We wrote our track “Grievability” as Israel accelerated its genocide on Gaza. Though some amassed on the streets, or encamped in the cold, the numbers were too small, the police too violent and cruel. There wasn’t a sense that art could do anything. That we could scream and shout as much as we liked, and it wouldn’t change a damned thing.
So we used the track to remind ourselves not to let the sense of powerlessness give way to nihilism, nor allow the flood of mediated violence create minds that skip from crisis to crisis, each round that follows somehow erasing or eclipsing that which came before it; oversupply reducing the cost of murder to zero, at least to the perpetrators.
How? How can I move on? No-one move on.
bow down
get down on the ground
no–no–no–no targets left
shell of nihilism
protects me from falling apart
although I cannot see it, it exists
although I cannot touch it, it exists
although I cannot hear it, it exists
although I cannot feel it, it effects me,
it effects you
it effects me in a way that I barely perceive
and when i break, i break down and
cannot taste the food in my mouth
cannot sleep
cannot bare the images
behind my eyes
sleepless minds are an act of resistance
to the institutional demand to forget
they were there
their lives were there.
human screams drowned out by the facts
and is the attempt to do something
just another human being doing nothing? / just another human doing not being?
although I cannot feel it it effects me as a change
I don’t register it as a change, but it changes me
and the lack of the other
it lives in me the lack
and the silence of the lack it lives in me
and the silence of my inability to mourn
–its so subtle
that the silence of the lack, it lives in me
its sewn in me
i don’t recognize it as not me
i don’t register it as a change
but it changes me
and i’m already changed.
and although I cannot feel it, it exists
and although i cannot feel it, it effects me
Failure to mourn its built into the system
so turn the page
swipe left
swipe right
go to sleep
dream uneasily
wake up and it all starts again
how can i move on
no-one move on
how can i move on
no-one move on.
how can i move on
no-one, no-one move on.
who or what counts for life
i can grieve? can grieve
who or what counts for life
i can grieve?
“One way of posing the question of who “we” are in these times of war is by asking whose lives are considered valuable, whose lives are mourned, and whose lives are considered ungrievable. We might think of war as dividing populations into those who are grievable and those who are not. An ungrievable life is one that cannot be mourned because it has never lived, that is, it has never counted as a life at all. We can see the division of the globe into grievable and ungrievable lives from the perspective of those who wage war in order to defend the lives of certain communities, and to defend them against the lives of others—even if it means taking those latter lives.”—Judith Butler, Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable?