Recognising the stranger

This moon's theme is inspired by Isabella Hammad's book Recognizing The Stranger: On Palestine and Narrative which I read in October 2024.

We who are not there, witnessing from afar, in what ways are we mutilating ourselves when we dissociate to cope? To remain human at this juncture is to remain in agony. Let us remain there: it is the more honest place from which to speak. — Isabella Hammad

Since finishing it, I found that other things would take me back there, including a Qur'ān verse, which I write a bit about below.

1. I am you
2. Accumulated knowledge, unconfronted
3. That is also you
4. It was the neighbour
5. When the line collapses
6. That is my daughter
7. The way we treat ourselves
8. To recognise each other
9. Denying affinity is self-alienation
10. Say that's me
11. My child, my mother, my father

I am you

Fariha Róisín reads a tribute to Palestinian poet Refaat Alareer before performing his poem "I AM YOU."

— Fariha Róisín, August 2024.^[1]
— Refaat Alareer, 2012.^[2]

Accumulated knowledge, unconfronted

The novel A Heart So White, by the Spanish writer Javier Marías, begins with the words “I did not want to know but I have since come to know.” Encased in this “I did not want to know” is an already-knowing. The reversal hastened by recognition functions only on account of an accumulation of knowledge, knowledge that has not been confronted. That’s why it’s re-cognition; ana-gnorisis: knowing again. In an interview, Marías said that while for some the novel “is a way of imparting knowledge,” for him “it is more a way of imparting recognition of things that you didn’t know you knew. You say ‘yes.’ It feels true even though it might be uncomfortable.” To recognize something is, then, to perceive clearly what on some level you have known all along, but that perhaps you did not want to know.

— Isabella Hammad, 2024.^[3]

That is also you

“The world is held together, really it is, held together, by the love and the passion of a very few people. Otherwise, of course you can despair. Walk down the street of any city, any afternoon, and look around you. What you’ve got to remember is what you’re looking at is also you. Everyone you’re looking at is also you. You could be that person. You could be that monster, you could be that cop. And you have to decide, in yourself, not to be.”

— James Baldwin on the Dick Cavett Show, 1979.^[4]

It was the neighbour

"It was not Hitler or Himmler who abducted me, beat me, and shot my family. It was the shoemaker, the milkman, the neighbor, who received a uniform and then believed they were the master race."

— Roma Auschwitz survivor Karl Stojka.^[5]

When the line collapses

How do we love others and ourselves, truly, not just say it, but feel it? How do you love a person who betrayed you, who hurt you, who disgusts you? Here's the part that sounds impossible until it's felt: The person you call the worst human you've ever met is YOU in another set of causes, of configurations. Not metaphorically, literally. If you were born with their brain, their body, their teachers, their causes, their moment-to-moment conditioning, you would be exactly the same. Everything, including who you are, arises from something else. [...] You don't love others out of virtue. You love them because the line between them and you collapses. I'm not gonna hate that person; I wouldn't hate myself if I were them.

— Robyn Humphrys, 2025.^[6]

That is my daughter

My daughter was riding her bike the other day. And she fell and skinned up her face pretty bad. We had to go to urgent care. She's crying, I'm carrying her. And all I could think about was parents in Gaza. [...] Hind Rajab is like... my daughter is 5, so that's my daughter. My son is nonverbal, has some other disabilities. That Muhammad, the boy who was killed by a dog. Like, that's my son. [...] I don't know if there's a way for America to come back from this in the sense of our reputation on the international stage. We've completely trashed these institutions, ICC, ICJ, the UN, for the benefit of what? To protect someone like Netanyahu and what Israel is doing it. I hope that Palestinians can have the determination and autonomy to live their lives. I think Palestinians are just like me. They have families, they want to do things with their life. They don't to be messed with by occupying powers. I just see so much clearly how their liberation is bound up in my own.

— former US Air Force engineer Rily Livermore, 2024.^[7]

The way we treat ourselves

The way that you treat the most marginalised people in society is ultimately how you treat yourself. Back during the rise of the moustache man in Germany, I just want to be clear; one of the first groups that he attacked was trans people and disabled people— literally history repeating itself. The way that you treat the most marginalised among you, the way we treat the most marginalised people in society, reflects ultimately on how society is going to progress. It is a litmus test. It is easier to see what you can get away with when you test the people who are pushed further to the margins. And it ultimately comes back to bite everybody.

— 5hahem Mclaurin, 2025.^[8]

To recognise each other

People, We created you all from a single man and a single woman, and made you into races and tribes so that you should recognise one another.
— Qur'ān, 49:13 (partial)

Liy: In the Inner Chambers chapter of the Qur'ān, God disclosed to humankind that we were made into races and tribes so that we may litaʿārafū (recognise each other). Grammatically, triangulating where else this word's trilateral root appears in the Qur'ān tells us that this endeavour to recognise each other (taʿāruf) is an active process of knowledge gained through effort, experience, and willingness to relate to the other as someone to be known rather than a stranger to be feared, dominated, or denied.^[9] Diversity is a reason for encounter. We were made diverse so that we may actively engage in mutual recognition across divisions of tribe and race.

This verse can be read as a definitive rejection of any kind of ethnic supremacy. The creation of diverse nations makes possible the universal experience of encounter with those who differ greatly in culture, yet share the same fundamental humanity. Making the criterion of measure taqwā ensures that material circumstance plays no part in the eventual eschatological success of moral actors.

— Ramon Harvey about 49:13, 2018.^[10]

Denying affinity is self-alienation

If you deny any affinity with another person or kind of person, if you declare it to be wholly different from yourself— as men have done to women, and class has done to class, and nation has done to nation— you may hate it or deify it; but in either case you have denied its spiritual equality and its human reality. You have made it into a thing, to which the only possible relationship is a power relationship. And thus you have fatally impoverished your own reality. You have, in fact, alienated yourself.

— Ursula K. Le Guin, 1979.^[11]

Say that is me

Someone once told me she had interviewed an elderly Palestinian woman during the second intifada as part of an oral history project about Palestinians in the diaspora. This particular woman, she said, pointed at another woman wailing in distress on the television screen in her living room in London and cried: “That’s me! That’s me!” I found this story quite moving. Then I was told the woman’s name, and learned that it was my own grandmother. I suddenly laughed, because my grandmother is very dramatic. Reflecting on this now, however, I find myself moved once more. What a pure relation, to see herself in the woman on the television, to experience the distance between them not as numbing but as another component of her pain. The present onslaught leaves no space for mourning, since mourning requires an afterward, but only for repeated shock and the ebb and flow of grief. We who are not there, witnessing from afar, in what ways are we mutilating ourselves when we dissociate to cope? To remain human at this juncture is to remain in agony. Let us remain there: it is the more honest place from which to speak. [...] Do not give in. Be like the Palestinians in Gaza. Look them in the face. Say: that’s me!

— Isabella Hammad, 2024.^[3:1]

My child, my mother, my father

Every bombed village is my hometown
Nikita Gill, 2024^[12]

"Every bombed village is my hometown." - James Baldwin

And every dead child is my child.
Every grieving mother is my mother.
Every crying father is my father.
Every home turned to rubble
is the home I grew up in.
Every brother carrying the remains
of his brother across borders
is my brother.
Every sister waiting for a sister
who will never come home
is my sister.

Every one of these people are ours,
just like we are theirs.
We belong to them
and they belong to us.

More foraging

More narrative resources gathered in this context here: are.na/liy/recognising-the-stranger