Learning to Fly: From Vietnam to Palestine
Date: 
August 13 2024

I first saw Dalia Ali’s Once Upon a Time in the Palestinian Feminist Collective’s feminist futures calendar. It was the featured artwork for the month of May 2023 commemorating 75 years of the Palestinian Nakba. Not only was it visually beautiful, but the collage of old photos and passages from literature combined different times and genres that I had typically thought of as separate. It brought together geographies, temporalities, and experiences that had been fragmented by history, all on one canvas.

This feeling of reading and learning across space and time has characterized my learning journey in Professor Loubna Qutami’s class on Palestine. To engage in this kind of learning after Oct. 7, during ongoing genocide — and amid protests on our campus and at campuses all around the world — was an experience fraught with complexity.

Zionism is a project of both material and cultural erasure. It forces a reckoning, with writing, reading, and sharing stories serving as defiant acts of resistance. In this spirit, I want to share some of my own stories, dreams, and memories, in hopes of showing what Palestine has taught me about what really matters.


Some of my earliest memories are of stories. During bath time, mom would light a candle, turn out the lights, and tell us about growing up in Vietnam. I remember always asking her to tell us a story because that intimate space — where we could all imagine, together, and relive those memories — meant a lot to me. I’m only now realizing that those stories meant a lot to her too. The past became present through those memories, and her memories became mine.

Saturday, Aug. 19, 2023

Today, I visited the building where my mother grew up. It's interesting to be here in Vietnam as a child of Vietnamese and American parents. I feel as if those histories are not immediately mine, yet at the same time, I feel connected to them across time and space. My dad was a soldier and my mom was a refugee. What does that make me? Coming here to this land has let me embody this state of being from here, but not really belonging. I can look out my window and see my mom’s childhood neighborhood, and know that so much has changed.

Sometimes, I imagine moments from the past placed on top of the present… a temporal superposition, in which I’m a spirit wandering through. When I look out the window and daydream, I imagine becoming a bird, having complete freedom, and going wherever the wind takes me. I’d want to feel what it's like to fly, endlessly falling into the sky. I’ll find myself losing track of my current time, looking down at a tree dancing in the wind, wondering how long it has been alive and what it has seen. I didn’t have this way of seeing before coming here.

What do I do with this strange sense of belonging? Even though I was not born in Vietnam, my consciousness and spirit feel tied to this place. I hadn’t really compared such an abstract sense of belonging to the situation of other refugees. Repeated displacements have unearthed transgenerational memories of the first Nakba, with Palestinian refugees still denied the right to return to their own land.

 I hadn’t fully grasped the significance of being able to return to a land that calls me home. Eco-occupation — the systematic transformation of the landscape — is a central part of the Zionist project, which removes and replaces native landscapes and erases Indigenous culture. The violence of this Occupation cannot fully be addressed by legal, empirical, and positivist interpretations of “facts,” because such facts cannot apprehend the spiritual and cultural connection between an Indigenous people and their land.

 This condition of repeated displacement of Palestinian people and destruction of land cannot continue. Their exile cannot continue.

April 24, 2024

Today, in class, I heard about the encampment. Many students were missing from their seats, and it was becoming increasingly hard to proceed with business as usual, especially when what we were learning in class and what we were creating at the encampment were one and the same. The university administration frames what we’re doing as a violation of policy and a disruption to normal functioning as if we can separate what we learn in the classroom from our lives that exist within and continue outside of it. I think that if the university wanted the encampment gone, they would meet our demands and divest.

Professor Qutami says that what we are doing is putting knowledge into practice, making learning transformative. While I agree, I wonder what that feels like. Meeting deadlines, submitting projects, and producing papers feel without meaning if they only live isolated within a digital folder. I don’t know how to feel. It's bittersweet. I’ve spent so much time and energy in this institution — practically a third of my life — that I don’t know what comes after it. I almost feel like I’m losing something, the part that endlessly hungers for truth, for knowledge that speaks to my soul and wants to be surrounded by people who desire something similar.

Can I find something like that outside the university? How do I hold that feeling of refuge and value in learning with the fact that the university — as an institution — profits from violence?

Since Oct. 7, the world has seen the most widespread student protests since the Vietnam War. It feels like the truth of the injustices in Palestine can no longer be hidden. We’re learning that it’s not just about Palestine, but about the ability of our leadership to ignore democratically-voiced demands and continue to make decisions motivated by profit in an endless spiral toward self-destruction.

As successive generations grow up, what is changing in the world? Is history a closed loop, or will my generation see Palestine free once more?

Friday, Aug. 4, 2023

Today, Mom and I visited the infamous Côn Đảo prison complex. The entire journey was sobering. To learn that the French and Americans had enacted over 100 years of torture on Vietnamese political prisoners to support their occupation and colonization of the country… was, simply, evil. How can humans be so cruel? How can such a beautiful island also be the site of such horrific treatment? It sickens me that white, Western countries did these things and justified them with their political motivations, greed, and desire for power.

I’m grateful that the museum had so many English descriptions, so I could learn more about the significance of the objects on display. On display were weapons used to discipline and torture, which I expected. But there were also embroidered artifacts in memory of loved ones, hand-sewn clothes, grooming tools, and even newspapers and textbooks that were handwritten and circulated in secret. Many of the political prisoners were highly educated and aimed to share their knowledge with other prisoners. I imagine that the desire to learn was closely tied to the will to resist and survive. Prisoners used buttons, rings, and rocks to communicate in Morse code through the walls and drains. It's crazy to me that even in a place like this, the will to resist, to learn, to be in community could not be eradicated.

I’ve also been thinking about the spiritual elements of this history. It's easy to think of history as dates and statistics, as dusty relics, but I think learning of stories like this helped me see how, even after death, things live on. History carries on the spirit of the past. Many Vietnamese make the pilgrimage to this island to remember the past and pay respects to those who died at the hands of the French and the Americans. I wonder if all the remains on this island are at rest. I truly hope so.

I had known that experiences of militarization during the Cold War connected Palestine and Vietnam, but I wasn’t aware of the depth of Internationalist and Third World solidarity. I didn’t know that, in 1966, Israeli Defense Minister Moshe Dayan visited the U.S. military in South Vietnam and that the U.S. completed its first sale of fighter jets to Israel before he had left the country. I didn’t know that Palestinian fighters in 1968 drew inspiration from Vietnamese guerrillas. They were allied not because of who they were, but because of what they were trying to accomplish.

To be honest, life lately has been difficult. It has been too easy to become trapped in a hole of self-defeating isolation, to feel like nothing can change, and that I am powerless. But to learn with a community of people who love life and are deeply committed to making a better future has been a source of strength and revolutionary optimism.

At the end of class one day, Professor Qutami encouraged us to reflect on what we can learn from practicing sumud, not just as resistance, but as an imagining of new possibilities in a state of liberation.  With that in mind, who might we become?

Thursday, Aug. 31, 2023

Last night, I had a dream. I was in an empty field. I could feel the sun’s warmth,  but there were no people. I knew that there was no one around. Strangely though, I didn’t feel alone. I wasn’t consciously moving, but I lifted my arm and gestured to the sky, and realized I was motioning to a bird flying around. I’m not sure if I was guiding the bird or if it was guiding my hand, but we were connected. The bird was beautiful: red, gold, brown, and green, with flowing feathers. As my arm moved, I felt a strange sensation wash over me. I closed my eyes and focused on it, encouraging the feeling to grow stronger. I fell deeper within myself, losing sense of my physical body, but my awareness expanded outward until I felt the entire sky and Earth through me. I didn’t want to open my eyes, because I knew that, as soon as I did, I would wake up and the feeling would leave.

Of course, I woke up and realized it was only a dream. But since then, when I feel the sun on my skin or hear the leaves rustle in the breeze, I can sometimes close my eyes and recreate that feeling of endless possibility. Can you feel it, too?

About The Author: 

Juniper Styles is a graduate of Brown University and the daughter of a Vietnamese-American War refugee.

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