Essay: Exhaling

Photograph: Robert E. Rutledge

I woke up too early today. Not getting enough sleep on a lifting day is never ideal and this sentence is full of negatives already but that’s how my mind is working right now so it’s a good thing it’s lifting day so that I can shift this heftiness off of me.

I have an Ideas document open because that heftiness is all the words that need to get out because I know I’ll feel better letting them go and making room for new words but those words want to linger because I’m determined that if I fashion those words just so they will activate a force so powerful that fascism will simply surrender and retreat.

I laugh at the thought that I think that I am so powerful that with just one essay I can vanquish fascism and yet I cherish that about me too–the arrogance, the self-importance, the faith in words and their ability to vanquish.

And the needs versus wants ping pong game in my mind is perhaps more intriguing than the exhaustion I feel endlessly scrolling on my phone. “What are you looking for?” I ask myself.

Nothing that can be found through scrolling.

And that same voice that asks the question I ignore is tenacious.

“What would you write if you didn’t feel the need to ‘vanquish fascism’ in one fell swoop?”

First of all, I do not appreciate the air quotes around vanquish fascism. Secondly, that’s actually a good point–the fight that happens daily versus The Fight.

Like many of you, I spend a lot of time on exactly how I can fight back, what skills I bring to the fight against the multiple crises we face. In my essays, I say again and again that fascism does not happen overnight.

The same with the fight. Many of us have been fighting for years. And we will continue to fight for more years to come. We will vanquish fascism through more years of fighting–through that fight that happens daily, and not through That One Fight.

Resist while resisting the idea that through one action we can take right now everything will go back to normal. First, there is no “going back to normal.”

And moreover: there is no such thing as a revolution that requires one single hero or one single action that overwhelms the fuckery into defeat.

Embrace the long haul. Embrace the discomfort. And fight hard as hell to make the fascists even more uncomfortable.

What do you bring to the fight? What have you been fighting for years? What are the skills that your needs versus wants bring to the fore?

What makes you dangerous? Not the one-time danger of an assassin with bad aim but the daily danger that drives the engine of revolution?

Take those skills offline and stand them shoulder-to-shoulder with the skills of the people you know, in real life, the ones we sometimes refer to as “community.”

Something powerful will happen.

First of all, the anger of the angriest person among you will infect you in the way one person yawning makes everyone around them yawn, or one person looking up at something infects those around them with a curiosity to see what’s up there.

Some of you might have combat skills–you will need those. Others will be good at hiding people in their basement. And someone among you will make the best coffee and cocktails or bring the cannabis gummies for some downtime. And I know the teens among us bring the best networks and know how to keep strong and powerful secrets for the appropriate moments.

The mundane is what connects us. Especially when we need a reminder of why we fight.

What are you looking for?

Thirty years ago exactly, Serb forces spent a week massacring eight thousand Bosnian Muslim boys and men in Srebrenica, in Europe’s only acknowledged genocide since World War II. During my first visit to Bosnia, nine years ago, I went to the memorial and burial grounds for those boys and men to pay respect. Over and over what struck me the most was reading the mundane details that accompanied the photographs in the memorial of some of the boys and men who were at rest in the nearby cemetery.

A photograph I took in July 2016 of the Srebernica cemetry

The two school books given to the memorial by the mother of Rijad Fejzic (1977-1995).

"In retirement he tried his hand at writing a novel," about Sead (Hasan) Hotic (1939-1995).

When you see the names of the massacred in Srebrenica, you see how many families were almost wiped out. Rows and rows of the same family name.

Just like the entire Palestinian families Israel is wiping out in Gaza.

The genocide in Srebrenica is an eternal shame for the international community. The entire Bosnian war was.

Everyone knew exactly what was happening. Everyone knew exactly what was going to happen.

Just as we all know what Israel is doing in Gaza.

Just as we all know what is to come in the concentration camps the Trump regime is building.

So learn those combat skills. I am looking into boxing lessons or perhaps a martial art.

Two years before Trump was reelected, I began strength training. I can now deadlift and squat more than my body weight. The timing had nothing to do with the occupant of the White House and more to do with my personal goals.

When fascism flexes its muscles, It’s time to make feminism dangerous again.

What makes you dangerous? Not the one-time danger of an assassin with bad aim but the daily danger that drives the engine of revolution?

That’s what you’re looking for.

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Mona Eltahawy is a feminist author, commentator and disruptor of patriarchy. Her new book, an anthology on menopause called Bloody Hell!: Adventures in Menopause from Around the World, will be published March 5, 2025. Her first book Headscarves and Hymens: Why the Middle East Needs a Sexual Revolution (2015) targeted patriarchy in the Middle East and North Africa and her second The Seven Necessary Sins For Women and Girls (2019) took her disruption worldwide. It is now available in Ireland and the UK. Her commentary has appeared in media around the world and she makes video essays and writes a newsletter as FEMINIST GIANT.

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