Speaking Life from Genocide's Rubble

In Gaza, we’re watching Ferguson; and in Atlanta, we’re watching Jerusalem watching Minneapolis watching: their weapons and their training programs, indistinguishable. The word almost flickers for a nanosecond. Here I note the shelf life of self-censorship, legacy of our era. Some days poems are scrawled on pieces of cardboard and carried on our shoulders at the protest like martyrs. Here I should say something about hope. Here I should say something about living.

Excerpt from Lena Khalaf Tuffaha’s poem, “Letter to June Jordan in September”

In this reconstituted conversation, we—Devin George Atallah and Hugo ka Canham—reflect on how we might speak life from the ruins of genocide. These conversations are held together by a sociality of care for each other and for the genocidal zones of the world, which, for the purposes of this essay, are Namibia, where the first genocide of the twentieth century was carried out from 1903 to 1908, and Palestine, where the genocide is ongoing. We orient ourselves in ongoing conversation by reflecting on what our work, and the people we think, feel, and struggle alongside are invested in. By implication, we must also consider what we intend to divest from. Thus, although this piece focuses on Palestine and Namibia, this conversation seeks to honor all instances of genocide, spanning across nations and spacetime. That is, to surface life now in genocidal ruins, we attend to traces of life through opening ourselves to the demands made on us by the dead. In the folds of death, we find other planes of being—forms of life which defy settler time and genocidal violence.

ATALLAH: Brother Hugo, when you and I come together, across our contexts, we help each other see these genocidal currents differently. To see always requires interpretation. So, when we help each other see differently and deeply across colonial borders, to me, our conversations are acts of faith – they are something about living. Like Tuffaha reminds us in poem and lyric. Or what my ancestors, my partner, my children remind me – it’s something about love. But this feels so futile in the face of a genocide that so systemically starves and strives to eradicate the Palestinian People from our homelands.

There is no need for any more words. We must immediately and continually pour our energy into dismantling the genocidal powers of the people controlling the borders and blocking the life-saving supplies from reaching Gaza. Why work as decolonial scholars—as radical thinkers, as healers, as ‘psychologists’, as teachers, as learners, or whatever we call all that which we do in our disciplines or academic positions? Why do any of this if we do not know how to stop the US from sending Israel bombs that mutilate our bodies and lands? Why do any of this if we do not know how to feed our children when the food is right there, only a few meters away at the border crossing, but remains locked beyond at a distance so violent that millions of Palestinians are left to starve, waste away, and die? Not only are Palestinian lives being lost, but the Palestinian future itself is under attack. As Reem Zidah, a Palestinian woman in Gaza, said in an interview with Al-Jazeera, “We cannot think of our future, because somebody else is controlling it.” The future is a target of the colonizer, but it is also a weapon of liberation for the colonized (Atallah, 2025).

We begin in the heat of the moment—the absolute nightmare of genocide in Gaza—but our conversation on genocide has a prehistory. We have been in conversation about our respective scholar/activist work since 2016, when we first met at a conference in Santiago, Chile. On that first encounter on indigenous Mapuche land, through conversations with elders, we organised and gathered around linked, yet distinctive indigenous struggles and reflected on their resonances with other similarly situated geographies and peoples. This piece occurs against the backdrop of a decade of conversation. It is based on recorded fragments of conversations we held online: Atallah in the United States and Canham in South Africa (though conversations in Cape Town were held in person). We began to write up these reflections from our conversations in May 2025, just as U.S. President Trump hosted South African President Cyril Ramaphosa at the White House to show him image and video evidence of an alleged ongoing genocide against white people in South Africa. Together with the rest of the world, we watched the White House theatrics with astonishment as Trump insisted on constructing a white supremacist narrative that South Africa was committing a white genocide. Coming on the heels of South Africa’s petition of the International Court of Justice to compel Israel to end the genocide in Gaza, this claim of a white genocide in South Africa represents another attempt to muzzle solidarity with the people of Palestine. Talks of white genocide and increased trade tariffs against South Africa are about the reconsolidation of global whiteness and enabling genocide in Gaza. We speak together about the valuing and centering of white life at the same time that the genocides of thousands of people in the majority world are enabled. Even as we draw from the deep wells of Palestinian, Black, and Indigenous resources, our conversation is obscured by this shroud of whiteness. This is what Christina Sharpe (2016) has characterized as the weather of Black and Indigenous death; our conversation occurs in this charged and inclement weather.

Our transatlantic conversation is a form of pushing back against this genocidal tide by speaking life from genocidal ruins. However, the racist White House encounter makes plain that dissent against genocide is punished. Speaking back to the génocidaires is risky business. But in the context of rampant death, there are no alternatives.

ATALLAH: For me, watching Trump sit beside Ramaphosa in the White House, attempting to draw empathy from the world for the purported suffering of white farmers—settlers who are descendants of colonizers and who are remnants of the historical apartheid structure itself—was a profoundly revealing moment. I see Trump trying to explicitly voice and value white settler life in a demonic dialectic with his administration’s violence against Palestinian life, and his attacks against the value of Black and Brown life, queer life, and Indigenous life everywhere. Trump’s administration has stopped all U.S. aid to South Africa and the entire region, while welcoming white ‘farmers’ from South Africa to create a news story that uplifts the value of white settlers. He does this even as he protects and supports Israeli settler society in the most horrific genocide of the 21st century which is brutally colonizing Gaza and the West Bank in real time. In August 2025, Israel's security cabinet approved a plan to ‘capture’ all of Gaza completely. In the West Bank, where many of my paternal relatives reside, Jewish settlers and the Israeli army continue to kill and detain Palestinians daily. Our olive trees have been uprooted. Palestinian farmland has been burned and Palestinian farms confiscated. They have demolished our homes; displaced Palestinians by the tens of thousands; stolen our water; blocked and controlled our (in)ability to move—still. The Israeli government has enclosed our villages with more and more apartheid walls and fences.

Here in the USA, the administration is detaining, disappearing, and deporting Black and Brown immigrants in the thousands across the USA. We see new levels of community protests fighting back; resisting at all costs, the flood of ICE (United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency) agents into cities such as Minneapolis. At the same time, the Trump administration is increasing its pressure campaign against students and faculty in academic institutions as part of a government task force that uses the guise of addressing antisemitism as a way to enact anti-Palestinian racism and exert control over universities more broadly, in order to push conservative political agendas. A linked conservative political agenda, deluged with anti-Palestinian racism is a Trump administration vision of the future of Gaza post-genocide, which was leaked in August 2025 in Even now, at the beginning of 2026, it appears that in the second and third stages of the current ceasefire, the US and Israel are moving forward with seeking to implement what Driscoll (2025) has called their “genocide-to-gentrify sequence” plan.

CANHAM: We need each other, across these colonial borders, to defend the future of our peoples. When we come together across genocidal landscapes, whether it be through my work in Namibia or your work in Palestine, we offer each other a different way of reading our contexts. This connection helps us reach into long pasts and futures, allowing us to defend and remap the traces of life against horrifying deathscapes of injustice that seek our complete obliteration. This work requires us to divest from scholarly disciplines invested in our annihilation. To see myself, ourselves, and our ancestors in the fullness of their being, it is important to divest from epistemologies that unsee us, devalue us, and deny the systematic attack on our humanity across deep time.

Right now, as inadequate as our scholarship might be, I choose to divest from the maladies of whiteness and instead care for and witness Black and Indigenous lives in our brokenness and in search of our fullness. How do we read traces of life in the ruins? So, rather than focus on the theatrics of whiteness, I turn towards us. I hold onto Toni Morrison’s wise caution that the work of whiteness constitutes a distraction from our own work. Morrison and her peers in the Black-majority world wrote through the fire, and their work has outlived the violence. This work helps us make sense of present atrocities and those yet to come.

ATALLAH: Yes. And as we remap traces of life, we re-interpret the violence against us and our peoples, from the Southwest of Asia to the Southwest of Africa. It is a violence our people have faced for more than 100 years; an abuse of power that delights in the creation of checkpoints, prisons, policies, and walls— establishing edifices of order even as that power wages complete chaos and death beyond them. From where I stand, I see the longest ban on food, fuel, tents, medicines, water, and so many more of the most basic, vital emblems of living by the Jewish Israeli colonizers, since the start of the genocidal onslaught in October 2023. Recently, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) held hearings on the Zionists’ racist restrictions on the access of the UN and other international organizations to provide urgent aid to Palestinians in Gaza. As a local Head of Office for the UN aid coordination wing said:

Today people are not surviving in Gaza, those that aren't being killed with bombs and bullets are slowly dying... What we see around us is endless suffering under a total and complete blockade. A total closure that's now lasted for almost two months while airstrikes, ground operations are intensifying and displacement orders that are pushing people out of their homes are increasing

At every level of international organization and intervention, all influence and determination to stop the genocide unfolding against Palestinians right now has completely failed. Our collective and individual bodies cannot effectively fight the colonial ideologies that entrap us within the nightmare of genocide. It is killing us. We are not surviving. So much of my focus right now has been accompanying Palestinians from Gaza who have evacuated to Egypt, while gathering my own strength and determination to keep connecting within webs of healers and activists across borders, all of us focused on protecting Palestinian life wherever we can, even as we contend with the reality that we are all failing. The spiritual disease of colonialism feels to me like it is ending us all. We are in some kind of transnational hospice. We are dying with the world’s consent, which is breaking all standards on protecting life. We are dying by the standardization of Palestinian death.

CANHAM: Yes, and as you speak about the genocidal violence and racist normalization of Palestinian death, I’m feeling how death is a tricky subject. It can seem like a movement away from healing or life, especially in the ways the discipline of psychology has fetishized ‘order’ and ‘well-being’ as interwoven. Yet, we have seen countless examples of people acting ‘disorderly’ and putting themselves directly in harm’s way to preserve life, at the risk of death. So, their instinct is both. Life through death. A divestment from colonial life. This occurs when we are confronted by a genocidal State but also through individual agency. For my family to live, I will come out and answer the police, and I know for certain that I will be killed. But my family might live. Or, I will go and look for food when I know that the Zionist army is on the prowl for Palestinian men. So, death is also an investment in life.

Right now, as you speak of the genocide in Palestine, the land of your father’s people, I see your grief and rage as you try to contend with the impossible horror of the current moment. But I imagine, for example, in the Namibian genocide of 1903-1908, within the concentration camps, a grandmother may have placed herself in harm’s way, in place of her granddaughter, because rape was endemic. In these moments we observe a kind of movement towards death to preserve life. There are countless ways in which these forms of moving towards death to sustain life are evident in the unfolding genocide in Palestine. This is how people are martyred. And in death, martyrs live on in profound ways. Seen this way, death in pursuit of life, too, is a divestment from colonial and genocidal death.

ATALLAH: This is really powerful. And I'm having goosebumps, because I was just in a meeting—a group supervision for therapists working with Palestinians from Gaza. That space is confidential, so I can't go into details. But I can say that as our meeting ended, we each shared one word or one phrase that would express how we were feeling at the end of the meeting. My share was: “wishing for death, wishing for life.” That's what I said as my one phrase closing from that space yesterday afternoon. That was my reflection—what I was feeling. I was trying to connect to the people from Gaza, who I’ve served as a healer in my work with them over the past year. Some have shared with me how they wished for death, but I see this as something that is different from a clinical perspective on “suicide ideation.” It's not from a place of depression, or a place that any Eurocentric or Euro-American psychological perspective could understand. It's not something that you could psychologize.

It's as you talked about it just now. It's much more a divestment from a life that accepts this colonial order as the standard—death as a dreamscape or divestment from this world that accepts and tolerates genocide. A refusal of a white supremacist ethos that tries to indoctrinate or teach that “the ends justify the means,” or whatever other lies that colonizers tell themselves to rationalize what Palestinians should be dying for, living for, getting locked up for, or getting released and freed for. It is all a lie—a spiritual disease. We read it as such, and sometimes dream of evacuating from it all. You know, to divest from all that makes it seem as though their white supremacist power is capable of wielding life. That's what you and I have talked about in the past in terms of different kinds of “white magics” or illusions. Part of our healing is finding the vision to see right through these white magics. And that's why seeing and interpretation are so critical. This is one of the reasons why you and I, coming together across borders, apartheid walls, and genocidal grounds is so important. It's such a critical strategy of resistance for us to come together and to hear each other across these different technologies of colonial violence to be able to ask ourselves, you know, what is behind genocide?

We know that behind the trauma is another type of trauma. We know that what is behind the violence is just another form of violence. But behind the colonial death, is another form of death. It's not life. However, sometimes, when in acts of love, what's behind death is life. That's how I see some of the difference. Knowing the difference is so important. I am learning, through this moment, as a Palestinian healer, that when we equivocate violence, or universalize trauma, grief, or rage, we turn away from the critical teachings of decolonial love.

CANHAM: I think of our geographies of thought as embedded in indigenous knowledge—for you whether in Chile or Palestine or the US, and for me, in the African What indigenous grounding shows us is that life is not lived on a single plane. This single plane of modernity is a universalist plane whose philosophy is “where you're born, you die, and therefore those who wield the power of life and death, have the last say on the matter.” But in African cosmologies, the world has many planes which offer a reprieve from the violence of whiteness. This is connected to the idea of martyrdom, right? In moments of violence and death, someone might long for death, as you were suggesting, to commune with their families and communities who have died or been killed. So, this longing for death to live in a plane where the death-making of modernity—of a Trump-like figure (and there are many)—does not have the final say. He cannot touch you. And there's something powerful in that, because it refuses the terms of death and life that the powerful insist on.

The fascists use the idea of life lived on a single plane as the basis for border control, deportations, determining who belongs and who doesn't, the quality of life that people will have, and those that will die. These are the necropolitics of the State. But we know that there are other planes of life—those multiple sites of living after death, defy the given. This is the indigenous logic that we are taught on our ancestral grounds, which have been turned into genocidal grounds or demonic grounds, to use Katherine McKittrick’s concept. This respatialising of life and temporalities is a powerful form of divesting from the idea that we live in one flat world—horizontal, self-evident, and transparent. Following Édouard Glissant’s powerful exposition of errantry, relying on our opacity, we have learned to proliferate in the ruins of genocidal There we create different forms of relation grounded in love.

ATALLAH: That makes me think of Rifaat Al Alareer's work, a poet who was killed in Gaza. This book just came out. It's called, I think there's a way that his work asks similar questions. He says things like, “let's survive together, and then we can build together.” You know, there's a real clarity of understanding. He talks about seeing genocide as against everything. In genocide, you can't say you're working for life. The point of genocide is clearly to be working against everything. It's the opposite of the Black spiritual teaching: “Everything Is Everything.” Genocide is an attack of that very premise—it’s the idea that the colonial, the powerful behind the wall, is somehow beyond and above everything else. It is important to point out the intellectual lineage of Rifaat Al Alareer's thinking in his “If I must die” in relation to how it echoes Claude McKay’s Claude McKay's "If We Must Die," which was written in response to the These circuits of thought illuminate the long battle against empire’s deathmaking.

CANHAM: So, genocide is an investment in supremacy, of course, and in vanquishment, in mass scale extermination. And the refusals, big or small, that often play on the boundaries between life and death, at least on this plane, are clear refusals and divestments from genocide, and often it's ideology of white supremacy, and patriarchy. So here, death can be an important form of refusal against states like that, right? And I link this to the bones, the skeletons that litter the landscape of Namibia. These surfacings of bones beckon us to buried pasts. The skeletons that pop up in the landscape more than a century later, defy the silence and might be said to divest from silence. In places like Namibia, they provide evidence—inconvenient evidence in landscapes that have been turned into sites of pleasure and tourism, which refuse to reckon with what genocidal pasts require for real healing and justice to be lived. Maybe also, it can be understood as how the purportedly dead continue to act in the present in ways that defy that the death-life binary again.

ATALLAH: Wow, Hugo. I so appreciate your willingness to see deeply and to see what's right in front of us. And yet, the world continues with the silence, with the invisibilizing, right? And even our psychological terms and training are embedded in the very problems we are trying to transform towards healing and liberation. We're stuck in the psychological framing of pathologizing it, or looking at these bodies that are so-called “mentally ill,” or that are struggling with trauma. And that's where these kinds of ways of understanding, even the broader systemic violences, are so fraught. Part of our role is to contribute to divesting from the languages of psychology. I have even started to refuse the idea of the “unconscious-conscious” binary. And I think that's part of what I heard you saying in a previous conversation when you were talking about worlds that are not linear and worlds that are not on one single plane. I think middle class European men in the late 1800s created this idea of the “unconscious-conscious” binary, with the ego and the id and you know, psychoanalysis overall. But we can see and interpret that differently as indigenous peoples rising against colonial ideas. I see the basic premises in our field that we're trained to work with as, in some ways, relics of a colonial world that did not know how to see the multi-impacts of their own colonial violence littered across the world, and across their own families and souls.

CANHAM: Yeah, more personally I kind of moved away from psychology. I don't practice, and I have not for decades now. I struggle to identify as a psychologist. I was confronted very early on by a shadow between these worlds. When I go to my rural home, where the term psychology is not even understood, I have to jettison this world. I won't say it's irrelevant, but it's made redundant by the fact that there are no psychologists. So, it's not a frame of reference, and there are other ancient frames of reference that have been in place and have held people together for the longest time. I think people make meaning of their lives, and live in, ways that defy what we've inherited as the ideal, a form of well-being that is not constructed around those primary psychoanalytical frames that many indigenous people have told us repeatedly; they contradict our more complex lexicons for living. Indigenous terms of being are world-making and are the things that hold us together in times of distress or when we’re under attack. And, indigenous people have been under attack for centuries. So, if there's anyone who knows the stress and the trauma, or you know, whatever frame we use, it's them. And yet they, the survivors of it, despite all they’ve overcome, are told by psychology about their own problems in ways that perpetuate colonial harm. This is what I mean when I say we must consider divesting from disciplinary modes of seeing the world, including inadequate psychological ways of seeing the world. And you know, those we've worked with over the decades have shown us repeatedly that there are many coexisting worlds. In the context of genocide, be it in Palestine or the Namibian case, people have operated on registers that disrupt life-death binaries. The land remains. The colonizer makes claims on the land on behalf of those who were purportedly silenced. So, there's a temporality that refuses settlement and makes claims for life and value, even years later. And we can find parallels of this in Gaza, for example. How people make claims to life in the folds between death and life.

ATALLAH: Yes, and I think this is what people in Gaza taught us when they walked back to their neighborhoods in the initial moment of ceasefire in February 2025. People who were displaced to southern Gaza walked back to their homes in the north, returning in the hundreds of thousands to their destroyed homes. Returning to rubble. This process of returning to the remains or ruins of the land is a defiant insistence on rebuilding, you know, showing the world, teaching the world a lesson about the limits of colonial violence. Palestinians are investing in their love for life each and every day as they fight to remain in the ruins of the colonial world’s wreckage. Genocide is grounded on destruction; its speakers don’t know the language of growth, the language of rebuilding, or the language of life, that Palestinians in Gaza are teaching us right now. Their insistence to return, even in the face of genocide, means that there's a courage, a willingness, and a strength to contend with the depth of the loss. It's such an easy thing to say, but such an impossible feat. And we see the colonial world fighting back with the worst cruelty on earth: forced starvation. We can all see the people of Gaza suffering right now in concentration camp conditions, inflicted by Israel and its allies like the U.S., due to the starvation and the bombing and the lack of water and medical supplies, and so much more. Children are dying. The elderly are dying. The injured are dying, all in huge numbers from the famine. This is the evil that Palestinians in Gaza are facing, yet the evil is embedded right here in all of us and all the world, the type of evil that does nothing in the face of such horrific suffering. Palestinians in Gaza move with embodied love—saying, in a language of love: “We are surviving right now, and we're not going to leave. We returned to a landscape of ruins only to be met with forced starvation.” There's nowhere on Earth that looks like Gaza right now, you know? The world needs to show up right now—to show up for life. But we are stuck and feel powerless. With the little power I have, I strive to offer support to the people of Gaza. But I am the one who finds myself so supported and honored to have any intimacies with Palestinians from Gaza right now. It is such an honor. This kind of proximity to the expansive love that the people of Gaza are enacting right now, teaches me, I think, why we need, so urgently, to divest from white supremacy, from coloniality, and from genocidal curses. Right?

A world without love is a lifeless world. But love looks like the people of Gaza right now. If the colonial world is investing in (and putting billions and billions of dollars into) starving, bombing, exterminating, and pushing out the people of Gaza, this is a world that exists on a plane that we need to abolish and divest from. Immediately. Even in death and in its margins, there is life that is always there, depending on how you see, and from where you see, and with whom you see. Indigenous peoples have always had different forms of temporalities and spacialities that imagine life beyond the given parameters or terms set by the colonizer. The body inherently refuses these neat closures and boundaries. Together, we see the traces of life from Palestine to Southern Africa and beyond.

CANHAM: Exactly. This reminds me how Indigenous people in Namibia are returning to the sand to construct graves by gathering sand, as a kind of return to the remains, to the rubble—an insistent return which is underpinned, of course, by love. You know, in Namibia, the genocide ended in 1908, and then the Afrikaners took over in As an independent nation, Namibians officially found their voice only in 1990, almost 80 odd years after the genocide. In the landscape, memory making is a very recent phenomenon. Even some memorials are as recent as three years old. For example, Shark Island, where roughly 5000 people were killed from 1903 to about 1905, is a tourist camping site, and it is only recently that Indigenous descendants have contested the use of the space to honour the genocide of their ancestors. The first national genocide commemoration occurred this May. In 2025. Almost 120 years later. So, there's this strange temporality of trauma—distant and close. To insist on recognizing these deaths nearly a century later is a remarkable investment in memory, in Black life. It is a refusal to buy into the lie of time.

Namibia is compelling for its understanding of the temporalities of genocide. This is compounded by the fact that Namibia is one of the last places on the continent to be colonized, in part, because whenever ships would pass, all they saw was desert land; it didn't look like there was anything exploitable. In fact, most of the country’s northern shoreline is known as the Skeleton Coast. But the Germans eventually made their way inland in the late nineteenth century. Soon afterward, they realized that there were diamonds in the desert earth. And so the genocidal settling of the land was tied to the extraction of diamonds. Railways had to be built, and natives were imprisoned in concentration camps to build the infrastructure that would help settlers tame and exploit the land and subjugate the people.

And fast-forward a century, all kinds of other minerals eclipse the reckoning with the genocidal past. Namibia has uranium and diamonds, and oil was recently discovered offshore. So yes, the Namibian State can exploit that. But this exploitation brings all the other problems that follow dreams of wealth. For example, the oil that they've recently discovered will lead to expansion of the Lüderitz harbor. However, this harbor is on genocidal ground, where skeletons sometimes emerge. So, its development and expansion are a colonial dream. Exploitation of the land, water, and natural resources always desecrates Black Indigenous land, bodies, and dreams. The dreams that are prioritized are always bound up in development. They are racial capitalist dreams.

The emergence of the skeletons from beneath the desert sands reminds the world that white dreams are genocidal waking nightmares, and they continue to haunt us if we do not do our wake work: to resist, and to follow the traces of life back to love. And so, throughout the Namibian landscape, skeleton remains emerge to shoal—which is to say, to question and problematize temporalities of development, which are always bound up with willful forgetfulness, the bones of those killed in the genocide divest from genocidal silence.

Sickness is part of the reckoning. You know, I got terribly sick when I traveled to Namibia to conduct research on the genocide. My sickness was the all-night kind. I projectile vomited through the night, as though there was something that needed purging. And oh, what that does to the body afterwards—dehydrated and drained by genocidal histories. The dead tug on bodies that are open to being moved. Our bodies are open to being moved because this is the inheritance of Black indigenous bodies: to remark on the colonial deathscape which is our legacy. For us, there is no forgetting.

ATALLAH: What you are saying suggests that material spaces are powerful sites of memory. Your research practice is to go to the site of the genocidal pain. How sick you were when you were on the genocidal grounds of Swakopmund in Namibia. This is part of the work of accessing memory: entering the terror of the genocidal space, and thus feeling physically ill in the space of remembrance. This works against a kind of collective amnesia. In this space of forgetfulness, there’s a power of remembrance waiting to be accessed; it’s like a tension building up, one that can lead us to much needed healing.

CANHAM: What you're saying reminds me of the work of spirit mediums, who almost embody the trauma. There's a contortion of the body—a ventriloquizing of voice and spirit. But it can only happen when there's an openness to these histories. Some of us who don't have the luxury of turning away from the past are prone to this embodiment. Our histories implicate us intergenerationally.

The irony is that most tourists in Namibia are from Germany; there are direct flights. Germany enacted the twentieth century’s first genocide in Namibia. Germany officially withdrew from Namibia during the First World War, and the South African government governed the country as a colonial power from 1915 onward. Germans and the Afrikaaners from South Africa are everywhere in that country. Now, as tourists and as the wealthy settler class, they drive large, elevated vehicles across the desert dunes. These dunes also carry skeleton remains from the concentration camps of the genocide. And so the very historical violators continue to violate the landscape, which is also littered with the remains of the dead.

But I don't know that they feel what I am describing. I am affected physiologically by the deathly atmosphere, an atmosphere saturated by the remains of the dead. And I'm not even a direct descendant of the dead, although it's a neighboring country. So I can only imagine what it is like for the people who live there, in the impoverished ghettos of the desert. How their bodies respond to being in those spaces of death.

ATALLAH: So you were there, and you were feeling ill, and you were feeling connected to the continual impact of the violence that you refuse to forget. Your body was processing that, too. Your body was refusing to forget.

This reminds me of something that Dr. Yasser Abu-Jamei and I have been discussing. We published a piece together recently that seeks to rethink trauma as an intergenerational echo against a genocidal world, and in which our healing, as Palestinians, is a sound of our There's also something I feel from what you're saying that has to do with how colonial violence seems to try to arrest us, capture us, and control us at so many different levels. I resonate with this.

CANHAM: I'm curious about your work in Palestine. When you cross into Palestine, when you enter, what does it feel like? Of course, entering Palestine is different, in terms of temporality, because the genocide is ongoing. When you are in the physical space, in Palestine, how is your body implicated? Is it?

ATALLAH: I usually get sick. As soon as I pass through the Israeli borders, within a few hours of leaving the checkpoints, I often get sick. But it doesn’t feel like a big deal. The illness, in some ways, is protective—as it reminds me to stay attuned at multiple levels and dimensions: corporally, socially, spiritually and more.

The colonizer works so hard to lock us within spaces that are so spiritually and viscerally violent, in order to entrap us in zones of continual psychological torture. This, of course, is part of our work: to fight not only the present but our being walled into a lineage of perpetual loss. I need to be ready at all times to ward off such evil. Getting a fever is the body fighting off infection and building our immune system. There are so many ways that colonial violence gets through our skin and infects our soul. We must develop a thick skin and a strong internal immune system. There are such powerful sensorial violences to the actual colonial conquest itself—after all, that’s a central part of the settler’s plan: to not only erase us, but to infect us. Our healing responses also need to be sensorial, visceral, embodied. They must build our collective immunity against these infections of the soul. Palestinian healing on a daily basis is part of how we fight back.

CANHAM: This is interesting. We are suggesting that the physical landscape and the body—its folds and surfaces—are affected, and infected, by genocide. Colonial violence carries a toxic energy, perhaps traces of haunted lives. They are called upon by the past and the ongoingness of the genocide. The dead insist that the land and the body remember the trauma of those killed. They divest from the idea of lazy forgetfulness and white impunity. And as indigenous healers, as researchers, we are called on to actively witness. Our bodies and psyches are tugged upon by the dead. This work and way of being in the world is a form of deadly living where we take on undetonated energies from the ruins of genocide. And on behalf of those killed, our work divests from Indigenous and Black death. In some ways, then, this piece is a haunting on genocidal grounds. Like the skeletons on the Namib desert sometimes surface from their shallow graves, this piece is a surfacing of traces of life that refuse silence. The great march back into the rubble of Gaza in February 2025 is another instance of this refusal. This is a respatialization that insists the dead into spaces of life. Perhaps, a respatialization that hints at the different planes of being that exist somewhere between white hopes of Black and Indigenous death and life. Planes that refuse total vanquishment and genocidal temporalities and spacemaking. And if, decades from now, the two of us are not on hand to witness the bones of those killed in Gaza, the purportedly dead will find ways of speaking because if we have learned anything, the dead will make demands for a reckoning for things done.

ATALLAH: How can we protect our traces of life that the colonizer seeks to erase? What is my role and responsibility to do so as a diaspora Palestinian living in a moment of ongoing genocide and the consolidation of global colonial powers pushing full speed ahead to erase the Palestinian people or completely strip us of sovereignty and dignity in our lands, from the West Bank to Gaza and beyond? What, if any, are impactful ways of being right now towards our shared liberation? How do we do this alongside each other, across our lives and works, as Black and Palestinian scholars? Where do we go from here? Yes, as I say elsewhere with reference to Palestine, “future is a weapon”—it is an infrastructure of desire and healing always lurking in the But where do we point it in the present?

CANHAM: You raise burning questions. I think we will spend our lives attempting to answer them. A shorthand response to these layered and urgent questions is that the dead find us. They do not only do this so that they might be witnessed, but to challenge genocidal impunity and to halt more dying. And so, in my work, I seek to remain open to the dead so that I might be receptive to their communication and desires. I do not know that we can stop genocide through scholarship, but it is one prong in a multivocal effort across different actors. Sometimes it feels like screaming in the wind, but we are part of a front of people that are resisting in different ways. You and I come from a lineage of resisters. I think that our responsibility is to support those in the heat of the genocide and to chronicle this moment so that our work is on hand when others say they did not know. Devin, I know that in your distress, these sound like empty words. But we follow a global lineage of Black and Indigenous people who’ve been here before. How might our ancestral listening fortify us in this iteration of deathmaking?

ATALLAH: Yes. When we listen together, across our distance and our nearness, we can indeed say something about hope. As we learn from each other, from our ancestors, from our martyrs, and from our mirrors, we can even say something about living.