This essay initiates a roundtable with responses from Ghassan Abu-Sittah and Sarah Ihmoud.

“We’ve extracted martyrs, many of whom are decomposed and completely unidentifiable ashlaa’. . . We’ve found corpses of women, children and individuals without heads as well as torn body parts.”

– Palestinian Civil Defense worker, Rami Dababesh. June 5, 2024.

“I heard dogs and cats eating my family members’ ashlaa’ in the street . . . I was running after the cats to collect the ashlaa’, to bury them…and dignify my family.”

– Dr. Haneen El Dayya. February 13, 2024.

“I beg you not to eat us when we die… please… if you stay alive after we die… don’t eat us, our scattered flesh.”

– Lena, a girl from Gaza talking to her cat. February 19, 2024.

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These voices, of Haneen, Rami, and Lena both reflect and reject the genocidal realities of death in Gaza. They speak against the brutalization of the scattered dead. The Arabic word ashlaa’ refers to scattered body parts and dismembered flesh and bones. Ashlaa’ concerns everyone in Gaza now, and also offers us a vital concept for grasping the situation, when speaking about ashlaa’ is a refusal to be passive in a horrifying situation. Rami describes the exploded, shattered, decomposed, unidentified body parts he collected, exposing the inhumane brutality of the onslaught. Haneen, haunted by cracked bones and bleeding flesh, feels the need to rescue the ashlaa’ of her loved ones from being eaten by dogs and cats; collecting the ashlaa’ of family members for burial. Lena, the little girl, holds her cat in her lap, pleading with it not to eat her should her family be bombed and turned into ashlaa’. In the act of speaking to her cat, Lena—a child—creates a space of respect for life and dignity during an ongoing genocide in which the colonial state and the global community are failing to protect even dismembered bodies.

On June 5, The New Arab published an infograph: a collection of photos showing how people identified the remains of their loved ones. The collection revealed how a young woman identified her mother’s ashlaa’ from the ring on the hand; a child’s ashlaa’ were identified from his pajamas; a brother’s ashlaa’ were identified by the car keys in his hand; and an uncle’s ashlaa’ were identified by the kidney dialysis tube still in his arm. It is from those graphic images of the dismembered remains, and the ethnographic moments shared on video by individuals like Haneen, Rami, and Lena, that we begin an almost impossible journey of trying to embrace the wounded remnants—ashlaa’ as an act of epistemic reunification.

Centering ashlaa’ unsettles the totalizing perception of annihilation by insisting on burials for the dead. It makes meaning out of the loving acts to collect and protect the scattered dead; to re-member the dismembered. How can we understand Palestine? We have to start with its people, even as ashlaa’.

As Bisan, a Gazan journalist, noted while walking among the ashlaa’ at a mass grave in the Naser Medical complex:

“… looking for organs, heads, or skin …[silence]… you walk a little bit… and you see corpses waiting for someone to recognize them [silence]…”

Bisan’s words and silences stage ashlaa’ as calling for recognition. Calling to be collected and embraced. Her eyes read the scattered organs as seeking reunification with family, a re-rooting against violent uprooting. Her silences amidst the scattered dead expose the inscription of state terror upon scattered flesh, a politics whose aim is to evict the already dead from humanity. Her camera and words function as a counter-mapping, insisting on embodied relations amidst Israeli settler-colonial state terror in Gaza.

Ashlaa’ as an analytic

Ashlaa’ live in the colonized, scattered, burned, and shredded body/flesh parts. They appear to have no place, “woven out of thousand details, anecdotes, stories’ (Fanon 1961, 111). They appear to be outside of identity and the international order (Agathangelou 2015). Yet ashlaa’ as a concept resonates with the term geocorpographies, coined by Joseph Pugliese (2007, 1), in that it “brings into focus the violent enmeshment of the flesh and blood of the body within the geopolitics of race, war and empire.”

Focusing on the Gazan insistence on speaking about ashlaa’ helps us apprehend how the violent dismemberment of bodies testifies to colonized life and love as they bear witness to state terror. In centering ashlaa’, I acknowledge the call in Haneen’s and Lena’s voices, and listen attentively to the words people use. I have collected social media images and narrations (Instagram, X/Twitter, Facebook), in a time of genocide, to engage a form of digital ethnography that helps me understand how people make sense of scenes of brutal dismemberment and death in their everyday lives amidst a genocide.

Thinking with Bisan, Lena, Haneen, and Rami about scattered body parts, we see that the ashlaa’ defy settler colonialism by reflecting back its racialized violence and the ossified structures and relations that accompany and foster it. The evidence of body parts and wounded flesh in the ongoing genocide in Gaza forces the question, “What is the political function of the colonized dead body?”

Exploring the political meanings of ashlaa’, mutilated and stripped of identity markers and continuity, reveal the pillars of genocidal colonial violence that seek to sever the ties between the living and the dead. Bisan describes ashlaa’ as crying out to be heard, to be given a home amidst such domicide, to give evidence of the terror. Ashlaa’, as the bearers of a violent politics and state terror, evidence the use of the shredded Palestinian body in maintaining a Zionist governmentality of body and land. Ashlaa’ push beyond dismantling the biopolitical and necropolitical domains of its geocorpographies by requiring us to read the inscriptions of dismembered, wounded, and dying flesh/body/home/land. Ashlaa’ function as a signifier revealing Israel’s ongoing desire to speak power through the smattering of flesh and blood, and by attempts to prevent both Palestinians and Palestine from being whole.

Gazan testimonies have centered ashlaa’ using their own language and Arabic syntax, producing their own morphology. Their use of ashlaa’ stages the architecture of the shredded body as a source of power against the violence of anti-Palestinian racism and Zionist supremacy. The colonizer perceives the existence and humanity of Palestinians as an impossibility, needing to reduce Palestinians into a state of non-breathing. The blood of the colonized is the raw material required for manufacturing a genocidal social order. Ashlaa’ literally becomes the ground for the colonizer’s life.

Palestinian voices point to the political and psychological work of ashlaa’. Palestinians in Gaza recognize the forms of material inscription that mark the dismembered body of the Palestinian as undeserving of the mourning of life. Joining Gazans in collecting the ashlaa’ of their loved ones by thinking through the meanings of ashlaa’ enacts a hope for creating living possibilities despite the genocidal impossibility of life in Gaza. The existential concern around the wholeness and collectivity of scattered body parts—of the dead themselves—is key to asserting ontological being and epistemic reunification in a time of genocide and on the land of Palestine.

En-living the shattered

On October 17, 2023, I was confronted with an audiovisual recording of a weeping father holding two plastic bags shouting to a crowd in Gaza, “Hey people…hey people [ya naas]…my children died [wlaadi maatu]… my kids died… here they are, all of them.” On July 7, 2024, I watched a reporter interviewing a crying father standing weeping among the rubble, as he explained that he was searching for the ashlaa’ of his four children. And I also heard testimonies of breast-feeding mothers who rushed to hospitals to breast-feed Gazan children when their own mothers’ bodies were rendered into ashlaa’, because they needed the warmth of a loving mother to hold and feed them.

When Gazan fathers and mothers searched for the bodies and scattered body pieces of their loved ones under the rubble, or carried plastic bags filled with ashlaa’ to insist that these bones and dead flesh were their children, families found new ways to create livability, warmth, and love. Between this wounded ashlaa’, and a dispersed communal motherhood, I read the parental re-assemblage of survivability amidst genocidal displacement.

Living through the genocide in Gaza, Palestinians assert their humanity by re-assembling shattered social and physical body parts, connecting them to loved ones and land. As a mother protested while collecting her child’s ashlaa’ after the attack on Nuseirat camp in June 2024, her daughter was now fatafeet (cut up pieces). However, she reclaimed her daughter into humanity, and against her impermanence as a Palestinian and her ontological exile as fatafeet. It is through these acts of collecting ashlaa’, even when in unrecognizable small pieces, that a mother’s breast milk, parental warmth, and communal collectivity insisted on love, wholeness, and livability.

This collecting, embracing, and feeding is done even when entire families are killed. Gazans are refusing physical and social dismemberment, instead choosing the path of actual and epistemic reunification through collecting and unifying the ashlaa’ (not only of body parts, but as also of socially dismembered entities); demanding remembrance and thus liveability.

As Palestinians in Gaza stand in an open, collective grave, suffocated by the stench of severed body parts, they collect, cover, honor, and sacralize the ashlaa’ to enliven the whole. Even when a Gazan mother breastfeeds children that are not hers to interrupt the settler-colonial machinery cutting life into pieces of dead flesh/bones, such actions birth ontological possibilities: a Gazan politics of life. Gazan words and actions reveal that they see an interrelatedness between the psychic, corporeal, territorial, and the social-national body of ashlaa’.

When faced with incomprehensible atrocities against their loved ones, they teach us how creativity can produce wholeness amidst and out of ashlaa’. It is in that space of death, of collective graves or hospitals packed with unrecognized dead bodies, that the transformation of the dried blood bath occurs. It is against the production of displaced and shredded corpses that relatives, sons, daughters, fathers, mothers recreate relationships and innovate life. They turn necrophilic settler-colonialism upside down when they breastfeed in a genocide; speak of, collect, hold, gather, and embrace ashlaa’.

Against settler-colonial necrophilia

Using the cut and bloody ashlaa’ to think about global transformation is crucial in this time of genocide. Ashlaa’ connect the past and the present, the living and the dead, the shredded and still intact bodies of the settler colony. To invoke ashlaa’ is to rupture the colonial dialectics of history. Ashlaa’ represent the struggle for psycho-affective survival and agency amidst the agonies of relentless attack. Centering ashlaa’ in an analysis of the genocidal violence toward Palestinians in Gaza is not only about refusing ontological non-being and deprivation of wholeness suffered by the colonized, but about naming and reclaiming ashlaa’ to problematize the Israeli state’s racial, geo-political, and aesthetic investment in violence.

Ashlaa’ is a concept that comes from the words of Palestinians in Gaza, and can be read as both a sign of extreme violence and terror, as well as a refusal of such genocidal dehumanization. To speak of ashlaa’ is a liberatory act of reunification (lamm shamil, lammlamehl) mobilized by Palestinians in Gaza, like Lena, Rami, Haneen, and Bisan who insistently re-assemble ashlaa’ as Palestine. They propose a liberated and revolutionary livability, a political effort to rebuild new spaces of love in a struggle for a dignified and humane life.