In an interview for a podcast by a major national publication about the end of the Gaza Solidarity Encampment at Brown, the interviewer stumped me by asking me questions about my identity and background. Since I became one of the media spokespeople for our encampment, I was expecting the usual questions about the divestment process, disciplinary action by the university, or the growing student movement of encampments spanning the nation (and at that point, the globe).
I was caught tongue-tied by seemingly undemanding questions like, “Tell me about where you grew up,” “How did your parents shape your political views?” and “How did your political engagements change when you got to university?” These questions made me uncomfortable because they forced me to center myself, detracting from the material conditions in Gaza. Yet, I was cognizant of the need to make my solidarity legible… to perform, for the media. I was aware that the stakes of my performance were high, as this encounter would put me face-to-face with the hegemonic media apparatus responsible for reproducing dehumanizing, colonial narratives about Palestine and Palestinians.
Rather than recite from my pre-written, well-rehearsed script of answers (rigorously sanctified and approved by our media team), one question — “When did you become a political person?” — sparked a purely visceral, very un-media-trained response. I told the reporter, “I’ve never had the privilege to separate the political and the personal.” I explained further by talking about how my formative years as a young person were shaped by Trump’s presidency (possibly, his first term), police violence against Black and brown people — especially in the American South, where I grew up — Narendra Modi’s right-wing ascent to power in India, and the experiences of growing up Muslim in a post-9/11 world.
Probably dissatisfied with my hesitations to delve into my personal connection to the movement for Palestinian liberation, my interview was eventually not included in the final version of the podcast. Nonetheless, the reporter’s line of questioning made me interrogate how I define, narrate, and express my solidarity. At a moment when I had been exhausted by the performance of solidarity, I felt the weight of unpackaging the narrative that the performance itself necessitates. How do we make sense of a relationality that is inherently messy, nonlinear, and dynamic? How do we practice a solidarity that is at once defined by the material urgency of organizing during genocide, yet intimately intertwined with the spiritual?
Palestine everywhere
I have been organizing with the movement for justice in Palestine on Brown University’s campus since the start of the genocide, in October of 2023. However, my solidarity with the Palestinian people predates my organizing work on my university campus. I grew up in a diverse suburb of the American South within a large immigrant community, including a sizable Muslim community. Looking back, I cannot really pinpoint a specific moment when I became conscious of the oppression of the Palestinian people. I remember chanting “Free Palestine” at a class walkout organized in my freshman year of high school. I remember watching the news in horror as the Zionist military invaded Gaza in 2014 during Operation Protective Edge. I remember seeing the Palestinian flag and people donned in keffiyehs at a protest against Trump’s ‘Muslim ban’ in 2017 at the airport. I remember making dua’as (prayers) to free my brothers and sisters from the Occupation every jummah (Friday). Solidarity with Palestine was enmeshed in various forms of community life that I belonged.
On the spirituality of sumud
This past Ramadan was the first time I completed a full month of fasting, the first time I fasted at all since moving away from home, a thousand miles away from my family. As a child, I remember the month as one of the happiest of the year; a time to spend with family and friends, driving to Little Pakistan (a concrete strip mall off the side of the freeway) where the shops would stay open late into the night: a slice of the bustling night bazaar on Mohammed Ali Road in Bombay (in suburban America). By contrast, I spent this Ramadan mostly alone, watching a genocide unfold on my social media feed. I saw Palestinians in the Gaza Strip praying taraweeh in the rubble where a mosque once stood. I made dua’a for the liberation of Al-Aqsa — one of the holiest sites in Islam — from Occupation. I grieved the opulent commemoration of the newly-constructed Ram temple on the ruins of the Babri Masjid in India that had opened just two months earlier, in January.
This past Ramadan, a month to become closer to God, closer to deen (religion), I felt only grief. But, as I see mosque after mosque reduced to rubble from a six-inch screen, from Gaza to Ahmedabad, curiously, my faith grows stronger. As I see Palestinian mothers, upon learning about the death of their sons and daughters, exalting Allah (SWT), I get closer to understanding the dimensions of iman (faith).
As my faith and my politics of liberation become further intertwined, I am continually reminded of the philosophy of sumud (steadfastness) that Palestinians have used to resist Zionist colonialism since before the Nakba. In 2014, Lena Meari — a Palestinian scholar from Birzeit University in Ramallah — wrote that for Palestinians subjected to the brutal extent of the settler-colonial regime in colonial prisons, death “is understood as a new beginning within a revolutionary political tradition.”
Prayer, performance, and transition
Before the first vigil held at Brown honoring the first of tens of thousands of martyrs, I recall a moment when I was struck with the suffocating antagonism and alienation of the political moment as a trans Muslim. The first item on the agenda was a Maghreb prayer: I remember how all the participants turned to face those praying on a tarp laid out behind the crowd on our university’s main quad. As the imam began the adhan, I stood still, stuck in my place among the crowd, and began to silently sob. At that moment, the grief of the past week came to the fore, and I was trapped in an inescapable limbo between the urge to join the prayer and the reality of publicly misgendering myself. I thought that if I remained true to my identity and stood in line with the women, I would disrupt the sanctity of the space. As a trans Muslim, normative Muslim communities and spaces carry the threat of violence, ostracization, and ridicule. But at that moment, I wanted nothing more than to submit to Allah (SWT), to find solace in a spiritual connection, and to grieve collectively through the act of prayer.
This fear is why I spent nearly all of Ramadan alone. Every evening, as I broke my fast, performed ablution, and prayed Maghreb, I would tell myself, “Today is the day I will go for taraweeh.”
I never went.
On the first (or maybe second) day of the encampment, after seeing Dhuhr prayer listed on the scheduled programming, I had made up my mind: today, I would finally join in prayer. Earlier that day, I had taken an interview with a local journalist, the first interviewer who asked about my personal connection to the movement. I spoke about my solidarity with the Palestinian people stemming from my background as an Indian Muslim, India and Israel’s disturbing military-economic alliance, the ideological parallels between Hindutva (Hindu nationalism) and Zionism, the colonization of Kashmir, and the cascading warnings of an imminent genocide in my supposed motherland.
As we lined up to pray, I panicked, initially standing in line with the men. But as I looked up, I felt the eyes of my friends, fellow campers, reporters, and professors. Internalizing their gazes and anticipating their confusion at me publicly and intentionally misgendering myself, I stepped back, in between the designation of men and women, and performed my raka’at in the middle, alone. Throughout the prayer, I could feel the gaze of onlookers, and instead of focusing my mental energy on prayer, on Allah (SWT), I was preoccupied with the performance of prayer, with the cameras, and the eyes watching as I intentionally broke normative gender conventions.
Throughout my time organizing on campus, I had always thought my transness to be secondary to the other aspects of my identity that inform my solidarity with Palestinian liberation. I started my medical transition one month into the genocide and haven’t been properly documenting or reflecting on it in the “normative,” “this-is-my-X-month-on-HRT” kind of way. How can I expend mental energy on my transition during genocide? It all seems so trivial when my tuition money and tax dollars are being used to indiscriminately bomb children in Gaza.
But, the writings and communique from queer Palestinians from the past several months reveal the exigency of a queer political orientation deeply intertwined with decolonial struggle. A letter from the group Queers in Palestine reads, “Adopting an anti-colonial, anti-capitalist queer framework in understanding our reality is not merely an option, but a necessity.”
Exploring the critical knowledge produced by the grassroots queer Palestinian organization, Al Qaws, has laid bare the mobilization of liberal identity politics to justify settler-colonial violence by the Zionist regime, developed by the American empire and its closest accomplices. The article, “Beyond Propaganda: Pinkwashing as Colonial Violence,” ends with a call to recognize that, “anti-pinkwashing work is conducted in the spirit of internationalism and anti-imperialist,” and that those committed to this work must “incorporate approaches that have developed throughout two decades of grassroots organizing in Palestine.”
Learning from grassroots organizations like Al Qaws and the transnational feminist organization, Tal’at, implores us to center a (trans)feminist ethic as we organize against genocide; to build care networks that fortify our struggle, and recognize the struggle for Palestinian liberation is a struggle against patriarchal capitalism, the same system that produces the violence trans people face. After all, as the writer and performer Harry Josephine Giles wrote, “The work of transition is the work of class struggle;" to recognize the structural and historical production of trans-misogyny in capitalism's global expansion and to be working for the system’s downfall. From the past [ten] months of mobilizing for Palestine, I’ve come to learn that the work of transition is the work of organizing: base-building, creating alternative structures and learning from the kinks, redistributing funds, and bargaining for union contracts.
Surrendering to impossibility
Amid the secularized and sanitized scripts I delivered to the press during our encampment, I felt myself slowly losing sight of why I was there. Even though I continuously repeated it to the reporters —- “We are here for Gaza, to stand in solidarity with the Palestinian people” — the intention lost its gravity the more I performed it.
A day after the encampment, in our class titled, Palestine: a Comparative Ethnic Studies Approach, I was reminded of the why. Upon hearing my peers speak about the encampment, the collective exhaustion, immense grief, and the intermittent raptures from the past several months, I came to an understanding that true solidarity requires an active surrender to the utter impossibility of painless or semantic understandings of it. Though we may have to compartmentalize and package it for the sake of interfacing with an institution, true solidarity encompasses the dissonances between grief and joy, love and anger, material and spiritual, world-historical and present.
As I make sense of the limitations and bounds of organizing on a university campus, the past [ten] months of relentless mobilizing, the countless teach-ins taught and press statements written, the hundreds of thousands of lives lost and mass starvation ongoing in Gaza, the encroachment of settlers in the West Bank, and the Sisyphean tasks that lie ahead in order to actualize collective liberation, I will hold the lessons I learn from the Palestinian struggle as I continue to mobilize, organize, and resist. In the words of my brilliant, inspirational educator, Loubna Qutami, “Palestine is neither an exception nor a litmus test, Palestine is a compass for revolutionary struggle.”
