The Failure to Crossover

An essay from the Refusing Complicity project.

Writing does not write; it exscribes, leaks from a site that never consented to speak. One could say that writing begins already in failure — the failure to keep the promise that the word might accompany the deed, that the said could coincide with the done. Each sentence performs this impossibility: The performative trembles, the declarative exposes its own impotence. What if writing were not the cure but the cough — a reflex, an expulsion, the body’s protest against what it cannot metabolize in action? To write is to signal the infection of language, to become symptomatic of a grammar that refuses mastery. The “I” that writes arrives dispossessed, delayed, haunted by an address that precedes it and by a deed that never quite arrives.

Here — for us, in Palestine — such failure is not a theoretical abstraction. It enunciates our suspension, the paralysis between saying and doing, where each word testifies to the impossibility of its own realization. Words gather, organize, grieve, but they falter at the threshold of the deed — that impossible domain where the question what is to be done? remains both imperative and unanswerable. Writing, here, becomes an archive of hesitation, a record of the unspeakable labor of aligning utterance with survival — and of the betrayal entailed in that very alignment. To act here is also to be unmade. To resist is to fracture the order of the world while knowing that the world will not bend to one’s intention. Writing, then, stands as both witness and wound — the persistence of a voice that cannot heal, that will not cease, that remains faithful to its own undoing.

Perhaps the symptom is not merely personal but territorial — language itself occupied, scripted by forces that precede us, scripting us in turn. To write from here is to bear the tension between testimony and betrayal, between saying and staying, between theorizing and acting. The page becomes both a shelter and a witness stand, its silence more eloquent than any resolution we could offer. But perhaps, more than anything, writing is the symptom of the difficulty of crossing over — of moving from word to deed, from saying to doing, from surviving to inhabiting. It is the trace of that failed passage, the trembling remainder of what cannot yet arrive. Crossing over, when it occurs, expiates the need to write. Deeds speak their own syntax; they do not require self-commentary. They generate only brief afterimages — short passages adrift from the self-indulgence of explanation. Action is its own erasure: It refuses the archive, it burns the text that would seek to capture it. And so writing persists where crossing fails, a prosthesis for the deed that cannot sustain itself, a repetition of what could not be performed.

It is not, therefore, surprising to see writers fail to cross over or to truly inhabit the truth of Palestine. Writing protects them from it; it installs a prophylactic distance where immediacy would demand risk. To write is to defer the reckoning, to remain safely within the interval of language — suspended, self-regarding, cowed by the possibility of action. The page becomes a shelter for the fearful, a space where one can perform proximity while remaining untouched. Yet this suspension is not without its own indictment: Each sentence testifies to the cowardice of articulation, the privilege of hesitation. Writing, in this sense, is not innocent; it is complicit with the very delay it names.

Read the next essay in the
Refusing Complicity project here.