A letter written for Bisan, circulated to my constituency:
Peace.
I write to you from the floor of my bedroom in Sierra Leone. Two days ago, Iran launched successful counter-attacks against the apartheid regime occupying the land of Palestine, currently known as Israel (which bombed their embassy in an open act of war on April 1). I can hear construction workers breaking rocks outside my window and the children of the house playing and running and the noise of Freetown traffic in an endless rise and fall. I always find it pertinent to name the moment clearly, as I am always certain tomorrow will not look like today; the things I consider commonplace will be precious and long gone. Some of my mind firmly plants itself in yesterday already: gone are the days where I can see children running and playing in the street— in any street, anywhere in the world— and I do not think of Palestinian children massacred in front of each other. I am in a permanent after. I kneel to pray and recall accounts of young Sudanese women messaging their local religious leaders, asking if they will still be permitted into paradise if they commit suicide to avoid rape from occupying soldiers. I am in a permanent after.
Today is April 15, 2024. Tomorrow will not look like today.
Bisan Owda, a filmmaker, journalist and storyteller, has called the world to strike on several occasions for the liberation of her homeland, Palestine. I feel about Bisan (and Hind, and Motaz, and many others) like I feel about my cousins: I pray for them before bed, asking for their continued protection, wondering for them— the same way I prayed for my family as a child, during Sierra Leone’s own neocolonial war of attrition, or when Ebola came like the angel of death. This is the way I pray for Bisan, and for Palestine: with this heart beating in me that is both theirs and mine. She is my age. Bisan! You are my age! I wish we could have met at university, or at an artists workshop; I feel we would have long conversation. I understand more now about what my auntie dequi means when she says sister in the struggle— that’s how she speaks of indigenous womyn, about Palestinian womyn, about womyn across the colonized world that use every tool they have to resist. Sisters in the struggle. It’s never felt like an understatement— I just feel it in my body now. Sisters (n.): someone who you most ardently for. Someone who you care for such that it compels you to action.
I’m certain many of you feel this for me—this long distance, cross-cultural, transcontinental kinship. Rhita, a stranger turned friend via instagram DMs, had me over for tea on a long layover in Morocco, and we spent at least two hours talking about blooming revolution and healing through art (she’s a musician and she helps pave the way for musicians in Morocco, who fight for their royalties as well as their right to exist. Brilliant). Sisters in struggle: your lens on the world changes mine, and I am grateful for it. Today we are among war; I mobilize and I organize and I pray for a day where we might sit down for tea.
I write to Bisan with the attention of my own constituency to shine light on her calls for a general strike, one of which occurs today, April 15 2024. These urgent asks have been met with lots of skepticism across the Western world: how do we organize something this fast? Does it really matter if I participate? How will one strike solve anything? I write to throw my pen and my circumstance behind you, Bisan. I lend you all (my constituency) my lenses as a teacher, in hopes that I make plain to you why these questions of feasibility assume there is another way out of our current standing oppressions. We have no other option for worldwide liberation that does not include a mass refusal to produce capital.
We occupy a crucial moment of pivot as a species. Victory for the masses feels impossible from the complete waste they lay on anyone who dissents to their power. This feeling is manufactured. The hopelessness is manufactured. We see the insecurity of the nation-state everywhere. Never before has surveillance from the state been so totalitarian— even (especially) through the device likely read this on. I also submit: a conglomeration of ruling bodies who monitor their citizens with paranoia do so because they are very aware of their own precarity.
^this is a very good video if you want to learn more about that claim.
The nation-state, as it currently exists, knows it will fall. Never before have we had this much access to one another in organizing across the world for our good. They know, and we are beginning to find out, this iteration of the human sovereign world (capitalism ruled by white, Western supremacy) is dying. Something else is on the way. The question is what? Will the world that comes after this one be for us or against us?
I hope this set of arguments helps us understand our place in the human narrative, as those that still have the power to stop the machine.
Theses:
(1) The genocide in Palestine is not unique nor novel except in the fact that we can see it in real time.
This is what colonial war has always looked like. Ruthie Wilson Gilmore described the machine perfectly.
“Racism, specifically, is the state-sanctioned or extralegal production and exploitation of group-differentiated vulnerability to premature death."
― Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California
Ruthie Wilson Gilmore is an abolitionist that has radicalized me immensely. To put the above in my terms: racism occurs or made when a group of people (Black, Indigenous, and colonized peoples) are constantly exposed to premature death (in overt ways, such as carpet bombing or slavery, or in more covert ways, like pollution, policy that denies healthcare, poverty wages, restricting access to food). This mass killing comes either with a green light from the state,
or comes from the civilian populace of that oppressive nation-state.
Capitalism in and of itself created the need for racial oppression. The establishment of capitalism required the open and expedited slaughter of indigenous peoples to secure their own land, and the slow-bred, constant slaughter of African peoples as a vehicle to over-harvest lands across North and South America, as well as across Europe. And they continue to expand.
So then: racial capitalism is a death-machine.
There is no way we can transition this world to a new order, where the masses are sovereign over our own lives, without withholding the labor that keeps the death machine going. Striking is not just in a decline of consumption, which is when we refuse to consume the products made by the machine. Radical action occurs when we decline production. That’s the only way to stop the machine in their tracks. If we do not, the machine will continue slaughter for output. Simply put: you can’t just stop buying. We do actually have to stop working.
Nothing about the actions taking place in the Palestinian genocide are new! This is racial capitalism doing what it has always done: slaughtered the indigenous population and embedded heinous acts of violence to crush dissent, exacted a nation-state on the shallow graves, and found or imported a labor force to exploit such that they can strip the land of her resources. It has always been this horrifying.
The only difference now is that we can see the horror live televised, in real time.
(2) we are tasked with mobilization from our new understandings.
We have a sister war now occurring in Sudan, where the superpower benefitting from violent civilian death is the United Arab Emirates (who extract the gold from Sudan in deals with the warring military groups while the people are slaughtered). This is a war of attrition, designed to break the will of the people bit by bit, massacre by massacre until they force consent to military rule. We had wars of similar depravity in the killings of Iraqis in this made up War on Terror by the United States, in the killings of Black radical counter-insurgents in the United States’ second civil war in the 1960s, in the attempted decimation of Viet Nam (again, by the US, there might be a pattern). This is what I mean about wars of colonialism— this is what the annexing of Hawaii looked like. The fall of Burkina-Faso’s revolutionary government. This is just to name a few. It’s happened again and again, and it will keep happening until we pivot away from allowing the technology of the nation-state be sovereign over the earth. This is what the nation-state does under racial capitalism.
(2a) EXTRAPOLATE.
The 15th of April 2024 also marks one year of war in Sudan, which has largely been ignored by Western spectacle. I say all the time your attention is lucrative.
This particular bit is addressed to my constituency: never is this more clear than watching world trials, UN emergency meetings, world mobilization on behalf of Palestine and no such thing for Sudan. I know that Palestinians do not feel good about this. We should not have to be in a state where we have to compete for attention in order to get justice. We should not require spectacle to mobilize for our countrymen! There are no journalist influencers living in Sudan to have risen out as superstars with moment to moment updates— the technological infrastructure and the political landscape simply didn’t align for that. Is this why we don’t care? I am also hyper aware, as a Black American and as a Sierra Leonean, of how no one blinks when Black people die. We were the original capital under racial capitalism. There still is this sentiment, especially among the Western world, that suffering and dying is just… what we do.
We humans are very good at caring for what we can manage to see. I am both heartened and excited by seeing increased conversations, direct actions, fundraisers, for Palestine. The responsibility to the human family is to constantly be in the work of expanding your eyesight— which means that you too care for the people that you might not see every day in your algorithm. The human tapestry, woven together in different colors and patterns, is ultimately one long, interconnected thread. The first step of mobilization that must come from from realizing our situation under racial capitalism is fighting for everyone that suffers from it— not just the people we can see. If we fight situationally, we are set up to lose, because we save one part of the human tapestry while another part burns. Coordinated action can only come from coordinated understanding. No one is free until everyone is free.
(3) Fast. Train. Study. Fight.
Only in a slaveocracy would the idea of freedom fighting and resistance seem mad.
—Mumia Abu-Jamal, 2003 | Black August Commentary on Prison Radio
Fast; train; study; fight is the slogan of Black August, a month of discipline where those active in the fight for liberation remember our political prisoners and dedicate ourserlves to the sharpening of our minds, bodies, and communities in service of liberation. Black August was first commemorated with collective action in 1971 when George Jackson was assassinated by San Quentin prison guards in an attempt to quell the revolutionary spirit he stewarded within the concentration camp of prison enslavement. The article linked above is by Mama Ayaana Mashama, an educator, healer, poet, and founding member of the Oakland Chapter of the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement from the Bay.
Black August also acknowledges the amount of life and world-changing victories of resistance that have occurred for Black oppressed peoples in August— everything from the Haitian Revolution to Nat Turner’s Rebellion to the birth of Fred Hampton.
I find these four actions to be the key to mobilization in the practical rather than just the rhetorical or theoretical, especially if you are newly radicalized (like me. I’ve only been radicalized for six years).
What are the practical ways to strike?
Fasting from consumption:
Do not engage in mindless consumption. Do not buy anything from companies who use your dollars to oppress yourself and your neighbor— this includes groceries, gas, flights, fast food, more than that. Do not grease the machine with your dollars. I understand these things are embedded into our day to day society. Resist anyways.
Additionally, fasting during the inaugural Black August included abstinence from radio and television. Last year, my first time fasting for Black August, I fasted from screens. Conscious divestment from the machine includes mind and body, not just dollars.
Training (in mind and body):
Train your attention. Train yourself to notice when you impulse spend. Money is a token you can trade for power. To be in the role of consumer is to constantly trade your chance for power for a momentary comfort— a good feeling, a rush, a high, a status symbol, all of which depreciate for you and all of which give tokens of power to the world-makers currently in charge. Now is the time to build up the muscles of dissent (both the literal and the metaphysical strength and will to act in favor of the people when it is time to).
Study:
You are only as useful to the movement as you are able to use yourself well. Study yourself and your own wants needs and habits. Know intimately your own boundaries, motivations and desires. What is your version of freedom? What are you specifically fighting for? Write it down!
Study your own observable world. Ensure that you are caught up well on the events that surround you. This means local. When you walk around outside, what do you see? First: do you take walks? I would recommend them. Who are your neighbors? What do they do? What do they want? Who are your comrades and who are not? What is going in your local policy?
Study the world that you cannot personally observe (and not just the news that comes through your algorithm). Learn where the stitches of the human tapestry are frayed. Note where they are being or have been burned intentionally. How do you connect to those charred places? What does regeneration and recreation look like?
The backdrop of Sudan’s war saw about eight months of sporadic striking that finally led to the general strike, which then led to the successful popular uprising. Sudan had a successful popular uprising in 2019 because they engaged in strikes, strikes, strikes until they created enough mass action to win. It will never feel like the right time. We create the time we need to mobilize on our best behalf.
Fight:
Fight the impulse to do nothing. You are in a natural state of doing nothing—by design. So better, I should say: you are kept in a default state of believing that you should do nothing. Do not do nothing. The more you do something, the easier it is to do the next thing. Fight the will to accept the world as something that happens above you. You have more power than you think you do.
Fight the urge to act alone.
Fight the urge to shrink from consequence.
Fight the restrictions that inevitably follow dissent.
Also literally engaging in combat training is helpful (for legal purposes I don’t condone violence :P).
(4) Revolution more about beginnings than endings.
Critical mass happens with repeat action. The tide will not change because of some mass quantum leap everyone has in logic and circumstance. It will not come because your neighbor saw you pick up your pitchfork and thought, “oh yes, we need schedule Revolution today, let me grab my chainsaw.” The masses will shift because person after person after person continued to practice small, increasing modes of dissent. Dissent!— such that when powder kegs go off, when moments occur like this, or like Black Lives Matter worldwide uprisings of 2020, moments which break through the numb dissonance we all wade through every day, we have enough discipline to engage in organized action.
General striking needs to be not just for Palestine, but for all the pressing problems that have a time mark on them. If Palestine is what gets you to mobilize, I commend you. Because Palestine is what got me to mobilize for general strikes. It was because of my sister Bisan, who called for them. And I thank her. Thank you!
We as a human species need to recognize that what’s happening in Palestine will happen again if we do not have a coalesced list of needs and demands. We need to understand the need to shape policy. We strike for sovereignty under the hands of the masses. Sovereignty under the hands of the masses!
I learn so much from studying the successes and failures of the Burkina Faso revolution, lasting for four glorious years. Here’s what’s previously happened across colonized countries that managed to have revolutions, like clockwork.
Step three (mobilization) was executed by a critical mass of people (not everyone, not even the majority, but enough people fasted, trained, studied, fought, enough people taught their neighbor/girlfriend/cousin/librarian/grocery store clerk the same thing, of the ways we can engage with struggle rather than the ways we run from it, or assume it’s the job of someone else. There was enough mobilization sustained by extrapolation (the understanding that this was bigger than them) such that a popular uprising occurred, when which is a hard thing not to lose (as in, to let dissipate). A popular uprising is a difficult thing to lose! The strength in numbers is very, very real. Look at the farmer’s strike in India! How could they fail?
Then, this new and fragile union with a new world, this baby that needs attention, protecting, a family of support around it— gets hijacked. Colonial or neocolonial regimes take root and begin killing as many people as they can in attempts to spread epigenetic fear into the populace such that they never, ever try and imagine a world without their power ever again. This is what’s currently happening in Sudan right now. This is what is happening in Palestine. This is what’s happening everywhere where there are colonized people fighting against oppressive regimes.
If we can manage to act together, if we can manage world-wide mobilization and world-wide solidarity, we can stand for one another at this crucial stage— we must dream past the start of something and be thinking towards the day when we are inevitably successful— how will we keep those gains?
Past the fall of the empire— what are we fighting for? How do we intend to keep it?
Peace to you and yours, Bisan. The sun has set in Sierra Leone. There is not a day that goes by where I do not think about you. And I thank for being plugged in, being supportive of, being for the revolutions across the world— especially your own. Thank you for being someone who belongs to your country in ways that are bold and ways that endanger you. I am so proud of you. I can’t thank you enough.
And peace to everyone reading, here meaning: I hope the work you engage with today emboldens you to act tomorrow.
ismatu g.
PS. THIS IS STILL A STRIKE THAT LIVES LARGELY ON SOCIAL MEDIA! WE NEED THAT TO CHANGE. TALK! TO! YOUR! NEIGHBORS! YOUR PARENTS! PEOPLE YOU KNOW IN PHYSICAL, DAILY LIFE! I DID NOT LEARN ABOUT THIS UNTIL PEOPLE IN MY PHYSICAL LIFE TOLD ME! USE THIS TEXT AND TALK ABOUT IT thank you have a good day.