Post #6

On Invitations, Endings, Openings

The other night I broke bread with a small collection of friends, colleagues, and comrades, and, at the invitation of our hosts, we discussed invitations. Trans-disciplinary, trans-generational, trans-temporal invitations of all kinds. A dear friend to the right of me brought up Derrida, who, admittedly, I haven’t thought about since grad school. But I do vaguely remember a general premise of Hospitality… that one can and perhaps even should invite in the Other, let the Other into one’s place, even at risk of losing one’s place, one’s time, the things that [one imagines] make one’s self. Hospitality as an invitation to lose one’s [imagined] self. At which point, the Other is no longer foreign, and we’re no longer talking about hospitality at all. Which, for Derrida, implies a contradiction: In order to host the foreigner, to offer asylum, the Other must consent to remaining forever foreign. In order to offer hospitality, the host must consent to giving up their home.

My friend beside me brought this up — the invitation of it all — and I thought of earlier in the day, when I walked with 15,000 Palestinians and their accomplices up Michigan Ave. Some boys had climbed on top of a bus station and, keffiyahs wrapped around their slender frames, shouted, “Ceasefire! Ceasefire!” Some marchers in front of us picked up the chant and, like a wave, it rolled through the crowd before becoming subsumed by “What do we want? Justice!” and shouts of war crimes. A friend marching alongside me turned to me and asked slyly, “When we say ceasefire, what do you think we mean?” She was asking: Do we mean CEASEFIRE in the humanitarian sense of a unilateral (or even multilateral) declaration of the cessation of military activity in the region? Or do we mean ceasefire, as in “stop the madness” and “can’t we all just get along”?

If we mean, “Israel: stop dropping bombs on Gaza, stop terrorizing and killing civilians in the West Bank,” then we must also surely mean, “United States: stop funding this war.” And what is this war, but the actions and reactions of a people embroiled in the violences of settler colonialism? Therefor, we must surely also mean, “Stop the settlements.” But the very notion of Israel is, itself, based on a settler colonial imperative of replacing an indigenous population with a previously non-existent Israeli state — so we must therefore surely mean, “Cease Israel.” Which would only require the U.S. ceasing its $4b annual aid to the country. But in that case we would be demanding the United States abandon its strongest ally in the region, its insurance policy in the Levant. “Ceasefire” — in this first instance of the term — would be a demand for something much greater than the cessation of military activity. It would be an invitation to undo the United States’ iron grip on the region. Which would, undoubtedly, mean undoing the United States as we understand it today: as the global superpower.

But there’s more. If ceasefire means “Stop settler colonialism,” then it also has to mean landback here in the U.S. as well. If that is what we mean by ceasefire, then we’re really talking about something, and we’re only getting started. Not just the end of the U.S. as global superpower, but the end of the U.S. If we mean the end of settler colonialism, we must mean the end of the U.S.

So there’s the invitation. Who is ready to lose their home? (Likely very few of us. James Baldwin, in his letter to his nephew, wrote “…as you will discover, people find it very difficult to act on what they know. To act is to be committed, and to be committed is to be in danger.”)

But this is not an invitation to chaos and anarchic racist violence, as Zionists argue can be the only result of a disempowered Israel. Ceasefire in this case — the case which I am making here, here being a hole in our reality, a hole where time stretches long enough for us to climb in and excavate before we return to the material non-theoretical world — is an invitation to other worlds. To let other worlds take up residence in our home, without asking its name or speaking its language, and to let “our” “self” become something else through this hospitality. Its utterance — CEASEFIRE — an invitation to imagine worlds without violence, without racial capitalism, without empires and colonialism, without the theft of land, without militarized puppet governments and open air prisons, without any prisons at all, without European/white supremacy. To let that imagining become us, until we are no longer merely imagining.

Do I sound polyannaish, like a child? But we marched with children this weekend, and their voices were the clearest. We marched with a nine year old who led us in a chant: “Stop! Occupying! EVERYTHING!” I trust that chant; the demand couldn’t be clearer. What if we mean not just the cessation of the occupation of Palestine, but the cessation of the occupation of EVERYTHING? What if our charge to ceasefire were an invitation — a calling-in — to reimagine our world? Not ceasefire as in “stop” but CEASEFIRE as in “what if” — and really mean it?