Raising a Brown Child in a Time of Genocide w/ Nikesh Shukla

For episode 160, Dana El Kurd, Fabien Goa and Elia Ayoub are joined by Nikesh Shukla to discuss his book ‘Brown Baby: A Memoir of Race, Family and Home’ which the three of us read with Gaza on our mind (although it was written in 2021 and is not on Palestine).

More broadly, we talked about what it’s like to raise a brown kid in a world where racialized lives are easily disposable.

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Episode Credits:

Transcript prepared by Shirley Yin and Antidote Zine:

It’s been very comforting in our little unit to know that we can talk about what’s going on in the world, and they do listen when the news bulletins come on the radio, and we can talk about stuff afterwards. I’m really grateful for that, because I grew up in an environment where my parents refused to talk about what was going on in the world.

Elia J. Ayoub: Welcome everyone to another episode of The Fire These Times. I’m your host, Elia Ayoub, and today I’ll be joined by Fabien Goa, Nikesh Shukla, and Dana El Kurd. We don’t quite know who is guest and who is host because it’s going to be a four-way conversation on a topic that is dear to our hearts for very personal reasons, which is raising a baby Brown child in today’s world. The four of us are parents. 

To get this conversation kick-started, let’s start with some basic intros.

Nikesh Shukla: I am a writer, a parent, an idiot, and I wish my niece would still let me play football.

Dana El Kurd: I’m a Palestinian researcher and writer, and I am a mum.

Fabien Goa: I’m a human rights researcher. I work with international NGOs, particularly, at the moment, researching human rights abuses in Europe, but having worked in other regions prior. I am British-Mauritian, and I’m currently based in Marseille in France, and I’m also a parent, father to a young boy who’s two and a half years old now.

EA: The thing we have in common, other than general political alignments and caring about human rights, is that we’re parents. My kid is very young, six months old as of a few days ago. Listeners who have listened to a few episodes would know the story by now where she was born extremely prematurely on 15 October [2023] and spent most of her life so far at the hospital. Thankfully for a couple of months now she has been at home. Everything’s fine on that front, luckily, so we’re very grateful for that.

The elephant in the room in so many of my conversations with so many people these days, when it’s not directly about that topic, is what’s happening right now in Gaza, the ongoing genocide in Gaza. My kid’s entire existence so far has been that. Of course, she doesn’t know this, but she was born one week after the attack; the war and ongoing onslaught had already started and has only gotten worse since. 

The question of How will I even talk about this to her one day? and the question of when, and all of these things are obviously on my mind. I created a lot of very dark associations in the early days of her existence because as a micro-preemie, she had to be in the incubator for a bit more than a month. At the time when she was put in the incubator, the images coming from Gaza of the incubators there in one of the hospitals, I believe it was al-Shifa, haunted me. Whenever I would go and see her, which was multiple times a day, these images were in my mind. I had to force myself, after some time, to compartmentalize a tiny bit, like, This is my journalist hat, this is my Palestinian hat, and this is my now-I-need-to focus-on-my-daughter-in-this-very-precarious-situation hat. 

It’s raised all of these questions of a tentative title for this episode, Raising a Brown Child in a Time of Genocide, because there are consequences to what’s happening right now—not just in Gaza, but so many other conflicts that I can barely start scratching the surface. Gaza is the one that’s most directly impacting me, my identity, my heritage, and of course, Lebanon (I grew up in Lebanon).

Let me open up the floor to have opening thoughts and reflections from you all, because I know that this is something that’s been on your mind.

FG: I was going to say, I don’t know how I’m going to make it through this episode. I was really shocked, to be honest, listening to you speak. We’ve been having really regular conversations, and we’ve, from a distance, almost felt like part of the journey that you and your partner and your daughter have been through. Even just starting this conversation, I can already feel the lump in my throat, and I don’t know where to start. Because my kid is also too young to really grasp any idea of what’s happening. Almost every time I look at him, there is a background shadow of this reality of horror that’s unfolding.

We live in Europe. My family’s origins are not from Europe, they’re from Africa, in Mauritius. Our background and my family history has always meant that, at least the way I was brought up, we saw other people’s pain as our own. It’s a sentiment or a feeling or a value that I felt growing up, and so when I see so much pain and devastation in Gaza, in Sudan, and so many conflicts, in Congo as well, it’s impossible since becoming a parent not to see it through the lens of my child’s eyes, and not to feel the fear that any parent must experience going through such horrors.

DK: The conversation is very heavy for me as well. As I mentioned, I am Palestinian, so this is all very close to me, but I agree with Fabien that ever since I became a parent, seeing any kind of suffering does impact me a lot, and affects my mental health and my psyche, and these last couple of months have been really difficult. It’s a very strange level of compartmentalization that we’re expected to undertake as Brown parents in the Global North. Check in in the morning, read the news, see devastating numbers and parents publicly mourning their children and so much sadness, and then compartmentalize and go about your day. 

And I’m getting worse at it. It’s very clear I am unable to engage in the same way. It’s bled into my ability to engage in any of my relationships, including with my child, and comes out in strange ways. At one point, my child was sick in the last couple of weeks, and I heard myself say, Children in Gaza don’t have medicine. The child doesn’t understand what I’m saying, of course, but it’s coming out in these strange ways, and it’s very hard to cope. Also, being a Palestinian in the United States with all this backlash against Palestinians—truly unprecedented level of backlash from our elite-captured system—I’m starting to wonder what future we really have in this country. 

That’s a whole level of stress and anxiety for me. I don’t know where to take my half-Palestinian baby. I don’t know where to take this child to keep them safe somewhere in the world. “Disconcerting” is too light a word to describe my mental state on this question.

NS: Echoing what Dana and Fabien were saying, and what you were saying, Elia, it’s really hard to make sense of your place in the world, watching on social media picture after picture of children in rubble, children without parents, children with horrific injuries. It gives you this real helplessness. There were times in the last couple of months where I’d wake up in the middle of the night, and I kept hearing the phone call that Hind Rajab was making to that Red Crescent worker. I was haunted by that story, and there is that familiarity—I looked at pictures of her and I saw my children. What’s been interesting and comforting for me at this time is being able to have these knotty conversations with my kids about what’s going on in the world, and be able to explain it to them without projecting my own weariness or sadness or cynicism or whatever negative feelings—just present to them what’s going on—and they understand that things are not right.

On Christmas day, my partner wasn’t very well, so we had to change some plans, and we were walking through the park: I took the kids out to get some fresh air, and my eldest child was upset because plans were changing and it was Christmas day, and it’s a special time for her, and I said, The kids in Gaza don’t have Christmas day (the first thing I’d seen that day was that the priest in the church in Jerusalem had said they wouldn’t be celebrating Christmas). And hours after she was supposed to go to bed, at eleven o’clock at night, she came down the stairs and was like, I just feel really sad that kids don’t get to have this one day because of all this stuff going on. She was really upset. 

My worry with talking to my kids about all this stuff is that you don’t want to find out that your kids lack basic empathy skills. That would be really heartbreaking for me. But it’s been very comforting in our little unit to know that we can talk about what’s going on in the world, and they do listen when the news bulletins come on the radio, and we can talk about stuff afterwards. I’m really grateful for that, because I grew up in an environment where my parents refused to talk about what was going on in the world with me, and would much rather I just be in my little study-hard box rather than engaged with world events.

EA: I relate to everything that’s been said so far. I was born in 1991, and the “civil war” in Lebanon ended in 1990. Not too long ago, I discovered that my mom was pregnant with me when our childhood home was bombed by the Syrian regime at the time—that was towards the end of the war(s). One thing led to another, but I ended up spending six years of my life doing a PhD on the post-war in Lebanon, trying to understand this period that is called the post-war. What defines it? What is it about it that even makes it different than the war? The parallels here are not the same, but when this phase of the “war” ends, what comes after? That is something I’m trying to understand.

I’m now comparing everything to how my parents did things, and the pros and cons. Nikesh, you mentioned this a bit in Brown Baby, towards the end: seeing them as a bit more human after you became a parent. It’s a bit like that with me. I used to judge them more. I still resent certain things, but I understand certain other things that I didn’t want to understand before, that I maybe didn’t have space for before. Ultimately, that was a generation for whom the Lebanese civil war started when they were fifteen and ended when they were thirty—and they had me when they were thirty-one. So it’s effectively their entire lives, really, in terms of being conscious human beings, at the age of fifteen onwards.

I’m thinking a lot about this now, and the contrast that I have in mind—I knew Refaat [Alareer] a bit. We were acquaintances at the time when that book compilation, Gaza Writes Back, came out. You mentioned the call by Hind, the little girl. What haunts me is a conversation that Refaat had with Jake Hanrahan from Popular Front. In that interview, everything is in the background. You can hear everything: the bombs, the screams of children. And Refaat somehow managed to—I’m not going to say “keep his composure.” But he was clearly impacted by everything that’s happening, but still trying to explain to Jake in that conversation what is happening.

I think about that sometimes, that even Refaat, who is in a situation that I have never been in, and hopefully never will be in, still felt that he had to put different hats on because otherwise he probably couldn’t function as a human being. It ties into a reflection, Fabien, you’ve had on how the book Brown Baby is almost as much about grief as it is about raising a kid and becoming a parent.

DK: I’m reflecting on this point that both of you mentioned about seeing parents in a different light. And Nikesh had said that he’s engaging with his children on some of these questions in a way that maybe his parents didn’t. I was born in Jerusalem towards the end of the first Intifada. I don’t have memories of that, but I do have some memories of the second Intifada. And of course, even between the Intifadas, it wasn’t a peaceful place. I saw military occupation.

Even when we moved away from Palestine, I feel like my parents weren’t careful about what kinds of information I was exposed to. Arabic news was blaring all the time, and as a young child, I was seeing things that maybe I shouldn’t have seen. So it’s interesting that I’ve had this opposite reaction, especially to the recent events in Gaza, where I feel panicked about keeping it from my child and not exposing them to some of this information.

It’s not necessarily working, because they did at one point say to me from the backseat, There’s something bad happening in Gaza, right? I was flabbergasted because I had never addressed the issue with them directly, but clearly they’ve been listening. Even if we’re being very careful, it’s interesting to see this level of engagement. Because it’s very good, of course, to know what’s happening around the world. But also for me growing up, it was such a psychological burden to understand yourself in this context: that you are a victim of racial abuse and that people don’t want you to exist. It impacted me in some positive ways and some negative ways. 

I’m not suggesting that I’m correct and you all are wrong. This is just my coping mechanism at the moment, to try to avoid the discussion.

EA: To qualify what I said earlier, I had both reactions at the same time, in terms of my judgment of how certain things were growing up. Certain things could have definitely been done differently, that I’m more pissed off about now than I was before, but with other things I’m more understanding.

You said you were born and raised in Jerusalem. I wasn’t. My relationship to Palestine is: I have a grandfather who has passed away now, who was born and raised there and then was exiled. And so for me, the relationship that my kid will have is: My great-grandfather was Palestinian, born and raised there, and they will have to learn about the Nakba at some point. I thought a lot about what the ethical balance is, if there even is one. 

Even with the naming of my kid: do I go with my family name, which is very Arab, or do I go with my partner’s family name, which is very Italian? My kid is, at least as of now, white-passing. Their first name can be both Arab and Italian, which was on purpose. But that’s the link with grieving, because ultimately I felt that I had to erase a part of myself, a part of my heritage, because it could become a burden on her.

We’ve gone through lots of rounds of aggression and violence against the Palestinians for as long as I can remember, but it’s definitely affected both me and my partner in a much more emotional way now that we’re parents, and see our own children when we see these kids.

Theoretically, I would say yes, everyone should have their culture. It should be passed on. It’s an amazing and beautiful and wonderful thing. I do believe that. But there’s this other side of me that’s like, Is it even fair for her? Because—did she ever choose that? Ultimately, I’m making a decision that’s going to impact her in one way or another, regardless. That’s just how it is, and we’ll have to live with that. Should we teach her Arabic? Or forget about it entirely, and reset the clock? We will, that’s been our conclusion, but it was one of the questions on our minds.

NS: Reflecting on what Dana was saying about the difference in how you grew up and how I grew up: my dad grew up in Kenya when it was still under British rule, and came to the UK in the sixties, to a place where he was nearly murdered a couple of times by skinheads. Something like a protective switch went on in him, and he bought into this eighties-era, Thatcherite, British lie about social mobility. If you work hard, then anything can happen for you. 

My dad really bought into that thing of being the “model minority.” We’ve seen that lie—the limitations of representational politics in the UK and how that results in people like Rishi Sunak helming some of the most regressive policies that the UK has ever seen. We’re talking today at the point he has announced that these deportation flights to Rwanda will happen in July. And looking at someone like Rishi Sunak—my dad is so proud that he’s our prime minister. The only time my dad has ever mentioned racism to me is saying, Rishi Sunak has suffered so much racism as prime minister! Which I find really interesting. I understand, but I also don’t understand, why he shielded us from a lot of this stuff. Because he changed; he became the type of person who really wanted to buy into that immigrant myth. 

The limitations of that are perplexing to me. I don’t want my kid to be put in that position. I’ve made some really stupid mistakes in talking to them about stuff that was slightly outside their realm of understanding of the world. There was a thing where I’d walk them to school, and every time we walked past a police officer, I’d be like, Stay away from the police, and it became this whole thing of, Daddy doesn’t like the police. And one day they asked me, Why don’t you like the police? Trying to explain an abolitionist mindset to your children, trying to explain that society has been set up wrong in the UK, to be punitive rather than whatever—it was slightly beyond them.

We’ve taken them on marches calling for a ceasefire or pro-Palestine marches, or whatever you want to call them, and the thing that they’ve grasped onto and what has really caught their empathy zones is: How many children are dying? How many children have become orphaned? You know, the statistics around life expectancy and how young the population is or was.

I wrote Brown Baby at a different time from now. It feels banal to talk about some of the stuff that I wrote in Brown Baby within the context of what’s happening in Gaza. But the central question I was trying to ask myself, which I suppose is an evergreen question, was, How do we raise our children to be prepared for a fucked up world and also retain some sense of boundlessness and joy and wonder? I want my kids to be kind and I want them to be curious, at a very basic level. And it’s really hard when the world is telling them that society is not set up that way.

DK: I also think it has to do with your particular child’s age and temperament and things like this. That drives a lot of those decisions of At what point? For me, I wish I could be more gradual about it. But the world is forcing me not to be gradual about it, not to be so careful with my child—because I know their temperament and their sensitivity. Unfortunately, the world is making me fast-pace some of those conversations. That is what I’m afraid of, because like you said, I want them to grow up whole. I want them to grow up with a sense that they can engage with the world fully.

I don’t do much correctly, but what I do correctly is reading, and my child’s library is fantastic. It’s interesting, because I have no problem reading my child books about the civil rights era (obviously they’re quite sanitized; they’re not showing police brutality), and he’s got a book about Loujain al-Hathloul, and all of those things, but I very clearly noticed the shift in his sadness when I’ve read him things about the Syrian civil war. That haunted him. I was like, Oh, okay, so this is the limit. And again, they’re children’s books. It’s not like I’m reading things with great detail. 

That’s why with with Gaza, it hits so much closer to home. We know we’re Palestinian. I’m so afraid, and I need to figure out a strategy—to pursue a more engaged approach, and not cede that ground, but still keep their mental health safe.

FG: The balance you were describing trying to strike is the conversation that I have with myself almost every day since my son was born. And as Elia said, when I read Brown Baby recently, one of the things that resonated with me was how much of it was about grief. There was a connection to the fact that my father died more than a decade ago, so my son will never meet his grandfather on that side of his family. 

Then alongside grief, there’s the element of trauma as well. In terms of my own background: my family is Creole-Mauritian, which you could loosely describe as Afro-descendant Mauritian. It’s more complicated than that for the purposes of this conversation, but there’s this concept (which is often challenged, so I don’t want to give it too much credence) called “La Malaise Creole.” Essentially, Creoles remain the most discriminated against group in Mauritius. That has been a persistent factor dating back to the origins of slavery and then post-independence: the way that Mauritian society has been structured has perpetuated those legacies of slavery and ongoing discrimination.

A small story from the literal birth of my son: my son was born in Paris, and there was a nurse in the maternity ward—I remember saying to my partner, I know she’s Mauritian. We didn’t talk about it—there was a lot going on, with many births happening in the wards. But when my son was two or three days old, she came into our room to do a check-up, and she said a few words to me in Creole. She’d spotted that I was Mauritian, that my son was Mauritian, and she knew that I knew that she was Mauritian. And I typically am not a flag-waving person, but in the chaos of getting ready for the birth of my first kid, one of the things that did make it into the little suitcase we came with was a little Mauritian flag. So we asked, Will you take a picture with us, with the Mauritian flag? She had been joking and laughing, but she went stone cold and said, No, I can’t. I realized immediately that I’d triggered a very deep trauma in her. She, like many other Mauritians, was someone who’d left during much of the chaos that was there before independence, and she’s never been back.

Listening to you all speak about how your parents had or did not have certain conversations with you, I try to think about what conversations I should have with my son and how. I don’t know if it’s a real separation or not, but my parents spoke about what I would describe as the collective grief and traumas and inequalities that exist in our society—but they didn’t really ever talk about their own. Since becoming a parent, I can recognize it in certain decisions they made. I realize that’s just something they weren’t able to tap into.

That phrase that you used, Dana, about a psychological burden—I want my son to be proud of his heritage, to know about his heritage and how complex it is, but at the same time, I’m always worried: am I going to overburden him too quickly when he’s ready to discuss or when he shows curiosity about those elements? Between the four of us, you were weighing up who’s got the right approach. There is no right approach, I’m sure, and everything that all of you have been saying is absolutely the same thoughts that I’ve been having as a parent. I just hope to find the right balance to raise a joyful, empathetic child.

One thing I’ve noticed as a parent, and am curious to know whether it’s something you’ve been feeling as well, is feeling a lot of distance from other parents. Like Dana, you were reflecting on where you’re raising your child—Where is the right future for you? But when I meet other parents in public groups, I can tell they’re not having the same thoughts that we’re having. They may have genuine sympathy, or even empathy, with what they’re seeing on the news, but they don’t take it to their home, in a way. Obviously they love their children and they empathize with the fear of your child being harmed in any way. I don’t want to underestimate that at all. But it’s not translating into these real-life decisions of Can I raise my child? Can they be safe and thrive here?

One sentiment that I’ve definitely felt a lot in the past few months is this sense of distance from other parents, where I can palpably feel that they’re not processing this in the same way, the way that all of you have described. I don’t know if that’s just a me thing, or if that’s something you’re all feeling as well.

DK: Definitely. I couldn’t really disentangle in my mind, until you said it, whether the last couple of months was a depression thing—I am depressed, so maybe that creates tendencies to isolate—or if it’s this parenting thing. Because in our social circles, we have befriended some parents with kids similar in age to my child, and I have had very little tolerance, in the last couple of months, for those conversations and to see those people. It’s not fair, I understand. I know this is somewhat a me problem. I can’t stomach the Gaza-as-a-footnote.

EA: As I mentioned, we spent three and a half months in the NICU. We saw a lot of other parents in similar situations, but also lots of nurses from different backgrounds—it’s a public hospital, so a lot of immigrant backgrounds as well. It is a broad generalization, but there were differences in how some nurses talked to us. With the exception of one nurse towards the end who said something explicitly racist, the others were more tongue-tied, and didn’t know quite what to say or what to do. Maybe they were genuinely worried that they would hurt me or make a misstep, or they didn’t know how to approach things. What that translated into in a concrete way is that I put my Arab-ness at the door before going to the hospital.

It’s a short walk between the hospital and the house, and it became like a routine. I would go in the morning and the evening, and my partner would go during the day. As it happens, I’m currently wearing a shirt that has Arabic on it—I would never do that going to the hospital. There’s a blanket that a friend gave us that has an Arabic poem on it that was to put on my kid in bed at the hospital, and I didn’t do it. I didn’t bring it, I couldn’t. My mind could not handle more than what it was already handling in the moment. It was like, One day we’ll deal with identity, but now it does not matter. She’s a micro-preemie, why would that even matter? I’m not saying that’s right or wrong, that’s just how it was.

Both my partner and I absolutely noticed that there were some nurses who viewed me differently, and by extension viewed my kid differently, in ways that I couldn’t control. That was exhausting, because we were already both in emergency mode, sleep-deprived all the time, and dealing with two dogs at home as well, who were not used to the sudden change of things. I was focused: I’m just going to go there and be there for my kid and then come back home, eat, and then do it again. Very specific tasks that are pretty straightforward, easy to follow in many ways. Not much to do, especially in the early days; just being physically there. But that wasn’t enough. I couldn’t just be. 

That’s the thing for me that’s partly about grief as well, and why I identify with a number of the themes in Brown Baby and other texts. I came to the book looking for something to relate to. Because I live in Geneva and I’m very disconnected from my environment. There are a lot of assumptions and preconceptions and racism and all of that shit that I don’t have the mental capacity to deal with most of the time. So frankly, I pretend it’s not there. And when it’s there, I pretend I’m not seeing it. Or if I am seeing it, I explode and I yell and then I withdraw, and then I pretend not to see it for a few more weeks after that. Because you’re not supposed to yell here about racism. You’re supposed to send a note to the manager or something.

The metaphor that’s on my mind is that I have two huge suitcases that I’m carrying around with me. At one point, I’ll have to decide which one of them, or both, or neither, I’m passing on to my kid. She’s going to inherit this. There are certain things that are going to be fun to inherit. I have an early edition of The Lord of the Rings that I’m super fond of, because it was a book I loved growing up. She’s going to have this, and maybe she loves it and maybe she doesn’t (and if she doesn’t, I’ll be heartbroken, but that’s okay). But then there’s other stuff. She’s going to be talking to her grandparents, and her grandparents grew up in a war. How is that even going to be brought up? Are they just going to pretend it never happened? But if one day she finds out about it anyway, what would the questions be? How would they approach it? Are they even ready for it? All of these are conversations that will probably have to happen in one way or another.

Dana, you mentioned other parents. Other parents are not much of a thing yet because she’s six months old and at home all the time. But with other parents from the NICU, and other nurses—who were more or less the same age group as we are and many of them also parents—I couldn’t not put a mask on when I was there. I wasn’t myself. I felt like myself was too much. If I was myself in that moment, I would depress the fuck out of them, scare them maybe. Ten different emotions could happen at any given time and I have no way of knowing which ones. I didn’t have the mental space for it. I was just there for my kid.

That’s something that is specific about being a parent of a Brown baby, I suppose, or at least in a racialized context.

DK: It’s very alienating.

Cultivating your child’s joy and seeing your child thriving is in fact very political—because it combats erasure. Obviously you care about the child in and of itself, but it’s also a political project, raising these whole children in spite of everything. It’s a way to to fight back. We are doing that work in our parenting, combating erasure.

NS: The thing that I’ve noticed in things that you guys have all said is a degree of guilt or shame about your place in the world, and what that means for how you are as a parent. The hardest thing you can do is remember to show yourself some compassion, because these are incredibly strained times. You’re not always going to be in the best possible place to do the stuff that you need to do with your kid, and that’s okay. Kids move on. We’ve all probably had a go at our kids for doing something annoying that’s just annoyed us even more because we’ve been depressed or sad or stressed or anxious. I guess we just have to keep going, and keep showing ourselves enough compassion. We are fallible people in difficult times, trying to raise kids and stay above water, and it is draining.

FG: You mentioned guilt, and I had a conversation with a good friend of mine who is the namesake for our son—he’s someone we respect and love dearly. He’s in the diaspora, based in the GCC at the moment. We were having a conversation along exactly these lines. He started with the term guilt. His second child was born in August of last year, a similar timeline to your family, Elia. What he said was that the most overwhelming aspect of this whole situation, at least from a personal standpoint, was the guilt. He said, It’s something I hadn’t felt as profoundly before being a parent. 

We’ve gone through lots of rounds of aggression and violence against the Palestinians for as long as I can remember, but it’s definitely affected me in a much more emotional way—both me and my partner—now that we’re parents, and see our children when we see these kids. It’s very complicated. It’s something I haven’t really felt before. It’s in the little things, being able to hold my daughter, being able to hold my son, to hold them in my arms, and the parents in Gaza and the West Bank can’t protect their own children. It’s a very difficult thing to even think about because as a parent you’re the protector, you’re the guardian, you’re the provider, you’re also the rock. Having that taken away from you as parents is very devastating. It takes away your superpower. Because as a parent you’re there for your kids through and through, no matter what happens.

That could have been me if my parents hadn’t fled in 1948 to the West Bank. My mum is originally from Yāfā [Jaffa], but her town was ethnically cleansed and they fled to the West Bank. A lot of Palestinians ended up in Gaza—seventy percent of people in Gaza are refugees, so there’s that sense that That could have been me. It just so happened that I got lucky, and now my kids are lucky, and that’s a combination of luck and privilege, and then the guilt sets in.

For my partner it’s been even more emotional, because she had just given birth to our son and she couldn’t enjoy those moments of laughter, of being there for her son, bonding with him, because effectively we were both just glued to the TV. I remember there would be times when she would be bawling her eyes out while breastfeeding our son, which was just a very dark place to be. 

Obviously this is nothing in comparison to what people are going through on the ground. I hope this provides insight into what Palestinians in the diaspora are going through, because I feel like it’s a collective grief. Even though we’re not in Palestine we are very much affected by it. Everyone is affected in different ways, and the guilt is definitely a common denominator for Palestinians in the diaspora, especially those in positions of privilege living out in the Gulf, or in the US and Europe.

I want to do justice to the sentiments that my friend shared, because they devastated me when I read them, and guilt was the primary emotion that he was feeling, and myself and my partner. Exactly as you were saying, Nikesh, it’s something you talk about in Brown Baby, especially towards the end—providing and cultivating joy. I always have but increasingly see that as an act of resistance as well as resilience. That really frames the parent that I want to be, that I hope to be. I know I fall short of that a lot of the time. But I want that to be my driving force as much as possible, to protect my kids’ joy as much as possible.

DK: I’ve said the same thing to people around me about feeling this guilt, and how no matter how much you do it’s not enough. It’s so strange to explain to people how your child’s joy and seeing your child thriving is in fact very political—because it combats erasure. Obviously you care about the child in and of itself, but it’s also a political project, raising these whole children in spite of everything. It’s a way to to fight back. We are doing that work in our parenting, especially for me as a Palestinian, to combat erasure.

FG: I couldn’t agree more. My son is two and a half years old and I’ve already picked up on lots of spaces where if I don’t bring that kind of political act to ensure protecting his joy, he will be politicized by other people in this society, and he will be judged very quickly. There is already a politicizing happening to my son whether I like it or not. I wish there was a better phrase for it, but he has skin in the game already, so I have no choice but to see his joy as political and to protect it.

As an anecdote, I live in Marseille in France, a very racist country. On Thursdays I take my son to a state-run play group called a créche, a space for parents and kids from newborns to the age of three. Previously my partner would take him there most of the time, so the people who work there recognize our son. I managed to negotiate some time off work so that I could have that time with him on Thursday morning—so I started going regularly. And there was a really strange experience I had in the second or third week, with the educators. I was getting my son ready, taking his shoes off, and he was getting ready to go run around, and I overheard this conversation. It was one of those conversations where you’re like, Hmm, I’m pretty sure they’re talking about me and about my son, but I might be getting it wrong.

And then I realized that they were talking about Métis—it’s a very complicated word again, but essentially meaning mixed-race. And I realized that there was a twisted, very colonial praise happening, where they were remarking how wonderful it wasthat I was now bringing my son to this space. My partner is white, and they weren’t using this term, but they were sayingit’s great that the “racialized” side of his identity is present and is part of his upbringing. The conversation then went into talking about gangs, and them sayingthere’s this void of identity and That’s how they get pulled into gangs. I was just sitting there, doing the menial task of doing my son’s shoelaces, and I realized that this is how they perceive my son, and this is how they perceive me.

It absolutely spun my brain, and I had to do that compartmentalization and lock off the rage in my head, while questioning if I’d really heard what I heard in the background, and then just focusing on making sure my son had fun in this space. I came home and spoke to my partner about it, and spoke to other racialized parents we know, and they were like, No, that’s definitely what happened. We know that stuff happens a lot in France. 

It was exactly the point that you were saying, Dana, that we have to fight back, and I have no choice not to, because if I don’t, other people are going to label and prejudge him in a very political sense.

DK: France is so racist. I have to say it.

EA: I had an experience that was similar in essence, although it wasn’t quite that, but one of the nurses at the hospital asked my wife, Do you have to be veiled? or Would your husband ask you to be veiled? or something like that. It’s in that moment that I remembered that I’m perceived to be Muslim, even though I’m not, and I’m of course perceived to be a very conservative Muslim, even though I’m neither of the two. That just precedes me. I’m not in denial of it; I’m very well aware of it intellectually. But in order for me to function emotionally, I keep the realization of that at bay at times, especially if I have to do something else that’s more important, which in this case would be caring for my kid.

There were concrete consequences to those comments, other than just, Oh, she’s an old white lady with bigoted views, because the nurses and the evaluations determined when our kid would come home. So in my mind, I was like, Is this the moment to challenge white supremacy and maybe this leads to my kid not coming home for an extra week? I couldn’t know, there was no way for me to know, and it’s not like it’s in the guidebook that they give you. You have to figure it out on the spot, and it’s one of those institutions that “doesn’t see color” and therefore doesn’t know where to look.

Brown Baby, the book, is named after a song performed most famously by Nina Simone. Nina Simone is one of my two favorite humans, alongside James Baldwin—this podcast is named after one of his books—and the photo of the two of them together is my background on all devices. In that song, she’s saying, Brown Baby / As you grow up I want you to drink from the plenty cup / I want you to stand up tall
and proud / And I want you to speak up clear and loud.

“I want you to drink from the plenty cup” is fascinating to me. I interpret it as: I know that I live in a world of precarity, I know that I’ve had to make decisions and choices that are not fair, and hopefully one day, inshallah, you won’t have to. It’s fundamentally unfair—that’s the whole baggage thing I’m thinking about. How much of it is mine to deal with and pass on, in the sense of explaining it to her one day, and how much of it is mine to deal with and pass on like, Here you go, now it’s yours. It’s early on right now, but that’s the thing that’s on my mind.

NS: I live in Bristol in the UK, and during the Black Lives Matter protests in 2020, a bunch of protestors pulled down a statue of a slave owner called Colston, whose name adorns many things in our city. There’s a statue right in the center of the city that there’s been an ongoing conversation about tearing down—since around the time it was put up, interestingly enough—and then finally in 2020 it was taken down and thrown in the river. The name of my kids’ school has an association with Colston, and the faculty wanted to engage the kids in a conversation about what that association meant going forward, especially given that the majority of the school is Brown and Black kids.

My daughter came home one day and was talking about how they were going to keep the name of the school but change the association away from Edward Colston, and then she asked me about the Bristol bus boycott. In the 1960s in Bristol there was a big civil rights action; Black people weren’t being employed by the bus company because of the color of their skin, so there was a big boycott of the buses that led to the bus company nearly going bust. She was asking me about it because they’d been talking about it in school, and I realized in having to explain it to her that I’d have to explain to her what racism was.

Typical of my child, this conversation is happening at the end of the day; she’s getting out of the bath and we’re getting her ready for bed, and she wants to know about racism. So I’m talking to her about what racism is, and halfway through the conversation I realized—this is a really hard concept to bring up. I said to her, Racism is when someone will treat someone else differently because of the color of their skin. This was two or three years ago when she was a lot younger, so I was trying to explain it as simply as I could. And she said to me, That doesn’t make any sense, that sounds really stupid. 

And I started to go, Well, you know, people might be racist because—and then I realized that I was trying to justify racism to her in order to explain it, when actually I needed to be on her level, and to be on her level is to take it for what it is and go, It’s stupid.

That really clarified for me how to have these conversations, because so often you bring too much of yourself to the conversation and not enough of where they’re at, and there are ways of talking about what’s going on in the world on their level that strip away your weariness, your pain, your grief, and all the rest of it. That’s what they need: someone to say, This is the world as you see it; we’ll complicate it as you get older, but right now, you’re right, racism is pretty stupid. 

That was really helpful. That way of approaching the conversation really helped when we needed to talk to our kids about what was happening in Gaza, because we were able to go, Does this feel fair? And based on their conception, they were like, No, this doesn’t feel fair.

EA: I’ll try to end on a hopeful note. As I mentioned, I’m really grateful for Nina Simone’s work and James Baldwin’s work and so many other people’s work. It took me some time to really understand certain things. Back when I was living in London, I attended this course called The Amazing James Baldwin in Brixton. It was at a time when the documentary I Am Not Your Negro by Raoul Peck was popular, and I was so impacted by the scenes in that documentary that I ended up consuming anything and everything Baldwin, especially video. He had a presence that marked me very deeply. And he had this framing, when he was talking to white people specifically, of saying, I am not the n-word. I’ve never been the n-word. You created that category, you created all of that, and now I give it back to you. It is your burden, you have to figure out why you had to create the n-word in the first place.

I found that realization that he had very liberating. I felt liberated by proxy, just by hearing it. I’m not a Black person and I didn’t grow up in the US. I don’t have that experience, and whatever I’m going through mentally, he objectively went through much worse multiple times. But he still had that perspective, which is not just a perspective of We can come together, we should all just love one another, but a righteous anger at the state of the world. To quote your your kid, Nikesh: This is stupid, this thing is just dumb. The world we live in in many ways is nonsensical and it doesn’t have to be this way.

It’s a bit freeing for me to understand that this world is created by humans and it can be created differently; social constructs can be constructed differently. That allows me some solace, at least from time to time. Not necessarily because it might free me, or because I might experience the fruits of that freedom, but it’s very clearly a possibility. It’s not just some religious dogma, because you can trace the roots of when this ism started—capitalism, patriarchy, racism—so it’s logical to conclude that at some point it’s going to end as well.

It’s not like I’m preparing myself for what comes after, because I may not live to see it, but I’m trying to live as if it’s already the case. Let’s say, treat my my kid as if there is no such thing as patriarchy, as if we have already overcome it.

FG: I’ll share a very brief anecdote from the first time my mom met my son, her grandson. I have this really vivid memory of her cradling him and singing a Mauritian folk song. It was the first time I really listened to the lyrics, because it’s a really sad song. It talks about a kid going to school, speaking Creole, and being told, You can’t speak that language! because you have to speak French or English. I was thinking, That’s quite sad, but then finding the moment very beautiful as well, because the chorus is the child affirming, You’re Creole, I’m Creole, and affirming their identity and their part in that lineage. 

I don’t know why, but that memory also speaks to finding beauty in those connections, and that’s how I think about Gaza, that’s how I think about a lot of suffering in the world. I grew up in a family that did talk about politics quite a lot, and rightly or wrongly, I do feel that empowerment or a certain resilience came with that. I don’t quite know how I’m going to deal with it with my own son, but I do hope that he sees that our history is connected with all other oppressed people in the world. 

For me, that saves me from despair, because I feel connection to all other humans, and I know that I can be part of affirming other people’s humanity as well. I hope that he can feel that as well, in a hopeful and positive and joyful way.

NS: Speaking of James Baldwin, part of the reason for writing Brown Baby was that we found out we were having a kid, and I turned to Baldwin as I often do, and read The Fire Next Time. And then I read Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates, and I’ve Been Meaning to Tell You by David Chariandy, and Dear Girls by Ali Wong. They were all a comfort, but I wanted to read something a little bit closer to home, and so often when you begin a writing project it’s to fill a gap on your bookshelf.

Thank you for inviting me on this podcast. It feels strange to talk about a book that I wrote before the pandemic—if I was to write it again now, I’d write a completely different book. But as you were talking, Elia, it reminded me of that Baldwin quote: “The children are always ours, every single one of them, all over the globe, and I’m beginning to suspect that whoever is incapable of recognizing this may also be incapable of morality.” 

I’d also like to recommend a couple of books that I think are phenomenal about the weight of parenthood in a political time. They’re both by Valeria Luiselli. One is a fiction novel called Lost Children Archive, about a road trip that she takes with her kids, but it’s inspired by her time acting as a Spanish-to-English translator for young children who are being separated from their parents at the Mexico-America border. During her time as a translator ,she had to sit with these kids and make them fill out a forty-question form that was quite arresting and quite confronting. She was appalled that she was having to ask these children really personal questions about whether they’d been abused or witnessed violence, when these children just wanted to know where their mums and dads were. 

She also wrote a non-fiction essay about it called Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in 40 Questions and it’s one of the the best books I’ve ever read about the weight of parenthood, because she wrote it at a time when she had become a parent not long before, and she was questioning whether she still wanted to write and whether writing was useful. So she went and did this thing and then wrote two of the best books that I’ve read, ever, immediately afterwards. Thank you for having me, and love to all of you.

DK: What gives me hope is witnessing Palestinian mothers. That they—we—can still try to take care of their children in a moment like this has been really awe-inspiring to witness. A recommendation I have for those with little ones is a book called Homeland: My Father Dreams of Palestine by Hannah Moushabeck. It’s a really lovely book, age appropriate for five or six years old. Thank you for having me on this conversation.

EA: Thank you everyone.

Elia J. Ayoub

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