On Guilt
What should you do with it?
When unexamined, guilt can become a ferocious friend in life. Since October, it has increasingly seeped into private phone calls, hallways, classrooms, subway rides, and spaces of resistance. I’ve seen it in the struggles of students, loved ones, strangers, community members, and, at times, within myself.
If collective responsibility and resistance to suffering are the motive, guilt is an obstacle. Guilt is an acknowledgment of having committed an offense; as a verb, it's the internal push toward rectifying that offense. Theoretically, it can catalyze individual or collective action—if it does not become a feeling of debilitation. But unexamined guilt builds too much space to enlarge the ego, enhancing desires for distractions, defensiveness, or a lack of action.
Guilt can be more than a burden; it’s an epistemic moment of growth, a signal for intervention and self-reflection — if we allow it to be. In 1984, Audre Lorde offered us her notes. The black lesbian, mother, warrior, and poet wrote about the uses of anger as loaded with information about the structures of the modern world. She examined its functions and how anger helps us conceptualize the meaning and purpose of guilt:
“Guilt is not a response to anger; it is a response to one’s own actions or lack of action. If it leads to change, then it can be useful since it is then no longer guilt but the beginning of knowledge. Yet all too often, guilt is just another name for impotence, for defensiveness destructive of communication; it becomes a device to protect ignorance and the continuation of things the way they are, the ultimate protection for changelessness.”1
Guilt is a device to protect ignorance. It is another name for defensiveness, destructive of communication. I sat across guilt in 2014. Over lunch, a writer cried about Michael Brown, her whiteness, and being at a Blue Jays game during mass protests. A familiar exchange — I knew I would be ranting about it later — I moved towards ambivalence.
Now, I search for emotive commonality in these exchanges. We all start somewhere. My colleague's expression of guilt was a nuisance and nescience. Her feeling, though, was anything but aberrant.
For some, a wave of guilt and collective responsibility danced around and with us through the aughts. At the digital turn, people turned to their devices to connect about shared experiences, ideas, and global struggles. A new era of digital connectivity also included tactics for protest and policies of domination, bringing into focus identities and experiences once deemed marginal. In 2011, Occupy Wall Street materialized. The same year, it connected protests of the Arab Spring. In 2012, it sparked the Black Lives Matter movement. In 2017, it was the Women’s March. In 2020, it illuminated the global outcries of anti-Blackness. Today, it is imperialism’s manufacturing of genocides in Palestine, Sudan, Ethiopia, Congo, India, China, and elsewhere.
The waves of resistance shaping the aughts, or our everpresent, result from the conjunctures of our time: digital connectivity, information dissemination, individual reflectivity, climate catastrophes, and histories of domination met with resistance. Many continue to grapple with the question: am I doing enough? (Or, they fail to leave their intervention at: can I even do anything?). This epistemic shift, shaped by the Information Age and grappling with local and global struggles, results in an epidemic of suppressed emotions veiled by guilt. In a 1976 interview with editor Richard Asinof, Toni Morrison said we feel guilt when we can’t feel the real emotion. Much like anger, guilt conceals buried feelings and larger truths:
“Black churches where you could run the gamut of emotions, scream and cry. When you take that away, you have an incredible amount of shame. You feel guilty [for such strong emotions]. Guilt is what you feel when you can’t feel the real thing – love, anger, hate – until it becomes a substitute for feeling. Before you knew the word, and what it meant, you could go ahead and feel it.” 2
Guilt, like anger or shame, is a secondary emotion, a moment of introspection, and a cause to reframe. In Islam, guilt is a step towards repentance, rectitude, and reconciliation. We might find release from our guilt in worship, protest, the wave of global student encampments, or marches (at least, temporarily, as the Supreme Court continues to make it unsafe to organize protests in Louisiana, Mississippi, and Texas).
Guilt veils our real emotions underneath. It signifies that we have not done enough to lean toward the practice of care as an antidote to violence, as Saidiya Hartman says. Care that compels you always to consider what the needs are of the most vulnerable; care that redistributes access, resources, and privileges to the neglected; care that is radical and understands that loving, hurting, and dying are all connected; care that compels us always to consider the needs of all of our neighbors; care that moves beyond shared identities; care that releases us of guilt to do the work of reflecting on the multiple ways that power permeates our lives.
Guilt fortuitously assembled my youth. I became aware in my third year of therapy, at the end of my twenties. A second family member got murdered, and I stammered with accepting how much I was flailing. My head was barely above water. I couldn’t afford a year of therapy, yet I stayed for over three. In my second year, my therapist identified my ritual of expressing guilt. She, another black feminist raised in Toronto, jotted down notes whenever I described the feeling. She perceived how often it entered the room with me, joining our sessions. Suddenly, I was keen on its use or how it swam through my body. I didn’t feel only the guilt ingrained into my adolescence during Islamic school, nor did I only feel guilty about being the eldest child in an immigrant family not yet able to support them financially in our rapidly gentrifying hometown. The guilt was more vast. I could never pinpoint it in therapy, but I came to my conclusions.
As war erupted in Somalia and my family fled on foot, my mother gave birth to me in Malvern, a small priority neighborhood of Toronto’s east end. After decades of civil unrest and attempted coups over a fictional national identity, one crafted during the colonization of Somalia, determined by the Brits, Italians, and French, my ancestral land collapsed. All erupted when the dictator Siad Barre pointed at a map of my parent’s region and promised to kill all but the crows. With time, his genocidal regime came for everyone. Supplied by U.S.-manufactured weapons, his regime killed off a quarter-million people in two years. Millions more fled. As family flocked in numbers, I, a newborn, was neatly nestled into the tiny co-op apartment that would be their safety point after the rubble. Some of my guilt lingered from adolescence and the realization of being one of a few born into safety. My brother and I were evidence of life after so much death; the family members who escaped made it clear with every hug, kiss, or tender embrace.
A few years after they sought refuge from our ancestral lands, I watched most of those who escaped slowly die a premature death. They didn’t survive the physical or mental battles after the war. Every transcendence was a reminder of how much life is about luck; waves of guilt transpired about the few of us who were touched by it.
Since October, some have been dealing with pangs of guilt birthed by ignorance; others are dealing with delayed guilt caused by a history of inaction; others are sitting with intergenerational guilt and the weight of decisions made before their lifetime. All of this, too, is inaction, hubris, and ego. Some weaponize guilt by misdirecting energy into scolding, shaming, or measuring others' lack of inaction against their own — act now, you’ll regret this later, they say. This, too, is ego (and a hindrance). This is how guilt becomes an obstacle to collective liberation — it distracts you from feeling the anger and heartbreak necessary to move toward action in the present.
The exception to all of this is the guilt of the survivor, the one who bore witness, who carries the burden of luck after mass death. Survivor’s guilt, as photojournalist Motaz Azaiza describes, imprisons your mind or heart to the scene of subjection.
When guilt from privilege or a lack of inaction starts infiltrating conversations, office hours, meetings, or organizing spaces, I consider these questions (for myself and others): What emotion is your guilt concealing? Are you actively engaged in the resistance of suffering? What are you doing with the privilege you’ve got at the expense of others? Who in your community, both familiar and a ‘stranger,’ needs care? How are the needs of those around you connected to other global struggles?
How can you care for a stranger in a distant place today? Are you fostering relationships and networks of care for people who could use you? Are you tending to them regularly? Are you studying histories, tools, and methods of care exemplified to you by organizers of the past and present? Is your ego dictating the ship? Is your ego harming the cause? Why are you here? Are you tending to your ego as you engage in care work? Are you actively involved in the resistance to suffering? If not, what is stopping you, if not guilt?
Further reading, recommendations, toolkits, organizations, and collectives for doing care work:
Resist Colonial Power By Any Means Necessary (playlist):
Refaat Library, a traveling library in ATL named for the martyred Palestinian poet Refaat Alareer </3 https://www.instagram.com/refaatlibraryatl/
You can also join me in volunteering with them here: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSfNX1sZGgXW8NskLCqd5aQB3yxihtHPPUurAVnnGLwyrfEB9g/viewform
The Written Resistance, a quarterly publication on student experiences during the resistance movement for Palestine: https://nationalsjp.org/the-written-resistance-issue-3
WKCR 89.9FM NY has offered some of the best radio journalism I’ve witnessed in years, especially w/r/t our current international student movement: https://www.cc-seas.columbia.edu/wkcr/
Sudan Solidarity Collective: https://sudansolidarity.com/
Sudan Solidarity Collective donations: https://www.paypal.com/donate/?hosted_button_id=C9GCHUJN37MCG&source=qr
Gaza Writes Back: Narrating Palestine by poet Refaat R. Alareer (2014): https://web.archive.org/web/20180719125911id_/https://muse.jhu.edu/article/576911/pdf
Rania El Mugammar’s IN OUR OWN HANDS: tools for talking abolition with little ones: http://www.raniawrites.com/inourhands.html
Dr. Yara Hawari’s ‘Rethinking Palestine’ podcast on Al-Shabaka, a Palestinian Policy Network: https://al-shabaka.org/podcast/
National Students for Justice in Palestine: https://nationalsjp.org/
Boycotts Divestments Sanctions list: https://bdsmovement.net/
Lorde, Audre G. "Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (1984)." (1984).
Interviewing Toni Morrison in 1976 with Richard Asinof, editor of ConvergenceRI: https://rinewstoday.com/interviewing-toni-morrison-in-1976/