technically english
no. 1: how i feel
Hey y’all,
Long time bleeblah.
I made a full digital zine that I am selling to raise some money for Gaza relief. It’s about Palestine—it’s about complicity and failure and detachment and failure again—and I’ve made it to raise some money for emergency relief. It’s only $10, and I’m putting a preview below to entice you to buy a full copy.
Again: half of all money I get from this will go to the Palestine Children's Relief Fund. I would love to give a lot to PCRF with your help! I will also just give you a copy if you send me a time-stamped receipt to PCRF, Anera, Mercy Corps, World Central Kitchen, or any other verified Palestinian relief aid / credible mutual aid network. I will try to batch my donations in amounts of $50--so every 10 copies I sell.
This zine has one prose poem, one long poem, and two collage sets. It's something I worked on over a few months because I wanted to make sure it wasn't shit. Overall the digital zine is 24 pages. It’s available as PDF unless that makes your computer hurt--thenI can do jpeg or png. (Tell me before—I get the orders directly.)
Anyway, here’s a preview—and I hope you buy a full copy. Thanks.
—Keegan
spirits in the material world
1.
Last week, I went to a show that was, on some level, supposed to be about Palestine. Or, I suppose, Palestine was the point for the show coming into existence, even if the theme was about spirits or haints or ghosts, something dead but not quite. Most of the acts did nothing to do with either Palestine or spirits for that matter. Most of them involved breathing: in and out, as a box, with each other, through a mask. To that I suppose the theme worked: I don’t think the dead can breathe.
Still the only connection I could find was from a distance. I would space out during a repurposed Broadway number and think, I don’t know if the dead youth of Palestine needed this. Halfway through my second beer, I realized that the point of all of this wasn’t for slaughtered people halfway across the world but, instead, to soothe people who were exhausted at feeling like the only people in the city who were thinking about slaughtered people hallways across the world. About three thembies seemed to love the show, although none of them seemed to take out their phones during the intercession plea to donate to Palestinian relief.
2.
If you're an American, complicity comes in waves: first, in any willingness to believe that your happiness has not been built off the misery of others, past or present: your phone, your morning coffee, your chocolate treat, your ability to rent, your city view; second, in any willingness to believe that you are somehow unmoored from the forces and broad waves of history, as if anyone could stand outside of systems or institutions and still be legible to the records of time; third and finally, in your profoundly American belief that you, yes you, you and you alone have the ability and sole responsibility to solve the problem.
If you’re an American, faithlessness comes in waves, too. This emotion is less collective, but it all amounts to the idea that the stakes you hold in something bigger has no material worth. Your faith alone doesn’t halt bullets or mass graves or drone bombs. Your faith alone cannot bring back the dead, nor comfort the living, even if you do box breathing. Some Americans are enough to have this faith dissolve as adults, while some learned it before entering grade school. This is typically a factor of race and class. The most doggedly faithful in America seem the most cynical of all.
3.
To be clear: helplessness isn’t complicity but it doesn’t really make for good art either.
To be clear: complicity may breed despair but that may lead to shitty art too.
To be clear: the horror of genocide also involves those who survive.
To be clear: maybe only survival truly counters despair.
To be clear: good art may just be the act of survival.
To be clear: who defines survival?
The rest of this piece and everything else is in the zine! Thanks again—tell your friends to buy a copy, too! Let’s make this a gigantic donation to PCRF.
—K