Sanan Moradi (University of Oregon)
It was May 20, 2024, on the University of Oregon’s campus. I was standing in the middle of the campus, under a relatively hot mid-day sun, surrounded by the bustling mid-day foot traffic. In my hands, was a stack of fliers with information about the rally that students at the Palestine Solidarity Encampment (PSE) had organized for that afternoon at 3:30pm.
The immediate goal of the rally was to show solidarity for the five pro-Palestine student protestors in the PSE who had chained their bodies together for over 100 hours at the main entrance of Johnson Hall, the university’s administration building. In taking such a drastic action, the students sought to make it even more difficult for the university administration to ignore the protest and the ongoing Israeli genocide against the Palestinian people. In another action to make the administration finally see the protests and acknowledge the genocide, the PSE had strategically relocated the encampment to the lawn immediately below and across from Johnson Hall, which the students had renamed Alareer Hall (Figure 1), to remember Refaat Alareer, the late Palestinian poet, author, professor, and scholar assassinated by the Israeli bombardment in Gaza.
More broadly, the rally planned for 3:30pm sought to shore up student support for the solidarity movement and increase awareness about the ongoing genocide in Palestine, something that the students began as early as October 2023 through sit-ins, gatherings and protests, and more intensely, by setting up the encampment on Monday, April 29, 2024. Through the encampment, rallies and protests, the PSE students sought to increase the pressure on the administration to meet their two major demands, namely, disclosure and divestment from companies and institutions involved in the genocide and issuing a clear statement condemning the genocide. Unsurprisingly, the (neoliberal) university administration opposed such demands.
To minimize the administration’s time to counteract, the PSE organizers had strategically decided to announce major actions no more than 24 hours prior to the event. So that morning and early afternoon on May 20, the PSE students embarked on an intensive information campaign, making sure as many members of the campus knew about the 3:30pm rally. This turned out to be a quite successful strategy and the rally attracted hundreds of participants. Around 10:30am, I participated in the meeting that was coordinating the rally. At the end of the meeting, around five or six students headed out to different parts of the campus to hand out fliers about the rally. Seeing an extra stack of fliers on the organizing desk, I volunteered to hand them out.
Since the start of the PSE, I had made it my de facto office, dividing my time there between participation in the encampment (activities, discussions, meetings, teach-ins) and working on my research and teaching projects. However, given that the PSE was primarily a student-led movement, as a faculty member, I was mostly listening (and learning) while the students took the initiative. I joined the PSE out of a personal, ethical, and intellectual conviction that I could not remain indifferent while a genocide was occurring in a region that I study, teach, and care deeply about. Further, my positionality as a Kurdish, minoritized, displaced, and marginalized scholar made the Palestinian struggle very personal. I have come to this realization, over the years, through my studies of such Palestinian intellectuals as Edward Said, but also through my conversations with students and scholars rooted in Palestine. Such intellectual exchanges made it clear that the liberation of Palestine (and Kurdistan) required mobilizing the largest possible coalition against the usual culprits that viciously reinforce one another: Orientalism, racism, patriarchy, colonialism, imperialism, Zionism, militarism, and neoliberal capitalism, to name just a few.
The stack of fliers in hand, around 11:30am, I started making my way toward the Erb Memorial Union (EMU), a student center at the heart of the campus. The EMU and its surroundings are usually the busiest part of the campus, especially around noon, as students leave or go to classes or dining places. I situated myself strategically, aiming to reach the largest possible number of students. I was in the area for around an hour, I think. In that short time, I had numerous interactions with those passing by, mostly students. Each of those interactions left an affective mark with direct implications for our (in)ability to bridge between the shattered spaces of Palestine and the (deceptively) peaceful spaces of the campus.
Weeks of student protest and education at the PSE was a cause for hope and inspiration but it had also revealed discouraging aspects of advocating for “strangers’” lives, namely, overcoming apathy and unsettling the spurious normality of everyday life on campus. The student body was largely supportive of the encampment and many participated. But I also learned—including from some of the students in my cultural geography class—that there was a general lack of “adequate and unbiased” (as one student put it) information and discussion of the situation in Palestine. To most students, the “mainstream media” (Agrawal et al. 2019) were to blame for this power/knowledge dilemma. However, students were also disappointed that most of their professors had simply decided not to talk about Gaza/Palestine at all—even in relevant courses. I frequently heard students saying, “I wish more of our professors were speaking out”. Given the number of faculty who have lost jobs or faced reprisal over protesting the war and genocide in Palestine (Lennard 2024), it was understandable—though perhaps not entirely justifiable—why so many were silent.
On that sunny day, in front of the EMU, all those thoughts were swirling in my head, thinking deeply and existentially: What did it mean for me to be there and take action, while so many had chosen a (un)comfortable silence? Will it further marginalize me in the—already polarized—academia? Can I stay quiet though as a political/cultural geographer of/from the “Middle East”? How would I be able to “look back” and remember my actions? Would Gazans/Palestinians ever forgive me if I stayed silent? How can I contribute to the forces resisting the war and genocide? These thoughts were buzzing in my head, as I was pacing my steps, trying to hand out the fliers and engage with students in the area.
Infused with the increasing heat, such thoughts and emotions created a strange, perhaps surreal atmosphere of feelings. My body was in the conflicting grasp of multiple affective powers. My deepest feelings were grief, inflicted by the horrors experienced in Gaza: gutted bodies and landscapes, humans without limbs, without shelter, food, medicine, or hospitals; parents grieving, if they could; children without parents, teachers, or schools. I was carrying trauma, the trauma of mutilated bodies and territories, scared by bombs, barbed wires, colonial borders, our colonial present; the past was present, hovering like a haunting specter (Gregory 2004). My trauma was “collective, complex and chronic” (Pain 2021) reminiscent of those in: Kobanî, Shingal (Sinjar), Helebce (Halabja), Sinne (Sanandaj), Dersîm (Bingul). The traumas of the Palestinians were enmeshed in my soul with memories of Kurdish trauma—they were two sides of the same coin, being traded, feasted upon by global capitalism and military-industrial warmongers, deathmongers, desk-killers, monsters.
In that hot mid-day spring though, I was occasionally brought back to life, to a more hospitable present by the support from students. Like a cool breath of fresh air, the relaxed muscles in their faces, the smile in their eyes, the sense of comradery, radiating from meters away, as they were approaching and saying: “Thank you; I will definitely be at the rally! I’ll tell my friends too!”
Those affective moments though made me self-conscious of the fact that perhaps I should smile more. Despite the genocide and trauma, I had to emanate encouraging affects, or “good vibes”, known colloquially. These smiles were the affective pillars of my emotional labor, allowing me to stay straight on my feet, an act of emotional resistance so crucial to the Palestinian liberation (Murrey 2016; Nablusi 2023). My resistance was rooted in grief, anger, and anguish, but also in hope and conviction, in the fact that the coalition of bodies on the street can, and should, form a force for supporting life—of humanity’s most vulnerable and voiceless (Butler 2011).
Equally vital to my emotional resistance, seemingly minuscule though, were the movements of my hand, its shape, its angle to my body and to other bodies, my embodied comportment, as I was handing out the fliers. A part of it was respecting interpersonal spaces. More crucially though it pertained to the ongoing genocide in Gaza. The anguish and trauma emanating from the genocide was telling me to be more forthright, more assertive. In those moments, I wanted to cry out, from the bottom of my throat, my heart: “There is a genocide going on at this very moment in Palestine! We cannot pretend as if nothing is happening!” I had already done a less dramatic version of such an outcry—when during the Women-Life-Freedom uprisings in 2022, I picked up a bullhorn and restlessly kept mentioning the Iranian state’s atrocities, repeating the names of the martyrs, mostly college and high school students—Say her/their name: Jina Amini, Nika Shakarami, Komar Daroftadeh…
Despite the desperate urge to shout, I contained my emotions, making my movements subtle, almost stealthy, as if I was awakening a loved one, or picking a flower. I feared, coming off too forceful could discourage those I tried to convince to show up to the solidarity rally, to care. But once their feet came to a comfortable stop, my words were clear, contextualizing the dispossession, colonization, and genocide of the Palestinian people. It felt like being in a real “class of the Middle East”; a class in the open-air, public, no tuition, no violence, no neoliberal nonsense; its only tuition was care, commitment, compassion, radical love (Freire 2000; hooks 2001). My mantra was that our lives on this campus, in this country, were closely tied to the thousands of lives already lost in Palestine, and many more who were severely maimed or in danger. The genocide perpetrated by imperialist militarism “abroad” was inseparable from the carnage caused by neoliberal capitalism at “home” (most grotesquely manifested in opioid and COVID catastrophes). We have a responsibility to resist apathy, to care and act. Most of my interlocutors were convinced, although at the risk of feeling quite uncomfortable. I tried to be a bridge, a space in between, an embodiment of the interconnection of lives and destinies beyond the borders of the matrix of thoughts and emotions.
Nonetheless, the “frozen scene” in The Matrix kept haunting me… As one of the most impactful works of “popular” culture, The Matrix (directed by Lana Wachowski and Lilly Wachowski, 1999) has been frequently cited, acclaimed, and critiqued for its incorporation of social, political, and spatial themes in contemporary cinema (Leary 2004). Central to the film is its artful exploration of the production of docile bodies and the (im)possibility of emancipation (Iliev 2023). In an iconic scene, Morpheus, the guru guiding Neo (the protagonist) through emancipation, refers to the pedestrians on a busy sidewalk, saying “Most of these people are not ready to be unplugged [from the system]. And many of them are so inert, so hopelessly dependent on the system that they will fight to protect it”. Disrupting the veneer of time-space congruence, this frozen moment seeks to rupture the artificial normalcy of everyday life in the late modern, capitalist society. In doing so, it critiques the society’s rendering of humans as docile, alienated, and uninterested in resistance and emancipation (Bartlett and Byers 2003).
The “frozen scene” in The Matrix kept haunting me… In that hot mid-day on May 20, in those moments when the subtle pleas of my hands, inquiring eyes, and affective labor, were facing rigid expressions of apathy and denial. The embodied intersubjective affective relations were signaling as if I was talking to frozen bodies, at a stalled time-space intersection. The embodied signals were telling me that what I was facing was not mere genuine lack of information. In those disheartening moments, what I was facing were the embodied expressions of late modern, capitalist alienation, apathy, induced by the Matrix. What I was facing, to echo W.E.B. Du Bois’ seminal statement about racism, was “age-long complexes sunk to the unconscious habits and irrational urges” (Du Bois 2007: 148) of those who tried to hold on to the belief that they could not, and should not, do anything about Palestinian lives. This active avoidance was rooted in the longer histories of colonialism and Orientalism, depicting the “east” as a queer space, strange, inferior, and unworthy of sympathy, lives as not exactly lives, the living dead, “human animals” (Abu-Manneh and Finn 2023; Said 1994). In those moments, the words of Edward Said were reverberating in my mind, saying how the mass killings of nameless Arab and Muslim bodies were a major staple of Hollywood cinema, and the dominant Orientalist discourse, in general (Said 2012). Furthermore, it was this Orientalist discourse feeding the sinical weaponizations of “anti-Semitism” to disparage the anti-war protesters and mask the gruesome genocide of civilians as “legitimate” self-defense (Traverso 2024).
The unwilling, awkward looks, turned-away bodies, guilty facial expressions, and diverging feet were saying, “Don’t bring this information to me. I don’t/can’t care. I have been trying to block it out. I don’t know what is actually going on, and I don’t want to learn about it.” These expressions of avoidance to learn, of selective (un)seeing, were wearing down on my soul, augmenting my emotional labor. My feet were heavy. But I kept moving. The spaces between us were contested, between the insistent power to ignore and the resistant pleas to connect. It seemed as if the spaces between us were frozen, sealed, marked, like a scar, by thousands of miles of border walls, barbed wires, separating us. I was in Gaza, in Palestine, in Kurdistan, in Oregon, all at once. I was torn. I was multitudes.
Without being intrusive or pushy, I was trying to dismantle the walls, to convince that “they” were “us” and we should care and believe that we could, and should, do something about the ongoing genocide. In doing so, I was simultaneously mounting an embodied emotional resistance against the (implicit) denial of my political existence, my exclusion, as a “foreigner” (Butler 2011). I was making a case for my political being, for the negation of borders. In those moments, the most I could accomplish though was often an unwilling response: “No, thank you.” More work needed to be done.
It was in those intersubjective affective moments that I was literally contesting the ground, a ruptured space enacted by the forces of state, capital, and centuries of colonial power/knowledge complex. I felt as if I was reliving The Matrix. The space around me was frozen, the time had stopped and my embodied movements, my pleas, were not able to tear down the border walls separating us. But in those frozen moments, under that hot early afternoon sun, I was absorbing an intense learning experience. It was excruciatingly painful that my decolonial messages were being ignored. But I was taking solace in the fact that learning “in the field” and producing knowledge is always marked by power/resistance. I was scrambling at the precarious edges of power/knowledge, on the margins of the neoliberal consumerist campus that had as its priority the commodification of its students, professors, and their knowledges, experiences, values, aspirations, and futures—before spitting them out into the “job market”. As in The Matrix, we had been reduced to mere sources of energy, fueling the machines in control. Resistance was continuing, nonetheless.
The passing of time felt very strange. The time seemed simultaneously to have been at times expanded and condensed, inducing an almost surreal experience. Despite the affective discomfort, very quickly I saw that only one flier was left in my hands. A student was walking toward me with a smile of solidarity. I held out the last remaining flier. But as they got closer, they pulled out a flier out of their pocket, saying, “Thanks, I’ve already got one—but thanks for doing this!” Immediately a student behind me said, “May I have one, please?” “Sure, that’s actually the last one”, I said. “Please tell your classmates too!”
At that moment, I thought I had just learned so much as a scholar, a student, a teacher, and a human of the geography of the “Middle East”. Still in the grasp of multiple thoughts/emotions, I was slowly making my way back to the PSE encampment ground. I noticed, I was hungry and thirsty—but even more so, I was shattered but hopeful. I was part of the resistance.
References
Abu-Manneh B and Finn D (2023) We must mobilize against the carnage being inflicted on the Palestinian people: An interview with Bashir Abu-Manneh by Daniel Finn. Jacobin 18 October https://jacobin.com/2023/10/gaza-war-israel-apartheid-international-solidarity-movement (last accessed 11 July 2024)
Agrawal P, Yusuf Y, Pasha O, Ali S H, Ziad H and Hyder A A (2019) Interpersonal stranger violence and American Muslims: An exploratory study of lived experiences and coping strategies. Global Bioethics 30(1):28-42
Bartlett L and Byers T B (2003) Back to the future: The humanist “Matrix”. Cultural Critique 53:28-46
Butler J (2011) Bodies in alliance and the politics of the street. #Occupy Los Angeles Reader 1/3 https://suebellyank.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/ola-reader-full.pdf (last accessed 9 July 2024)
Du Bois W E B (2007 [1940]) Dusk of Dawn: An Essay Toward an Autobiography of a Race Concept (ed H L Gates). Oxford: Oxford University Press
Gregory D (2004) The Colonial Present: Afghanistan, Palestine, Iraq. Malden: Blackwell
Freire P (2000) Pedagogy of the Oppressed—Thirtieth Anniversary Edition (trans M Bergman Ramos). New York: Continuum
hooks b (2001) Salvation: Black People and Love. New York: Harper Perennial
Iliev J (2023) Cultivating docile bodies in The Matrix trilogy. International Journal of Humanities and Social Sciences 17(10):679-686
Leary C (2004) What is the Matrix? Cinema, totality, and topophilia. Senses of Cinema 32 https://www.sensesofcinema.com/2004/beyond-the-grave-of-genre/matrix/ (last accessed 3 July 2024)
Lennard N (2024) University professors are losing their jobs over “New McCarthyism” on Gaza. The Intercept 16 May https://theintercept.com/2024/05/16/university-college-professors-israel-palestine-firing/ (last accessed 1 July 2024)
Murrey A (2016) Slow dissent and the emotional geographies of resistance. Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography 37(2):224-248
Nablusi J (2023) A politics of conviction: The refusal of colonial carcerality in Palestinian graffiti. Human Geography 16(3):370-376
Pain R (2021) Geotrauma: Violence, place, and repossession. Progress in Human Geography 45(5):972-989
Said E W (1994 [1978]) Orientalism. New York: Vintage Books
Said E (2012 [1998]) Edward Said on Orientalism (directed by Sut Jhally). Palestine Diary 28 October https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fVC8EYd_Z_g (last accessed 11 July 2024)
Traverso E (2024) The Gaza massacre is undermining the culture of democracy. Jacobin 6 April https://jacobin.com/2024/04/gaza-genocide-holocaust-memory-democracy (last accessed 4 July 2024)