April 14th 2024: How to resist injustice with love.
Healing from conflict: how to resist injustice with love.
MEET RAMSEY HANHAN
Ramsey is a Palestinian Canadian writer and author of Fugitive Dreams, a literary exploration of the Palestinian experience through five decades of personal stories. Having come to America from Palestine in his teens, he has experienced first-hand both the Israeli occupation of his country, and the immigrant journey of rebuilding life anew. In a previous career, he was a physics professor noted for his computer models that describe and predict complexity in nature. For his next titles, he is finishing a romantic novel and a collection of essays. His short stories and poetry have appeared in Fikra Magazine and elsewhere, and he also speaks publicly about Palestine. Ramsey holds a Ph.D. from the University of Michigan and resides near Baltimore, Maryland.
Ramsey’s dream is to spare his daughter and her generation of Israeli and Palestinian children the violence he experienced as a child. Yet, under the dark shadow of a genocide in Gaza, how can we effectively confront violence without contaminating ourselves with its destructive power?
First reading
The readings and quotations are from Ramsey Hanhan’s autobiographical novel, Fugitive Dreams: Chronicles of Occupation and Resistance.
For my own well-being, I need to reaffirm, I am NOT a victim.
“Survivor” is the wrong word either.
I choose not to be defined by my traumas.
I am far greater, deeper, than that.
The pain inflicted upon me by others binds me not.
Second Reading
“In 2015, I took my five-year-old daughter to visit her grandparents in Palestine. The closest we got to Jerusalem yet was the hill at Ramallah’s outskirts, where I took Ksenya to see it from above the Wall. She asked to visit the city. I explained that the Israelis, whom she had encountered at the Bridge, blocked us from going there. That night, before bedtime, she approached me whispering something. I leaned in, and asked her to repeat it.
She whispered again, with eyes as wide as when I told her about seeing a fox on the trail, ‘Tell me more about the Israelis.’
I immediately understood the weight of my undertaking. Her attitude toward them will be shaped by mine – not only what I tell her, but what tone I use, and how I behave. Am I angry? Or fearful? Vengeful, perhaps? Apathetic? Ignorant? I want to tell her the truth, but how to stop its bloodied shadow from staining the course of her life?”
Third Reading
From an article by Ramsey Hanhan in The Taoist Online, entitled “Spiritual Puzzle”
“How can we effectively confront those destroying life, and in a way that does not harm our own spiritual growth? In other words, how can we prevent ourselves, in resisting them, from becoming them?”