from November 18th to the 22nd, i am guest posting on the Center for Arts, Design, and Social Research’s IG (Centerartsdesign), and wanted to share some of the thoughts i had… i’ve been thinking about the people who have influenced and contributed to my own politic, and wanted to share this small snapshot:
“writing can undo power.” - dr. stella nyanzi
the first time i left the US on my own, i was 19 years old, as part of a group volunteer trip to Monterrey, Nuevo Leon, Mexico. we took a 9 hour turi-mex bus ride to the city, where we stayed a week in a halfway house. our time was committed to supporting various local organizations in Monterrey. i painted a schoolhouse, deep cleaned a woman’s house in the colonias, and worked in a food bank. one of the members of my cohort was Palestinian, and it would be the first time i began to think about the concept of solidarity. before i met Zafar (who later became a human rights lawyer incidentally), i knew little about Palestine or the Israeli occupation. growing up in a rural community where MTV was censored by our local cable distributor, i very much only saw Western media, which of course focused on Hamas… Zafar had grown up in Houston, and on the long ride to Monterrey, he talked about the struggles of Palestinian people. that trip pushed my knowledge of the universe into a different direction. a year later, 9/11 would happen, and i witnessed how much fear my Palestinian and Lebanese friends would endure.
i have spent the past 20 years learning and reading and finding ways to support liberation and labor struggles across the continents, and it has only strengthened my belief that an anti-imperialist (and anti-colonial and anti-capitalist) commitment is imperative in the work we do.
in 2020, just after the whispers of a global pandemic began, i came across a news story about poet Stella Nyanzi and her book. i ordered the book and was immediately transformed by her fiery words, her language, her poems. it was a great pleasure and honor to have the opportunity to meet and listen to Dr. Nyanzi during the Un-Writing Nature II workshops from the CAD+SR. she spoke about law, about power, Queerness, solidarity, poetry, and naming. all of which i have spent time digesting since the days we spent together.
a few days ago, petals (petero) kalulé published an incredible article called Being Right-With: On Human Rights Law as Unfreedom in the Feminist Legal Studies Journal. The article “develops the notion of being right-with, a conceptual lens that underscores what happens when individuals turn to human rights law and other legal processes and proceedings to address injustices by the state.” one of the cases they look at is Dr. Nyanzi’s, through a critical approach that i would venture to say includes abolition. Part of Dr. Nyanzi’s political protest (aside from poems) is “radical rudeness.” Kalulé posits that “I want to situate radical rudeness differently, i.e. more capaciously. That is to say, I want to think of radical rudeness as a holler, scream, and sometimes quiet non-linguistic excess of Black speech that is irreducible to law.” Stella spoke of this act of protest in detail during our workshop together, and this is one of the most important thoughts that listening to Stella’s workshop brought to me. we live in a police state, but it does not mean we have to think adjacent to the law or police, or as Rancière uses “the concepts ‘police’, ‘policing’, and ‘police order’ to name any order of hierarchy.”
i only wanted to share what this experience sparked in my mind, and sharing a bit about how my journey to this started. abolition is a way forward out of this police present, towards a future not rooted in subjugation, but in care and relations created and cultivated outside of the state, law, and hierarchies. in a previous post, i mentioned a quote from Saidiya Hartman that i will paraphrase: that we write singularly seems more of a fiction. this is true for me. each word, cited or uncited, comes from a person i carry with me. so much of my own growth and knowledge is because of Black and Indigenous thought, writing, and scholarship. i hold the texts and actions of anarchists, socialists, organizers, workers, and abolitionists with me. i did not arrive here alone. it is always with a collective in mind.