Write a little spider web

on watching the Global Sumud Flotilla

At the time I start writing this on the morning of October 2, more than 500 unarmed civilians have been sailing across the Mediterranean Sea for over a month now, carrying food, medicine, and baby formula, bound for Gaza where Israel has been committing genocide for nearly two years.

These activists are unarmed. They are from countries all over the world. They are aid workers and media workers and all kinds of people who left families and jobs and pets and friends and fridges full of fresh food to spend weeks at sea, trying to reach a place and a people they mostly don’t know, because they so badly want to help. They carry aid and heartbreak; horror and fierce determination; skills that could save lives, if only they could reach them. You can hear it all in their voices—the hope and the fear—in the videos now being released following Israel’s illegal interception of several boats. Some boats continue making their way towards Gaza. Despite the risk, they refuse to stop. By the time I hit publish, it is likely most of the boats that make up the Global Sumud Flotilla will be intercepted, and most if not all of those humanitarians detained.

I am floored by the bravery of these individuals. And in the early hours of this day, I feel a little lost at sea.

So many of us are looking for our role to play in speaking truth to power right now, at a time when the powerful are causing indescribable destruction and pain—all of it built on lies. As a writer who relies on stringing words together to find meaning and also to feed my family, it is disorienting when words fail me. When certain people tell us that something we know to be true is false, it’s paralyzing. What can we possibly tap into a keyboard that matters, when truth is being tossed overboard? When humanitarians and peaceful protestors are labeled terrorists? When so many people are suffering and dying, with food and safety just out of reach?

Again and again, these flotilla missions have been intercepted by Israel. But people keep trying. They have yet to reach Gaza with aid, and to watch them get so close is gut wrenching. It is enraging that our leaders have forced them to try.

They have not reached Gaza. But they do reach people around the globe with a simple truth that lives in our bones: We are all connected, and this genocide has broken something in all of us.

I recently listened to that conversation between Ezra Klein and Ta-Nehisi Coates, and I have a lot of feelings about what transpired there. But this quote from Coates is what I’m clinging to.

“All I can go to is my role as a writer, and my role as a writer is to state things as clearly as I possibly can, to make them in such a way that they haunt, to state truths and to reinforce the animating notion of my politics — which is that all humanity is equal and is worthy of that.”

Not all of us can be on those boats. But as writers, all of us can keep writing the truth. Keep haunting the powerful with our truths. They might not tell us, but they hear it.

And whatever it is we’re writing, there is room to be a little more truthful. I think that even when the truth we’re tasked with feels insignificant next to everything we’re up against, it eventually adds up to something much bigger.

When my own words didn’t come to me this morning, I cracked open a book to sit with someone else’s. In Forest Euphoria: The Abounding Queerness of Nature, Patricia Ononiwu Kaishian asks us to imagine a spiderweb: “It’s invisible, except when the angle of the sun and the angle of your vision mutually agree upon the existence of a prism. Invisible, except for when dewdrops, strung like pearls, fish-eye your surroundings into an enlarged clarity. Invisible, except when your body, your senses, and your environment come together to tell you: Avoid this.”

Our intuition helps us “avoid this,” so that we don’t go crashing through the spider’s home. But it also helps us to step back and see their home, to see the intricate beauty of their work, spun while we were sleeping, stretched across seemingly unfathomable distances for such tiny creatures.

When I let the dog out at just the right time in the early morning, I catch the sun lighting up the spider webs in our backyard, a vast network of connected labor. One giant web.

Photo by Bianca: https://www.pexels.com/photo/cobweb-on-tree-branch-1722050/

And now I’m thinking about all of us looking for the words, weaving our little webs, only visible in the right light. Our individual webs might feel tiny, but together, our words are vast, crossing backyards and oceans. We can’t all try to reach Gaza in person. But we can say that 500+ people tried. They were unarmed and peaceful and determined to do something to ease the pain and suffering of Palestinians. They showed the world that while our governments keep trying to divide and dehumanize and obliterate hope, people won’t stop trying to reach each other. With our words, our boats, our little webs. We’ll keep weaving and writing and reaching for truth.

Upcoming Deadlines for Writers

Stanford’s Western Media Fellowships | Applications due October 6

NPF Rare Disease Reporting Fellowship and Grants | Applications due October 12

The McGraw Fellowship for Business Journalism | Applications due October 13

Writing x Writers Residencies | Applications due October 15

For a much longer list of upcoming deadlines, check out The Big List, which I update regularly.