What We Are Allowed to Give

There is a video I have watched only once. A man in Al Fashir, in Sudan’s Darfur region, holds his phone to his face. He is calling his son. The footage moves the way all footage of this kind moves, compressed and sideways, already carrying the weight of everyone who passed it along before it reached me. The man is calm. This is the most devastating thing about him. His voice has the steadiness of someone who has already moved through fear and arrived somewhere past it, somewhere that looks, from the outside, like acceptance, but which is probably just the mind doing what it must when the body has run out of options. He tells his son to take care of his mother. He tells him to take care of his sisters. Then the Rapid Support Forces take him, and the video ends.

I have watched it once. I have thought about it every day since.

What I keep returning to is not the violence, which is implied rather than shown, but the last minutes before it. The fact that this man’s final instinct was to find his son’s face. The fact that what he chose to send, in the time remaining to him, was not a cry or a confession, but an act of transmission. “Take care of your mother. Take care of your sisters.” He was giving his son something to carry. He was handing down, in the only form the moment permitted, everything he understood about what a man is supposed to do in the world. And his son, on the other end of that call, received it the way sons have always received these instructions—without preparation, without the years of watching and learning that should have preceded them, with only the weight of the words and his disappearing face.

I was fourteen when I first received that weight. My father was not dead. But for a few weeks that summer he was in a hospital bed, and my auntie sat beside me in the waiting room and told me to be ready: his living was not certain.

***

The man in Al Fashir is not an anomaly. He is part of a pattern so consistent and so deliberately unexamined that we have not yet found the right language for what it produces. Across the Muslim world, across the last several decades alone, fathers have been taken from their children, not by accident or illness, but by the organized violence of states and armies and paramilitaries that have decided certain lives do not require protection. In Gaza, where Israeli bombardment has killed tens of thousands of people since October 2023, an estimated seventy percent of the dead have been civilians, and among them, thousands of fathers. Palestinian journalists and aid workers have documented what this looks like on the ground, which is children pulling men they recognize from rubble, fathers recorded in their final moments holding infants they will not see grow, sons waiting at hospitals for men who do not arrive. In Sudan, the RSF’s campaign in Darfur has produced the same images in a different geography. The same compressed goodbyes. The same instructions handed to sons who are too young to receive them.

What does not get discussed, in the coverage of these genocides, is what happens to the fathers who survive. What the man who watched his neighborhood burn in Gaza carries into his children’s bedroom at night. What the father who fled Khartoum with his family and arrived in a camp in Chad is carrying in his body that has nowhere to go. The trauma literature is unambiguous about this. Survivors of mass violence who receive no support, no space to process what they witnessed, no acknowledgment that what happened to them was real and monstrous and deserving of grief, do not simply move on. They carry it forward in the only containers available, which are their bodies, their silences, their relationships, and eventually their children. The wound travels. It does not announce itself. It arrives, sometimes decades later, in a kitchen, at a table, in the form of a man whose fear has run out of other shapes.

I know this because it arrived in my kitchen. And because tracing it back, I can now see that it did not begin with my father. It began in 1971, in what is now Bangladesh, years before I was born, when my father was still a boy.

***

What happened in Bangladesh in 1971 is among the least discussed genocides of the twentieth century, which is itself a political fact worth sitting with. Between March and December of that year, the Pakistani military conducted a systematic campaign of mass killing against Bengali civilians and nationalists in what was then East Pakistan. The estimates of the dead range from three hundred thousand to three million depending on whose accounting you accept, a range so vast it tells you something about whose deaths the world has found it convenient to count carefully. Entire villages were burned. Intellectuals were hunted. Women were targeted with sexual violence as an instrument of war. Families fled in every direction, carrying whatever could be carried, leaving behind everything that could not.

My father’s family from a Sylhet minority was among them. He was a teenager, the eldest of five children, when they fled for their lives. His own father, my grandfather, joined the Bangladesh liberation army and went to fight the Pakistani military that was trying to erase his people. Which means that my father, at fifteen or sixteen years old, was left as the head of a household in the middle of a genocide, responsible for four younger siblings and a mother trying to hold a family together while her husband was at war and the country outside was on fire.

I want to stay inside that image for a moment, because I do not think it has ever been fully seen, not even by me until I started writing this. A teenage boy. Four younger siblings. A mother doing everything while her husband is gone. He was not asked. He was just the eldest. He had been a caretaker since he was barely old enough to be called a man, in the middle of a genocide that the world has largely forgotten.

My grandfather returned from the war. Bangladesh won its independence. The family survived. And then, ten years later, my grandfather died of lung cancer. He was gone before my birth. My father, who had spent his entire young life watching over his family, who had never been given the chance to be only a son, who had never experienced being fully held before being asked to hold others, became the permanent eldest again. He carried his mother. He carried his siblings. He crossed an ocean and carried the dream of an entire family’s future in a body that had carried things since fifteen years old and had never once been asked how it was holding up.

This is what I mean when I say the damage does not begin where we think it begins. The man who came home from the night shift to a failed math exam was not only a tired immigrant father. He was the boy who had stood watch over his siblings while his country burned, who had buried his own father too young, who had never been permitted to need anything because need had always been a luxury the circumstances did not allow. The hardness that I grew up inside didn’t emanate from his character, but was the accumulated residue of everything that had been asked of him before I arrived, pressed down and never processed, still sitting in him like sediment.

I want to say this carefully, because the easy version of this story is available and I am not interested in it. The easy version makes my father a villain, and I have spent too many years with this material to settle for that. What I am trying to understand is not whether my father caused harm, because he did, but what caused the harm he caused, which is a different and slower investigation. bell hooks wrote in The Will to Change that the first act of love is attention—not provision, not the crossing of oceans, but the willingness to be present to the specific person in front of you, to see them in their actual reality rather than the reality you have decided they ought to occupy. She was writing about what patriarchy withholds from men and what men therefore cannot give. But patriarchy is not the only thing that withholds. Genocide withholds too. Displacement withholds. Carrying your family since you were fifteen withholds in ways that no amount of will can simply undo.

My father looked at me often. But there is a difference between looking and seeing, and for much of my childhood I was not sure which he was doing. He saw the grades. He saw the performance of the son who was supposed to justify his sacrifice. What I am not sure he could see, because I am not sure the world had ever shown him how, was my interior. The child who was failing math not because he was stupid but because his mind moved in images and stories, who was drawing comics and selling them at recess, who was desperate to be known rather than only evaluated. That child was present at the kitchen table every night. But the seeing required something my father had not been given, and I did not yet understand what had taken it from him.

One night it came apart. In fourth grade I had failed another math exam, and my mother had left the correction of it to my father, who came home from a late shift already depleted, already compressed to the most essential version of himself. We sat at the table. I kept getting problems wrong. He started screaming. “Are you stupid? What is wrong with you?” The questions were not questions. They were the sound of a man whose fear had run out of other forms, a fear that had been running since 1971 and had never been given a name or a room or a witness. And then he hit me. His wedding ring caught the back of my head and I bled, and our extended family was in the next room, and no one intervened, because this was the kind of discipline that was recognized, that fell within the range of what men did with sons who were not performing correctly, that was understood as love even when it did not feel like anything close to love.

I knew I was not stupid. Even at nine years old I held onto that. But there is a difference between knowing something and being able to keep knowing it under sustained pressure, and over the years the knowing got quieter. The other voice, the one installed by repetition and force, got louder. This is what it means to be a child who receives love and damage from the same pair of hands. You do not only inherit the damage. You inherit the confusion about what love is supposed to feel like, whether something without an edge is real, whether you can trust the warmth when you know the heat is also possible.

I carried this confusion into adulthood the way you carry something you have held so long you no longer notice the weight. I carried it into the Marine Corps, which I joined at eighteen partly out of economic desperation and partly because I needed to put distance between myself and a house where my father and I had reached an impasse that neither of us had the vocabulary to cross. I carried it through the years of reporting from war zones, through the West Bank and Lebanon, through all the rooms in all the countries I moved through trying to understand what men do with what they were given and what it costs the people around them.

It was in Palestine that I began to understand what the alternative looked like.

***

I met Awdah Hathaleen in the village of Umm al-Kheir, in the southern hills of the West Bank near Masafer Yatta. The village sits inside a siege that has been building for decades, Israeli settlements pressing in from the ridgelines, checkpoints and surveillance infrastructure visible from every angle, the bureaucratic machinery of occupation grinding at the community’s edges through demolition orders and zoning restrictions and the slow theft of land through legal mechanisms designed to make the theft look like administration. You feel the compression before you enter. You feel the way space has been rationed, the way someone has been working for a long time to make this place impossible to inhabit.

And then you enter, and you find that the people inside have refused the impossibility.

Awdah met me in Arabic, asking if I was Palestinian. When I said no, he laughed, the laugh of a man who finds the world genuinely interesting despite everything it has done to him. He said I looked like one of them. He said he was glad to have a Muslim brother. The word “brother” carried something I want to try to describe because it was not casual or rhetorical. It was the recognition that passes between people who have both been told the world is not fully theirs, who find in each other a brief and genuine rest from the labor of justifying their existence.

I watched him with his sons. This is what I want to stay with.

He was gentle with them in a way that was not passivity, but decision. The gentleness was deliberate, and you could feel the deliberateness in it, the daily and conscious choice of a man who understood that everything around his children was not gentle—that the soldiers and the demolition orders and the surveillance drones and the settlers moving through the nearby roads with the confidence of ownership had all been designed to make tenderness feel like a luxury. Awdah had decided that conditions would not make that decision for him. He laughed with his boys. He answered their questions with patience. He put his hand on the back of one son’s head in the gesture that cannot protect anyone from anything serious, but is still the most honest thing a father’s body knows how to say.

bell hooks wrote that to truly love we must learn to mix various ingredients—care, affection, recognition, respect, commitment, and trust. She wrote about love as something built rather than simply felt, assembled from practices rather than erupting fully formed from emotion. What I saw in Awdah was exactly this. A love built, daily, in the specific and ordinary acts of presence. Not the grand gestures. The hand on the head. The patience with the question that had probably been asked before. The laugh that arrived without calculation. He was a man living under occupation who had decided that the occupation would not determine the temperature of his children’s daily life. He was choosing, every day, to give his sons something the world around them was designed to prevent them from having.

I thought about my father. I thought about what he had been trying to give me, and how the tools available to him for the giving were not the tools the job required. I thought about my grandfather going to war and coming home and dying before I was born. I thought about the fifteen-year-old boy who had been left to watch over his family and had never stopped watching over people since. I thought about what it costs a man to carry that much for that long without anyone asking him to put it down.

I left Umm al-Kheir with an invitation to come back. Awdah and I stood at a doorway and talked about future visits and I drove away thinking about return, about the conversations still unfinished, about the friendship that had announced itself so quickly it felt like recognition rather than introduction. A few months later I was at my desk when a message arrived from a friend in Palestine. Awdah had been shot and killed by an Israeli settler. On his own land. In the village he had refused to leave.

I watched the video once. I will not describe it in detail because description here would be its own kind of violence, a turning of his death into spectacle. What I will say is that the light in the video was the same late afternoon West Bank light I had stood in when he was alive, and the land looked exactly as it had looked back then, and only the man was gone. The land does not know the difference. It keeps holding whatever history has been pressed into it, the olive trees and the ochre soil and the long memory of people who refused to be made to disappear. Only the man was gone.

A memorial was held in New York. I sat in a room with people who had known him and people who had only known of him, and we spoke about what he had meant and what had been lost. Men wept. I want to say this plainly because it is not the image that circulates. Muslim men, Arab men, men from diaspora communities who knew exactly what the world thought of their grief and wept anyway, openly, without the performance of recovery, without compressing the feeling into something more manageable and therefore more acceptable. We were given permission in that room to feel the full weight of what had been taken. Not just Awdah. The possibility he represented. The image of a father being fully present to his sons in a place designed to make presence impossible.

Our tears were testimony. They said: this man was real. His love was real. His sons are real, and are watching, and will carry forward whatever they were given, which was more than the world wanted them to have.

***

My father is still alive. This is not a small thing. I have thought about what it means, in the context of everything I have described here, that he came back from that hospital and kept going, that the disease retreated and the foreclosure eventually resolved and life continued in the way that immigrant life in this country tends to continue, which is without stopping even when stopping would be the reasonable response.

We are learning, in our late and imperfect way, to talk to each other. This is not a resolution. I want to be careful not to make it sound like one, because it is not. It is more like what happens when two people have been circling the same unspoken thing for long enough that the circling itself becomes a kind of conversation. We talk on the phone with a frequency we did not manage for years. There is something in his voice in these calls that I have been trying to name. A warmth that I think was always there, that was always the truth of him underneath the exhaustion and the pressure and the model of manhood he had been handed and never asked to examine. The warmth is surfacing now the way things surface when the emergency has finally, slowly, begun to pass.

I do not know if we will get to the conversations I still need. I do not know if either of us has the vocabulary for them yet, or if some of what went untransmitted between us will simply remain untransmitted, a gap in the record that neither of us can fully close. What I know is that he tried. That inside the hardness that the world required of him, that the genocide installed in him before he was old enough to choose it, there was something he was always trying to give me, even when the giving came in forms I could not receive. The night shifts were a form of it. The crossing of an ocean was a form of it. Even the screaming at the kitchen table was, in its own damaged way, a form of it, the expression of a man who had been told since he was fifteen years old that the measure of his love was what he could endure on behalf of the people depending on him.

bell hooks asked what it would mean for men to be loved well, to have received as boys the full undivided presence of someone who delighted in them without condition, without the love being laced with requirement or performance. She understood that most men have not had this, that they have had love wrapped in expectation, in the silent agreement that the love would continue as long as they kept deserving it. And that the wound this leaves is not only the wound of sadness, but the wound of confusion, the not quite knowing what you are when the performance stops, the waiting for safety to become dangerous again because safety was never the condition you were taught to trust.

I am still learning to trust it. I am still, at the age I am now, in the middle of that learning. And I think my father is too, in his own way, in the life he is living now that most of the emergency has passed and the boy who was left in charge of everything is finally, slowly, being allowed to put some of it down.

The son in Al Fashir does not have this. He received his father’s last transmission through a screen, in a minute, without the years of ordinary ongoing presence that revise and deepen and complicate what we understand about the men who made us. He has a goodbye. He has an instruction. He has a face he will carry inside him without supplement, without the late phone calls, without the warmth that surfaces when a man finally has room to let it. The fathers being killed in Gaza do not have the chance to grow old and soften and discover, in the slowing down of emergency, what they were actually trying to say. Their sons receive them as they were under pressure, and pressure is not the whole of a person, but it is often all the dead get to leave behind.

This is what I want people to understand when they watch the videos, when they see the numbers, when they absorb the statistics of Muslim men dying in wars and genocides and occupations that the world has decided are acceptable or necessary or complicated. Those men were not only fighters or victims or symbols of wars. They were fathers in the middle of a transmission that got cut off. They carried things they had not yet finished passing on. They were, most of them, the sons of men who had also been interrupted, who had also been handed more than they could process, who had also brought the residue of unwitnessed catastrophe into the rooms where their children waited. The chain goes back further than any individual act of harm or love. And it will continue forward, through the sons who survived, in whatever form those sons can manage.

I am going to call my father after I finish writing this. I do not know exactly what I will say. I know that I will listen for that warmth in his voice, the one that has been surfacing lately, and I will let myself believe that it was always there, that it was the truest thing about him even when it was the least visible. That what he was always trying to give me was more than what he knew how to give. That the gap between his intention and his capacity was not the measure of his love, but the measure of what history did to him before I arrived.

He was a teenager in a genocide. He buried his father at twenty-five. He crossed an ocean and worked nights and stayed. He is still here. The conversation between us is still open, incomplete and imperfect and full of everything we have not yet found the words for.

That is the inheritance I am choosing to carry forward. Not the wound, which is real and present and has required many years to see clearly. But the love that was underneath it, the thing that was there before the world got to it, before 1971, before the displacement, before all the years of carrying. I am choosing to believe in that thing. I am choosing to pass it forward instead of what it was wrapped in.

The transmission is not over. There is still time.