In the Midst

I am the twelve-year-old girl,

refugee on a small boat,

who throws herself into the ocean

after being raped by a sea pirate.

And I am also the pirate,

my heart not yet capable

of seeing and loving.

Please Call Me By My True Names

— Thich Nhat Hanh

The writers and artists in ROOM 2.25 bear witness to what must happen in ourselves, our communities, and our political movements for truth to be faced and change to occur. Some write from amidst genocide, others from their country’s fascist turn, and still others from the impact of environmental catastrophe. Each of these life-threatening events inscribes itself differently on our souls. We live in terrifying times.

Hala Al Sarraj’s Will the Sun Rise Again in Gaza?, Mohamed Omran Abu Shawish’s For How Long!? From Gaza, Yianna Ionnaou’s Our Guernica, and Sahar Vardi’s Activating Hope in Dark Times come to ROOM through Circle of Witnessing, facilitated by a network of colleagues committed to justice, equality, and human rights who have been working closely with practitioners on the ground in Israel/Palestine and Gaza.

From Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital Abu Shawish writes, “each loss has cut deeply, each unique and irreplaceable. [… ] Every time I feel the pull to surrender, to collapse under the immense weight of my grief and exhaustion, I remind myself of all those who have anchored their strength within me (They planted the stakes of their resilience within my ribs).” Leaving her home in Gaza City, Al Sarraj recalls, “Many times, we felt it was the time for us to die.  […] Entire families were erased from the records. […] What reactions should we have to all of that? What amount of emotions and tears? What yelling and shouting should be heard? Will our hearts keep beating?” And from the West Bank, Vardi adds, “Seeing society shed all compassion and take pride in these crimes is enough to drive any heart to despair…(but) resisting despair is not enough. Activism and resilience require hope.”

There are moments of hope. In War Alone Does Not Define Aleppo: Ammar’s Story, Mohamad Kebbewar recounts how a young boy, alone in Syria, manages to survive. But “What makes it harder,” Abu Shawish reminds us, “are the relentless waves of false hope.”  “We kept reassuring our two kids that we were moving to a safer place,” Al Sarraj writes, “although we knew we were lying to them.”

What can we do? asks Ipek S. Burnett in Hurricane after Hurricane. “I do not know what enough is, none of us really know, but we are certainly not doing it. […] I have to explain to [my kids] how we are failing the earth, how we are failing one another and ourselves. It will confuse them, I know. It will break their eager hearts.”

All the authors in ROOM 2.25 are telling us not to look away.

When Anastasios Gaitanidis’ patient despises herself “for not doing more” in On Hatred, Gaitanidis feels the destabilizing impact of his own hatred toward activism’s insufficiencies. Recognizing how hatred defends against more vulnerable feelings of powerlessness and grief allows Gaitanidis to imagine what collectively holding our hatred could mean. “It [wouldn’t be] about managing or suppressing these difficult emotions, but about creating containers strong enough to hold them while they transform.”

Interestingly, the only essay in this issue which speaks directly to the rise of authoritarianism in the United States is Max Beshers’ Free Radicals. Fanned by cancel culture, Beshers’s clinical work brings home to him how primal fears of annihilation and loss are defended against by political correctness and false binaries: “If those fears led to more successful outcomes in activist movements and helped us build a better world, then it would be worth the pain,” Beshers concludes, “but I’m not sure they do.”

Beyond the visibly protective barriers we construct to mark out good from evil, and to wall off who we love from who we hate, there are invisible barriers at play. In Solitude, Resignation, and Hope, Rina Lazar senses how “Within our psyches, the very task of digestion exceeds our strength, creating disassociations between the known, the internalized, and our psychic foundations.” The unconscious barriers that exist within our psyches and between ourselves and others defend us from “a ‘catastrophic encounter’ with the truth of terrible and ongoing injury.” Paradoxically,  Yianna Ioannau describes in Our Guernica how today we are also experiencing a collapse of all barriers. There is a “dissolution of the boundary between inside and outside […] a dissolution of the network of relations that lends us a sense of belonging, that shields us from alienation and, by extension, annihilation.”

Akin to the integrative work of psychoanalysis, the art and poetry in this issue expand and reconfigure the temporal and spatial boundaries of our worlds. Destabilizing received histories, Keli Safia Maksud’s work “interrogates how binaries like inside/outside, here/there, and us/them can be disrupted to expose their effect.” Chihara Shiota delves into the extreme particularity of her personal experiences and emotions to find new ways to embrace the universal structures that hold us all together. Mary Buchinger’s The Ever-Restless Voice and Ann Shenfield’s Like, adults speak for themselves.

ROOM 2.25 implores us to join these analysts, activists, artists, and poets, as well as the creative writers featured in ROOM’s new literary supplement to find new ways to collectively hold the paradoxes, hate, terror, love, longings, and hope that make up, in Winnicott’s words, “the common pool of our humanity.”

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Eight years after beginning as a local newsletter just a week after the 2016 US presidential election, ROOM has evolved into a powerful social platform reaching readers in more than 160 countries. ROOM archives the present moment while applying a psychoanalytic lens to global challenges. Each issue is carefully curated from submissions and made possible solely through reader donations. ROOM represents a community call to action. 

Now more than ever—join us.