Toward a New Collectivity

A sensation of my neighbor’s misfortune pierces me and I begin to comprehend

In this dark age the bond of our common fate and a compassion

more real than I was inclined to confess

—“On the Beach,” Czesław Miłosz

In Kara Walker’s words, “history is the oft-repeated fable; power is the oft-repeated script.” From Walker’s art in THSLNWN: In the Colorless Light of Day, to Karim Dajani and Eyal Rozmarin’s conversation in Speaking of Home: An Intimate Exchange on Israel-Palestine, ROOM 10.24 is a testament to our collective heartbreak and resilience. Exactly one week after the 2016 US election, we created ROOM: A Sketchbook for Analytic Action. We knew that to “live out,” in Sartre’s words, “that unbearable, heart-rending situation known as the human condition in a candid unvarnished way,” we needed to do it together. For the last eight years, ROOM’s worldwide community has engaged in a collective struggle for recognition and authenticity across generations, culture, and political pressure. Now, just one week after the re-election of Donald Trump, ROOM 10.24 could not be more prescient.

 

Aicha Bint Yusif’s poem, Bread and salt, which opens this issue, harkens back to the place in Dante’s journey where his ancestral grandfather forewarns the pilgrim that in exile he will come to know the bitter salt of another’s bread, and the hardship of climbing another’s stairs. 

 

Tu proverai sì come sa di sale 

Lo pane altrui, e com’è duro calle

Lo scendere e ’l salir per l’altrui scale

 

In their journeys of exile, the Israeli analyst Eyal Rozmarin and the Palestinian analyst Karim Dajani, as they have come to know one another, have experienced the salt, not of bread but of tears. 

 

 “As much as we love each other,” Dajani says, “there are ways that we actually cannot hear each other.” 

 

“I’d like to really emphasize Karim’s last point,” responds Rozmarin. “It really happens that the two of us reach a place of understanding with each other and then we have to start again. And I think those little slips, those little mis-hearings happen because underneath—on both sides—there is the fantasy that both of us have: You do really want to kill us. And it’s not just a fantasy.”

 

Their deeply analytic work illustrates how there are aspects of ourselves which are only available for us to know through conversation with another.

 

While Dante’s fantasied relationship with his paternal ancestor may have been a comfort to him,  the relationship Stefania Baresic has to the fascist grandfather she never knew is not. In Portrait of My Grandfather in Uniform she writes, “I can’t contain the sadness. It feels desperate and raw. It comes from a place within where reason and thought have a hard time claiming their role. It is a place that houses my shame.” The complex interplay between personal histories and collective experience is manifest throughout this issue.

 

Mary B. McRae and Katie Burner describe the impact familial and cultural inheritance has had on their lives. In Notes from a Sharecropper’s Daughter, McRae acknowledges that when she moved north to become a psychologist, she wanted nothing more than to forget her Southern childhood. Decades later, after caring for her mother in the throes of dementia, McRae writes to remember the mother she had and whom she is now determined to keep. In her essay, Degrees of Separation, Katie Burner writes of her determination to leave. Growing up in the Church of Latter Day Saints, she found that deconstructing her faith gave her “grounding and patience” to be with her patients and  helped her to bear the “crushing weight” of an “internalized misogyny that ran so deep [she] didn’t even know it was there.” 

 

The intergenerational resilience and trauma McRae, Baresic, and Burner describe are seeded within different social soils of politics and culture. In their essays, Sue Grand, Nancy Prendergast, and Michael Krass take the soil samples. They don’t just explain how misogyny and racism become entrenched societal perversions; they offer solutions. In Fascism’s Erotic Register, Grand shows how leaders like Trump, Putin, Modi, Hitler, Franco, Mussolini, Orban, and Salazar arouse society’s misogynistic and heteronormative desires. All authoritarian leaders, she explains, construct the category of “deviance” and it is down to us to liberate the powerful anti-fascist force that resides in the so-called “deviant.” 

 

Are women “deviant?” Nancy Prendergast, lawyer and grandmother of 10, describes in The Accidental Activist how she organized after the 2016 election. Her neighborhood group of “Like Minded Women” has  grown into a national group of women and men. Turning their “outrage into action,” they have been lobbying, postcarding, canvassing, donating, and promoting women leaders for the past eight years.

 

But what happens when the fascistic powers are unconsciously internalized—when we are them—liberation isn’t so simple. In Stemming the Flow: Racism in White America, Michael Krass describes the oozing power of forbidden satisfaction derived from the domination of others that runs rampant through white America. Confessing to the damage we have wrought and the pain we still cause will require a “tectonic cultural shift,” he warns. The forces against the loss and mourning that this will entail are immense.  

 

Shifa Haq’s Bare Life describes the liminal divide between “the favored and the damned,” particularly with regard to colonialism. She is awakened by vampire dreams leaving her to wonder if she is “perpetuating her own private caste division in which [she] must protect [her]self against the ones condemned to starve.” Haq’s stereotopic vision grasps the tragic divides that exist simultaneously in herself and in her country. In Six Short Poems on the Iran-Iraq War, Ali Alsadollahi’ writes of a different liminal divide—the one between life and death.

 

Imploring us to notice the various ways in which “the relationship of oppressed people to their oppressors always involves a prohibition against seeing or being seen,” Richard Grose’s essay Can You See? is a prelude to Susan Greene’s community project “I Witness Silwan.” In this community project, Greene turns this “prohibition against seeing” on its head. The eyes, painted on buildings in East Jerusalem by children and artists, gaze steadfastly at the oppressed and the oppressors.

 

There are days when it is impossible to grasp the full implications of authoritarianism, racism, or even the mass destruction of an entire people. We stop seeing. We debate the words themselves: fascism, white supremacy,  genocide. Ta-Nehisi Coates suggests that we suppress the network of neurons that house the soft, humane parts of ourselves. Freud recognized how much we resist knowing what we cannot bear to face. ROOM 10.24 speaks to those parts of ourselves that, in the words of the poet Czesław Miłosz’s “we aren’t inclined to confess.”

 

For the last eight years, ROOM  has honored the courage it has taken all our contributors who have dared to make themselves known. We are committed to making space for new ways of seeing and for individuals who remain underheard. Toward this end we are launching a new “room” on our website called We Are the Light. Initiated by Sara Taber, activist, and author of The Afghanistan Story, We Are the Light will be publishing stories, art, and poems by women living in countries where they do not have rights to their voices or their futures.  

 

“Our stories,” Dajani tells us, “had very little in them structurally that allowed recognition of the other. We came together through a collision course of history, and now we’re bound together for eternity, yet we know nothing about each other’s lived experience and hearts.” 

 

Rozmarin asks, “How can we have an identity that is not steeped in injustice? How to change?”

 

However we find each other after the 2024 election, ROOM remains committed to bringing the margins of our communities to the center, and mapping new ways to heal our suffering and destabilized world.