The End of Voices In The Woods, Emergent Narratives, and Palestine
This is going to talk about my experiences with post 9/11 so prepare for that
CWs for nationalism, CSA mention, islamaphobia, genocide, Palestine, and more.
Highly reccomend listening to the finale of SITW before reading this
So I was casted to be part of a friend’s (KendoMakesFilms) inter-season radio show based in VOID 1680 AM Voices In The Woods, which airs after the first season of Strangers In The Woods
I had an interest in the show before signing on but had only listened to a few episodes. Kendo was kind enough to inform me that my (somewhat random) choice to play a tree was actually a plot-relevant point in the story, to which i though "awesome, let me play it up in the episode I'm on". I still haven’t finished season one at this point before recording, Kendo also told me that I was randomly selected to play in a secret fifth episode, so i did episode three with the intention to foreshadow, to be enigmatic, and to build upon the actual events of the season finale. I listen to about 1-2 episodes per day as the time between recordings was about 2 weeks. im going to spoil an event in the finale for those who may wanna listen to S1.
The tree gets killed in the church explosion. The supernatural forces within also die, somewhat, by association, and the forces at large use that event to spread jingoistic, xenophobic propaganda about outside anarchist aggressors that bombed the church to attack their way of life. Actually getting to this point in the show felt very grim and challenged my will to continue for a bit, but i reflected on it. Season 1 is not a very hopeful portion of the show. It deals with heavy themes and explores "natural" consequences to them, in a way that I sometimes felt was defeatist. It is not a fun listen at times. But Kendo also expressed a desire to turn a more hopeful leaf in the second season, and I imagined very vividly a way in which I could facilitate that, in a way.
I finished the s1 finale the day before recording episode 5 and decided that my previously less intentional choices for an Arabic character could actually gain more relevance in this context, as well as thread into future seasons of the show. I also knew, due to being the last caller, that it would help the main character to have something to counter the defeatism that was sure to come with tragedy.
The tree is Arabic because i am Arabic, the tree is hopeful because I am hopeful, and the tree wishes for a dissolution of fascistic ideologies because that's my real belief. I played those tenants very close to my heart in the hopes of instilling something bittersweet amidst the violence being discussed. I felt like i said a lot of things people could listen to and apply to a post 9/11 world about the realities of xenophobia, which is certainly not a common thing for ttrpgs to address, much less as directly and Kendo set out to do.
People (non Muslims and non-swanasa) like to imagine 9/11 as a event but that self containing language dismisses the realities in which American nationalism has changed infinitely for the worse since that moment. I was 2 and I have flashbulb memories of my parents having their lives endangered, and also harassment and bullying as a child that I would endure, but that is just the personal reality. The political landscape has been much worse for millions of others. Middle Eastern death and suffering is often an abstract concept to Americans that see their college degrees, their shitty VA benefits, their loser status as the biggest warmongerer of all time, as more important than people who are foreign to them. So i will always feel foreign and i will never be surprised that Western Nations continue to stoop lower. The writing has been on the wall for more than 79 years, and I've never had the privilege of not paying attention.
ALSO the thing with defeatism that is hard to counter is wondering what to even do next (which Harry dealth with). If you're voice matters. If you are feeling that way about this genocide then the thing to do after realizing that your marginalized peers often lack the space to feel that, is to help them. Don't let it make you feel lonely when there are people that need you (at least to be there for them!)
Some people think an ESIM donation is meaningless(for example), and I challenge you to imagine a reality in which you:
help a family connect to gofundme coordinators (by the way gofundme doesn't operate in palestine. They rely on external coordination to get to egypt and phone connection is vital in these cases)
help a person distract themself from the sounds of drones for a semblance of normalcy
get updates from their communities in regards to where to go, and who's alive and local
for a somewhat (American currency in mind) reasonable price you can do this!! and the alternative is silence, which helps nobody, least of all yourself. You can choose to help people!!! Individuals!! You can choose to save people, and we need to let go of the notion that heroes save somebody once. We save people with actions that you might consider small, but they succeed in the goal of saving a life, and they are each contingent on that person being alive just prior. We save each other many times over, and that is worth cherishing, for us to really analyse the value of what we choose to save. The fact that we even consider these actions small comes from a place of privelage, because these actions are all large, and just relatively small in the face of the opposition.
I have been dismissed and bullied for being against this notion of American exceptionalism but more than that, I have been labeled aggressive for feeling fear for my life had I never emigrated here (from military brats, military supporters, and the like). So I constantly seek to trim my emotions from my language to never come off as aggressive. Many Muslims and SWANASA can probably relate to being emotive as a sign of being labeled as a traitor to this country. It was easy to resign myself to a long term defeat over the effects of this nation's unrelenting decimation of foreign lives that we can choose to never see.
But defeatism is something that I wanted to nip in the bud and this show reminded me of that. I wanted a concrete reminder of the individuals on the other side of the screens, and across worlds, in a way.
It can feel like the world itself is split apart from "east" and "west", but even that division only seeks to provide an illusion of safety for westerners. It's not real and it will not save you when our governments cannibalize you. It is only a shame that so many people are continually shocked by how much worse it continues to get, because it reminds me of how foreign i feel. This shock feels like a uniquely American thing and I truly just live here. I have no love for the nation. Sexual assault at TSA is seem as a natural consequence of 9/11 instead of something horrifying that I've needed to numb out since I was a literal toddler. I do not think there's anything more American than that.
Even as I write these feelings out, I knew that this character existed in a barely-parody of America with magical elements, and due to what seemed like divine providence I got to be the very last call after something awful. So i needed to imagine talking to a younger version of myself, and imagine how scared they felt, in order to feel like i was contributing anything to the show. I was (i believe) the only Arab/Muslim on the cast and I would've discouraged Kendo to go the 9/11 parody speech route had the ending given into defeatism. The speech was done after the recording (as far as i remember), and I was consulted as to my feelings about it.
These (the parallels to my own experiences post 9/11) were things that I realized after recording, and I was surprised by how natural it felt that these themes in my character actually supported what I was saying and the simple arabic elements of just the name. The strange relationship to death, ostracization, and long distance connection. It all made sense in retrospect and I was shocked that it came from a series of random choices that Kendo made through the game, and also the release date. I try to be invested in every project I'm in but this happened to be so easy precisely because of how much I was able to put myself into it, how much of myself was invited in, and how much I could see this influencing the future of the show, which i find to be very touching as a guest. It is an honor to (possibly)live in a story that I only touch once.
If I have a single wish, it would be for Harry to take a piece of me to the Border Cities.
As far as my feelings beyond the show, I have been for a free Palestine for as long as I've comprehended language and that is a part of me that'll never change. A part of me died when Shireen Abu Akleh was assassinated in 2022 and since it wasn't as big of a trend, I felt like I couldn't talk about it. I learned Arabic as a child by watching her on Al Jazeera, and then she was gone. The silence suffocated me and I personally cannot stand the idea of it being a trend. Even though for every Ramadan that I've had internet access, Palestine has been through atrocities that would get forgotten in the next news cycle.
If you are angry, do something about it. If you are depressed, connect to people about it. If you feel like your actions are meaningless, find an individual in need to cherish, whether or not they live where you live. If you are grieving (and this is hard) please focus on the living. It is the most disrespectful thing imaginable to me to imagine Palestine as a nation of the dead when there are still people living there. They need our care, and they need us to imagine them as individuals, and not as a monolith of infinite resilience. They need more respect than what we currently give them.
We can imagine better worlds instead of just talking about imagining better worlds. Telling stories is certainly important but just because that is a skill we can hone doesn't mean that it's the only thing that we're good at. But the alternative to talking, if its silence, is giving up. And I will always refuse that because my life is less important than those we need to save; over and over again. It is not that I am unimportant, but our communities are more important than me. I challenge us to let go of our egos, even when our egos make us hate ourselves. That is still an egotistical position to hold while we live in nations that will never, ever save us all, and are also actively killing millions of people.
I should not have to beg for this either, for people to care, but it is interconnected to worldwide issues that equally beg for you, people reading this, to consider others as people worth saving. It is an exercise in humiliation that I will do forever if it means one extra person gets saved. I get incensed when I consider how many Palestinians and Congolese and Sudanese people need to do this for a claim to legitimacy, but I will continue to beg you to care, and then do something about it. At least be more upset about the soil you stand on. I would rather care too much then die as someone who never stood for anything.
This show was impossibly special to me, and I know how nervous Kendo was about the direction of it. I don’t really care how big it gets, I will just take more pieces of me beyond the borders we imagine for ourselves, and hopefully plant them somewhere that will help someone. It helped save me by reminding me to care out loud. If I save an individual, I can be happy with myself. What a privelage to be in a position to save more than one person, at all, and to share that. Or to even imagine myself as a tree doing something similar.