today is day 1 of the 7 day strike in solidarity with occupied, martyred and risen palestinians. today i keep all of them in my heart, i think of their fear & pain & confusion, i think of their reverence & strength, i think of their voices and i wish for their relief and support. use tribunals and law proceedings and anything published by institutional strongholds as informational for minutae, but listen to the voices whose mouths and feet are moving on the ground, for the west is cursed with the most stupid abstraction. listen to yourself and find love and compassion in your heart and forgo the guilt that metastasizes & silences you. forgo it for the love that will open your heart in solidarity for palestinians, for the sudanese, for your first nations, your indigenous populations, for the kids in slums that are continually brutalized under a lingering colonial gaze.
bell hooks reminds us of the strength inherent to a critical gaze in the “oppositional gaze.” hooks draws from fanon & i speak in their tones to harriet jacobs and anne frank and to all subjugated colored peoples who’ve considered engineering their own permanent solitude with my critical gaze. i open up love with my gaze, and i love you and i love your time here. with our critical gazes, we critically remember the fallen and why they gained their wings. we understand their mundanity, their physical death, but we find solace in tending to their legacy and truth.
during this strike, seek love for Palestinians. Seek love for indigenous peoples. seek love in solidarity.
