Liberation Diary 1: Do I have a role in the resistance?
On Crip Solidarity for Palestine liberation and global revolution
Hello friends and comrades. Today is the first Substack in a new series; my Liberation Diary in which I’m going to be processing my thoughts and learning aloud around Palestinian resistance and global liberation. This learning is very much rooted in and informed by getting Palestine free, but I may at times stray to look at the wider context of broader commitments to global liberation in the many forms that might take. Right now, ending the genocide and occupation in Palestine feels like the most urgent path to be taking, so that is where much of my focus lies, but it is still unified within larger frameworks of liberation globally, and I’m figuring out those connections as I go. So you can also expect my usual organising and thinking around disability justice, ancestry, generational trauma and processing grief within there too. This newsletter is still called Winging It, becuase I’m still Winging It – I now see that title as an articulation of learning in real time, in public, not always getting things right, admitting my mistakes, and doing my unlearnings out loud for all to see. I hope in doing so, it inspires you to live your learnings/unlearnings out loud as a radical act of resistance too.
(The images throughout this newsletter are by Softcore Trauma on IG)
I have never considered myself to be an activist. Within my artistic practice, people have often attempted to align my making with socially engaged practice and activism. But I haven’t previously felt the capacity to commit myself fully enough to those frameworks, in order to honestly claim those terms. With my disability, autistic tunnel vision, limited capacity and energy, I had previously built barriers around my health in order to sustain being able to live in the world. Namely, I work for wage labour (which in my case means making and writing), I imagine through my artistic and writing practice as a healing space, I am cared for by my mum because for the past few years I haven’t been able to manage domestic tasks, I very occassionally socialise when my spoons allow for it and I prioritise rest. Rest for me looks like watching a lot of TV, films and reading fiction. Even prior to the worsening of my disability in 2019, outside of my academic learnings, I have always leant towards fiction as what I read. I love to read, but for me it is fundamentally decompression. I find absorbing new factual information to be endlessly interesting and necessary, but also very overwhelming, and I have struggled to find the space for it. That has translated into an endless “to read” pile of non-fiction that I never touch (in recent years that pile has predominantly reflected a desire to commit myself to learning about abolition and transfomrative justice), and a failure to engage with any form of news, beyond what finds me on my social media feeds.
I have been ashamed of my lack of engagement. In order to keep going, though, I’ve pushed that shame to the side, in the name of rest and recuperation. I’ve created walls which for me felt like necessary adjustments in order to live. As an autistic person, when I consume non-fiction or news, I get tunnel vision, and also get really fundamentally rocked to my core in a way that can be incredibly debilitating. So I’ve chosen to look away. What opting out of those learnings has meant is that I haven’t committed myself to global liberation because I’ve felt too uneducated on the frameworks involved, to valuably, fully and honestly be able to articulate my thoughts. What Palestinians have helped me realise in this moment of increased educational resources in many many formats (which certainly existed before too but I did not engage with until they were right in front of my face), is that I don’t need to have read every book in order to align my actions with what is in my heart. And it is integral to my artistic practice – which is preoccupied with grief and trauma work, and disability justice – to not only be thinking through making, but also to be thinking through activism. I’ve come to view myself as a reluctant activist, who in the present moment is recalibrating her practice as a way of finding activism and continual learning that is accessible to me as a disabled person.
Johanna Hedva’s Sick Woman Theory, will be in the hearts and minds of many crips at this time. For those of you not familiar with this pivotal essay on disability justice and political action, Hedva thinks about the modes of resistance that exist within disabled communities; in private, indoors and in bed. In so doing, she challenges Hannah Arendt’s argument that political actions must take place in public and shines a light on the inherent politics of the decisions we make in private: who we go to bed with, what our bodies do behind closed doors, how we rest, how we live our intimate lives. I’m sharing the opening here which says so much; opens so many doors for us as disabled people:
“In late 2014, I was sick with a chronic condition that can get bad enough to render me, for anywhere from days to weeks to months at a time, unable to walk, drive, do my job, sometimes speak or understand language, take a bath without assistance, and leave the bed. This particular flare in 2014 coincided with the Black Lives Matter protests, which I would have attended unremittingly, had I been able to. At the time, I lived one block away from MacArthur Park in Los Angeles, a predominantly Latinx neighborhood and one colloquially understood to be the place where many immigrants begin their American lives. The park is not surprisingly one of the most active places of protest in the city.
I listened to the sounds of the marches as they drifted up to my window. Attached to the bed, I raised my sick woman fist, in solidarity.
Solidarity is a slippery thing. It’s hard to feel in isolation. In bed, in pain, I started to think about the kind of solidarity in which I could participate as someone stuck at home, alone. I started to think about what modes of protest are afforded to sick and disabled people at all.
I thought of the many others who were not at the protest either, who could not go because it was in some way inaccessible to them, all the other invisible bodies, with their fists up, tucked away, out of sight. It seemed to me that many would be the people for whom Black Lives Matter is especially in service. I thought of how they might not be able to be present for the marches because they had to go to work, or because they lived under the threat of being fired from their job if they marched, or because they were literally incarcerated. They might not be able to go to the march because of the threat of violence and police brutality that exists at any protest. They might not be able to go because their bodies were this peculiar convergence of hyper-visible and invisible, marked and unmarked, which instantiated a dangerous vulnerability around them. They might not be able to go because of their own illness or disability, or because they were caring for someone with an illness or disability. They were many, and we were different from each other in key ways, but what was true for all of us is that we were not there.”
That’s the thing, as disabled people our actions might not be the same as our abled comrades. They might not exist in public through going to protests, or be time consuming, or regular. We will need to do them in and around our disabilities; with regular rest and breaks. And doing our actions on Crip Time is resistance in itself – resistance of the colonial, neoliberal, capitalist agenda which equates human value with productivity and commercial worth. An opressive system which is also fundamental in devaluing Palestinian lives, because part of the colonial world’s motivations for doing so are grounded in the fact that Palestine is not a place of great global wealth (in part because Britain and the West were instrumental in preventing it from becoming one, in their propping up and creation of Israel). So, if we are organising on Crip Time then the actions we take might be less time consuming; small in some ways, but colossal in their ripple effects in contributing to a collective movement of global liberation.
One seemingly-small action (in that it doesn’t take any time) which is immeasurably huge in impact, comes directly from the Palestinian led liberation movements of the last decades: Boycott, Divest, Sanction (BDS). You can find out more about the meanings of BDS through that link and in the infographic below, but for the purpose of “small” (big) actions here – or maybe I should phrase that instead as accessible actions – I’m going to focus on boycott. The BDS call has come directly from Palestine and it mirrors the methods used in global resistance which ended the legislation of Apartheid in South Africa (the material ending of Apartheid is still a work in progress). As with above, the colonial world equates value with commerce, and as such a powerful tool to impact change is to speak with our purse strings: by Boycotting Israel, Israeli products and any companies who support Israel. This takes money away from the direct funding of Israel’s army (the IDF), occupation and genocide. When we give money to these brands and companies we are directly funding the genocide. Cultual boycotts too (i.e. refusing to travel to Israel to perform, to publish our books or share our art in Israel and refusing to perform at cultural institutions that support Israel) were a fundamental part of ending the Apartheid in South Africa. And it takes no time at all. It is an action which is fundamentally based in inaction. All it takes is to look at the list, such as the infographic we created below, which is not an exhaustive list but is a start. There is also this great chrome extension which blurs out products which support the Israeli regime. You can find more inforgraphics on IG and there are a few different and more extensive ones in my IG story highlights. I’m not sharing the more extensive infographics here because of the spoons of having to go through and find them, because in this moment I’m prioritisng using my spoons to write this newsletter.
Some “small” or accessible actions might be imperfect. One of the things I did a couple of weeks back is to sign my name to every open letter calling for a ceasefire and end to genodice that came across my screen. We have seen the imperfections of open letters. It is something that many of us know intimately as workers who have lived through the harm and traumas of insitutions. Fred Moten articulated his dissilusionment with open letters beautifully in this talk (which is available for free on youtube / was originally shared with me through this post by my friend Eliel Jones, who also had valuable articulations of his own, and within which you can see some great clips from Moten’s talk). We have seen just how imperfect open letters are in the case of ArtForum (link for full details there), in which artists were pressured to retract their names from an open letter calling for an end to genocide by their collectors and funders. Then the Editor in Chief of the magazine, David Velasco, was FIRED for publishing the open letter (he’d been with the publication since 2005). In what people are quite rightly naming as a reinstation of McCarthyism – the repression and persecution of thinkers throughout the 1940s and 1950s who the US saw as progressing the “Communist” regime (Communist in speech marks, to indicate that America’s definition of Communism as necessarily tied to tyrannical rule is not the same as the ideology of Communism).
What the firing of Daniel Velasco and the pressure on artists to retract their names tells us, is that institutions are inherently tied up in the colonial project. Many institutions are complicit in the Israeli occupation, and many are also direct funders of it. If you, like me, are an artist, then to just scratch the surface of how deep things go, we can look to Outset, who The White Pube helpfully revealed is co-founded by Yana Peel, a close personal friend of Netanyahu who hosted his 70th birthday in her home (Outset’s history summarised helpfully in this post by juststopart). There are very very few UK arts institutions that haven’t received funding from Outset. I don’t have an exhaustive list (if anyone has seen one please do share it with me) but I imagine it would probably be easier to name the institutions that haven’t received funding from them. And yet, knowing how inherently flawed institutions are, knowing they often uphold the status quo of colonial regimes, I still signed open letters coming out of them. Hell, even Fred Moten, who has revealed to us the many ways in which institutions will not get us free, told us loud and clear that he still signed the open letters. That he signed them, realised doing so wasn’t aligned with his politics, but that he still might waiver and have another moment in which he signs them. Because to sign them is to still create public pressure to clearly name our denouncement and condemnation of Israel. To say loud and clear - NOT IN OUR NAME (although as Moten points out, there is the question of how clearly we can articulate our beliefs through institutions).
I, too, have been personally engaged in starting imperfect actions. In my first week of organising, which probably started around 5 days into the present escalation of genocide, I was organising in a hurried, panicked way. My co-organiser F also told me that our actions often are imperfect; after all we are flawed humans who often make mistakes. I still am organising in a hurried, panicked way a lot of the time, because that is generally how my neurotransmitters fire within my autistic brain. Much of my organising takes place on little sleep, first thing in the morning or last thing at night, because for some reason that’s when my brain is most locked on to things. I am writing this newsletter now on too little sleep, and it too, will be imperfect and contain mistakes. F has helped me realise, though, that there is value in learning and unlearning those imperfect actions in public. Because we shouldn’t be scared into complete inaction out of fear of getting it wrong. We will get it wrong, and all we can do is listen to the people around us – particularly those with experience of organising and direct lived experience of being Palestinian or direct connections to Palestine – and to keep evolving our actions so they get closer and closer to ones we can stand behind with our full weight.
All of this is to say, we all have a different role in the revolution. And all our roles are valuable, no matter how big, small, or imperfect. Some of us might start an imperfect action (such as writing an open letter), others might follow that imperfect action with a “small” action of their own (by signing the open letter), and others will provide the critical framework through which to understand those actions, their meanings, their failings, and how to imagine and ask for more. All of those things are valuable and all of them contribute towards many actions coming together, building into a collective global movement of change, resistance and revolution. We can see on the ground in Gaza too, that no two people are necessarily engaged in the same action of resistance: some people are looking after kids, some people are baking and sharing food, some people are pulling living and dead people out from the rubble, some are breaking into the UN to redistribute medical supplies, some are bearing witness to and showing the world what is happening through journalism, some people are helping to bury the dead and some people are saving lives through medical procedures. All those actions are endlessly meaningful and the Palestinian people are showing us how much they are capable of living, dreaming and enacting a better future, while living through the most atrocious hell. They are showing us the way, guiding us into action, and we must follow their example of how to get free.
When deciding what my actions might look like, then, I have been asking myself what my specific skillsets are. I return to what I know to be true of myself. That I have been lucky enough to meet and know lots of beautiful creative people and I enjoy connecting people up. That I have an active imagination. That I enjoy writing. That I have a small but not insignificant following here and on IG through which to share thinking with. So as an example, my actions for today are to write this newsletter, write some of my thinking into simple graphics on IG using Canva and stitch a square for Tenille’s collective quilt for Palestine. Next week, I’m going to refocus my energies on co-organising a Collective Day of action for Palestine, which will take place in December. When I can’t act, my co-organisers support me in ensuring things keep going. We allow each other to take breaks and step back when we need to; with many hands actions don’t have to stop altogether in order to allow for rest.
What I’ve learnt in the last few days though, is not to let a fear of an imperfect action freeze us into inaction. Doing nothing is worse than doing something wrong, then trying to rectify it. So we should act, but simultaneously learn and unlearn in public, own up to our mistakes, and do our best to rectify things and do better. Listen to the people holding critical frameworks for us; Palestinians with lived experiences, people who have been committed to Palestinian liberation longterm, or are seasoned activists elsewhere. Heck, just learn from each other full stop. In learning publicly and out loud – sharing our mistakes and imperfections – we can learn together.
Prior to writing this newsletter I had questioned what it would do. I don’t have experience in organising or activism. I’m not an expert or a voice of validity within the Palestinian liberation. But I do know that I can write and enjoy writing. So right now, I can learn out loud and publicly, so you might learn along with me, and I can use my creative tools (as has been said elsewhere) to make liberation feel irresistible to you.
I hope that this won’t be my only action for now. I hope I’ll be working with my friends to co-organise the day of collective for next month. I also hope to turn this into a series and write to you again. The reality is that my health might intefere, I might become debilitated again. And if I do my friends will take over. The power of collective solidarity is to keep moving forward regardless of our individual capacities, and to hold space for each other to come to the resistance in whatever way we are able. So for now, I’m doing what’s at my fingertips. An imperfect action that might do nothing at all but which utilisies the skills I know I have, to try to find my role in the resistance.