Nadim Choufi, The Bodies Belief Requires, 2026. Courtesy of the artist.
Listen: I don’t know which is correct anymore. Am I bringing you with me or am I taking you with me?
Bringing implies movement with the speaker to here. Taking implies movement with the speaker to there. Neither implies how I long for you.
When the direction is clear, you can’t mistake one word for the other. Can you bring a cake with you to the party? Take the rest with you.
Take and bring become unstable, become interchangeable when the direction of movement is unknown. When here and there are not certain, when the object held matters more to you than the direction you are headed in, you bring and take at the same time. This can happen after tragic events. I’m taking you with me; I’m bringing you with me. They become synonyms for ‘I’ll carry you with me, but I don’t know where to.’
When the resting points, the here and there, of history remain unresolved, you carry. When too many people are on your shoulders and in your arms, when too many events make the here and there hard to grasp, when the carrying gets tough, you carry on.
Between carry and carry on there lies not only a bent back. The final resting point is not settled. It’s a long way ahead, but so is the here and there across time. They aren’t fixed and you can fix them, momentarily, to locations in time. Each fix is a coordinate that bends the course. You bend history a little. You catch a little rest, a breath not only for you but for everyone you carry. A small intake, a little pulse for everyone in your arms, a summoning. You ask: Now what? Where do I go? Where do I carry you to until the next breath? None imply how I long for you.
Making resting points when none are given is the generative power of the creative process, and artists’ task is to make the way. The creative process is an exercise towards unknown destinations. It isn’t simply the record of consecutive events like history. It is about clearing space for what and whom you choose to carry with you and those you carry for. The creative process is a summoning. You carry, you carry on, you summon a world not yet fixed in history.
By summoning, you are never by yourself. This companionship is the enduring sustenance the creative process offers. You stir all that you carry out of their sleep so they can accompany you on the way. Yet James Baldwin opens his essay ‘The Creative Process’ by cultivating the state of being alone as necessary for the creative process:
Perhaps the primary distinction of the artist is that he must actively cultivate that state which most men, necessarily, must avoid; the state of being alone. […] The aloneness of which I speak is much more like the aloneness of birth or death. It is like the fearless alone that one sees in the eyes of someone who is suffering, whom we cannot help. Or it is like the aloneness of love, the force and mystery that so many have extolled and so many have cursed, but which no one has ever understood or ever really been able to control. I put the matter this way … to suggest how nearly, after all, is his state the state of everyone, and in an attempt to make vivid his endeavor.1
To reconcile the aloneness Baldwin speaks of with a practice of summoning: you have to look to see who is sitting in your séance. For Baldwin, ‘the state of birth, suffering, love, and death, are extreme states: extreme, universal, and inescapable.’ But it is misleading to think of their universality as a shared experience; it is only a shared eventuality. The relationship to them you inherit is not universal. That is where the aloneness starts. What I carry, what makes my back bend, what makes my grandfather’s back bend, might have left your back unbent or bent in a different direction.
I might feel alone in that I’m the only one who knows how to summon you. I’m alone in that no one is carrying you with me, but I will carry you through. Here, I imply how much I long for you.
Sometimes, here and there, I carry a different you: the reader.
Not long ago, the phrase ‘We are all Palestinian’ carried a lot of people in the streets. Activists, friends, family, the ones voicing it, and the people it reached. I wonder when those around me would belt it out at the same time, if the same faces of the ‘We’ that appear to me appear to them. I wonder who they summon when they utter this phrase. I wonder if, even if the ‘We’s’ are different, they can be considered together. In that moment, when you summon a large and varied ‘We’ together, you can still find yourself alone in thinking about who enters your mind, but that is partly why you are there. The collective summoning fixes many coordinates, and it fixes them fast, creating many here’s and there’s. It bends the course of time by implying that if the Palestinian condition will be the future and history of many populations around the world, ‘we must embody the Palestinian condition, the condition of resistance and refusal, in the lives we lead and the company we keep’, as Mohammed El-Kurd puts it.2 It bends history a little to say that what you inherit is not the same as what I inherit, but we must find a way to carry each other through.
When you summon, you carry what you have over time and space. You carry, you carry on, you carry over. To carry over what you have inherited means carrying the traditions, tools, customs that have shaped you. You don’t just carry over an identity; you carry over what forms one. In other words, when you summon in the creative process, you carry over who and what has kept you alive until now. You summon tools of freedom.
What ‘We are all Palestinian’ can ask of us is: How do we carry over our inherited tools to overcome a shared eventuality? When you chant the slogan, ‘In our thousands, in our millions, we are all Palestinians’, it is not about becoming one large identity; rather it is a question of sharing this inheritance together. How can we use the tools, traditions, and customs that have kept our identities alive, that have kept them free and available to draw on?
Then you ask: Now what? Where do I go? Where do I carry you to until the next breath? Those questions arise at every step of the creative process.
I hope here and there I have shown how much I long for you. I hope others help me carry on carrying you.
A poem was carried from Palestine to a prison cell in California. When George Jackson, the revolutionary activist and Field Marshal of the Black Panther Party, was murdered by the prison guards at San Quentin State Prison in 1971, a handwritten poem titled the ‘Enemy of the Sun’ was found in his cell. It was attributed to him and circulated in the Black Panther newspaper. Decades later, scholar Greg Thomas found that Jackson had copied the poem by hand from a Palestinian poetry anthology he had in his cell. The poem is by Samih al-Qasim. Thomas refuses to say that one author was mistaken for another. He says one was taken for the other. Jackson carried over the poem from the Palestinian fight for freedom to the Black liberation movement. It is a solidarity without sameness. They did not share the same identity but shared what they had inherited. They carried each other far enough to carry on. They gathered a ‘We’ whose power does not depend on being considered as one, but on what can pass between them. A small intake, a little pulse, a summoning not only of those you carry but of those who can carry you to carry on.
The poem’s passage from one author to another, from one struggle to another, changed it. Excerpts of three poems by Samih al-Qasim appeared under Jackson’s ‘Enemy of the Sun’.3 Jackson wove al-Qasim’s words into a new poem, transforming its ending into an insistence on a shared future:
Therefore, do not say goodbye
Tomorrow we shall meet.
You take someone to the end, or I can say I have brought you here. But even when the end is not clear, we can insist on what comes after, so please carry, carry on, carry over, carry each other through.