What It Means to Speak With the Dead

What It Means to Speak With the Dead

October 10, 2024 at 12:25AM

In this short, poignant essay for Jewish Currents, Palestinian performance artist Fargo Nissim Tbakhi recounts a Zoom session with a medium, Lawrence, who appears to communicate with one of Tbakhi’s friends, Dan, who has since passed over to the other side. “Lawrence asks me what I’m looking for from the session. I don’t know what to say,” writes Tbakhi. “There is a version of my answer—probably terrible for all involved—in which I tell him about family and genocide and two-thousand-pound bombs and we try to get at the singular question that will define life going forward: What do I owe the mass of dead suffusing my days?” As it happens, the session is not quite what Tbakhi hopes for. But later, he realizes the experience is just what he needed.

Part of me wonders if I thought that this experience would give me some back-door entry into the question of how to carry those other dead, those Palestinians in my family or not, counted or uncounted, whose loss is a tear in the fabric of the world. I think I knew I wouldn’t find that. Rather, I was looking, I can see now, for a tether to a world that had felt totally alien to me for the past eight months. And, in a way, I got that. Maybe it didn’t matter what Dan said to me so much as what I said to Jen, what we said to each other. After all, it was in this pull back toward the living that I was able to most intimately connect with the eerie ways the dead find to make themselves understood—and to let myself feel that there is indeed something beyond this world, which is maybe what I’ve been desperate for this whole time.

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from Longreads https://longreads.com/2024/10/09/230219/
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