The Year of Rage and Disbelief
An end-of-year reflection
One of the most sobering videos I’ve seen of the ongoing genocide in Gaza was posted during the communications blackout the last week of October. Without access to the Internet as a result of Israeli bombardment, the loudspeaker of a mosque was used to broadcast a plea to the world. “There is no one left but you, God,” a man cries out in Arabic. “Oh God, they are using their strength against us, but we believe in your power over them.”
The Palestinians holding steadfast to their faith in the face of such horror will always be a marvel to me. I’ve spent this year in so much despair that I began to pray for something or someone I can rely on to handle my affairs for me. God. Karma. The natural cause and effect of things. I’ve never been religious. This yearning isn’t really an act of faith, but a crisis of it. I joked with a friend that I would call this essay “I Believe in God Now but Not for Good Reasons.” Too angsty, even for me, but I come by it honestly.
The rage and disbelief I’ve lived in for so long now was brought on by an abusive relationship I was in at the end of 2021. How is it possible that it’s almost 2024 when so much of me still lives in 2021? We all know the world keeps turning regardless of how much pain we’re in. That knowledge doesn’t do anything to abate the shock of it. If I’ve learned anything from this, it’s that knowledge is power, but it never made anything feel better. At least not things like this.
In Joan Didion: The Center Will Not Hold, the 2017 documentary about Joan Didion’s life and work, Didion expresses not wanting the years to change after losing her husband in 2003 and her daughter in 2005. If the year changed and became a new one, her husband and daughter will have existed in a different year. I felt that exact feeling when 2022 became 2023.
“There was a level on which I believed that what had happened remained reversible,” Didion writes in The Year of Magical Thinking. If only the future could stop coming, we could stretch the present forever and keep it from becoming the past, keep it from becoming real.
I suffer so much guilt knowing it’s my calling to be a revolutionary artist while struggling to hold myself together, let alone be a revolutionary or make art. The endless scroll is my go-to coping mechanism. Lying in bed in the wee hours of the morning, I’ve watched genocides, mass shootings, the rising tide of fascism, the rising tides of climate catastrophe with dead eyes and an only momentarily wiped mind.
It’s a habit we’ve all been victim to at some point, a habit which often lulls us further into our fatalistic conditioning. These injustices are not at your doorstep, they are far away, and they are inevitable. They just don’t happen here or to people like you. And when they do start happening here to people like you, there will be nothing you can do about it.
The single most encouraging thing I’ve been told this year is that every abuse radicalizes us. I believe the world is being dealt that fateful blow. We will not wait for a miracle. We are not looking for the hand of God to rescue us. We are looking at each other and seeing, maybe not for the first time but this time in a very real way, how necessary and possible it is to make the world what it ought to be.
I was working for the Chicago International Film Festival in mid-October when the news of the latest Israeli aggression against Palestine started circulating. I wanted that job so badly. I spent endless hours sitting in movie theaters, going to nice dinners, getting drunk with directors and critics at downtown parties with champagne towers. I would check the news and think, God, how selfish of me to care about movies in a world like this. I need to do something with my life that actually means something.
During the festival, I briefly met Lina Soualem, the Palestinian filmmaker whose documentary Bye Bye Tiberias features her mother, the actress Hiam Abbass. We spoke only of Palestine. She expressed some guilt that she was out promoting her film at a time when her people were suffering so greatly. Of course, her work is vital, not frivolous at all, though a genocide makes all else feel frivolous, even art that seeks to liberate the victims of it.
She gave me hope, inspiration. I can’t really explain it beyond that. I was so shaken by that brief, chance meeting. I sat in the car for a few minutes, parked on a pretty street on a fresh autumn day. I let that uncanny feeling run through me like wind through the leaves.
All this to say, there is still magic left in this world. As quickly and violently as life can take a turn for the worse, it can, and does, often just as mysteriously, become beautiful again. And there is still a lot of fight left in me, though it’s taken all this time to recover it once again. I don’t know how many times I have sworn This will be my year only to be met with more difficult years, but I’ll say it again. With all its difficulty, this will be my year.