There is no itinerary in this guide.

The part-time job I started a few weeks ago needs a different version of my brain than the one I use to write. It feels more difficult since the outside world has become such an unreliable narrator. Perform capitalism as if I didn’t see noose cakes and the rebirth of Jim Crow. I wish I didn’t know that the big prize for elites was to preside over rape ranches. The list of things goes on and on. I try to pretend like I’m not drowning in my own revulsion, but it catches up.

Moving back and forth between the denial world and the revolting world is an uncanny energy drain. We’re supposed to just go about our days pretending the noose cakes aren’t ultimately referencing our own necks. Like we didn’t see what we saw, and we don’t know what we know.

I remember my father on an average day in the late 1970s or 1980s, I think of his frequent bad moods, his suspiciousness. The expression on his face was frequently troubled and heavy. Only now do I tie that to his engineering work in the aerospace defense industry, and his Top Secret clearance. He even had like Top Top Secret clearance, whatever they call it.

I wonder now what he knew. I mean, I suspect he knew a lot of crap. And of course he couldn’t talk about it. In hindsight, I see my father as someone who knew a lot of horrible things and it made him miserable.

*

What good is a guide without maps, highlights, lists of interesting facts about local fountains or favorite dishes or holidays? There is no architecture here, only rubble. I’m not sure where we are, but we appear to be rudderless.

Welcome, citizens, to your new life at these unidentified coordinates. We’re on the brink of a post-human world the oligarchs have yearned for. Perhaps we’re moments away from AI having consciousness. You are here to finance death plots with your paychecks, grotesque plots concocted by a ruling class that is interested in neither your comfort, nor personal evolution, not even your survival.

Say hello to the new robot confederacy. You have boarded the train that cannot stop. What was that movie, with people in the back eating cockroach Jell-o squares? Right, it was Snowpiercer, directed by Bong Joon Ho, based on the French graphic novel. The elites in the front of the train dined in abundant elegance. I remember giggling when I watched that movie, thinking it was exaggerated. I’m not giggling anymore and I don’t see any exaggeration.

I know people say this a lot but really: how will future historians write about this period, assuming there is a future and it will have historians who write books?

At the moment I’m turning into a version of the Greek mythological figure, Echo, just repeating these horrors, stuck in the reverb of it all.

I hope to be back soon with another letter and some words or topics that feel more grounded.

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All the world’s a staged attack

And all the men and women at the WHCD are merely ‘playahs’

They have their lockdowns and their parties

And one man in his press conference formal attire in primetime plays many parts,

His acts inspiring all stages of decolonization

Around the world.

First it was those files, about babies

Leaving us puking.

Then, the wars and lies and grift.

This monologue I’m mangling

was originally not just from Shakespeare

But from Petronius,

Roman courtier during the reign of Nero.

Wikipedia describes Nero as

‘tyrannical, self-indulgent, and debauched.”

I mean, if the shoe fits.

“Many Romans believed the Great Fire of Rome was

Instigated by Nero to clear land for his planned ‘Golden House’”

A palace, of course.

Which reminds me of the new ballroom under construction.*

The words attributed to Petronius?

“almost the whole world are actors.”

Yes. Almost. It’s true.

So who in his cabinet has studied Roman history?

*Yes, we noticed how the ballroom immediately entered the chat after this event

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Thank you for reading Uncanny Valley Girl’s Guide to Empire. Welcome, new subscribers!

I do not write with AI. I work at a slow pace and edit myself obsessively. But I like thinking. That’s why I do it. I have no interest in AI’s existence and neither talk to it nor ask it to write for me. This is all just my own human cringe on the page.

I bite my tongue in my sleep.

For the longest time I couldn’t understand where faint marks and indentations came from, and I was mystified every morning, brushing my teeth. It turns out my nervous system’s baseline is so anxious and high-strung, I fall asleep biting my tongue and don’t even notice. Imagine Sabrina Carpenter in the same situation. She’s too valuable to her investors. They’d be on the case immediately, probably insuring her tongue for several million dollars, the way Heidi Klum said in 2017 her legs were insured for 2.2 million US dollars.

My tongue is never comfortable or at ease. It is a restless organ, always pushing against the back of my teeth, making them crooked, making me seek out orthodontic help. The roof of my palate is a battlefield of stress-related jaw clenching. The architecture of my mouth gives this wild organ a permanent shelter but somehow, it must sense how far away from an ancestral home I really am.

So maybe I try harder than usual, these days, to not bite my tongue in my waking hours.

*

A hierarchy of tongues has been revealed since Sabrina Carpenter’s Coachella performance, and since that hierarchy was always there, this event is a perfect illustration of colonialism’s structures and standards. Even at open-air concerts and music festivals in Southern California, land of young people shouting “woo” into the drunken night, a speech code exists, a partier’s vocabulary of approved audience shrieks. Woo, the monosyllabic rip-off of something that originated from Native American circles, is ‘correct’ festival vocabulary. It is the settler teen’s official anthem of intoxication and concert joy. Coachella has people cosplaying in flowing robes in the desert, possibly even belly dancing if the music is right. But certain sounds are a bridge too far. I’ve never wanted to go, even though technically, I could drive there.

Enter the brown SWANA diaspora concert goer, slipping in from the night.

The current wars and genocides don’t get the fervor that a white blonde woman in a leotard can summon from the hordes. All the people defending her is…interesting. Because first of all, you don’t have to. She’s protected. Her shows seem heavily controlled by handlers designing a precise product. I see contrived, cynical marketing, I don’t see her as someone with artistic agency or freedom, because how could she? She brings in too much money for that kind of freedom.

Old footage of Britney Spears on stage in a leotard flashed across my nightly news as I wrote this, reminding me of the storied lineage of blonde pop stars in leotards and what happens to them: they are discarded. Maybe they both began as Disney teens, I’m not even going to look it up because it doesn’t matter. This isn’t so much about the pop stars, it’s about *this* culture, the US culture which is capitalist and colonial in its every projection, in the soft power of ladies in leotards whispering into microphones in front of wind machines.

The music fans sway in the desert gusts to the manufactured pop, performing socially approved scripts in flowy outfits with orientalist tropes that US western culture has long since grown numb and indifferent to. Maybe a few in attendance even have a copy of an Edward Said book somewhere, or had one long ago in college that they gave away. But that doesn’t matter now.

Then the Zaghrouta appears, shrill and clarifying in the hot dusty wind. It announces itself as an impromptu woo-in-translation, celebrating this beloved slice of white cheesecake wearing a bathing suit at a piano.

This sound is immediately registered as deserving of a frowny brow. But excuses abound: she had a thing in her ear, she was afraid of hecklers, she is fun and engaged with her audience. What is a blonde white woman’s best defense against the unknowable? A touch of Mean Girl hazing. Plenty of people will explain it away. The gaslighting is programmed deep into the veins of the whole colony and beyond. They don’t even know it’s there, just like I don’t know I lull myself to sleep by biting my own tongue.

Even as I wrote this I grew tired of Carpenter’s gaffe, how it saturated our social platforms with an instant relentlessness. We all grew tired, and we’re all supposed to. Another useless distraction took away my precious attention which is increasingly compromised by an insane, unstable world. But the kernel worth noting was this gaslighting and amnesia. These are the tools of colonialism. Many people rushed in to say, essentially: This isn’t about being white, you are way off, brown people. She just didn’t understand because we’re in America.

She didn’t understand because we’re in America.

You mean, white America?

You mean the America that can’t remember 6 years ago?

What is America exactly, except for a vague term that could mean either North or South, and isn’t actually the full name of any country? We’re in an unnamed state of being where predominant whiteness, and the erasure of all the crimes it took for them to get that dominance, is the blithe status quo.

The whole episode feels like a microcosm of our current world.

I saw an unrelated social media post in which someone took a phone call from relatives in Lebanon being bombed. The person taking the call apologized to someone else in the room: Sorry I had to take that, my family is being bombed in Lebanon. The other person said “Oh no! Who is bombing them?”

Zero awareness. It’s unconscionable. We’re in an absolute meltdown of batshit fuckery, and apparently some Americans don’t even really know nor care what’s going on. It hasn’t occurred to them there’s something to pay attention to.

The white woman starlet’s glowing blamelessness must be defended from brown interrupters. Therein lies the joke: the browns weren’t interrupting. They were going, yay we love you, yay we’re here. They were saying woo. But brown sounds in close proximity to a blonde woman are cause for suspicion.

The gaslighting forces the brown community to explain again and again, and the same questions get repeated ad nauseum: who are you, how did you get here, what are you doing here? You’re in OUR public space. That inherent colonial ownership needs and thrives on the collective amnesia underneath it all. The public’s duty is to forget, to be rid of any long-term memory. Because by the way the ground you are standing on is soaked in blood and you are a guest here.

As many people have already noted, the public forgot Shakira’s tongue on Super Bowl Halftime TV in 2020, ululating and doing the Zaghrouta right into the cameras. The talking heads talked about it. Fingers wagged. Moms of young children wanted apologies. The policing of the brown tongue came out in full force. Meanwhile, a white blonde pop starlet clad in red lingerie can dry hump a heart-shaped bed on a stage in front of a live audience, and that’s fine.

I have browsed so many of the posts on the platforms. Someone did a great video on yodeling in United States musical history. Sabrina Carpenter should be thanking the history of yodeling because it’s part of how she got here today. If I can re-find that post, I’ll put it up in the Notes. But I don’t have the energy to quote and screenshot. Thank you to those posts I saw out in the online world that inspired me to create an anonymous sludge out of it all, both the insightful posts and those less so.

I chose the words “brown tongues” as my title deliberately, because it sounds like a compromised organ, like something is wrong. Even worse, it sounds human waste-adjacent. It doesn’t have the luminous allure that a white woman has in a colonial space, to a colonized mind. Of course we associate brownness with less-than-ness.

So, it was nice synchronicity that I recently happened to come across images of Egyptian painter Samir Fouad’s work. The subjects in his paintings are often sticking their tongues out. Yes! His paintings are influenced by Francis Bacon, and he has always lived in Heliopolis, Cairo, where my dad grew up and where some of my family still lives. Samir Fouad is in his 80s. Perhaps he even knew my father’s family. Fouad still paints in Heliopolis to this day.

I want to end with a paraphrase of his quote in that interview which I’ll link again here. A person sticks out their tongue to tease or provoke. Samir Fouad wants to mock with these painted tongues out. But who is he mocking? In some of these images, doesn’t it look like the women could be in the midst of Zaghrouta?

This is the SWANA tongue taking up space. This is the brown tongue aware of its forced otherness, the sounds it is nevertheless capable of making in whitewashed, colonized deserts. This tongue will not stay hidden. It is outside of obedience and will not be shamed or shushed. He has opened that mouth up, and let it come out.

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Thank you for reading, and thank you for being here! Welcome to new subscribers and followers.

I do not write with AI. I write at a slow pace and edit myself obsessively. But I like thinking, I enjoy the process. It’s satisfying. That’s why I do it. I have no interest in AI’s existence and do not talk to it nor do I ask it to write for me. This is all just my own human cringe on the page.

1.

When I was in Egypt in January, I finally saw some of my Gaza relatives again. Our reunion was bewildering and heartfelt. We were young when we first met at our grandmother’s house in Cairo decades ago, and now we are so much older. They’ve had careers and children and grandchildren. I have less of a list of accomplishments, but I’m still here. Somehow, I expected we’d return to our grandmother’s front steps even though our family sold that house in the 1990s. I expected that afternoon light to return and restore us to our younger ages. We have missed each other’s lives almost entirely.

And that rift continues. It feels like January was 3 years ago. I half-expected to see weapons dropping then; it was reasonable enough to assume. One of my Egyptian cousins had originally thought my January travel plans were not such a great idea simply because of the weather, and had suggested springtime: we could go to the sea. For whatever reason I said no, let’s stick to January, and then I got myself home on February 1^st. The launch of the “excursion” war “bombing campaign” in Iran began on Feb 28. Lebanon, by the way, is just the side piece and, as ever, there is nothing to see in Gaza, and even the nooses are invisible to the rest of the world.

Egypt was on that original Do Not Travel list of countries when this war began. But quickly, it somehow negotiated itself off of that list. Egypt became the route out for people stuck in Dubai, or wherever, if they could magically get themselves there. But the country has now begun rationing electricity, restricting energy use, generally closing up cafes and restaurants at 9 pm. That has apparently occurred at intervals over the last few years for other reasons. I even remember as a child, during a few dinners at my great-aunt’s house and my grandmother’s, the electricity suddenly went out. Candles were lit, dim glow for the rest of the meals. Just by noting that, I feel like an asshole westerner. We’ll get to that later.

But what is it with Egypt’s exempt status, the safe kiddie pool of the SWANA region? I actually don’t know. I’m wondering out loud on the page. I feel kind of sorry for Egypt, the amount of placating it must do. I can relate. The identity crisis of Egypt filters down into my own chronic case of losing myself, my hypervigilance, my repeated lovesickness for sneering white men who never considered me fully worth their time or effort.

I know from my cousins that the mood is gloomy in Cairo now. Many are talking about World War 3. I think they must assume I’m not; since I’m in the US, I must be spared gloominess, fears of another world war. They must think I feel safe. I try not to ask too many useless questions. It’s the least I can do: make myself a little smaller while the country I live in sets their entire region ablaze. I don’t tell them how I really feel, just like I don’t tell people here in the US how I really feel, either.

As Arab women in diaspora, we often carry even more layers. Many of us are navigating the pressure to succeed in Western society while also carrying family expectations, cultural responsibility, and the emotional labor of keeping everyone okay.

We work hard to honor where we come from without losing ourselves, speak up without being shamed, and belong in spaces that often stereotype, exoticize, or erase us. This constant contradiction can create chronic inner tension.

MICHELINE. MAALOUF

I recently followed diaspora therapist Micheline Maalouf on Instagram. I often screenshot particular quotes in her slideshows, just so I can digest the words slowly and stare into the void for a while, letting it all sink in. I resonate so much with the quote above, with caveats. But it extends out into the other direction. When I go to Egypt, I’m also vulnerable to stereotyping and erasing myself because I’m an American. Others, too, exoticize me as “The American” which erases me, and in my mind, I’m immediately assigned repugnant traits.

2.

In January, I had worried about what to wear in Egypt. One of my safe outfits, I thought, was a loose pair of wide-leg black pants and a loose, long beige sweater. You know those long pullovers with floppy sleeves with holes for thumbs, and the asymmetrical neckline. I wore a shirt underneath but my bra straps still managed to slide out. This beige sweater, despite all its looseness, still managed to hug my curves just enough that it must have been a social gaffe. In certain neighborhoods, anyway. I remember how one younger fellow stuck his finger into his nostril (I guess this was supposed to be suggestive?) as he walked toward me, staring straight at me. I immediately went to a shame-based place. This young man, possibly a teen, certainly young enough to be my own offspring, glared at me. With shame, I went to the nearest available guilty place: my boobs.

You didn’t think this essay was going to be about breasts, did you? Neither did I, sadly.

To contrast my shame in my large sweater: I shared an elevator with a young woman from some other Arabic-speaking country. She was in a teensy crop top, breathily talking on the phone in Arabic, standing there in the mirrored elevator looking at herself, all bare torso. Honestly, anywhere else I wouldn’t have noticed. And honestly also: good for her and her healthy self-esteem. But, in Cairo, a city where I felt insecure and hypervigilant about how my body translated, the amount of clothing on her body looked aggressively absent. Just some tight material barely making it over her chest. Maybe she was a performer going to a belly dance show? This is also a bit asshole westerner to wonder. I hate all of my thoughts about this.

I was still worried about my own boobs in the big sweater, worried how many people had studied my chest and given it the evil eye as I marched around downtown with my cousin, meandering somewhere between the old bazaar and a street near Al Azhar Park. Roasted sweet potatoes for sale were piled up on a rustic wooden wagon parked nearby, like a food truck for locals. Not much pavement was available for pedestrians, so my cousin and I walked in the street with the traffic; ahh, how authentic. A couple of white women tourists trod carefully in our direction. The dirt pathways along the street, the cars, so many people, and these white women tourists with stunned looks on their faces: all of it energized me. No doubt they saw the stunned look on my face, too. Since I have always lived in artificial American environments, I was just as touristy as these two white ladies. I was exoticizing and erasing the very street I walked on with my western thoughts, my western comparisons. I am embarrassed for myself now and already was then, but just hadn’t articulated it to myself.

I was walking around with my cousin who has always lived in Cairo, a city where my documented family lineage goes back hundreds of years. But I was so far from the ‘home’ I was accustomed to. All of my own layers grated against each other and felt increasingly uncomfortable: western taxpayer forced to financially supply weapons for the genocide next door, and now the new war too; pedestrian in the Cairo streets with her boobs and her cousin and her emaciated Arabic language skills consisting of ten average conversational words; unmarried, childless, godless neurodivergent mixed-breed lost soul. Welcome to my context mismatch overload. Term definition forthcoming.

Just before we got to the potato stand and the young man with his finger in his nose, my cousin did the ‘chill out’ hand gesture to a particular driver in a car that was either parking or pulling away as we clambered through that spot. I impulsively mimicked her, quietly thrilled to be doing the chill-out hand gesture I had received so many times during other visits to Cairo. The gesture looks similar to the younger generation’s version of making a heart, pressing thumb and forefinger together to create two lazy, stingy half-moons. For the “relax” gesture, simply add all the fingers. But I was quick to feel fear. Had I overstepped my cultural permission slip? I was afraid of angering the driver. Was I too American to be doing that? My fear in the US is that the slightest provocation to any driver at any moment could result in gunfire. I had to sort out where I was on the globe, and how maybe I don’t have to carry all the paranoias with me from side to the other. Maybe.

Anyway, I never asked my cousin’s opinion on my sweater, because I knew she was too polite to say anything critical to my face. She was trained in keeping everyone okay, too.

3.

When I wore that sweater again, I layered with a puff jacket, even though it wasn’t cold. I had another elevator incident. Let me back up: several times, if a man summoned the elevator and saw me in there, he wouldn’t get in. He’d let it go and wait for one that was less soiled with my presence. On this particular occasion, my elevator stopped and the doors opened to a group of young, maybe Saudi men. They looked at me, pausing, and then stepped into the lift with me. However, they formed a protective circle and had their backs to me, maintaining distance on their half of our shared territory, maybe just in case I flashed them with my boobs. I felt so ashamed just for existing in an elevator. For being exoticized, erased. I was simultaneously exoticizing them.

I have no idea what any of that elevator ride meant to them. The exact cultural context was lost on me. Does this mean they hate women, or that they’re terrible people and should be bombed? Um, no. I was simply in another culture, on the other side of the world, in an elevator. I don’t need to know what their reasoning was. But I still felt awkward and ashamed.

The sum of all of these moments had me ruminating on the question: what do I look like when I’m in Cairo? I travel alone, I’m a self-conscious introvert. I didn’t want to embarrass my relatives there, or be a liability. My goal was to pass. Or at least, to be sufficiently acceptable so I wasn’t on the egregious side of things. I wasn’t there to have fun but rather to do paperwork, to shuttle around between bureaucratic offices and wait for someone to translate to me what was said, unless the conversation had taken place in English. I was helpless, a cumbersome package that had to be transported from place to place with others talking around me.

4.

Dalia Halabi, MSC also posts slides on Instagram that give me the vocabulary I’m craving, to help me accurately name my experience. From her I learned this term context mismatch and after I read it, I wanted to shout THANK YOU into the void. Precisely. That’s it. Never mind the context mismatch when I’m obsessing about how I’m perceived in Egypt. I came home to the US, skies soon darkened with burned oil over Tehran, death counts rose on three Southwest Asia fronts, and the gaslighting went on and on. Inside, I was freaking out about family, the world, feeling outrage for the entire region ‘over there.’ But here in the States, people were casually going about their days. I was casual too, sipping my coffee, watering my plants. Scrolling my phone, seeing horrors and footage and photos. The wars zoom in and out, simultaneously close and far away. But I don’t talk about it with anyone.

When the environment does not mirror the emotional reality you’re carrying, the nervous system struggles to resolve the stress response.

That’s a Dalia Halabi quote there.

This can create feelings of detachment, surrealness, isolation. Almost like reality has split in two, she says. To loosely paraphrase: Internally, I am holding a completely different world than the one I’m currently sipping a coffee in. And that kind of context mismatch is exhausting.

Halabi offers another term I’m somehow parched for, and I melt with the recognition: Disenfranchised grief. Yes! Inhabiting spaces that require I leave most of myself behind, at the door. Fuck. This is so accurate. How many friends for almost 3 years have I protected, keeping myself silent about [scans hand across the horizon] all of whatever this is?

For all that silence on the outside, in my private world I’ve been learning how to translate myself. My father never wanted to translate Arab diaspora to me, only in incidental scraps and haphazard info leaks. Yet he was the only one who could begin that translation with me. Halabi adds this layer, and I’m loosely quoting her: When carrying Arab diaspora grief, you’re constantly reading the room, deciding how much of yourself is safe to bring in. You are moderating yourself… It stays stuck inside the body. The world hasn’t participated in it with you.

So, that’s it. I’m here moderating myself, translating myself, grieving my mom and my sister who died here in the States 15 months apart in addition to everything else. But I’m trying to find the right words. Sometimes, I don’t have any at all.

You can find out more about Micheline Maalouf here

You can find out more about Dalia Halabi here

*

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I do not write with AI. I write at a slow pace, argue with myself, and edit myself obsessively. But I like thinking, I enjoy the process. It’s satisfying. That’s why I do it. I have no interest in AI’s existence and do not talk to it nor do I ask it to write for me. This is all just my own human cringe on the page.

The weapons have launched. The US proceeds with its usual business, which is the business of escalation and use of force. As much as there is to say about that, I’m shifting attention to another Western capital because I have some Berlin-bashing on my mind. Wim Wenders is the inspiration. I was mad about his Berlinale comments, but didn’t think to put it in writing until I read Fariha Roisin’s excellent post.

Below in italics is an excerpt from a 2016 essay I wrote for a defunct publication called Smashpipe. Ten years ago, I attended the 66th Berlinale, and had attended a few times prior. Back then I was an enthusiastic attendee, eager to play along with their pretend narratives. I had a golden retriever’s devotion to almost anything Berlin back then. Yes, I just wanted to be loved and/or belong somewhere (note: it didn’t work).

From 2016:

Miraculously, we [my friend and I] manage to get tickets for an East German film that’s screening as part of the fifty-year German film retrospective section of the festival. The general theme of this year’s festival is Route 66. “The legendary Route 66 connects places in a continent, crosses highways and hubs,” festival director Dieter Krosslick explains in the festival program. “That’s what the Berlinale intends to do with the chosen films.” This Germany-in-1966 theme is of personal interest to me: that’s the year my parents and older sister left Germany and moved to America.

The only seats remaining are right in the middle of the first row. The whiplash seats. We lean back and tilt our chins up. The film is “Jahrgang 45” (Born in ‘45), directed by Jürgen Böttcher, a painter as well as a filmmaker. It’s a film with sparse dialogue, a lot of space, and stunning views of East Berlin’s empty streets. Really, really empty streets. Böttcher gives a short talk after the screening.

He [Böttcher] explains that “Jahrgang 45” was originally just the working title, but he was never allowed to change it because the film was banned by the government in ‘66. It was a watershed year for film in both East and West Germany, though in very different ways. In the West the “Young German Film” movement -- directors like Fassbinder, Herzog, Wenders - were just beginning to earn international recognition. Their counterparts in the East, however, were being shut down by the Socialist Unity Party. Half the films produced there in 1966 were banned. Jahrgang 45 didn’t premiere until 1990, after the Wall fell (and he wasn’t allowed to shoot the Wall while filming).

Böttcher also talks about an excellent scene with a busload of mesmerized, silent tourists snapping pictures and taking home movies with their 1960s cameras. It was not staged. The bus appeared during his location shoot and he simply went with it. I remember being a tourist on a bus like that twenty years later, in 1986. We were visitors from another planet, taking photos of the moon.

Afterwards [my friend] Lars and I…walk to Alexanderplatz -- from what was in 1966 No Man’s Land [Potsdamer Platz] to what was then East Berlin. We stop at sights that were in the film, like the neo-Classical French Cathedral (Friedrichstadtkirche) on the Gendarmenmarkt square, where the tourist bus had probably parked. It’s so empty even now in 2016. The sidewalks are like an abandoned movie set. We cross the River Spree, passing the construction site of a new version of an old castle, going about as well as the construction of Berlin’s new airport, which is to say, lots of snags and controversies. We head toward that iconic piece of Berlin, the giant disco ball on a toothpick, the Fernsehturm, the giant TV tower also from the mid-60s, shining over Alexanderplatz in the empty night.

People stuff themselves silly on film during the festival. They take time off from work to plan a rigorous Berlinale schedule. Many see at least three films per day. A friend of a friend even sees a second movie after the eight-hour mega-epic from the Philippines, “A Lullaby to the Sorrowful Mystery,” by director Lav Diaz.

The Berlinale isn’t just about stars posing on the red carpet for studio blockbusters, although there is some of that of course. It’s about human rights. Giving the Golden Bear award to Gianfranco Rosi’s documentary Fire at Sea (about refugees fleeing war and terror and arriving at the island of Lampedusa), Meryl Streep [President of the Jury that year] says that connecting art and political understanding are the heart of the Berlinale. To me it makes sense that this festival takes place in Berlin. I don’t know if it’s a Route 66 city, but it’s definitely a crossroads, politically, culturally, in history.”

I’m embarrassed at how under the influence of the Kool-Aid I was ten years ago. But it is satisfying to see even Meryl Streep’s previous comments contradicting Wim Wenders’ tiptoeing in 2026.

Wenders’ comments in this year’s Berlinale feel like simping for the establishment. “Movies can change the world but not in a political way.” Would his colleague Jürgen Böttcher agree? Clearly, someone had feared his particular film back in 1966.

Last month, emergency meetings were held about the future of the festival. It’s an ‘emergency’ when the German environment minister gets his feelings hurt by Syrian-Palestinian director Abdallah al-Khatib, who criticized Germany as being a ‘partner in the genocide.’ Is it criticism, or is it just facts?

This Wenders-adjacent Berlinale piece in The Guardian addressed Tricia Tuttle, who is apparently going to be fired from her role as Berlinale director because of pro-Palestinian speeches at the closing of the film festival. Indeed, there was a naughty photograph involving keffiyehs and a Palestinian flag.

Meanwhile, another war has begun. A certain government plane known as the Wings of Zion, from the blue and white country, was airborne over the Mediterranean Sea for hours and ultimately, it landed in: BERLIN. When I first saw social media posts about this over the weekend, I was screaming. On Monday in Berlin, groups of protesters were in front of the German Ministry of the Interior, and activist Yasemin Acar was asking at the top of her lungs, who authorized this landing?

Oh, Berlin. What an infuriating city. You get mad about a film festival director and a photograph with scarves, but you gladly harbor a genocidaire as if there wasn’t a warrant out for his arrest?

I remember when Wenders’ “Wings of Desire” came out in 1987, maybe I saw it in 1988. This film had such an impact on me. It still does to this day. I know that Berlin and walked around inside of it, just like I did that night I watched “Born in ‘45.” I have returned again and again to my adoration of “Wings of Desire.” And it’s so disappointingly 2026 to realize the director is possibly protecting his own racism with these opaque, milquetoast statements, but certainly he’s protecting the German state’s.

To go back to 2016: the US was still at war with Afghanistan at that time, as part of the War on Terror. That, of course, also included the war in Iraq. The US withdrew from Iraq in 2011 but the withdrawal from Afghanistan was still years away. And I was still years away from understanding, as I attended that film festival in a city that is often at the crossroads of complicity and malevolence.

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I’ve been slow to post because I’m still unwinding from the massive clusterf<ck of code-switching I was doing, along with the emotional masking and the maintenance of jet lag, sleep, and dental appliance hygiene. I came home and the vacuum cleaner blew a fuse in my apartment. I am about to lay my sister’s ashes to rest, as per her final wishes. And I’m in a writing workshop. Formerly Tin House, now McCormack Writing Center.

My whole personhood feels scrambled up. So many things are happening at once. I have trouble processing. I want to return to my Cairo hotel balcony where I sat and drank Nescafe in the morning, watching the birds and the traffic.

The way I pronounce “Cairo” sounds like I’m a character on that old SNL skit “The Californians”. It’s embarrassing.

So, let me just share some photos here, and I will post again shortly.

The last photo features the Nile beyond the fence. But really, it’s a photo of that fence, which only went up after the revolution.

Strange I lined up the photo of my balcony railing with that hotel fence, making it look like I was always in confinement while I was there.

Clear boundaries existed, for sure, between myself and my environment in Cairo. I remain an obvious outsider there. Young men sing suggestive songs behind my back when I’m walking around (and my cousin translates), or a young man shoves his finger up his nostril, staring straight at me. Though I tried to match the codes, I was still breaking them just by being there.

I’m reminded by my family that Egypt is ‘my country’ because it was my father’s country. And it’s true. But the contradictions I experience of belonging/not-belonging when I’m there are clear, in my face, and continue to baffle me. I get pulled in so many directions. I need a solid minute to separate and study these layers. I need just the right tweezers, a microscope.

Things I’ve been thinking about. I have more notes from my trip, probably a part 2 coming soon….

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Thank you for being here, and welcome to new subscribers!

Just about four more hours left of the year 2025 here on the West Coast. I wanted to quickly do a round-up of my most popular pieces this year, especially for newer subscribers. Thank you for being here.

Wishing everyone a reasonably tolerable 2026 that doesn’t feel like a dumpster fire hellscape at all times. Perhaps it could even be happy. Let’s see how it goes.

Happy New Year!

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I met my first robot in my childhood.

It was the mid to late 1970s. I was with my family at the company open house at my dad’s work. He was an engineer. I was young enough that I didn’t really have an idea what that meant, and it didn’t matter.

The company had a sprawling campus, but maybe I’m just remembering it that way, from a child’s point of view. It did have a lot of open space, green grass and trees where they must have set up food and entertainment. People gathered. We were there by a patch of grass, mingling around. Someone unusual was coming down the path toward us.

A mannequin propped up on a platform rolled down the sidewalk. She was riding a square plywood skateboard, and wore a dark, shoulder-length wig, a skimpy top with tight, shiny satin pants. The kind of outfit I was never allowed to wear. She was a ‘70s disco robot, moving independently, no one pushing or pulling her rolling platform. Her hands were cupped in the classic mannequin pose, motionless like her face, the earliest Botox archetype. Legs, bolted down. She slowly rolled her way to us and parked, joining the group.

This is the part I can’t mechanically explain. She started talking to my dad. She probably even introduced herself and had a name. But I can’t remember. A camera must have been built into her somewhere, maybe she was remote-controlled from another location. But she had a robot voice, too. Had my father met the robot mannequin lady before? Was she always at his office, were they having an office romance? My mother was right there, laughing. I didn’t know how to interpret this scene. The mannequin robot flirted with my dad a bit. Then she asked the question.

“How about a little kiss?”

My dad put his arms around her and bent her backwards. He planted a solid kiss right on the robot mannequin’s mouth. Everyone laughed and maybe applauded, a reaction along those lines. But I was horrified. Did this mean my dad was cheating on my mother? Why was my father being so slutty with this robot mannequin? I had never seen this aspect of him. I had never seen him as a man. He was always just my father: a two-dimensional archetypal figure whose existence and purpose solely revolved around me and my needs.

I was embarrassed that my father kissed the robot. In hindsight, it was sort of funny, and extremely 1970s. The mannequin was a party trick not interested in being a person, just content in being a clown.

Now we live in a world where the robots are everywhere and human beings are encouraged to turn themselves into robots as well. Don’t move your face, don’t digest food, don’t age, and if you need to think or answer a question, hand it over to a chat robot.

Eliminate the human in the human experience.

In my Notes feed today I came across a well-researched and beautifully written piece by , which introduced me to the term transhumanism. That’s when I remembered I’d started drafting this robot newsletter back on December 11^th. I had abandoned it in a long stretch of time melting away from me.

I wanted to write about robots because I adjusted my newsletter name to include the term “uncanny valley.” I wish it meant more than it does, I want it to. The general landscape of our lives is an uncanny valley. I see people stopped in their tracks, frozen in place to stare at their phones, appearing at first like they might be in a fentanyl freeze; both are robotic. People are becoming plasticized simply by consuming food contaminated with microplastics. It’s in the water, the animals, the air.

I only liked robots on old television shows, back when they looked like walking refrigerators. Friendly, slow, nice-guy robots like Robby the Robot from Forbidden Planet, or the housekeeper in The Jetsons. They were only there to help with dull chores. That’s my memory of them, anyway. With only a few key robots roaming the popular culture of my Main Street youth, I was free to ignore them. Now the robots have the capacity to follow people around from the sky and they’re armed to the teeth, or they can be. It’s alarming and so disappointing. Being human and doing human things was always much more exciting to me, and it still is.

Frankenstein is popular at the moment. I think that’s a good sign. We’re learning how to grieve in a dissociated world. Maybe we’re collectively looking at the same monster archetype because he turned out to have humanity. The real monster was the creator who longed to outsmart death.

The robot in the film Metropolis, a golden woman, is destroyed by workers in in the end. I happened to be watching Metropolis the other week. I was distracted, looking at my phone and writing on my laptop at the same time. How robotic of me. I didn’t watch all of it, but it’s so beautiful, such a perfect movie.

Robots are made in a human being’s image, but we’re being remade in their images, too. How to force-feed AI into us through our phones and apps and word processing documents. How to hate your body and face and get them rearranged with scalpels and injectable poison. Feel more confident with your body only after you have acquired a paralyzed stomach. Who is the role model here, a human being or a robot?

I’ve seen the term ‘uncanny valley’ used properly lately, by writers who knew what they were doing. I use the term loosely, with poetic license. My uncanny valley is a mosh pit of science fiction movie plots, all of which are slamming into our faces at the same time. I suppose we were warned about this being the future, and since my teens I sort of assumed it would be. But now that we’re here, I’m disappointed with the hyperreality of it all. Cartoonishly evil villains with a catastrophic disregard for human life hatching cartoonishly grandiose plots that of course involve cheating death and transforming people into plastic. I am an old nerd. I just wanted human rights.

The name change to my newsletter doesn’t mean I’m only going to write about robots. I often write about Gaza, and what other blood-soaked land has been the robot-builders’ main launching pad and testing ground of horrors. I’m writing about us, the world, and the future, which is being tested in Gaza. Those of us in flesh-suits with real pulses are an obstacle. Being alive, being human, means we’re in the way.

On New Year’s Eve, that will be my toast to 2026, when I raise a glass of some non-alcoholic beverage:

Here’s to being in the way.

Thank you for reading and welcome, new subscribers. Thank you for being here.

Happy New Year to you all!

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Dear Fellow Citizen.

That’s how the letter to my father from the President of the United States began. Sent in 1972 and signed by a different foul-mouthed criminal, it nevertheless has an elegance, formality and respect. The whole letter is gracious. Simply using these three words appears miraculous. “Dear” is a salutation that implies affection, value. “Fellow” means comrade, associate, or peer, equal in rank or power. “Citizen” means a native or naturalized person who owes allegiance to a government and is entitled to protection from it.1

My sister became a citizen a few months later, in the spring of 1973. The Senator sent letters of congratulations to both my dad and sister as well and they’re even hand-signed, giving the occasion a homey feel, like there was a real person behind the government office.

I’m certainly not going to wax nostalgic about the 1970s and Nixon. But I think some individual in our current 2025 dystopia suggested stripping people of their citizenship if they’re the wrong color or ethnicity. You can be at your U.S. citizenship ceremony and a team of masked men might swoop in and cancel your paperwork. You might pay $100,000 for a visa. You can become a citizen for a million dollars. Plurality as instability is one of the selling points of these…what are these, anyway? Policies? Hallucinations? Manipulations?

But back to this particular letter. I wonder how often this text has been redrafted over the decades, and how drastically the language changes according to who occupies the White House. Does a letter like this even go out at all anymore?

Just look at that: Nixon’s letter states that as an American, you now share rights. An emphasis is placed on the concept of “We.” And the newly naturalized citizen has access to full participation in the democratic process. I mean, don’t tell Stephen Miller.

I wish my parents had thought for even just a minute that maybe this United States thing isn’t forever. Maybe this isn’t for keeps, and we’re just catching a sweet little bubble of excellent public relations that conceals the dark underbelly. Nothing to see here, just green lawns and blue skies. I wish my parents had wondered, what if the US becomes a berserker nation and our daughters need other citizenships?

I am just as undesirable to Germany even though my mother was “Biodeutsch,” which is a shameful term and I’m using it ironically. But I sent in my paperwork. I was feeling a bit cornered. In the mean time, I have no idea what’s happening; the German offices don’t say anything. I assume they’re once again hung up on my late father being named Mohamed, or they’re looking at my social media, all the videos of Gaza protests in Berlin to which I’ve given a big red heart. It’s fine if they don’t grant me German citizenship, though technically it is my birthright. There’s always a caveat, if you’re exhibiting too much plurality. I want them to just send my paperwork back.

Egypt, maybe?

Oh wait, we aren’t going to be allowed to have second citizenships anymore. Wasn’t that another recent proposal, as well?

1

I am loosely quoting definitions from merriam-webster.com.

---

Thank you for reading Uncanny Valley Girl’s Guide to Empire. A big welcome to all new subscribers. Grateful for all of you being here. I recently showed up on Substack as #74 rising in International. Many thanks!

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I wanted to be a food writer when I lived in Brooklyn in the early 2000s. I read the New York Times Sunday hard copy, drenching myself in newspaper ink, savoring details from the Food section. After realizing how difficult it was to break into food writing, I abandoned the idea as one of my many delulu ambitions that were best kept as an occasional daydream.

I think around that time, Jhumpa Lahiri said in an interview that she did a lot of cooking after a day of writing. In this Brooklyn period of mine in my thirties, I cooked too. Maybe I had about 4 regular recipes but I always had to refer to the instructions a little too often and too closely, doubting myself every step of the way. It feels like a lifetime ago. But on occasion I felt fluent enough in the kitchen to improvise pan-searing a fish that still had its eyes. I shopped at markets in Queens with a friend whose cooking I admired.

Caring for my physical self after being up in my head with thoughts and words all day seemed so grown up, like I had finally become the adult in the room. But, because it was New York, I soon drifted into a reverse phase where that felt nerdy and corny, self-indulgent. My work schedule no longer allowed it, anyway. Takeout and alcohol became the focus. Thankfully, that phase ended too.

I slipped far away from cooking. Making something from scratch was more of a rare special occasion, like wearing heels at a friend’s wedding. It’s weird because I grew up in a household where my mother cooked every day. And in my twenties in Seattle, I was frequently cooking for myself. My obsession then was macrobiotic eating, long before macrobiotic foods really had a strong presence in stores and on health food shelves. I still have that particular cookbook. The worn pages and lentil soup stains are testimony to my efforts. But I abandoned whatever skill I’d accumulated.

Over twenty years later, I no longer live in either of these cities. I don’t read that particular newspaper anymore, either. But I think a lot about how I eat and how I feed myself lately. The reason is one I never could have imagined twenty years ago, let alone five years ago.

*

I think the most surprising media genre to emerge in the 21st century so far is the genocide cooking video. This twist on the food blog emerged from landscapes of rubble and flooded tents in Gaza, delivered by smiling creators (although one, Hamada Shaqoura, famously does not, and I love him for that). I admire the chopping skills, the recipes, the improvisation. Though some of these creators are adults cooking for large displaced groups, several of these creators are kids just preparing a meal for themselves and a few family members. They conjure invention and elegance with texture and flavor, even with just a few ingredients. They have a real relationship with food, which sounds crazy because these videos exist out of scarcity, out of deliberate starvation, out of war crimes. Often, they used mostly food parcel ingredients.

Gaza’s displaced and impromptu chefs of all ages have been teaching me how to eat. They’re also inspiring me to cook again, because I am forced to examine my own relationship to food. I see how lazy I have become inside privileged western feeding patterns: Takeout, restaurants, delivery, waiting for others to cook. Not even noticing what I am eating, at times. Eating to numb. These are some of my more embarrassing and egregious eating sins.

Empire seems to thrive on disrupting a natural relationship with food. Empire withholds food and uses it as a weapon. Food becomes an implementation of hierarchy. Food becomes a tool of control, of punishment, of judgment. It isn’t just used on Gaza by its occupiers. Here, too, millions of Americans recently lost SNAP benefits from the government. They’re still struggling and I’ve read conflicting headlines about how that has, or has not, been resolved.

Gaza genocide cooking videos are profound testimonials. After watching them for two years, I realized I could eat with more gratitude and awareness. Not to punish myself, but to savor it better, honor its essentialness. I want to relearn how to feed myself. From scratch, not just from packaged salads grabbed at a health food store. I want to inhabit my food world more, not just as a detached yet dependent consumer.

My mother and sister are dead. These words still take me by surprise and I catch my breath. I’m still learning who I am without them. When we were together, they fed me. They were my cooks or co-cooks and we often hung out in the kitchen together, making something. Maybe I’m going back to my kitchen in the hope that I’ll find them again.

Considering how badly we’ve been manipulated in recent years by the powers that be, a recipe feels revolutionary in its simplicity, its straightforwardness. A recipe is humble and honest. I need that so badly right now. It’s real. I find a quiet defiance in a recipe. When up against power, authority, institutions that want to strip you of your ability to have something for dinner, read a recipe. Finely chop the nearest few vegetables. Add an herb. Stir. Sprinkle the blend on some rice you manage to find.

This is the lesson from the chefs of Gaza. Perhaps your home is demolished, your job is in ruins, and your possessions are smashed or stolen. Then turn to the sand, the pounding surf and overcast sky, and focus on the perfection of garlic, olive oil, and salt on a piece of bread. Find portable cooking gas, chop tomatoes, season with chiles. Send this message in a bottle out to the world: I am still human. I am still alive.

In a world that forces so many to go without, I want to side with the nourishers.

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The wind of the Mediterranean rustles nonstop into my ear. I’ve had the wind close to me all day, since last night even, coming through one earbud. I keep one in and maybe do chores, pretending like I’m not obsessed. But then my eyes lock onto the phone screen for hours at a time, just watching. Not much is happening. But I know there’s movement. They’re moving. I’ve never been this happy to see someone sitting wide-legged, man on subway style. His hands are steering a giant helm the size of the front wheel on those old-fashioned bicycles, Penny Farthings. He’s turning and leaning in the sea wind.

Good, keep going, keep going, Penny Farthing. I encourage him, even though he can’t hear me. I pause to savor the nickname I’ve given him.

Earlier, the moon shone behind this one boat named Marinette. It gave me shivers to see the moonlight on the Mediterranean, glowing behind him like an amulet.

I had already watched the livestream from several other boats, a feeling of unfamiliar hope rising up in me. And then I watched each one get intercepted, and those on board taken away.

I stop for a snack, feeling guilty that I can eat, and rearrange how my phone rests while I watch. I worry about every note I take, not wanting to jinx the steady progress, and so I fully invest in ideas of magical protection, knocking on wood and smudging my thoughts with sage spray. I need that sound of the wind in my ear, of the boat moving at 6.6 knots. I need to see the weaving and bobbing of the vessel as it motors toward Gaza.

There are a lot of trolls in the live chat and I only check in there once in a great while to send a few hearts, or to get a summary of what people are saying. Otherwise, I just want to be with the camera images. I’m on deck, sea spray flying past my face in the moonlit night. That giant steering wheel, turning.

I spent 24 hours with the ships, and with Gaza, and with protest footage across Europe. People in Berlin being dragged across cobblestones. Chants in Paris, Madrid. Something happening in so many cities.

Then I go to the flotilla website and stare at the tracker, looking at that little blue arrow, wishing I could push it farther along. I calculate what time it would be here, should they arrive. I wonder if I’ll have trouble putting the screens down to get some sleep, like I did last night and the night before.

The sun rises over the Mediterranean. Color returns to the camera feed. I see the bright teal blue of a man’s shirt, the tan of his skin. I start to get too comfortable or distracted by other things, though. It’s late at night for me, after all. And then when I look at my phone again, they’re putting on the fluorescent orange vests. That’s when I know it’s over. The Marinette, final vessel of the Global Sumud Flotilla, still going strong after the others had been intercepted, was on the verge of being apprehended. These activists calmly prepared for their kidnapping to the blue and white country.

Today is Sunday, October 5^th. The next fleets are already underway. We’ve read about what happened to the Sumud activists: they spoke of kneeling, thirst, beatings. Greta dragged by her hair. Has she been released yet? Many just landed in Madrid, the next wave of freed, deported activists wearing beige sweatpants and t-shirts.

The ceasefire is fake, as always. The bombings continued after that announcement. I texted my cousin who is still there. I don’t know if he’s in the North or the South, and I don’t ask. I never bring him up to others, ever. More magical protection. I always just ask him if he is okay. I tell him I’m thinking of him. We heart each other’s messages. He thanks me for my interest. It breaks something in me.

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I’ve been listlessly working on this essay about my great-grandmother for months. She was euthanized in Nazi Germany. I think she was Protestant, or something like that. My mind kept wandering away from the draft, because I couldn’t figure out how to make it feel relevant.

That sounds so fake now. Dear readers, I did not want to find relevance through Brian Kilmeade on Fox & Friends recently suggesting a kind of Final Solution for homeless/unhoused people. “Just kill them” via involuntary lethal injection, he said. It made me even more listless about writing this piece. He apologized later. But it’s on tape, has been written about and commented on extensively.

Now, Tylenol, pregnancy and autism has become a bizarre and frenzied topic, and it’s also eugenics-related. This Note from summed it up perfectly:

The word “eugenics” used to feel like a sinister, outdated word safely secured behind a locked door. It was trapped in the amber of ancient history. But now, like the long list of other horrors that have seemingly made a comeback, eugenics is back in style.

I did a search for “euthanasia and eugenics” and landed at an article from 2018 on an official website of the United States government. Do I link to this article? The article’s title is “The Nazi Physicians as Leaders in Eugenics and ‘Euthanasia’: Lessons for Today.” Written by Michael A. Grodin, Erin L Miller, and Jonathan I Kelly.

I don’t know why they put quotes around the word euthanasia.

The article says that in Hitler’s Germany, doctors aligned themselves with the Nazi Party faster than any other profession, and did more in service to the regime than any other profession as well. By 1942, 38000 physicians were members of the Nazi Party. There were 6 euthanasia centers: Brandenburg, Bernburg, Hartheim, Grafeneck, Sonnenstein, and Hadamar. These had previously been traditional institutions, mental hospitals or nursing homes and the like. They were transformed and repurposed into the “killing centers” for the regime’s eugenics-informed standards. Doctors decided who still had societal worth, and who was ready for elimination.

And this shouldn’t be surprising: the USA was their model for eugenics programs. The United States was a leader in involuntary sterilization, to prevent “social misfits” from procreating. I don’t even have space to cover all of the racially-motivated sterilizations that took place in this country.

Here’s a chilling quote:

“Nazi physicians viewed the State as their primary “patient”….These physicians thought of themselves as “biological soldiers” instead of healers and caretakers.”1

So, let me back up and explain the story of my great-grandmother.

*

I probably noticed her because I didn’t grow up with any family portraits in the house. My quiet little family far from all the others only had anonymous interior décor. Maybe my parents really wanted to forget and reinvent themselves. Random artwork barely populated our walls, leaving plenty of blank space.

When my sister and I were older, in our 20s and again in our 30s, our mother suddenly wanted us to pose for professional family portraits. Mom, Sis, and me wore black clothes and posed in front of a black background, our matching silver jewelry shining in the darkness. An oversize portrait of my sister and me hung in the foyer of our parents’ house. Meanwhile, my sister and I lived in different cities on the other side of the country. While she and I grasped at more empty, anonymous space, our parents finally made a solid attempt at Americanizing their domestic world. They embraced that showy pride so many other parents exhibited when I was young.

Because of our anonymity in California, I loved the recognition I’d get on the family visits to Berlin. But it took some adapting. I gazed with curiosity and fascination at the photo wall above the dinner table at my aunt’s place. Family members at various ages, framed and clustered together, made the room feel populated. They added warmth and connection. It drove home the obvious point that all the relatives, on my mother’s side anyway, were there in Berlin and we didn’t have anybody over where we lived.

One particular portrait hung at the top center. It was not a black and white photo, but beige and grey. The woman had an oval face to match the frame, a bun on top of her head, and sharp pale eyes. My aunt bore a strong resemblance to her, jokingly blaming the bags under her own eyes on the woman in the photo: Bertha. That was her name. In German, it’s pronounced bear-TA. I somehow need her name spoken correctly, to remember her right.

My attention, though it went to her first, always got carried away by more recent pictures of people I knew and recognized. But Bertha was in the room, right there at the dinner table, watching my aunt smoke Marlboros over crossword puzzles after a long day at work at her hair salon. It occurs to me now that maybe Bertha was haunting us, staring us down as a way to ask a question, or demand an answer.

My aunt told me this or that about Bertha when I reached my early 20s, and she and my mom repeated these details to me in my 30s and beyond. Funny it was at the same time that we posed for our dark portraits.

They explained Bertha in probably just a few sentences. I’d instantly forget who she was, as if Bertha was a character from a television show I didn’t watch. I think the first time my aunt or my mom told me what happened to Bertha, it just seemed distant and impossible. That’s the luxury of being young and dysfunctional. I mean, I just wasn’t paying attention. My own life was loud enough inside my head that a lot of messages didn’t, and couldn’t, make it through.

Bertha was my grandfather’s mother. (If you missed it, I wrote about him here).

She had the money to buy their house in Halle, it wasn’t her husband’s. But women weren’t allowed to own property. The house was in her husband’s name. When he died, only half of the property was hers. The other half belonged to her son, Walter.

Gradually, my mother’s stories of childhood connected to each other in my own memory. I noticed the presence of her grandmother. There’s Bertha, moving in with them in the Neu Westend neighborhood of Berlin in 1939, after leaving the house in Halle, because she couldn’t live alone anymore. There’s Bertha, dabbing away tears as she witnessed my little mother getting a spanking from her own mother for not finishing her rice. Bertha lived with the family for about a year. She had dementia, and it had progressed, so she moved into a nursing home — in air quotes— where she died.

My mother was too little and didn’t know right away. I don’t even think her parents knew. It probably took years before the family understood why Bertha’s life really ended at the precise moment that it did. She was euthanized at the killing center disguised as a nursing home. Of course there was no consent. Hitler’s medical killing program of the elderly meant these selected individuals were given involuntary injections, and it was never discussed beforehand with the family members.

*

Was it the Brandenburg location? I’ve been studying the Wikipedia page for Aktion 4. I can’t help but wonder which one of the killing centers Bertha was sent to, or if my mom remembered. Maybe it’s written down somewhere. I’d have to search the archives.

I liken the stages of empire to my own stages of perception regarding my great-grandmother’s death by eugenics: First, ignorance. Then, a sort of distracted, protected indifference. Then comes shock. And finally, a cynical and resigned identification. I see my world now echoing these chilling elements, though these were supposedly abolished. Society allegedly evolved out of this sort of thing, but I assume it was always simmering underneath the surface. And so here we are. We can now consume a genocide on our phones and tune in for chitchat about eugenics on our televisions.

Bertha’s portrait still hangs on a wall at my cousin’s house in Berlin. I think about her. Women not permitted to own property probably sounds like a good idea to some, these days. Just like being euthanized for being homeless, or for having ‘inconvenient’ diagnoses.

This is her portrait below. I see you and remember you, Bertha. I am telling your story.

Do you remember this Cure song from 1980? It was titled “Killing an Arab,” and it was about Albert Camus’ novel, The Stranger.

I loved this song when I was a lonely introverted adolescent who stayed indoors all summer, glued to the stereo. I think I got the album with birthday money and picked out some vinyl at Tower Records. I played this song over and over on the record player. It didn’t occur to me I was being a self-hating Arab-American who was raised in an artificial environment that trained me to normalize shame. I assumed they were right. I was lesser than. My life would be more worthwhile if only I was a highly processed white girl named Laurie or Jennifer. But I had a strict dad and everyone who knew me knew his name was Mohamed, and they said it with suspicion and/or derision on their lips. I wasn’t allowed to dye my hair or wear nail polish, the two keys (I assumed) to being attractive.

“Killing an Arab.” That clunky vocal intonation when Robert Smith sings those words in the song seems to be vaguely nodding at Arabic music, in a way that suggests there was no need to try too hard. The album’s cover featured primitive artwork of a pyramid and a palm tree. I think that visual spoke to me. Like, I was happy to see a familiar place showcased through pop culture. That song was an anthem to the disparate parts of myself I was only barely aware of, and didn’t have the vocabulary for. Clarity, as always, only shows up in hindsight.

*

The last week of August offered up particular Gaza genocide vocabulary highlights. They were much discussed and written about, including “Hamas Camera” and “double tapping.” used the term “industrial genocide” in a Note. And I had been thinking about a hazy quote in the back of my mind from the Iraq War days. Something about a million Iraqis killed. Then mentioned it in conversation on a Substack Live. And had a Note also referencing the same infamous quote from Madeleine Albright.

I am feeling breathless with sudden clarity because in my cloudy memory, I had conflated several facts into one non-fact. So I just did some searching online.

The notorious quote was from an interview with Lesley Stahl on CBS 60 Minutes, in 1996. This is before 9/11, before the second Iraq War. I just can’t get over that.

From a 2022 Al Jazeera opinion article titled “Let’s remember Madeleine Albright for who she really was,” the dialogue she and Stahl had was as follows:

“We have heard that half a million [Iraqi] children have died. I mean, that is more children than died in Hiroshima,” asked Stahl, “And, you know, is the price worth it?”

“I think that is a very hard choice,” Albright answered, “but the price, we think, the price is worth it.”

*

Then I wanted a precise count on the war deaths in Iraq and Afghanistan. I landed on a page titled Civilians Killed & Wounded | Costs of War, on the website for The Watson School of International Affairs at Brown University. They describe it as follows:

U.S. Post-9/11 Wars

• The post-9/11 wars in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Syria, Yemen, the most violent conflicts in which the U.S. government has engaged in the name of counterterrorism since September 11, 2001, have taken a tremendous human toll. Indirect deaths are estimated to be 3.6-3.8 million, bringing the total death toll, including direct and indirect deaths, to 4.5-4.7 million and counting. Precise mortality figures remain unknown. [emphasis mine]

• At least 408,749 civilians in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, Syria, and Yemen died as a direct result of the post-9/11 wars. U.S. drone strikes and other military operations in Somalia, Libya, and elsewhere have also caused civilian deaths.

• As of May 2023, more than 7.6 million children under five in post-9/11 war zones suffered from acute malnutrition.

Something I think about regularly is the colossal amount of toxic pileup of bomb residue coating Gaza, seeping into its grounds. So here is a fact about Fallujah. I remember in the Iraq War days when this city’s name would come up constantly. No one hears about it in our western “news” anymore, but:

• Studies have shown the long-lasting environmental costs of war in Fallujah, where the population has seen a 17-fold increase in birth anomalies, a rise in cancers, and myriad other health problems linked with bombardments and accompanying exposure to heavy metals. Bone sampling research detected uranium in 29% of study participants and lead in 100% of participants’ bone samples.

This page I’m quoting from was last updated in June 2025, so it’s been recent. I just wanted to grab some quick facts on the run, but it seems like a reliable source.

Let’s round it up to 5 million deaths, direct and indirect, in the post-9/11 violence that the US hoisted onto the wider region. That does not include Gaza’s half million and counting. Then add the half million Iraqi kids killed by sanctions. I hate to write this next sentence, I really do.

But I’m speculating it comes out to about 6 million dead Arabs and brown people in the Global South. The post 9/11 wars have been a long-term holocaust project.

*

I read Camus’ L’Etranger in high school French class, either sophomore or junior year. Discussing Existentialism felt so important and grown up to my teenager self. I don’t remember if we paused much to discuss the unnamed Arab man, or that the killer was a settler in Algeria. Being a settler deadens your senses. A dead Arab is merely a tool to launch an internal monologue of indifference. The irrelevance of an Arab from the point of view of Western culture was expressed in this novel published when France was occupied by Nazis. There’s so many layers of cultural commentary. In a way, I want to re-read this novel so that I can better understand what it contains.

Killing 6 million Arabs? Madeleine Albright has the chorus: “the price is worth it.”

No wonder the Gaza genocide isn’t moving any Western governments to action. No wonder the US and all of these European nations have been silent. Not even Ireland’s government is shifting its position. The Irish public is fantastic, but the government is complicit. The bar was raised so high with the Iraq War and its side adventures, it makes half a million killed in a genocide still seem like a modest toll. And Albright is eternally there, whispering to us that it’s an acceptable number.

*

The Global Sumud Flotilla set sail for Gaza on August 31^st with around 20 boats and over 300 people, according to an Eye on Palestine Instagram post. Sumud is “named after the Arabic word for steadfastness” the post points out. That’s what we need. I am grateful and godspeed to all of them. The west, by which I also mean Israel, has apparently based its identity on killing Arabs. But this bloodthirsty practice is an outdated old song that has been overplayed too many times. Maybe with steadfastness, this tune can change.

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Do you remember Francis Fukuyama? I read that famous essay in 1989. It twists my mind to think about Fukuyama’s The End of History now, and see where those claims of liberal democracy winning the century and defeating authoritarianism have brought us.

All the cruelty of the world was allegedly left behind in the 20^th century. His thoughts were amended apparently, after 9/11 and the Iraq fiasco, to somehow account for a new cycle of authoritarianism. But what he didn’t predict was that liberal democracy would become a superhighway to genocide. And that subsidized genocide would not be permitted to END. It could not be criticized, it could not be stopped. The good and moral and noble whitewashed West is doing the killing. Keep calm and carry on.

At the moment, it feels like the Nazis actually won the Second World War, but everyone just pretended like they didn’t. I feel like here in the United States, we are at an intersection where the Civil War and the Second World War collide and alter reality. They have been brewing underneath the surface all along. But the average citizen simply got away with pretending these active forces weren’t there.

I went along with all of the narratives I learned in history books about post-WW2 and then the Cold War. Especially after the fall of the Berlin Wall, which was considered the final act. I mean, I was there, one of the young goofballs thrilled to climb on top of the Wall. And I remember reading Francis Fukuyama’s essay. I was a philosophy and literature student in college. People would ask me with a grimace, What are you going to do with that [useless] degree? And I said, Know it. But I was a distracted, even troubled young woman. My nuanced takeaway of the Fukuyama essay at the time was something like: wow okay we did it, I am the future, yay us, we will have peace forever, let’s go shopping. The world that my mother grew up in, Nazi Berlin, was buried forever at last.

But.

I wonder now if it all was the longest hoax.

World War 2, the Cold War. The two merged and their monstrous offspring, greed, was simply left out of the headlines or cast as a worthy pursuit. Here we are, the last to find out that the West was never “the west” as it defined itself to the average citizen. The practitioners of power were up to other things, getting ready for an unimaginable future. Meanwhile, we could go to college and study, and universities could work on medical research, and people weren’t being kidnapped off the streets of Los Angeles by unidentified masked men, and brown Arab people were only murdered in more modest fits of racist violence. But hey, no one’s perfect, the world order seemed to tell us little people. Meanwhile, they were conjuring some malevolent yeast to rise behind closed doors. The “West” was a grandiose costume. Cosplaying as world order, or vice versa: World order as cosplaying.

Many scientists who worked for the Nazis had a future after the war. To be clear, they weren’t necessarily members of the Nazi party, but they might have been. And they got good jobs with the Americans or the Soviets. They were the ones who built the post-war world. I can even make an unnerving argument that my existence in California, the fact that I grew up here, that my father moved his family to the US and all the way to California, was ultimately because of Wernher Von Braun. Because of NASA. My father eventually worked for NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

Based on where the world is now, it seems more like the teams who purchased these scientists were asking: How do we become more like you?

This is a Wernher von Braun Wikipedia passage below, and I’ll link it here (Operation Paperclip is interesting):

“Following the war, he was secretly moved to the United States, along with about 1,600 other German scientists, engineers, and technicians, as part of Operation Paperclip.^[5] He worked for the United States Army on an intermediate-range ballistic missile program, and he developed the rockets that launched the United States' first space satellite Explorer 1 in 1958. He worked with Walt Disney on a series of films, which popularized the idea of human space travel in the US and beyond between 1955 and 1957.^[6]

In 1960, his group was assimilated into NASA, where he served as director of the newly formed Marshall Space Flight Center ….”

*

One of the anecdotal stories of my mother’s childhood is about a relative, I’ll call him Dr. E. He was a scientist with no big ideologies, I want to assume, but he worked for the Nazi government. At the end of the war, he was imprisoned by the Russians. But then he was “entnazifiziert.” I wish we had an English word as effective as this one. Each jagged syllable just sounds like it means. Denazified. What happens when someone is entnazifiziert? I have no idea. It might simply mean signing a piece of paper.

After being denazified, Dr. E got a good job with the Soviets and lived in East Berlin. He and his family had a comfortable life. They were one of the first families to have a car in East Berlin, my mom said. Big house. Fancy resort vacations that went along with being a part of the Russian intelligentsia class.

My mom would go visit them on Sundays. She was 12 years old and liked to go there for Kaffee and dinner. She took the S-Bahn all by herself to Schöneweide to spend the afternoon. The border was open, there was no wall, no checkpoint. All those things came much later. A West Berliner could shop in East Germany without any trouble if she wanted to. The East Berliners could come over to West Berlin, too. Travel back and forth was still easy. After coffee and cake and then dinner, Dr. E’s wife would give my 12-year old mom some money, and she went alone to see an old movie in a theater nearby. At the end of her long day visiting her mother’s cousin, she got on the S-bahn and went home to Neu Westend, back in West Berlin.

She loved visiting them. They were nice, she said. This adolescent girl had no comprehension that her mother’s cousin was a former Nazi scientist who had been denazified and worked for the Soviets. It was just Dr. E and his wife, Tante Inge.

This tranquil domestic experience that my mother had fascinates me. Whatever Dr. E had done, his work with the Nazi regime was forgivable and even marketable. The U.S. recruited Wernher von Braun, and Russia, or the Soviets, made an offer to their prisoner Dr. E that he couldn’t refuse. Just how happy was the US to get their hands on former Nazi scientists to help rebuild a postwar world? Had they been eyeing the Nazi regime with envy all along?

I wouldn’t doubt it.

*

I appear decades later as the Cold War kid staggering along the top of the Berlin Wall, drunk on cheap sparkling wine that New Year’s Eve, thinking the world was an amazing place. I believed the world – The West! Our gentle giant, The West – was focused on humanitarian progress, expanding the essential dignity of each individual. I was so brainwashed, such an idealist.

They put on a good show: Enter the global fight to defeat Nazis, put them on trial, print “Never Again” on some pieces of paper. I still have a Never Again postcard that I got when I went to Dresden in January 1990. That newly revealed East German city seemed so tender, blinking under the bright lights of Western scrutiny and curiosity, after years of being hidden from view.

I want to believe that those 1600 scientists, engineers and technicians that came over to the US from a defeated Nazi Germany really were “entnazifiziert.” They were magically debriefed enough to have a reformed world view, assuming they even had a world view to begin with. I want to believe that justice was served at the end of World War II, and that Nazis and Nazism really were reviled and rejected, punished, banished from the human world.

But clearly it wasn’t banished enough and now I want more justice, better justice, thorough and nuanced (that word that one end of the political spectrum can’t stand). I think of how, after apartheid South Africa was dissolved, a lot of people moved to Israel. Same rot, different coordinates. I just remembered GW Bush’s silly phrase from the Iraq war days, something about changing hearts and minds. That doesn’t really work, does it? How are we supposed to change the hearts and minds of people who don’t think Palestinians are humans, or are too busy counting their money to care? Am I now old-fashioned because I want to live in a world that has a bottom line, insisting that genocide is the ultimate unforgivable taboo?

No one is in charge of clear-eyed, benevolent justice at this moment of horror. Leadership in so many countries is compromised, corrupt, and complicit. It’s the people, the citizens who are seeing the situation with a grave accuracy. We are the leadership we need, plus Francesca Albanese. We are the only ones flying this plane.

*

I think that’s why I’ve been obsessed with scouring Berlin protest videos. Savoring every screaming syllable, every voice breaking in the midst of a chant. I clap for every protester trying to have a dialogue with a stormtrooper. I don’t want these citizens of Berlin to give up on screaming. I zoom in to read the street names, study building facades and background skylines and restaurant signage. As if by recognizing a piece of the landscape, I can be there too, and that it might help. I can participate, even though I’m far away. The simple witnessing and recognizing lends some immediacy.

I desperately want Berlin to get something right, because for God’s sake, it’s Berlin, and its history is horrible. I want more and more people there to understand what is happening and to resist their complicit government and to stand up to police. In these videos, I’ve seen 13-year olds carried off by police in riot gear while the crowd yells, She is only 13, let her go. I saw a woman’s shoulder dislocated as they dragged her off. The officers groped a woman’s breasts as they hauled her away, and in another incident, an officer punched and groped a man’s genitals while knocking him to the ground. I’ve seen a thin woman in a pink dress and Mary Janes slammed into a wall with her arms pinned behind her back. There is this chilling tendency amongst the Berlin police to cover people’s entire faces with the heavily gloved palms of their hands. These officers must train for this: Cover the eyes, nose, mouth, and force the head back into a tilt. It makes me claustrophobic. I have trouble breathing just observing those seconds of footage.

All of this to defend the genocide in Gaza. Today they were clearing away the pro-Palestinian encampment outside of the Reichstag in Berlin, and the protesters no longer have permission to gather there. Defend the bombings, the forced starvation, the slaughter, the destruction of a people, says the German government. Defend the genocide. Let’s embark on another Final Solution.

Then I watch videos from Gaza. I linger over the moments where people find something to eat, or plunge into the sea to go swimming, or somehow live their lives. I watch all of it, though. The videos with exposed ribs, spilled blood. Unimaginably wrecked bodies and obliterated skylines. Crime scene after crime scene. Over and over. More bodies, stacks and stacks of bodies.

The Western nations keep the death machines churning and keep counting their profits. Maybe this is what the West wanted all along, they just played the long game. This isn’t their first genocide. But it might be the most profitable, and it is the first one livestreamed for two years in front of our faces. It is the first one where we’ve been properly told to go fuck ourselves for not liking it. I don’t know how we get our world out of this insufferably dark path drenched in guts and blood. I am demoralized enough that I’m scared to hope a price will be paid, and that there will be justice for Gaza.

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During a recent rummage through my family ‘archives’ I found a newspaper article my mother had clipped in 2015. The word “starvation” grabbed me, so I started reading.1

My mom tended to clip things like this, probably to get that window of insight into her own childhood in WWII Berlin. From her adulthood home in California, she was able to read this headline, The Morgenthau Plan for the deliberate deindustrialization and starvation of Germany and understand a bit more about her former life as a girl in wartime Berlin, in an enemy country, and that she was deliberately being starved, a child paying the price for adult crimes. Compared to Gaza’s genocide and forced starvation, her experience seems mild. I hate to make comparisons.

I remember my mom having lots of German newspapers around, but I didn’t pay much attention to their contents. The Wikipedia entry says the German Times was originally founded in 1834, and went through various iterations and owners until Jes Rau, former New York correspondent of Die Zeit, bought it in 1989. The Wikipedia entry makes sure to note that the paper had an “evolving view” of Hitler and his Third Reich. Its earlier incarnations described that regime as “friendly power” but finally got around to having a strongly anti-Nazi stance. So I am taking that into account. My apologies for using Wikipedia.

But it’s American President Franklin Delano Roosevelt I’m interested in here. Whatever vague memory I have of him from high school history courses, I don’t recall learning about his remarks on starvation as policy. A particular quote from the article goes:

“Let them have soup kitchens! Let their economy sink!” [FDR said.] Asked if he wanted the Germans to starve to death? He replied Why not?”2

The Wikipedia entry for the Morgenthau Plan is a little more milquetoast. I’m sorry I’ve been dissociating and can’t think as clearly as I could two years ago. I’m not pretending to be a historian or an expert. I’m approaching these topics as a daughter of Germany and a cousin to Gaza, which has become my own personal social science. From the genocide during my mother’s childhood in Germany to the genocide that’s playing out in Gaza in my adulthood, with the US fully supporting it, these words of a US president offer a rare window of truth. FDR, considered a popular president, casually dropped a “Why not?” as if a bartender asked if he’d like to order another round. Sure, why not.

Now we have the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, whatever that is. A manifestation of hell. The current powers-that-be took FDR’s “why not?” and just cranked the dial. Starvation is a word that falls casually from a popular western leader’s lips in the 1940s. In 2025, cages and snipers are added to give it more spice, while also getting political cover. Starvation is a useful trinket in the western toolbox of oppression and violence. It was always there, waiting. “Why not?” Especially if a native population lives on land that, according to the occupiers, would make an ideal golf course.

In the article my mom clipped, there’s a photo of that book, Germany Is Our Problem, and the cover sets off my dystopian imagination. I can only imagine a similar cover reveal with the title, “Gaza is Our Problem” and imperialist suits with blood on their hands explaining away how the territory of Gaza is to be divided, managed, disciplined, exploited. Meanwhile, the genocidaires committing crimes against humanity are patted on the head. As it has been for decades upon decades. How many versions of such a book have already been written, and how many more are still to come?

*

Family stories keep pulling at me. They have for decades. But I always thought it was an exploration of a safely entombed past, far away from current events. I thought I was simply being a quiet, private student of history for my own personal benefit.

Here we are though, two years into a genocide (and it’s not even the only one happening). The past never went away, it upcycled. The system’s structural flaws practically depend on the premise that civilians are expendable. It’s been that way since my mother’s girlhood and really, even before that. Civilians are pawns on the chessboard of megalomaniacs.

Today is August 9^th. We just moved through that window between memorials, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, two highlighted bullet points on the US foreign policy resumé. Scrolling through Notes, I came across photos: the Hiroshima aftermath juxtaposed to the currently decimated Gaza. Two landscapes flattened by western bombs. But also circulating on Notes is this fact: the amount of bombs dropped on Gaza is roughly the equivalent of seven Hiroshima atomic bombs. And we’re not even at the conclusion of this genocide yet.

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Table of Contents

1. Intro, reintro

2. Fragmented + How to Avoid Extraction?

3. Cultural Memory for the Peopleless

4. Griefscape: my life vs. the death certificates

Intro, reintro

I began this Substack in late August or early September of 2023, which turned out to be just weeks before the genocide in Gaza began. I knew writing about empire and family was my goal. In a previous essay class I was examining/trying to separate the narrative threads of my family, and I found the only thing my German (maternal) and Egyptian (paternal) branches had in common was empire and its after-effects. My mistake was thinking empire would remain an inert term, distant and manageable, a dry academic idea I could keep under my thumb.

Then the livestreaming of war crimes in Gaza and the unimaginable bloodshed began. Al Quds and Al Shifa hospitals were bombed and burned out, two hospitals where my aunt and cousin worked as doctors in earlier times. 1 Meanwhile, my mother in California was diagnosed with cancer that fall of 2023, and I laid her to rest in January 2024. Then my sister was sick. She died 15 months after my mother. That was just about three months ago.

So: the genocide began, displacing my relatives in Gaza, and here in the U.S. my mother and sister died. Almost incidentally, I moved twice. It’s been a time of huge upheaval. So much death and transformation. My cortisol levels have been a mess for a year, my hair has thinned out. Do people keep schedules when they’re in the throes of transformation and witnessing? I suppose many do, or have to.

I didn’t manage to keep a schedule.

Lately, I am capable of getting lost in my own apartment, falling into the various rabbit holes of memory. The other day (week? I don’t know anymore) I opened a box of my sister’s old personal effects from childhood, high school, and early college: She had painted a strawberry on a flat rock, there was a fluffy googly-eyed thing with sticky feet, and a box of book name plates. I remembered all of these items. I spent an hour on them, maybe more. Then I sorted my mother’s gift wrap and greeting card collection, because that was her hobby. I sorted birthday cards and Christmas cards as if she was coming back and needed to easily locate all of this stuff to send out the next card and gift to a friend. I was doing a favor for her. Who was I really organizing it for, though? Maybe for my memories or my peace of mind, or perhaps my desire for order in the world, or my longing to have my mother and sister back, so I could feel loved again.

Fragmented + How to Avoid Extraction?

I was even having trouble identifying the problem. Like, what is it that I’m floating past in a state of numb fogginess. Why is it that I somehow lose access to language, and need to go to another place? Language stops working.

I want to avoid extraction as the purpose of each day, from myself and from others. Yet how do I also still participate in some palatable version of it, because that’s what people are obliged to do? How do we reinvent this model?

Partly because of grief, my time perception is completely busted up. I need a different time cycle because I haven’t lived on linear time since the first pandemic lockdown in 2020, assuming I did before that. But now, after all this death, linear time is an adorable fiction. I need something else. Someone used the term “time alchemy” in a Note recently, and I love letting that roll around in my mind, personalizing it for my size. I want to link it but not sure how. (I’m looking at you and thank you, )

Meanwhile, the abusive 24-hour news cycle insists that I pay attention to it. Really, it’s a 24-hour crime update cycle. I am so much cornier than this world of hustles and cruelty and bloodshed. I don’t know how to chase words for this. That’s not why I started my Substack, to be hijacked by empire’s hijinks that are in feverish escalation. And yet, it’s precisely why I started my Substack. I’m just trying to keep up while grieving.

My grief has been my superpower, I realized. Facing the absences has been the key that I didn’t notice I was unlocking doors with. I’ve grown so much since 2023. However, it occurred to me that I also locked myself in a room with those memories, and I need to separate myself from them. I must continue to live, because I’m still living. But clearly, I’m seeing how important memory is to me.

Cultural Memory for the Peopleless

I’m adjacent to people, but remain outsiders to all of them. I don’t have a people. Whether it’s Germany, Egypt, Gaza, or the U.S. (where I am a citizen), I’m in the gray area of belonging. How am I supposed to live and remember when I’m an outsider everywhere? I guess I have to create my own cultural memory based on my family’s idiosyncratic quilt that we stitched together. I’ve written before about what I call my ‘family museum’ and how I’ve been curating our objects since my father’s death in 2019. Cultural memory is stored in objects. The only place my particular version of culture made sense was within my nuclear family. I have to write more on this in a future post, to organize my thoughts.

But I bring it up because:

you get fresh clarity on how dysfunctional your international family is when you’re the one left holding all the death certificates.

Griefscape: my life vs. the death certificates

Griefscape is my new word for the landscape where I live, which is simply a place of sorting so much mourning and its detritus. When I’m not thinking about memories, mementos, and household possessions, there is the awkward topic of leftovers, of what is termed “property,” and how I’m mired in bureaucracy trying to prove that I am my mother’s and my father’s daughter. And my sister’s sister, too.

Local, national and international institutions, in my parents’ homelands and here in the US, all offer the same red tape and have me snagged. I have to go through all kinds of procedures and paperwork to show I belong to my family. Don’t they understand I spend all day mourning and remembering them with their trinkets? Yet the institutions still don’t believe me. It hurts my feelings; it is the ultimate gaslighting. I can’t even remember what the most recent situation was, but I received a letter the other day from some institution saying not enough documentation. I thought to myself how I need to order more death certificates. But that also means getting the request notarized, in some cases. This is my life as the manager and re-orderer and sender-outer and keeper of my family’s death certificates, which has ironically become the most important identifying marker about me. But it’s not enough.

When everyone else is dead, and there are abandoned bits of property in three countries (old bank accounts with not much in them, a hospital refund, among other random things) and there’s no citizenship in two of those three countries for the surviving family member: this is dysfunction. This is the messy sprawl that our diaspora story has left me with.

Trails of paperwork that might lead to dead ends. Certificates for their births and deaths in three languages. I have to get my sister’s death certificate translated into Arabic, but meanwhile I can’t remember where I put her Egyptian birth certificate. And I’m the one in charge of keeping the papers now. I spent two days searching every shelf in my apartment. It’s mind-boggling, and fulfills the family stereotype about me, that I’m a bungling idiot. But why didn’t my dearly departed take care of their own affairs?

At first it felt like solemn duty but increasingly, it feels like a waste of my own life. I have spent months and months juggling their births and deaths. Where is my own pleasure in this short life, in all of this duty? The other day, the word “fulfillment” came up twice, either in TV shows or videos I was watching. It was so shocking. I had forgotten about that word, that concept. What is fulfillment? How do I get back to tending to my own life, and not just shuttling death certificates to various institutions that still won’t be satisfied?

I wish I could wash my hands of this whole thing. Of course, I cannot. I think I’m washing my hands in the grief and its surrounding waters, rather than washing my hands of it.

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Thank you so much for reading, welcome if you are new, and thank you everyone for subscribing!

I work slowly and I do not use AI for my writing. I obsessively edit myself and search for typos.

Hitting “publish” on here still makes me nervous every time.

I am grateful for all of you. See you in the next post.

My sister’s death, my cousin’s wedding, 5 weeks apart, an ocean in between. Code-switching, multi-tasking, grief and jet lag.

How much did I dissociate my way through the springtime?

Last month, I sent out a newsletter.

This post was my most read and most popular, by far. I had not seen numbers like that before. In the broader scheme of Substack things, it was no comparison, still small-fry. But luckily I’m not into comparison, and so I relish this personal breakthrough. Thank you so much to everyone who read, commented, liked and subscribed after reading that post! It was an amazing moment for me, and I am so grateful for your readership.

If I was a person who knew how to use momentum advantageously, I would have coasted on that wave of new readers and maybe reached even more, all to great applause and fanfare, and everyone would have been happy. {writer’s fantasy}

Instead, what happened is this: I prepared to leave town.

I was leaving the country, not just traveling inside the U.S., so I had a little story in my head about safety. Which means, I was already thinking about the trip back.

I didn’t want to post anything while abroad. I was in Germany and Austria, two of those European countries where it seems everything is interpreted as ‘antisemitic.’ And I was overwhelmed in other ways. Too many stories were shored up against each other at the same time. Family, death, marriage, history. Honestly, I was still just trying to catch up on processing my mother’s death.

My mother and my sister were both born in Berlin. So, a couple of weeks ago, I was back in their city for the first time since their deaths 15 months apart. I was in town to attend a cousin’s wedding, and thereby was also marking 50 years of making this journey, which has always been a kind of disintegration for me.

I finally cried for my sister.

Long distance family fatigue is real

And maybe it can be symbolized by hail.

It hailed my first day in Berlin. Just as I peeled back the hotel room curtain to take a look at the sky, a bolt of lightning cracked overhead and the rains unleashed. Then the ice came down. It was all the baggage of the city’s past pouring out against my window panes. Lightning and thunder kept cracking. The tears hadn’t started yet, but maybe that’s how they were dredged loose. It felt like something was dislodged with that storm. It hailed on the last day there, too, when I was walking in the park with my niece, looking for rhododendrons.

How do you bring your grief with you to a different continent? I’m not sure the mechanics of it all, but somehow, you do.

How do you code-switch fast enough, with enough silkiness and gracious presence of mind to go from mourning a sister’s death to celebrating a cousin’s marriage while having jet lag? The answer is I think you don’t. I didn’t, anyway. Maybe I tried to disguise my clumsiness by simply holding my breath, especially in photos. I welcomed the change of pace, the opportunity to gather for someone’s happiness, a new beginning. But how much of the time was I floating outside of my body? Consuming, rushing, struggling to keep up with punctual Europeans.

I shifted roles, too. Previously I was always the younger one, as daughter or sister. There were elders like my mom, dad, aunts, big sister. A long while ago I even had a grandmother. This time, I was the aunt to my niece, buying her things. Just like my aunts and mom had patiently done with me over the years, waiting outside the dressing room, asking me to show them how each outfit looks. Murmuring their approval and encouragement. I loved shopping with my aunts and my mom.

In my new auntie role of shopping with my niece, I felt a little insecure, especially as it was the first time since her mother, my sister, wasn’t with us. But it was comforting to have the torch passed on to me.

I became the elder.

My sister died. I still can’t fucking believe those words.

How do I access my writer self while crossing time zones and entering into different language parts of my brain, becoming my German self? Who is my German self? Is she outdated, still stuck in the 1980s? Does my German self ever write, or it that solely the work of my American self who is constantly trying to synthesize what the hell is going on, cross-referencing the Egyptian and the German currents of the family?

My American self is that name for my original self before I understood what it meant (colonizer) and how I got here (empire lured my dad), and how much figuring out would be left up to me, and how much of it was a.. trap? An unsolvable mind puzzle that my mind enjoyed puzzling over anyway.

I am a person who enjoys her thoughts, the process of having them. I have gone to considerable lengths to make time to have them. But they’re mostly about all the family threads, and what patterns they make together.

I was in my Berlin hotel room listening to that hail, thinking: I keep needing to return to this altar of western civilization’s nightmare-ishness. Berlin is the city where my family happened to assemble itself. This is where my nuclear family began. And, this was my first return to it since my nuclear family had officially ended with the death of my sister in April.

So I finally cried. It was the right place for all of it to finally land. I never had time to process the shock of seeing my sister slowly disintegrate from cancer, her body and her temperament and spirit all on wildly different speeds and pages. She was cheerful and bright and loving until her final days. She was a joy to be around.

I returned to the maternal and sororal home town to mourn them, to mark their passing which was too soon and too close together. I had to bring it back to the place where their lives began.

But what else do I do at this altar? How to actually mark it? I’m back at that landmark idea I dealt with in my previous newsletter. Can’t I ever get any farther along? I’m sorry I’m still working these same themes over and over, processing something particularly indigestible. It feels like my family ultimately sacrificed itself to that voracious appetite of empire, and the sins of Berlin are recycled, still hanging in the air in this new form of genocide complicity in Gaza.

It turns out that 50 years of visiting Berlin is only an anniversary for me. I didn’t get to share it with Mom, Dad or Sis. It’s private. Solitary. I’m marking a moment only for me, though of course it also includes Berlin. Our relationship, our little trauma bond marriage. How we’ve grown over the years in our understanding of one another’s dysfunctions. But really, my relationship with Berlin is one of the most important relationships of my life, and it has taken up the most space and has had the most visibility.1

I marry cities, not people. I marry places. Not because I want to, but because of my character defects, my third culture obsession and fascination with place. They pull that commitment out of me. I guess because I want to belong somewhere. Maybe one day I’ll be able to do that with a person.

The Incident with the Child

In Berlin I had dinner with an old friend, his partner, and their very young daughter. I am fond of them all, but something just hit different, seeing a white German couple fuss over their bright assertive child who had spent the day being thoroughly entertained with concerts and playgrounds and friends. For dinner, she ordered a generous portion of schnitzel with fries while reviewing some parental artwork for the day. I pointed to a particular feature of an animal sketch, and my hand rested there too long to the child’s liking, and she serenely brushed my hand away with one decisive swat, then reached for a fry. No one was bringing up Germany’s complicity in the genocide of course. I didn’t dare, because I wasn’t ready to find out that they might be indifferent, and that I would hate them. This friend is the son of my mother’s lifelong friend. I love his mom. This friend and I are almost like cousins. I am holding onto to whatever illusions of family I have left.

But I was startled by the immense protection surrounding this child. It’s not that she shouldn’t have these things, but rather, I could think of thousands of children who had been violently denied their own existence. This protection and enjoyment of life and of art sketches and of hot dinners should be the norm for every child. It should be for Gaza’s children, too. They should have the freedom and confidence to flick an adult’s hand away while feasting on a meal of their choice.

Just the absurdity of the scene popped in that moment. I didn’t want to resent them, and I don’t (do I?). But my observation stayed with me. It’s larger than them, It’s the culture they’re in, and I’m in it too. Their child was so carelessly safe in her world, so well-fed. I’m sorry: I think I did resent it. After having seen how many endless streams of violently murdered, starved children. Just the sheer obliviousness startled me.

*

As I close out this big chapter in my German story, I can say the same thing about Egypt: my first trip there was also 50 years ago. Notice that there were fewer visits over the decades, that my Arabic language comprehension is slim compared to my German fluency. Note the decades it took to evolve my perspective on the Global South. I finally outgrew my Western-dominated way of being raised that never quite fit. It was my father’s wish that I be raised that way, yet he also couldn’t fully commit to it, that pool of elsewhere history always returning to lap at his ankles. It seems obvious that his life in Egypt influenced his way of seeing and being, even against his will. His westernized will. But I think he was the one who was most surprised to realize this.

How many times was my Egyptian-ness used against me by a person of whiteness, and did that linger in a way I have grown accustomed to, at my own expense? Did I play along for a few seconds too long, for decades?

Do I know how to be myself when I am always in multiple worlds, making me hard to see? I am flickering in and out of different dimensions. I feel like I bring an atmosphere of colorless southern California landscape with me even when I’m strolling through a green space in Berlin or Vienna, where I spent a few days. And I do so even when I’m thinking about Cairo. The particular cities in my genes have entrusted me with a responsibility, but I always find myself falling short, wishing I did a better job of holding space for these spaces, navigating them properly with finesse. Instead, I get lost in the labyrinth and drowned out by whatever is louder in the room.

I’m reading a Christa Wolf novel. She was East German. The novel was published in 2010, I think. Sometimes the books that resonate hurt more, and force me to slow down. It’s called City of Angels2. I’m reading it on my phone, so I highlight passages in different colors: yellow for general, green for bad German feelings, pink for my heartstrings being pulled. It was particularly relevant to read on the flight home. I was also reading a hardcopy of Permission by Elissa Altman, carefully folding corners of pages that felt sacred with exchange, soul work that connected to my current place in life. I wanted to easily find the pages again and again so I could revisit that feeling of wisdom and connection, maybe especially because I am not finding that connection in my human exchanges at all.

Permission is something I still (always) struggle with, even if last month I had breakthrough numbers for my newsletter.

So, Christa Wolf. An East German in Los Angeles in this particular book, City of Angels. In real life she had a Stasi file on her (which maybe happened a lot in East Germany), but she had also worked for the Stasi and had no recollection of it. Being an informant was somehow erased from her memory. I haven’t finished reading this novel yet, so I don’t know what happened. I’m just enjoying her writing, her descriptions of Los Angeles while also exploring memory, history and Germanness.

I collected some quotes that I’m going to drop here, hoping this isn’t too random. They’re relevant:

We were talking about the possible end of our civilization. But the bombs had not yet fallen on Baghdad then. The twin towers in New York had not yet been brought down….I only hope, I said, that there is no God and no Judgment Day, because he wouldn’t bless any of us fat contented heartless white people, unless he really was only our God. (Angels, page 116)

Wow.

It is resonant. And there’s more:

Every single one of our modern societies, based as they are on colonization, repression, and exploitation, has to block out certain parts of its history and deny as much of its present as possible too, in order to keep the self-assurance it needs to live. But one day it will all collapse, if we don't face reality, I said. (Angels, page 117)

She ain’t kidding.

Finally, the key to my puzzle here:

A word wandered through my head like a ghost, not for the first time: IRRGANG, "labyrinth" or "aberration," literally a "going astray." I thought that that would be a good title for a future piece of writing, it would fundamentally lead me in the right direction—no, force me in the right direction-and so then the question arose: Is that in fact where I want to go? Could I want that? The title fit too neatly: it remained a lonely title in search of its text. I knew it was there, that book, written in invisible ink in case it fell into the wrong hands. The writing would appear when held up to a special kind of light, I thought, it had to be not too bright and not too faint, but rather, and still I shied away from the word: Right. Fair. Just. One of those obsolete, discarded words, like boulders from prehistoric times that obstruct the smoothly flowing. (Angels, page 117)

Devastating.

This newsletter is my own nod to a lonely title in search of a text. A text that actually matches. But maybe, matching is overrated.

*

Let me back up and reiterate: I was concerned about the coming home portion of my trip. The end, when I’d have to deplane at LAX and go through customs. I had created a story in my head about it, as if there’d be a file there too, on me, similar to Christa Wolf’s in East Germany. So I went to Berlin, thinking about the imaginary file that would impede my reentry into the US. It was one of the main reasons I didn’t want to send out a newsletter while I was abroad.

I was mirroring Christa Wolf. I go to Berlin to process my memories, and her character in this novel was in Los Angeles processing hers, and we’re both narrating unreliably.

Like we’re both in a labyrinth.

Here’s the truth. Nothing happened when I came home. Maybe there’s a file, but nothing happened. It was simpler than it had ever been before. There was no line and I sailed through to the front. A young person in a uniform took my picture on an iPad-looking device, and asked if I had anything to declare. I said no, because I didn’t. And then I was welcomed home and waved through. It went so quickly, I think I almost asked the workers to make it more complicated. I said thank you and hurried to the luggage carousel. I felt both ridiculous and relieved. My legs began to sag from the 9 hours of time difference. And once my ride had me securely in gridlocked traffic on the 405 freeway, I surrendered to that smoggy familiarity, and only barely kept my eyes open for the long car ride home.

My grandfather and I speak to each other through monuments in Berlin that are down the street from each other.

Is there prophesy in a monument, especially when it’s sent from a grandfather to a granddaughter raised on another continent?

Time doesn’t only go in one direction. A lot of my time has been spent looking backwards. I bring more and more of the past into my present and future.

What was my grandfather’s message to me in his time capsule?

*

After the title and opening, it might surprise you that this essay involves a postcard that my grandfather Walter received in Germany in 1906, which I found decades later in California in 2022.

A postcard, of all things. They are supposed to be transient, temporary. Maybe I’ve even written about it here before. I think about it a lot.

This postcard is something my grandfather held in his hands when he was 15 years old. That’s 119 years ago now. My Egyptian father later held it in his hands and took it with him when he brought his young family to the United States.

This postcard kept traveling. It kept going and then hiding, traveling and hiding. For over a hundred years this postcard kept going. Sneaking on ships, crossing to other continents, making its way to California like a stowaway. It has had the longest fucking life of any postcard I’ve ever encountered. I admire its determination, and it makes me pay attention. What does the postcard want to tell me so badly?

It features an old photograph of the Siegesaüle. The Victory Column in Berlin. I always assumed it was a golden winged angel at the top, but it’s actually a bronze sculpture of the Roman goddess Victoria, or Nike. The deified personification of victory. Pink and blue and marzipan-colored clouds float behind her outstretched wings. At the base of the structure at street level are two enormous hats worn by two fine ladies in long skirts and pale blouses. I realize these people are placed in front of the structure to demonstrate scale. That’s how tall this thing really is. That’s how victorious this victory was.

I’ve been there before. But it all looked different when I saw it on this old postcard that, over a hundred years after its send date, said to me across the front, Grüss Aus Berlin.

On the back of the card was the beautiful handwriting of my grandfather’s friend, a calligraphic text in well ink and pen nib. It’s the kind of flowing lettering that is now mostly reserved for wedding invitations. Among other things, the sender asks my grandfather Walter: how are your parents?

I showed it to my mother in 2022, who’d had no idea she’d been living under the same roof as that postcard for her entire life, from childhood in Germany to grandmotherhood in California. This postcard was secretly there, inhabiting a corner of her world like a small spider living in a floorboard crack. Part of the surrounding plasma, a message waiting for someone to break the code.

“Ach! It’s to my father when he was a schoolboy in Halle.”

I already knew about the small city of Halle, about an hour outside of Berlin, because we once had property there long ago1. But I somehow never made the connection that my grandfather had been a young student in Halle. It is addressed to Walter at Frankesche Stiftung, a fancy boarding school back then. Walter’s parents wanted the best for their only child.

Finding this postcard felt like reading a Tarot card. I tried to piece together over a hundred years of history into a morsel the size of my palm. Because this wasn’t any ordinary postcard anymore. This was a time capsule, and I was in communication with my grandfather who had a message.

What was it?

I tried to imagine Walter receiving this card. Those were the Kaiser days in his country, and the well-born used a formality of addressing each other: “Hochwohlgeboren,” as the school friend wrote in the pretty script on the back of the card.

Oh my goodness, I suddenly realize: this postcard had to survive World War II. The hamstern fahren on top of trains to gather food, the walking to the brick lines and walking back home, saving any slice of bread for his daughters. Walter went through all of this while the postcard peacefully sat there in some drawer, waiting for 1966 so it could sail to America.

During the Second World War, some of his former school’s buildings were bombed in an air raid in 1945. And in 1946, during the Soviet occupation of East Germany, the school was closed and turned over to the Martin Luther University Halle-Winterberg. Later in the 1970s, part of the school was demolished. And after German reunification in 1990, the Francke Foundations were re-established and the buildings were renovated. These buildings have endured since the 1600s, through world wars and occupation and division.

This school has been on the German proposal list as a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1999.

Francke Foundations is still there. It’s a non-profit educational organization where thousands of people learn, teach, work and live.

This somehow shocks me. I assumed because of the beautiful handwriting on the postcard, this place had now vanished and turned to dust. But it’s a real place. It’s still there.

It’s so unrelatable, because the elementary/junior high school I attended in Southern California was built in the early 1970s and it has already been unceremoniously torn down. Single family homes were built in its place at least ten years ago, with starting prices at one million dollars. Nothing is made to last around here, except money.

In one sense his school offers a testament to durability, of course. My grandfather was an authority on durability, survival, memory and commemoration. He was sending this message to me in my disposable present-day society.

But what else had unwitting durability?

*

And why do I need my grandfather to be victorious? What do I get out of it?

Walter died when he was only 67, having just retired a couple years prior. My mother was maybe 21 at the time. I never even went to his gravestone until I was in my thirties. I remember the manicured ivy that had covered his plot like a perfect green blanket, a tree-covered slope right there where he rested. I talked to him in my head, trying to introduce myself but in a way that assumed he had been waiting for me, watching me, proud of me. I stood there at his headstone, its own little monument, trying to feel what it was like to have a grandfather.

I’m a bit suspicious of my impulse to glorify my grandfather. Where did this come from? Did I learn it from the larger culture around me?

I created a blameless figure, a man who was mostly good and never wrong when it really counted. What does that narrative serve me, what am I getting out of it? Some kind of comfort, a weighted blanket effect of having a grandfather with only heroic deeds to recount? I didn’t know him in real life. So, I get to mythologize him and make a pretty painting out of him. I create my own Victory Column out of him, or for him, complete with marzipan-colored clouds painted into the background. After all, obituaries don’t list toxic traits and cruel misdeeds. That’s the nature of the form. It’s a remembrance.

I feel like I’m sending bottled messages to the past, asking all of my ancestors: Look, can you see me? What would you say, what could you tell me? What is it that I need to know way over here at the edge of the Pacific Ocean with the sick sea lions and the eucalyptus trees that don’t belong here and the brown, burning hills.

I get to create a mythology of victory out of my grandfather, to tell myself a story that makes me feel something. Because just like my grandfather, the Victory Column survived WWII without much damage. It had been built to commemorate a victory in an earlier war.

Why are my grandfather and I symbolically on the same street, celebrating these alleged victories that are elusive and maybe even illusory, and are certainly not long-lasting? How long is victory supposed to last, anyway? For how long are we supposed to receive the same message without questioning its dull repetition?

These two landmarks my grandfather and I use to communicate with each other, are they warnings? Or at this point are they almost kitsch? They shape the environment and how we talk about it. But what if it’s mostly hot air?

And I say all this as a fan of ornate architectural monuments. But finally, I am feeling impatient with them, and even a little angry.

My Landmark, the Peace Gate

While Nike lives atop the Victory Column, Eirene the goddess of peace lives in that bronze quadriga atop the Brandenburg Gate. There’s a small temple near the gate with a statue of Mars, Roman god of war, putting his sword away. This was to symbolize an ending of war.2

The gate was built in 1788 and took a few years to complete. It marked the start of the yellow brick road, in a way: the road from Berlin to the former capital in Brandenburg back in those times.

I’ve been hovering around the Brandenburg Gate since I was a child when I played with my German post office set. Imagine kids of today being entertained with pieces of paper, with words? But I was enthralled and engaged. I liked filling out the little forms, feeling like a message was going to arrive somewhere.

Included in the post office set was a tiny play postcard of the Brandenburg Gate. I filled it out for my mother, writing on the back that I loved her. I signed it, and wrote my address as She is from America.

This is hilarious to me now. It feels prescient and perfect.

It’s funny how the Brandenburg Gate ended up being a theme in my life. It was a place I kept going to. In 1989 I was the family member who went to that area by the gate when the Berlin Wall fell, and I chipped at the wall to gather my keepsake pieces, and spent that first new year’s eve reveling in its new meaninglessness.

I assumed it was a clean break. It seemed like its own victory, at the time. I was smitten with reunification and all its party favors and fanfare.

Time capsules were built into these symbols on public display. But how do we interpret these symbols in 2025, when the western world has become the most grotesque caricature of itself, or perhaps its most obvious version of what it was built to be? All while claiming to be the grand savior of everything good and fair?

Was my grandfather warning me that monuments trap people into thinking they are safe when they are not?

These landmarks keep people compliant and inert. Things can’t be that bad if we still have our big eternal symbols. Lulling oneself to sleep with complacencies.

The social control behind monuments suggests to me there was a victory once, and you are encouraged to go glom your attention on those victory wings and soothe yourself into believing that the victory is, still, somehow yours. Even when it isn’t.

But also, there is a need to name a location and attach a memory. Something happened here. I mean, Germany knows it lost World War II. But were the bad guys really defeated?

How are your parents? Asked the sender of that old postcard. Maybe this is the question I need to keep in mind now, even though my parents are dead. What were their stories? What do I need to learn? Who were they battling? The future needs memory and story, especially in those times when memory and story are under threat of being erased.

*

I come from a family that communicates about war and place and time. We communicate with structures whose goal is to preserve memory and to commemorate. To persevere.

My grandfather’s time capsule becomes my time capsule. My grandfather and I are swatting it back and forth to each other now, angry tennis players with a hot potato, neither one of us wanting to hold it. We ask each other, have you figured out what to do yet? No? Don’t you have an answer yet? We’re stuck in a time loop.

Where I stand today, these two Berlin landmarks and their grandiose meanings have been hollowed out. Victory, like my elementary school, is disposable and impermanent. It’s more performance than reality. It is a costume.

I’m haunted on all sides: from the 50^th anniversary of the Vietnam War, my mother growing up in Nazi Germany and surviving the Battle of Berlin as a little girl, and then surviving in Berlin after May 8^th, V-E Day, 80 years ago today.

Here’s what I have learned since 2023, and I’m embarrassed I didn’t figure it out sooner:

The West will always choose war and profit over equality and peace.

*

Today is May 8^th. They’re gathered around the Brandenburg Gate to mark V-E Day 2025.

I saw on Instagram that words were projected underneath the quadriga. It just so happens to be the breathless first sentence of the German Constitution:

“The dignity of man is untouchable.”

There should be an asterisk and a footnote after that projection, but they didn’t offer any. The mayor of Berlin posted some stern words about antisemitism, and serenely moved on. Gaza somehow doesn’t count, because they aren’t considered human, and therefore don’t deserve any dignity or even bread. Germany is looking forward to a more militarized future, it seems. Their days of self-reflection are over.3

Just focus on the pretty opening sentence of their Constitution. That’s the assignment on a day like this, spending V-E Day gawking at a landmark such as the Brandenburger Tor. Don’t think too much, just accept the vacuous performance. The meaning of that sentence doesn’t actually apply to the real world. But ssshh, be quiet. Just let the propaganda seep into your bones. Let it lull you to sleep.

Lately, the word I say most often all day long is “motherfucker.”

I chalk it up to grief. The stage I’m in mostly lingers in the territory of anger, its sinewy arms pulling me in and keeping me there. Old grief, meet new grief. 2024 grief, meet 2025 grief.

*

The day before our mother died in January 2024, my sister and I went to the bird sanctuary.

It’s one of our favorite places in California where we grew up. She and I followed our favorite scents of shrub and wild grass, searched for quiet bunnies nibbling something on the side of the dirt trails, and watched hawks gaze out at the sun from their manmade perches. We wanted to be in nature, let it restore our spirits as we let our mother go.

It was unusual, but we spotted a dead egret that had maybe been killed by a mountain lion just before we got to the edge of the pond reeds. We backed away and headed towards an easier path. All the crows in the world seemed to descend on the trail with us, landing on a tree they must have called home.

It wasn’t just the last visit before our mother’s death. That was our last hike together in the sanctuary before my sister’s death, too.

We had no idea. Same with lunch at our favorite beach restaurant just prior to her return to the East Coast. The last hike, the last lunch. We didn’t know those were the last times we’d do those things in those familiar favorite places. I’m catching up now on the whole list of things that were the last time.

A few weeks after we had laid our mother to rest last year, my sister had been diagnosed with cancer. Neither one of us ever wanted to know her prognosis. I didn’t want it in my head.

Now, she’s gone. I’m the only one left.

I’m alone in my memories of what it was like to be us, our little half-German, half-Egyptian family of four growing up in California. We were camping out, far away from the other relatives on different continents. I remember our earnest nerdiness, our quietness in a county of show-offs. I learned eventually to become a show-off too, because my environment demanded it as a life skill. But I like my original quietness better.

*

It’s been just over a week since my sister’s death.

All of the language is wrong. When it comes to death and grieving, there is no language. Emotion can’t even come out anymore. It’s gotten stuck somewhere. I’ve already adapted, just like that. What choice do I have? On one level, the acceptance has to be immediate.

On another level, really meeting that acceptance face-to-face might take years. Do the experts and books warn how little I’ll feel for days? I never checked. I guess that’s the denial stage. Anger is the easiest feeling to access. The other layers of grieving take more game, more finesse and patience. Acceptance isn’t even interesting yet.

I mean, why should I accept something that doesn’t even feel possible? How is it real that my sister is gone?

*

There are notes I took in the build-up to losing her. They go like this:

Being the sister during a popular girl’s hospice

Planning to delete social media, go to Europe, and lose my only sister

[reverse that order, it turns out]

Her transformation

Sometimes I just watch her, fascinated. But tender. Always with empathy, love, grief, helplessness.

This is how we care for our dying, if we’re lucky. Yes, Gaza is always in the back of my mind, and not only because I have family there, and relatives who fled. If we’re lucky and have the luxury, we perch our dying beloveds in their comfy beds surrounded by flowers upon flowers sent from friends and loved ones, and we shower them with attention and devotion. We sing songs, read to them, and have cappuccino picnics on the bed with small bites of homemade hazelnut cake.

I lay in the bed next to my dying sister and draped an arm across her narrow frame, and just stayed there quietly, looking at the trees waving outside the window, savoring the silence before the next interruption, the next social call or medical visit.

We knew (or at least, I did) her hospice would be relatively short. A few weeks. She wondered what death would be like. I assured her I would continue talking to her. Because I really will.

Her face in the end was still hers, but somehow a different iteration, like an artistic interpretation of a myth. Her nose became sharper as she grew more gaunt. I became accustomed to the deep contours of her cheekbones, her neck, her skeleton. The day she got a haircut from a visiting hairdresser, I gave her a mirror to look at herself. She was surprised at her own reflection, disappointed that it didn’t match how she still felt in her spirit. How emaciated she was compared to her former self.

I was sleeping on an air mattress and living out of my suitcase for two weeks, making sure to store my dirty clothes in a small plastic bag that acted as my travel hamper.

I still could not comprehend what it would be like to lose her.

*

People still got our names confused.

I was chided for making a note of that. Even after she died, people still got our names confused, and I wanted them to do better but was rebuffed. How difficult of me to request that: treat us as individuals. Honor my sister by giving her the identity she built and earned and also, was simply born with.

As if people didn’t have to be accurate with us. Any few syllables will do? Oh, just slap on any old name.

I had to spend a lot of time with her friends. They were the authorities and I was the outsider, getting report cards and evaluations from them. “You’re so gentle and caring with her.” Surprised tone of voice. I guess I got an A+ that day. I was also informed when I was being ‘aggressive.’ I can’t even remember why. Was it because I wanted a cake at her memorial service? I backed out of the planning completely, and understood I have no place at that gathering. It is for her friends, not for me.

They were not accustomed to making space for me, and maybe wanted to keep me small, as manageable as possible. Yet people urged me to be comfortable, which felt like wanting me to perform comfort in order to make them feel better. This was the realization for me: I have always been in a family dynamic that asked me to perform and pretend, rather than actually feel comfortable.

I’ve been tending to my family’s well-being since childhood, when my parents’ emotional lives took priority. I pushed my feelings down and learned to arrange mine into palatable shapes so that I wouldn’t be too much. My parents had such limited capacity. Was it because they were new to the country? Was it because it was the 1970s?

After my sister had passed, I was talking with a friend of mine about my childhood and my family role that began long ago. And that now, I’m the only one in my nuclear family who is still alive.

“You know why, right?” my friend asked. She paused to apologize for what was coming. “You’re the survivor because you were the caregiver.”

*

But I didn’t tell you yet about my anger. Let me introduce you.

When a family death arrives, it brings realizations. I get a clearer picture of who my family was because of the things that remain for me to deal with. Responsibilities the now-deceased members didn’t take care of now fall onto me.

These things pop up just when a death is fresh, and hijack my ability to mourn. Yes, it’s partly that second stage of the grieving process, coming in after denial. But I felt angry that I can’t simply enjoy my memories of my sister and give her a good death. I felt anger at these leftover family responsibilities. Why didn’t my parents and even my sister take care of this stuff? It’s mostly bureaucratic and/or financial matters in their native countries. That means a lot of it is beyond my ability to repair. I’m rebuilding paper trails in three countries for the work my father, mother, and now my sister have left behind.

And it’s been six years since my father died. I’m still taking care of him. His taxes, his possessions, even his neckties and a few hats. I still have some of his clothes. Notes he took on astronomy and labeled the notebook cover “very interesting!” which still always makes me giggle. I still love looking at his handwriting. When I hold this notebook of his, I feel a wave of love for my dad.

So I’ve been the caregiver of my family since I was child, pushing my feelings down in order to meet the needs of others. That’s what my sister’s death drew out of me. There it was, so obvious, something I already knew but understood better, with more urgency. My sister’s death taught me that I value myself enough to finally fully appear. With my name and everything. I want to emerge and be present.

I want to live.

*

My sister’s death taught me about the importance of releasing a long-held family dynamic.

I am still learning how to do anger correctly, like learning how to fall down without injury: Land on your forearms, bend your arms. If you fall on your back, tuck your knees and chin. Don’t let your head hit the ground.

I can’t rescue and nurse all of my family’s mismanaged and neglected assets back to health. In fact, I don’t even want to give care to all of that. My life means more to me than taking on the burdens my family didn’t handle well. I’m going to be selective in what I still carry forth and tend to. Because my anger is teaching me that I don’t have to hold their problems anymore.

Of the list of inherited international problems, I will pick and choose what gets my attention.

I am willing to bear witness to the inventory of lost objects, ignored tax refunds and abandoned property in my family. I will take note: this was once ours, or could have been ours, had it been properly secured and cared for. Instead, it disappeared or will vanish shortly. I am here to witness the disappearing. And with that, I give my deceased family members the permission to have been careless with their assets. There are things they left to rot. I cannot summon it all back from the dead.

But I can document, curate.

Maybe I’m getting better at this, at handling the death of a family member, facing all of the connecting threads that come with each death. But nobody wants to be good at this.

First, I want to spend time with my memories of my beloved sister. I want to remember her well and often. She deserves that. I want to be tired of death, and hold myself with care and respect while I ache. I want to pretend that death is rare and far away, even though I know better.

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Someone has to teach me how to do the email headers and footers, because that is a whole other life skill….

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Books are my family’s love language. I kept much of my father’s library after his death, though I don’t understand many of the titles.

They deal mostly with science, optics, engineering and universe stuff, since he was an aerospace engineer: The First Three Minutes by Steven Weinberg, The Black Hole War by Leonard Susskind, Supersonic Flow & Shock Waves, a textbook published in 1948 by R. Courant and K.O. Friedrichs. There are too many to name. I love these books. They’re part of the wallpaper of my memories, seeing my father surrounded by volumes written for a highly specialized crowd. Having these books now keeps his spirit somehow present, alive and active.

I became more available to him after his death in 2019, after having spent much of my life harboring a secret harshness towards him. I finally wanted to love him, forgive him. I wanted to give him permission to be himself, flaws and all. So, I went to his books. But not just any book. It meant zeroing in on a vulnerable spot, one particular British volume.

The book I had to reach for? One obscure title that no one speaks of anymore: Tree Tops, by Jim Corbett. It’s just a slim 30-page volume, one illustrated essay. It is an ode to a tree and a queen, but it’s also a tell, and metaphorically, it’s about my father.

*

I had a long history with this book of his which was not like the others. Did I like the art on the cover, is that why I noticed it, always right there, tucked in a shelf facing out from my father’s study? Though I didn’t dare touch it as a child, I’d often wondered about it (Why does my dad have this?). I finally read Tree Tops after my dad’s death, as part of my grieving process.

Somewhere in these pages were hints of the world that was once my father’s, the memories he brought with him to California, and the person he used to be while living in a country that was run by yet another country. His memories, that I learned of only in snippets once I’d started asking him questions in my adulthood, were also layered into my California. His memories of Egypt were like fascia holding our bones together. There was plenty of physical evidence of Egypt in our library of artifacts: books, magazines, maps, photos, medallions and other memorabilia. Our index of Egyptian history was tucked into the various shelves and cupboards of our home, gathering thick dust in the garage. Objects that had been quietly transferred from one empire to another, one gentrification to another, one palm tree-lined street to another.

In Tree Tops, the author Jim Corbett “describes the scenes witnessed by Her Majesty the Queen (on her last day as Princess Elizabeth) and her husband during their visit to the famous hunting lodge [in 1952].” That’s from the book flap. The famous hunting lodge in question was Tree Tops itself, a treehouse lodge then located near Nyeri, Kenya.

Princess Elizabeth had been on an extensive goodwill trip. Corbett had been invited to accompany the princess and her husband Philip as part of the lodge’s team. It turned out, of course, that the night she spent up at Tree Tops was the same fateful night that her father, King George VI, had died. Her life changed dramatically up in that tree house lodge. This, Corbett’s last book, published by Oxford University Press in 1955, was his firsthand account of the events.

It sounds simple enough, but the book has some uncomfortable complications and connotations about colonialism, race, who is valued, and who is not.

In her final months, Queen Elizabeth seemed to have that same curvature to her spine that my father had, the same toothy smile that appeared almost too large for such a frail face. They were both born in 1926, two people of the same Greatest Generation. My father certainly had a lot of admiration and fascination for her, had collected magazine snippets and anniversary special editions about her.

But this book was about when she was young.

My father purchased this book at G.M.’s Bookshop on Mohamed Bey Farid Street in Cairo, probably in the 1950s. All three of the Corbett books that I have saved from my father’s things were purchased at the same bookshop in Cairo; there’s a small square sticker on the inside back cover, discreetly placed in the bottom corner. This slim book features illustrations by Raymond Sheppard of jungle animals in the margins: monkeys cling to sentences, elephants fling their trunks at paragraphs, birds peck at page corners. And there are drawings of the Tree Tops hunting lodge. In the writing, I had not guessed that what awaited inside was the term “jungle craft,” a pejorative that upset me, yet piqued my morbid curiosity at the same time.

It was 70 years of stealing Egypt, Dad always said of the British Occupation of Egypt. Yet that occupation was his home, too. My father grew up normalizing, yet critiquing, and ultimately internalizing Britishness unconsciously, as if through osmosis. He was attached to the colonizing power that exploited his native country, like a trauma bond. I wanted to set the scene of my father’s life and imagine the book in his younger hands. To me, processing the messages of this book was an important part of piecing together what I knew of his life, trying to understand what this story meant to him as a young man. When I read it and my father read it, did we see the same book?

Jim Corbett was a well-known naturalist and writer who practiced this poorly-named craft and apparently came up with it himself. He was a white British man with some casually racist tendencies that were the norm of that time, a man who navigated imperialist adventures successfully; I think that would be today’s translation of the term jungle craft. Jim Corbett was a hunter and a nature enthusiast, which meant that as a British man, he was often or always in India or Kenya. He was known to have killed tigers and leopards. He had a touch of the white savior complex, helping the poor in India, yet had a touch of the magician too, able to imitate animal sounds and read the forest like a sleuth. He was good at tracking, at adapting to wilderness environments. Only a white man could employ a term like jungle craft, and I apologize for repeating it. Because I’m relating it to my father, I’m bracketing my discomfort with a scientific detachment, and forgiveness. I want to call it something else, but what? After all, it was Corbett’s flaw, not mine, and I want to report on it. Who has the mobility, the power, the freedom? These places are what we call now the Global South. But as demonstrated in this book: who is given a name, a meal, a bed, and who is presumed dead? The jungle is for white men to flex their dominion over nature and lesser species and races. I presume that was the general line of thinking.

Princess Elizabeth went to Kenya with her husband in 1952. She received the news about her father’s sudden passing and thus became Queen while up in that tree. Later that year, the Mau Mau Uprising tore through Kenya, and two years after her visit, the Tree Tops Hotel was burned down. The final drawing in Corbett’s essay is a burned stump that was once the tree that housed the famed hunting lodge. The transformation that took place is stunning. In a way, the British Empire loved that tree to death and ultimately killed that tree. Maybe it was inevitable. Maybe the Kenyans hated what it represented, and the British were the last to find out. I’m only speculating. The essay ends, “From those ashes a new Tree Tops will arise, and from another balcony a new generation will view other birds and animals. But for those of us who knew the grand old tree and the friendly hut, Tree Tops has gone forever.” A new Treetops Hotel was recreated, but closed in 2021.

A strain of nostalgia tugs at me when I read Corbett’s final words, because I find myself conflating Tree Tops with my father, and that he is gone forever. I feel dizzy at how much the world has changed from my father’s youth to my own middle age, even how much it has changed in the last six years since his death. It’s as if his being alive had held the world together and now gravity itself has been unmoored, redefined in his absence.

Kenya is portrayed as a magnificent backdrop for the Very Important White British Notables of History, the true stars of the story. This book becomes desperately dated and yet profound in the same breath, a time capsule and a window and a wart, all in 30 pages. The breezy colonial imperial mindset. White royalty and ‘jungle craftsmen’ explaining Kenyan wildlife to one another while the Kenyans cook and serve in the background, offering supporting hospitality roles. There is even an “African Boy” character who fittingly doesn’t have a name, only a destitute character arc: Corbett reports with a British stiff upper lip that the African Boy was stolen soon after the royal visit, and it was never known if he became a terrorist or died (or, I suppose, both). Because what other options are there? Corbett didn’t assume that the lad had won a scholarship and went off to study medicine at some modestly prestigious school in England, no. That would only be for the proper white people, with royal-adjacency and main character energy. Like my father had.

I try to imagine the world from my father’s perspective at that time. In Tree Tops, I read about a British royal’s visit to my father’s continent, Africa. But what did Dad read into it?

*

Princess Elizabeth and her husband were up in a tree, k-i-s-s-i-n-g.

That old singsong taunt from my childhood echoes in my ears. I had never known about this treehouse before the Corbett book, never even really considered that Elizabeth II had once been a princess. She had mostly been two-dimensional to me which was entirely appropriate, as we had nothing to do with each other. Or? Perhaps the creeping effect of the British Empire had affected me after all. The country where I was born and raised and continue to live was once a British colony. My father and I have empire in common. We have empire as an elementary particle in common. Empire is our Higgs Boson, responsible for giving all our other particles their mass. But our roles in the structure of empire are wildly different.

In Corbett’s book, the two royals spent the night in the treehouse while Corbett stayed guard on a ladder, protecting the platform against lurking predators in the wild. The royals, meanwhile, had enjoyed their tea and dinner and breakfast, meals served by “African Boy” who later was stolen. Princess Elizabeth filmed the natural wildlife around her, took notes, was earnestly moved and interested and yet wrapped in a kind of bubble wrap, protected. And then in one instant, she was no longer protected from her inevitable future. The Princess had originally been scheduled to continue traveling to Australia. But after her father’s sudden death, she had to go back home immediately to begin her new role and take the throne.

I liken this story to my father’s Arabness. I imagine that’s how he read this slim volume: as a sort of prince in his own metaphorical tree, having tea and enjoying privileges, assuming whiteness and mingling freely amongst those in relatively high circles.

My father was, in other words, protected. He wasn’t exposed to his own native culture’s experiences the way someone else might have been, and he was also eager to flee whatever trap he saw in being brown. Because if you believe white narratives, it is a trap. My father was beyond being referred to as “Arab Boy” and being stolen. His uncle had been able to move from court-martial to pardon with apparent ease, and my bow-tie-clad father still attended his Ivy League graduate classes and local charity events that were covered in the local newspapers. He and his ilk were somehow spared the more graphic fates of other Egyptians, other classes, and the revolution largely took place without bothering them. That’s what I suspect, anyway. The truth is, no one in my family has ever said much about Nasser’s revolution, but maybe they figure I’m an American, so what would I know about that. But my father, in being spared, perhaps learned to dissociate himself from being Arab. He wanted to be British, and white.

Old black and white photos capture my father as a young man golfing in Egypt, looking like an actor in some aristocracy period piece. His trousers and shoes had those pleats and fine craftsmanship, his rested face gave off a Versailles air. One could probably decipher from just a glance at his confidence that his aunt had a butler. No wonder he had at least three Corbett books and loved them so much. They were his handbooks instructing him how to experience his environment. He internalized Corbett’s mindset and imperialist, pejorative craft, then applied it to his movement through the world. My father was metaphorically up in his own tree house with staff and provisions, taking film footage and notes of the goings-on down below, where the mere mortals dwelled.

*

I think one morning in the late 1980s over breakfast, my father held this Corbett book up. Or maybe I was curled up in front of the TV upstairs in the guest room. It was something like that; he and I were alone with the book and I didn’t want to be.

Most things about my father I resisted, because my own culture gave me subliminal cues to reject him and otherize him, and I didn’t want my culture to reject and otherize me as well. His name, his strictness, his taste in food and propensity towards wearing ties no matter what the occasion, all of it was different from most of the dads in my town, who were casual and mellower than mine.

There’s the irony that needs to be addressed: my father in my childhood passes sometimes, but not always, and often not enough. He is too intelligent and well-spoken and well-dressed. He is too interested in classical music and international foods and old books. It trickles down to me and how I act.

Maybe he stood in the kitchen doorway, holding the small book up. When his pronunciation landed on the double-T at the end of Corbett’s name, I heard my father’s Britishness again.

Mr. Corbett was a renowned naturalist and writer, I imagine him saying over his toast and marmalade, pausing for a sip of black coffee. I know I was indifferent to his suggestion. There was no way in God’s proper hell that I could continue to live in our white, sanitized, wealthy suburb and read this tiny book with a picture of a deer and a tree on the cover. This softer side of my father made me uncomfortable. I didn’t have any tools to handle my father shifting form. It had never occurred to me before to associate him with nature, with personal interests beyond golf. My father was always at work or going to work, making rules, wearing hard shoes.

Probably I’d mentioned a homework topic at some earlier point that made him think of his old book. But I was a teenager, desperately concerned with my hair and my sexual worth with boys. Even though I wasn’t allowed to date, and boys made it clear that I was ugly, I at least wanted to feel I could become dateable. My father, in his insatiable desire to participate in my education, was trying to share with me his love for this old book and how he saw it as relevant to me in that moment.

I only offered my father blank looks, overwhelmed with embarrassment. I remember watching the frustration rise in his face, from his cheekbones to his brow. My father at times seemed clearly annoyed, even disappointed that I was growing up American. And yet I had no other option. The feeling of helplessness immobilized me when I saw that reflected in his eyes. He was seeing the unintended consequences, and it wasn’t at all what he had hoped for. I wasn’t what he had hoped for.

In some sense, what little I know of Egypt is tailored around nostalgic remnants of an upper-class Egypt during British rule. I inherited scraps of memorabilia from a pre-revolutionary time, along with the stories and photographs and a meticulously mapped-out family tree. My father was too elite and too polite to explain to me in my childhood in Southern California that he was from a totally different upbringing and context, and that we were about to have some serious culture clashes simply because I couldn’t read his social cues that he knew from 1930s and 40s Cairo, before its own royals were exiled. And he couldn’t read mine that I learned from 1970s and 80s Southern California public school, where peer pressure and bullying were as common as dandelions in a grassy field.

My dad inhabited a completely different orbit from my sneakers and playgrounds and field trips to Dana Point tide pools. My ahistorical suburban world probably made no sense, compared to all of his historicity. And yet I know he was happy to raise me there, at least at first. My life was so pedestrian, so exposed to the elements compared to the high-profile realms of my father’s younger years. He didn’t see his privilege, at least not clearly. And he wasn’t interested in equality. Neither one of us had clear views of ourselves, or of each other.

As an act of love, I now want to take care of the slim publication with its illustrations and browning pages like it’s a small, ill houseplant. I want to receive the gesture I missed long ago and shield this book from the world, preserve it from decay, scrutiny, derision. A museum piece in my family archive, safe and protected. This outlier book in my father’s science library is my father’s love for me, and my love for him. We expressed our love through books, trees, and missed opportunities, our inability to see each other clearly.

His world didn’t know how to survive in mine, yet little pieces of it arrived anyway; slivers of proof, documentation of this other galaxy. Like the Tree Tops tree, it was gone forever. The Egypt my father came from had burned to a stump. It only remained in the family lore. My father’s country was like a fairy tale passed down from generation to generation about a princess who once climbed a tree in Africa, spent the night there filming animals, and descended the next day as queen.

But there was a layer of willful ignorance to his existence. Perhaps it was learned by his mother who preferred the white European language of French over Arabic. Their milieu was the layer of ministers around the royals who were exiled, not the revolutionaries who overthrew monarchy or occupation. My family members were the Arab people under British rule who wanted to pass and relished their distance from brownness; it was their class, after all. And I, eventually, was doing that too.

Behind the privilege of my father’s family and upbringing is a secret brand of racism that I am ashamed to acknowledge and discuss.

I know my father saw himself as a white man, a man with agency. He had all the markings of power that went with his upbringing: the education, career, mobility, ownership, and masculinity. My own life has been much browner than his, even though I grew up in the United States. I am accustomed to being overlooked, othered for my name. Maybe it’s because I grew up in this country that I see the marked difference between us. And of course, in the U.S. and larger western world there is a thick layer of racist bias against Arabs and Muslims.

More than once that I’ve heard Egyptians say Egyptians aren’t Arabs. But I think it’s euphemistic tiptoeing, a delicate, shy racism pretending to be polite. And that’s what makes it pernicious. This realization about my father was endemic: he was not the only man with this conflation of identity loyalty, or whiteness longings. The Arab world has become accustomed to losing its identity, its resources, and being forced to sell out. My father was one small part of that entire collective experience.

Just because he is gone doesn’t mean Egypt has left me; on the contrary, Egypt feels more present in my life than ever before. The memory of the smell of fire and sand in the Cairo air hits a secret heart valve I didn’t know I had, and I can feel my ancestry reaching out to me. But I also think of an old cliché saying: The sun never sets on the British Empire. It’s true in my father’s Egypt, and in the remnants that I still encounter. I still see and experience his country through his memories of British occupation, and the Ottoman trails and footsteps laid down before that. But I can’t speak my father’s native language. I only marginally participated in his religion. I had to, and still do, rely on extrasensory cues and intuitions when I navigate my father’s native world.

I miss his fierce pride in his family, his whole way of being which was a kind of joy. Not North American-style joy; he didn’t behave in any of those conscriptions. A deeper, more somber joy? So much of my father I’m only understanding now as I eulogize and analyze him in hindsight.

What is it called when a family is trying to understand itself, when being a daughter feels like stumbling in the dark? Is it medicine?

I am willing to admit my own guilt in the lopsided ways of our father-daughter universe. Our anecdotes are somehow folded into the pages of this old book of Corbett’s. These tree tops were once my father’s, but now they are mine.

Thank you for reading, and welcome new subscribers! I’m so grateful you’re here!

This is the longest post I have ever done, and it’s an essay I’ve worked on for a few years. There is an even longer version that I was going to send to paid subscribers! but I want to see if anyone can even get through this version first.

I might not post next weekend, as I have a family matter to attend to. I’ll get back to it as soon as I can.

Thank you again for being here!

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