Who, then, will document the misery of this world?
Layan Kayed poses a resonant question. At the time of writing, Kayed was a twenty-five-year-old master’s student in the Occupied West Bank turned political prisoner in the Israel-run Ofer Prison. Kayed’s ‘The Prison as a Text’, translated by Roba AlSalibi, reflects on the prison’s circumscription of the act of writing, treating incarceration as a text unto itself. The text, in its confrontation with the circumstances under which it is produced, points to the conditions of possibility of Kayed’s captivity: Israeli settler-colonialism. At our time of writing, we are six months into the apogee of the Zionist project. The death toll, deprivation, and psychic, bodily, and infrastructural debilitation architectured by the Occupation upon Palestinians in Gaza continues to rise, abetted by complicit cultural apparatuses across the world and a collusive geopolitical order. For those of us bearing witness from outside the boundaries of historic Palestine, the documentation of this orchestrated misery feels like an act of posterity that teeters on present inconsequence. Kayed’s question reverberates back. The fact of her text is a response to her own question. The immiserated will document the world’s misery.
Drawing from Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s work on ‘organised abandonment’, our aim with this special issue was to explore the work of those thinking and organising against the orchestration of material vulnerability under racial capitalism. For Gilmore, organised abandonment exploits and deepens social violence. The utility of organised abandonment lies in its emphasis on, in Gilmore’s words, the ‘abdication of responsibility’ — not a passive withdrawal, but an active plot. Unambiguous in its analysis of our worsening conditions, organised abandonment invites the same precision in our counterplot. This special issue is a consideration of the role of writing in this counter-position. In other words, we consider writing as one possible tool in the orientation against abandonment. At the same time, writing against abandonment has been a reminder in the humility of writing as a political tool: its necessity and its insufficiency. It is offered as one of many political modes of living and enacting abolition creatively. As Kayed reminds us, ‘writing is oscillating between the constrained reality, “without being dragged by it”, and the expansive horizon, without indulging in it’.
Kayed does not romanticise writing, instead focusing on its humanising potential. Ayòdélé Olófintúadé’s excerpt from Lákíríboto opens with a similar sentiment. In this instance, the perspective is historical: ‘Words are used for archival purposes. … Words connect the Yoruba to their ancestors, their ways of being, to problem-solving, society-building, adaptation, and possibilities of new inventions.’ The political purpose and potential of words to connect us with the past is further explored in Marral Shamshiri’s interview with the Revolutionary Papers collective. Shamshiri’s conversation with Mahvish Ahmad, Koni Benson, and Hana Morgenstern illuminates not only the political utility of archival revolutionary periodicals for contemporary movements but also, and crucially, the historic and oft-forgotten role of labour in the production of these texts. Beyond the written content of these radical journals, the authors pay attention to their context:
the re/productive labour that was absolutely necessary for these papers to thrive … allows us to uncover people whose work was essential in sustaining both these periodicals and the left and anti-colonial politics more generally.
As well as opening lines of transtemporal communication, writing can also be a means for people and liberation movements to forge connections across geographies. This issue includes several pieces translated into English from Arabic and Urdu, accompanied by translators’ notes, to highlight the importance of the work of translation for building solidarity across physical and linguistic borders. As Alexandra Wanjiku Kelbert points out in her interview with Annick Metefia of Mwasi Collectif, cross-border collaboration offers essential opportunities for anti-fascists to ‘exchange information … around the specific manifestations of the same violence by the same systems in different countries’. Just as governments learn from each other to bolster systems of repression, as we have seen in the spread of laws across Europe and North America to criminalise solidarity with Palestine, so too must the resistance be coordinated and global. ‘THE THING IS WE’RE ALL IN TROUBLE’, shouts the tormented protagonist in Pear Nuallak’s story ‘Happy Birthday, You Are No Longer a Daughter’, only to find that her cause for despair – our shared vulnerability to harm – brings with it its own antidote: a community of others in common struggle.
This issue also attempts to engage with writing as it crosses prison walls. ‘Is the hunger strike a desire for “death” or a longing for “freedom”?’ asks Basil Farraj in his incisive consideration of Palestinian prisoners’ hunger strikes. For Farraj, these captive practices are better understood as a refusal to submit to Zionist domination. This dreaming and enacting of a liberated geography also appears in Layan Kayed’s text, which similarly insists on the agential capacity of the incarcerated: ‘Through [writing] we disrupt our isolation and its psychological, social, and intellectual manifestations, and we become, at least in our minds, subjects and objects amid events.’ The transnational and local politics of organising towards prison abolition are further explored in Alexandra Wanjiku Kelbert’s interview with Mwasi Collectif, and in Latifa Akay’s interview with Nejma Collective, which considers the legacy of the practice of letter writing between those inside and outside prison. These interviews, we hope, translate the dynamic, non-hierarchical approach followed by abolitionist organisers into writing.
Beyond the utilitarian value of the text for connecting and sharing knowledge across time and space, the emotional and affective dimensions of the act of writing are also politically meaningful for resisting abandonment. Like the prisoner’s hunger strike, as analysed in Farraj’s article, writing can be an assertion of freedom and subjecthood, a way of ‘rejecting defeat’ even when confronted with the degradation and brutalisation of life — in Nat Raha’s words, ‘for survival, we write’. When the conditions under which we exist are geared towards our repression and disempowerment, writing represents an insistence on our agency to experience, record, and make meaning of our realities. ‘How did you manage to turn this place into such a sad story? Where does all this misery come from?’ Soha asks Khaled as they stroll along Beirut’s coast in Hilal Chouman’s novel Once Upon a Time, Tomorrow – an excerpt from which has been translated for this issue by Caline Nasrallah – all while a spate of unexplained sudden deaths of humans and animals beleaguers the city and is met with futile political intervention. In these contexts of organised abandonment, writing can be a powerful means of bearing witness — it is while she watches her friend assiduously track the annual migration of birds in a notebook in Ofer Prison that the question of who will document the world’s misery comes to Layan Kayed’s mind.
And yet in spite of the text’s myriad virtues, while pulling together this special issue, we found that the abandonment of writing was often more imperative than writing against abandonment. Just as the goal of our organising is not the everlasting endurance of the movement, our political mission is not the production of radical literature at all costs. Amidst Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza and the violent repression of Palestinian resistance and solidarity, there are many more urgent demands on our time, attention, and care than literature; indeed, some writers had to withdraw from this issue to focus on more pressing needs. As editors, we also chose to prioritise our own and each other’s health and well-being above the exigency to work, particularly as we each underwent extended periods of illness. In the same vein, Maymana Arefin exhorts us not to rush in our efforts towards liberation, finding inspiration in the mycelium network of the honey fungus, the world’s largest known living organism, which grows only when conditions are right and has reached its enormous size in stops and starts, sometimes lying dormant for decades at a time. ‘What if we humans were afforded the same right to pause, to rest, to move at our pace?’ she asks.
We offer writing in this special issue as a tool for liberation – one of many in our political arsenal – rather than as an end in itself. ‘On God, I don’t have a craft anymore’, writes poet Sarah Lasoye. ‘I have two hands and a resolve that’s hardened over twenty-four years.’ With an eye towards prefiguring the liberated future, we hold in mind the question of what writing will become when we no longer have to sell our labour to produce literature in exchange for sustenance, when we no longer have to write against abandonment at all. Shripad Sinnakaar invites us to imagine such a world: