The screen reflected back not just environmental catastrophe but my own complicity in the systems that perpetuate it. My car keys sat heavy in my pocket. The plastic water bottle on my desk suddenly felt like an accusation. In that moment of recognition, I understood something essential about hatred’s dual nature—how it can both separate us from and bind us to the very things we claim to despise.
Having ambition and drive is the usual thing to have in Aleppo. My name is Ammar and I am part of this culture.
It’s when you leave your inner self and move into the unknown; it’s when you are forced to flee from your awareness, from your assets, from yourself, to move as a physical creature and start to find any place or shelter. Literally, you are not aware enough to ask yourself, “What is this? Is this real, or am I watching a terrifying movie? Am I awake?”
I have not had the luxury to mourn fully, to scream, to collapse under the weight of it all. 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.
This collapse of the boundary between inside and outside, which induces in the spectator a sense of profound spatial disorientation, is paradigmatic of the collapse of the parameters that sustain a basic sense of reality in experiences of catastrophe. In war, this collapse becomes utterly literal: the actual destruction brought upon familiar spaces, both private and public, material and spiritual, bodily and mental, renders the distinction between “inside” and “outside” obsolete.
This is an argument based on faith that there is right and wrong—and that at some point things will be different. Faith that no occupation lasts forever, oppressed people eventually reach independence, and justice will prevail. Faith is hard to hold. Over years of activism, I have found that focusing on what we are able to achieve in our work has helped me hold on to hope.
Webster reminds us that breathing phenomena were and are involved in a variety of neurotic symptoms and refers to the first patients of psychoanalysis, who developed swallowing difficulties, feelings of suffocation, and coughing tics. Nowadays, we experience the importance of breathing in anxiety disorders, with their high prevalence, and in a heightened form in panic attacks, in which the ability to breathe seems to be lost.
Survival Story: An Artistic Approach to Harm Reduction was inspired by my hands-on experience in harm reduction across both states. A pivotal moment occurred as I sat in a mobile phlebotomy van, under the dim glow of a headlamp, preparing to do a blood draw on a participant in the HIV/hepatitis C treatment program with which I work. Her reluctance to seek treatment at local hospitals due to fear of judgment and trauma underscored a common narrative of stigma experienced by people who use drugs.
So, in existential panic, I pulled my gaze from the claustrophobic weight and scanned the narrow tube I sat in and knew while I was not suffocating, nor in peril like those doomed cavers, I too lived in a dangerous world, and I too didn’t measure the consequences of my choices adequately, and I too got sticky in the ungainly spaces I crawled through.
Her grandmother warned her not to fall into the trap. She didn’t say what it looked like, or when or how one might typically encounter it. She used the article “the,” not “a,” as if there was only one trap to fall into, and everyone must look out for it at all times.
Did everyone in Honolulu know about the man on the balcony? Did the lead vocalist mean him? Was he famous, even? A local phenomenon? A freak, showpiece? Or were there many people in Honolulu missing chunks of themselves?
Think what it would be like,” Italo Calvino wrote, “to have a work conceived from outside the self, a work that would let us escape the limited perspective of the individual ego, not only to enter into selves like our own, but to give speech to that which has no language… ” Of course we know that no person and no theory can ever escape the limited perspective of Calvino’s “individual ego.” Taken together, however, the authors and artists in ROOM 6.24 are giving language to a world that is rendering us all increasingly speechless.
I understand my subliminal acknowledgment of this absence as the source of my uncontainable sadness when I look at his image. I recognize the seed of that absence in my younger self as well, when in the grip of my defenses I distanced myself from an other with all my disowned shame around my own vulnerability; in the way I was a mother to my child, when unaware of my own dissociated self-states, I shared with them the heavy anxiety of my emotional inheritance.
With an urgent focus on Israel-Palestine, Eyal Rozmarin (Israeli) and Karim Dajani (Palestinian), engage in a powerful and tender conversation showing how unconscious process underlies political-cultural realities and individual misunderstandings.
[…] The interesting thing about dementia is that there are those moments of clarity, where the afflicted person comes to life with all the vitality of the past. It is so short, like the blink of an eye.
[…] Many of us recognized the need to unblinkingly face the people we kill by our complicity in a racist system, a system that could make such an unabashed murder possible. Many of us started a long-overdue process of mourning the devastating impact of our complicity, of the ways we enact our own nightmares, creating a nightmare for an Other. But such tectonic cultural shifts generate great volatility.
[…] Watching the rituals of fascism, these people can see what the Leader does not want to be seen. They can look at him and through him. Their eyes seem to be everywhere. In the United States, we can sense that this gaze shatters fascism’s narcissistic mirror. To MAGA, this gaze must feel like a shaming panopticon. It is no wonder that these unregulated bodies evoke paranoia and rage in the dominant.
The story of Afghanistan, my young women informants have taught me, is yet more complicated even than a battle between communism, democracy, and Islamic forces or a battle over women’s position in society. Stories upon stories, I have learned, compose the story of a country. But just being a woman of a certain generation is not the whole story, either. My young informants have disabused me of the notion that there is one Afghanistan story.
We are the Light is a forum and gathering place offering free and open expression to women from around the world whose voices are seldom heard and whose futures are threatened. The education and health of women, attention paid to the development of girls and women, and inclusion of the outlooks of women are critical to the welfare of the world.
[…] In my dream, a vampirish presence is approaching fast to feed on me. It dawns on me that this is an unconscious representation of those for whom my heart bleeds. On waking up, shame replaces terror. Besides one’s identification and caritas, is it possible I have perpetuated a private caste division in which I must protect myself against the ones condemned to starve?