This conversation between Palestinian psychiatrist and writer Dr. Samah Jabr and Nkem Ndefo is an invocation, a reminder that we each have power and responsibility. As the world bears witness to the continuing genocide in Palestine, the Congo and Sudan, we must challenge the systems—capitalism, colonialism, imperialism—that do not care for us or the earth. We must refuse individualism, refuse the pathologizing of our wounds, refuse to be silent.
Healing, as Dr. Jabr and Nkem Ndefo remind us, is collective. Liberation is our medicine. Each act of solidarity, each truth told, and each vision for justice brings us closer to a world where dignity is not a kit handed out by the same forces that perpetuate violence—but a shared, living reality.
Sumud: More Than Resilience
Dr. Jabr shares the meaning of “sumud,” a Palestinian concept often translated as steadfastness, but one that transcends the individualistic notions of resilience pushed by Western, neoliberal frameworks.
“Sumud has a collective aspect, it’s not only about a state of being. It’s action oriented… It was created in the context of political hardships and difficulties. So it includes the political response or a psychological response to a political predicament.”
Sumud is about connection—finding strength together and in the land itself, resisting the forces that would reduce our suffering to a private, personalized wound. In a world where imperial powers and NGOs often offer “dignity kits” while fueling the violence that devastates lives, sumud calls us to collective care and defiant hope.
Western Psychiatry as a Tool of Colonialism
Dr. Jabr begins to name psychiatry’s complicity in oppression:
Most of my medical and psychiatric training is Western based… It’s obvious that when you practice in Palestine and listen to patients… you need to question many of the things that I read in books and was exposed to during my education. In my clinical work, I can see the occupation behind every clinical presentation.
She reminds us that therapy cannot heal what is ongoing, that real safety comes not from pathologizing wounds created by structural violence but by ending that violence—by witnessing, validating, and demanding justice and liberation.
The Power and Medicine of Solidarity
International solidarity, Dr. Jabr insists, is not charity but medicine. For a people forced into isolation and erased from the mainstream narrative, every act of bearing witness, every challenge to complicit institutions, every refusal to be silent is an act of healing—a refusal to be “muted” while genocide is live-streamed to the world.
“International solidarity provides acknowledgement, validation, holding… it is appreciated. I saw images from Gaza—people thanking and saluting university students in the US for their campaign, for their encampment… International solidarity has a therapeutic value for Palestinians because so much of our experience is about silencing us and muting our voices.”
Radical Imagination as Survival
To survive, we must refuse to surrender our capacity to imagine better futures, Dr. Jabr says:
“We can have radical positive imagination or an end for this genocide and this horror. Sometimes the threat is so huge that people are afraid to imagine positive things. I think positive imaginations is a very important resource that we should utilize.”
This is not naive optimism—it’s a strategic refusal to be crushed by the machinery of empire and despair.
Our Role: Dismantling Systems, Building Community
Let us continue to hold each other, steadfast in sumud, until justice is no longer imagined but fully lived.
For more conversations that nurture hope, connection, and the radical imagination we need to survive these times—join us inside the Lumos Community. Together we build capacity, deepen solidarity, and practice collective liberation.
