We went to look at puppies because I was heartbroken. Summer 2020, my sense of time was off because my days were blending together. It felt like time was moving too quickly but also not moving at all. Without teaching and leaving the house for the gym or the supermarket to mark my days, everything felt the same. There was COVID, yes, and the separation anxiety of social distancing. But it, my sadness and brokenheartedness, was much more intimate for me: I was experiencing something like a breakup.
Sleepless nights, prayerful nights, sweaty nights, overwhelming nights. No rest or too much sleep, I was fatigued in body, in mind, in spirit. My emotions felt distant and dissociated but also nearer and more in and on and through me than I’d known before. And lots of tears too.
Queer people, if you ever listen to and are in relation with us, can tell you a lot about how grief feels. How you have too many words and not enough, how harrowing and emptying it all feels. And not just the grief from death. Having to mourn the silence of another, the unkindness of another, is a real separation too, a kind of death of possibility. This isn’t just the grief for the departed and dead. It is a grief for the living—a family member, a severed friendship, a flirtatious relation gone cold, a lover now gone. A grief because they still live and there is hope even when you do not want there to be hope, when you want the door closed and finalized and ended. The quality of this grief is different than that experienced through the death of a loved one. The ones that remain in this realm that we must grieve compel us to need to forget and pretend they are gone when there remains a stifled and ever so quiet hope for change.
But this isn’t a story about a breakup. It’s a story about a dog.
I remember it clearly. My pandemic pod—my friends, wife and husband—came to my house for dinner on the 25th. It was July and hot and we likely watched Greenleaf. We laughed and ate and it felt like a moment to breathe. They returned home and I sent my friend a text telling her that I was glad they came over, that I’d been crying the entire week, grieving the loss of possibility. She suggested we go to the Charlottesville ASPCA to look at puppies the next day, told me to fill out the paperwork to foster a dog. I did it without much thought, there was no way I was going to take a dog home.
July 26th we went. I thought we’d be looking at newborns and I could hold them for a couple of minutes, get an endorphin rush, smile, and give the puppies back to the workers. Instead, they brought dogs that were a bit older, and larger, than I was imagining. We walked a couple of dogs around.
I’ll only take one with me if it sits next to me and doesn’t say anything for 45 minutes. An impossible task, I thought. There was no way I was taking a dog home anyway.
The folks brought a white pit bull terrier mix, with brown spots, named Speckle. We walked for a bit and I sat down, tired, ready to go. My friend was walking another dog. 45 minutes passed without my noticing, Speckle next to me sitting quietly. Someone brought me the papers to sign, take her with you, they said. Protest though I did, she was in my car a bit later.
Me and Speckle—who I renamed Speckles because I’m black and we add s’s to everything—have been together, quite literally, ever since.
Dogs have been on my mind a lot since October 8th. And cats too. The atrocities being rained down on Palestinians makes me feel so much grief. I began following an Instagram account—Sulala Animal Rescue (@sulalaanimalrescue), described as “the only organization in the Gaza strip that rescues stray animals,” and it follows Saeed Al-Err, an Afro-Palestinian man that provides food and medical care to animals—particularly but not only dogs and cats. Their work has increased exponentially after the violence that began on the Gaza strip on October 8.
I go to the page and see so many animals with shrapnel, broken limbs, gouged out eyes. And even in their different and varied injuries, all of these animals, these pets, hungry, all of them with frames thinning and frail, animals looking for food because they have not been cared for. Perhaps deceased, their human companions, or at least separated, confused, unable to find them. Before my encountering Speckles I would have thought about these stray animals on the street seeking solace as sad, certainly, but not something to concern one’s thinking and emotions with. Not when there are bigger things to worry about like the people.
I was the person that would proudly say I don’t understand why people cook for their pets and Why do they give them sweaters. And I would question any real display of affection between animals and people. We are the top of the food chain and all that, so I thought. But being in relation with a pet does something to you.
She is annoying, she snores a lot, she eats expensive food because she has a weak stomach. After she came home with me and my heartbreak did not subside and I cried multiple times at the edge of the bed, she just stared at me. Her incurious nature at my tears actually made me laugh then. Still does now. Because I had been taught that dogs are empathetic, and they care and they cuddle with you when you are feeling terrible. Speckles just looked at me from a bit of a distance, stayed a little bit removed from me because I think she was confused.
I imagine what she would do in a moment of protracted crisis like the animals Saeed Al-Err cares for. Like them, I know she would be confused. And like them, I know there is no explanation that for their confusion, though cataclysm is surely being registered and felt in their central nervous systems. Mine is a very nervous and easy to startle dog. It is not an overstatement to say that she becomes afraid at the sight of her own shadow. I often laugh at her because as we are on our morning walk in the park, she will see her tail get startled and try to run in the opposite direction.
**
But she is not innocent. Innocence is a concept some use to assert pets, animals, olive trees, dirt, shouldn’t have to experience or endure the violence of settler colonialism. And on the surface, it makes sense—innocence because it implies a lack of blame, a lack of acting or behaving criminally. Speckles staring at me is funny because she lacks a kind of knowledge to act maliciously. This is true. It would be true for the pets in Palestine experiencing cataclysm and crisis and settler colonial violence too—the lack of knowledge to act maliciously, the lack of blame, the inability to be criminal. They are confused, and after confusion, hungry.
Sulala Animal Rescue, Speckles too, make so very real to me the urgent need to think through different epistemologies regarding how we treat one another, our animal friends, and the earth.
I’ve been thinking more about the limits of the concept of innocence when applied to pets, animals, olive trees, dirt…and people too. Because the very conceptual domain of innocence and guilt is deeply flawed. Innocence is primarily about moral claims that presume punishment and property.
Some would claim that no Gazan, no Palestinian, is innocent, that they are all on their way to becoming terrorist. This is reasoning at least some do not lament the deaths of children, framed as “collateral damage,” precisely because they—according to this logic—lack the very capacity to be innocent. These folks wield innocence as a weapon precisely to withhold it. They are the measure and metric by which the concept can be given and withheld. With their concept of innocence, their affective orientation to the world is privileged and centered, and they then are allowed to justify targeting those they decide are enemies and carry shame and are guilt embodied by virtue of their breath, their existence. And this is the problem.
As an abolitionist, I think about harm a lot. Innocence is not a measure for how harm happens, and it is not a reason to provoke or condone It either. Abolitionists believe no one should have to endure harm. We believe we can build worlds in which everyone’s life and breath can thrive and flourish. An abolitionist commitment compels us to interrogate the epistemology of the normative world, the world that allows settler colonialist violence to occur.
In this peculiar epistemology of innocence and guilt, grief and mourning for the victims of genocide are turned against us, our grief and attempts to mourn transformed into antisemitism. And this, we are told, because Gazans, Palestinians, Muslims, and their earth and dirt and ground and water and trees and fruit and pets are not innocent. We are supposed to pretend the loss of life in Gaza, the targeting of hospitals and schools and zoos and children and women and men and grandmothers and granddaughters and cousins and dogs and cats and horses and poets and journalists and the laughter the emerges from the delight of having an animal companion or imaginary friend is inconsequential.
**
As a young person growing up in the Blackpentecostal religious world, there was so much loss. But there was not the expression of grief, not the sharing of mourning. If we expressed or shared it, we were rendered guilty of sin and shame too.
HIV was being contracted and the AIDS virus was manifesting itself in so many folks that were an integral part of the church communities of my young life. Musicians, singer, choir directors, ushers, drummers, preachers, pastors, laypeople were contracting the virus and dying of complications related to it. There was so much unkindness, especially for the queer folks, or the people presumed to be queer. The vitriol was levied at and reserved mostly for the ones writing the music, directing the choirs, singing and playing instruments. It was heartbreaking to experience so much loss. But I was nine and ten and eleven years old when I began to notice the disappearances and began to really pay attention to the rumors and gossip floating all around and about me, the whispered conversations about these ghosts. I dared not ask questions about them because in such asking my affinity and similarity to them would be revealed.
There was an existential crisis happening, but we lacked the fortitude to confront it. And I began to wonder, and it is the basis for everything I teach and write and my artistic practice too—how does an entire people get rendered disposable? What is necessary to think and feel and sometimes explicitly state in sermons and songs too, that it does not matter that uncles, sons, cousins, brothers, nephews die—oftentimes alone, oftentimes without homegoing ceremonies that honor their lives? What does it mean to lose so many lives and not be able to bury your dead in the traditional ceremonies?
Musicians in black churches—the ways their lives were rendered expendable, the ways they became lives so many of us refused to grieve—prompt my questions. But I make connections with other communities and spiritual practices and stateless peoples too. What do we make of the dead still under rubble in Gaza, unable to be washed and wrapped and given the appropriate traditional ceremony according to the sacred life worlds and traditions? We should be heartbroken.
I watched a TikTok video of an Israeli citizen saying she looks forward to the destruction of Gaza so that the state can build a Sephora, a Disneyland, a Starbucks on the occupied land. There is something so menacing and unkind about such a declaration of desire for things to consume after being made available through vengeance, through violation of international law, through unfettered violence. I do not presume that every Israeli citizen wants a Sephora or Disneyland or a Starbucks. But I do know that after October 7, economists have declared that there has been an intense downturn in traveling leisure spending especially with regards to gathering in public: “Spending on leisure and entertainment crashed by 70%. Tourism, a mainstay of the Israeli economy, has come to an abrupt halt.”
Even so, some have made it to theaters to watch, and celebrate with Israeli flags, the releases of Taylor Swift’s “The Eras Tour” and Beyoncé’s “Renaissance” films. These films being shown there are being used in the service of encouraging and strengthening the ideology of displacement of Palestinians. With direct distribution deals with AMC, they both profit from the genocide. Their silence, then, is more than complicity.
Architecture and construction firms are envisioning what Gaza could look like after the violence—beach front property, leisure. And as someone that loves section drawings and digital renderings as an artistic practice, for me this is the transformation of art into a menacing practice of ongoing settler violence.
That hoped for destruction of land and displacement of people for a coffee chain and a visit to the movies simply means that consumerism has taken the place of spiritual fulfillment. They sing in theaters because it gives a moment to refuse to think about the violence being inflicted 40 miles away.
So much destruction of land, of earth of soil, of people, of pets, of laughter, of love, of language. Family lines decimated and all delivered to us on smartphones. Heartache. Harrowing and emptying mourning and grief. Words fail.
And but also, I keep thinking about the dogs, the cats.
The folks like Sulala Animal Rescue, like the kids, demonstrate another form, a different epistemology, for living. And they give me hope. Hope—not a disregard for the loss of life, or an attempt to redeem it because it cannot be redeemed but a social practice of endurance and encouragement. And in enduring, the invitation others to the cause of justice, to remember there is so much worth fighting for—like our breath, like our rest.
**
Speckles snores when she sleeps. A lot. I sometimes wonder if there is a cpap machine for dogs because she snores so loudly she wakes me up. Her snoring reminds me, too, of how comfortable she is with me. She had lots of nightmares when we first met and her sleeping was very anxiety-ridden. Now she just makes loud inhalation and exhalation noises and I say her name loudly to get her to stop. It works most of the time. Her loud snoring reminds me of the beauty and necessity and fragility of breath, and rest. I am undone daily at the lack of care and concern, the refusal to tend to and be incited to rage regarding the breath and rest of Palestinians, their trees and water, their air and soil, their pets and animals, their imaginations and songs, their poets and plays, their hospitals and homes.
I think about the kids, the adults, the human companions, that miss their pets—their snores, their chasing of their tails, the tales they can tell about the delight and joy and love brought to them by feeding them, caring for and tending to them. I think about the heartache of losing someone that cannot articulate their own confusion but still register it. There is sadness. There are tears.
As bombs burst in the air, a Palestinian boy holds a cat gently. As a mosque is raided and a hospital destroyed, a group of Palestinian girls feeds a stray dog. Finding innocence in dogs and olive trees isn’t the solution to the problem of thought. They tell us to remember them, to continue to fight for them. To hope with them. And this hope, my friend Mariame Kaba teaches me over and over again, is a discipline. And I have hope that a world otherwise is being constructed each and every now moment and that we can join in the struggle.