Nov-Dec 2025

1.

Before I leave for Palestine, I listen to an episode of “Between the Covers” with the poet Robin Coste Lewis, on the occasion of her newest book Archive of Desire. Lewis talks about feeling bolstered by the vast arc of African antiquity, including seventy thousand-year-old art found in South Africa’s Blombos Cave. She describes these findings as insulation against colonial ideas of race and modernity, “a shield to refuse the tragically reduced notions of time that…we use to imprison our bodies.” It shouldn’t have to be said, but we are older than 1619. For Lewis, findings like the Blombos Cave art speak to an expansive, almost cosmic notion of Blackness that far exceeds the four centuries of transatlantic slavery and its aftermaths. The intellectual and creative lives of our ancestors did not begin with their arrival to the Americas. The myth that Europe is the only continent to boast of such things as the Lascaux cave paintings has been used to justify everything from art history curriculums to settler colonies. In the face of those who brandish carbon-dated artifacts as license for contemporary theft, ancient history is both shield and claim.

2.

Standing on a hill looking out over the Al-Aqsa mosque, Yazan tells us how Zionists use archaeological findings to construct an invented past, how they point to ceramic shards as “evidence” of Jewish settlers’ entitlement to the land. “They’ll say, ‘This tile must have been from a Jewish bathtub, it can’t be from a Muslim or Christian bathtub.’” We laugh.

3.

In Hebron, we file through the turnstile gate at an Israeli security checkpoint, showing our passports to soldiers who confiscate items we have purchased from Palestinian stores. We eat lunch on a patio outdoors with drones circling overhead. The owner of the house has recently built new rooms with extra-thick ceilings, a preventative measure against airstrikes. On our way out of the city, we see a sign announcing “Hebron: 4,000 years of Jewish history.”

4.

A new father from Jaffa tells us that the Hilton Hotel, which marks the outer boundaries of the city, was built on a Muslim gravesite. On the hill above Al-Aqsa we learn of how, after protests, Palestinian families will sometimes run through the streets with their dead, rushing to bury them before the Israeli state can detain the bodies on criminal charges.

5.

After driving past rows of date trees we stop at the ruins of an eighth-century palace in Jericho. Our guide asks for a water bottle and flicks droplets onto the mosaic floor, revealing the brilliance of the colors lying beneath the dust. I try to summon the requisite awe, but my mind is crowded with more recent remains.

6.

A Jerusalemite writer scoffs at tourists who visit the holy land in postures of oblivious piety, waiting for Palestinians like him to step out of the frame so they can take photographs of old buildings. He has just finished telling us about his recent stay in an Israeli jail. Jerusalem is not a city of stones, he says. It is a city of people. “In fact, when I get too drunk, I piss on those stones that you romanticize so much.”

7.

It becomes clear that the dead are speaking. The hollowed homes and mosque still standing in the ethnically cleansed village of Lifta, the teenaged martyrs watching over us on the streets of Nablus and Hebron and Ramallah. In Archive of Desire, Lewis writes in the voice of a sacred owl, “Ancient neighborhoods I fly over at night—wing by wing—each city built upon—dependent upon—the silence of an older city buried beneath it…Our silence suspicious of anyone who believes they know where or when history began (It has yet to begin).”

Note: I have been wanting to clarify my terms more. Like many people, I often invoke a collective “us” or “we” when telling a story, or writing something with political or moral claims. But who is we? In section 1 of this newsletter, the “we” is Black descendants of the transatlantic slave trade. In the following sections, the “we" refers to the group of people I was traveling to Palestine with, consisting mainly of American passport holders.