ABSTRACT
Approaching three decades of anti-colonial and abolitionist organizing, scholarship, and teachings, I turn towards my Coptic and Palestinian roots to examine and disclose the unspoken loss and grief that embody this journey. The militarized terrors of colonialism harvest loss and anguish in so many ways, for so many people. Within my family, colonialism meant that my Coptic father and matrilineal Palestinian grandparents became the first generation in their respective lineages to be buried outside their ancestral homelands. We exist at the early cusps of colonial displacement and dispossession, grew up within families that experienced those ruptures first-hand, and now exist between the worlds they lost and those we are trying to create, so that we can go on living. In this chapter, I break my silence surrounding the roots of colonial trauma by reconsidering penal colonialism and Black Feminist Hauntology in relation to the lands that hold my ancestors and carry the histories and wisdoms of our ways. Anchored within an intentional commitment to write between the lines of land and time, I reflect on my scholarship in relation to my lived experiences and historic memories tangled within the viscous, knotted formations of colonization’s enduring violence. I map portions of our journey towards decolonizing justice.
