“The Meaning of Love In Politics—a response from a conscious (non-nomadic) Pariah,” by Abdaljawad Omar, originally appeared on July 23, 2025, as part of the fifth instalment (“Exilic Politics”) of the “Letters” series on dabartis.com, accompanied by texts by Monika Janulevičiūtė, Carsten Juhl, and Peter Weiss, prefaced by Anacharisis Kloots. It is republished on Communis with the kind permission of Dabartis’ editorial collective and Abdaljawad Omar. The Spanish translation of this same text can be read here.
“What propels the fighter to fight, if not this: an ethic of enunciation, a word uttered not from secure ground, but from the tremor of what could be otherwise. It is not simply the inheritance of a task, but the emergence of a will—a will to deform the deformed, to twist the twisted back into the arc of dignity.”
— Abdaljawad Omar
A response from a conscious (non-nomadic) Pariah
There is a secret rule—perhaps akin to those unspoken yet powerful ones that quietly shape our relations with others. A rule concealed in the way one responds to a certain question while walking through the narrow streets of Ramallah.
The rule does not declare itself—it murmurs. It sidles into the everyday. When someone asks, How are you?—or, in the crumpled familiarity of Palestinian colloquial, Keefak—you are not meant to answer. Or rather, not beyond the sanctioned utterances: mneeh (fine), mashi al-hal (it’s going), or the sanctified deferral—alhamdulillah (Thank God). Anything more would rupture the contract.
There is a weight in the question—a gravity that resists articulation. What can one say of how we are, of how I am, when the massacres unfold with the rhythm of breath, and the world averts its gaze, entranced by the gaudy spectacle of chaos, by the orchestrated theater of shock and awe paraded under the banner of Trump’s rule?
Is one to forsake the collective wound, the grief that binds us, and retreat into the fragments of a private life? To speak of a love lost, or another poised to declare itself in the sanctioned dialect of marriage? Should one speak of work, of health, of the quiet rituals by which we accumulate wealth and conceal despair? Or rather, should one confront the conditions that have made it possible to eat without tasting, to speak without the words rising skyward, to survive in a manner so passive it becomes a kind of complicity?
The question is heavy. It slices through the dull rehearsals of daily life, through the small talk and the pleasantries, and lands somewhere deep—where the silence aches. And though we answer it, again and again, with the same tired scripts—”I’m fine,” “We’re managing”—I know, every time, that it’s a lie. A quiet betrayal.
Because the pariahs are not okay.
They are not, as some would have it, the keepers of some mystical clarity, not always burning with the eloquence of critique, not always radiant with love for mankind or thrilled by the music of collective resistance. No, sometimes they are simply tired. Sometimes they are broken. Sometimes they are silent.
And so when the question comes—“How are you?”—it does not strike as care, but as obligation. It does not open, it closes. It demands an answer already shaped by the grammar of survival. One reaches, not for truth, but for something that can be said without undoing the fragile weave holding the self together. The reply becomes less about what is felt, and more about what can be endured aloud.
In the wake of the question—and the answers that follow like lines in a well-worn script—there emerges something else: a liturgy, a liturgy of complaints. And each time a friend, a comrade, or a familiar face begins again, I whisper to myself, almost like prayer: Beware the nation that can no longer complain.
Here, one does not speak to reveal, but to circulate—fragments of weariness, tokens of despair, tremors of anxiety, residues of a hope long abandoned. The conversation proceeds almost ritualistically, caught in a closed loop of dull repetition. It is less dialogue than a collective monologue, a murmuring chorus tethered to its core: shakwa—the complaint.
The story goes something like this: work is dull, life unlivable, others intolerable. The world appears as an archive of offenses, of quiet betrayals and mounting disappointments, of the unbearable weight of being—especially within the cramped, inward-turning confines of that small, walled city called Ramallah. One speaks, and in speaking, performs a tired ontology. This is not the sharing of suffering, but its reverberation. The self does not emerge; it is cited, recited, reduced to a footnote in a conversation too weary to carry it further.
Ramallah is too conservative—or far too liberal. Too familiar, or not familiar enough. Too small, or maybe too corrupt, bloated with its pursuit of wealth. Ramallah is not Jerusalem, my friend from Jerusalem says with quiet authority, as if that alone settles the matter. But what matters more is that Ramallah has become the stage upon which all complaints are performed. And yet, these complaints rarely reach the frontiers. We have grown so accustomed to our masters—so habituated to their presence—that we forget they are there. Until the screen flickers with their violence. Until the soldiers and settlers pierce the illusion and remind us, briefly, whose world this really is.
It is perhaps this inflection, meaning this forgetfulness that, at times, renders the romanticization of the pariah troubling to me—the impulse to elevate the oppressed into a sanctified realm of “human togetherness,” of “fraternity” and shared solidarity.
The difficulty lies not only in the abstraction—but in what happens when the pariah no longer inhabits their exclusion. What happens when the margins become a mirror, when those cast out turn inward, building a shrine around their wound, feeding it until the performance of pain eclipses the world itself? When the margin is no longer a vantage point, but a closed circuit. Is there, then, still room for love—for the conscious pariah Arendt once imagined? Room for a critique of the world as such, not merely a reaction to its wounds?
And what of the masters—those who govern, dispossess, and divide? They remain, yes—but strangely. They are present, oppressively so, and yet somehow hidden. They are visible in their violence, and yet veiled in their legitimacy. They are there, always there, and yet they manage to remain just out of reach—obscured not by absence, but by excess. By being overtly hidden.
In other words, there is a suffering that comes not from the inability to overcome oppression, but from the failure to inhabit any stable identity at all, even that of the marginal, the alienated, the deformed, the target, and the excluded. There is instead a slow implosion. A sense that the world is closing in—not only through the colonial machinery, not only through the soldier or settler haunting the horizon—but also through the other, the comrade, the companion, the one who mirrors your undoing.
***
To hate is another way to love—another mode of love distorted, yes, but never quite extinguished. It is love twisted by betrayal, scorched by history, made heavy by the refusal to forget. Hate does not rise from a void; it erupts from excess—too much memory, too much longing, too much proximity to what once shimmered with life, to what once promised meaning. The one who hates has not abandoned the world; he clings to it with a fevered grip, too close, too raw, unable to bear what it has become.
Hate is not the posture of a melancholic, alienated soul—it is love gone feral, love that has crossed over. It is the cry of love when it can no longer recognize itself in the world that made it possible.
One might say, then, that we must learn to grapple with the deformities that colonialism imposes—not just on bodies and borders, but on the interior life of a people. And perhaps the hatred that simmers among the pariahs of Palestine is not a hatred to be feared, but one to be understood—as a cry for coherence, as the residue of a love unfulfilled. It is a hatred that must not be banished, but overcome through acts of collective resistance, through the stubborn work of shared suffering and struggle, the agonizing beauty of those words starting with an S.
What propels the fighter to fight, if not this: an ethic of enunciation, a word uttered not from secure ground, but from the tremor of what could be otherwise. It is not simply the inheritance of a task, but the emergence of a will—a will to deform the deformed, to twist the twisted back into the arc of dignity.
Here we are already in a different mode of articulating the pariah—not as the exilic prophet, the one who speaks from the margins with mournful clarity, an insider who is simultaneously outside. No, this is a pariah who refuses the safety of symbolic distance, who will not dwell solely in the citadel of critical reflection. He does not content himself with the invention of new languages for understanding, nor with elegant diagnoses of failure. His consciousness spills beyond critique into contact, abrasion, confrontation. He is not the melancholic bearer of lost worlds, but the one who dares to deform the deformed to disturb the grammar of defeat. The pariah, in this modality, is not merely a witness to suffering, but a saboteur of the order that produces it. He bears not just memory, but rupture—a living crack through which the future seeps. No longer satisfied with interpretation, he intervenes.
How does hatred recoil into love in his intervention? Not through reconciliation, nor forgiveness, nor the purification of affect, but through the act itself—the intervention—which cracks open the world and lets the future bleed in. The pariah’s hatred, shaped by the scars of history, does not vanish in his action: it is recomposed. It is no longer the corrosive residue of betrayal, but a ferment, a pressure transfigured into contact. He does not love his enemy, but he loves the world enough to refuse its terms. This refusal is love as rupture, not harmony; love as sabotage, not peace.
This is the pariah as militant caretaker—not the healer who soothes, but the one who ruptures so that healing becomes thinkable again. In his intervention, hatred folds back into love—not because it loses its edge, but because it finds direction, a form, a place to go. It becomes fidelity to the unfulfilled, not nostalgia for the past. It becomes allegiance to the possible, not mourning for the lost. This is not redemption; it is transformation. To sabotage the machinery of ruin is to insist, however violently, that life is still possible.
***
But here, I must pause and turn toward Hannah Arendt. You, who saw in the pariah a figure of reflective exile, a bearer of worldliness forged in statelessness, also feared what you called the “darkness of the heart” that hate brings. For you, hatred was a danger to politics—too intimate, too explosive, too close to totalitarianism. But what if hatred, in the colony, is not a temptation of violence but the trace of having been violated? What if hatred, in the mouths of the pariahs of Gaza, Jenin, Shu’fat, is not the negation of politics but its last possibility?
You elevated forgiveness, action, natality. But what of those who were never allowed to begin? What of those who were born into rubble, not as a metaphor, but as a daily condition? Can they be asked to forgive before they have been permitted to speak? You wrote of the human condition, but what of the unconditioned,t he ones to whom humanity is only ever extended in posthumous sympathy? They cannot afford your ethics of distance. Their proximity to death is too immediate, their wounds too legible.
Your pariah walked the boulevards of Europe with a book under his arm. Ours walks the ruins with a rifle, or a memory, or a stone. Yours strove for dignity through visibility, ours is made invisible except when dying. But perhaps here too is the divergence: for you, politics was action in the space of appearance. For us, politics is the refusal to vanish. The refusal to let erasure have the final word.
Yes, the militant pariah hates. But it is a hatred that binds, not isolates. A hatred that recognizes, even in its ferocity, the contours of love deformed by colonialism. He does not erupt blindly—he intervenes precisely because he still cares for the world that betrayed him. He is not the end of politics, but its irregular site of birth.
So no, the pariah will not relinquish hatred—not yet. Not while the bombs fall. Not while the camps are razed. Hatred here is not fascism—it is fidelity. Not destruction for its own sake, but the violence of the broken world breaking back. You feared that hatred would devour the world. But have you not seen the problem with this perspective when you wrote your report on Eichmann? The world has already devoured us.
***
I have not slept these days—not really. The night does not fall so much as it lingers, heavy and alert. I am older now, and more attuned to the dissonances that once felt trivial—the way a car door slams like a threat, or the gathering of young boys near my window.
I think often of that street—narrow, dusty, alive with the friction of play and reprimand. When we played football as children, there was always the risk of the ball going astray. And if it ever landed in the old neighbor’s garden, we’d flee—instinctively. The ball’s fall was like a border crossing. We knew her scream would come before the ball even settled. It wasn’t the scream that frightened us, exactly. It was the world it belonged to: a world of order, of the demand for silence, of walls that must not be touched, of gardens that were not for us.
And perhaps that’s when I began to understand what borders really are. Not fences, not laws—but reactions. Screams. Reprimands. The visceral enforcement of space. Of quiet. Of control. Even now, years later, I hear that scream when the city grows too loud, or when I move too freely. And I think: perhaps she was the first settler I ever knew. It is strange, how the smallest memories can echo the largest violences. How the scream of an old neighbor in Ramallah can reverberate in the speech of generals, in the declarations of zones and closures, in the language of “permitted areas.” The child who flees from the ball learns something of flight, of unwelcomeness. And the adult who cannot sleep carries that unease like a scar turned inward, a chainsmoker living off the neurotic inducements of caffeine.
I hated my neighbor, and she hated us back. There was no grand lesson in it. Only the quiet, reciprocal detestation born of proximity—of our noise in her silence, of her scream in our joy. At some point, we stopped playing football, and we started playing with her screams. We would dare each other to cross over, to ruin her garden. We would throw the ball and see who had the courage—or the foolishness—to retrieve it. It was a game, but not quite. We knew the scream would come, shrill and immediate, like a law being spoken. And still we did it. Again and again. Maybe out of boredom, maybe out of spite. Maybe just to hear the world respond to us.
And yet—today, I catch myself identifying with the old lady. A recognition I almost wish I hadn’t seen
I glimpse myself identifying with her—the old woman that used to sit at the wide balcony in silence. Not with her scream, but with the impulse behind it. The desire for quiet. The resistance to disruption. The yearning, however fleeting, for control over something, anything. A garden. A silence. And some peace of mind.
I see her not as an enemy, but as a precursor. And I reprimand myself for it.
Because that is how it begins, isn’t it? Not with betrayal—but with fatigue. With the subtle shift from the one who runs to retrieve the ball to the one who flinches at its sound. From the one who crosses lines to the one who draws them.
I was never satisfied with the notion of the nomadic exile—the elegant figure who traverses cultures, crossing boundaries with perpetual dislocation, inhabiting none. That archetype, so beloved in literary theory, fails me. It fails many of us. Because we do not drift—we are held in place by force. And if we do move, we are chased, checked, registered, deported and also denied return. We are not exilic in the abstract. We are trapped. Bodies made heavy when we enter the room, cutting through the laughter, and making everyone feel “uncomfortable”. We are pariah’s even when we become doctors, or find solutions to vexing questions and quandaries. We are students at Columbia, but also the first to be deported.
Edward Said once described the exile as one perpetually out of place, a figure of ironic detachment, of refined estrangement. But what of the one who is not out of place, but in it—too much in it? What of the one for whom estrangement is not ironic, but suffocating?
And so I cannot romanticize the exile. I cannot inherit the poise of the worldly intellectual, crossing borders with a book under his arm. Because every time I try to leave, I hesitate. Not out of choice, but because choice has been thickened to the realm of betrayal, and also thinned to the surface level of an illusion. I am not a wanderer. I am a wall-dweller.
And yet—there is something that stirs even here. Something that cannot be named by movement or dislocation. A resistance that does not drift, but concentrates. A rage that does not scatter, but compacts. If I do not cross, it is not because I do not desire. It is because I know that even when I do, I remain marked.
You can also be a pariah in the hate of the world. Not just hated—but forged in hatred, folded by it. Turned inward at times, perhaps most of the time. Into the bones. Into the breath. You become the container of the very violence that sought to expel you.
To be pariah is not only to be cast out. It is also to be held in, immobilized, crushed by the impossibility of movement. Not wandering, but sinking. Not dislocated, but over-located—so pinned to a place that it begins to rot inside you. You do not leave the world; the world embeds itself in you, until every wall and checkpoint becomes internal, psychic, metabolic.
You can inhabit a place too much—so much that it implodes within you. Not in the clarity of exile, but in the blur of estrangement that comes from overfamiliarity. You know the cracks in the wall, the scent of the soil, the tilt of the sun—and still it feels foreign. Not because it is no longer yours, but because it is so painfully, exhaustingly yours. Because you have had to defend it with every breath, until even the breath feels suspect.
This is not the exile of elegance. This is the exile of overstay. Of being too long in a world that no longer recognizes you, nor one that you are able to truly recognize. A pariah not because you have wandered, but because you have stayed. And in staying, have refused the gift of anonymity, of disappearance, of the world out there.
A conscious, non-nomadic pariah.
Not one who wanders. Not one who flees. One who stays. Who lingers. Who rots, perhaps. Who sits in-between—the worn grooves of memory and the unbearable weight of the present. He is no longer the child who ran to retrieve the ball, nor the one who screamed from the garden. He identifies with both, yet also despises both. He is what remains when both figures collapse.
A conscious, non-nomadic pariah who overstays—who inhabits the ruins and writes the implosion as slowly as possible, in the faint hope that some remnant—some fragment of what is remains in the wake of the implosion—might touch the exilic nomads.
Featured image: The fence bisecting the West Bank village of Sinjil, north of Ramallah, June 25, 2025. Photo: Mohammad Ghafri. Courtesy of +972 Magazine.
