✨ on recognizing the stranger
thoughts on country music, the prince of egypt, + gaza
Dear friend—
At the Grammy Awards earlier this month, Beyoncé took home “Album of the Year” for Cowboy Carter, which is in large part an homage to American country music’s roots in Black music and musicians.
The album commands recognition of a historical fact: country music—while being a cultural cornerstone for many white Americans—has got Blackness embedded in its DNA.
Much of mainstream country music has obscured these roots. The Billboard charts fought to deny Lil Nas X his flowers for “Old Town Road.” Early on in the genre, record labels hid the Black performers behind their biggest hits. The country establishment has embraced racism as a “marketing tool.” Cowboy Carter received its fair share of naysaying doubting Beyoncé’s country cred, even though she’s literally from Houston, Texas.1
This is just one example of how America hides—or purposefully forgets—the Black origins of its most beloved cultural phenomena, from rock music to internet slang. And this hiding, in turn, helps undergird segregation, racism, and dehumanization.
Recognizing that “an Other” lives in the roots of our culture—especially culture so important to group identity—would mean admitting that the lines we draw around ourselves are not so impenetrable. That the people we might vilify are in fact a part of us.
Avoiding such recognition, writes Palestinian author Isabella Hammad, is tied to denying others’ very humanity.
✦
In "Recognizing the Stranger," Hammad recalls Palestinian literary critic Edward Said's final lecture. Said discusses Freud's Moses and Monotheism, in which Freud (himself Jewish) interprets Moses as Egyptian.
Freud suggests Moses' "ideas about a single god are derived entirely from the Egyptian Pharaoh," Said writes. He argues that in this interpretation, Freud provided an alternative to Eurocentric Jewishness and Zionism by putting a "stranger" at the heart of a founding story of Judaism; and, therefore, an Arab at the center of European Jews' state project in the Middle East.
From this, Hammad draws a reversal from an earlier line of thinking: We must work to recognize the familiar in the stranger—to see our shared humanity with those we see as different from us—and we must also reach for the stranger in the familiar. What lies in us that disrupts our self-conceived identities and affiliations?
Artwork by ghidzillustration of a Gazan journalist embracing his mother, styled after Gustav Klimt’s The Kiss.
Writes Hammad: "We must eventually be ready to shapeshift, to be decentered, when the light of an other appears on the horizon of human freedom, which remains undone.”
By being open to finding parts of ourselves that contradict our ideas of who we are and what groups we belong to, we resist the calcification of group identity—the sharpening of lines and hardening of borders.
This is a key part of Said’s own worldview, per Hammad. She writes of Said's understanding of exile as "agony but also an ethical position." To be an exile means preserving your connection to your origins on one hand and, on the other, "remaining always a bit of a stranger, to resist the resolution of narrative, the closing of the circle, to keep looking, to not feel too at home."
Gaza, photographed and posted by Suhail Nssar in September 2023.
This kind of certainty—”feeling too at home”—is often accompanied by an unwillingness to commune with the stranger both within and without. We ignore the ways our lives, cultures, histories, desires, values, and futures intertwine with others’. We come to feel that “we” are intrinsically and irrevocably different from “them.”
And this allows us to discount others’ fears, struggles, and pain; as though they are different from and lesser than our own. It allows alienation and precludes empathy, paving the way to all manner of dehumanization and horrors.
Alternatively, per Hammad and Said, we can resist resolution of narrative. We can resist giving in to easy, simple, and narrow stories about who we are, and who others are. We can always keep looking, searching for the stranger within; embracing the stranger without. That’s how we remained rooted in the fact of all our shared humanity.
✦
One of my favorite movies is The Prince of Egypt, an animated retelling of the story of Moses. The movie begins with his adoption into Pharaoh’s family and ends with his leading the Israelites out of slavery in Egypt. It’s a gorgeous movie accompanied by an unparalleled soundtrack.
My favorite scenes come at the end, when Pharaoh has finally allowed the Israelites to leave. These scenes are set to one of the most beautiful songs ever written, I think. I still get shivers when I think about it.
In these scenes, the Israelites are leaving their homes to follow Moses out of Egypt. Children clutch dolls. Farmers herd sheep and oxen. An old woman, perhaps a slave her whole life, perhaps having known nothing but Egypt, hesitates at a threshold. A young girl takes her hand and gently pulls her forward, and the old woman's face breaks into a smile.
The scope swings between intimate moments like these and breath-taking, panoramic views of the Israelites in their thousands upon thousands.
In late January, I thought of these scenes as my social media feeds flooded with photos of Gazans moving back to their homes in the North of the Gaza Strip. I heard that song from The Prince of Egypt, “When You Believe,” playing in my head as I paused over these images.
I saw photos of people holding their cats, who had kept them company while they took shelter in the South. A video that showed a troupe of young men rolling a hulking metal water tank, taller than they, up the road. Elders in wheelchairs—perhaps old enough to have fled to Gaza in the 1948 Nakba—smiling from ear to ear as their loved ones pushed them toward home.
These photos were taken in the wake of the latest ceasefire deal between Israel and Hamas. There was so much joy in them. But Gazans were not headed toward a Promised Land or toward freedom. Many were returning to rubble, as more than 9 in 10 homes in Gaza have been damaged or destroyed under Israeli bombardment.
The ceasefire deal has nothing to say about the future of Gaza, its rebuilding, its freedom, or a long-lasting end to genocidal violence there. President Trump has proposed expelling every single Gazan—literal ethnic cleansing—and developing Gaza into beachfront property.
In late January, Trump also resumed sales of 2,000-pound bombs to Israel. Biden had paused them in May 2024 after sending more than 14,000 to Israel since October 2023. An unimaginable cache of devastation. Meanwhile, in its latest offensive in the West Bank, the Israeli Defense Forces have driven an incredible 40,000 Palestinians from their homes.
Nevertheless, I was so glad to take a moment to soak in Gazans’ joy. I read accounts of people sleeping through the night without the threat of bombs, for the first time in more than 400 days. Every single photo of a smiling person in Gaza is a gem. I wanted to print them all out, pull them from the transience of social media and press them permanent to page.
✦
Hammad writes about how she has spent her whole life working to prove her people’s humanity to others; to convince them that Palestinians’ hopes and fears and desires are just as precious as anyone else’s, even as negotiations and public discourse around Palestine have discounted them as “unrealistic.”
Now, the destruction of Gaza and its people has been live-streamed for the West for more than a year. Broader swaths than ever of the American public recognize their humanity. (This is key, as the U.S. is Israel’s biggest arms supplier.)
However, too often, literature and politics work toward this recognition, but stop there. We change language but not policy. We use more empathetic words but do not change the material conditions through which dehumanization manifests.
Hammad gives the example of the Oslo Accords, in which Israel officially recognized the Palestine Liberation Organization as the political representative of the Palestinian people, without actually allowing the PLO to exercise political autonomy on behalf of them.
Recognition doesn’t mean much if it doesn’t come with "the responsibility to act," as Hammad puts it. It is not enough to talk and think in recognition of the humanity of others; we have to act to usher in a world in which others can realize their humanity in the same ways we can.
“Recognizing the Stranger” raises questions that I’ve been asking myself more and more recently. Am I keeping my eyes open for the stranger in the familiar, and vice versa? Am I resisting the hardening of easy, narrow narratives that discourage empathy? And if I am truly recognizing others’ humanity, how can I act more to bring that recognition to bear?
Thank you for reading, much love,
—mia xx
✦
You see a plume of smoke rising to the east. You know your aunt’s family lives in that neighborhood, and there’s a chance they could be under that plume, their house or tent destroyed, your young cousins stumbling through the rubble or worse. But you have no way of reaching them. The internet has been out for months. The roads are stacked high with rubble from previous bombings.
Crips for eSims for Gaza is a coalition of disability justice activists working to send eSims to Gazans. With telecommunications infrastructure destroyed, eSims allow Gazans to access the outside world, communicate with their loved ones, continue their studies, and much more. As of late January, Crips for eSims is running out of money to continue disbursing eSims and continue service for the ones they’ve already sent. If you have funds to spare, please consider making a donation.
Further reading:
Tangentially, shout out to ismatu gwendolyn for their incisive analysis/critique of Beyoncé. Truly both-and’ing—acknowledging Beyoncé’s incredible contributions to the culture while critiquing the hypocrisies of her image and actions and asking us to question our own aspirations. Long-form essay, short-form video.