Period 38: To transform, to be transformed
I spent hours this week reading names of the dead.
Out on the quad, on sunny, gorgeous fall days, we stood at various intersections with four binders full of around forty thousand names. The list, created by the Palestinian Health Ministry, provides each martyr’s name in Arabic, in English, their age as a whole number. The source we used had the list largely organized by age.
There are fourteen pages of babies under the age of one.
On the first day I had a binder where I ended up reading the names of dead seventeen year olds for an hour. On the second day I ended up with that same section of the list. For some reason we hadn’t made much progress on that binder and so I read eighteen year olds for an hour.
Or maybe there were just a lot of seventeen and eighteen year olds.
On the third day, two hours. People in their twenties. We thought, with four binders and continuous reading from eight thirty in the morning until at least five every evening, we would be done in three days. But we had to create a schedule for a fourth day.
On Thursday, I skipped office hours to put in another hour, then had to go to a meeting. Soon after the person who organized the reading messaged us: only two pages left! Come by and we can read the final names together.
It turns out there were five pages to go. Nine or ten of us stood in a circle, passing around the binder. The order of the final page we read wasn’t quite by age – there were people in their thirties, their twenties, several lines of age zero.
I stood next to a friend who is a recent grandmother. I got to meet her eight month old grandbaby recently, and I could still remember the warm, soft, sturdy feel of her little back against my hand as I rubbed it in circles, like my mother and grandmother used to do for me. I tried not to unravel.
The colleague who organized the reading said a prayer, and I cannot do it justice here. But she prayed for those martyred, she prayed even for those who had murdered them, that they may be forgiven should they seek to account for their harms. She prayed for those who had read, she prayed for those who had listened.
**
The first time I encountered a set of twins, I thought it was an error. Each name on this list has four, often five names. There were two names with only the slightest difference in the first name. Then I looked at the birth date and age.
Only a page or two later, another set of twins. I talked to a colleague about it: she had encountered several as well. To bear, birth, and care for twins is an incredible act of love. I thought of what it meant to lose both of them. I wondered if their parents also died, their siblings, if anyone else in their family was alive to remember them.
I was self-conscious reading the names at first. I’m sure I pronounced many names incorrectly. As I went, I got a bit of a rhythm going, for my pronunciation at least. And after a while you see the same names over and over. I saw names I recognized because I had already read the surname several dozen times; I saw names I recognized because they shared a name with a friend. It became a meditation. Sometimes my mind drifted as I read, thinking of the people passing by me, or the surveillance teams for campus who now loiter at every event, listening but not bearing witness. Sometimes it drifted to the martyrs: I imagined maybe they were hearing us, forgiving our mispronunciations. I saw a smile, maybe a gentle eye roll. My voice broke when I would land on this image. I would pause, compose myself, and continue.
**
I have two children: they each have four names. A first, a middle, then a hyphenated last name. How we agonized over these names when I was pregnant! These names meant family, and strength, and love. Each letter chosen with care. When our oldest changed his name, he considered it for months, in part because he worried how we would feel about his dropping two of those names (fine, in fact: the name had served its purpose), and in part because he wanted to choose rightly for himself. He ended up choosing the two names we had planned to name him if he had been assigned male at birth. I love cupping his sweet face and calling him by his name. I love shouting it down the hall to hurry him on to school. I love typing it into our group chat.
When I read names of the martyred, I thought of how every word, every letter, was chosen with care. Someone decided on each of those four or five names. Maybe they bickered, maybe there is a name in there to satisfy someone, maybe a name represented a secret wish. In every one of these lives, a universe.
I have two children: each of them have my whole heart. I will not do the math for you, I will not clean up the metaphor. Each of these martyrs was someone’s whole heart.
**
When reading names, I found myself consumed with that work: getting the pronunciation and pacing right, speaking loudly enough for my voice to carry a little, keeping track with my finger and a sticky note where I was on the list. My colleagues and friends shared something similar: we were in our own little worlds while we read, unable to see or notice much happening around us.
Still, two of my colleagues heard, then felt when they were spat on. I had one moment that I thought was going to become frightening, and then he walked away.
For the most part, instead, when we noticed anything it was that people sometimes stopped talking as they passed by us. They slowed down. They thanked us. One person came and sat at my side for almost an hour. Another lay a chocolate bar at a friend’s feet. Another tried to thank a different friend; his voice broke, and he rushed on.
Faculty brought their classes outside in the beautiful weather, and they and their students bore witness. A student in my class told the room what a special experience it had been to talk about their readings under the trees, and to hear the names being read as they learned. Did you know they were doing that, she asked? I did, I said. I was one of the ones reading while you were out there.
The friend who organized the reading said maybe it was a good thing that it took so long to read the names. Four full days of mostly faculty and a few students reading the names of martyrs on the quad, and she thinks maybe the students saw us enough times that they realized what it meant. That this is just how long it takes to read forty thousand names. Another friend guessed that, between reading five word names and their age, we shared about three hundred thousand words. Multiple book-length collaborations in one week. We may not otherwise get to share that many words with our colleagues in a lifetime.
**
Because of the hours I spent reading this week, I did not get much organizing done. I did not complete some service obligations. I ignored important emails. I did not make much progress on my research. I certainly haven’t been doing promotion for the paperback edition of PERIOD.
As scholars, we are often asked in grant proposals and award nominations how our work is transformative. How are we, as agents of our lives and experts in our disciplines, changing the world around us? And I like to think that some of what I do has had an impact, from publications to consensus committee reports to Congressional bills – and perhaps more importantly, from interviewing rape survivors to listening to peoples’ stories of medical mistrust to supporting people through disciplinary and legal battles. I became an academic because this is the work I want to do.
I don’t think it’s possible to do transformative work without putting yourself in positions, as often as possible, to be yourself transformed. I certainly didn’t think of my participation this way – mostly I worried about whether I would mess up names or whether I would be attacked. It was only as I started doing it, and the reading began to change me, that I realized how necessary it was that I be changed.
This week was hard, and yet how lucky am I that I was alive to be changed? What slight difference in circumstances meant that I was reading names, rather than having my name read? Or that someone was reading the names of my children? If there is one thing I wish for every person it is that they allow themselves to be changed, that they discard their Palestinian exception and recognize the humanity of a people who have been enduring a genocide for seventy five years, as a direct result of a different genocide. The pain and suffering layers and layers while we continue to read American headlines in the passive voice. The binary way American politicians and media identify some people as permanent victims, others as permanent victimizers, shows their reluctance to be transformed.
**
One last story. I went over to some of the surveillance team on Tuesday night during a vigil organized by the students. I had been crying after learning one of the students with whom I’d worked with for weeks that spring has now lost one hundred and twenty family members. Then crying some more as another student played recordings of a physician in Gaza leaving messages for his daughter at medical school to stop worrying about him and get sleep so she could do well in her studies – he would be martyred days later.
I asked them if they were moved. “Oh yeah, we have to create this safe space for them,” one said. That wasn’t what I’d asked. I told them the father telling his daughter not to worry had nearly undone me. Nods. They had been listening, but I don’t think they were hearing.
You have to open yourself up to change. If I were ever asked to do a job where I had to close my heart like that – or maybe, to be more generous, to keep my truest heart a secret – I’m not sure I could do it.
The best work is not just transformative, it transforms those who make it. I dreamed in names last night. Perhaps I will tonight as well – I think I want to, to be honest. I don’t want the names I spoke to be forgotten.
Speak a few names aloud tonight. Imagine their soft, warm bodies, their lively minds, the futures they imagined for themselves. Imagine what it was like for their families to hold them, or for them to embrace their families. Remember what it is to love and be loved.