THANK YOU
+ student encampments and abandoning "normalcy"
I’m so thrilled to share that with the flash raffle we were able to send $1800 to the Gaza evacuee fundraising! Izzy Jarvis was the winner and the most amazing part of the day was seeing how many past clients, friends, and familiar names were showing up. I’m grateful for each and every one one of you. (Donation receipts at the bottom of this newsletter.)
I’ve spent the week since getting back to New York glued to Signal. Every time I open social media or the news I let out a primal scream (both internal and external). The most recent discoveries of mass graves at hospitals in Gaza— doctors in their scrubs, patients with catheters still inserted, so many children— continue to stun in their relentless cruelty. The mundane habits of daily life are fully integrated with the daily crises both in other countries and here in New York. I woke up at 5am to try to find out how many people were arrested last night. I flossed my teeth while watching a video (cw police violence) of Cal Poly Humboldt students attacked by riot police, police that a local friend told me were called in from three surrounding counties to confront just 40 students occupying a college building. I cried when they chanted “WE ARE NOT AFRAID OF YOU! WE ARE NOT AFRAID OF YOU!” as police closed in and I finished brushing my teeth.
These students are so brave. Young people are brave. Elders are brave. My friends are brave. All these people remind me that I can be brave too, even if I don’t tend to think of myself that way. I went up to the Columbia encampment to deliver supplies this past week and spent time on the lawn with the students, faculty, and supporters. An elder activist from the original ‘68 student occupation of Columbia gave a speech. I cut my finger and the supply station gave me a band-aid and a tangerine. I lay on a blanket and looked up at the sky as night fell, surrounded by friends and strangers, listening to the teach-ins and the audible chanting from supporters outside the gates.
Two weeks into my trip to Oaxaca, the NYPD dramatically escalated its targeting of Within Our Lifetime, violently assaulting demonstrators and handcuffing a protestor while they were unconscious on the ground. Sickened, I showed the other artists in the international cohort the videos. They were floored, saying they had never seen police act that way. In that moment, I was forced to reckon with how acclimated I had become to the militarized violence of New York police, even as someone who works in all the ways I can to oppose them.
On March 8th, we attended a march for International Working Women’s Day in Oaxaca City. Women and girls in purple and green filled the streets, chanting slogans against femicide and against patriarchy. A feminist black bloc wearing short shorts andd Converse sneakers and boots and tube tops and balaclavas, wielding hammers and baseball bats marched along the entire route smashing windows and pasting up posters with the photos and names of rapists. Graffiti outside one man’s place of business read WE ARE YOUR WORST NIGHTMARE. I saw a woman wheatpasting up a poster of her abuser, tears streaming from her eyes as she affixed it to the public wall. No peace police tried to stop anyone, and neither did any actual police that I saw. The next morning, the city was thickly blanketed in feminist graffiti as high as an arm wielding a can of spray paint could reach.
I came home to the National Guard stationed in the subways and walls of cops. Tonight, on the 200th day of genocide in Palestine, police arrested over 300 people as they held an emergency Passover seder outside Chuck Schumer’s house, demanding that the US stop arming and funding “israel.” At 8:30 pm yesterday, NYPD in riot gear stormed NYU’s Gaza Solidarity Encampment, arresting, beating, and macing nonviolent student protestors and the faculty attempting to protect them. Importantly, you can support arrested NYU students and faculty by flooding their administration with messages (contacts and script linked here). The New School and Columbia encampments are still going and need support, most often bodies inside and on sidewalks outside, to help protect them in centering Gaza through their demands.
Something that has viscerally stayed with me since the George Floyd uprisings of summer 2020 is the feeling of waking up, desperately checking the news, and looking outside to see a perfectly normal-looking day. It seemed impossible that I wouldn’t part my curtains to a world on fire, the entire city aflame with resistance and rebellion in response to the extreme conditions engendered by racist police violence. It felt inconceivable that in one part of the city people were being kettled and chased through the streets, and in another, people were living uninterrupted lives, often totally, blissfully unaware of anything wrong aside from the city-imposed curfew. I think of the people I saw sitting outside eating slices of pizza last summer in the midst of a grey-orange haze, crisis-level air quality suffocating the city from the Canadian forest fires. In the face of traffic blockades, drivers have total fucking freakouts that they can’t get to work— to work, of all places.
Every firsthand account I’ve seen from Gaza and the West Bank says this: It’s so much worse than what you’re seeing. This strains the imagination and I’m glad that it does; each new atrocity cruelly expands the outermost edges of what I believed to be possible and I do not want to imagine that any further. If I hope for anything aside from the end to genocides everywhere in the world (a wish I never knew I’d have to articulate so desperately in my lifetime), it’s that we can abandon the devotion to normalcy. That we reject the routines and social expectations that silo us from action, that we insist on making it stop, even at the expense of a degree, or a job, or a quiet, safe schedule. I watched a speaker at Columbia invoke the 1968 words of Mario Savio from the steps of UC Berkley:
There's a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart that you can't take part! You can't even passively take part! And you've got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus -- and you've got to make it stop! And you've got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it -- that unless you're free the machine will be prevented from working at all!!
I’ll end this newsletter edition with these words from Fatima Mohammed:
and if we do nothing else in the short time we have on this earth, let it be that we stood on our feet, used our bodies as stubborn wedges, trampling a machine of death, and ignited a spark to protect what will pass us all— to protect life and witness liberation.
❇️ The Printed Matter union is asking the general public to sign a petition in favor of Printed Matter signing onto PACBI.
❇️ Highly anticipating a virtual conversation between Shellyne Rodriguez and Orisanmi Burton on Tuesday, April 30, 2024 3pm to 4:30pm: Insurgencies/Counterinsurgencies: a Conversation on Aesthetics, Archives, and Autonomy
❇️ Help the Freedom Flotilla, a fleet of civilian aid workers attempting to break the Israeli siege to deliver crucial aid to Palestine, by pressuring US lawmakers to protect the ships and crew.
