By A.B.
The day that I ended up at my first rally for Palestine was also the day that I forgot, for a moment, how to walk. That October morning, I took a math midterm exam for an hour and fifteen minutes. I was crying uncontrollably but doing so under my blue face mask so as not to alert my classmates. When my professor called for the final test books to be collected, I realized I couldn’t bring my legs to carry me up the two steps of the auditorium to hand my work to my TA. I couldn’t seem to move at all. It turns out that days of grief had caught up to me.
After what felt like an eternity, I finally figured out how to move my legs, muscle by muscle, make my way to my TA, and hand in my test.
Three days before the rally, I was studying for that same midterm. It was then that I received a call informing me that one of my best friends had died in an accident a thousand miles away. Her funeral would take place after her family could bring her body back home. In the meantime, I would need to peel myself from the sidewalk where I’d been crying for 20 minutes, summon up the energy to call a list of people to notify them of her death before they saw it on the news and finish studying for the exam worth 20% of my grade. As it turns out, her death did not count as an excusable absence under the university bereavement policy. When a friend was offered a less than one-day extension for a similar exam, I figured it wasn’t worth trying.
From there, the rest of the day was a blur. Somehow, by the end of it, I found myself at a weekly vigil for Palestine at another university’s campus. I had aged out of my former political home and wasn’t organized on campus. Still, when I heard of the weekly rally hosted by Jewish anti-war activists for Palestine for more than four decades, I knew I needed to be with people who were also grieving. As I listened to strained voices recount the violence inflicted on their parents, cousins, and grandparents, I felt their grief and anger fill the space around us. Speaker after speaker led the group of protestors in chants, speeches, and a practice of communal grief as they wove intertwined stories of struggle in Gaza with others from around the globe. Before I knew it, an hour had passed. A friend walked me home. She understandably assumed I couldn’t physically make it back on my own, and she was probably right.
I spent the next few weeks going to every event and protest I could find on campus and throughout Minneapolis. There, I met dozens and dozens of people. Through them, I also “met” all of the people they were grieving. A few told me about how they coped after their parents died. Others told me stories about coming to the US as refugees from other US-fueled conflicts. Even more talked about their friends and cousins who were taken from them too soon. Most of us didn’t usually speak about any of this. Somehow, in these late evening meetings and flyering sessions, our grief found a home.
The small vigils of the fall quickly transformed into the mass solidarity encampments of the spring. Across the country and world, thousands joined solidarity encampments in response to immense communal grief. At the People’s University, we read the names of martyrs and sat in our grief. We built community libraries filled with the works of imprisoned and martyred Palestinian writers – ours was named after Refaat Alareer, professor of English literature and author of the now-famous poem “If I Must Die”. We hoped that, if they must die, they would not be forgotten. In leaky tents and pouring rain, I talked to community members who said that they had not felt safe going to other protests in the area due to their immigration status or workplace threats, but they felt safe here. In the face of so much violence and grief, they told me that here, they felt less alone.
Despite a year of genocide, we know our universities – and the world at large – hold no space for grief. Though our institutions finance, legitimize, and research the technological innovations for genocide, there is no line in their bereavement policies for when your tuition dollars finance the bombs raining down on your people. Instead, the People’s University became a site for the collective grief our institutions cannot hold. We cried in waterlogged tents, but we also sang, hoped, and dreamed. In this new community, we built practices of radical love, care, and mourning in a society that systematically devalues and delegitimizes our grief.
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In our times of greatest tragedy, we have a choice to make: either recede into isolation or forge radical communities with each other. Months after police raids and mass arrests closed the doors of the People’s University, we know that this brief moment of solidarity has not radically changed our institutions. Our grief alone was not enough. On the contrary, administrators used this time to shore up ties with university and municipal police, enact draconian anti-protest policies, and attempt to end academic freedom as we know it. At the University of Minnesota this fall, students are now barred from using flyers or banners larger than an 8.5”x11” piece of paper, drawing crowds larger than 100 people, distributing printed materials within 25 feet of a building, using more than one handheld, battery-operated amplification device, or chalking outside of registered student group events. When asked by students in a private meeting what would happen if 102 people showed up, recently instated President Rebecca Cunningham claimed that the protest would have to be physically split into groups of 51 at different locations or, according to her generous suggestion, students could choose to stay as an act of civil disobedience (which could lead to interim suspension or “enforcement by public safety”).
To do this, our presidents, provosts, and boards have violated their own rules and regulations with impunity to form secret committees and pass new university policies through “emergency” meetings. My university rerouted our student divestment coalition through contact after contact to discuss the promised funding for a group of incoming Palestinian students and an academic exchange with a Palestinian university. At the same time, they withdrew renowned Israeli-American genocide scholar Raz Segal’s invitation to head the Center for Genocide and Holocaust Studies for naming what Israel is committing in simple terms: genocide. Our universities tell the public they are listening to students while actively reversing decades of work that came before us. We know that administrators across the country used the summer to collude, plan, and conduct the greatest targeted threat to free speech and academic freedom in recent years. This fall, it is our turn to make a choice.
The threats against student protestors, staff, faculty, unions, academic departments, and community members should be a sign: we cannot win if we are fighting alone. I fear that academics too often see movements and their involvement in them as a place to “prove” their politics, choosing to opt out of participating if the language on posters or decisions of the coalitions of their peers have ideas that differ from their own. If there is a lesson to be learned from the broad-based undergraduate coalitions that organized mass movements in a matter of days, it is that we cannot win without compromise. Organizing cannot be done without community, and community cannot be won without compromise. Solidarity encampments would not have been possible without the unique access, knowledge, and experience of faculty, staff, graduate students, community members, and undergraduate students working together. Community education requires archivists, writers, and public speakers; storing supplies requires graduate students and faculty with building access; and creating the type of mass movements that push our universities to even “listen” to our demands requires all of us to show up. Even when it feels like we are losing ground, we cannot risk losing each other.
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In the final days of the encampment, we hosted an art drive that stayed with me. Tables were set up a few feet from the free food, masks, and water, and all proceeds from the drive would go to a local encampment of unhoused neighbors. In the sea of donated prints, paintings, and drawings, a small black-and-white zine caught my eye. Keep going. Keep going. Keep going. The words printed on the front of the booklet pulled me ever closer. I picked it up, scanned the QR code to donate, and placed the zine in my front coat pocket. When I got a chance to read through the booklet of quotes later, one page of large, handwritten text stood out to me: “May my heart never recover so that I will revolt forever” (originally from @ykreborn). In the last year, we have all learned too much about grief. We have seen too many photos of headless children and heard too many stories of entire families martyred in moments. We know our grief to be a tool, and we also know it to be a weapon used against us.
Whether through or despite our grief, we must keep going. Even when it feels like we are fighting a losing battle, we cannot give up. May we see a day with no more martyrs and a free Palestine in our lifetime. Until then, I hope we make our grief useful and all revolt together.
AUTHOR BIO
A.B. is a student activist at the University of Minnesota.