Howdy friends. I wrote most of this after midnight several weeks ago, sitting on the kitchen floor. I haven’t given myself time or space to write much at all in the past year. Right now especially, it feels frivolous, like I shouldn’t be publishing a Substack piece that isn’t about Palestine. But underneath it all, this piece is about Palestine. It’s about grief and preserving heritage in the face of loss. It’s about being unmoored from your origin, and finding your way back. It’s about the contradictions that so many people are facing right now, as they become radicalized and have to fight against the currents of liberalization and normalization. It’s uncomfortable, growth. It’s much easier to rely on someone else to tell us what is right and wrong, to rely on some fallacy of a “universal morality”; it’s much harder to sharpen our own ability to discern right from wrong based on our personal politics and principles. I continue to stumble through this. So I hope sharing this is helpful for those of you stumbling alongside me.
I’ve been thinking a lot about the various ways that we carry forward a lineage. I’ve been thinking a lot about the ways we, or I, engage in tradition.
I’m prone to intellectualizing this practice. I catch myself believing that I need to be writing about, reading about, thinking about, planning, creating intention around this thing, this memory, this value, this ritual act. I spend more time in my brain contemplating and calculating than I do in my body actually doing and enjoying the thing. I’ve fallen prey to the notion that I must be constantly advancing my aptitude, my excellence on a topic to justify its continued existence in my life. That this is the only worthwhile cause, to intellectually understand and justify my choices, and anything running counter to the current iteration of my belief system is off limits to me.
That’s what being steeped in leftist dogma can do to you.
I’ve also been thinking a lot about this question from Kai Cheng Thom, “when does my commitment to being politically ‘radical’ prevent me from perceiving a more complete truth?”
Sometimes it’s the things that so blatantly contradict a part of my current consciousness that are so necessary for me to engage in for the sake of honoring my grief, for connecting me with the memory of someone or something. Sometimes it’s the very things that make me afraid of being perceived as a fraud that I must do in order to stay tethered to my identity.
Like going to Dillard’s on Black Friday.
My mom raised me to never pay full price. She was a dedicated bargain shopper, a maxxinista. We didn’t have a lot in common, in fact I often felt like we spoke different languages. But shopping, clothes, shoes, oh especially shoes, we shared a love for shoes. We shared a love for sale racks and a good deal. Dressing rooms and Saturday mornings cruising up I-85 to Lenox Mall, listening to Wait, Wait Don’t Tell Me. And Black Friday at Dillards. We had that in common.
Department stores in particular remind me of my mom. Outside of the house, it’s probably where we spent the most time together. I find them comforting in that way, like I can step into a reality where my mom is still here. Any second now, I’ll hear her voice from outside of the dressing room. Even before she died, department stores were a source of comfort for me. When I lived in Scotland for my first two years of undergrad, I only came home for Christmas and summer break. In between, bouts of homesickness were rare, but when they hit, I would hop on a train and go to the nearest department store. The employees had different accents but the sale racks looked the same.
So this past year, with an explicit call to Boycott Black Friday in solidarity with Palestinian liberation, I was faced with a pointed contradiction. I’ve gone to Dillards every Black Friday since my mom died. But my politics are principled. I am deeply committed to collective liberation. I have been a wreck over this genocide. But I never want to lose sight of a more complete truth for the sake of being politically radical. Because my grief, too, is principled. Plus, I fundamentally disagree with the notion that liberation can be boiled down to individual consumer choices.
So I went to Dillard’s on Black Friday.
“I think that overrides boycott and is actually essential,” my friend reassured me when I explained my predicament.
A few months prior, I spotted a banner commending Arab veterans at our local Arab cultural center. To me, this is an obvious and sharp contradiction, one that makes me deeply uncomfortable. But to some of our elders, it is not. My options for connecting with Arab community in Atlanta are limited; how can I turn my back on my biggest opportunity to meet and connect with my community? Am I going to stop supporting our cultural center for tacitly supporting the military? Sure, there are elders in our community who do not quite share the politics of young Arabs, but they share our culture, they hold our history in their hands, and that’s worth something. That’s not something I’m willing to throw away for the sake of being politically radical.
And yet sometimes I still deny myself such pleasures, connecting to my culture and my past. Sometimes I deny myself the honor of honoring my parents and where I come from. I intellectualize which parts of my origin I want to carry forward and which I want to leave behind. And when I do decide I want to carry a piece of my past forward, I tell myself that I must save this experience, this ritual, for the optimal time to enjoy it. It’s often not even something that I need to ration, and yet for some reason I hoard it. I hoard the tradition for some unknown future date when I will have capacity to fully relish in the memory and the meaning of it.
But isn’t every day a good day to remember someone?
Why do I deny myself the experience of pleasure and pride that tethers me to a part of my past, a part of where I came from? I wonder, maybe, it’s because of the pain that comes along with it.
I opened the Panettone on a whim, late one night. I bought it several months earlier, ahead of the holiday season. The big red box of sweet bread sat on the counter for weeks. Until late one night in early January. Christmas had already come and gone, what am I waiting for? If I keep waiting I will miss the chance to eat panettone at Christmastime, an Italian tradition.
I made a mess with the packet of powdered sugar, a gift for the ants that would later find their way onto our kitchen counter. I cut a slice, sneaking a bite before plating it. I realized the slice was too small for my appetite— not my appetite for food but for the memory. So I cut a second slice and added it to my plate.
The smell, a blend of custard, sourdough, and citrus, transported me back in time and place. It’s the very same panettone that my mom would pick up at TJ Maxx or Costco in the weeks before Christmas. The smell reminded me, too, of the homemade pinze that my Tia Nella would send us every Easter, wrapped in pastel colored plastic.
The texture is soft and airy, it almost melts in your mouth. I could taste the sourdough beneath the notes of vanilla and orange. For me, it tastes like home. But I don’t know how it tastes for people who don’t feel grief when they eat panettone.
Grief, however, is not a thing that happens to you. Grief becomes you. It alters your very being in a way that you will not understand until you too are changed. Grief becomes you such that every moment, every choice becomes political. Every moment is an opportunity to honor someone you’ve lost. Every choice is an opportunity to stay tethered to your ancestors. It changes once simple acts into rituals and traditions that you cling to.
And it’s in these small moments, these often unseen choices, that you reproduce a lineage. It’s in the ordinary. It’s in the contradictions, in the connections and experiences we are inclined to deny ourselves. It is here where we find the threshold we must step through in order to connect who we once were to who we want to become.