Looks Like In Public

To Source Solace and Sustain in Solidarity

Oct 26, 2023

Audre Lorde said in 1989, of us in the US, “we are citizens of the most powerful country on earth—we are also citizens of a country that stands upon the wrong side of every liberation struggle on earth. Feel what that means.”1

I mistakenly recall staying up all night in the student union building, just west of Sproul Plaza in 2013, listening to the UC Berkeley student senate debate a bill proposing divestment from companies that profit off Israeli occupation of Palestine.2 It was a ten hour debate, but we weren’t there properly overnight; the bill passed in the early hours of the morning that April Thursday.

I recall distinctly that I did not have any salient insights or useful contributions to offer that night, or throughout that year. The memory is entangled with the Occupy protests on that same plaza in 2011, two months after I had moved to the city, and Obama’s 2012 election, another occasion where we stayed the night on Sproul. But the hazy residue of those memories carry a biting clarity: there was continually something additional to unlearn, more to be ashamed of not having known sooner, and therefore more shame to metabolize into guilt, to metabolize into useful actionable and sustained behaviors.

A good friend I’ve known since we were nine, SK, messages me this week from the hospital in San Francisco where they work in emergency medicine, “Feeling not so great about myself because I’m not able to contribute in ways that I used to, but trying to keep in mind that I’m doing stuff for the long run.” I see SK’s work in dialogue with Audre Lorde’s 1989 speech. Lorde reminds us that here in the US, the median income for Black and Hispanic families has fallen between 1986 and 1989, that the infant mortality rate is up and disproportionately impacting Black mothers. I know that SK has specifically directed their life’s work toward combating racism within the for-profit healthcare system, providing access and resources to economically-disadvantaged and otherwise-marginalized folks in need of care.

I take what a stranger I meet Sunday night at Eastside Cafe in El Sereno, Serita, shares with all of us in the room. She worked the front lines as a healthcare worker during the pandemic in 2020, throughout lockdown, and protests against police brutality and the ongoing murder of black people in this country, and got burnt out. Serita reminds us that a part of the work of liberatory struggle is to “divest from this very capitalist idea of being a martyr, of seeing value only in showing up for things as an individual, because the reality is that we show up collectively.” Serita redirects our attention to disability and neurodivergence, reminding us that there are multitudinous ways to show up. Her insights are more useful to SK right now than anything I can provide, and I’m grateful to be a conduit.

NO ONE WAY WORKS, it will take all of us
shoving at the thing from all sides
to bring it down.3

In moments of such enormous grief and rage, togetherness cannot be an abstract or metaphorical project. It is a literal and physical practice, requiring the intimacy and specificity of real-time bodily gestures and facial reactions. I’m sharply conscious that the overwhelm and guilt that I feel at merely bearing witness to such death and destruction is only a pale shadow of the actual loss and grief experienced by Palestinian and Israeli people.

“Oh rascal children of Gaza. You who constantly disturbed me with your screams under my window. You who filled every morning with rush and chaos. You who broke my vase and stole the lonely flower on my balcony. Come back, and scream as you want and break all the vases. Steal all the flowers. Come back.. just come back..” Khaled Juma, a Palestinian poet from Gaza

Writer and AIDS historian Sarah Schulman wrote last week to remind us that “the most difficult challenge in our lives is to face our contributions to the systems that reproduce inequality and consequential cycles of violence. Every person has to face their own complicities, and we start this by listening to whoever is suffering.”4 Liberation work is imperfect, incomplete, and aspirational. “We need to be doing this ‘working through’ more in public,” I say to E, when she calls me from New York’s Upper West Side today. “Because the divisiveness of sequestering ourselves and our views to people who already agree with us is a non-starter for moving forwards.”

Borders between the identity of the singular self, the identity of the like-minded collective, the identity of the collective ‘other,’ these borders are constructed in much the same way as border walls and fences, the component parts that constitute concentration camps and open-air prisons. This means those borders can also be deconstructed, I tell myself. But the fundamental difference between peace and liberation can never be forgotten in that struggle to collectivize. A masquerade of neutrality that protects normalized power imbalances, hierarchy, exploitation, and oppression is not the same as an effort toward the liberation of the diverse multitude.

Real grief —Palestinian grief, Israeli grief, Jewish grief— can be mobilized toward destructive ends when human emotionality gets conflated with the objectives of the nation state gets conflated with spirituality. Marking this distinction, James Baldwin said in 1979, “But the state of Israel was not created for the salvation of the Jews; it was created for the salvation of the western interests.” Tracing this archive of Baldwin’s thinking and these articles detailing time spent in Palestine and Israel written by Starhawk, whose parents were children of Jewish immigrants from Russia, has undergirded my political education around Palestine. Specifically, these sources trace the perspective of US citizens whose understanding has deepened and changed over time.

Witnessing ongoing genocide of the past 75+ years increase in visibility, rapidity, enormity, every day of the past two weeks, live-streamed, means that we have unprecedented access to the images and sounds of the imperiled and injured, to the faces of the dead. We listen to truth-telling direct from the mouths of a people who are fighting to survive. Journalists on the ground ask that we share their stories, uplift the realities they are documenting, and amplify their voices against prevalent anti-Arab media bias, rampant Islamophobia, and the active silencing of Pro-Palestine advocates, writers, thinkers, and artists in the diaspora who call for the freedom, safety, and self-determination of all people in the region.

In Pratibha Parmar’s 1991 documentary A Place of Rage,5 June Jordan states that there are “two issues, of our time, really, that amount to a litmus test for morality, as far as I’m concerned – One is, what you’re prepared to do on behalf of the Palestinian people, and the other is, what are you prepared to do on behalf of gay and lesbian peoples. I really feel those two things are coequal fundaments, in my worldview at this time.” Jordan’s poetry cannot be divorced from her politic:

Activism is not issue-specific.
It’s a moral posture that, steady state,
    propels you forward, from one hard
    hour to the next.
Believing that you can do something
    to make things better, you do
    something, rather than nothing.
You assume responsibility for the
    privilege of your abilities.
You do whatever you can.
You reach beyond yourself in your
    imagination, and in your wish for
    understanding, and for change.
You admit the limitations of individual
    perspectives.
You trust somebody else.
You do not turn away.6

Even as individuals on the ground in Gaza ask that we share their reporting, it’s easy to remain cynical about the use of social media. But this neglects that social media can serve as an accessible popular education tool. Bite-size infographics and instagram carousels, with their reductive and simplified language, can provide clarifying definitions, stark distinctions, helpful graphics and visual tools, often citing both their original sources and additional resources for further learning. We are capable of fact-checking and cross-referencing what we read online in the same way that we would double back to verify information we receive from any other source. Also relevant to the role of social media is Jordan’s “You trust somebody else.” Among many Jewish folks who have been so generous with their perspective and teaching throughout the past two weeks, HZ writes

“The coolest thing about being a Jew is that for thousands of years we’ve been a stateless people.
There is sacredness in being detached from the nation even though it’s historically coincided with our vulnerability.
I’ve always understood the holy texts to mean that god and study are our anchors—we don’t need borders, iron domes, and barbed wire fences to keep us safe.
Our statelessness is precious because it should demand our solidarity with all displaced and diasporic peoples.
Our statelessness is what has made so many of our ancestors revolutionary—international thinkers instead of empire apologists.
Imagine telling the pogrom survivors that they should have empathy for the families of their oppressors.
Because I grew up with internationalist anti-zionist parents, I’ve always been called a fake Jew.
The deepest antisemitism lies in the rotting hearts of essentialist Jews who would tell other Jews that real Jewishness exists and is constituted by occupation and fake indigeneity.
This 80 year period of human history is just a temporary blip… Soon Palestine will be free and we will go back to living in right relationship with God and our neighbors."

There is a lot of honest and vulnerable writing circulating, providing us with overwhelming access to opinions with which we might agree or disagree. Situating my own positionality is crucial to my onboarding the opinions of others; per Schulman, “we start this by listening to whoever is suffering.” The pain is wide-ranging; loss can look like death or estrangement.

Still, as Neema Githere Siphone writes, “Instagram was not built to be a public square.”7 Interacting online feeds on the falsehood of the atomized self, enforces isolation, pushes us toward a dissociative state, whether during a global pandemic, ongoing climate catastrophe, unrelenting militarized police violence, or a live-streamed genocide. Using social media to organize in-person gathering and calls to action bolsters the necessity of ritualized mourning and movement.

Friday night last week, I pull out my wallet. The person behind the counter, large glasses and curly hair, asks if I live in DC. “No,” I say, bewildered, and they point to my metro card. “Oh, I was there for the protests–with Jewish Voice for Peace marching on the capitol, and with Palestinian Youth Movement at the Israeli embassy,” I say. “I used to work for If Not Now,” they tell me, “and Sammy’s partner,” gesturing backwards, “was at the protest in DC, but on Monday.” This brief bridge between us is, for me, easily the most generous moment of the night.

The strategic action Monday blocked off entry and exit from the capitol, human chains linked arm in arm and hand in hand to demand ceasefire in Gaza. I keep seeing these videos flicker across my little phone screen, and process them with my anachronistic brain, like looking at historical black and white stills of protests against the Vietnam war. M and I watch these clips on Monday and leave Tuesday night on a redeye, to stand with the largest Jewish-led pro-Palestine protest in US history.

“Feel what that means,” Lorde said in 1989. It’s the Palestinian-led march on the Israeli embassy that night in DC that really loosens something in me. Grieving aloud and naming atrocities —screaming atrocities— together, in the street, over a thousand of us, had me accessing a full range of emotion; deeply held, devastated, disgusted, and galvanized. The next day, M and I walk through rock creek park. We dread rising islamophobia, rising anti-semitisim, governments that continually choose to fund wars not provide for their people, while depriving the land of its original stewards. I remember that the trees are bearing witness, even as we learn from our Palestinian comrades to regard them as kin.

I pulled Lorde’s quote up top from her commencement address to Oberlin College in May of 1989, more than thirty years ago. In it, she condemns rising anti-semitism and condemns the ongoing genocide of the Palestinian people, reminding us that “Together, in the conscious recognition of our differences, we can win, and we will.” The productive friction of meeting each other where we are at, of growing together, is only possible in the public sphere where we encounter our differences with nuance and complexity.

Two nights ago, gathering at the El Sereno Community Garden, someone gets up on the open mic to connect the dots between US military occupation and violence in North Korea, in Afghanistan, in Iraq, in the US colonies of Puerto Rico, Hawai’i, across countries in Latin America, in the Philippines. Somebody reminds me that in 2004, Winnie Madikizela-Mandela said “apartheid Israel can be defeated just as apartheid in South Africa was defeated.”8 Indigenous musicians lead us in a call and response, singing under the moon, and I follow JR’s steady harmonies with my uncertain notes.

To secularize something that isn’t secular is dangerous. The secular embrace of capitalism in the West turns money and the individual into a religion. If we don’t talk about spirituality, ‘ideology,’ ‘religion,’ ‘philosophy,’ or whatever you want to call it, whatever guides your life ethos, “if we don’t understand our ethics, how we understand time and space, how everything dies,” if we don’t contend with that dimension, then capitalism does it for us. It’s another dominant system, just like organized religion. This makes it so hard for people to talk about death, because it seems final, when it isn’t; so many of our communities don’t understand death that way.

I’m learning what aspects of organized religion can be weaponized, and what aspects of spirituality enable a people to survive. I’m learning that whether a religious congregation is organized from below or from above is sometimes more significant than the governing beliefs of any one religion. All organized religion has the potential to produce hierarchical power dynamics, or to safeguard life and coexistence. I glimpse the writing of a friend of friend —as we do, in decontextualized glimpses on the internet, care of social media— who describes that as a baby, her child would refer to marches as “Churching.” That collective pain, grief, and desperation might be transmuted to hope is only one form of prayer.

drafting curbside

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