Fine Lands in the West

In February of this year, I went to a small church in southeast Portland, Oregon, to listen to a talk by Paul Reid. I hadn’t met Paul before, nor did I know much about him beyond the subject of his talk. The previous fall, he had set sail as part of the flotilla that tried to make its way to Gaza during the genocide. His boat was boarded by Israeli soldiers, and for a while he was held captive. 

Paul spoke about his experiences. He described the size of the prison cells and the methods employed by the guards: shoving the prisoners, cursing them out, taking every petty opportunity to let them know they were helpless under the control of the Israeli state. He talked about the Palestinian prisoners that he knew were destined for far more grotesque forms of punishment than he, an American citizen, would receive. He described the day consular officials finally came to visit him. He recalled laughing in their faces when they told him that the US had no influence or say over Israeli affairs.

But what struck me most about the talk was the way it began. For a few minutes after he’d been introduced, Paul didn’t say anything about the flotilla, or the Israeli prison, or Palestine. Instead, on a screen at the front of the room, he projected images of old American print advertisements for land along the western ‘frontier’: pristine, fertile country from which the indigenous population was being cleansed, so as to be made ready for settlement by white homesteaders. Ad after ad floated on the screen, celebratory in wording, evangelical in tone, drunk on the prospect of domination.

There’s a particular type of framing of the term ‘Global Majority’ that takes the idea of solidarity as sameness as one of its principal conceits: that there exists an overwhelming overlap in the conditions of the Sahrawi people under Moroccan occupation, the Mexican migrants labouring in California farm country, the Afghanistan wedding party wiped out by the misguided zeal of a US drone military operator. In this way, a set of wildly different conditions, both culturally and geopolitically, become intertwined, and one can speak of something produced rather than expressed. The Global Majority emerges not just as a massive swathe of people currently living on this planet, but as a movement possessed of both agency and a coherence of intent. This is especially important, in a political sense, because it begins to create a larger constituency, one to which the institutional can perhaps be made to bend; or, more usefully, a constituency for which entirely new institutions might be built (it’s difficult to watch the virulent suppression of pro-Palestinian activism in this moment, for example, and not come to the conclusion that one of the central reasons we find ourselves in this situation is because the institutions charged with doing the suppression were never really intended, when push comes to shove, to serve any other purpose). Either way, a new condition is created. And if individual ways of being or specifics of struggle must be flattened to produce this condition, well … it’s a small price to pay.

But as much as this framing helps produce a more cohesive-feeling definition of what Global Majority means, it sidesteps the reality that there is in fact a mind-numbing narrative sameness that already exists. It emerges not from the colonised, though, but the coloniser.

From the single largest genocide in human history, one that decimated the indigenous populations of the Western hemisphere, to the brutal whims of British colonialism. From the wholesale slaughter perpetrated by the Belgians in Congo, to the theft of Black labour and lives in the United States. From an oil-rich emirate’s backing of atrocity after atrocity in Sudan, to a more than seventy-five-year-long ongoing occupation in Palestine. Always, the same stories buttress every system of endless taking: It’s complicated. You don’t know these people like we do. They only understand violence. They made us do it. This is a war between the civilised and the savage. God ordained this. We showed restraint. It wasn’t that bad. It was bad, but it was so long ago. There was no other way. It was necessary. Look away. Just look away.

Anyone who has written about the Gaza genocide during these last three years of relentless killing has had to contend with only the most recent resurrection of these stories. They represent a phantom root system of sorts, an attempt to hold up an image of stability, even while the land is being strip mined to shreds. When authors such as Randa Abdel-Fattah are subjected to the most insidious, bad-faith attacks, constituting a serious effort to destroy both their personal and professional life, it is precisely because the work these authors produce seeks to pull these roots out of the ground and plant other ones in their place.

In this context, solidarity must mean (among its many other meanings, among the sharing of grief and anger, among amplifying the voices of those against whom the worst injustices are enacted, among simply speaking up) a kind of narrative rejection. It’s not tenable to live within the comforting illusion that narratives of domination can happily coexist alongside narratives of justice. This much-hoped-for state of peace and quiet – in which those who scream at the top of their lungs that this endlessly extractive way of living is rendering the planet we occupy uninhabitable can just learn to live and let live alongside the agents, supporters, and beneficiaries of this extractive system – does not exist. 

This is a solidarity that might serve to define the Global Majority, on whom colonialism’s tropes have been imposed, in a way that doesn’t flatten difference, doesn’t make an archetype of the oppressed. And yet it allows one to acknowledge the simple reality that every one of the stories used to justify mass-scale theft and destruction is deeply modular. The argument that the dead Palestinian child would have likely grown up to be a terrorist has been used many times before to justify the slaughter of many different people, and will undoubtably be used again, whether or not the drone used to murder that child eventually makes its way to your local police force. 

Eight years ago, I was on a panel with the author Waubgeshig Rice. The topic was speculative fiction, and one of the questions posed to us had to do with how authors can convincingly envision the post-apocalyptic. Waubgeshig, who is of Anishinaabe and Canadian descent, addressed the idea quite straightforwardly. For the indigenous people in this part of the world, he said, the present is post-apocalyptic. 

I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about that idea recently. For three years and counting, I’ve woken up to see images, video, audio, all manner of documentation of the most horrific crimes imaginable, all paid for with my tax dollars, all endorsed by my elected representatives. A Palestinian man trapped under the rubble begs not to be rescued because his daughter is somewhere under the rubble, too, and he won’t leave her. What is to be said of a world that allows this? How else to describe this, but apocalyptic?

And what is the obligation assigned to those who are spared, those who by the wild luck of privilege get to witness from afar or turn away completely, as though none of this was happening? At the very least, we should be obligated to refuse the stories used to justify every such apocalypse. 

At the end of Paul Reid’s talk in Portland, a young Palestinian woman in the audience stood up to speak. She described the horrors that had been inflicted on her family, and then she urged everyone in the room to do something, anything, right now, not in some distant future. 

That night, no one followed her plea by reminding her that the situation is complicated. No one reached for any rhetorical contrivance that would have allowed all of us in that room, whose tax dollars paid to slaughter that woman’s friends and family, to feel some distance, some remove. The narrative root system of empire is a powerful, burrowing thing. But even the strongest roots need nourishment. And that, at the very least, each and every one of us has the power to withhold.