Post #9

On Hysterics and Catasrophes

Part 2

Go back to part 1 here.

In October, over lunch in Portland, Erin Boberg and I discussed our love of divas. The Jessye Normans and the Kathleen Battles (and for that matter, the Angel Bat Dawids, a composer for FORCE!) who stand in front of a room of hundreds to thousands and give what anywhere else would be called “hysterics,” but in this case is called “arias,” and own the entire fucking world of that theater. That that is maybe why I made an opera – so that I and my folks could get on stage and go hysterical and own the whole fucking world and have that whole world say, “Bravo. Encore.” As in: so good we had to do it twice. As in the words of Darwish: “a pair of human eyes, for a shared silence or reciprocal talk.”

Because we have a right to our hysterics – derived from the Greek for uterus. Our bodies. Our interior as uncontrollable feeling. The incredibly horrible universality of it all. The truth is, Norman (rest in power) and Battle did not and do not live on stage. They just worked there. And a diva like one of them off-stage is just a black woman and almost no one is saying “Encore” to a black woman for anything, let alone her feelings. What is it to have an interior – a self – if it is not to be a feeling thing? Off the stage, who was there to meet Norman’s eyes with their own?

We can say unequivocally: these feelings, for us, they are without end. And don’t they feel so rooted, so true? “Dark, ancient, and deep… Beautiful and tough as chestnut,” to quote dear Mama Audre Lorde, where we find that “living [is] a situation to be experienced and interacted with.” And this is why when we are in architectures of containment – whether they be prisons or bantustans or universities or occupied territories – we immediately sense our awareness of that dark place diminish. If power can control what we feel, how and when we feel it, power controls our self, the part of us that lives through experience. No matter our domicile, these parts – dark, ancient, and deep – always revive themselves in our memories. When we forget to tend to these parts, they haunt us.

What we are witnessing right now in the western world’s response to Israel’s decimation of Palestine: This is a catastrophe of feeling. For months I have heard from friends and acquaintances that the massacre is “too complicated for me to speak on,” and I wonder if that refusal to speak truth to feeling is rooted in a desire to not know – a plea to forget as soon as possible. Though not as quickly as we forgot Sheikh Jarrah, the March of Return massacres, or Israel’s wars on Gaza in 2014, 2012, or 2008. And yet. The dream of the Nakba is that one day the world forgets Palestinians existed. The dream, moreover, is the death of the diva, the dark and deep part as hysterical as a mother’s screams in Shatila. The dream of the Nakba is that one day “It’s too complicated” becomes “How would I know?” To forget the screams is to one day never know they existed at all.