These last few weeks I’ve been writing on love and becoming real and the kind of self-affirmation that makes love as “an ethics of otherness1” possible. I’ve been working with the idea of humility through the biblical tale of Joseph and the dream coat and thinking about how, as a writer situated at various intersections of privilege, there is a very real risk of fooling myself into thinking I’m doing more with my work than I am.
I barely read last week, but I did read The Apocalypse Letters which is an exchange between poet George Abraham and writer Sarah Aziza. In September, Abraham and Aziza began writing letters to each other on “their experience as Palestinians, writers, artists, and intellectuals.” In a letter to Abraham on the first of September, Aziza asked “and what, after all, can speech do for afflicted flesh?” Which is something I wonder about constantly.
For various reasons, I’ve spent a lot of time thinking through humility these last weeks and have come to imagine it’s about being responsive. In this way, humility may be an expression of love, which Abraham describes in one of their letters as “a compassionate reckoning with these un/knowables, instead of a failed empathy that claims to be all-knowing…”
Last week, I shared a bit about the story of Joseph and his “scarlet, crimson, maroon, yellow, green, royal blue, turquoise, and Tyrian purple2” dream coat. After being betrayed by his envious brothers, Joseph is bruised and bloody at the bottom of a cistern. With little room to move and no promise of survival, he does two things that come to me as surprising: he confronts himself, and he prays. Not for strength or resilience or even grace. But for humility.
I am coming to think that humility is what makes it possible to both hold onto ourselves and self-confront, so that we can change. I am writing to you, in the words of Palestinian-American performance artist and writer Fargo Tbakhi, “in English from within the imperial core in this moment of genocide.3” And while I hadn’t thought to pray for humility until maybe ten days ago when I heard Joseph had, I relate with Tbakhi’s warning that as writers we are at risk of believing “our words sharper than they turn out to be.”
In Notes on Craft: Writing in the Hour of Genocide, Tbakhi writes "We play with toy hammers and think we can break down concrete. We think a spoon is a saw.” If I am in fact fooling myself—not doing nearly as much as I could with my work, toward liberation—the ability to self-confront is what will let me to see otherwise. And if I pray for humility, I may be able to not only tolerate but respond to what’s revealed through that process.