‘It’s burning, siblings, it’s burning! Oh, our poor little town burns!
Furious winds blow, breaking, burning and scattering, destroying and dispersing everything. All around, all is burning.
And you stand around, with folded arms, oh you stand and watch, while our town burns.’
It is 1938 in one calendar, 5698 in another. Yiddish songwriter Mordechai Gebirtig, of blessed memory, writes these lines about pogroms in Brest and Przytyk. As war unravels in Europe, his song - Es brent - ripples across the continent. Imprisoned partisans whistle it as code. Just a few years later, Gebirtig would be shot in the Krakow ghetto during the systematic pogrom of the Khurbn.
The word pogrom emerges from the Russian word ‘grom’, thunder. Yet a pogrom isn’t just a noun or an event; it’s also a motion, an active verb. Pogrom (v) : to thunder, to bring a thunderous devastation.
For so long, those haunted by colonial violence have asked: what can be done before such senseless rage in motion? What disarms arson? What is counter-thunder? Which amulets, rituals, resistances, emigrations are called for? In what shape does spirituality become a shield?
Simon Rawidowicz insists that the core of spirituality is home. Grace Zhou writes of home as a ‘verb of motion’. Can a spiritual home - our actions to anchor and adorn the architecture of our belonging - withstand thunder?
Springtime, 2024. I walk the hills that circle Barcelona. Restless birds, parched leaves, bitter swirls of dust whisper the thirst of drought. Over the last months, river levels in this corner of the world have dropped to record lows. States of emergency have been declared.
After weeks without rain, soaked clouds finaly start sweeping in from the Mediterranean, gathering over the city. For days they hover, rehearsing their release, briefly making obvious the ‘flying rivers’ of the sky.
Then one afternoon, a crack of thunder rolls through the valley. The sky opens and drenches the mountains. I think of the rivers of this land, breathing less fearfully, if only for a rain.
The philosopher Ailton Krenak’s words come to mind: ‘Rivers, those beings that always inhabited the world in different forms, are those that suggest to me that if there is a future to be considered, it is ancestral, because it was already here.’
The sage Menachem Mendel of Kotsk asks: why do ancestral texts emphasise a doubled commitment to justice especially in the cases of orphans or widows? The rabbi sketches a compelling answer: an injustice committed against someone who has already traversed thick trauma ‘raises in their hearts the special suffering of their orphaned state or widowhood’ (Itturei Torah, 3). In other words, wounding someone who is wounded is a doubled wound: one fresh, one reopened. Such a profound and plural injury, immediately brings perpetrators into responsibility for an ecology of wounds. To dispossess a refugee, to bomb an orphan, to haunt a haunted people, is to shake the pain of generations.
The Palestinian-Armenian scholar Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian, mapping the brutal impacts of occupation on children, offers the concept of ‘unchilding’: ‘eviction from the realm of childhood itself’.
The news bulletins, the speakers at the tail of a march, list the latest tolls: 14,000 children. 14,000 unchilded children.
Pause. A pause is the place where we remember, says Resmaa Menakem. Remember, the future is ancestral, Krenak reminds. ‘Memory (the deliberate act of remembering) is a form of willed creation’, teaches Toni Morrison.
The health of our memory mirrors the health of our hope. As Rav Joey Rosenfeld suggests, hope is ‘our ability as human beings to be free from the stuckness of time.’
In the sticky despair of our present - marked by genocides, fires, disparities - how do we remember our way towards more liveable futures?
Scholar Michael Rothberg invokes our capacity for ‘multidirectional memory’. Rather than competitive memory, which sees remembering as part of a ‘zero-sum struggle over scarce resources’ and attention, multidirectional memory invites us to remember together, to look back at the interrelated ecologies of the past.
Multidirectional memory nurtures our capacity for multidirectional love. It is this disposition which allowed groups such as the Bund in the Warsaw Ghetto to organise urgent communal resistance and enact solidarity towards other peoples, all while enduring the vicious conditions of genocide. To illustrate this, here’s one example of a cable Bundist organisers sent to UK Prime Minister Winston Churchill from the ghetto, as documented and recovered by Molly Crabapple: ‘Underground Jewish Labor Movement Poland in Tragic Days of Annihilation of Entire Jewish Population by German Conquerors Considers It Her Sacred Duty to Share Request of Freedom Loving Elements Throughout the World to Release Mohandas Gandhi Most Prominent Leader of People of India Who Are Striving to Liberate Their Country.’
A ‘sacred duty’ to share the requests, the questions, the liberations of others. In this multidirectional gaze, one cannot understand 1943 without co-imagining South Asia and Eastern Europe, without co-contemplating the Bengal famine and the Shoah.
Multidirectional memory allows for multiple places and pasts to teach other. The Khurbn and the Nakba can finally speak across their imposed confrontation, as in Palestinian scholar Dana El Kurd’s tremendous essay ‘Memory Voids and Role Reversals’. Visting Germany, El Kurd reflects: ‘Berlin, and the fate of its Jewish population, has always weighed on my mind as a Palestinian. The atrocities of European antisemitism had overturned the world, ours included.’
A memory infused with generosity and curiosity allows us to braid narratives in clarifying and empowering ways. Take 1948 for example. The year of the formal installation of apartheid in South Africa, the year of Plan Dalet and the Nakba in Palestine, and the year when legendary Jewish artist and cultural leader Solomon Mikhoels was murdered in the Soviet Union, initiating the violent purge of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee. One year: a multidirectional extinguishing of possibilities.
Days, evenings pass. A phrase from Toni Cade Bambara returns: ‘The sky is lit by tomorrow’s memory lamp.’ Against my stubborn prayers, from Ukraine to Sudan, our warring and warming world continues spiralling.
How can we remember our way forwards? Birdsong, poets and elders offer coordinates. Diane Seuss warns: ‘The danger of memory is going to it for respite. Respite risks entrapment…What can memory be in these terrible times? Only instruction. Not a dwelling.’
Khadija Saye reflects: ‘We exist in the marriage of physical and spiritual remembrance. It is in these spaces that we identify with our physical and imagined bodies.’
Deena Metzger, healer and author of the acutely-titled ‘Personal Disarmament: Negotiating With the Inner Government’, apprises: ‘We can not separate how we govern from who we are, nor who we are from how we govern. We are a reflection of the State, but the State is also a reflection of us. The divide we hope exists, against which we build a Wall, has no validity. The moral harm that we and war are creating has no bounds. There is no future if we continue in this way.’
The great late quilombolist philosopher Nego Bispo teaches: ‘Ancestrality isn’t death. Ancestrality is alive, it is the present, it is now. Ancestrality is a trajectory.’
Ailton Krenak echoes: ‘we are a continuum of memory we receive from our ancestors’. A memory that is radically alive, a swelling river fathomed in its fluid force, can help nourish our fluid imaginations.
The Palestinian sociologist Mohammed Bamyeh draws on the fervent waters of memory to remind us that ‘new realities have often been produced by those determined to ignore the existing reality…Successful revolutionary movements throughout the twentieth-century were often formed and led by personalities lacking interest in “realism,” which they understood to entail working within the script of a dreadful status quo.'
Whether it be the political Zionist project of a Jewish nation-state, or multiple waves of grassroots Palestinian resistance, all these historical movements were largely ‘unrealistic’. It is this world-changing unrealism that may inspire us in this hope-starved moment.
In that spirit, Bamyeh spells out the seemingly quixotic idea of the ‘no-state solution’. This solution as Bamyeh writes, ‘may seem to be out of reach, even inconceivable. However, radical ideas tend to gain resonance when “realistic” approaches reveal themselves to be phantoms, which was already the case even before the current war. “Realism,” meaning operating within the limits of the apparently possible, has in this case repeatedly led to a dead end. The no-state idea, therefore, confronts the closed horizon of both: an intolerable, genocidal reality; and the incapacity of traditional “realism” to lead anywhere other than to the same impenetrable wall.'
One of the most storied pogroms in Jewish history is the 1903 Kishinev pogrom. It is most prominently remembered through Hayyim Nahman Bialik’s poem ‘B’ir Haharegah’ (‘In the City of Slaughter). Bialik’s thundering lyricism would help shape what would emerge as a compelling narrative of weak and emasculated Jews, unable to stand up for themselves, heading like sheep into relentless acts of slaughter. Such a severe diagnosis needed an equivalent prognosis: a reforged identity, strong, militarised, powerful, state-forming.
But suppressed memories tell a very a different story of Kishinev: there was major resistance there, as there was across the long history of Jewish persecution. In the often-ignored oral histories of the Khurbn (Holocaust), what is abundant is ‘the banality of heroism’, to borrow Samuel Tchorek-Benthall phrasing.
Memory is an ecology and its protection is a collective affair. The Jewish social historian Emmanuel Ringelblum, in the abyss of the Warsaw Ghetto, organised a diverse assembly of activists who encouraged and organised Jews to document their stories before their disappearance.
At the time, he reflected to a friend: “I do not see our work as a separate project, as something that includes only Jews, that is only about Jews and that will interest only Jews. My whole being rebels against that. Given the daunting complexity of social processes, where everything is interdependent, it would make no sense to see ourselves in isolation. Jewish suffering and Jewish liberation and redemption are part and parcel of the general calamity and the universal drive to throw off the hated Nazi yoke. We have to regard ourselves as participants in a universal attempt to construct a solid structure of objective documentation that will work for the good of mankind. Let us hope that the bricks and cement of our experience and our understanding will be able to provide a foundation.”
From Palestine to the planetary scale, we are confronted - to paraphrase Noam Schuster Eliassi - with ‘those who build settlements rather than a future.’ I wish I knew how to radically shift global balances of power, how to respond adequately to the haunting suffering of so many, how to upend horrifying trajectories of immiseration, how to redirect torrents of dehumanisation.
Among the few clarities I carry is that there can be no transformation without memory. Many of us live, as Davi Kopenawa Yanomami outlines, in a ‘culture of commodity’. One that smirks at notions of ancestrality, and rushes headlong towards the future, accumulating, polluting and forgetting along the way.
In a recent talk, when asked for a reading recommendation around the theme of memory, Ailton Krenak instead suggested a practice. I paraphrase his response below:
‘Experiment being in the sun. Find a pleasant place where you feel the sun is generous, the earth is generous. A clearing, a park, a forest, a quintal. Forget yourself and let the memory of the Earth speak with you. It’s the most radical experience of memory that you can experience.
And after such a ritual, such a rite of putting your body on the body of Mother Earth, then you can come back to many other conversations to memory.’
‘Who will remain? What will remain? There will remain a wind.’
- Avrom Sutzkever