Dear Nasrin,

In prose and verses, I began writing to you, grieving from the shoreside of Harling Point and Haro Strait on Vancouver Island, petrified about the impossibility of returning. Behind me sits a graveyard turned heritage site; the graves and I, all facing the waterway that brought my ancestors to this land from the other side of the Pacific. From the swamps of the provincial archives, I learned that in colonial regimes, the reality of displacement and dispossession has not disappeared, even in death: the bones and ashes in the cemetery initially migrated from another cemetery in Ross Bay, which uprooted Indigenous, Black, Mongolian, and Chinese graves to make room for more, mainly white, graves. The remains were dug up, with bones left in plain sight, unattended, with seasonal currents washing ashore, eroding parts of the cemetery, carrying the ashes and bones into the sea. To avoid continual desecration, the remaining Chinese bones were dug up from the Ross Bay Cemetery and transferred to the cemetery at Harling Point after 1909. The vacant site can still be seen today from Ross Bay.

Graves are channels to attend to our ancestors’ work, with vitalities and spiritual bonds that cross generational ties through rituals of mourning. Like angels of history that flap their wings, each grave, when well attended to, becomes a rearview mirror that carries the weight of history while we move forward. Beneath the rubble of coloniality, it seems that the lost graves only gain their spectre through a stroll among swamps of archives. The unending replicas of textual materials, photographs, and distributed film reels have become reminders of the impossible return of the lost graves, bones, ashes, rituals, and bonds that will forever be carried through the oceanic currents and seasonal winds, with nowhere to land… I can’t help but think of whether, in the enduring struggle to return, there can be alternative channels of mourning and strategies of relationality that emerge to contest the colonial regime’s perpetual impulse to choreograph our life cycles?

Each desecrated grave is a bond broken. Each desecrated body is a bond broken. The archive is cruel, an exhausting stroll, moving from one grave to another.

Eduardo Cadava describes photography, or in some ways, the nature of archives, as a mode of bereavement that speaks to us of mortification. He interprets the process of eternal return as a celestial graveyard, reflecting on the ways in which technological reproducibility had turned history into a mass-(re)produced event. The fragments of each circulated photograph are like stars and meteorites shot from the universe’s birth, as replicas of (the moment of) dying. Photographs and archives possess a certain cruelty that makes our sky a celestial cemetery that requires the eternal work of mourning. Every passing image disperses time and space in an infinite collision that sheds light on the impossible return of the passing, perpetuated through the replication of fidelitous documentation of loss:

The world of the eternal return is a world that incessantly fixes and returns to the event of a vanishing, and what vanishes in this return is not only the finite subject matter before the cosmic camera in which the world begins but the possibility of returning itself. A return without return…¹

I recently came across Taysir Batniji’s photobook Disruptions (2024), a collection of over 86 screenshots from 2015 to 2017 of WhatsApp video calls with his mother and family in Gaza. The screenshots are all disrupted signals that turn moments of intimacy into complete abstraction, with each heightened pixelation revealing the materiality of exile and the reality of occupation and genocide that seeps into the everyday. The work, at least for me, is also an invitation to reflect on our attachment to the fidelity of visual representation and the reliance on accurate portrayal of violence to garner solidarity in moments of conflict. The body of work is almost an active refusal of transparency, yet it speaks more about the precarity of occupation that rids kin. Aruna D’Souza, in her most recent book, Imperfect Solidarities, warns us about the destructiveness of empathy as passivity. To me, it is an uncanny danger that images of fidelity evoke, which turns us into passive voyeurs of violence until our need to understand and relate to others’ pain is satisfied.² In the media outlets, almost every image of Gaza, of the occupation and unfolding genocide, forms a fidelitous archive of death, a celestial graveyard that builds on the eternal return of displacement and dispossession. Batniji’s works require acts of activation and ask for attentiveness and reaching in for us to understand the context that perpetuates the abstraction of violence.

We live inside a celestial grave, One image atop another. Yet, we mourn, reflexively.

What is the texture of relation that we form as light, as stars? When we reinterpret the night sky as constellations of perpetual becoming, we begin to transform a celestial graveyard of reflexive mourning into a site where acts of grieving can activate something more. I think of meteors, the moments when stars burn before they return to from whence they came: the night, the dark, the binding texture of the night sky. It is a moment where the cosmic fire engulfs us in liberation, when the celestial forces can no longer suppress our vitality. It is a moment when destruction and resurrection collide, shining across the eternal sky. How can we not just bear witness to the fire but bear it? When we mourn the burning stars, who and what do we become? How do we witness the phantom traces of the cosmic fire and carry it within us?

I was walking across the King’s College Circle on the University of Toronto campus the other day, where the reverberations of the student encampments can still be seen and felt. I can still see the marks left by the OccupyUofT movement, the spectral afterlives that still mark, mow, and “burn” the lawn in parts where the grass almost refuses to grow. Maybe these are the phantom traces I am discussing, the marks left by our comrades, martyrs, and all those who are in active refusal in order to undo the oppressive and complicit regime of death, brutality, and violence that is built on the continuous logic of extraction and destruction that denies us of peace, even in our afterlife. Perhaps the traces of the passing are also traces of resurrections that launch us into imaginaries of another world in this world. Fred Moten’s words resonate with me deeply; perhaps they also resonate with those of us who still have faith, not in regimes of coloniality, but in each other:

I believe in the world and want to be in it. I want to be in it all the way to the end of it because I believe in another world in the world, and I want to be in that. And I plan to stay a believer, like Curtis Mayfield. But that’s beyond me, […] and out into the world, the other thing, the other world, the joyful noise of the scattered, scatted eschaton, the undercommon refual of the academy of misery.³

I wonder about the channels through which this fire can be passed on.

Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, in her book As We Have Always Done: Indigenous Freedom Through Radical Resistance, uses constellation as a concept of relation that grounds purposeful opacity as a form of fugitive intervention. These constellated relations, as Simpson calls them, invent a dimension where mobilization and movement weave interrelational webs of co-resistance.⁴ As creatures of light and people of stars, how can we learn from Nishnaabewin? I wonder, what relation can we form across the night sky, across darkness?

Nasrin, being your student has been a privilege, and what you have said stuck with me. You spoke of writing as a form of relational act. Perhaps in a way, letter writing, correspondence, and exchange through poetics are our own lingua franca in times of collective grievance, a gesture of reaching in without the burdens of disclosure. It is a form of relation-building that occupies the space in-between, and a form of active listening that binds the fabrics of the night sky that weave us together without the need to make ourselves in each other’s image. When we use opacity as a ground for building relation, I believe we begin to render a language untranslatable to the mind of the colonizer. Like what D’Souza writes, it formulates a generous space for communication through the thickets of mistranslation, and an alliance built not on empathy, but on imperfect understanding of each other’s desires, motivations, values, and struggles.⁵ It is a form of relationality through mobilization, about existing beside each other’s struggle. I return to the bones and ashes of my ancestors that became part of the Pacific currents. Their afterlives in the ocean teach me to mourn differently, to embody the oceanic as the texture that forms diasporic thought, to adapt exilic movement as channels of relationality, mistranslation shared as embodied struggle. Maybe these are gateways for us to depart from the logic of coloniality built on occupation, fixated on the contradiction of permanence and death. I don’t have answers to these questions yet, but perhaps these are spaces where we can begin to genuinely mourn and grieve, together…

As I write to you, I also must be aware of the margins we are given. It is never enough to express the love, struggles, and care we all share with each other, which may be precisely why these exchanges must be in constant motion through and with each other, as a form of ritual… There is always so little time, so little space to convene, yet so much more to be done.

With love,

Yantong

Dear Yantong,

Writing feels incredibly hard these days. I find myself without words, and yet, I’ve never been as busy with so many writing commissions. Somehow, I push through and arrive at a place that feels close to the ache and pain in my bones. As you know, those of us who come from a lineage of the dispossessed carry grief and longing for our land, no matter where we are or where we go. But since October 7th, I’ve been feeling something else— something for which no word exists yet. I believe there are many words we haven’t found because of what we’ve been made to witness. It’s beyond grief, beyond embodiment. It exists both within and outside of our bones. It reminds me of Ojibwe artist Andrea Carlson, who speaks of how “colonial tactics sever us from ourselves.”⁶ In a way, bearing witness to this violence forces us to distance ourselves from our bodies. My question is: how do we continually find our way back to stay centred, focused, and clear?

Before October 7th, I would have said that grief, for me, is generative. It shapes forms of life that include dreams, relationships, connectivity, solidarity, poetry, visions, and imaginings. To me, there is no life force more powerful than grief, because its depth in the body knows no bounds. Grief creates the conditions for transformation— for hope, for anger, for new languages, and utterances. Most importantly, grief generates an ethic of love. You’ve heard me say this before, in my introduction to the “dreamworlds”⁷ screening at Images: “How we mourn is how we love.” Grief connects us in profound ways to those who have passed and to our lands. Yet, since October 7th, I’m no longer certain of anything. My entire centre has been shaken. My deepest concern, as always, is with language: how will we come to understand the traumas emerging from this horror? What new words will be created for someone who found a fetus under the rubble? What dreams can come when the sound of drones is constant? As I write this, I think of Marcellus Williams, murdered by the US state. Before his death in prison, he witnessed the atrocities by Israel, writing and observing. In one of his poems, he expressed astonishment that the children of Palestine still smile: “and somehow you are able to smile / O resilient Children of Palestine!”⁸ Even amid this other horror—the horror of capital punishment—connections can still be forged: through prison walls, across borders, and through the same mechanisms of violence that seek to separate our bodies from ourselves, our bodies from our kin, and our bodies from our lands.

In our initial conversation about this exchange, you spoke to me of mourning and loss and their cycles of manifestation through ritual, resistance, and relation. Reading your letter now, I find myself freezing up at every sentence, taking a breath each time to sit with the stories of gravesites of ancestors denied proper burial, evoking to me the image of Palestinian gravesites dug up by Israeli soldiers, the tanks repeatedly rolling over and crushing bones. Even in the afterlife, the violence of erasure and unrest endure. Many of us understand this, but it is the learning of these stories—in detail, location, and context—that provides insight into the land as a carrier of histories and the untold stories that remain.

When I read your letter, I was reminded of Brandon Shimoda’s poetry reading at UC Berkeley in April.⁹ I wasn’t there, I watched it on my screen. He titled it Oranges, and said he’d never titled his readings before, which I thought was so moving. He began with the most beautiful line, an image I won’t ever forget: “I had a dream last night that a rainbow was burning.” He continued:

I had a dream last night that the war fit on the tip of a finger. I had a dream last night that a scream did not need a hill to gather speed to reach the people. I had a dream last night that a shrine burned down and was replaced with a shrine, identical but empty. Photographs of the dead grimacing from the walls, and the aura of a tree in the shape of smoke, keeping cool the dead, a perfect instrument.

For the reading, Shimoda altered the original poem, published in his recent book Hydra Medusa, to evoke the image and spirit of Refaat Alareer. As we listened, he spoke of Alareer, describing how he had sat “right there,” at that very desk, reading—reading many books, including The Autobiography of Malcolm X “three times.” We could feel his presence, imagine him, and sense that he is still with us. In this reading, Shimoda evoked many images, conjuring visions that flowed through the poem, now transformed for the present moment, continuing to mark and archive dreams. An instant took my breath away: “Do not situate, before the gaze of one particular stranger, the dead were not ‘gazing.’ They wanted it to be over, their reflection to be stronger, like a lunar sound materializing a hymn of thanksgiving to the missing.”

The transition from “they wanted it to be over” to “their reflection to be stronger” demonstrates the power of language in action, giving us an image of those who have passed as deeply resonant and enduring—an overwhelming force that had already decided “they wanted it to be over.” This shift moves us away from the colonial narrative, where death is often manipulated from the colonizer’s perspective: “Do not situate before the gaze of one particular stranger, the dead were not gazing.” Shimoda’s poetry, through his dreams, breaks open language, shattering the normalization of its use to deaden the story of those already dead. Here, they are instead given presence and life—life beyond death. Their bodies return to them, they return to their spirit, to the land, moon, and sky: “their reflection to be stronger, like a lunar sound materializing…”

When you write about Batniji’s work, saying it requires “acts of activation and ask for attentiveness and acts of reaching in for us to understand the context that perpetuates the abstraction of violence.” I think of this act of writing through and alongside dreams—of writing through and recording what we dream as an act of activation and recovery by reaching inward. As my dear friend Maiko Tanaka expressed after hearing Shimoda’s reading, “It opens up spaces I couldn’t reach on my own, just to feel, and to feel things within the dynamic constellation of what is happening now alongside our ancestors... I hear poetry like this, and what else is there to do but feel?”

When October 7th happened, I stopped listening to the news in the mornings. For the first few weeks, I only listened to June Jordan. One recording I returned to often was from The Poetry Center in 1993.¹⁰ I thought of her uncompromising strength, her ability to live and engage with the world relationally. Reading and listening to her reminds me not only of the powerful ways poetry transforms our imaginings—keeping the past and future alive in the present—but also of how it empowers our positionalities as it demonstrates the material force of language. It calls us to return, it calls us to return to ourselves, as we return to sound the call for collective responsibility, and with the words of June Jordan, “I believe that you cannot claim a people and not assume responsibility for what that people do or don’t do. You cannot claim to be human and not assume responsibility for the value of all human life.”¹¹

I’ll leave it here for now, as I am off to another screening of “dreamworlds,” here, in sunny Minneapolis.

With love,

Nasrin