Emergence/y
When does emergency give way to emergence and vice versa? And what role does each one have in a cycle of changemaking?
In fall 2023 we saw the emergence of a 'Holocaust imaginary', carefully cultivated to shape Israeli retribution and Islamophobia, giving way to the full-blown sacrificial offering of Palestinians (coded as Holocaust-prevention)—revealing, yet again, how crisis creeps up within and between the walls of colonial expansion / extraction, how the dam of so-called security cannot hold, how resistance to colonization (to being displaced, dehumanized, destroyed) always exists alongside colonization. In the 'carnival of white lies' a general rule-of-thumb is: whatever accusation someone hurls is the one they commit themselves.
Moments like these, caught in rhetorical whirlwinds and algorithmic whirlpools, it's easy to get swept up in self-defeating stories and lose your sense of direction. Especially when what moores you gets unmoored itself: like your sense of identity or place of belonging. So we've taken to listening to the trees and following those who know them best. Turns out our trees are libraries, groceries, pharmacies, and sanctuaries all in one. In times of emergency prompting migration, they can also be vehicles. Countering the 'Holocaust imaginary' could be the 'Keffiyeh imaginary'—a now-widespread recognition of resistance to and survival through oppression, encoding a people's relationship to land and water within its cloth. The core patterns of the keffiyeh are the fishnet and the olive leaf, honoring Palestinians' ancient connections to the seas and groves. The keffiyeh, like the fabric of so many colonized peoples, like the songs and dances that mix babble with blessings*, imparts a language of freedom only to those who would recognize it; whispers the past into existence so future generations can have a connection, defeating the colonial force at what it does first and foremost: erases. These are emergent seeds, floating above the flood, promising a return to land once the storm has passed and helping re-member us to what was lost. Like a razed city given as a child's name. Like a family's name inscribed across a child.
No doubt your ancestors breathed life into emergent seeds to promise your connected history today, like instructions buried deep underground to be recovered when needed most. What emergent seeds are you creating now? What recipe out of the rubble are you recording? And how?
We don't mean to romanticize disaster, however, we believe there's a place for crisis consciousness—the kind of collective awakening that can occur when overwhelming tragedy spills forth. Emergence is that groundswell, the slowcooking force of resistance / reclaiming that shows us what currents to take once the false nets of imperialism break open. Emergency is always there just under the surface in these settler-states of crises, and when the dam breaks (which it always does), we can notice which narratives are shoring it up and which ones are carrying us to shore.
