The Blasphemy of Hope

I find it borderline blasphemous to think about hope and gratitude when the world is what it is. When humans are human-ing in the ways that they are. To believe that humans are innately good and kind and loving is hard work at this point in time.

I'm Sara and I come from Egypt and we share a border with a genocide on one side, and war on the other. I don't know what to call what's happening in Sudan but I know that when I walk the streets of Cairo, there are a lot of displaced people from both Sudan and Palestine. The Palestinians can't cross the border anymore. A lot of Sudanese have died trying to cross the other border. But you can watch some trustworthy news source for this. I don't have a full report I just have a head full of thoughts.

I order my cappuccino and have it served by a Gazan man, fierce in his eyes like his fellow Gazans. I sit here under that big tree, listening to the birds and I find myself missing the beauty of Gaza. I've never been to Gaza, I wouldn't even be allowed in if I tried. It even takes special permits to get to the Egyptian side of Rafah.

But I get flashbacks of the olive trees and the sea, it reminds me of something or I'm taken there. I don't know. I've been to Arish as a child once with my grandparents. I remember the palm trees on the beach – I haven't seen them anywhere else by the Mediterranean, only Arish and perhaps Gaza.

I don't know where that nostalgia is coming from, that yearning.

Yearning is one of my favorite feelings, I resort to it to keep my heart alive. So I sit with it.

I sit with it and imagine a Gaza that I can visit. A Gaza where people can freely enter and leave. You know, a Gaza that's not a warzone, an exile or a prison.

This is hope.

This is what hope does.

It's the reason why I feel imagination, speculative, hopeful imagination is the thin thread tethering me (us?) to faith in humanity.

To find gratitude in this moment is hard, because it comes with guilt. It comes with the guilt of sleeping in a bed at night, enjoying my small pleasures during the day. It comes with the guilt of being here. Alive. Well.

I remember last year, a few weeks into what people were still calling an act of defence because the situation is “complicated” and my friend Esam shared his writing with me and a few other friends.

He wanted us to help translate his work and we did and it was hard. It was hard because with bombs and screams and death in the background, he wrote of Gaza in the winter, when his friends would go to the beach at night, when lovers would try and get some time alone by the sea. He still wrote about love.

As someone who's native to the Mediterranean, I have to admit it has this effect on you. It makes everything and everyone seem more loveable. It makes everything equal parts harsh and romantic with those big roaring waves and exaggeratingly colorful sunsets. By the Mediterranean, your hands want to reach for someone else's skin.

So how dare I not write of hope and gratitude? Yes, I'm grateful. I'm grateful to be alive in this moment in time because I know I'm on the right side of history. I know that history won't matter because the world is ending anyway and we still get to dream.

Yes, we get to dream. In fact, it's our assignment, our duty as dreamers to keep dreaming alive.

I'm grateful that I can write about it.

I'm grateful that the veil has dropped, the masks have melted and if you choose to, you can see the truth emerging from underneath the rubble.

And while I'm not Palestinian, where I come from, before the performance of Arab Nationalism, the people traveled and met across borders. Before the colonizers arrived, I don't even know how people dealt with borders.

I'm grateful I get to imagine a world with no borders.

I'm grateful I get to imagine new economies (or remember ancient ones) maybe those ancient trade routes have something to tell me. And you, they might have something to tell you, too.

And perhaps it's this: yes guilt is there and privilege, too, and still (always) there's room for gratitude.

A prompt/invitation:

Speak your guilt and your privilege into saltwater (sea, ocean, tears, water mixed with some salt) and ask it to be transmuted, ask it to show you where gratitude is. Ask it to show you the world that could be, the world that was, and how you can bridge them both.

We get to be bridges, we get to call in realities where no one is dehumanized.

It's been a year.