This peice was featured in Muntjac Magazine Issue 1
1.
To the White Creative Residency Facilitators and Slightly Less White Residency Cohort at 56A Infoshop, Understand that this letter is not a pleading missive intended to change your hearts and minds but is a form that lets me use the accusatory ‘you.’
Those of you who make claims upon radical pedagogy and anarchism, openness and discomfort, care and complaint: why do you normalise colonialism by prioritising the comfort of israelis?
Why did you feel the need to collectively waft soothing noises at one person who cried over a ‘Globalise the Intifada’ zine and was frightened by the phrase ‘From the river to the sea’? When this person complained it was easier to say they were argentinian rather than israeli in certain spaces, I heard someone say ‘I bet!’ in reassuring tones. I wonder what possessed them. Why did you take pains to reassuringly say that israelis are welcome in that space and that “we” were behind them 100%? Why did you appear so very sure that everyone in the room thought with one mind, one heart?
Distantly through my rage I heard someone say that she ‘did not have black and white thoughts on what was unfolding’, with a little hiatus near the end of that sentence, and I wonder: what values and relations did you think that space was capable of supporting? One that refuses to name genocide and whiteness, it seems. It is therefore unsurprising that people were willing to make expressions of anti-colonial resistance into a problem, rather than be accountable to the Palestinian struggle.
We were all in that same room at that moment, which I acknowledge was abrupt. I understand responding under pressure is difficult. However, you cannot simply explain this fulsome affirmation from the whole group as merely an imperfect stress response, a poorly thought-out and emotional moment in group dynamics. I believe what I witnessed was a severing of politics from care where the group defaulted to comforting someone who should have been further challenged. Perhaps you refused to create this challenge because you think of yourselves as nice people: I have no such delusions about myself.
I needed to leave the room in order to interrupt this moment. I just said, ‘I’m out.’ I got up and walked away.
With comical timing, one of the white facilitators called out to my retreating back– ‘I think we can still hold space for this!’
For what? For whom? A white colonist throwing a tantrum is by definition refusing to hold space for anything else.
The only space I am holding is for Palestine and all colonised peoples of the world, and I find in June Jordan’s words a ballast:
YOU SAY YOU LOVE ME AND I COMMIT
TO FRICTION AND THE UNDERTAKING
OF THE PEARL
– Intifada Incantation: Poem #8 for b.b.L.
I am curious about whether you think the cause of Palestine, and by extension the struggle of all colonised peoples across the world, is merely your little branding exercise. Do you understand the necessity of actively refusing cultural or material complicity in zionism and any other form of racism? Anyone may wear a cute little Palestine badge and go on an A-to-B march while avoiding any critical self-reflection about how to relate to the colonised world and its peoples, I suppose for fear of “black-and-white thoughts” that may result in the political discernment required to see zionism for what it is and reject it instantly.
This was a situation that required a refusal of the nonviolent communication we had just been practising. Those rules don’t apply in this situation as all forms of white supremacy must be run out of our spaces, not coddled and validated. Refusing to understand that white supremacy currently takes the form of a multicultural project which is sustained through the active invitation of racialised and ethnicised people is what underlies this normalisation of zionism in social spaces.
We must contextualise israeli identity as we do british, american, australian, and other colonial identity categories. If we see zionism as colonialism and adherence to colonialism as a form of whiteness (no matter the identity of the speaker), then this allows us to see the shocking amount of racism permeating our spaces. The tools, tactics, and emotions are familiar to many of us: upon encountering anything critical of the colonial project with which these people still deeply identify, they cry white tears, centre themselves, act like the victim, whine about being unfairly judged, and insist they have reason to fear for their safety while everyone else in the room sits in quiet sympathy. This normalises colonialism by reproducing the idea that “both sides” just need to come together and talk because everyone’s feelings are equally valid, or whatever vapid bullshit liberals throw out like a cosy blanket over their desire for order and quiet.
In the case of liberal zionists, their vision of “peace” is merely a more capacious settler colony, a continued apartheid (“two-state solution”) that gives up the majority of historic Palestine to israel, a generosity that allows Palestinians–disarmed, docile, grateful–to live in bantustans. Too many people only object to zionism in its specifically Kahanist form, an overt and gleeful desire to exterminate Palestinian existence through blunt violence. Liberal zionists who are “anti-occupation” / “pro-peace” / [dove emoji] but who mainly mobilise through photo-op demos and saturating the discourse with their complaints about how they feel unfairly targeted for criticism, who analyse everything through internal israeli politics, who fear anything but the most placatory and normalising gestures from Palestinians and their supporters, are very much zionists. They’re just being wet about it.
But look at the kind of moment saying something wet engenders: a collective betrayal of anti-colonial values in response to one person crying. You were quickly disarmed by the liberal zionist weapon of choice: the tearful declaration that they are being attacked–that actually, this moment is all about them and their feelings!
Though I am an anxious person who often freezes up, I knew where my comrades were: outside of this room full of people who think Palestinian life is worth less than a moment of their discomfort.
I give you my absence and ask what you think could take its place.
2.
‘Art-making: not as a leisure activity, solely or simply an expression of self, but as the most important medium that we have to communicate. Art-making which hides the seeds of how to be a human stitch in the tapestry again, passed for safe-keeping in the hands of our indigenous. Art-making as a means to mobilize the weapon. If armed struggle is the first action of finding a world beyond colonization, beyond what we can see, culture loads the gun. The role of the artist is to load the gun.’
– Ismatu Gwendolyn, ‘The Role of the Artist is to Load the Gun’
ismatu.substack.com/p/the-role-of-the-artist-is-to-load (shared via Isabella K.)
You, the residency cohort, will be sharing your work in the middle of December 2024. You, who welcome the coloniser; you, with no black and white feelings; you, who sit quietly and nod your head.
I wonder what kind of art you thought was possible under such conditions. How can you make art which engages with ownership, property, and social relations of the local area when you have decided that colonial comfort, with its funhouse mirror distortions, is more appealing? I bet you can’t even see your own faces, blurred and reflected; I bet you insist that it’s different–it’s different!–because you don’t want to think on your own complicity. How can you speak of magic, play, and care when it’s obvious your imaginations are blank due to your predictable willingness to placate racist fragility? What is anarchist about any of this? You are in lockstep with the state as you jingle across the floor with your jester’s hat.
‘So watch your treasures closely. Because we refuse your culture. No sonnets but shouts of “SHAME!” at you from across the street. No stinging critique, but the sting of the Wasp’s Nest. No lionising the powerful, but rather the roar of the Lion’s Den. And when you are dead, no portraits await you, only us performing Piss Aktion on your grave.’
– Ravachol Mutt, ‘Destruction is the only cultural expression left’ newsocialist.org.uk/transmissions/destruction-is-the-only-cultural-expression-left
This is a peer critique. The disruption that Ravachol Mutt calls for is sorely needed in grassroots cultural spaces: these, too, can be hegemonic. They’re smaller, less bureaucratic, the stakes are lower–and that is exactly why it’s more disappointing when people refuse to take risks and cling to what the ruling class wants us to consider normal. Yes, wipe away the coloniser’s tears and reassure them! You’ve just repackaged the same old respectability and whiteness.
I believe we should communicate more violently against colonisation. The failure to do so means our social spaces become like any other: centres for reproducing bourgeois colonial cultural norms. The white anarchist, then, merely becomes a whimsical academic or single-issue reactionary, each in their own way nostalgic for something more interesting than our current modernity, which is harsh, extractive, grey, corporate. It seems their vision of a changed world is a liberal capitalist garden city in western europe, but with improved art schools. How our current modernity and all its objects and relations are nourished through centuries of stolen colonial resources and labour–that is to say, of finely ground human and non-human lives–is not something which figures in their analysis. If we really come down to it, white anarchists are mostly fine with this fundamental structure of their world; they just wish it was all a bit nicer for them (or at least less embarrassing).
So it is no surprise that when the colonised subject revolts, certain white anarchists respond with horror, sympathy, comfort-seeking. Decolonial insurgency is not a viable political consciousness for them. If people they see as fellow whites take up armed resistance, it is only their right: racial solidarity is naturalised. For anyone else, it’s barbaric. The West and the rest has never been so clear.
Wherever you are, and by whatever means necessary, may a thousand intifadas bloom!
3.
to m.,
thank you dear comrade–if u had not left that zine at the infoshop back then, i would not have known i needed to walk out of it the following month.
in steadfast solidarity with all colonised peoples of the world,
p.