Some moments in a life, and they needn’t be very long or seem very important, can make up for so much in that life; can redeem, justify, that pain, that bewilderment, with which one lives, and invest one with the courage not only to endure it, but to profit from it; some moments teach one the price of the human connection: if one can live with one’s own pain, then one respects the pain of others, and so, briefly, but transcendentally, we can release each other from pain.
—James Baldwin, Tell Me How Long the Train’s Been Gone
Nowhere is the sadistic potential of a language built on agency so visible as in torture. While torture contains language, specific human words and sounds, it is itself a language, an objectification, an acting out.
—Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World
Power not only acts on a subject but, in a transitive sense, enacts the subject into being.
—Judith Butler, The Psychic Life of Power
We were passing the time talking
about East and West
when death came to a peak of Albaicín.
So death reaches Granada too
with a message on the phone.
It came on its black horse
and took a friend
while the hooves wounded the sunset
over Alhambra, that summer palace.
I did not try to stop it—
we Arabs don’t stop death,
we just want it to know the value
of the hand that slackens the reins.
—Najwan Darwish, “An Afternoon in Albaicín” (trans. Kareem James Abu-Zeid)