“Indeed, there is no life other than Israeli life that counts as life to be defended at all costs. And though we can count the number of Palestinian civilians and children dead, we cannot count them. We have to continue to count them again and again. We have to start to count them, as if we have never yet learned how to count. How and when does a population begin to count? What radical changes in matrix and frame allow for the breaking out of those numbers as the animated traces of so many lives? And under what condition to those numbers efface the trace of the living, and so fail to count? Under what conditions does the grievability become possible?”
Judith Butler Frames of War (introduction to the paperback, 2010)
part one of two: grievability
It is the 1st of March 2026 and I am waking up to these—what seem like boy’s—tweets on Truth Social from the President of the United States: “Iran just stated that they are going to hit very hard today, harder than they have ever been hit before. THEY BETTER NOT DO THAT, HOWEVER, BECAUSE IF THEY DO, WE WILL HIT THEM WITH A FORCE THAT HAS NEVER BEEN SEEN BEFORE!”
The military operations named “Epic Fury” (USA) and “Operation True Promise IV” (Iran) and “Operation Lion’s Roar” (Israel) make me feel like I am witnessing boys playing Battle Ship (with the stamp of the Boomer generation). If only it were just plastic pieces feeling the fury. It is not. It is horrific. I am not well, and I feel I am part of a collective mental illness.
The Funny White Progressive man on American TV points out how bombastic the title “Epic Fury” sounds. It does. His whole audience guffaws—those in studio and those millions watching—because, apparently, humour is available as an emotion. Grief—that young Iranian children were killed on the first day of the operation in an elementary school bombing—is somewhere there, perhaps, as an afterthought, but not suggested.
But these children’s lives are not “grievable” (to him, nor to the us/U.S. he is speaking to). I am not suggesting that the Funny Man might not go home and cry; that is different, that is private, that is not a Brand. He might. I am not suggesting that he is incapable of feeling sadness for humans who are not his own children. I am suggesting, as the idea of grievability does, that for the collective imagination, the intellectual project of the U.S. audience to whom the framing is directed – that those lives are not given the gravitas that would warrant a collective grieving process, a collective shutting down. The loss of those lives is a “tragic error of war”—not a reason to call to action.
One might ask, as Butler does, what would it take to collectively grieve? When is a life “grievable”? The answer is not objective. The answer, needless to say, is contextual to a collective, contextual even to a temporality. We sometimes—often even—grieve retrospectively, when it is “safe” or “politically convenient” to do so. Germany eventually grieved their Jews, one might say.
Yes, the question of which lives are grievable is answered differently depending on the collective we; depending on the when. Because we know, there is always a night when the Funny Man—whether in the United States, or somewhere else, stops laughing. There is always a night when he says something to the effect of—there are no jokes left to tell. Most of us have experienced that night in our own contexts.
One might justify the joking by pointing out that grieving is not what Funny Man is here to do. He is here to help us make it through the darkness. And indeed, dark humour is a useful device, used across time and space. But there’s no need for justification. The truth of the symptom of the illness (that these lives are not grievable to us / U.S.) runs deeper and creates the illness which it also signifies. Funny Man’s audience is given no framing for grief at all. I, as “lefty” U.S. citizen, am his audience. And the framing that I am constantly given, consistently encourages the illness—the distancing, the Othering, the Xenophobia, the racism, the White Supremacy, the entitlement. The lack of grievability of these lives.
The Funny Man is a figurehead of Americas Progressive Left, who apparently finds it gauche to believe in Trump’s “America First” policies. But everything about the Progressive Left’s behavior suggests that is precisely what they in fact do believe—American lives matter first, matter most. American lives are grievable beyond all others and have value above and beyond all others—even, despite Butler’s claim, above Isreali lives.
Needless to say, American life always trumps any other. On March 4th posts rain across leftist social media pages that read “no one wants to fight Iran for Israel.” A Marine Corps veteran, Brian McGinnis, was forcibly removed from a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing shouting “no one wants to fight for Isreal.” After all the weapons that have been sent, to hell with Israeli lives. Is this the best the Left can do?
The American Right appears on the surface less complicated. The justification changes, but they back this war. They believe in “Operation Epic Fury” and they back their leader with a doggish focus.
But the American Progressive Left—they seem primarily concerned with not taking accountability for their own culpability. It’s easy to claim that “we” wouldn’t be here without Trump, but they fail to mention congress’ never-ending support for enormous military budgets, sending billions of weapons to Israel under every president, Right and Left. They don’t stand behind the openly racist rhetoric of Donald Trump, but as they laugh along with Funny Man, they don’t seem interested in investigating the deep White Supremacy of grievability in and of itself.
On the March 1, 2026 episode of The Times podcast “the Daily”, reporters focus on the risks to the US, the homeland, or our allies in the West. Will there be boots on the ground in Iran, in Lebanon? Is Iran actually capable of building intercontinental ballistic missiles? Will Americans be threatened on American soil? Could Iranian missiles reach the United States? The listener’s world outlook is narrowed to the frame of the debate. Our whole sense of what to spend our tax dollars on, spins around the idea of an existential threat of survival. The anxious brain gets triggered.
Instead of asking, Why aren’t Iranian lives grievable? or Goddess forbid, How could the United States radically shift its foreign policy? the Left is, after covering their own ass, secondarily concerned with whether there is a “good enough” justification for this war. Will this be Good or Bad for the United States? Will the number of U.S. bodies taken (valued at far greater than any others) outweigh the “results”?
In Frames of War, Judith Butler wrote that “grievability is a presupposition for the life that matters.” The grievable life, a life that matters, is a necropolitics that is worn or broadcast by a Nation, borne out through the subtle and not so subtle wording of its media. The grievable life is one that benefits from White Supremacy. It is the one the Nation will go to war for. It is the loss that the Nation must make a performance of and about. Sometimes it is the performance of mourning, but then it is soon a horrific performance of war, of retribution. In this case the Left asks, for what is this performance? But it doesn’t ask why.
Those lives affected by this military operation—whether Israeli, Lebanese, Iranian, one might even fail to mention Palestinian—are not grievable to the American psyche, Right or Left; not grievable to the Nationalist project.
Yet whether politically grievable or not — every life lost is being grieved, is being mourned, in real time, by real humans. We may attempt to shield their eyes, but from the vantage point of the West, we see the mourning on our screens, if not in our personal networks. We know and see and feel the mourning. What would it take for us collectively to embody, to truly take on and share, that depth of mourning?
To those who would want to disassociate, to those who would want to “declutter” their minds and create distance — is it too much to ask that we summon acts of sociological imagination, that we reckon with why some lives have been deemed less grievable than others? Should we not be looking squarely at the racism that could even create the conditions for some lives to “be” more grievable than others?
Is it possible to hold aliveness shapes in our hearts — vague, but present, insisting on their space there? Perhaps these losses cannot be grieved through tears alone, but through an absolute commitment never to let those losses happen again.
part two of two: aliveness
I first started thinking about a thing I called aliveness in the mid 2000s and it had everything to do with the corresponding digital transition we were living through. Aliveness, as I started to conceive it, was not about the extent to which I felt “alive,” but the extent to which another thing or person felt alive to me—which both did and did not have to do with whether or not they were actually alive. I was old enough to experience the deaths of people who I had shared significant enough time and depth with in life. Simultaneously I was experiencing a new kind of contemporary—one in which digitality was creating a particular way of understanding death and life that I had not experienced before. This juxtaposition of the live and unalive ghosts I saw on my screen created the experience of doubtful slipperiness between presence and absence, death and life, reachability, access.
We always say in my family: we have had a lot of deaths. And we habitually calculate what my aunts’ call, “Death Math”. Death math is the sudden thought that crosses our mind that is something like: “Wow, I’m now the age my mother was when she died”—followed by a projection of what they might have been feeling at the time. It is the aliveness of a theoretical lifespan.
Death experiences started young: great-grandparents, grandparents. Cancers, Strokes, Heart-attacks. Then there were deaths in my social proximity; one in my teen years—the younger sister of another teenager; the mother of a fellow teen; and then, in my early twenties, the devastating death of my gregarious and brilliant uncle. And then, my best friend’s mother, a person whom I considered a friend. Then, my father. My lesbian aunt, the one I had first come out to. In my thirties, forties, an increasing amount came from acquaintances. Friends. Dear, dear friends. Cancer. Drugs. Mental Health related Suicides.
And all during my life, of course, people have died and were dying whom I didn’t know at all. People I read about in the news. People who were murdered by the country that I was born in and held a passport for. The Vietnam War had just ended the year before I was born (1979). And since that year, the United States has been militarily involved in Iran (1980), Lebanon (1982–1984), Grenada (1983), Libya (1986), Panama (1989), Iraq in the Gulf War (1991), Somalia (1993), Haiti (1994), Bosnia (1994–1995), Kosovo (1999), Afghanistan (2001–2021), Iraq again (2003–2011, and again 2014–present), Libya (2011), Syria (2014–present), and Yemen (ongoing). Alongside these direct interventions, the US was simultaneously funding and arming proxy and covert wars in Afghanistan against the Soviets (1979–1989), Nicaragua through the Contras (1980s), El Salvador (1980s), Angola (1980s), and backing Saddam Hussein during the Iran-Iraq War (1980s) — and most recently providing weapons and diplomatic cover to Israel throughout the genocide in Gaza (2023–present). Presently, as I write this, seven days into a war on Iran.
There has not been a single year of my life in which the United States was not at war somewhere. Not a single year without deaths to which my life was connected, whether through my privilege of experiencing the absence of war at my doorstep, or though my privilege to travel, or through my tax dollars fundings these wars.
Sometimes, I just felt dead, unable to understand how it could be possible that I would open the news to destruction and no one with power had a vested interest in ending it. Sometimes, often, I felt rage, and the rage would take me to the streets. Sometimes, not always, I would cry, opening the newspaper, opening my phone. Iraq. Kosovo. Afghanistan. Palestine.
Yet this ability to feel signaled that, despite not knowing “these people I read about in the news,” they were alive to me, somehow, had aliveness. That they died at the hand of my government impacted me and left in me a hole. What would I do with this hole?
There was also the aliveness of something connected and equally sinister, which was the ongoing culture of rape in which I had been grown. I could “feel” that women and feminized people were being raped and molested all around me, all the time. I knew because I had experienced it, and I knew because my friends had experienced it, and this knowing also made me know that others who I didn’t knew were experiencing it. I knew because islands and available girls and women and rich men and secret parties were all the myths of songs and books and videos and films and lyrics. We knew, we always knew, that this rape culture was not just the stuff of dark fantasy. We knew because the names of the missiles that were used to kill and maim people that the United States didn’t find worthy of life were named with the names that good old boys would reference when referring to taming an animal or raping a woman. And all of that was the language of patriarchy. And this language of war, this language of rape, this aliveness of that knowledge, was sinister because no matter how much one spoke about it, like rape, like war, no one heard us and nothing changed.
And this aliveness has lived in me in a dead and silenced shape. It is the aliveness of that knowledge that I have never been able to heal from, to forget, to contend with, or to integrate. In part because I refuse to.
As the world grew more digital throughout the first decades of the 21st century, the reportage of deaths (and, eventually, as well, the rapes) became increasingly accessible. Proximity to information on our hand-held screens multiplied ten fold with a disorienting and inundating aliveness. The shapes of aliveness were increasingly there, on our screens – but were they feel-able, mournable? Were they, as Judith Butler called them, “grievable”? Would they call us into action?
It was my father’s passing in 2009 that struck in me a grief so deep that it stopped time. I couldn’t seem to understand how I had spent so many days of my life not communicating with him, so many missed opportunities of reaching out. I realized that although he had been alive, there were years in which his life was not alive enough to me to call me to action. There were many years of his life in which I felt alone and distant from him. I thought about him so much more on the daily since his sickness, since his death, than I had for many years leading up to that point. How could I explain this or contend with this as I grieved? My father’s aliveness grew.
And Aliveness, to me, as an idea, as an experience, metastasized.
A waitress I had once known, waited tables with, laughed with, complained with—committed suicide—but not until long after I left the job. I hadn’t heard from her in years, so in a sense she was not very alive to me, and in a sense her death was only a further deadness that had already existed. And yet she remained a shape in my life experience and an eerie vacant placeholder in Facebook.
Another waitress friend—I remember the sight of her crumpling into that kind of mess that must continue to host and be presentable and go on working—at the sudden news of the passing of an ex-boyfriend whom she hadn’t spoken to in years. I will never forget the look on her face behind the cash register as she read the news off her cellular phone—a thing I didn’t yet have. It marked a new period in history, where suddenly news would criss-cross our work lives with regularity, calling us into private wormholes of distant mourning, creating emotional juxtapositions between the laboring body and the emotional one. This was different from the public knowledge of events we could experience together through community stories and rumors carried on lips. This was the invasion of privately crushing events that we were forced to experience within our public lives. There were beginning to be loops and gaps and ghosts in our communications—the Dead that were living on in digital space, the Alive that were long since dead, and the sudden digital appearance of those that we thought were ghosts could occur at any moment.
I was living in an apartment in San Francisco at the time and the man at the top floor flat hung himself. I didn’t remember ever seeing him, meeting him; I couldn’t say what he looked like. But after he died the landlord threw all of his things—the entire contents of his apartment, personal belongings and furniture and eventually even beams and woodwork—out of the window into the backward, creating an enormous rubble monument that came up above the windows of our kitchen on the ground floor. Rubble which I would actually climb on; his imprint made tangible, voluminous. Still, walking on it—I didn’t exactly feel anything I could describe as grief. How could I? And yet also: there was sadness, disassociation, the weight of a life lived—a life that could not, would not, simply disappear from consciousness.
These alienating experiences have only multiplied over the course of my lifetime as death becomes more commonplace in both my relative proximity and the blast radius of my digital proximity. As this radius is filled with increasing reminders of just how many people die or are murdered every day, some of whom I knew and loved, some of whom I don’t, I am walking on a pile of rubble that I cannot excavate or understand.
Every day in my Instagram messages I receive an update of exactly how many people have been killed in communities under military attack across the SWANA region and in which cities and by whom. Yet this knowledge of their deaths, this increased knowledge, does not make those lives more grievable to the American project, the European project, the White Supremacist project. And to me, as an individual, I too feel blocked, numbed, sometimes even disaffected. And sometimes, without the sense that we have all stopped, I look around and wonder—what do people do with all this absence? With the aliveness of the knowledge of the absence? Or do they not feel it?
If pre-digitality were a kind of convenient ignorance to the network of alive bodies, our current condition presents the network with what masquerades as a crystal clarity on truth as it is. The numbers are there. The bodies are counted. And yet—the performance of digital accuracy may cover more than it reveals. As we rely increasingly on quantum tools to present all the facts, we also see these tools’ failures and we see the lacks, the spaces, the silences. These are precisely the spaces that we have to remember the alivenesses that we felt, that we knew were there, before we ever knew.
We have to remember that the lacks exist. We have to remember that the fact of not seeing the lack makes it more powerful and insidious and dangerous. We have to hold on to the idea of the silence, the idea of lives that were lived and not counted. That lives are there, important, loved, known. And taken.
Sometimes, in speaking about Love, people like to say, there is always more room to love, like some kind of paradoxical principle that the space to love could be infinitely capacious, despite the finitude of time. This could be true. And what if, like love, the space to mourn were also infinite? Could you always mourn more, make more space for mourning? But what, indeed, about time? What about time to actually shed tears, to actually come together and to pay attention to the life that once was? Or, in the case of love, what about the time to actually love someone the way they want to be loved, with care, with attention?
What if rather, our space to love and to mourn is finite, but extremely large, so large that it encompasses all the sentient bodies in the world? What if our emotional centers are largely unused, and the dark parts are our inability to mourn and this is not a question of time but a question of emotional capacity? Do we simply need to fire up our neurons, expand our neural capacity?
Would we burn up?
Indeed, some humans who have not been able to endure the pain of the aliveness — they have literally self-immolated. Some have sailed towards Gaza with no regard for whether they would live or die. Some of have taken on brave acts of civil disobedience and found themselves imprisoned.
Like many others, I rushed to protest. My partner Adrienne and I wondered what to do with our bodies as we looked on at such injustice occurring. We took to the streets and to the encampments. We took to creating art pieces on the steps of theatres where we had once performed, demanding they use their platform to condemn the actions of Israel and Germany. We organized with other artists who were silenced.
When the grieving is felt most acutely, I, like many others, cannot to do anything else but find others that feel the same. I cannot concentrate on my “work”; I cannot sleep. I feel called by the aliveness of others to fight against all odds—despite police repression, arrest, lost jobs, lost funding, lost friends—to speak out. I’ve never felt so alive as when being in the streets or doing activist work. Without it, I cannot even sense my own aliveness. I spiral.
But then, as the injustice goes on and on, the aliveness of others wavers in and out of view, wavers out of feeling. And then I manage, I pick up the pieces, mask up, go to work.
When I am not feeling, I find myself asking: How can I allow myself not to feel more completely, more deeply, more consistently?
And when I feel, I ask myself: If I am indeed feeling, how do I continue to do life?
These days, as I write this, I am not well. Perhaps I am.unwell because I am not allowing myself, or not able to, grieve enough. The loss is less and less alive, replaced by the aliveness of a collective mental illness, a collective inability to grieve. And this is perhaps the scariest place to be.
The lyrics for HYENAZ Grievability were written in the ruins of these thoughts, but specifically during the post-7.10.2023 period of the genocide in Gaza. But this text does not fail to remain true, and will not fail to remain true, so long as the “ungreivable” lives gestured here will be replaced by others — other lives whom we fail to name, mention, count, stand up for.
“The Israelis, as we know, have targeted schools, open play grounds, and UN compounds. So in what sense could such assaults be construed as justifiable self-defense? Still the hyper-defensive claim is made that this is Hamas fault–the use of children as human shields–and we hear the same argument against Hezbollah in Southern Lebanon. I am wondering: are all children human shields? Only some? Are we supposed to understand Palestinian children as nothing but so many shields? If this Israeli view is right, then the children who have been killed by Israeli military aggression were already transformed into military instruments, shields that let attackers attack.
If one “feels” for the children or, indeed, if one comes to regard the children as those whose lives are being unjustly and brutally destroyed in an instant, and in grotesques and appalling ways, then that kind of “sentiment” has to be over-ridden by a righteous and cold military rationality. Indeed, it is not only a cold military rationality, but one that prides itself on its ability to see and feel past the vision of massive human suffering in the name of an infinitely expanding rationale of self- defense.
We are asked to believe that those children are not really children, are not really alive, that they have already been turned to metal, to steel, that they belong to the machinery of bombardment, at which point the body of the child is conceived as nothing more than a militarized metal that protects the attacker against attack. The only way to defend oneself against this attack is, then, to kill this child, all the children, the whole cluster; and if the United Nations defends their right, then the UN facility should really be destroyed as well. If one were to conceptualize the child as something other than part of the defensive and manipulative machinery of war, then there would be some chance of understanding this life as a life worth living, worth sheltering, and worth grieving. But once transformed into duplicitous shrapnel, even the Palestinian child is no longer living, but is, rather, regarded as a threat to life.
Indeed, there is no life other than Israeli life that counts as life to be defended at all costs. And though we can count the number of Palestinian civilians and children dead, we cannot count them. We have to continue to count them again and again. We have to start to count them, as if we have never yet learned how to count. How and when does a population begin to count? What radical changes in matrix and frame allow for the breaking out of those numbers as the animated traces of so many lives? And under what condition to those numbers efface the trace of the living, and so fail to count? Under what conditions does the grievability become possible?”
Judith Butler Frames of War introduction to the paperback (2010)