russian roulette: student intifada
Revolutionary frenzy comes in seasons, and it was the spring of Gaza solidarity encampments, like pollen.
We’re in another episode of hell limned by street movement. ICE is kidnapping and imprisoning families. We’re veering into WW3. Gaza is still burning.
Now I got my diploma and can share more openly about April 2024, when ~150 of our community members were arrested at the UT Austin protests. My diary entries are suitably delusional.
April 26th, 2024
This nightmare is vast and malleable.
If you touch the state apparatus, it disintegrates like an online relationship w an AI Instagram model you’ll never touch. Hyperreal.
I f w historical materialism and it means writing your own holy book. No love for the GodofMoneyandWar.
I am a scientist. No dog is too old. What you imagine, you could do— your neurons are real.
WHAT HAPPENS WHEN SEEDS RISE FROM THE UNDERGROUND?!
Revolution = oceanic love = a bleeding Sun engulfing the Sun of War = giving the corporate pizza to strangers-turned-comrades = spontaneous dabke circles that coincide w de-arrest formations = linking arms to protect brothers and sisters praying when I’m on my period = our love.
I came here with so much love it evaporates into storm.
2 BILLION SEEDS SPROUT FROM THE GROUND AT THE SAME TIME.
WHAT U GONNA DO? GET A BULLDOZER?! You know we’re too wispy & windswept for that. GET ON YOUR KNEES. You’ll have to root us out one-by-one, until you’re prickly w blood and the bees sting you. The hummingbirds mock your whines, and we spring from the damp earth like hydrangeas, making سَجْدَة.
We didn’t come from nothing. We’re not brutes. There are billions of years of geologic time beneath us, bones of our ancestors, buried ruins. And you make new ruins of Gaza. You scrape your dirty metal paws into earth’s core for petroleum. (Even the Manhattan skyscrapers began to quake in their red cowboy boots.) You make children in Congo mine cobalt till their lungs and bodies collapse, then package it in sleeker & slimmer metal each year, more suffering, and you call it PROGRESS? Everything is becoming masturbatory…
IF YOU BURN OUR BODIES, OUR ROOTS WILL GROW, VIRULENT.
A “mass orientation” begins w growing eyes all over ur body. A biblically accurate angel. To be ٱلسَّمِيعُ ٱلْبَصِيرُ , all-hearing, all-seeing. No seeds will fall through the cracks.
Emergent, THE MOON BLINDS US.
My psych major sister told me, “U probs have trauma but I don’t think you’ll develop PTSD bc you have community.” There’s nothing we could do to avoid being brutalized, and I’d rather be for a cause. Our lives are “stitched with violence” (Audre Lorde). But our mamas taught us how to embroider and we’re learning tatreez.
Last semester we stayed underground. […] a tunnel miles long gushing with stormwater, where paramedics couldn’t reach. […] My heaped near-death experiences feel like deaths, or passages into deeper realms / inception / like I didn’t survive. I am drowned / car-crushed / emaciated. I spiral into a deeper dream-state.
(What is the USFG (United States F-ing Government) but a dreamstate? (Layers (of bureaucracy: a dream-inside-a-dream-inside-a-dream.)))
…
My friends and I made art in windowless apartments, met for Iftars in corners, did dabke in a basement. I AM TIRED OF LIVING IN A CLOSET. Out the closet Greg Abbott & his groupies shooed us w batons, pepper spray, chained horses.
“We are many”
—Pablo Neruda
My body isn’t a closed system.
Is this body mine alone when people— Auntie [F], comrades, Hafsa, strangers, have fed me for 3 days? When I linked arms till they were sore? When I zoned out and my friends’ arms pull me away from the cops? When E tied my keffiyeh for me in the bathroom? We got each other.
On Wednesday, ~5 police officers arrested [X] as soon as he told us to disperse. Then a battalion of state troopers, and a cordon of horses for good measure. On Speedway. (I saw the video later on Al-Jazeera.) C, A, M, etc, & I had ran to see what was happening and it was X surrounded by police surrounded by us. It reminded me of images from West Bank, or the decolorized Civil Rights photos.
They thought that would disperse us. But the movement for Palestine is so much bigger than 1 person. History is not made by great men; it’s made by people, even scatterbrained girls.
Commands hissed through the crowd like telephone whispers. We hopped fences, walked through buildings, walked on bushes. We waved, texted, learned each others’ names, or Signal usernames. This is our home turf— statetroopers from Houston having sleepovers get lost and sundazed (can’t imagine what they talk ab). They started grabbing ppl in yellow vests like old men developing cataracts, or Spanish bulls mad about red cloth. The rest shed their vests w all the violence of desecrated flowers.
Rhetoric
English doesn’t have the right words for a spiritually rich revolution. ਗ਼ਦਰ , عشق. Hence my thing for portmanteaus like “girlbody” or “lifewish”.
I can be a closet of personas, or a nobody. Don’t dress for men; dress for the police state!!!
Revolutionary fervor comes in seasons, and it’s the spring of solidarity encampments.
April 28th, 2024
Images from the Global South
Rafah students, “UT students, we thank you”
Yemen protest, “Dear American student, they can arrest you but they can’t break your spirit”
A girl in Gaza makes a birthday cake in a tent over fire
Children mine in Congo mud— it looks like the abyss where they’re building the capital extension project on Lavaca St. My stomach lurches. Rabied bats fly onto my head.
The bombed out shells of universities. Mollusks of ours. UT funded this.
Boys drowning in the Mediterranean Sea for airdropped aid / the sea which holds oil Americans martyr their souls for / the sea where they’re not allowed to build ships or fish / the sea where Israel killed 11 activists on the 2011 peace flotilla / the sea which bears no walls and douses wounds in salt / the sea carrying bodies of refugees, runaway slaves, people under siege, to foreign shores which prefer corpses to living bodies.
Over the sea, Palestinians watch the sunset and rainbow, the roar blending into the buzz of drones. They stand, don’t dip their toes too deep into the sand. The children build sandcastles like new homes lost in the tide, rebuilt every nightfall.
