I only wept for the olive trees
I watched the first Intifada on TV, sitting on my father’s lap. I felt the tanks roll over my limbs. I didn’t cry. I began to pick at my cuticles and the tanks went away.
I recovered a memory of huddling low under my father in his childhood home during a contravened ceasefire. I didn’t cry during the gunshots. I didn’t cry when I saw the traces of those bullets on the walls a decade later when we were finally able to ‘visit’ home. Or when the memory came back. I blinked and journaled about it, eventually published it, and put the paper away.
The Monday after 9/11 as I sat in a class 598km from where it happened with peers wailing at their lack of safety, blaming me as if I had flown those planes, I didn’t cry. I sat, in silence, watching from as far outside my body as I was from home.
When I learnt the airport had been bombed during my mom’s trip home, I had to wait hours to know my mother’s flight had safely taken off and landed, I didn’t cry. That was just a psychosomatic migraine requiring an ER visit and an IV to make it go away.
As the genocide unfolds unendingly slaughtering my people our babies with fragments of truth only on my social media and not in the news, not in the formal communications, not in hegemonic reality, I don’t cry. I freeze, stop sleeping, write from a disembodied-depersonalized place that was never home, and lose my sense of time across a day, across generations.
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Maybe you’ve known what it is to leave your body to survive. And maybe when the threat subsided, you’ve been unable to find your way back. This racist, capitalist, ableist world does not want to keep you whole. It can only stand to benefit from bodies emptied of their protectors. But hear this: If you aren’t in your body, someone else is. You will soon find that the many tyrants of the world have taken the helm in your absence.
Cole Riley. Black Liturgies. Prayers, poems and meditations for staying human. (2024, p.58)
One of the primary complaints in my psychotherapy practice is childhood-onset dissociative experiences. The people I work with use grounding strategies. They breathe deeply, time out, run cold water on their hands, count backwards from 100, scan their surroundings for the color violet to come back to the here. They understand the links between their personal traumas and dissociative states. They know what will trigger them, how to cope during or in the aftermath. We discuss and challenge the negative perceptions of self: I'm not worthy of love. I’m such a burden. I’m a mess. It’s my fault. It not their fault. I’m damaged. I need to try harder. Maybe you’re right: I was parentified, I was just a child, it wasn’t my fault, I couldn’t leave the house so I left my self, I am a decent person, my dreams matter, I started an exciting new job, I blocked their number, my friends right now are very supportive, I like me a bit more now, I can be proud of how far I have come.
Yet still, the dissociation happens. Is ‘self-management’ - to be the CEO of our bodily self as a corporation - all we can expect?
Aside from emotional abuse and neglect experienced in childhood, the DSM has little to say [...about...] why someone might experience such feelings [of depersonalization/ derealization]. The extent they allow trauma to reach is only interpersonal – never intergenerational, institutional, societal, political...the DSM and APA are only concerned with self-control – not the loss of control, freedom, or agency as it can be affected, granted, rescinded, and mitigated by the state.
Johanna Hedva. How to Tell When We Will Die. (2024, p.74-75).
What if you don’t live in your body. Maybe it has parts you don't want to live in. A body physically disciplined in the inherited familial learning of enslavement and colonialism, even though you are no longer on a plantation/in a caste system/on a reserve/in a war zone. A family scattered across geography with estrangements, losses, disappearances, sudden tragic deaths across disasters and accidents and addictions, a deep mistrust of capitalism because of its reliance on bodies such as yours and your family’s being run into the ground too soon. Always too soon. And insurance won’t pay. There is always a clause that excludes your bodies and lives and conditions.
I say to (too) many people: “you aren’t sensitive to rejection. There needs to be a ‘you’ to reject. You’re pushing against erasure”.
Everything changes with this reframe. You slam back into your body with a witty comment or topic change. You decide to speak your native language, play your grandparents’ music, and cook your aunt’s recipes. You feel the “broken line of communication being reestablished between me and my ancestors”. You want to dance in this body.
~
What if your parents didn’t know how to honor their bodies - because history has made it clear they are deviant, disposable, detestable - and you had to protect your siblings’ bodies, from them, from each other. What if you learned to leave your body when you are home. And now, protests are alive on the streets, the world over. And you go, because you must. And you are exhausted, burnt out even. Still, you show up to the protests and the organizing, but not in your body. And I am worried, about the police and jail and I can see that problem-solving your food schedule or sleep habits or guilt and rage is doing nothing so I blurt out because I cannot hold it in anymore: “why do you always have to throw your body into the way of harm?”
And you finally experience recognition and say: “Because, without people who put their bodies in the way, my grandparents would not be alive. I wouldn’t be alive.” And you sit up straight and something deep is clicking into place. And your history is more than the parts you needed to dissociate from, and you reconnect to the parts you are proud of, grateful for, and in doing so, you begin to land in your body.
~ ~ ~
Can politically framed interpretations that have resonance with one’s ancestral and personal constellations of embodied meanings make such a difference?
~ ~ ~
I see my own therapist, I recount the discrimination and accusations I suddenly faced from colleagues who have known me for 20 years. She insists on finding strategies for me to cry. Maybe I could journal to myself as if I were writing to a close friend? I delay re-scheduling our next session.
When Israeli forces destroy 47’000 olive trees in Lebanon, some of them centuries old, I weep uncontrollably. For hours until my eyes swell and I’m dry heaving. The olive trees - the crumbling dark brown earth and sharp leaves - are my coalescing political interpretation. My ancestors planted them for those who come next without tasting their fruit yet. Their scent permeates my memories, inhabit and protect me, guide me unerringly, call me back in/to my land-body.
April, 2025