We are all familiar with it. We know all too well the patronizing smirk and condescending smile that grows on the faces of agents of Empire when they are confronted with their moral bankruptcy and our suffering which they have no desire to engage with constructively. We stand before them with hundreds of hours of critical education and reading, years of lived experience, and centuries of suffering and resilience coursing through us. Yet they dare to instruct us on emotional restraint, failing to comprehend that our principled rage is not a weakness but the very crucible from which transformative justice is forged—a dialectic that must thoroughly confound those who have ascended to the upper echelons of Empire by strategically maintaining a calculated distance from reality.
They may claim, “I hear you. I see you.” in a show of performative empathy when what they do hear and see, in fact, are not individuals they will ever afford the necessary respect to learn from and speak to. What they perceive are not individuals worthy of profound engagement, but objects to be managed, categorized, and ultimately dismissed for we are far too bitter and unwelcoming—because it is entirely sensible that the call for an end to genocide be preempted with a warm reception and flattery. Let it be unequivocally clear: We are above and beyond small talk and diplomatic niceties that may normally precede a request for a favor but certainly not a demand for a right—the right to life. In the face of such a demand, what is in order on the part of the agents of Empire is not a lesson on semantics or an attempt to discipline and most certainly not a declaration of pride over which they have no right nor authority to feel of us. If no shame on their part can be felt to drive them to action, then the second best thing that may come of them is resonant silence.
We occupy any given space not in pursuit of individual validation but for the very cause that we have organized around to be centered and confronted first and foremost. We stand seething and enraged that for over 400 days, scenes we have seen and sworn to never normalize repeat themselves with utter impunity. Never again will those of us with eyes open to the past year look at things the same- every object carries with it the weight of witnessed violence. Bread is no longer sustenance on the plate but a memory of deprivation; incubators speak of interrupted futures, of an end to a life that never began. Nor shall we ever look to podiums, flour, pots, rollerblades, plastic bags, pagers, or our very own limbs the same. Though it is never just the 400+ days of atrocity that drive us, it is never just the transgressions against Palestinian life that move us to act in this moment. It is all that has occurred and continues to occur to the multiples of people and places, it is the fear of the fate that our silence will deal to our children. This is the common and collective suffering that has in turn birthed the collective struggle.
We who are different in name, texture, language, and contribution may well be unable to speak to one another about the state of the weather. But when the eyes of a father in Gaza meet that of a father in Chenagai, no words in any language need be spoken to communicate the unspeakable trauma of watching your child be disintegrated by a drone. What linguistic constructs could possibly do justice to the mothers in Gaza, in Sudan, or in Yemen to speak of their helplessness and shame? What but a language written in the shallow breaths of their infants, in protruding bones that speak of their systematic deprivation?
But it is not only that Empire’s capacity to conflict and inflict suffering is beyond any spatial or temporal parameter, it is that we too have come to understand that grief and resistance are nations without borders—they must be so that we may lend from one another to infinitely sober and strengthen those who reside in them. A nation that transcends cartographic imagination and the chains of ‘sovereignty’ and the state.
Thus, we assure those serving as agents and representatives of and from within the Empire that we are not waiting nor searching for their permission to bring it down. Nor are we looking to kneel before and please the rotating ‘powers’ housed miles away on the ancestral lands of the Nacotchtank. For how much longer can one delude themselves into believing that this evil which seeks to disfigure and displace is a product of one faulty administration and not an inherently rotten core? Was life meant to stop still in the early hours of Nov. 6, 2024 as genocidal liberalism lost to genocidal fascism? Was there an international liberal order whose presence we were meant to mourn that was not already buried with the victims of Abu Ghraib?
We turn not to imperial ‘powers’ but derive our obligation to act instead from the legacy of those who did the same before us. We answer to the Hind Rajabs of the world—a child whose final cries for help and whose family’s car punctured with 335 U.S.-supplied-Israeli-fired bullets have been recorded for the world to hear forever and see. We answer to all the children born with names that land sooner on a death certificate than their mother’s lips and those who live to tell the tale of their unchilding.
We answer to the Yousef Zeinos and Ahmed Al Madhouns of the world, paramedics on their way to rescue Hind whose fate was sealed when Israeli forces targeted their ambulance with a U.S.-made M830A1 explosive missile. We answer to all those who run, who run towards the wreckage knowing well they may leave their families behind if it is not their very bodies they are retrieving from under the rubble.
We answer to the Ismail Al Ghouls of the world, a journalist who was the last to bid Yousef and Ahmed farewell and the first to report on the U.S.-Israeli atrocity committed against them and Hind only to be martyred himself by Israel in a targeted drone attack six months later. We answer to all those men and women, before and behind the camera, who endure reporting on the loss of their own while escaping death by seconds so we may be informed, so the world may be left with no excuse to justify their inaction.
We answer to the martyr rescued by the martyr, healed by the martyr, photographed by the martyr, and carried by the martyr because we recognize that we may become the martyr. And every time we answer to the martyrs, who are as young as those who met death in their mother’s womb, we walk with them and the echo of thousands of histories of people who lived and lost their lives in pursuit of justice follows. We choose dignity where it can be found in this life or die trying because our struggle is not a choice but an existential imperative. So even if all we have as students and scholars are our words and expo markers, we will fight, and fight, and fight.
We, a collective in a perpetual state of learning, are acutely aware of our fallibility—that is what defines us, that we claim no absolute authority nor do we seek to center the ego over the ethos. We remain humbly indebted to those scholars and writers who push us to employ our active voices, who speak to us and not at us. They are the individuals who maintain the privilege of claiming pride over us, not those who uphold and fraternize gleefully with the systems that disfigure us and leave craters in the streets that watched us grow. Those who teach us to be critical of ourselves, to look inwards and challenge and challenge and challenge so we may grow. But those who uphold the systems that scheme to suppress and subjugate, what capacity do they maintain to move beyond their narcissism and self-righteousness?
So we shall continue to obsess over semantics and words because our acquisition of literacy did not come without a sobering realization that language too is a battlefield in which we are dehumanized and decontextualized. We shall fight in and against the language that has softened the mutilation of our fathers and brothers by their depiction, not as the honorable and caring men they are, but as nameless “targets,” “suspects,” and “terrorists.” We shall continue to be blessed with the rage that pushes us to resist and eases the sacrifices we make in the pursuit of justice. Let it ring loud: our revenge will be the laughter of our children.
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