By zoe ly sen
First and foremost, I want to dedicate this essay to Hamed and Sheikh and their children, Ashraf, Rafef, and Rose. They inspire me every day to be a better person. I pray that in our lifetime, we will meet and walk hand in hand in a free Palestine.
يعطيك العافية
The UC Santa Cruz encampment became a reality on May 1st. It stood for 31 days. Students occupied the Quarry Plaza for three weeks, then relocated to the base of campus in solidarity with the 2024 UAW strike. Students brought tents, medical supplies, food, and art supplies to this protest of UC’s investment in israeli military technology, particularly companies like Blackrock and Lockheed Martin.1 The list of student demands from Students for Justice in Palestine was detailed, expansive, and received significant attention from supporters as well as censorship from critics amid waves of protests from Pro-Palestinian student organizations across the globe.
All the focus on the demands fuels me to write about the less visible sides of the encampment. The moments are not captured on news broadcasts but are vividly present in the community. Powerful instances of generosity, nourishment, and mutual aid filled my spirit with hope. This movement embodied a sort of love, and like all love, it was profoundly spiritual.
Expanding upon bell hook’s definition of love as a dedication to spiritual growth, I define the act of loving as political practice.2 One that possesses rejuvenating qualities that allow love to withstand state violence and weather feelings of grief and exhaustion.
Intifada انتفاضة
Shaking off, tremoring, shivering. In the Palestinian context, civil uprising.
During the May 31st raid of the encampment, hundreds of protestors linked arms and formed a human chain in a standoff with over 500 cops from nearly 17 different districts. We stared down a sea of riot-geared police as they destroyed our encampment, dismantled tents, disposed of a month’s worth of medical supplies, and defaced the banners and paintings that covered every surface. As their tactics grew more violent, including handcuffing 120 protestors and pressing batons against their chests, the fierceness of our chanting only grew. The violence also produced shrieks of pain and cries for help as people were pulled by their necks and hair. After more than five hours of standing, packed together in the line, I distinctly remember the sweat along my back, the ache of every muscle, and the clamping of my hands as an officer grabbed the woman in front of me. I know it was not in my imagination when I felt my fingers breaking and my arms giving in when a great spirit, an unbelievable strength of an army, all of a sudden helped me pull her by the waist, out of our attacker’s grasp, and back into the line.
The fear I felt in these moments could not compare to the feeling of overwhelming support and solidarity from the hundreds of students all around me. This recollection of experiences during the historical student Intifada comes from a desire to map the living, breathing body of the movement. The love we practiced was a uniting force stronger than brutality or repression. On this night, and in the aftermath of such brutality, the humanity and unconditional love shining through the student movement became abundantly clear to me.
A place where the act of loving was highly concentrated within the encampment was the community ofrenda. Located at the heart of the encampment, this altar was a sacred space where people of any spiritual practices were welcome to pray and offer blessings.
In all about love, hooks often references the core principle of spiritual practice: to know the most powerful force in the universe is to know love. Whether the language used to describe this force is God, Creator, or a divine sanctuary within oneself, love is the uniting force across religions.
When we understand that the essence of the human spirit is pure divine love, we understand that all spiritual endeavors are profoundly intertwined with love. When we passionately pursue a loving philosophy, we understand that spiritual practice does not need to be connected to organized religion to be meaningful. The community altar grew and was adorned with offerings of ceremonial tobacco, seashells, wildflowers, medicinal herbs, paintings honoring the memory of martyrs, and portraits of the Buddha and Quan Âm. I often came to this altar in moments of turmoil, fearful for the safety of my comrades and feeling despondent as I recalled entire Palestinian family lineages scorched from the earth. This altar became a place of sanctuary, and I felt deeply inspired by the diversity of spiritual practitioners who devoted so much loving intention to the altar. This sacred space demonstrated the undeniable uniting force of love, precisely the “liberatory theology” hooks theorizes. Practicing loving intention became part of a rejuvenating routine necessary for painting an activist spirit.
Photographed by zl. sen
I’ve further come to understand that where there is love, there is the possibility of grief. When grief escalates to the point that it feels unmanageable, it manifests as trauma. I felt a great deal was out of my control. Witnessing police brutalize my comrades, as well as the cycles of violence from imperialism that wreaks havoc on the Earth, was overwhelming. Knowing that the family of my family, Hamed, and Sheikh, and their children Ashraf, Rafef, and Rose, are trapped in Gaza, which functions as an open-air prison, and knowing that the Israeli occupation targets refugee camps, I would wake up full of feelings of rage and helplessness. I recognized that accepting what was outside my control was not a weak response but a necessary act of self-preservation that allowed me to dedicate my time and energy toward positive change in the crucial aspects of life within my sphere of influence. I decided to dedicate myself to being a beacon of support for others facing state violence through the organization of trauma circles.
Trauma Circles
I approached these trauma circles with hook’s ethic of “liberatory theology” in mind. First, I committed to being transparent about where I come from, my goals, and my limitations. I was a sophomore in college, I am a painter and a poet, and most of my work focuses on self-recovery and transformation from grief. I am a survivor of abuse and violence. I am the daughter of a Vietnam War refugee. I have also had encounters with police where I felt helpless, once as a child and as an adult, when I was put on the ground and detained. I have done years of therapy, art therapy, as well as Dialectical Behavioral Therapy, and found healing in Buddhist philosophy. While these workshops were informed by case studies and what I have learned from mental health professionals, I am not a licensed counselor, but I am someone who has wisdom and insight on surviving unbearable pain and turning pain into fuel for empathy and activism. I asked participants to reflect on what resonates and leave what did not.
The goal of my practice was also to demystify the process of “healing.” In capitalist media, healing, and happiness are depicted as a destination we can attain through capital and consuming commercial goods. There is a misconception that we must perfect ourselves and “heal” with extensive therapy, solitude, yoga classes, crystals, etc., all the while isolating ourselves and treating healing as a completely individual project. Treating healing as a project where we chisel away at ourselves in the dark before reemerging as “healed” only reaffirms capitalist ideology, where healing itself becomes a product. I have always thought this sort of narrative only fits a narrow range of western audiences organized into nuclear families and who have extensive time and money at their disposal.
In my experiences of living with PTSD, pain comes back like fingernails and hair. We can never undo a painful experience the same way one cannot undo a flesh wound. We can only move forward, with the power of time and medicine (love and forgiveness are also medicine), and learn to live with it. Healing is not a linear process. Some people heal from their trauma, but this is just not realistic for all. When our trauma does not have a clear end, and we are struggling to get up every day and be present, it is far more practical to learn skills that allow us to live with our trauma and self-soothe when we are suffering.
I approached these circles with transparency about my position as a student, which was focused on self-recovery and transformation. I felt honored when an indigenous midwife offered her knowledge as a nurse practitioner and ancestral womb healer at one of our circles. Her gift of knowledge in leading prayer circles allowed me to lead my first prayer circle in a crucial moment of massive grief.
Generational Trauma
The realities of war, genocide, and police brutality no doubt created a rippling effect of generational trauma for members of the student movement descended from those enslaved, colonized, or displaced by war. I can speak for myself that attending teach-in classes that covered the history of the zionist colonial project in Palestine– particularly the 1948 Nakba, the destruction of over 500 Palestinian towns and slaughter of over 15,000 Palestinians, displacing 750,000 Palestinians from their ancestral land and how these histories established israel, as well as Ghassan Kanafani’s interview on the Palestinian liberation struggle were all eye-opening. Learning these histories and witnessing indifferent american news anchors narrate televised massacres and pictures of charred Palestinian bodies was a poignant reminder of my own family’s history being violently separated during the Vietnam War.
In this way, I came to view my lineage as interconnected with the Palestinian peoples’ struggle for freedom. I also felt a great deal of admiration for our Jewish comrades, who took on a great burden to reconcile with the Holocaust’s immeasurable toll on Jewish life and how zionism as a political ideology has weaponized Jewish suffering as justification for israel’s apartheid government and genocidal warfare. Given how entrenched zionism has become in many Jewish cultural hubs, it is never easy taking a stand against your own spiritual teachers, family, friends when they have lost their way. By extent, I grieve for those who face an internal battle wherein the light in them is unable to see the light in Palestinians.
Life in the Encampment
Rather than hoarding resources or wealth, the interdependent nature of the encampment encouraged those who interacted with it to share what they had in energy and resources. Creativity and skill-building were essential. If you surrounded yourself with the encampment cooks, you would cook. If you surrounded yourself with the safety team, you would participate in encampment security. The politics of problem-solving involved a collective responsibility of participants to organize their own affinity groups and actions as a means of staying accountable for the needs of the community. If you strived to be a more honest, kind, and brave version of yourself, and to put forth the best of your ability in contributing to an encampment environment that fostered those values, you were engaging with the very best of the encampment. This fueled moments of incredible creativity like poetry, open mics, and live music. Well, over 100 students united for the Gaza encampment and given that everyone who participated would be clothed, sheltered, and fed, a passionate labor incentive formed.
Hoisting up makeshift tarp canopies on nights before rain. The welcomed sight of trays full of hot food at community dinners. Cop-watch shifts that went until the morning birds sang. I can scarcely remember a time where I had felt more lucid than in these moments of quiet protectiveness of one another. The entire matrix of capitalism in all its forms, namely settler-colonialism, coerces and induces complicity in oppression, whether it be imperialist wars, climate change, or homelessness, to name a few. The very principle of capitalism is antithetical to the principles of love, and so capitalism induces a sort of existential poverty. Echoing the work of Vanessa de Oliveria, the clearest symptom of existential poverty is torpor, the deadening of the nerves, of one’s connectedness towards life and love and light around them.
Naturally, we may also struggle to feel meaningful or genuine in our relations and contributions in a society that focuses on hoarding resources and materialism at the expense of values like generosity, compassion, and honoring the Earth’s natural abundance. In retrospect, I believe the vast majority of people agree that the current capitalism matrix is insufficient, but fewer believe that a more loving way of life, a life without torpor, is possible. Few believe that we can redirect our competitiveness towards one another for resources into labors of love, or an entire social movement of love. A direct goal of the encampment was to confront torpor head on, to shake the people at every branch of the university with the cries from below. The encampment’s organized and ever-expanding community, as painful and frustrating as it was at times, provided moments that stunned me with just how obvious another way of living was.
A handful of people faced with homelessness found shelter at the encampment. One particular person revealed that the encampment was the most housing and food secure they had access to all year. An overwhelming amount of donations from the broader Santa Cruz community, and assistance from non-profits, allowed the encampment to thrive with the necessary resources to not only sustain life, but to give people reasons to live. To name a few: three hot meals a day, free menstrual products, a community library, communal art supplies, daily workshops and lectures at The People’s University, and life-sustaining medical supplies with student EMTs on site. We cooked for each other, shared what we had, and sheltered each other. I do not doubt that given the wide variety of expertise and ingenuity within our ranks, had the encampment itself become a long-term project with the possibility of gardening and compost, a self-sustaining commune would have formed.
ARR House and Spirituality in Abolition
On June 10, eight students who occupied the vacant Chancellor Building and renamed it ARR House in honor of three Palestinian children, Ashraf, Rafef, and Rose were arrested by UCPD. The ARR House students released a manifesto condemning the UC’s exploitation of workers and failure to provide its students its housing. The manifesto claimed the UC’s corruption and imperialist ties were intimately connected to colonial violence and called for land back and sovereignty for all indigenous peoples from Palestine to Turtle Island. This historical demonstration occurred in tandem with another israeli massacre resulting in hundreds of deaths in the Gaza Strip. The following night, students honored these martyrs and our own students afflicted by state violence with a prayer circle.
We started the ceremony by cleansing the community ofrenda with incense. People decorated the space with herbs, seashells, fresh strawberries, and wildflowers. After blessing bundles of sage and medicinal herbs the way the midwife elder had taught me, I led group prayer with Buddhist chanting as my grandmother taught me, Nam Mô Quan Thế Âm Bồ Tát. When the prayer circle concluded, a student approached me, weeping. We embraced, and as the candles and incense illuminated the photographed faces of the martyrs, she whispered in my ear again and again, Nam Mô Quan Thế Âm Bồ Tát. People who had appeared hesitant to participate in this sacred mourning suddenly were on their knees, bowing to the earth, the altar, offering flowers, and weeping. It was a deeply moving sight.
As we envision liberation and learn firsthand how to engage with these struggles within the belly of the imperialist beast that is America, we must also envision liberation for our hearts, minds, and spirits. We must recognize our anger and grief come from a place of care. Anywhere there is care, there is room for loss. A passionate, philosophical pursuit of virtues like love, compassion for all living things, and spiritual wellness is a lifelong commitment to challenge. Embracing our post-traumatic stress for what it is, a human response to dehumanization, allows us to exercise grace and self-compassion and move forward with principles of love. Just as the key to organized resistance is discipline, resistance to the highest form of internal oppression that is believing we are broken, only comes when we are disciplined in self-care.
Hooks describes daily service to others as an “affirmative spiritual practice” that grounds us in purpose and feeling we are leading a life worth living (hooks 75). Serving other students with a life affirming spiritual practice rejuvenated my wellbeing in own my hours of grief and anguish. In my commitment to abolitionist work, I have learned that without love I am nothing. It becomes absolutely necessary for me to adhere to living life where I am committed to giving and receiving love as a political practice. When I am able to muster compassion for myself or others, this belief in a more loving world order being possible keeps me grounded, principled, and disciplined.
When fighting for any abolitionist cause within a heteropatriarchal, racist, capitalist, colonial, militarized police state, it is inevitable that there are days where our hearts will feel worn, beaten, and injured, sometimes so painfully that we cannot even imagine a future where there is love and freedom. When our political organizing is fundamentally linked with the process of spiritual growth and collective liberation, theory and practice become reciprocal processes that enable the other. Much like a fruit tree given nourishing fertilizer, political organizing creates energy for positive change, capable of withstanding violence and state repression.
AUTHOR BIO
zoe ly sen is a Vietnamese American poet, storyteller, and writer in their third year at UC Santa Cruz. They want Palestine to be free in their lifetime.