Thread by @elevenverses

sharpie resistance (thread)

this is a a story about rage. rage that's old, but not that old. not as old as they want you to think it is. it starts a long time ago, but for our purposes it starts in roughly 2004, with a seven year old scribbling permanent marker inside an atlas.

i knew this was important but i didn't know yet why. the way my dad explained gaza to me was that it was like someone came into your house where your whole family lived - a reality easy for me to imagine since we shared our home with aunts and uncles - declared it

theirs now, and forced you all to live in a tiny bathroom. i didn't know about electrical panels at the time, but he should've added that they shut off your water and electricity at a whim, and plant bombs in the bathtub where you all sleep.

i'm from a place that doesn't exist, or at least that's what the older girl told me, with venom in her voice at a school event in second grade. our finnish teacher had wanted us all to showcase our countries of origin. i was already ashamed enough to be there; each student was

supposed to bring in a family heirloom, but we didn't have any. my family had fled from palestine to escape genocide, from kuwait to escape discrimination. my uncle was the first to end up in canada after persecution by kuwaiti police. when my dad listens to Black activists

speak, he's moved by a deep understanding of certain aspects of their struggle. none of us will find our history on ancestry dot com; it's been systemically erased.

i stood in front of a table with a poster - the palestinian flag i coloured in with my mom, and a traditional

dish she cooked. i don't remember which one. the girl in front of me was saying palestine doesn't exist.

in ways, i have internalized the rhetoric of non-existence. the village my dad's side of the family is from, sireen, for which i'm partially named after, was destroyed in

the nakba of 1948. it was a little village on top of a mountain. diaspora palestinians will often tell you about how these places are preserved through intergenerational memory, but i was never good at arabic and my grandfather died before i could understand what he might tell me

about it. i found out through heritage preservation website that there's still a few structures left standing: a well, a graveyard, and a building they think might have been a mosque is still partially intact. life, death, and hope.

my grandparents on my mother's side struggle

to talk about what happened to them. my grandfather was four years old when he walked with his family on foot from aqir to gaza, carrying what little belongings they could. aqir was destroyed completely; israel bulldozed it and placed a new town on top. they call it kiryat ekron.

living in a settler-colony, it can be overwhelming to think about the scope of colonial erasure. there's a place that used to mostly be hills. the hills were flattened out, and they built new york city on top. when you walk the streets of manhattan, you're standing on the bones

of the Lenape people and the ashes of a landscape. you're standing on a carefully constructed lie designed to make you think that this was inevitable.

it pains me to think that that is what i would find if i ever went back to aqir. a town built on blood and annihilation.

the echoes of my family and the others dispossessed a palimpsest.

i lived in jordan for four years. the landscape there is different from here - the first thing you'll note if you go is the bizarre road system. unlike the canadian grid roads, where it's always easy to turn

around, jordanian roads often force you to make a u-turn to get to your destination when you're going the right way. what colonizers might describe as primitive and poor planning is actually the evidence of a history intact. these paths were paved thousands of years ago to be

walked on, and then converted to roads with the progression of technology. there was no genocidal altering of the landscape to perpetuate the myth of terra nullius - an empty land ripe for settler-colonial shaping. jordan is "real" in a way canada and israel aren't; not because

they don't exist, but because they're built on inelegant, brutal, bloodthirsty lies.

i'm seven years old scribbling permanent black marker in my atlas. a big book by cartographers, historians, and archaeologists, who included on each region's page a brief overview about that

country. not even a lie but a summary of a lie, like it doesn't require justification. we ordered it from the scholastic book fair, which determined these lies are appropriate for children. but my copy was different from the others. my copy said palestine in it.