10/07/2025
A letter from Mx. Yaffa on the pub day of their new book, LETTERS FROM A LIVING UTOPIA:
How do you honor an anniversary of a genocide? An anniversary that is neither a beginning nor an end, a continuation because genocide does not have a beginning nor an end.
We can guesstimate, but genocide doesn't start with a single action and it does not end when the bodies are buried. Genocide lives within our bodies for the rest of time.
So how do you honor a day? How do you honor a people? How do you honor memories that can never be captured? How do you honor memories that were never there? How do you honor all that?
We have turned humanity into something so vile, so evil, that even the concept of liberation no longer reaches the vast majority of people.
For the last 15 years—starting with the Syrian Revolution—my work has centered on a collective liberation practice that recognizes that collective liberation is not only possible, it is probable. As a species we are meant to be liberated. I moved towards this practice because I needed a way to honor the revolutionaries that were being killed and disappeared all around me at the start of the Syrian Revolution. This has been a practice that I have engaged in my entire adult life and some days it is difficult to hold onto–not because collective liberation will not happen, but because I am not sure how many of us will survive these coming years and decades until we build a collectively liberated world.
I write this on the day that Assata Shakur passes. I write this recognizing that for so many revolutionaries, they will not live in a collectively liberated world, but that the rest of us might someday, as a result of their labor.
I sit with the grief of losing more comrades than I can name, losing more queer and trans Palestinians in the last two years than I can count, more stories than my brain can keep track of. I say this, no longer knowing if any of my family remains in Gaza at all. I say this wondering where the escalation will come next. I say this wondering if my immediate family in Jordan will be next. I say this wondering if I will ever be able to go back home.
So much of my work has been about envisioning utopia, envisioning a liberated world, because the art of dreaming and the practice of dreaming utopia increases our capacity to hold the grief that overwhelms us day to day. Every moment of every day, we are mourning systems. We are mourning loved ones. We are mourning people on the other side of the planet that we will never meet. We are mourning the planet itself. We are mourning spirit. We are mourning the most intimate parts of ourselves.
Grief is a reminder that the work is not yet finished.
It's during days when we're not in crisis that I find it hardest to believe in a collectively liberated world: days when people are not activated because something big is not happening around them. Those are the days when the majority forgets our reality. They forget that people are actively being killed in genocides and have been for hundreds of years. It is on days like the anniversary of October 7th that I believe in collective liberation the most. From the very beginning on October 7th, 2023, I knew what was to come. I wrote about it in BLOOD ORANGE. I spoke about what was to come the day after. From the very beginning, I spoke of collective liberation.
I've been called naive, I've been called insensitive, I've been accused of spiritual bypassing, I've been called all kinds of names in this belief because most places are not ready to believe that a collectively liberated world is not only possible, but probable, and is something that we can build.
LETTERS FROM A LIVING UTOPIA is a love letter to my people and to all marginalized people to remind us that dreaming is our right, and that we may be afraid of liberation but that fear does not mean that we will not do the work. We will invest everything to build a collectively liberated world, finding our way to liberation once and for all. Liberation starts with us right now at this very moment.
I do not claim to know what a collectively liberated world looks like. Not yet. I have never lived it. I await that day, and today and every day, I think about what that life will be like, not just for me, but for everyone that comes after, for the stewards who will care for a collectively liberated world.
Every day, I practice utopia so that we may one day build it. I want to be ready for it when it is here. When we have done enough work to claim it.
I am honored that LETTERS FROM A LIVING UTOPIA is coming out on the second anniversary of Oct 7th, as a reminder that a better world is not only possible but probable. We are responsible for building it.
—Mx. Yaffa
www.commonnotions.org/letters-from-a-living-utopia
