This essay is a response to Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian's "Ashlaa’ and the Genocide in Gaza: Livability against Fragmented Flesh."

Death is a blessing, and the living die a thousand deaths a day. In Gaza, this has become a common refrain. Those who escape the “luxury of death” are left to gather its remnants, to live with its traces. As Mariam Mohammed Al Khateeb, a survivor of the ongoing genocide recently wrote,

No one dies complete. After a missile strike, everyone searches in the debris to put their loved ones back together. Mothers search for their children’s heads to match with their bodies. To be a good mother in the rest of the world is to feed your children good food and keep them warm, but to be a good mother in Gaza is to bury your children whole.

Among those who continue to survive the ongoing Nakba, Mariam’s words invite us to consider how to account for the impossibility of embracing Palestinian life amidst the totalizing perception of death. Can gathering the dismembered parts of the dead Palestinian body be understood as a radical act of love and care, of life-making and mothering at the end of the world?

Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian theorizes this impossibility through the concept of ashlaa’. In its direct translation, ashlaa’ is an Arabic term that refers to scattered body parts, the dismembered flesh and bones left in the wake of Zionist airstrikes and massacres. Yet, opening this further, she considers ashlaa’ as an analytics of gathering the dead, one that grows organically from the praxis of Palestinians in Gaza who collect and (re)member the remains of their loved ones.

According to Shalhoub-Kevorkian, “the existential concern around the wholeness and collectivity of the scattered body parts—and the dead themselves—is key to asserting ontological being and epistemic reunification in a time of genocide and on the land of Palestine.” Zionist colonialism in Palestine is invested in rupturing our bodies, both individual and communal; the hypervisible Palestinian body, torn apart into fragments, performs the power of the colonizer over our bodies and/as our lands. Hence, in this this vital act of gathering the scattered parts of the Palestinian dead body, those who survive Nakba assert a claim to livability, wholeness and belonging, even in the face of unending terror.

I read Shalhoub-Kevorkian’s theorization of ashlaa’ not only as an urgently needed analytic of Palestinian study, but as a feminist analytic that thinks with the force of Indigenous life-making amidst the colonial grain of death. It is also, I contend, an urgently needed critical feminist methodology for listening to and narrating the Palestinian story in this moment. For to (re)member is not only to piece together the bodies and flesh of our dismembered beloveds, to stake a claim to the value of their life in the effort to bury them whole; it is also to stake a claim to remember them.

What do the dead want us to remember, and how can we listen with love and care, to their calls from beyond the grave? What can the written word do to hold the pain of a mother tearing into the sand searching for her son’s dead body, or to comfort the child who has lost her entire family? Can the ethnographer’s pen be put to task alongside the child gathering ashlaa’—pieces of our dead, dismembered flesh and bones—from beneath the rubble?

Language to describe the embodied horror of this moment often feels inadequate or suffocatingly impossible. It is nothing short of a devastating invitation to think with the force of life amidst so much death, in part because to do so invites us to feel the insurmountable loss and to grieve. How can we mourn that which has not yet ended? “There are many things I wish to be able to feel and say about Palestine,” Tara Al Alami writes, “but first it will take several lifetimes to grieve what has been done to our land and people.”

This world must end, and those who survive must help to carry the story. Against the impossibility of language to narrate the ongoing horror felt viscerally in each video seen of a young body burned or torn to pieces, of a headless baby’s flesh held up for the cameras to record, of a mother kissing her dead children’s feet, ashlaa’ as critical feminist methodology centers the imperative of bearing witness and gathering the pieces of our ongoing Palestinian story as part of the task of our survival.

Keeping with the ontological move of ashlaa’ as (re)membering the Palestinian body invites us to gather the fragmented pieces of the Palestinian story in this moment, to follow the example of the mothers, children, and caregivers on the front lines of genocide who remind us that it is only by way of our togetherness—allowing for the continuity and inter-generationality of our family and community lives—that we will continue to affirm Palestinian life and our survival as a people. Our investment in the urgent task of being the collective keepers of our wholeness is fundamental to honoring our martyrs, listening alongside them to envision and help usher into the world a liberated future.