Ser Davos Seaworth is a lowborn man. He’s a sailor who breaks the laws of the realm by bringing food to break a siege. Liam Cunningham, the man who depicted him in HBO’s Game of Thrones, is today turning 64.
He’s doing it from the deck of the Madleen, part of the Freedom Flotilla, which is sailing from Sicily to attempt to open a humanitarian corridor and get aid–food, medical supplies, anything and everything that might save a life–into Gaza, which is currently subject to genocide by Israel.
I say ‘currently’. It is difficult to periodise Israel’s behaviour toward Palestine into a ‘genocidal’ and ‘non-genocidal’ era. From the 1948 Nakba onwards Israel has explicitly treated Palestine as a stain upon the land — which it has claimed under shield of British imperialism, though its settlements contravene international law.
What is the clearance of a people from its land, if not genocidal? So asked a speaker at a UN panel discussion titled “1948–2024: The Ongoing Palestinian Nakba”. Representing Doctors Against Genocide, he:
said that the reason for the current genocide is that the international community “never addressed the original sin”. Instead, in the same month that the UN recognized genocide as an international crime, it turned a blind eye to the Nakba. He then asked what it would take for the UN to create a special body to restudy the Nakba as an act of genocide to both hold perpetrators accountable and strengthen the case currently before the International Court of Justice.
(source)
Here’s the rub, or part of it: to correctly label the entire Israeli project as genocidal also implicates every other imperial and colonial project as such. They were and are, of course.
George RR Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire examines at length the effect of war upon the smallfolk. Hundreds of thousands of words are dedicated to famine and flame and fear:
“You in the holdfast. We mean you no harm. We’re king’s men.” Faces appeared on the wall above the gate.
“They was king’s men burned our village,” one man called down. “Before that, some other king’s men took our sheep. They were for a different king, but that didn’t matter none to our sheep. King’s men killed Harsley and Ser Ormond, and raped Lacey till she died.”
(A Dance With Dragons, Jaime I)
In the north, the existential threat of the undead gathers beyond the realms of men. The Commander of the Night’s Watch, Jon Snow, makes the controversial decision to admit the Watch’s frequent enemy, the wildling host, through the wall to safety. Note the construction of wildlings as Other: savages, barbarous, undeserving of the rights afforded by being considered human. Genocidal rhetoric relies on such othering.
“You have not seen them. Half of them are dead on their feet.”
“I would sooner have them dead in the ground,” said Yarwyck. “If it please my lord.”
“It does not please me.” Jon’s voice was as cold as the wind snapping at their cloaks. “There are children in that camp, hundreds of them, thousands. Women as well.” […]
“These are godless savages,” said Septon Cellador. […]
“I am the shield that guards the realms of men. Those are the words. So tell me, my lord — what are these wildlings, if not men?”
Bowen Marsh opened his mouth. No words came out. A flush crept up his neck.
(A Dance With Dragons, Jon XI)
A Song of Ice and Fire was first conceived in 1991, shortly after scientific consensus crystallised on climate change (the IPCC, for example, was formed in 1988). George RR Martin himself acknowledged the similarities:
“The people in Westeros are fighting their individual battles over power and status and wealth. And those are so distracting to them that they’re ignoring the threat of “winter is coming,” which has the potential to destroy all of them and to destroy their world. And there is a great parallel there to, I think, what I see this planet doing here, where we’re fighting our own battles.”
(source)
Greta Thunberg, then aged 15, went on strike from school to campaign for Sweden to comply with the Paris Climate Agreement. She is also aboard the Madleen. As a pigtailed child exhorting leaders to care about climate change, she received a relatively warm reception from world leaders who perhaps thought her easily defanged and coopted.
Yet she has always recognised that climate justice is inextricably linked to colonial injustice. She reified this stance in 2023 when attacked for her support of Palestine:
“Advocating for climate justice fundamentally comes from a place of caring about people and their human rights. That means speaking up when people suffer, are forced to flee their homes or are killed — regardless of the cause.”
(source)
I watched a video today of Thunberg, close to tears, as she says from the deck of the Madleen that “no matter how dangerous this mission is, it is nowhere near as dangerous as the silence of the entire world in the face of a livestreamed genocide.”
I can’t identify a ‘most horrifying’ part of this genocide. No one can rank a burning child against a beheaded baby against the 335 rounds fired at five-year-old Hind Rajab. But the silence and indifference of those watching this genocide is something I did not quite expect. I thought we would all be howling in the fucking streets.
What privilege, to be intimidated by a few flags and leaflets!
In Gaza, people sit in rubble and makeshift housing, without food or water or hope, as F-35 jets (whose construction depends on British parts) fly overhead. We sit here in the so-called developed world (developed at whose expense?) and are all of us materially complicit in this genocide. We should not be able to speak for shame, and some of us laugh!
Are people so blind to empathy, so eager to turn their eyes away, that they would rather pretend Gaza has nothing to do with them than look in the mirror and ask what action they can take?
Those on the Madleen have a simple ask: all eyes on deck. Their task is dangerous: in May another Freedom Flotilla ship, The Conscience, was attacked by drones in international waters. It costs nothing to extend your solidarity. It costs everything–your very soul–to look away.
If you have loved another living thing, you should be screaming. You should be boycotting everything on the BDS list, and having uncomfortable conversations with others who do not. You should be supporting direct action like that undertaken by Palestine Action, who act to impede the operations of companies who profit from the genocide (and succeed in doing so). If you cannot undertake arrestable actions yourself, you can learn more about supporting actionists here, or donate here. You should be supporting Medical Aid for Palestinians, and the Palestine Children’s Relief Fund, and the Palestine Solidarity Campaign. You should be showing solidarity with a keffiyeh, or a pin, and otherwise doing everything you can to at the very least ensure that Palestine, and its people, are not forgotten. Don’t let people look away.
doors. These are the ones that first caught my eye. They’re in Roseto Valfortore, a small village in southern Italy that’s been subject to repeated waves of emigration over the past century and a half. The houses were built to last, and many have outlasted their use. Few people remain.
One of Janus’s faces looked forward and out; the other looked back and inward. He governed liminality itself: transitions, gates, passages, frames, beginnings, endings, time. If the gods of Ancient Rome had survived through today, he’d be the god of a bleary airport pint. He’d be the god of the hard plastic chairs I sat in at the hospice, and of the cuts that TV shows make from their cold opens.
Even the word liminality is Janusian. It derives from the latin word limen, or threshold. So many thresholds are constructs, rather than constructions: border after border, imaginary boundaries of imagined communities, scrolling away from under me as I sat gawking from various trains. My long slow journey never really ended; I completed in a month one languorous loop, both immersed and removed from the places I explored.
I completed most of my trip alone. It’s how I like to travel. I like being free to walk a half marathon round Rome, or to spend hours counting pennies at a numismatic museum, as I did years previously in Athens. You meet a lot of interesting people when you’re alone, or at least when you look outward: people look back, and they smile, and they invite you in.
In Rome, for example, I saw three similar bikes all lined up together. I’d stopped to take a picture when another bike stopped in front of me, and its grinning rider asked that I take his.
There are more daunting people, too. I was followed in a park by a man who wouldn’t leave until I gave him my number, and who then walked me back to a hotel that I pretended was my friend’s. He wasn’t fooled, and showed up there the next day–thankfully, after I’d already left.
Suppose you’re on a game show, and you’re given the choice of three doors: Behind one door is a car; behind the others, goats. You pick a door, say №1, and the host, who knows what’s behind the doors, opens another door, say №3, which has a goat. He then says to you, “Do you want to pick door №2?” Is it to your advantage to switch your choice? (x)
I wouldn’t switch. I wouldn’t even choose. I would lie on the bristling carpet forever, boneless, listening to the rattle one room over and counting the pauses between breaths.
They should let you flip the coins at the numismatic museum. They should exhibit one that spins forever in the air. Its two faces should merge to a shine-edged blur, each on constant display as it pins its audience in a moment, as it refuses to resolve to a head or tail that might start the match, or settle the question.
One wave of Roseto’s deserters set up camp in Pennsylvania, in an area they also dubbed Roseto. They came to work the slate quarries, and did not die at the same rate as their American counterparts. The Roseto effect was coined by Stephen Wolf, whose 50 year study comparing Bangor and Roseto suggested, he believed, that social cohesion saved lives. Indeed, as Rosetans integrated further, and the community disintegrated, heart attacks in this second Roseto rose.
When Roseto’s emigrants closed their doors, they made it permanent. They had to. Though they brought their place name with them, and for a while their community and habits, most of them would never again climb the crookback mountain roads to their former home. Today their descendants–the ones with means to do so, anyway–fly over to find their roots. Behind the doors their families closed forever, they find that life was bleak and hard to live (and the cell service was terrible. 2 stars). More visit every year.
In dreams, I loop chains lovingly around a handle. I snick padlocks into place like Christmas baubles. Janus watches me–for surely he must be the god of dreams, as well. He says: how secure; how well-defended. He frowns at himself and says: she’s still dreaming of the door. When you create a ghost town, you invite a haunting, I suppose.
I was in the Cairngorms this January and loved how crisp and bleak the landscape became. I was there primarily to shoot wildlife but I couldn't help myself with this shot (which is why it's taken on my long lens!)
📷Canon R5, RF100-500, 100mm, 1/1000, f/4.5, ISO 3200
This is a picture of a meerkat demonstrating its nictitating membrane, which is a sort of additional eyelid. It's activated on every blink and keeps their eyes free of sand granules.
