To Marina Vishmidt, after Sean Bonney

The dead. They have a plan. And their plan is simple. It is called Sumoud صمود. To stand fast and start all over again. The dead. They direct us to the open graves, desecrated by bulldozers. A severed hand. A mutilated tongue. A stained truth, beside a suitcase of books. The dead. They are hungry, and they have a plan. Their plan is to summon us to the soil. Where they are not buried anymore. And insist that we stand fast and start from there, all over again. Haven’t written to you for a while. But you crossed my mind today. My earache made me think of you. It is a pain that has worsened since the genocide in Gaza غزة began. Basically, my ear’s anvil has decided to reject every sound it receives, and harken instead to what is buried inside. For there are infrasonic signals around me everywhere I go. In the U-Bahn announcements, in my upstairs neighbour’s creaking floorboard, and in the cold abstract conversations with German leftists. In the silence carved out from hours of talks, while acrobatically avoiding the word Palestine. Sometimes my anvil suspends everything that hits my eardrum; other times it runs madly like an emergency alarm, or like a paramedic in Khan Younis frantically searching for the missing. It is painful, but it has made me realize that what is buried deep in everything I hear are not whispers of some ghosts, but the “unvoiced longing toward a truer world.” This is the longing that W.E.B. Du Bois heard in Sorrow Songs, echoing through melodies passed down from the enslaved ancestors. To speak to the dead means to undo the function of my ear such that the tiniest bones in my body can transmit this “unvoiced longing.” Everything meaningful I can think of about the word solidarity resides in this longing. An untimely solidarity that endures and gradually intensifies counter to capital time, and to capital geography. Is this earache familiar to you? Anyway, to speak any other language than the language of the dead today is to participate in the ongoing crime. The dead. The unburied dead. They can never be annihilated, even though our enemy continues to be victorious. Their language is that of the tiniest imperishable life forms, persistently sending signals, from beneath the earth. How is your progress with learning? Mine is pretty bumpy. I learned a new word recently though. It is called AR-CHI-TEC-TURE. When Iman Mersal had to give a lecture in English for the first time, she thought of a trick like any migrant would. Migrants learn to become tricksters. Their tricks subvert the humiliation of being forced to speak a language that continuously infantilizes them. Mersal’s trick was to write down the difficult English words in Arabic script, so as to visualize them in the reassuring shape of a familiar language. The most difficult one was the word architecture. So, she wrote it down with: Alef ألف, Ra راء, Kaf كاف, Ya ياء, Ta تاء, Kaf كاف, Ta تاء, Shin شين, Ra راء. At the critical moment, she tripped over the word. What happened then, she writes, was that “A mosque, an Omayyad mosque, specifically, seemed to be collapsing somewhere, the sound of its broken glass windows issuing on the thread of my voice.” I keep thinking about the sound of destruction buried in the word AR-CHI-TEC-TURE, which no one seems to hear. I keep thinking about the Arabic letters that hide in the English word, which no one seems to see, except for the dying angels around her in that lecture hall. AR-CHI-TEC-TURE, the way it broke in Mersal’s voice, is the word I learned. It is not exactly a word but a heap of rubble. Yet it captures eloquently the colonial violence in four broken syllables. I mean, the violence of an empire turning a deaf ear to the jarring destruction, busy building its ruinous towers all the while. I wish, when made to speak English, my voice, much like Mersal’s, would always break with the sound of the shattered glass of homes in Deir al-Balah دير البلح and Tall al-Hawa تل الهوى. In your last letter you wrote that the language of the dead is devoid of words, yet it can be heard when our words crack open under the dead weight they carry. Isn’t the “unvoiced longing” literally this dead weight you were talking about? The true substance of history? Deep inside any modernity lies buried a crime, a mass of decimated lives, their longing toward a truer world still pushing and pushing through language. I am keeping the red stain on my face, and I spin in half circles to the messy rhythm in my ear. The dead. They sing with severed tongues. And they have a plan. To bring us back. To the land. Despite their murderers. Do you remember the stone I wrote you about? I woke up this morning and I found it again in my palm. I felt its smooth surface and I knew this time that it was not a relic of my childhood, when I was smashing windows with my angry friends, but another childhood, now buried beneath the rubble of Gaza غزة, coiled into itself. I say I woke up, but actually I didn’t sleep for five days. There is a line by Etel Adnan that says: “to live by night is to live by ear, and the eye will follow.” I find it a very helpful line in this endless night. For what makes the night is not the absence of light, but the mass of destroyed lives, heaps of rubble and unrealized longings. These nocturnal beings linger and persist. They insist on their belonging to this world, and continue to exert their demands upon it. Day and night. It is thus time to start living by ear, and listen to their unvoiced longings. It is time to un-witness the fascist crime, committed in the brightest hour of every day. The bright light has simply become a white supremacist. Its sole purpose is to safeguard border control, or the gates of settlements. Prisoners confined to minuscule cells, and subjected to the relentless glare of 500-watt fluorescent bulbs, know how dead and dark light can be. My friends are dead. And they have a simple plan. But simple is not easy. It is not easy to mourn the cities. It is not easy to go into hiding. Instead of accounting for the criminal light that everyone sees, it is easier, rather, to wait for the end of the world. But that is not the plan. The plan is to start from the darkness, underneath the soil. Deep in the open wounds, there is something awaiting us: tiny germs that will immunize us against complicity. For Sumoud صمود isn’t a steadfastness that maintains the status quo, but a stubborn glitch in it. Sumoud صمود is actually to become a stone on expropriated land. I imagine that stones were once eyes, who had silently and fiercely kept track of history since time immemorial. And because they never blinked, they became petrified. A stone is a negation of everything the bourgeoisie calls Nature. The land we are summoned to is not nature. It is the sedimentation of struggles against naturalized violence. Sprouting from it are hardened stones that stick in the throats of those who use hunger as a weapon. I clenched my palm firmly and applied a magic trick I learned from my Cheikh شيخ. When I opened it again the stone had become a word. Its four letters shivered every time I touched them. The راء, the فاء, the عين, the تاء. I kept the consonants for myself, and carefully buried the vowels, which no one seems to see, in various corners of the city. Then I stood by in the dark, heart racing, waiting for the earth to tremble. I stood awaiting the roar of detonation that would shatter the eardrums of genocide apologists. I stood waiting for the “dead humanity drenched in salt and faced down on the shores of the Mediterranean,” as you wrote dear Refaat, to come back to life. But instead I heard a bulldozer. They are building a lot in the city these days, transforming parts of their financialized capital into empty houses. People like you and me can only work on their construction sites, but cannot set foot into the buildings once they are built. I wish I could describe to you properly the ear-splitting clamor of steel blades digging in the soil’s rocky crust. A monotonous, overstimulating pulse interrupted by short pauses in which the blades are cooled with water from a sprinkler hose. But it is not exactly the sound of the engine, nor the stabbing of the blades, that I would like to describe to you. What I would like to describe is what surplus value sounds like. If property could speak it would do so in this grammar: a long series of shocks maintained by an efficient cooling system that prevents insurrection and resurrection. It is an omnipresence that shields the earth and shocks the nerves, leaving no room for any signal approaching from the past or the future. Another form of AR-CHI-TEC-TURE. The land, the driver, the machine, the water, the subsoil, the topsoil and me, who cannot think about anything else right now, have all become mute, yet we are all enlisted in a monstrous sentence. Property speaks in a language that can eloquently replace financialized capital with settler colonial capital. Replace the cooling system with anti-riot cops. Replace the worker sitting in the cabinet with a soldier desecrating graves. Or can even, for that matter, replace both of them with the dead. Because all plans can be hijacked easily in the genocidal superstructure of this language. All plans. One thing I would like to ask you though: what might a truer world look like to you? I mean, sound like? Which truth is transmitted through the “unvoiced longing”? In the meantime, I will spin to the messy rhythm in my ear, and start all over again. I will rub the consonants against my flesh, and seed the vowels, hoping next time to hear the detonation. Will keep you posted.

* An early version of this text was read at “Politics of Listening” – an iteration of the public program at the Italian Pavilion during the 2024 Venice Biennale.

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Haytham el-Wardany is a writer and translator. He lives and works in Berlin. His latest book, Jackals and The Missing Letters (Al-Karma 2023), considers forgotten expressions of hope within Arabic fables, where animals speak and humans listen, in a moment of post “Arab Spring” speechlessness. In previous publications, including The Book of Sleep and How to Disappear, He has examined the potential of passivity, through regimes of listening and the dialectics of sleep and vigilance. He is the recipient of the Keith Haring Fellowship in Art and Activism 2022/2023.