Excerpts from a Presentation on Writing about Palestine

I want to begin my talk by reading an excerpt of a text written by Camilo Torres Restrepo, a sociologist and priest who died as a guerrilla fighter. As some of you may know, Camilo and Orlando Fals Borda also founded the department of sociology. In 1961, Camilo presented a paper in one of the first sociology conferences in Latin America. He wrote the following:

Sociology has not been an exception within the mosaic of our cultural [and intellectual] colonialism, which persists across political and economic forms of colonialism.

This statement reveals that before postcolonial and decolonial studies emerged as a more solidified field in the Global North key figured in Latin America were already challenging the craft of social science and its detached and neutral forms of writing under the guise of objectivity. From the very beginning of the creation of social science departments in the region, radical critiques against material and symbolic forms of colonialism already existed. These critiques arose in a context in which decolonization and liberation movements took hold of the aspirations of subjugated peoples throughout the world (including the US with students fighting for third world studies programs which became ethnic studies)—this context served as the condition of possibility for radical discourses to emerge within and beyond academia.

Radical thought is therefore not a mode of thinking that is property of academia. Rather, every community, region, or continent that has the shared history of modern/colonial domination has expressed radical interpretations of the world in literature, poetry, music, and oral history, not to mention the ways these interpretations shaped struggles for liberation.

For example, Garcia Marquez’s 100 Years of Solitude theorizes the heterogeneous social existence of Latin America and the Caribbean and paints a new image of the social world of the region—where histories of colonialism and imperialism, as well as sociocultural universes coexist with one another and more often than not enter into contradictions and conflicts.

Literature, understood in its widest sense, offers theoretical insights often ignored by disciplinary knowledge. Perhaps there’s a reason why Mariátegui dedicated over 40 percent of his book to examining the heterogeneous character of literature, particularly the intimate links it has with the heterogeneous social existence of colonial contexts. Anibal Quijano builds upon Mariátegui’s work to advance the notion of historical-structural heterogeneity, which helped shift the understanding of the Social toward a heterogeneously structured totality.

Theorizing must therefore be situated for it to interrogate social reality from vantage points often excluded from the canon—that is, from the ideological hegemony of disciplinary discourses. It must be capable of learning from excluded texts and contexts to be able to reconceptualize the notion of social totality beyond the narrow understanding of “society”. Our writing must draw on a wide range of geographies to amplify other interpretations of the world. It must uncover what modernity has excluded, which implies theorizing the world from places of understanding that to this day are systematically silenced. By thinking from excluded geographies not only are new images, concepts, and interpretations of the world made more visible but, more importantly, the silenced histories and material struggles for liberation.

Tracing the struggles of the past uncovers the systematic silences that distort our understanding of the present and limit our future political horizon—for without an understanding of the past, how is the present unsettled to create the conditions of possibility for an alternative future to emerge? As Robin DG Kelley states in the forward to Cedric Robinson’s book, we need to recover a “radical understanding of the past in order to chart the way forward.” The past helps us radically interrogate social reality to collectively act and realize the unthinkable. As James Baldwin expressed, “People are trapped in history, and history is trapped in them.”

Thinking from silenced histories intends to recover the alternative future horizons past struggles fought for under material conditions not of their own choosing. Keeping utopia alive is not naïve, nor is it ahistorical or lacking sociological implications. It’s the utopic horizon we keep alive that makes it possible to articulate a politics that may work toward reaching said horizon—albeit without any guarantees. Utopias are intense collective desires and projections of a world we would like to live in.

As Robinson observed, “The shared past is precious, not for itself, but because it is the basis of consciousness, of knowing, of being. It cannot be traded in exchange for expedient alliances or traduced by convenient abstractions or dogma. It contains philosophy, theories of history, and social prescriptions native to it. It is a construct possessing its own terms, exacting its own truths.”

Writing in Times of Genocide

It is worth asking: What purpose does our writing serve in the hour of genocide, when bombs continue to drop, when mangled bodies are strewn in the streets, where paramedics constantly carry real beheaded babies for the world to see? When our writing actively unsettles colonial projects, we must be ready to make sacrifices by writing unequivocally about Palestinian liberation and by unapologetically critiquing Zionism, which, as some of us personally have experienced, can easily jeopardize our careers.

No matter the consequences, we must write as if life depended on it because that’s exactly what’s at stake. As Salamanca et al. (2024) inquire:

How does one write in the midst of an ongoing genocide? When the contours of Palestine are being redrawn in blood, and when unconscionable images of starving, injured, and dead children, women, and men have become our daily breakfast? What’s our task as scholar-activists, as human beings, when we become witnesses and thus unwilling accomplices to the ravaging of an ancient people and geography that has stood tall for generations as a cradle of civilisation? (para. 1)

In Digging Tunnels with Pens, Yafi asks, “What do we do, then, when the very structures we seek to change enforce the limits on our activism, writing, and thoughts?” (para. 3). By asking this question, Yafi suggests that one should work toward creating a clandestine publishing network to resist intellectual colonialism and to create “a pathway to knowledge production that bypasses the gatekeepers of Western academia and operates beyond its restrictive boundaries”. Only by breaking free from these institutional constraints can we begin to speak truth to power in more radical forms. This does not mean that we need to abandon our positions within academia, but that we need “to master the art of navigating both worlds – maintaining our presence within institutional frameworks while never losing sight of the collective struggle” (para. 14)…

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I want to end my talk with an excerpt from Sherene Seikaly article Palestine is a Paradigm. This excerpt exemplies what it is to use a craft that affectively moves the reader away from despair and toward hope and action.

To parent in genocide is to exist in fragments of time between life and death. To parent in genocide is to witness bodies in fragments. It has become a “strange scene” to mourn over a shroud containing “a whole body with two hands, ten fingers, two feet, and a head.”

To be a good parent is to “bury your children whole.” To be a good parent is to find the head matching your child’s body after an air strike. It is to hope that your child’s body parts will not be “mixed with the garbage” or “cut up in pieces,” marked with tank treads and bulldozer tracks.

To parent in genocide is to exist in fragments between speech and silence. It is to find words to prepare children for forced absences, sudden deaths, unexpected arrests, and critical injuries. It is to shelter from a “place of grief.” It is the “struggle to speak” with rage filling the throat. It is to “swallow … [the] tongue” in times of speechless horror. It is to witness famine robbing speech. It is Khalil watching his son, Sa‘id, his eyes hollowed, his skin ashen, his stomach empty, unable to cry from hunger. It is Nabila, witnessing how horror forced her nonverbal son, Muhammed, to speak for the first time as Israeli soldiers released the dogs that would maul and kill him. It is Mona, looking at her son, Muazzaz, as he emerged from nine months of administrative detention, less than half his previous body weight, unable to walk unaided, his right arm jerking, his speech erratic, unable to recognize his father. In the face of all this death, Palestinians offer lessons on life--on how to cherish life amid relentless horror. Fathers like Ahmad Imteiz navigated bullets and survived hunger on and through love alone. On the day of the Flour Massacre, when throngs of hungry people at the Nabulsi roundabout in Gaza City were subjected to live Israeli ammunition, Imteiz crawled for a kilometer as bullets rained down around him. He clung tightly to four cans of fava beans and a chicken. Once he was far from the Israeli attack that would take 115 lives that hour, he stood up to run. A journalist would later ask him if it was worth it. “Yes,” he answered, “to save my hungry children, yes.”

Underneath the rubble and the smoking guns of genocide, lie the deepest threat to these regimes, our capacity to tell our stories.

We know, however, that stories or knowledge alone are insufficient if they do not inform militant action against a genocidal settler colonial state.