You can listen to the playlist on Spotify or scroll to the end. Two weeks after October 7, 2023 I had a flight to Ljubljana, Slovenia for the Digital Sovereignty Conference. The night before, I called my mom crying. Ljubljana felt like the very last place in the world I needed to be. The weekend of my trip, a big protest was planned in Bay Ridge. That’s where I needed to be, at the heart of New York’s Palestinian neighborhood, standing in solidarity. At the time, I couldn’t fathom that the genocide would be ongoing for more than a week, or two, or a couple. That there would be countless more protests to attend. This was the time to show up within my community, not to be detached in a very new city. “Do they know about Palestine in Slovenia?” I joked to a friend. I was only comforted by the knowledge that the day I land in Ljubljana, a dear and trusted college friend would be taking the bus from Zagreb to meet me. Almost immediately after we met, my friend was translating graffiti on the walls: “Konec apartheidu!”, “Izrael izvaja genocid”, “Shod za Palestino.” Later that evening, I walked over from my hotel to Metelkova, an autonomous neighborhood a Slovenian friend recommended I visit. As I approached, I saw this large mural outside its walls, a dedication to murdered Palestinian children in Gaza. (To its right, a sound + light installation I couldn’t really parse; I was definitely in the right place.)
Immediately moved, I took a closer look to learn who painted it: Mazen Kerbaj. And a date: October 5-7, 2023. Kerbaj had no idea what was coming so immediately after. A few minutes from my hotel was a halal Bosnian burek street-side spot, and my first dinner launched a truly impressive quantity of bureks per week. The man on the register first saw me walking over in my kuffiyeh from a distance and quickly shouted “FREE PALESTINE!” Not needing to know what prompted his exclamation, the other men in the kitchen quickly followed: Free Palestine! Free Palestine! I thoroughly loved Ljubljana, but as I closely followed the escalations in Gaza, I was also in inevitable horror and misery. Unable to socialize, I left the conference’s opening night early. On the rainy walk back, I stopped by Cukrarna, a sugar factory turned arts museum. To my pleasant surprise, it stood in front of a skatepark under a bridge, and I immediately saw the graffiti: STOP APARTHEID / FREE PALESTINE.
On my last night in Ljubljana, I walked by an anti-gentrification protest outside Rog, a previously squatted factory that served as an autonomous cultural zone until the government evicted its inhabitants in 2021 to turn it into a fancy, more exclusive cultural center. A protestor wearing a Palestinian flag pin told me, “I hope you know that all of us [at the protest] support Palestine, because we stand for justice and equality anywhere in the world.” It was a complicated week in Ljubljana. Insightful workshops and near-panic-attacks in the basketball court outside, inspiring art exhibitions and the newfound distaste for the art I recently loved, beautiful rivers and mountains and the most gory, heart-wrenching videos I have ever seen on my device and everywhere I looked. But the many small shows of solidarity I encountered in a city I never expected to visit or relate to kept me afloat, and kept me close to what mattered most. — Before October 7th, I naively thought the Fall 2023 semester would be the most chaotic semester of my life for - in retrospect - very trivial reasons. I had a trip to Amsterdam two weeks after my Slovenian adventure, and more than my fair share of carbon emissions. In the single North American weekend in between, I took the bus from NY to D.C. to attend the first national march. Whereas others felt empowered or inspired, I felt hollow and wholly insufficient. On my way out, I heard the first song on this playlist, Ounadikom, blasting out of someone’s speakers, and it perfectly matched how I felt. I sang it over and over, and in the coming weeks and months, continued listening to it to no end. (Lyrics & translation here.) In “ounadikom”, or “I call on you”, I found a devout promise and a helpless desperation. The next week, I flew to Amsterdam to attend IDFA, a dream in the making. I excitedly picked up my badge and my merch and on my walk back to the hotel saw that the festival had just put out a statement condemning workers’ use of the slogan “from the River to the Sea”, a dream unravelling. But the shows of solidarity that followed from filmmakers from across the globe reading out solidarity statements, pulling out their films, and reallocating their time to talk about Palestine were my week’s most valuable learning experience. And of course, a protest nearly every day. On my final night, I rushed late to a screening, and saw a vaguely familiar face outside the theatre. “Are you Chris?”, I asked. “No, Charlie.” (Close enough?) I told Charlie I recognized him because I saw the solidarity statement he put out on Instagram to announce his withdrawal of his film from the festival. I sincerely thanked him, and with relief, he said that my timing was fortunate as he’d literally just walked out of reading out a statement and announcing his film’s withdrawal from its international premiere to a large crowd inside that same theatre. Four months later, Charlie’s film had a new international premiere set at New York’s Museum of the Moving Image, and I had to be there. Before opening the festival with his ‘tiny’ film Lateral, he explained that it had been withdrawn from its initial premiere in solidarity with Palestinian activists opposing the genocide in Gaza. He continued, “I still find myself having the same conversations about words, slogans, and artistic expression, while tens of thousands of Palestinians are killed,” and noted that, following a similar controversy at the Berlin Film Festival, its directors tried appealing to the “power of cinema.” “Personally, I have never been less convinced of its power.” Lateral was made over a weekend with no budget when Charlie realized he could reconstruct scenes from cinema history in 3D by quickly alternating the image between the right and left eye. It carried a beautiful and contagious sense of excitement and marvel, and was not at all political, which he said made it feel “jarringly out of step with the state of the world.” He wondered, though, “whether any film can meet the severity of the moment, and the scale of what needs to be done outside of rooms like this one.” — These words stayed with me as I continuously struggled with the insufficiency of everything at my disposal in the face of the horrors of this ongoing genocide. Not just of film, but art more generally. Music, playlists, writing, language itself. Daily protests, our loudest screams, statement after statement after statement. Slogans, metaphors, platitudes, hope itself. Nothing could meet the severity of the moment. For a while I could hardly listen to music, the joys and beauties and sorrows of my usual rotation all felt “jarringly out of step with the state of the world.” So I listened to anthems of Palestinian resistance and solidarity. This playlist starts with Lebanese artist Ahmad Kaabour singing the aforementioned Ounadikom, a call to Palestinians that says I would sacrifice myself for you, and ends with two songs that are basically on here because they sample the title track, referencing the words I couldn’t - and didn’t want to - keep out of my head. Ya Falasteeneya is another folk song speaking to Palestinians: pledging Egyptian Sheikh Imam’s unwavering solidarity. Rajaoui Falastini, by Raja Casablanca’s Ultras, is best sung/chanted in unison by thousands of Moroccan football fans turning the football pitch into an arena of solidarity. Still, nothing could meet the severity of the moment. Not hope, not art, not solidarity. But the moment demanded both that honest outlook and a continuous, escalatory quest to meet its severity nonetheless. With solidarity, with art, with hope, with whatever else we know and do not yet know. — In the months since October 7th, and that confusing trip to Ljubljana, all of us who care about Palestinian life have felt helpless, powerless, and defeated as the occupation and its allies continue murdering, maiming, starving Palestinians in the most horrific ways unimaginable. Truly nothing can possibly console the weight and horror of that reality. But I have learned, over and over, what it is to keep showing up in committed and borderless solidarity. I learned it from strangers and from my closest friends. I learned it in protests from the Brooklyn Museum to Times Square and in student encampments setup soon after the NYPD violently swept another encampment. I learned it from my friends who got arrested and fired protesting big tech companies’ complicity in genocide, my friends who led protests, labour actions, divestment campaigns. And still we must escalate for Gaza. I am learning what it is to show up for those far away and to show up for your own community. For months I passively pondered whether my next newsletter would be about solidarity or friendship, until I realized I wanted to write about the same thing. Friendship lately has meant waiting for long hours outside of 1 Police Plaza, finding each other at chaotic rallies, being there for your people who want to be there for others. It is solidarity on the inter-personal level. And solidarity has been to show strangers the same love and care and respect you would show your dearest friends. As I reflect on recent months, I look back to that night before my flight to Ljubljana and am horrified by the knowledge that I was not going to miss showing up at a New York protest because I would be attending many, many dozens more, and it still won’t be enough. I think back to news that filled me with an all consuming shock and horror and misery with the knowledge that the most horrific headline I have ever seen will continue to be another swipe away, week after week after week for 8 months and counting. I set this newsletter aside for nearly 7 months but in the time since have written various versions of this, on paper and in quickly abandoned corners of my brain. I wanted to sit down and finally write about solidarity, about art, about friendship, about contradiction. I am left with nothing more honest, and disappointing, than the fact that nothing we are doing is meeting the severity of this moment, and the resounding belief that we must keep showing up regardless; in love, in care, in friendship, in solidarity. Today I celebrate Eid and I turn 26 and I remind myself that if I live another 26 years and somehow 26 more, I must show up regardless, in love, in care, in friendship, in solidarity. Even when language, art, hope are insufficient. With whatever light one might offer, as dim or bright as it may be. I do not yet fully know what it means, but I know I must strive for it wherever I am, whoever I am with, and whatever I’m doing. I know I will continue to learn it from those near and far, and I know that Palestine is everywhere. Eid mubarak, friends, and free Palestine. 10 songs (Spotify)
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#20 - ounadikom
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