Samara Gaev

Written by the Collective – Woven, Performed and Produced by Samara Gaev

In October, our collective gathered in a cabin in the woods of Vermont, to vision, to reflect, and to create together as the glowing crimson, hazel and amber leaves spun from the trees with a passion, grace, and abandon one can only yearn to embody. Some of us drove from New York City, some of us flew from The Bay. All of us held between our ribs the butterfly wings of hope and despair, faith and defeat–anticipation. Two weeks to the day before this country’s election, as genocide continued to laugh at our helplessness, we boiled water for tea and took breaks to stretch our legs and gaze with our rage and grief and love and yearning at the breathtaking reminder that nature will do what she does, no matter what. That we, in fact, are small. 

And yet, our stories matter. Among us, we are grieving the loss of our parents. We are nursing our daughters. We are raising mixed race children. We have no children. We are caring for our mothers who are sick. We are estranged from our fathers. We are healing from a double mastectomy.  We just had an abortion. We are Black. We are Jewish. We are queer. We are sober. We are survivors. And writing is an anchor. Below, is a weaving together of our voices, gathered from each of our individual freewrites, inspired by Mary Oliver’s From the Book of Time. As we continue to stretch into this new configuration and move towards a more circular form, experimenting with what happens when we allow ourselves to truly collectivize, is an enticing challenge. Stretch your legs, boil some water, and behold the tapestry of our recollections.

~Samara Gaev

Even now

I remember something

the way a flower

in a jar of water

remembers its life

in the perfect garden

the way a flower

in a jar of water

remembers its life

as a closed seed

the way a flower

in a jar of water

steadies itself

remembering itself…

the unbreakable circle.

– Mary Oliver –

Even now, I remember something. 

The way shadows play on water,  

Showing me how darkness can dance. 

I remember belonging 

To vastness 

To constellation 

To kinship

The iron coursing through my veins pulsing with the memory 

Of black holes and galaxies far away

The way my father would cry so easily and then try to hide it, 

As I have found my way towards confidence 

Being seen with those salty tears, 

Filling my eyes and overflowing 

Like flash floods and mudslides after the hurricane.

The rock at the end of the driveway, like a sleeping fawn. 

Where my mom says she wants to be buried.

I’ve died already

Since his embrace felt big enough to wrap around me

Let me let go a little

Lay my head against his chest

Look up and see protection

Safety

Love.

She remembers her brother, who died almost 60 years ago. 

When the lightning struck him after the storm had passed. 

Even now I remember being afraid

Being young and safe, sometimes, but afraid. 

I remember something about family.

About brothers.

About shared snacks and shared glances 

To see if we might get away with it this time.

I remember something about a long driveway in the middle of the woods 

And learning to ride a bike, 

My brother cheering me along

The way a flower in a jar of water

Remembers its life

In the perfect garden.

I remember Oakland, just barely, 

I remember Oakland and being picked up by Mom 

After a swing shift in the early morning hours.

I remember sliding down concrete steps on a piece of cardboard.

Our house on the hill 

And skateboarding down on our butts.

I remember the redwood stumps that became fortresses and castles

I remember our house on the hill that was our forever home 

Until it wasn’t.

I’ve died already 

Since that home was home.

Shed skin

And blood

And milk

And salt

And buried her with every moon 

As tides swelled 

And forgiveness haunted and tempted me.

I’ve laid down flowers 

And built altars, 

That she’s washed away

With no hesitation

As I would cling 

And pray

And try so hard to hold

Or remember 

Or commemorate 

A version of myself 

That slipped away…

She’s gone.

Even now I remember something

I remember that I am mostly water…salty water

Like the oceans that separate me from the bombs. 

From the place where terrorized people are being denied access to water 

To drink or clean an open wound

Can you cry tears when so dehydrated?

I remember the places I love through different eyes. 

My eyes, but different.

Salt of the stars.

My heart beating with the memory of former galaxies, 

I steady myself

Remember this is not our true nature.  

We want to belong to these places, 

Not take it all and leave ruin behind.  

Where will the oceans go when our sun caves in on itself?

Remembering itself.

They were holding hands 

And the lightning went straight through his head

Then through his arm, killing him instantly and paralyzing her from the waist down. 

Do I remember that even now? 

Is it in me, part of me, the lightning and the storm? 

Their lives and his death? 

Even now 

As we gather ourselves,

Even now 

It is hard to imagine how we got here. 

I steady myself

Remembering that version of myself

From long ago

The plunging roots

The unbreakable circle

Towards and away 

From forgiveness.

The salt dust of the stars on my skin

In my bones, my blood

Even now I remember something

Long before language

An ancient cosmic story

Stars exploding, differentiating

But adhering to a central thread

The unbreakable circle.

The blue dream.  

I remember the blue apartment 

And the seams that held our family together, straining

Seemingly to the point of fraying entirely.

I remember stomach aches as we heard the fraying

So loud in the next room

And turning up the TV to drown it out.

I remember my green bike that was stolen 

And how my dad got it back

I remember walking with my brother to school 

Matching logging boots 

Because our Dad refused to spend money on shoes 

That would just fall apart in a week

I remember playing basketball in logging boots.

I remember the weight of playing basketball in logging boots.

I’ve born two daughters.

One in the woods,

And one in the city.

One on my own,

And one with my love.

After days and days of labor 

I would cling 

And pray

And try so hard to hold

Or remember 

Or commemorate 

That version of myself 

That slipped away

The way a flower in a jar of water

Remembers its life

In the perfect garden

Even now

I remember something

The unbreakable circle

Of sorting into tribe

Before post-partum pains 

Of power

Progress

Potentiality

Trees releasing leaves

A simple breeze

Awe

The right to exist, as we are

The salt tears of the stars

That we become compost 

Scaffolding for the next generations.  

That my ancestors live on through me.  

Even now I remember

Something hidden in code 

An unbreakable circle

Belonging

The times when I wanted to walk away.

What has kept me here

The experience of being seen and held

The gift of seeing and beholding.

The familiar embrace of these hearts

Belonging

We are here now. 

Even now, 

Even though the world is shuddering – 

Quaking and falling like the leaves 

We are still here,

Breathing, listening, loving each other

Into being.

The unbreakable circle.

**************************************************************

by Samara Gaev

Listen to the audio version

“The children are always ours, every single one of them, all over the globe; and I am beginning to suspect that whoever is incapable of recognizing this may be incapable of morality” 

~James Baldwin 

I am nursing my 6 month old daughter as I write this. Her breath slows as our nervous systems co-regulate. I pray she doesn’t feel the shattering of my heart from the ricochettes of grief I’ve somatized from mothers everywhere. No matter the languages we lull our babies to sleep in, her pain is my pain. Her prayers are my prayers. Her children, my children. As wars we never asked for rage, and catch like wildfires in our names, we sing to our babies.

And what if we refuse to relinquish our humanity? What if we believe that history is a collective project and that we, with our mouths open wide and our hearts to the sky, can sculpt the scriptures that become our future’s memories? 

My grandmother raised me to taste the freedom songs she sang with her sisters in Auschwitz. She spared me no details of the chambers and skeletons and eyes of soldiers no older than boys. She was younger then than I am now. She knew survival. Loss. Adaptation. Trauma. War. 

Her family hid behind a wall in their Warsaw ghetto apartment. Her father was sick. His worsening cough gave them away. They shot him, execution style, in front of his daughters as they took them to the camps, their grief flooding the floors of a home they would never return to. “Anytime you leave”, she would tell us growing up, “take your passport. You never know if they’ll let you return.” I remember tracing the numbers on her arm as a little girl, reckoning with violence. Hatred. Murder. Forgiveness. Trying to grasp it all as I memorized her tattoo with my fingertips.  

I think about the days she didn’t die by the weight of a trembling finger on the trigger, pressed against her temple. 

Solílei shifts in her sleep, her infant instincts inching her closer and closer to me, until we are braided limbs and rhythms and heartbeats. She looks like her father. And his father. And his–who left when he was born, back to Jamaica. My daughter’s grandpa spent his summers picking cotton on the plantation where his grandparents were sharecroppers. He lives alone now in that same small town of South Carolina. On purpose. To “be with his trauma”.  An 80 year old man dancing with his shadow on plantations. His larger than life size paintings never don’t have cotton in them. I draw along the delicacy of my daughter’s Black Jewish body on my breast, and pray that her wingspan will transcend the weight of centuries of persecution and survival on both sides. 

I labored in the wake of Breonna Taylor’s murder with my first in 2020. Born at home under quarantine while COVID ravaged my city, this country, the globe. Passed through the places in me where trauma still lives from the violence I survived. To give birth to my daughter—her sacred brown body scriptured with prayer. 

I think about the day I didn’t die by the weight of a trembling finger on the trigger, pressed against my temple. 

I wonder what she might have absorbed as she moved through me to get here. And if here is a place I want to offer her. Where we kneel on Black men’s necks and send our dollars to decimate generations to come. Where we justify genocide with genocide. As sirens wail and mothers wail, I pray my milk won’t curdle. 

Her father’s father died when he was still a boy.  His mother too. Addiction raiding his Harlem home like the Nazi’s my grandmother’s. The architecture of his absence etched from trauma. The beat of his bravado, a buoy. 

I think about the days he didn’t die by the weight of a trembling finger on the trigger, pressed against his temple. 

Hurt people hurt people, I whispered like a mantra to myself as I raised this baby alone, in isolation. Mahala calls Solílei’s father Daddy now. His father, her grandpa. They paint on a shared page of his sketchbook in the heat of early summer, running their colors together with a brush of water, singing a song they made up about the sky. I watch his gaze follow a shifting cloud, his eyes water slightly through his smile. He always looks a little sad, even when he smiles. I wonder if he imagined he’d be painting rainbows with a three year old in Brooklyn at 80 while holding his newborn granddaughter when he was counting cotton 7 decades ago. He dreams of Jamaica. Wants to die there–where his father ran to. No matter how much scar tissue collects, we can’t build fortresses around our hearts for very long without the consequence of callused castles crumbling. 

I am nursing my 6 month old daughter as I write this. Her breath slows as our nervous systems co-regulate. I pray she doesn’t feel the shattering of my heart from the ricochettes of grief I’ve somatized from mothers everywhere. No matter the languages we lull our babies to sleep in, their pain is my pain. their prayers are my prayers. Their children, my children. As wars we never asked for rage, and catch like wildfires in our names, we sing to our babies. 

Mine are bronze & coppered. Cast from the clay of survival.  With ancestors whose bodies extinguished at the hands of oppressors. For being Black. For being Jews. Their names mean forgiveness. What will I tell my daughters, who walk with the complexity of persecution and resilience in their DNA, about the bombs dropped on Gaza? About the babies born to war and left for ash? About our leaders who lay together, in beds of tyranny and terror?  

She deepens her tiny breath with such intention it seems—She’s teaching me, reminding me to ground.

Slow down. Breathe. Find my center. 

What if we refuse to relinquish our humanity? What if we believe that history is a collective project and that we, with our mouths open wide and our hearts to the sky, can sculpt the scriptures that become our future’s memories? 

When my grandmother died, the only thing I wanted from her home was a little embroidered piece of art that always hung on her wall. A little girl on a swing, beside an empty swing she held onto, like a friend–though no one’s there. The words read, “When you’re not around, I just pretend you’re here.” It’s smoke stained now from a fire I survived 6 years ago in my home. It hangs on our ancestor wall, between photos of of my daughters’ great grandparents, sitting on their porch with smiles so deep no one could rob them of their joy. I imagine her here today, as I pass her needlepointed heirloom and I know she would rage and grieve and protest. How dare we.

Genocide is happening in Palestine. And civilians are not their governments. And when a government as powerful as Israel ruthlessly bombs the mothers, children, and elders of Gaza, who have nowhere to go, in the name of defense, we are living at the epicenter of a humanitarian catastrophe. And there is no call more urgent than the call for ceasefire that beckons us all. In the name of my grandmother, who survived flogging, gas chambers and hunger, how dare we?

Samara Gaev (she/her) is a Brooklyn-based activist, educator, facilitator, theater director, performer, and mama. Samara has been a Senior Fellow at Center for Whole Communities since 2011, as well as the Founder and Artistic Director of Truthworker Theatre Company. Her work, which examines & challenges constructions of power, privilege, the prison industrial complex, & systems of oppression that not only excuse, but enable cycles of violence, has taken her from Zimbabwe to Scotland & from coast to coast. Gaev is committed to reframing story through creative engagement that translates the most pressing issues of our time into stunning artistry, catalyzing audiences to activate the transformation they wish to cultivate within themselves & their communities. Under her direction, Truthworker Theatre Company has written, devised, & self-produced three original hip-hop theatre productions through the lens of a dozen youth directly impacted by mass-incarceration.