “I am trying to survive a sepsis of the soul because the toxicity is overwhelming.” “The word ‘sepsis’ feels right,” responds Eyal Rozmarin “…We are also part of it, this war, this conflict, this colonial nightmare… It’s hard to sleep at night. Yet our roofs are still over our heads.… We have the entire fields of humanities, social science, and theory to engage with but we need to look up and out.” Together they are Crossing Divides.

From ROOM to room we never can predict how our community will fill this space, and we are often surprised. In the midst of the violent societal crisis unfolding in Russia and Ukraine, in Israel and Gaza, and with the pending election looming over the United States, it was striking, this time, that the submissions for ROOM 2.24 received were, for the most, quieter and more inwardly focused. The authors recall how the grip of class, gender, race, and geopolitical history held them so tightly that it was, at times, actually difficult for them to “look up and out.”

Born in 1966, a year before the miscegenation laws banning interracial marriage were overturned in North Carolina, Ann Augustine explains how “racism and the adoption practices of the time, including efforts to race match, made finding a home for (her) difficult.” In A Sea of Mothers, she writes, “…my life has always revolved around mothers and mothering—what it means to have a mother, to lose a mother, to be mothered, to mother. In Second Chances, Delia Kostner recalls what it meant for her to have been part of the first generation to have control over reproductive rights. As a young adolescent in 1974, she was enveloped by a “lively swirl of women who provided [her] with the guidance and intimacy [she] lacked at home.” She writes, “My life was my own; my autonomy was declared inviolable. I knew I was obligated to pass this gift on.”

Shari Appollon’s My Mother’s Haiti and Isaac Slone’s Rights of Passage illustrate two different kinds of internal anguish children can experience when, from the start, belonging and not belonging are intertwined. “My mother was a proud Haitian woman, and remarkably critical of her fellow countrymen…, I could not comprehend as a child, nor as an adolescent, why her words did not match her actions,” writes Appollon, recalling the distinctly Caribbean warmth of her family. For Slone, “There were few resources for someone [his] age and seemingly even fewer that took up gender identity outside a conversation about sexual orientation.” Slone recalls, “Perseverance meant compromising and learning to feel comfortable enough presenting as male solely to feel more socially integrated.” There are always invisible layers, as Aaron Bourne’s Backstory makes clear. In one of the few submissions ROOM has received dealing with the classism inherent in our field, Bourne writes, “Retaining contact with the stark contrast between where I come from and where I find myself today helps keep me grounded.” Seeped in different political and cultural marinades, these memoirs are about ways of beginning and beginning again. Looking “back and in” goes hand in hand with looking “up and out.” These writers are looking in to locate their minds in an intersubjective world.

But, as Freud taught, “looking back and in” is ribboned with unconscious resistance. Addressing the unintegrated and painful past of national trajectories, Jill Salberg looks at the grand-scale implications of this resistance in Fascism Amnesia: A Failure of Witnessing. “Every episode of mass violence is enabled by willful obliviousness and collective denial,” she writes. “Disappeared memory and history erased remain fascism’s best weapon.” Asking, how we can wake ourselves to the traumatized burden of history, Salberg finds her answer at Abuelas de Plaza de Mayo. Here, every Thursday, week after week, in the midst of totalitarian regimes, generations of mothers and grandmothers gather to protest and remember Argentina’s “disappeared” children. Today, the cumulative and acute trauma within ourselves and within our nations present enormous challenges to finding ways to continue to hold space open for thought and memory.

ROOM’s medium is the message.

Last month I received an email from a reader, Denni Liebowitz, who wanted to share with me some words that had inspired her “as Torah,” she said, ever since she had first read them in the 1980s. These words, by the American poet Adrienne Rich, were, “profoundly relevant to what has been intensely occupying my thoughts and feelings—the real unbearable on-the-ground facts of Israel’s war against Gaza and the complexities taking place in that Holy Land for everyone.” “Adrienne,” Denni told me, “was writing about her experience of coming into contact with her Jewishness in a new way. Hesitantly at first, she empowers herself to Belong and immediately engages with an ancient teacher, Rabbi Hillel. She extends and deepens his questions, responding with a question of her own, rendering a beautiful integration that makes the old new.”

“If I am not for myself who will be for me? If I am only for myself what am I?

“If not now when?” —Hillel

To which Rich added,

“And if not with others, how?”

I shared Denni’s email with the ROOM editorial board because it’s why we do what we do in ROOM, and I realize, while closing this editorial, I also want to share it with you because, from the beginning, it has been ROOM’s readers and writers who have made this virtual space for thinking and remembering possible. Our next submission cycle ends on May 5. As we begin 2024—our seventh year together—let us continue to find new ways to look up and out.