What brings me to the work of liberation
I enter into the work of liberation as the carrier of a tradition I was born into. In my familial and spiritual heritage exists a long history of striving towards God’s justice — whether through the church or within my community where mutual aid, by another name, is practiced as central to our shared values. In my cultural history is the vibrancy of West African talking-drum infused-music, spicy, peppery food, and an endless love of community. Also in my cultural history is the clashing of hundreds of tribal groups forced together into a centralized nation-state. I come from a country enmeshed in decades of ‘conflict;’ endless bloodshed that was stoked by colonialism and continues on because of the incomplete process of decolonization.
What fuels me is knowing that we will one day live in a world where justice is the unquestioned norm, where land back is our reality, and where we will live in communities characterized by trust, rather than violence. I am driven by the deep belief that there will be a time and place when we recognize that we have enough resources, skills, and capacity to not only survive but to all thrive. What fuels me is knowing that we all have our part to play in bringing our current world closer to the one we can imagine together.
I don’t think we have all the answers on how to get there quite yet, but it will come as we co-build that roadmap. We dedicate ourselves to continuous experimentation based on what we know does and doesn’t work, what aligns with our values and premised on the belief that we need to work as a collective to get there.
This is also not to say that this will ever or consistently feel easy. In the moments when it feels the hardest to continue struggling for global liberation, I’ve learned to take inspiration from Palestinians — for whom sumud (Arabic for steadfastness) is essential, enabling them to continue resisting for the sake of survival, even with minimal tools at their disposal and especially when facing an oppressor with seemingly infinite resources.
The instinct to challenge injustice in all its forms is one well articulated by liberation theologists and abolitionists like Mariame Kaba — and is one that brings me personally to activism for justice and freedom in Palestine, where so many violent structures (from the settler colonial to carceral) intersect. I resonate with June Jordan’s words, who wrote:
“Activism is not Issue-Specific.
It’s a moral posture that, steady state,
propels you forward, from one hard
hour to the next.”
The rise of momentum
Within this year are so many moments I will never forget.
I remember what it felt like to finally experience the momentum of student activism that followed the escalation of the genocide in Palestine. Brown University had, up until that point, been a space where activism felt limited to the same segments of the student body; now urgency colored every day and our worlds revolved around struggling against the forces that committed atrocities with impunity; endlessly taunting us: ‘Just try and stop us.’
In ways I never had been, I was energized by the long late-night meetings we began to hold — riding the wave of national momentum that crescendoed for Palestine gave us all the energy we needed to organize collaboratively in new ways — as a group all from activist traditions and heritages. Seeing our potential and our power made me believe even more in what we could do together. It felt like we had fallen into a moment when anything was possible. I leaned on the romanticism of solidarity in practice and the glimpses of other iconic moments of protest at Brown that I had only read about — from the civil rights protests of 1968 to South African anti-apartheid protests in the 1980s. I was hoping it would never end, and choosing time and again to feel the power of collectively standing in our values.
The more we saw the Palestine exception to free speech at play within our institution — from the singling out of professors who supported Palestine to the willful ignorance about the racism my Arab peers experienced — the more determined we grew to push back against it.
The high point: the Brown Divestment Coalition 41 sit-in
Looking back at the consistent organizing I did during the Hunger Strike for Palestine and the Gaza Solidarity Encampment at Brown, I remember how much the high points are characterized by so much joy in resistance. But there was one high point that I also hold particularly close: the December 2023 Brown Divestment Coalition 41 sit-in and arrest. As I write this (in May 2024), I am still facing trespassing charges from the December 2023 sit-in, when I and 40 of my peers sat in University Hall and refused to leave until our demands were heard. We demanded to “Divest for Hisham,” referencing Hisham Awartani who is one of our Palestinian student peers who was shot in a hate crime the month before, now paralyzed from the waist down.
Before and during our sit-in, I leaned on my organizing communities — from members of the Jews For Ceasefire Now 20, who participated in the November sit-in, to activists from the 1992 University Hall takeover — when students occupied the same building in protest of the school’s insufficient financial aid and minority admission policy. We leaned on our friends, the ones who we knew would show up for us as we were being arrested. We leaned on each other, and on our intersecting activist traditions —– from environmental justice to housing justice to education justice, and multi-ethnic heritages and racial backgrounds, being a collective of Arab, Jewish, Asian, Latine, and Black students — to remind us of why we will always be compelled to take a stand against genocide.
Walking inside that building and committing to stay inside broke a mental barrier, and was the moment when I truly understood what solidarity looks like and how much stronger we are when we stand together — even at the cost of criminal charges on our permanent records, among other consequences. The moment was an actualization of our collective hope in ways I was determined to create and, yet, I was still amazed when it happened.
While police and university administration might try to belittle our protest or criminalize it using racialized language that portrays us as aggressors and disruptors to justify our punishment, we remain steadfast in our commitments. When they ignore every method of protest calling for something as simple as ending the university’s complicity and participation in genocide, we must find ways to be heard.
Lessons affirmed: our liberation is bound to one another
In September of 2023, Brown University hosted a ‘Voices of Mass Incarceration’ symposium to mark the opening of archives dedicated to Mumia Abu-Jamal’s work. Abu-Jamal is a journalist, former Black Panther, PhD candidate, father, grandfather, and political prisoner still fighting for freedom on ‘slow death row’ after decades of being wrongfully incarcerated for the death of a police officer. In the eyes of Abu-Jamal, his struggle for freedom and that of the Palestinian people are inseparable. Mumia discusses how “because Black people suffer from oppression in this country, our hearts are open to oppression in other parts of the world and other communities.” With an open heart and his own decades-long fight for liberation, Abu-Jamal understands the spirit of sumud, as he articulates in one of his books, Death Blossoms: “Here and there, in the barrios and the favelas, among those who have least, beat hearts of hope, fly sparks of Overcoming.” At the opening panel for the Symposium, Mumia spoke to us over the phone, saying: “Prisons, among other institutions, have the solidity of mountains… they promise slow death to all who enter it,” but this promise does not have to be realized. Even up against these institutions, Abu-Jamal teaches us to imagine beyond what exists; to imagine and hope for better. Hearing his words, I remember thinking that the least I can do is honor him, honor all political prisoners, and honor all people who experience slow (or quick) death at the hands of the state because they fight for life and liberation. Our conversations with him (including during our sit-in) and lessons from his art and essays have taught me: never to forget why and for whom and with whom you continue to fight.
The same way we center what compels our solidarity should be the way we connect our struggles to others. For me, most of my learning on this has come from peer-to-peer education.
One of the teach-ins closely following the symposium connected the Stop Cop City movement to Palestine — discussing both decarceral and environmental justice activism. I learned from my Atlantan peers about how one of the biggest strengths of the movement is its decentralized structure. How can an institution destroy an organizing structure that, instead of being hierarchical, stretches wide and deep, with branches everywhere — much like elements of Palestinian grassroots activism? This is the power of shared purpose paired with a wide range of tactics. It was during this teach-in that I heard for the first time that the same applied to policing forces globally. GILEE, an Israeli-Atlantan policing exchange program, shared strategies of racist state violence to ensure they could more effectively brutalize those fighting to live safely. Similar “Deadly Exchange” Programs exist between the NYPD and Israeli policing forces, among others. I left this teach-in determined to counter this structurally violent cooperation with our own structurally liberatory collaboration – continuing to learn from the stories we’ve heard and the stories we tell each other.
Neither failure nor victory but a process of liberation
My advice to the next generation of student organizers during a moment like this: Know that the relationship between those pushing for justice and the state and its institutions cracking down to maintain hegemony will be a cycle until we successfully break it.
Until then, know that nothing is a complete victory or a complete failure; instead, challenge yourself to think about who you mobilized, how you raised political consciousness, how you resisted oppressive structures, how you built solidarity, and how you opened up others’ (and your own) eyes, hearts, and souls to another way to live in community. What lessons did you learn?
How did the work of liberation transform you — and how might you consider that transformation, a gift in and of itself?
For now, use the pause after the moment to make the next one more powerful — even beyond what you imagined was possible… Acknowledge the pain and exhaustion wrapped up in you but held with pride for what you accomplished; the friction in the community and the joy; the determined, desperate, disorganized struggling and striving that will always be imperfect; the inconsistent layers of (mis)communication and the depth of all of the emotions tangled together and sinking so deep that you can’t grasp it or sense it let alone heave it up and untangle it and make sense of it the ways you lost yourself in the momentum of community, or lost yourself in the momentum, or lost yourself, or are lost within yourself.
Know grace for your distant critic and your co-struggler. Know your limits and let them lovingly bind you: “This is time for rest.” Do not let them bind so tightly that you choke — on self-doubt, on fourth-guessing, on undeservingness, on the binary/absolutism of success and failure.
Give yourself breadth as you err and continue to struggle, continue to find yourself, as you continue to dream. In the words (that have stuck with me since) of my professor: “Continue to find the things that reaffirm your sumud.” This all constitutes the work of liberation.
