Ruby Molotov

whizzed past, we liked the look of it, it liquefied death, it was here to stay, it actually had nowhere else to go, was in its last stages now, longed to be revelation, longed to be part of nature making its whistling sounds above, its screaming below. The classrooms exploded. The bits of desks lay about in the dust-filled amnesia. Were we supposed to wake up, or was it never sleep again—sleep a mind blown to bits after each ordnance hits & the craters open… We are so late in this story. Unable to tell our heroes from our tormentors. Unable to be convinced ever again of anything. Convinced. The word like a year in which nothing happened, a day blown off the record—the spree an exhausted teacher unveiling yet again the temporary lesson. You’d think it must be about great love. You’d think it must be about poverty or endgame or the provisional emergency visa nobody ever received in time so no exit from the spree ever occurred… So, no, friend, stranger, when your turn in line brought you to the desk, up front, the teacher was a killer, one of the very best, and as he bent over his desk over his list looking for your name you realized he was your old professor of astronomy, the one who taught you to see the stars— what year was that— the skies were still visible, and the stars, the stars…You are afraid to look up now, the guard towers so full of thirsty lights so eager to make of you a singular example. The paint has chipped off the legs of his table, you can see that through these layers of desert-dust. But once it had gleamed, once it had stood at the front of the class, behind it the huge night sky of the blackboard where he had made his chalkmarks scratch releasing the spidery calculations and then the galaxies… Those marks look now like the tips of rifles, though you hadn’t seen it then, & they were all pointing straight at the class, at you in your row, at us, at our assembly line of questions. We still had questions… You were ready for the blindfold when they pulled it from the drawer. The dark felt silky over your burnt face. You heard the sound of the shovel cutting the earth. Where is your mother. What is that springing forth, that deep inhalation followed by nothing. It’s the trees. Listen to me, think of wind in trees. Yes the drones pass over and this is their wind. But it’s still a precious thing. A pure thing. Wind. It will brush you as though there were leaves, as though there were trees. When is the last time you saw trees. You feel them begin to cut your hair. You listen hard for your new wind, your drone. You imagine the leaves. Their glittering still there under the dust. You can smell the old maps lying on the desk. You hope a rat will find you, you hope your fingers will still feel its small jaws, its minuscule hunger. You remember Saturn—how he’d drawn it, almost giddy, its wings hatching wildly across the blackboard, I lived you say to no one in particular, the key deep in your pocket they’ll never find, yr hand closing round it— & that time I came home late & the door was locked, u think, I slept on the stoop all through the night, I will lie down now, I will take off my shoes, they will put me against the wall, I will leave my mark— & it’s then that the smell arrives of rust, iron, acid & fresh cut roses—a thunder of sweetness. It is your blood as it explodes from you. We hear the bullet. Will it be erased from time itself now the small stony hill in which my village lay, will it bleed out from me now the cool stone floor, the water in the basin, my window onto the olive groves, the pigeons muttering in the lowest limbs— & where will it go where I overhear my father thanking my mother— late at night in the dark kitchen— his thank you, thank you—this clicking of the stars all round them— where will it go, where will it be buried my time, will it rise up in no one ever again as memory, as dream, this moonlight’s scent over the fields & in it the barefoot steps of my father coming to see if I am asleep. And stars falling anytime I look—anytime—like magic—my luck. And mother’s low song in the other room…. You who do not know any longer what song is, or dream, or memory, or the sound of stars—look up—don’t blink—here it is now the slit throat of the sky where the endless beginning keeps pouring itself forth.

In framing class struggle and workers’ counterpower as something that must be exercised transnationally, the CIG reflects an understanding of solidarity not as relation between fixed, stable, and bounded “national” identities, but as the building of dialogic, subaltern alliances that defy national geographies. In this way of thinking, the CIG mirrors Gramsci’s thinking around the making and re-making of identities by means of political alliances and hegemony forged within uneven spatial geographies (Gramsci 1978). By this understanding, explains Featherstone (2012: 7), solidarities are “not just part of the binding together of pre-existing communities”, but “the process of politicization” and conscientization that allows “new political terrains and possibilities … [and] new conceptions of political subjects and actors to emerge”. It is also in this sense, we can posit, that a politics of transnational solidarity must be understood as an organic, generative part of a movement’s capacity to enact the feeling that another world is possible.

A protest demands that we look toward it, but only so that it can reroute our gaze to the thing being protested. The two-step hypostatizes the dynamic speech act of protest, dissevering it from its referential function so that it cannot achieve its goal. The cameras of the mass media turn away from the referent and toward the protest, which is presented to the audience as the actual crisis worthy of our attention, fury, and terror.

Crucially, our predicament has been over-determined by the Western left’s political myopia. The left’s Orientalism and Eurocentrism strengthen a theoretical error of viewing the ‘global North’ as the engine of history, denying people elsewhere their agency, treating the ‘global South’ as peripheral to the real drama elsewhere. On this view the ‘global South’ is the object of forces outside its control, cursed with the wrong politics, mired in traditionalism and so on.

The most important thing masked by this mutual competition, however, is the power relationship inside each solidarity group, behind the shared cause; a relationship by which the solidarity-provider acts as spokesperson, interpreter, and adviser—the creator and director of the cause—while the solidarity recipient is merely a stage actor and implementer. In other words, solidarity conceals the reality that its provider is in fact a custodian, with the recipient in his custody, or under her protection. This is not a healthy and equitable relationship. And even if the recipient, or ward, is not expected to express gratitude openly, they are nonetheless in too weak a position to criticize the paternalist tendencies of their guardian, the cause’s manufacturer. That is, unless they leave the relationship, or revolt against it.

The idea of the future has become a cliché, especially when it comes to understanding and decoding various non-western cultures. According to the Western mindset, a “new” or an unheard or unseen thing in Asia, Africa, or the Arab region is perceived or imposed as the future, and the reason is that many perceive it as an alien coming from a different dimension, so the easiest way to think about their music or art is to brand it as “Future cyber-African post-you name the rest”. This shows a lack of effort to ask, learn and understand and trace the origins and the various factors behind this music and art, (theoretically it’s very idealistic rather than materialistic) and a failure to perceive it as music that belongs to a certain geographical region, where artists use their cultural (and internet) influences through common technology. When it comes to non-western electronic music, the use of the term “future” is reduced to an alien artist doing weird things, or simply the “other”. This “future” is forced on artists whose concepts and music are not even future-based.

improvisational space offered a home for musicians from different racialized groups to build collaborations, relationships, and thus political solidarity, through playing with each other. These relationships then often translated to deepened trust on the streets, wider direct actions, and broader collaborative protests.

Many imagine that the war against the Palestinians was settled in 1948, occasional flare-ups notwithstanding. This elides the experience of Palestinians, for whom the war never ended. Indeed, what Israel experiences as extended periods of calm manifests as uninterrupted siege warfare for the Palestinians of Gaza. Both Israel and the West are only able to ignore this state of war because Palestinians have been so thoroughly dehumanized that their brutal subjugation has been naturalized. To break from this order is violence, to maintain it is peace.

The experts agree that language is power. But how many brilliant books have I read that fully delineate the violent degradation that is capitalism, colonialism, that convincingly examine the histories of unfreedom and incarceration? How many perfect lectures have I attended that reiterate this truth? And yet not a single jail collapsed. This is an earnest question. I am asking in earnest. Do their google docs work but not our books?