January letters: To Malak

The other day you texted “any thoughts on ten yrs?” and for a second I wasn’t even sure what we were talking about, lost for context I scrolled through our message history and I still haven’t responded. I am sorry we didn’t see each other over the weeklong trip that ended up feeling like a blur. Although it’s approaching a month since I have been back, I am still unable to shake off how Cairo felt to me like a city without God. Or maybe that’s just due to the fact that the adhan doesn’t reach all corners of Zayed.

I had this fantasy a few months ago of an uninterrupted chain letter that would lead us up to a moment of reflection, a medium more personal than, say, a poised essay pontificating over the political malaise of all that has been lost and gained in escapism, prisons and diasporas. To answer your question, I have more feelings than thoughts about then, now, and our lives in between. I still am trying to conjure thoughts, these are harder to come by. This US election season marks four years of my recalcitrance to address politics in writing. Time folds, and I still yearn to plant more tomatoes. In the meantime, I have finally found the resolve to plant and write other things, although my basil and parsley plants gave up on life while I was away. There has been a great deal of sublimation of what we once experienced, reincarnate in our practices, our friendship, our hopes and dreams, in what we have achieved and in our children — it’s fascinating to watch all the new people that were conceived on the eve of hope, even if none of them are strictly 'ours.' Then again even when we birth our own or have them they are never truly 'ours,' as all people are their own. This last year with the accelerated deaths driven by the pandemic, and the loss of things we have known, loved, and taken for granted has bred a nonstop meditation on mortality, the angst comes with a flip side.  

In her book The Human Condition where Hannah Arendt theorizes freedom she also introduces the notion of natality as a conceptual instant of being born into the political sphere. The spontaneity of acting together and creating the unexpected reminds me of what you often talk about in terms of the nascent party scene and the ideas you have of creating timespaces as offshot encounters to take place where things might magically happen. At a moment when all feels tainted with hopelessness and failure, action and natality in an Arendtian sense emerge as a conceptual antidote. I want to focus on life and not death, on natality and not mortality, and to insist on that in my encounter with the world.  

In some ways this shift in focus is one toward love, this elusive horizon we all seem to strive for in an ideal sense but also crave. In Arendt’s understanding of love that follows from her study of Saint Augustine, she connects craving in love or appetitus to mortality, and mortality is just another way of describing a fear of loss. Cairo does this to me. It amplifies my cravings. The palpable fear of loss heightened in the face of a pandemic that has been rushing deaths, but also it’s a craving that has been stoked by all sorts of things in the past years. I find myself wondering what to do with all the futures we imagined that still aren’t and might not be, but also might. I crave a life without fear which requires a certain kind of love where it doesn’t feel like I’m in a state of flight from myself or a flight from death itself. I had an argument recently with someone I care about deeply which is quite rare since I am an expert at conflict avoidance, I emerged from it with a clear desire for equanimity. Oddly it has taken that long for me to understand that this higher form of eternal love that allows us to come into our own being (caritas) is the very thing that protects Alaa in prison from losing himself or his freedom. 

Natality as Arendt articulates it is connected to a state of gratitude for all things. The connection between natality and gratitude creates the idea of amor mundi — love the world. There is a spiritual kindling in Arendt’s thought to think of how a love of this world is needed. My aunt Laila died recently, and I feel I haven’t been able to properly mourn her. The loss is difficult to describe insofar that I have always felt spiritually connected to her. It is through her that I have come to understand that gratitude and remembrance are able to quieten our deep fears of loss and of death. How we act and how we recollect and remember is important.

Perhaps you will write to someone else, too. 

Love,
Sarah