have trowel, will travel

telemachus addresses eumaeus the swineherd as atta (ἄττα). in my fagles edition it's translated as "old friend", but as vandiver points out, atta has two meanings: it can be used as a familiar-but-respectful form of address to an older man (which is how telemachus uses it), but significantly it's also baby-talk for "father", parallel to papa/dada. it's what telemachus WOULD have called odysseus growing up, but now telemachus refers to him as xenos -- a visiting stranger/foreigner.

ghosta nova 👻🎸

one of her examples is how challenging it is in modernity to fully grasp how impossible penelope's position is. she's a good, dutiful woman with a husband who is M.I.A, but has no way of knowing odysseus' status, or which duties she's obligated to pursue. if her husband is currently alive, she has an absolute duty to preserve his household and herself until he returns. if odysseus is dead, she has an equally absolute duty to swiftly remarry and dedicate herself to a new household. she doesn't live in a society where she can live alone as a widow (or potential widow), only as a wife of someone living.

and i'm thinking about how our perception of her situation is also shaped by how we know odysseus is alive and will return. there's also the fact that the suitors are rude and dangerous -- we certainly don't want her to end up with any of them. so the trickery with the weaving of the shroud comes across as ingenious and morally justified to us... but penelope can't be sure. if odysseus had been dead, the shroud trick would be doubly damning on a societal and moral level -- both for delaying her sacred obligation to form a new family, and for using her feminine skills and resources on her "previous" family (since the shroud was made for laertes).

A lot of my friends have backslid--understandably--into despairposting and doomreblogging about this, so I want to give you something a bit different: the UK does not like these rioting racist twats and is prepared to say so loudly and with force.

I love her?

[image i.d.: senatortedcruz, 6d ago: Friends I will be honest I don't think real life Gazans are taking time out of their day to make brand new tumblr blogs then send asks to big bloggers asking for money.]

This makes my blood boil for a couple of reasons:

FIRSTLY, there is the assumption that palestinians were somehow never on the internet before. The smear campaign against shahed began literally after some users found it impossible to believe that she was a real person who loves photography and to talk to me about her art and how important it was to her. This was IN SPITE of me linking her Instagram that has existed long before October 7th 2023 and has over 6k followers specifically there for her art, which they would have found easily if they had cared to actually read my posts about her.

This is nothing new, because it has always been the general assumption from users in the imperial core that you don't think we from the global south can exist on the internet and see all the shit you say and have opinions about it– but it never stops being shocking to me how thoroughly you are ready to pretend we aren't real people every time. We are directly seeing the results of that wilful ignorance manifest itself cruelly against palestinians in their time of need today.

And then SECONDLY comes the fact that they aren't entirely wrong– reaching out to us on the internet in the middle of a genocide IS insanely hard. There are constant network outages due to the incessant bombing, people have lost their homes and livelihoods, they have lost so much of their friends and families, they are sick and injured, they are struggling just to find any food or any clean water. A lot of people either lost their cellphones while fleeing violence or probably had to sell them and pick cutting themselves off from the world and each other over starving. They are experiencing atrocities beyond our comprehension. A lot of people have given up, especially in the face of the apathy they see from the rest of the world to what they are going through. But that doesn't mean everyone has and that they aren't reaching out to us anyway, often at great cost to themselves, because it is a matter of survival.

Shahed has told me that she has had to struggle a lot to reach out to us. Finding places where there is internet connection is very hard, and she often has to risk going by active combat zones to get a good enough reception to talk to me and others here she has befriended. The danger is even more so at night, and she has told me about how afraid she is at those times because of the presence of iof quadcopters in the area. Sometimes she is able to come by internet connection at night from someone with some solar cells nearby her tent now that running electricity has become so hard to come by in gaza, but she has to pay a high fee to get it from them, dipping into the meagre funds her family has saved for food and water instead.

Every single message that reaches us from gaza comes with a sacrifice we can't even begin to understand.

The cost she has to pay both literally and in terms of the dangers to her life to reach out to us are extremely high, but she still does it all because she is the sole provider for her family of seventeen right now– especially her little siblings Rafif and Masa, who are suffering from severe hepatitis right now and urgently need to get out of gaza so that they can seek treatment in egypt; and her months old nephew who was born just weeks before the genocide began and has no access to baby food or diapers right now.

It GALLS me to see people try to call her a liar for being able to have an internet connection at ALL when i know just how hard she had to fight to get it.

Just because YOU are unable to imagine yourself in that situation when you are in your comfortable homes with an easily available connection, DOESN'T mean there aren't people who are willing to fight to be heard and get the help they deserve. And of course, this is only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the struggle that comes with crowdfunding when you are in gaza.

Your “cynicism” comes from a place of privilege and doesn't help anyone. You are only insulting all the palestinians who work so hard every day to reach out to us, all so some truly heartless people can call them bots or scams for being able to reach out to anyone at all.

WE ARE RUNNING OUT OF TIME. SHAHED HAS TO REACH 80K WITHIN THIS WEEK TO EVACUATE HER WHOLE FAMILY.

WE HAVE ONLY JUST CRACKED 68K/80K, AND THERE IS STILL A LONG WAY TO GO.

Please donate to and share Shahed's fundraiser as widely as possible. Take it to your whatsapp groups, to your discord servers, your instagram stories. Repost her story and her photography, repost the link to the raffle at @journalsforpalestine wherever you have reach because there is only so much i can do with the deadline looming so close to us.

Hello, I'm Ola, a graduate student from the faculty of science - Al-Azhar University in Gaza Palestine. I truly appreciate you taking a moment to read my story. As you reading my message, myself and my family, “my mother, father, three sisters, and my little brother,” are fighting death in northern Gaza and trying to survive under all kinds of suffering including but not limited to destruction, fear, and instability, starvation, thirst, and poverty.

For nine months until now, we have been struggling to get proper food after prices increased by 15 to 20 times, struggling to have clean water for use and drinking. We lacked security and stability as we were forced to evacuate our house and left everything behind. Then we had to move at least three times since every new area we seek refuge to gets bombed.

I sincerely hope you can empathize with our dire situation and consider supporting us. You can follow me to make sure I am not a scammer and to inquire about any details. Your generosity has the power to make a significant difference.

Please donate and/or replog 🥺🙏🇵🇸

I've been messaging back and forth with @mohammedalanqer after he shared his fundraiser with me, and very quickly into our conversation I offered to draw a comic about him to help boost his gofundme. he was incredibly excited about the idea and shared so many lovely pictures of his family for reference. the text is based off his story of him and his family living under constant bombardment, which you can read here.

Gorgug was in a forest the first time he died. It was scary, a leaf cut him, he talked about it a lot for a while, it stuck with him, it wasn’t at all comforting. 

Three years later he finds Kristen in her peaceful woods. 

“Remember when we died?”

Vs 

i had goosebumps