May Please

You have disappeared, my winter friend

They were both in a strange holding pattern. He needed to reconnect with his old life. It was never the plan to cut himself off*
- Damien Wilkins, Delirious

There’s a scene towards the end of Jessica Stanley’s second novel Consider Yourself Kissed that details a haircut. This particular haircut is not just a haircut, but a violation. The haircut is a gender enforcement performed by a character with unearned power, and an unexamined need to dominate others. The dark, controlling moment of the haircut is almost swept away in the tumbling light and warmth of the novel’s central blended family, but a sense of body horror and betrayal sticks around. It’s just hair, but it’s also never just hair.

Hair can be powerful, but therefore also vulnerable. Women accused of witchcraft would have their hair shaved off in a humiliating move to coax confessions. Old Testament Samson, having made a vow not to cut his hair, was rewarded with great strength. But he was betrayed by his lover Delilah when she cut off his hair for the profit of his enemies. His hair had seemed to connect him to his God, and its removal left him a prisoner. Without the strength of his hair Samson was captured, blinded, and enslaved.

And the opposite can happen to us mortals, where an inciting trauma can then cause rapid hair loss. A treatment that carries a burden — chemotherapy. A hormonal shock — birth, miscarriage, medication. Even a pathogenic shock can do it — Covid-19, a major source of telogen effluvium, can cause a disproportionate number of hairs to enter the resting and shedding phases after the spikes of a fever. In a position of vulnerability, the loss of hair on top of emotional or physical duress is an extra-othering stress. A person experiencing hair loss can feel marked and haunted, a lesser ghost of themselves.

“Each time I use the comb, more of my hair falls out,” Middle East Eye reports from 12-year old Rahaf Ayyad in Gaza City, “I don’t like seeing myself. This isn’t me.” And a similar ordeal for Sama Tubail, an eight-year-old from Beit Lahia: "I was sleeping when the army attacked the house ... I was afraid so much and I did not know what to do. I cried without making any voice and my heart was racing so quickly," she told The New Arab. "I was so happy when we weren’t killed," she said. "But I was shocked when I saw my hair falling out a lot later…I cry a lot, so I have stopped playing with girls outside". Her mother explained to CNN that Sama feels ashamed of having lost her hair, and feels she can’t restart her life until it regrows.

When tolerance mainly serves the protection and preservation of a repressive society, when it serves to neutralize opposition and to render men immune against other and better forms of life, then tolerance has been perverted.

Herbert Marcuse, Repressive Tolerance, 1965

After 20 months of atrocity it is mind-numbing to see some institutions and leaders now come to find some weaselly kind of voice. None are saying, “gosh I was wrong”. Instead they behave as though something new or different has happened, and that there is a category change in the situation. Polite people who care only about preserving normality, and their place in it. Well normality is changing, and they are scared of being left behind. As Omar El Akkad says in the title of his book, one day, everyone will have always been against this. Israel is burning children alive, starving children to death, and creating so much trauma that so many living children wish to die. Eight year-old Sama again: “Will I stay like this, bald, for the rest of my life? No, I want to die and have my hair grow in Paradise, God willing”.

There are so many things to grieve every day, but the thing that has surprised me in my own grief is that I’ve found myself grieving the loss of what I thought the world maybe still had in it and grieving the realization of just how much barbarity and Evil underpins our society in the most banal of ways. 

I have always believed in the good of people, I have always believed that our world, in spite of the structures of violence and repression that exist, could fight back when pushed into a corner. 

I no longer believe that.

There is good in this world, there are so many good people — people who lay their lives and livelihoods on the line everyday for a better world for people they’ve never met. But this world we live in is manufactured to kill them, to render them criminal, to present them as radical and disposable. 

How do we grieve that?

Sana Saeed, X Thread, May 2025 

*Editor’s note: They were both in a strange holding pattern. He needed to reconnect with his old life. It was never the plan to cut himself off - I read this line in Wilkins’ novel last night, and it said so much for me. For the past while I have been really very depressed, and [hopefully just temporarily] isolated from people outside my immediate proximity. Depression is not really the right word, maybe it’s more like suspension. Maybe it’s the afterlife of last year’s illness. Maybe it started with the genocide. And all my moving around. Or— I can’t keep making a litany, this is what stops me from talking at all right now. Every time I try to make sense of the soupiness of this life it all sounds self-pitying. But that’s not how I feel at all. I don’t feel self-pity, I feel merely that I am not really a person, but more a holding pattern. Safe to say that a lot of emails and texts and social media are currently languishing. It was never the plan to cut myself off. And so I offer this song, a “short sweet ballad about relationships and the difficulties of preserving them when they’re stretched on the rack of space and time”:

Kāhore te taumaha e pēhanga nō runga rā
Oma ake tonu ai, ka pekea ngā matata
E kore e kite ana au, e te hoa hōtoke
He pohewa tonu ai i te makaro e

Not this burden that presses down from above
And I, forever running, leaping over the cracks
You have disappeared, my winter friend
A vision lost in the dimness

Until next month, until—
H x

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