#102 Poetry and Grief: Jess Semaan
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Maurizio Benazzo: Good morning. Good afternoon. Good evening, wherever you are in the world. Maurizio here and Zaya. Welcome
Zaya Benazzo: everyone.
Maurizio Benazzo: We are talking to you from the Costa Miwok and South Pomo land, known also as Sebastopol, California. And we're super honored and happy to have you with us.
Zaya Benazzo: And our very special guest, Jess Semaan, do you want to introduce Jess
Maurizio Benazzo: quickly, a brief bio, then we can jump into it.
Zaya Benazzo: And it's so nice to see everyone again. We've been quiet for about two months after we released Where Olive Trees 21 days conversations on Palestine. And since then, our team has been immersed in doing lots of screenings. In two months, we did over 600 screenings all over the world with the film and Even last night we were screening it at the Al Jazeera Film Festival in Sarajevo where Ashira was there and basically the whole room became a chanting ground for healing and for free Palestine.
So it was very moving to see the videos. from the event and to carry that energy into our gathering today here with Jess.
Maurizio Benazzo: Yeah. And also in those 21 days. We also had to recover, at least in the last two months, we had to recover from the launch of the movie because it was an intense time, super intense time.
Those 21 days in a row that really took a toll on us and our team. So let's jump into this conversation with no further delay. Again, such a joy to have you. Here. Okay. Jesse Mann is a queer Lebanese poet, psychotherapist, group facilitator, and speaker. She researches, writes, and speaks on subjects of healing from complex trauma, immigration, war, and belonging.
Her first poetry book was Child of the Moon, her second, Your Therapist is Depressed Too. Love that. Jess currently facilitates student groups at both UC Berkeley, UC Santa Cruz, and her own. Jess identifies as Swana, and her grandparents are from Syria, Palestine, and Mount Lebanon. She resides in Holoneland, Oakland, California, with her partner Burke and their two cats.
Welcome welcome, Jess.
Jess Semaan: Yeah, I'm going to open with a poem that I've written a few months ago and and a Lebanese pianist reached out to me and created this music piece for it that will come in the background. Her name is Leila Milki. So yeah, whenever you're ready to play the music.
Let your grief for Gaza be the permanent ink of a soul that has not turned away, that will not turn away ever again.
Let Gaza in, let Gaza and the rest of Palestine and
Lebanon and Syria and the beautiful land of the Levant know. Let the land know that you are bearing witness. And that you will show up to testify for her farmers,
for her trees,
courts, in class, and in private, over and over.
Let Gaza open your eyes to the West Bank. to the Congo, to Yemen, to Artsakh. Let Gaza open the gate of memory and let Gaza send you searching for truth outside of the colonizers books.
Let Gaza in. Let Gaza allow you to imagine a different reality because the one we're in is not one of life. Imagine. To resist, to imagine, is unimaginable, and to imagine is our right.
Let Gaza be a remembrance of what resistance really is. That resistance is unwavering. That resistance is steadfast. That resistance is escalating. Let Gaza be steady and predictable as the sun rising every morning.
Let Gaza in if not for the world, for your younger self. Let your inner child know that you stand for what is right. Show them how to. Let them learn early on that our freedom is interconnected and our liberation is imminent. Let Gaza be the gaze of us. A steady gaze. The gaze that sees through the times.
that sees beyond the horror. Let Gaza in. Let Gaza be the last time and let Gaza be the last place and let Gaza be the real never again.
Zaya Benazzo: Yeah. Thank you, Jess. Maybe we will do another reading. Of it at the end because the piano was competing a little bit with your voice. So maybe we'll bring it. We tried to. I know Zoom didn't do this justice. Zoom doesn't like poly voices. It just likes one. Yeah,
Maurizio Benazzo: it's very linear. Very
Zaya Benazzo: monogamous. Yeah,
Maurizio Benazzo: very monogamous and linear, right?
Yeah.
Jess Semaan: I feel honored to be here and to be speaking about Palestine and Gaza and all of what is still going on. And there is something surreal about the fact that it's almost been a year.
Yeah.
Zaya Benazzo: And to say that we still, like I mentioned in our conversation, We're still receiving letter of people saying, how can you call this genocide? Just a year, close to a year of watching the atrocities, the massacres every day. And we still have to fight and assert to call this genocide. We still cannot see the truth straight in the eyes and name it for what it is.
This is. I think part of our collective grief that we're in this place.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Jess Semaan: No, I often think about what does it mean for some of us to admit that there is, that it is a genocide, like what is the cost of that for some people and and I was recently reading. The book, the it's about the Native American history of the United States.
I think that's what it's called. And and about, the genocide that has taken place here. That's probably one of the biggest in the Americas for us to be here and how much there was a reckoning with. If for some people who haven't really, I think reckoned with colonization and I call it like the spirit of colonization that can shatter everything that they know if they exceed what it is, what's happening in Palestine, they're going to have to see so much more.
And that might be devastating for the ego. And that's me trying to use my mind and psychology to make sense of people not caring.
Zaya Benazzo: We will go back to this question. But before we go into your research on genocide in more detail, I would just like to hear more about your journey of being born in Lebanon and with parents from Syria, Palestine, Mount Lebanon how was your upbringing and your early life informing you and influencing you your understanding of wars, conflicts and where you are today, if you can just share something about your own journey.
Jess Semaan: Yeah I often find that like being born in the end of the civil war and living through a lot of wars, that's what I knew to be reality, right? That's what I thought the world is so since I was a kid, I understood that there is violence. Yeah. Yeah. And I understood that there is sometimes no resolution for violence.
And so for me, it's internalizing since I was younger that humans can, are capable of destroying. And I would say the other thing. About growing up because there was multiple wars with Israel and also the occupation of the Syrian regime of Lebanon. And then they, the Syrian regime assassinating all of our leaders and roadside bombs.
And then there was the 2006 war was that the idea of there to be long term planning or things changing for the better also was not a part of my psyche, right? That didn't enter my. reality. In my mind, things just get worse. And and then also in a way that brought my inner child became very curious about why humans do the things that they do.
And I think this curiosity is what leads me in the work that I do right now. And also it's my survival. I would say my curiosity and intellectualization. Diving into books has been also a survival strategy from the intense trauma of living in constant fight or flight. And I would add that growing up also in Beirut, which is I have a lot, like a number of poems called Beirut is my mother and there is a lot of I feel like I was raised by Beirut, right?
The city. I'm the city too. The city is in me. The city birthed me, but I'm also the city here, living in Namer in the United States. I'm Beirut. And Beirut is very unpredictable, but she's also seductive. I'm And she knows how to party and have fun and knows that has the wisdom that tomorrow might not come.
Make the best out of it. So there was, it created this complexity in me of there is no safety. Humans are sometimes, most of us are not to be trusted, but also this life is precious pleasure. It's carnal, Beirut is carnal. So Yeah. And to basically maybe answer your question like, I've become my city in many ways and I carry it with me whenever I go, and it shaped me into this wanting to understand, but also being in my body and wanting to enjoy.
Zaya Benazzo: . And what I also hear is like not rushing to quick solutions and resolutions like you've been raised with that. notion that there might not be a solution in this lifetime, or this is a, an incredible lesson. Often we're given early in life, simple explanations and you didn't get that.
Yeah. And what would you say, are you touched on this bringing Beirut to America and like being In the place of war versus being a diaspora and watching genocide and wars happening from here. How would you describe that experience?
Jess Semaan: I hate to admit that, but there are days that I wish I was there and not here.
And the reason I say that because part of being here has been experiencing a different type of violence. Which is the unseen violence the violence disguised as silence as gaslighting, as apathy
being in a place where I am paying to destroy my homeland and, the homeland of my ancestors has been actually a big moral injury that yeah, I didn't expect I didn't understand that type of injury before that way.
Zaya Benazzo: From the lens of trauma is almost like when we are in a survival mode, we are mobilized and we are, we have some notion of agency, maybe.
And then when we are numb and when we are frozen this is what I'm hearing. It's almost being in diaspora could have that sense of frozenness, which
Jess Semaan: is a trauma response.
Yeah. And I would say that I think I, I feel that I am in a war zone here too, in a different way. And I think something about being at home and knowing that there is some sort of consensus reality felt safe in some strange way, although you might die from, a bomb or or you might not find the medication that you wanted because, you're You know, of the economic collapse that happened, but somehow the psychological warfare here and being living here has led me to the brink in a way that I've never experienced throughout all the wars that I've lived through in Lebanon, like psychologically.
It was destroying me like being afraid to speak up in my workplace, for example, or but luckily where I work at the Sage Institute, where we do ketamine therapy here in Berkeley, has been very supportive. But in previous workplaces I've been publicly canceled by a lot of my classmates. I went to Stanford for my grad school.
studies, there's that idea of being canceled not getting jobs and living in that fear of seeing a lot of my friends who are Palestinians just for saying that they're Palestinians being fired from their jobs like that injustice and not being able to do anything about it is very heavy, I, psyches and Yeah, the silencing just that bearing the injustice and then not being able to always speak about it or not knowing where and when is okay to speak to something that you said so obvious.
Zaya Benazzo: Yeah I just want to go back to your research on genocide and a little bit to what you said the genocide that has happened in this country for so long and how in human history we have not faced the genocides that Maybe you could speak about the genocide you have studied and not facing them how actually that might be part of perpetuating, not looking at the truth of what happened historically is also the same thing happening now that we're not allowed to look straight and speak straight to what's happening and how not grappling with the history might have led us to where we are today.
Jess Semaan: Yeah, I watched earlier this year, the killers of the flower moon. I don't know if any watched it and it's really long movie about and it's a, true depiction of what happened to the indigenous people, the Osage people by the white people. And the Osage people had power and money and the white people, the settle, the colonial, the colonizer worked for them, but how they destroyed them and killed them slowly and took their wealth and when I watched it, it was it like clicked in my head I'm like, that's the disease.
It's like that, the colonizer's mind. And in my work, my healing work. 'cause I'm like, where is that inside of me? Where is the colonizer inside of me? Where is the genocide part inside of me? Where is the part of me as a human that's sadistic, right? That will get joy. Looking at the, some of the videos from Gaza of the IDF soldiers, like enjoying or dedicating blowing up somebody's house to his daughter.
I never forget that video, whose birthday it was. Like, It's baffling, but also it is a human experience. A lot of searching into how is it that we are not confronting, yet, as a collective, our capacity to destroy, our capacity to enjoy destruction. How are we so split off from those shadow parts?
And for me, it is my work, right? It's my work to integrate those parts, right? Because if they are happening in a collective, they are in me. And A lot of what got me thinking is the banality of genocides and how many mass genocide, like there has been so many genocides, like I didn't, like I learned about the Congo and how King Leopold, killed over 12 million by starvation and by enslavement of the people there.
That was in the beginning of the 20th century. The Germans and the French supplied chemical technology to Saddam Hussein to kill the people, some of his people. So it's and that wasn't, again, a long time ago, that was after the Holocaust the ongoing genocide. So there is something that we are not looking at.
And it's harder for, I think, Americans to look at because what happens is that there A way that the system is designed around outsourcing the violence, right? So it's happening, like the word used, in the Middle East. Like it's these Arabs, these Muslims are savages. It's not happening here, right? It's not.
That, I think, plays into disconnecting from this reality that humans can be genocidal, and humans that are educated can be genocidal. Education seems to not be playing a role in it because, hey, you want to call us like Lebanese and Palestinians that we're like uneducated, whatever, sure, okay, call us like that and we're acting savage, great, because we're uneducated, but you Israelis are educated.
You have a ton of money, you have the best technology, and you're still committing genocide. Trauma trumps logic. We know that, right? You are becoming your oppressor, regardless of how much money you have, regardless of how much technology you have. You are your oppressor. We need to look in the mirror that we internalize our oppressors and there is an oppressor inside of us.
So for me to be like, victim, oppressor, no. You were a victim and now you're an oppressor and own it because this is part of the human experience.
Yeah.
Zaya Benazzo: Yeah. And so how do you understand from a psychological perspective, what is the mechanism for dehumanization? What is it that, and I love in your research, you, I don't love it, but you asked the question how does a middle class father of three children who likes going to concerts on the weekend is also the same man that That shoot two older women his grandmother's age in a church in cold blood.
What a human being, like what makes us so cruel and so blind to our own cruelty? Like how do you grapple with that human psyche, that part of the psyche?
Jess Semaan: Yeah, one of the research that, so there was a big understanding before I started, I've read over a hundred papers on genocides because it was my manic way of coping at the beginning of the, this reality that we're in.
And one of the things that surprised me is that for a long time, there was an understanding that like that man would go kill the two women because of dehumanization, right? Because he didn't see them as humans. So it's as if you, they were like two flies and you killed them. However, in the latest research, the biggest also research that they've done on dehumanization, and the leader of the research, his name is Taj Ray, I really recommend looking at his work.
And he he does a lot of research on violence and the research that they found is that people don't do this type of. Cruelty because of dehumanization. Actually, it's because of morality. So dehumanization allows us to ignore. So dehumanization say it's happening here in the United States where people are like, whatever, there is this possible genocide happening.
I'm paying for it, but I'm going to focus on voting for Kamala Harris. And there is a way where maybe unconsciously from the repetition of the information through the media and the news and Hollywood is that maybe I believe deep inside that like these Muslims are like, just Weirdos or monsters.
But the person who is doing the actual killing, like that man, is feeling good about it because it's moral. So he's seeing that I'm eliminating this human
because
he is bad, and I, that makes me good. So I think morality is a very interesting I think factor in enabling the cruelty.
Zaya Benazzo: Which comes from propaganda, this kind of morality.
Would you say that? Yeah. Yeah.
Maurizio Benazzo: And the dehumanization is the first step. Once they humanize you create good and evil, I'm the good, you're the evil.
Zaya Benazzo: And he justified with propaganda,
Maurizio Benazzo: which
Zaya Benazzo: is what happened in Nazi Germany. That's why, what was the film was so good that we see the life of the Nazi that goes home to his happy family and then the next day he gets up and goes to work.
Yeah. As if nothing happened. Yeah. Exactly. So that kind of split in the psyche and supported by propaganda, what I would say. Yeah. The zone of interest.
Jess Semaan: The Zone of Interest. The Zone of Interest. Yeah. That was a great movie. And I think it's literally, isn't it so powerful that you're watching this and you're like, it's actually happening?
I
know.
Yes. Yeah. Yeah. We, people can't see it.
Zaya Benazzo: And the filmmaker actually got an Oscar and he spoke about the genocide in Gaza. We big respect for him because he got cancelled. It's all repeating, all those stories keep cycling.
Jess Semaan: Yeah it's it's something that's not resolved, like we haven't resolved it yet.
And I think even sitting with the fact that we haven't figured it out is a very important part of the reckoning. I don't think we need to of course, at the beginning, we're like, let's pass a resolution and do this. And you know what? Nothing stopped it. And I think it got me really thinking, okay, maybe we are being called right now to sip and take this in, digest it.
So uncomfortable.
Not
Zaya Benazzo: to look away. Yeah. Which is where. Which is where healing is, right? We don't resolve it from where we sit with the discomfort. We are with it. We don't look away. We don't go for the easy fixes. This is part of the healing. And what I'm hearing you say, you're calling for that collectively to sit and be with it.
Of course, don't be passive viewers. Each of us can do so much. still from the place we are. But there's something about grappling with this reality that can is perhaps part of the healing. Yeah.
Jess Semaan: And sobering. I would say that there is a lot that has been highlighted by the current genocide around the power structures and around our limitations, like what we call democracy.
And I think it lifted whatever last veil was there.
Maurizio Benazzo: Yes. Yes.
Jess Semaan: I don't think there's any more veil. I think Palestine. Lifted the last veil.
Maurizio Benazzo: Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah. It's becoming so evident. The absurdity of what we call democracy, that has nothing to do with the word. Yeah.
Zaya Benazzo: It's. Do you want to share a poem before we continue to now conversation is too long.
Jess Semaan: Okay I'll read this one I'll read a couple of short ones and this one I wrote my, in the earlier times of the, it was in the fall in November and I was also going through my own issues with my mother. So there was the parallels of all of that and it's called, is it a massacre if it's a Palestinian.
Is it fall if the leaves haven't fallen? I watch an old Asian lady picking fallen leaves by hand, one by one. I watch my grandmother picking edges of fresh grape leaves, one by one. I watch my mother walking away from who once was her daughter. Is there anything that a war does not break? Is there anything that a war does not break?
My friend tells me I'm her only Arab friend. Does that make me a history teacher? Is it hard to spell Palestine? What truth lies between the letters of a word? What is a country but a hollow vessel? A desperate call for a rest. I fall as I sleepwalk looking for my mother's eyes. Looking for my mother's eyes to tell her, Mom, it was always the war.
It still is the war. The leaves fall, and I did not know of another season until the old Asian lady picked the fallen leaves one by one. Who picks the corpse in Gaza? Are the hands picking them gentle. I want to say sorry to a mother who confused daughter for war.
I recently did this powerful healing workshop with Linda Thai, who you've interviewed actually.
music: Yes.
Jess Semaan: Is wonderful. And it's called Psychodrama. And you replay maybe traumas from your childhood with the group and they played different roles in your family system. It's very powerful work, but the reason why I bring it up is because we were, first of all, the group that I was participated in was BIPOC.
And after doing, for three intense days, we're all doing our family structures, one after the other. And you start seeing that at the core. Of the interpersonal trauma of like your parents abusing you or neglecting you or, not attuning to you or not being present is the collective trauma of land dispossession, of colonization, and you see it like and it was so powerful to just watch it, it wasn't thinking, I was just watching how this person's abuse started because the parent had to leave their country as a refugee, you come here, they don't have support, they don't understand the system, they're stressed, but they become violent with their kid, and then you go into Western psychology that blames always the mother.
And then the father, but it's always the mother. And so I think there's something that I, in understanding that I've been having more for a while for my mother specifically, because although my mother was, in a way we had a very difficult relationship and there was abuse, but also my mother was kid of a civil war.
My mother escaped. her father's home and met my dad in the war and got married in two months. And she was 16. And then I think about that. And I'm like, Oh why was there a war? And why was there a civil war in Lebanon? And who decided to create Lebanon and divided us this way? It was, and what, how did the role of Israel play into who I am today as a too, not just Like from a war perspective, but how, so there is a way where in this poem, there is a connection with my mother wasn't talking to me for a while, part of it because, my queerness and other things but then it was so hard to not personalize it as my mother is abandoning me.
She doesn't love me. But also like my mother is the daughter of war. She knows when there is a conflict to cut people off because that's what you do in war. You literally cut people's bodies off. And so there is this, I think, understanding that I've been also metabolizing around what happens when you go and look for the source, the true source.
What do you find?
Zaya Benazzo: Yeah. And the collective and the individual, after all, are not separate. We can trace our traumas along our individual family lines, but that's limiting. Like seeing the larger landscape within which all of that occurs is what I hear you like your mother. Who she is was formed was shaped by war. So she has internalized the war instruments in her own being.
And that's, we all do that in our own ways. So having that larger understanding, it's part of our healing. I think that's what I'm, we're no longer. I've been through that process with my mother blaming her for all my life to arrive at the place that it's, that's what she knew because that was the environment she grew up in.
No, no compassion, no self care, no understanding for human needs. They didn't. Yeah. So beginning to see that vast territory of the psyche, I think is. It's very
Maurizio Benazzo: I'm thinking
Zaya Benazzo: Yeah.
Maurizio Benazzo: I'm thinking what Bayo says, that the couch is too small of a place to hold trauma and therapy. So it's just Therapy's
Zaya Benazzo: couch.
Therapy's
Maurizio Benazzo: couch is too small of a place. Really, it's the environment. It's the land. The land. The land, the water, what's happening around you. People being in terror all the time, knowing you're going to be killed every second. It's incredible. How can you then Heal your trauma, as a separate being from your community, from the people surrounding you, and not only your parents, everybody around you is
Zaya Benazzo: Yeah.
The notion that makes us turn away is where our it's the mechanism that perpetuates trauma. That thing in our collective psyche that is saying this is not a genocide is the very thing. That prevents us from beginning to heal.
Jess Semaan: Yeah. Yeah. I think there is something interesting about, I think, the American psyche around splitting, like simplifying, splitting and that complexity sometimes doesn't come as an inherent way of looking at the world.
I noticed, when I went to Stanford business school there was this class that was required at the beginning and it was called critical thinking. And I was like what I went to a school in Lebanon and I'm like, why are we learning critical thinking as like adults, and then why is it a required class? For people and I think I understood later that they're like critical thinking is not a given. In the culture here to question it's becoming more with the newer generation. And, but that like inherently being like if what is the, is what I'm reading in the New York times true, maybe it doesn't occur to a lot of people to question because questioning is also effort.
It's work. When. When you start questioning, good luck, you're going to go down the rabbit hole and it's a lot of work.
Maurizio Benazzo: Yeah. I was even thinking that critical thinking is a strange theory done by a professor from Finland in the 19, whatever. But in reality, critical thinking is just, thinking, ask about what I'm hearing, especially now with social media, we are also bombarded by bias.
But anyway, can you help us discuss the concept of bystanderism? Let's say, how Being a bystander and the impact has on conflict on our ability to accept atrocity was this relationship, 'cause I feel is one of the main maladies of, of this modern society in the west. This,
Jess Semaan: yeah. I, so by, so the one way to think about the roles of, of people during let's really, since we're talking about genocide is that there are three main roles, right? There is the perpetrator and there is the victim, and then there is the bystander. And the bystander are the one who give in a way, the green light. To the perpetrator to keep falling is 1 way to think about it.
And there was something to think about also that there we have a new concept of modern bystanders. So back, think about during the Armenian genocide. If you were living maybe in Finland, you didn't have, there was an internet, so you didn't know that maybe the Ottoman Empire was slaughtering the Armenians and starving them.
But what's happening now, I think, is a new reality, which we don't have, I think, a lot of understanding of, but it is that you, everybody is a bystander. You are. Yeah. Like you don't have a choice. You're a modern bystander. You're not like not in the know at all, which which I think that there was a grappling with that because I'm like, Oh, I can't be like, I haven't heard about the genocide.
I haven't seen photos. It's being broadcasted live. What are you going to do? So that's, I think, a new reality to, for us to sit with is that we are being asked to be bystanders for a lot of calamities and including for example, the fires in Brazil now. And I just found out about the air and now I'm participating in that.
I'm a bystander. So that's one thing, but I would say that Americans by default are bystanders in everything. Almost everything. And I just say not because it's malicious or anything, but if you think about it, most people in the United States have to struggle to get health insurance, like basic things.
People are in survival mode here. And that's something to keep in mind, like if you're in survival mode, how are you going to spend time. Caring or organizing for somebody else. I think that's one thing. It's I don't think a lot of people have capacity and I just want to name that this country is struggling in and of itself.
But the other thing to think about is that to move from a role of a bystander to, to like helping and supporting requires also a desire to. Like knowing that you can change things in your life or you can change things in the system. Now, also, a lot of people are bystanders because they have been taught that you cannot make change, right?
Even if I went to a protest, what does it mean? It's not going to change anything. So apathy, I would say that is that. And also and I would say the third big thing is that blind trust and authority. And so there is this Oh I'm sure that Joe Biden knows what he's doing.
They're the experts and they have the policy. And so I don't have to be involved. So deferring to authority also goes along the way of not taking responsibility for one's life and also fear of being canceled. As we know. A lot of people are being canceled for speaking up for Palestine.
So there's also that fear of I might not belong anymore in my group of origin. So these are many, there are so many ways and reasons to be a bystander. It's probably the easiest thing to do in many ways, but but bystanders, again, are the green light for the perpetrator to keep going.
So there is no perpetrator and victim without bystanders. We need to take that it's a triangle and it's no longer triangle if there are no bystanders.
Zaya Benazzo: And in the spiritual community, we also see this bystanders. The reason that is justified by. . There is a greater force that I trust and I'm just working here on my own awakening enlightenment. , and making a new, yeah. No. This is
Maurizio Benazzo: beautiful. 'cause it connect. Yeah.
Zaya Benazzo: Yeah, making a Because
Maurizio Benazzo: we connect to the individualism, right?
And the individualism that we have is me. And I remember arriving in the U. S., one of the things when I'm late, mid 80s, I arrived here, 5 percent of the Americans had a passport. I don't know now, 5%, including the military, which were probably 3 percent of them were military going around. So if you don't know, there is there is other people out there, but you have never had a relationship.
It's easy to remain a bystander for something that happened out there. So it's very insular. This country is very insular as individual and insular as a state and insular as a nation. And that brings all this But we're seeing the same
Zaya Benazzo: in Western Europe, it's maybe a more active, a little more active, but is the, Yeah, it's a
Jess Semaan: Yeah.
Maybe it's about a poem. I wanted to read it's pretty brief, but it's, but it's called Silence and maybe it speaks to that. Yeah. Okay. Silence, there is a genocide. A sale, a holiday sale, a one day holiday sale for everybody, 10 bodies, for everybody, a sale. Silence, there is a truth.
There is a truth no one will tell you, the truth is our blood is not for sale. Silence! There is a sale! 100 bodies for unlimited oil, 1, 000 bodies for I don't have capacity for this, 10, 000 bodies for more land to settle, 100, 000 bodies for small talk and yoga class uninterrupted, 1, 000, 000 bodies for never having to ask why.
Silence. There is a genocide and a sale. There is no genocide, only a sale. Only a sale and apathy and irony and cruelty.
Yeah. So that, that poem comes from that place of like when I had a close friend of mine and I wanted to talk to her about what was happening and she said, I don't have capacity for it. Genocide right now, but sorry. And I was a bit envious. It's I'm like, I wish I could go there.
No, I don't wish that's not my soul for,
Maurizio Benazzo: I have a French situation with this Jewish friend who tells me finally they're starting to shift a little bit. They start to see, Israeli friend, they start to see, they start to see, but now at one point they reach, it's too much for me. I cannot I have no space for this.
I have to take care of myself. Otherwise I have nightmares.
It's,
Zaya Benazzo: and talking about, that leads me to grief because grief and also I hate to bring that subject, but it's real Care, like how do we, for those of us who stay with it and who have been watching every day now for 12 months dead bodies and mothers carrying their babies and just atrocity after atrocity.
How do we, hold this? How do we break? How do we don't hold, we break. I burned out. I had a moment that I had to for a few days and I felt so guilty for a few days. I did not look and there was the guilt came through, these are layers and so complex of emotional landscape, but I had to.
take care because I knew I was becoming not functional anymore. I was really falling apart because, so some, if you can speak about your own process and your own journey in this and collective grief, how do we grieve together with what we're, scene, what we are part of.
Jess Semaan: I'll only speak from my personal experience because I don't know if I have global answers to that. I don't know who does, but I don't I think at the beginning I and a lot of people thought this was temporary. So there was a different kind of experience somatically for me towards a lot of action, writing, reading, going to protests, organizing, doing a healing circle, you name it.
I was so busy. And and as it was more and more ongoing I had I was going through a process of IVF with my partner and that fell through and, part of it is the. stress from what's happening, the genocide and how, and I was on my phone the whole time too. So I had to make the difficult decision of taking time off social media, right?
It wasn't ideal. It's not what I wanted, but also my body broke. And speaking of therapists, like my therapist said you have been through war also. So I was like your body is already primed for this like your PTSD is being reactivated. And I don't know what is the right way of handling what this reality is so overwhelming and new, also new, to have, to see so like a life televised.
Genocide and then pay taxes towards it. And, it's not like something that's happened as much before. So I took time off and then I started feeling the grief, but it was, and there was this one moment that I remember my, I went with my partner to buy the water and then we ran into this.
couple that was parking. We just talked to them to ask if we can park there. And they were an older than us couple, there's maybe 50s to 60s, 70s. And they and then, so we, I looked at the men and I was like, he looks like he's from my part of the world. And it turns out that he was Palestinian from Jerusalem, Christian.
And then the settlers took their home, so moved to Lebanon, and then was injured in the civil war in Lebanon, came to the U. S. And and he and so we ended up going having drinks with them, and there was a moment we were sitting, and I looked into his eyes, and we started talking a bit about Palestine, obviously and then I started crying,
and he was crying, and there was no words, there were no words, there was no words. They were just that reckoning that I see you, you see me. And I could see through his eyes the pain.
And so I find grief to be in those places lately of the unspoken, like I'm tired of explaining, I don't want to explain to you. So finding people who like just know and like semantically know what is going on. Yeah. And I think that it's also hard to grieve when it's still ongoing. It's like I just sometimes I'm like, please let it stop.
We want to grieve. And I think about the people in West Bank and Gaza and all of the people who have families in Palestine, like I think about how they probably don't have time to grieve. And I wonder if it's on us to grieve for them.
Yeah.
And the grief is also layered with the loss of innocence. And I think about that lately a lot, like the innocence that, oh, I could do something if there is injustice, or if we all go down to the streets, things can change, or that if there's enough information, people will stop the China, like people will won't let the, the government continue doing what they're doing and then there is that grief of oh no, the grief of the by watching bystanders, the grief of my trust in humanity, whatever trust I had built is gone. There is so many layers of grieving friendships. And community. How many people lost friends and community and family members like these, primary attachment figures how many people can't go home?
It's, they were so much degree.
So I ask for all of us to be so compassionate with ourselves. If you're being compassionate times, a hundred. We are suffering and we are asked to suffer. We are asked to suffer and bear this. So no, like it's a responsibility, but also we need each other through it. And I, we need to be together.
Like even me being here now is healing for me to be with y'all. We are not designed to grieve alone, too. And then the couch is very interesting, like the couch can't hold also all this grief. It's too heavy for the couch.
Zaya Benazzo: Nature can hold the grief. That's my medicine. Like when I go to nature and I weep and I cry and the creek and the trees and she can hold our grief and she listens and Yeah.
I was just in the redwoods and I was, I kept being reminded by the redwood trees that, those trunks of dead redwood trees, most of them are also wombs for the new trees coming out. So at the same time, you have that not being separate from life, like the dead tree is giving birth and nurture and nutrients to the new to the new tree.
So I was also reminded that, Life and that are not separate. They're not opposite. And so grieving with nature is also incredibly healing.
Jess Semaan: Yeah. Yeah. That reminder. Also,
Zaya Benazzo: do you have a poem on grief? You might want to share before we move to to get questions from our audience.
Jess Semaan: I just want to add that I have been also so humbled by the faith of the Palestinians, of the people from Gaza.
I'm so humbled by their faith and I have a lot to learn. We have a lot to learn from them, how they face death
and their trust. There is something around trusting beyond your life, trusting beyond this life that I'm in. There is a trust in the beyond, in that there is the beyond of freedom, that there is the beyond of the land being back. There is the beyond, and I will not be here for it, is the collapse of the Zionist project.
And that's the faith every day I want to learn, I want to integrate in myself, I want to take in as well. I'm like, y'all have a lot to teach me, you're my teachers. Yeah. Okay, so this poem, I wrote it for Bilal, who is a farmer. And he was killed by a settler in the West Bank. He's an olive tree farmer.
And I remember being at my friend's house watching Al Jazeera and like his story. And so I wrote this poem right after. It's called The Olives Won't Be Picked.
The olives won't be picked this season. This war, this war's season, this season's war. The olives won't be picked and the earth won't rest and the oil won't hit the shelf of the Arab grocery store. And I will search for Nablus's oil on the shelf and I will ask Ammo if it's coming and Ammo will mutter, not this season, not this war.
Ammo won't tell me Bilal woke up at sunrise to pick the olives. He won't tell me Bilal was watching over the olives since he was six. His eyes knowing from a glance their ripeness and their oil concentration, his big farmer's hands, knowing when they were ready and when they needed it. Just another day he won't tell me what was the settler wearing their Mor that morning besides his AK 47?
He won't know how loud Bilal Sun scream was. He won't know if Bilal dreamt the night before and he remember his dream. He won't know who his wife called to pick up his body. The olives are still not picked, not pressed, not cured, not packaged, not shipped, not transported, not stored, not priced, not sold, not tasted, not mixed.
Should Bilal have come another day? Could the olives have waited? Could the harvest have been delayed? Could the settlers have stayed in Brooklyn? Will the trees remember Bilal?
Actually there was another small poem that was written that it's very short, but it was so powerful and it was written by a Palestinian poet called Neshwen Derwish. It's called Who Remembers the Armenians? I remember them and I ride the nightmare bus with them each night. And my coffee this morning, I'm drinking it with them.
You murderer, who remembers you?
Zaya Benazzo: All of it. It doesn't, we're not resolving anything. We're not finding solutions here. We've just been having a permission to be human together. And thank you, Jess, for this invitation. Shall she
Maurizio Benazzo: read the poem?
Zaya Benazzo: Yes, absolutely.
Jess Semaan: Okay, so actually, I wanted to read this poem because since we're talking about resistance, it's called We Will Resist, I Insist.
We will resist, I insist. We will resist the killers of the flower blooms, the hunters of the flying doves, the thieves of childhood, the bullies of Tel Aviv. We will resist till our last breath. We will lose our jobs. Whatever we thought were friends will wither. We will write poems, papers, studies, research.
We will tell our people stories in all its details and glory. And we will resist. We will simplify our lives, we will question greed, and we will pray for strength when the despair is near. We will speak truth to power, and we will speak truth as our mother tongue. We will be canceled, we will be ghosted, we will be insulted, but we will never feel shame.
We will risk it all for our kin. We feel proud. We will resist. I insist.
Zaya Benazzo: Thank you. Thank you. Thank you, Jess. Thank you. Oh,
Jess Semaan: oh, everybody's notes are so sweet.
Zaya Benazzo: Thank you, everyone.
Thank you for being here with us. Thank you for creating the field in which we actually could share so much from us human hearts. And Jess, anything you want to tell people where to find you or how to follow up? I will
Jess Semaan: be, my Instagram is Jess. Samaan Y'all want to post it like I usually post there, but my poetry readings and I also work at Sage Integrative Health in Berkeley will also do on video therapy.
So if anybody's interested, we have sliding, we're sliding scale clinic. We offer ketamine and also regular therapy. And yeah, if you can just put my website and my Instagram and these are the ways to keep in touch. And I am so honored again that I was here today. This was so powerful for me too. And and I wish I could have spent more time with everybody here, but the limitation of time is real.
Thank you, Zaya Maurizio. Thank you, Jess.
Zaya Benazzo: Thank you, everyone. And blessings. Thanks.
Maurizio Benazzo: Ciao.
