Zainab 
Gosh, Martin. We’re a day away from the World Cup final [at the time of recording]. Exciting times, right? I know it’s going to be difficult for you. It’s not England!
Martin
I&#8217;m very excited, it’s all going to come to its culmination! I wanted England, I wanted Mexico. And then I wanted Morocco. None of those three teams have made it. So I will just be watching it as an avid football fan and hoping that the best team wins.
Zainab 
Fantastic. So that <a href="https://twitter.com/mertesakib/status/1598698752574996480">viral video</a> of you, featuring the now famous pairing, “it’s coming home” followed by Falasteen Hurra (“Free Palestine”), has been viewed at least 5.5 million times the last time I checked, and that&#8217;s just one video on Twitter. How does it feel to be an icon at World Cup 2022?
Martin 
Imagine you&#8217;re just going about your daily life minding your own business. And then all of a sudden you have 850 messages on every social media platform, including from people that you haven&#8217;t seen in years. It&#8217;s really bizarre.
I left the England v Wales match full of adrenaline, you know. There was a camera crew. They saw me with my England shirt, the ghutra on my head, and the England flag painted on my face. They probably thought he looks absolutely ridiculous – we should get him on TV. Yeah, so it just kind of took off. I wasn&#8217;t expecting it.
In fact, you know, “never read the comments” is probably the most important rule you should ever stick to if you go viral. I did read those comments. Some people are like “he&#8217;s a plant”, “he&#8217;s actually a fair-skinned Qatari”, “he&#8217;s not from England at all”. Those are just the ones I can repeat. It’s been a whirlwind.
But more than anything, I&#8217;ve been touched by all the support that people have shown, including people from Palestine, who’ve written to me or commented on the video. I think we can see by the support generally at this World Cup in Qatar that, as <a href="https://johnpilger.com/videos/palestine-is-still-the-issue">John Pilger</a> said, “Palestine is still the issue.”

<blockquote class="tiktok-embed" style="max-width: 605px; min-width: 325px;" cite="https://www.tiktok.com/@footballjoe/video/7172604241020833030" data-video-id="7172604241020833030">
<section><a title="@footballjoe" href="https://www.tiktok.com/@footballjoe?refer=embed" target="_blank" rel="noopener">@footballjoe</a> This England fan says Free Palestine 🇵🇸 🎥 Al Jazeera <a title="fyp" href="https://www.tiktok.com/tag/fyp?refer=embed" target="_blank" rel="noopener">#fyp</a> <a title="palestine" href="https://www.tiktok.com/tag/palestine?refer=embed" target="_blank" rel="noopener">#palestine</a> <a title="israel" href="https://www.tiktok.com/tag/israel?refer=embed" target="_blank" rel="noopener">#israel</a> <a title="qatar" href="https://www.tiktok.com/tag/qatar?refer=embed" target="_blank" rel="noopener">#qatar</a> <a title="qatar2022" href="https://www.tiktok.com/tag/qatar2022?refer=embed" target="_blank" rel="noopener">#qatar2022</a> <a title="englandfootball" href="https://www.tiktok.com/tag/englandfootball?refer=embed" target="_blank" rel="noopener">#englandfootball</a> <a title="itscominghome" href="https://www.tiktok.com/tag/itscominghome?refer=embed" target="_blank" rel="noopener">#itscominghome</a> <a title="threelions" href="https://www.tiktok.com/tag/threelions?refer=embed" target="_blank" rel="noopener">#threelions</a> <a title="soccertiktok" href="https://www.tiktok.com/tag/soccertiktok?refer=embed" target="_blank" rel="noopener">#soccertiktok</a> <a title="soccerboy" href="https://www.tiktok.com/tag/soccerboy?refer=embed" target="_blank" rel="noopener">#soccerboy</a> <a title="footballedit" href="https://www.tiktok.com/tag/footballedit?refer=embed" target="_blank" rel="noopener">#footballedit</a> <a title="aljazeera" href="https://www.tiktok.com/tag/aljazeera?refer=embed" target="_blank" rel="noopener">#aljazeera</a> <a title="fypシ" href="https://www.tiktok.com/tag/fyp%E3%82%B7?refer=embed" target="_blank" rel="noopener">#fypシ</a> <a title="fypage" href="https://www.tiktok.com/tag/fypage?refer=embed" target="_blank" rel="noopener">#fypage</a> <a title="♬ original sound - FootballJOE" href="https://www.tiktok.com/music/original-sound-7172604246364408581?refer=embed" target="_blank" rel="noopener">♬ original sound &#8211; FootballJOE</a></section>
</blockquote>
<script async src="https://www.tiktok.com/embed.js"></script>

Zainab
I do sense that there&#8217;s been a shift in consciousness on this issue, even prior to the World Cup. <a href="https://www.hrw.org/report/2021/04/27/threshold-crossed/israeli-authorities-and-crimes-apartheid-and-persecution">Human Rights Watch</a> and <a href="https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/campaigns/2022/02/israels-system-of-apartheid/#:~:text=This%20is%20apartheid.,order%20to%20benefit%20Jewish%20Israelis.">Amnesty International</a> both released reports in the past year or two, calling out Israeli apartheid. I think that&#8217;s the first time that&#8217;s happened. Why do you think it was so important to put Palestine on the agenda?
Martin
I think we&#8217;re seeing a disconnect between local governments in the Arab world, and their relations with Israel, and what people on the ground are saying and feeling. If we&#8217;re talking about the UK or the European context, I really think there&#8217;s been a shift in attitudes and even a softening in mainstream media, which a couple of decades ago was just ardently 100% staunchly pro-Israel. Many years ago, people who would talk about Palestine were often put into one little box. “You’re only complaining because you&#8217;re Muslim,” or “you&#8217;re only complaining because you&#8217;re a far-left trot”. That&#8217;s not the case anymore.
Zainab
And you&#8217;ve been to Palestine yourself. What was that like?
Martin
Palestine? Wow. Palestine was an amazing experience for me. I went about four or five years ago. It touched me on an emotional level, in a big way. You know, I went there, because I’d always wanted to visit. I was shown around by a local Palestinian guide, I went and met many Palestinian people, and I&#8217;m not shy – if they don&#8217;t speak the same language as me, I still try and get into conversations.
You just see an incredible strength in the Palestinian people in a way that is so inspiring. They face some of the harshest conditions, their lives are made to be very, very difficult. I spoke with one guy, and it’s something very simple but touching, he&#8217;s like, I&#8217;d love to be able to take my kids to the zoo, but I&#8217;ve not been able to get a permit, because the zoo’s on the other side of the separation wall. Going there and seeing things for yourself, with your own eyes, is a completely different kettle of fish.
Zainab 
Were there any towns that stood out to you?
Martin
One of the areas that, for sure, was the most impactful was Hebron. You have the Palestinian markets at the bottom with all the traders, then you have literally above them, the settlers. So when I went there with my guide, he took me up as far as he could go, to the entrance of the settlement. And, you know, he is from Palestine and his great, great, great grandparents were too, and he&#8217;s not allowed in. I just kind of rock up as a tourist with a British passport, and they let me in, which for a start made me think “there’s something wrong about that, but okay”.
So you go in there and… all of Palestine has gone through great injustice, but Hebron felt like next level. And then, you know, we started to talk to people, some of the shop sellers in the market, and they tell stories about the settlers throwing faeces and urine down from up there, and all sorts of things about police brutality. People being taken away in the middle of the night. Kids not just being attacked, but dying. Just absolutely heartbreaking.

Zainab 
Really heartbreaking. Okay, so back to football for a moment. We all know the stereotypes around being a football fan, not least an England football fan! Always getting drunk and causing mayhem. Just wondering what your perspective is on that from the stands?
Martin
I&#8217;ve been going to England football matches for about 20 years, possibly more. You know, a lot of the time the loudest or most extreme example of something is the one that&#8217;s the most newsworthy, but that&#8217;s not really representative. When we&#8217;re talking about England fans specifically, the vast majority are well behaved, they don&#8217;t get into fights, they don&#8217;t get in trouble.
Over the last 20 years or so, I’ve seen a change. For a start, we&#8217;ve got a much more diverse football team now, but we&#8217;ve also got more diverse fans going into the game. The British media likes to make out that the only fans in the world that have a problem with hooliganism is England, and that&#8217;s not true. England is not even in the top three worst. It did have a great problem with it in the 1980s and beforehand, but we don&#8217;t have the same levels today as many parts of Latin America, as Indonesia, as many others. That’s why it was great to have <a href="https://www.reuters.com/lifestyle/sports/no-british-fans-arrested-world-cup-report-2022-12-15/">read the news</a> that there wasn&#8217;t a single arrest of any British fans at Qatar. I was there. People were just having a good time, smiling, laughing, just supporting their football team.

In particular, I want to say, the Moroccan and the Iranian fans. Wow! You know, I was lucky enough to go to a game featuring both teams. Let&#8217;s talk about the England v Iran game. 6-1 down. And the Iranian fans were still jumping up and down, they were singing… I don&#8217;t think there&#8217;s many nations in the world that when they&#8217;re 6-1-down are still drowning out their opponents, and they were, so all credit to them. That was fantastic.
The World Cup is kind of like this international party atmosphere, it&#8217;s people getting together, having coffees, exchanging ideas. You know, I made a friend at a World Cup in South Africa that I then ended up working with. Qatar is very much a coffee culture kind of place and I love coffee, you know, having a sit down and just talking about the world and talking about life is amazing.
Zainab 
I love coffee too, so we’ll need to meet somewhere in the world.
Martin
Probably, let&#8217;s do that.

Zainab 
With football at home, there have been instances of racism, particularly when it comes to Black players, or the problem of Islamophobia. How do you reconcile those kinds of contradictions in football?
Martin
Yeah, I mean, it&#8217;s very interesting. I&#8217;ve had messages from many British Muslims directly, and somebody said they didn&#8217;t feel that they could support England until my video. Pretty mind-blowing to me. There&#8217;s definitely been issues, like at the <a href="https://www.skysports.com/football/news/12016/12360852/fans-in-england-surveyed-on-racism-in-football-after-abuse-of-england-players-following-euro-2020-final#:~:text=Over%2070%20per%20cent%20of,of%20Euro%202020%20in%20June.">Euros</a>, although I think that actually says more about the organising and lack of policing at that particular event.
I&#8217;m very aware of the fact that I wouldn&#8217;t necessarily see a lot of racism. I don&#8217;t want to be the white guy that just says, there&#8217;s no racism here. What I can say for sure, as somebody who used to work for a social media company, a lot of that is because you&#8217;re clicking on things, and we&#8217;re being polarised, and extreme positions are being given a platform that they wouldn&#8217;t have got before.
I remember when BBC Panorama did a special on hooliganism after England fans were <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/football/2003/apr/27/newsstory.sport5">banned from travelling</a> to the Euro 2004 decider in Turkey. Fast forward 20 odd years later, and you’ve got multiple England fans, shouting “Free Palestine” on TV. That, to me, is indicative of how things have changed. Is there racism among some of our fans? Sure. That&#8217;s because England fans are a reflection of society. I think some of these things are not necessarily a football issue, they’re more of a society issue. And so whatever problems are in society, well, obviously, they&#8217;re going to be reflected when you get a stadium of 80,000 people together.

Zainab
What team do you support at home, by the way?
Martin
I&#8217;m a Liverpool fan, for my sins.
Zainab
Liverpool fans will always have the exemplary legacy of <a href="https://platformonline.uk/posts/making-doodles-and-recording-history-hamja-ahsan-on-diy-cultures-2017">campaigning at Hillsborough</a> for 20 years. Could you tell us a little bit about that, or how football intersects with politics in that way?
Martin
Yeah, absolutely. Well, I am a ‘wool’ as they call me in Liverpool, ‘<a href="https://www.liverpoolecho.co.uk/news/liverpool-news/origin-woolyback-what-makes-someone-22693259">a wooly back</a>’. So I&#8217;m from the outskirts in Cheshire. People back home are incredibly political, especially in Liverpool where I spent a lot of my youth, in a way that they aren&#8217;t in the rest of the country. So for a very working class, socialist city, like Liverpool, to have the kind of issues that we had with <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/football/2021/oct/21/the-great-betrayal-how-the-hillsborough-families-were-failed-by-the-justice-system">Hillsborough</a>, which is not just an incredible human tragedy, with the <a href="https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-merseyside-61079095">loss of 97 lives</a> now. But also the terrible injustice that happened right afterwards, whether that&#8217;s from disgusting rag newspapers (I won&#8217;t even mention the name of) maligning Liverpool fans, playing on all sorts of negative stereotypes about Liverpool fans – stealing money off corpses, urinating on policemen – these were 100% lies. I was very young at the time, but there was somebody at my school who lost a family member, so this is something that&#8217;s personal for me as well. Finally, it was given away that it wasn&#8217;t the fans, it was <a href="https://www.reuters.com/article/uk-britain-hillsborough-idUKKCN0XN14W">the police that were at fault</a>. Now, there&#8217;s been no criminal proceedings against any police officers in particular, but yeah, it was a big deal.

The people of Liverpool are very strong people. They are salt of the earth kind of people. They care about other people, they are collectivists. Whether it&#8217;s the Dockers Liverpool Football Club, which has had a strong association with socialism over the years. Or whether it’s Bob Shankly, talking about his favourite type of socialism, or <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/football/gallery/2008/dec/03/1">Robbie Fowler lifting up his shirt</a> after a goal to show support with the striking Dockers, you know, all the way to today. Different views on modern-day politics compared to the rest of the country, <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/aug/27/liverpool-sun-boycott-remain-vote-hillsborough-disaster-eu">different voting patterns</a>, when it comes to party politics or Brexit, then all the way to today where we&#8217;ve got the Egyptian king – Mo Salah, Mo Salah.
Liverpool is already famous for being a very multicultural and accepting city, but ever since he&#8217;s arrived, the <a href="https://www.skysports.com/amp/football/news/11669/11734787/mohamed-salah-signing-has-reduced-islamophobia-and-hate-crime-rates-in-liverpool-study-finds">rates of Islamophobia are reduced</a> – what better way to prove or to show that football can be a uniting force. Mo Salah prays on the field, which for many people is the first time they&#8217;ve ever seen a Muslim pray. So I think that football has a way of breaking down barriers, of bringing people together. Having one of the best players in the world, come on to the pitch, score a goal, and then get down and pray in front of everyone is really touching. And that builds relations that no politician, no PR company, nobody can do.

Zainab
True! Returning to the World Cup for a moment. There’s been significant attention on human rights issues and workers’ rights issues in Qatar, and I guess the scale of these kinds of issues are unbelievable. What were your thoughts on World Cup 2022 being held there?
Martin
Football is the beautiful game and it’s a global sport. So if we really want to be taken seriously in saying that it is a sport around the world, that means we need to host tournaments and games around the world, and we need to accept that not every country is the same. Some countries have different beliefs. Some countries have different religions. Some countries have different ways of viewing the world.
I think Qatar gets spoken about in a way that other places don&#8217;t, you know. I don&#8217;t remember all these cries of boycotts, or “don&#8217;t show the opening ceremony” when it comes to the Beijing Olympics or Russia. All sorts of potential issues there, the <a href="https://platformonline.uk/tag/uyghur">treatment of the Uyghur people</a> in particular.
We’ve really picked on Qatar. It&#8217;s a small country, but a rich country too. It&#8217;s also a country that the UK and Europe does a lot of business with, we all get our gas from Qatar. So why are we picking on football – is it just because football is a soft target? So are we saying that we should not put the opening ceremony on, but our politicians continue to receive financial donations from Qatar? Germany itself did a <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/nov/29/germany-agrees-15-year-liquid-gas-supply-deal-with-qatar">15-year gas supply deal</a> right after that famous photo of the footballers covering their mouth. So what are we expecting exactly? I just don&#8217;t think football fans need to be the ones that suffer for their politicians being the ones that are doing all sorts of deals.
Zainab
Did anyone buy you a ticket to the World Cup final?
Martin
No, no one bought me a ticket sadly!
Zainab
What next for you? Are you going to <a href="https://platformonline.uk/author/martin">write for the platform again</a>, sometime?
Martin
Yeah, I mean, I&#8217;ll just keep on doing my thing. I think I will write for the platform again, that&#8217;s a good idea. I miss my creative outlets. I will just have to find the right topic!
Zainab
We can’t wait. Thank you so much for your time.
This interview took place on 17 December 2022. This is a shortened transcript edited by <a href="https://platformonline.uk/author/zainab-rahim">Zainab Rahim</a>.

Martin_Zainab_cropped

Our editor Zainab Rahim sat down with the World Cup viral sensation Martin Near to discuss football, politics and the many shades of an international sports tournament.

“Free Palestine” viral England fan gives us an insider account of World Cup 2022 at Qatar

Najma Sharif
Hi, I’m Najma. I&#8217;m a culture writer. And when I say culture, I mean, I write about everything from film and music to politics. I try to analyse and theorise about the world in the ways I can. Aside from that, I guess I would be a critical thinker and Somali woman living in the US.
Shadee Malaklou 
It&#8217;s nice to meet you, Najma. I’m Dr Shadee Malaklou. I am the founder and inaugural director of the <a href="https://www.berea.edu/bhc/">bell hooks centre</a> of Berea College. I&#8217;m also the chair of the Women&#8217;s Gender and Sexuality Studies Department. I am a scholar of Black feminism and Black liberation thought in the vein of Franz Fanon, and I actually read Fanon as a Gender Studies text, much through the lens of bell hooks and other Black feminist writers. It&#8217;s a real joy to be here. Thank you for having me.
Najma 
Oh, nice! Fanon, I could talk about him all day. So where am I going to begin? In an interview, bell hooks once said that the line between culture and political writing was that the intent of political writing is to change how people think about their political reality, whereas with cultural criticism, the goal is to illuminate something that is already there. hooks is known for engaging in both.
Shadee 
I think bell was really invested in the feminist politic of making the personal political. I once asked her – I had the supreme pleasure and privilege of befriending her – if she would describe herself as a Black feminist, and bell said, “No, I&#8217;m a feminist”. Without the additive. And she took that seriously, insofar as she wanted to use feminism as an anti-racist analytic to think about the way the world worked, and her place in it, and our place in it.
She named those intersecting worldings “imperialist white supremacist capitalist patriarchy”, and later, in the conversation with Laverne Cox, added “cis” and “hetero” to patriarchy. This is what is especially powerful about bell’s work: she locates, with precision, the intersections that others abstract. When we abstract intersectionality, we misunderstand it as an analytic of intersecting experiences of oppression. And that&#8217;s not what it means to analyse and really disarticulate the intersecting structures of oppression that bell named and agitated against, both in her writing and in her person.

bell was a contrarian. That much I can recount from sharing time and space and conversation with her. To those ends, I would actually argue that the cultural and political merged for bell, because to change how people “think about their political reality” requires helping folks see “what’s already there”. And I do think that social media is one way that we can help people see past “imperialist white supremacist capitalist cis-hetero-patriarchy” in order to re/think their political possibilities. However, bell did not personally engage social media platforms, and warned that “social media is clutter and life is already full of clutter”. So, I guess what I’m saying is that social media can be the space of vapid filtered selfies and images of food (as “clutter”), but it can also be the place where we rattle and rage.

bell wrote about popular culture as the political, and, before she fell ill, invited well-known folks to her Institute at Berea College to do this kind of thinking with her – like Emma Watson, Laverne Cox, Cornel West and Darnell Moore – all of whom (perhaps, excluding Emma Watson) straddle cultural and political critique in a public-facing way.
One thing that bell talked about a lot was her <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/music/2016/may/11/capitalism-of-beyonce-lemonade-album">critique of Beyoncé</a>. Until the day she died, she was upset about the amount of vitriol she received because of writing that. bell was a spitfire and a dissident, even (especially) when it got her in trouble. She was a critic of our time. I become quite frustrated when the public opines and obsesses about her love ethic and forgets the critic that she was. They really de-politicise what she means by love. But for bell, love is the way and justice is the destination. There can be no justice without love, and no love without justice. And so even as she drags Beyoncé, there&#8217;s a love there. And I have to be honest, I was one of her closest friends, and she dragged me too, sometimes. But it was always with care.
Najma
I remember the response to the Beyoncé essay, talking about criticism and love, right? Was that part of her radical approach to this fearless, bold critique too? Was love what empowered her to put herself out there, and face the vitriol, or was it just the love of the criticism? The theory, the thought, like, how did she think about that?

20220318_shadee-malaklou_christopher-rice-34

20220318_Shadee Malaklou_Christopher Rice-34

Shadee 
On the voicemail recording that bell took with her from home to home in Berea, she says, “All awakening to love is spiritual awakening”, which is a quote from her book All About Love, but it&#8217;s also inspired by the writings of the Sufi poet Rumi. For her, love is a verb, an action, a community, a care, an accountability, a possibility. And all of these things are what creates an anti-racist feminist praxis for addressing the intersections that bell critiques.
I do think that she came to love out of her Buddhist practice. And that&#8217;s something that she found a little later in life, not in opposition to theory, but as its complement. In an interview about the first time that she met Thich Nhat Hanh, bell recounts that she came to him with anger and rage, and that he told her to use that anger as <a href="https://www.lionsroar.com/bell-hooks-on-meeting-thich-nhat-hanh/">“compost for her garden”</a>. Which is to say, theory (bell’s garden of possibility) was made possible when she turned her anger and rage into love. The two co-existed for her.
Najma
I’m very curious as to the boldness in her critique that we don&#8217;t see today, because if it is coming from a place of love, knowing that source is important.
Shadee 
bell was really skilled at making academic jargon accessible. We see that sometimes with academics who write for the public. Imani Perry and Cornel West do this, and I think that’s why they were invited to the Institute to have conversations with bell, because they similarly had one foot in the public sphere. They weren&#8217;t talking in this echo chamber of academia – a masturbatory practice in which one only speaks to other people who know their language, as a means of self-aggrandisement. You know, Dionne Brand says, “Black people are people without a translator”. And I think what is so beautiful about bell is that she tried to put words to something that is outside of language and its structuring logics of grammar – something that didn&#8217;t exist before she described it.
&nbsp;

Najma
I have this really big book of contemporary writers, and I found an interview with bell hooks and Cornel West, when she started moving away from the more academic work, the early stuff, and he called her a “Black prophet”. What do you think of that?
Shadee
I do think bell was a prophet. Absolutely. To name just one example: ten years ago, at the National Women&#8217;s Studies Association Conference in Puerto Rico, she said that, given the choice, white women will always choose their race over their gender. And then <a href="https://platformonline.uk/tag/donald-trump">Trump</a> happened.
Najma
So happy I asked that. I was very afraid of dehumanising her or making her out to be some sort of deity.
Shadee
She is an elder, an ancestor now, so I feel she was part of a Black prophetic tradition. I think that&#8217;s what Cornel West was getting at, too. That it wasn&#8217;t just that she was a prophet in the popular sense; she was engaging this prophetic tradition of call and response, and radical critique and liberation theology, to make her interventions known.
Najma
How did bell hooks approach transgression in the classroom? I saved this quote where she says, “The academy is not paradise. But learning is a place where paradise can be created. The classroom with all its limitations remains a location of possibility.” So…
Shadee
Yes, thank you for that quote! So Fred Moten, a cultural critic and Performance Studies professor at NYU, describes the classroom as a potential <a href="https://www.google.co.uk/books/edition/_/sNGVmAEACAAJ?hl=en">“undercommons”</a>: a space of possibility within but not of the university. Another thinker, who publishes under the pen name ‘la paperson’, describes this mis/education as a project of the “third university”. <a href="https://www.societyandspace.org/articles/on-black-negativity-or-the-affirmation-of-nothing">Jared Sexton</a> talks about how under-the-radar, life-affirming socio-political spaces can exist: these are “not lived in the world that the rest of the world lives in, but [are]… underground, in outer space”, or underwater as the case may be. So for example, returning to Beyoncé, in Lemonade, she curates Black life almost entirely underwater, in an underworld where Black persons can actually breathe. I think that bell created a space in the classroom for those kinds of questions.

Najma 
It’s interesting you mention these third spaces, because bell hooks can be attributed to a lot of digital feminists, really. A lot of people learned about her work online. Was that something that she thought about, like how her work came into the Tumblr sphere? Someone was saying there is no golden age of Tumblr or digital feminism without bell hooks, and that&#8217;s how I came across her work, on Tumblr at 16 years old.
Shadee 
That’s so interesting, she would want nothing to do with that.
Najma 
I know she hates social media. [Laughs]
Shadee 
Yes, and she hated the computer. It was her sister and I who answered bell’s emails and received her correspondence. She didn&#8217;t have a mobile phone either; she only had a house line.

Najma 
I guess I&#8217;m talking about how the digital space becomes a space to learn. You know, she talked about transgressing academia, and a lot of folks study online and come to terms with her work online.
Shadee 
I agree with you, even if bell wouldn’t. I think that virtual and social media spaces can be a location of the Otherwise that bell wanted – an underground outside of the white gaze. Or, the space of an “oppositional gaze”, to use bell’s own language. It is very much a space where you can make your own possibilities. And to make your own possibilities is transgressive.
Having said that, we must beware – and I think that this is what bell feared – of how those spaces are appropriated. Representation will not save us. We see this with Black Twitter, for example. Spaces like Black Twitter are no longer sacred. They are available to woke, virtue-signal plucking and retweeting. bell was very much against that. Once usurped in this way, Black spaces are no longer the underground, undetectable, and yes, transgressive Otherwise of Black mutuality and care – those things that make Black life possible.
Najma 
I remember witnessing the beginning of all this, and it was that safe space for Black women. Black non-binary people, plus-size Black women, Black Muslims, where there was nuance in the discussions being had at the time, and now it&#8217;s very much what you describe.
I want to follow through a line of where all this leads to, like what&#8217;s going to be the future of this? I hate the word “wokeism” but it’s the best way to describe the kind of virtue-signalling, grandstanding, self-righteousness that happens online with young people. Because when I think of bell hooks I think of intersectionality, nuance. I think of not looking for the most oppressed person in the room – there’s also solidarity, right?
Shadee 
Well, bell was very concerned towards the end of her life about feminism, and that feminism was dying. She was very into feminist sisterhood beyond racial distinction.
Najma 
A lot of what I&#8217;m seeing happening today is people trying to re-package misogynistic white supremacist patriarchal dynamics as radical. Like all the girls are saying they want to be housewives right now, and it’s like, are we in the ‘50s? Um, I think we already went through that wave of feminism?
Shadee 
But also, which women have the privilege to be a housewife? Feminists of colour have held white feminism accountable for precisely this privilege. <a href="https://platformonline.uk/posts/we-need-to-talk-about-claudia-jones">Claudia Jones</a>, for example, and Toni Cade Bambara, to list another example, implored that we “get our house in order”– that we think first about our own participation in “imperialist white supremacist capitalist cis-hetero-patriarchy” before we go lead a march or participate in some movement out there. What about the Black and brown women who are cleaning these feminist activists’ homes, who these white feminists are paying under the table – in other words, not a living wage – so that they can go out and climb this patriarchal ladder at the behest of capitalism? “<a href="https://thefeministwire.com/2013/10/17973/">Lean in</a>”, and all that.

Najma 
And then there&#8217;s the other facet: this isn&#8217;t a reality at all because men aren’t even making money – they&#8217;re not even the capitalist patriarchs that they used to be.
Shadee 
Black men certainly aren&#8217;t.
Audre Lorde says Black people were “<a href="https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/147275/a-litany-for-survival">never meant to survive</a>”, and I think she means not just slavery, but its afterlife. People weren&#8217;t paid living wages on purpose, so they would starve and die out. I think it&#8217;s very, very intentional that communities of colour, especially Black communities, cannot find work that makes life possible.
Najma 
I would think that intersectional feminist lens, that nuanced, caring, holistic viewpoint of the world would come back as people struggle, but instead, people are reverting back to harmful ways of thinking, because they&#8217;re realising they didn&#8217;t benefit from the virtue signalling. They benefit more from performing, I guess, heteronormativity, hegemonic ways of living, like playing into these housewife dynamics. I feel very alienated as a Black Muslim woman, right now, so I&#8217;ve just been thinking a lot about how to make a u-turn on the thinking. What are we gonna have to do?…cause it’s bad out here.
Shadee 
There&#8217;s several strands to what you just said. I&#8217;m going to try to tease them out.
You talk about Black men and youth: bell was very, very invested in the children&#8217;s novels that she wrote. The thing that she was most concerned about at the end of her life was that she wanted to not write academic books, but more children&#8217;s novels. She wrote novels specifically about Black boys. She wanted Black boys to feel that they could be tender and soft.
The second thing I want to say is I actually see a different move from what you do in terms of romantic dynamics and gender and sexuality. As Hari Ziyad says, “<a href="https://afropunk.com/2017/07/my-gender-is-black/">My gender is Black</a>,” because gender in Black culture has always been fluid. Black genders and sexualities are not imagined as modern or postmodern, in other words, at the apex of human civilisation and progress. Instead, we locate them in “the bush”, in a time before human time, marked by sexual excess and gender ambiguity.
I think a lot of sex/gender performance in communities of colour, such as what you’re describing, is an attempt to climb that ladder of civilisation through white mimicry, to appeal to whiteness in order to accrue what Fanon describes as <a href="http://www.critical-theory.com/frantz-fanon-argues-no-being-through-others-for-people-of-color-in-1952/">“ontological resistance”</a>: the human recognition that makes secondary markers of identity like gender and sexuality cohere.
So, you go to any non-white country and the first thing that you see at the pharmacy is skin-lightening creams and hair removal products. Communities of colour have an obsession with laser hair removal and electrolysis, and an obsession with nose jobs, specifically, aquiline noses. I don’t think that this is just about being “marriage material” or having romantic sexual appeal. I think that it&#8217;s about having white feminine appeal specifically.
In terms of what bell might say about this, I encourage everyone to revisit her first book, taken from Sojourner Truth’s refrain, <a href="https://www.plutobooks.com/9780861043798/aint-i-a-woman/">“Ain&#8217;t I a woman”</a>.
Najma 
It&#8217;s very interesting that you say all that is for white appeal. Because there&#8217;s an entire genre on TikTok right now of women who teach each other etiquette and how to dress. And they&#8217;re getting nose jobs, and the amount of money they spend on just everything, filler, extensions. They&#8217;re teaching you where to grab the champagne flute from, because, you know, we all do that every day (!)
Shadee 
Do you think that this is about respectability? Respectability politics is always white. I was never invited to cotillion [a ‘ball’ in which children are taught etiquette] when I was growing up in multiculturalist Southern California. Yes, even (especially) in a liberal haven, one must perform the trappings of whiteness.
Najma 
Respectability politics is making a huge comeback, like for sure – there&#8217;s a whole culture of it – men and women, all genders, all races, across religions.
Shadee 
I’m not on TikTok so I feel like an idiot.

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Najma 
Don’t come! You don&#8217;t have to do that. [Laughs]
It has damaged my brain! But yeah, that was very illuminating because it definitely ties together something I have been witnessing in politics and culture and social media.
So, what do you think are bell hooks’ most underrated books and essays?
Shadee
I like Bone Black, mostly because she talks a lot (and lyrically) about her childhood in that book. I also like Appalachian Elegy, because in it she attributes her dissident feminism not to the cosmopolitanism of (post)modernity, but to the culture of hillbilly folks in the “Kentucky backwoods”, who she describes as her “ancestors and kin”. bell was Appalachian, but we don&#8217;t think of her that way, because she&#8217;s Black. Appalachia is imagined as this white coal mine region. There are plenty of Black and Indigenous Appalachians. bell was Indigenous as well, which again, we don&#8217;t talk about because she&#8217;s Black, and Black almost cancels out anything else. So, I think her books about growing up in Kentucky are really meaningful.
Najma
Before you dip on us, I wanted to know more about what bell was like as a friend and as a colleague?
Shadee 
Oh, she was a spitfire, and she was a gossip. She was obsessed with Juicy Fruit gum. I’d buy it for her in bulk. And she didn&#8217;t like the sugar free kind or the kind in a canister; she liked the old school Juicy Fruit gum packets. Before Juicy Fruit, she was obsessed with peppermints, specifically, soft fluffy peppermints. Not the hard kind.
She was the first person who called me in the morning and the last person who called me at night. And she&#8217;d want me to bring her coffee in the morning. And I&#8217;d be like, “bell, I have to teach!”, then she&#8217;d call me fifteen times during my class because she wanted a McDonald&#8217;s cheeseburger.
bell was in a lot of pain towards the end of her life. And she could be – well, she described me in this way, but I think this applies to her too – “strident”. But, you know what, I loved that about her. I loved that she was a truth teller. It was her love language. A tough love, but love. She wasn’t airing dirty laundry; she was curating an honest, intentional, beloved feminist community.

I would sit with her as she devoured mystery novels. I think that the kind of friendship we had gave me a lot of love, because we would sit there, and she would be reading in silence or napping. And I would be working. And it was a kind of friendship where you didn&#8217;t have to talk. You know, there was an ease there.
She said it like it is and took no prisoners. You knew when she loved you, even when she knocked you around, even when her loving and doting gaze turned into her trademark side-eye. I loved her, too, and I&#8217;ll miss her forever.
Najma
Wow, that&#8217;s… wow. Thank you so much.
Shadee 
Thank you. I&#8217;d love to be in conversation again soon.
Najma
That&#8217;d be really dope.

&nbsp;
<a href="https://www.najmasharif.com/">Najma Sharif</a> is a culture and politics writer based in the USA. <a href="https://www.berea.edu/wgs/faculty-and-staff/dr-m-shadee-malaklou/">Dr Shadee Malaklou</a> is the founder and inaugural director of the bell hooks center of Berea College. This interview took place on 25 February 2022. This is a shortened transcript edited by <a href="https://platformonline.uk/author/td">Theodora Danylevich</a> and <a href="https://platformonline.uk/author/zainab-rahim">Zainab Rahim</a>.

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Featured photo: bell hooks speaks on campus at UW-Madison / University of Wisconsin-Madison Archives Photo Collection

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Dr Shadee Malaklou, director of the bell hooks center at Berea College, speaks with journalist Najma Sharif, sharing insights into bell hooks&#8217; life and work in light of our current social moment.

The critic of our time: An interview on bell hooks’ life, love and legacy

لبنانُ! أَوَّلُكَ الدّنيا، وآخِرُكَ الدنيا&#8221; 
&#8220;وبعدَك لا أُفْقٌ ولا شُهُبُ 
الياس أبو شبكة (١٩٠٣-١٩٤٧)
“Lebanon, you are the beginning of the world and the end of the world 
And beyond you, there are neither horizons nor meteors” (author’s translation) 
– Elias Abou Chabakeh, Lebanese poet (1903-1947)

I remembered Abou Chabakeh’s lines, saturated in deep-seated parochialism and singular self-sufficiency, when I introduced my Brit Lit students to worldmaking, imagined and forged by literature and art. This concept draws on the work of the American philosopher Nelson Goodman (1906-1988), who sees in cultural expressions a confluence of material and intellectual forces shaping and conditioning real and fictional worlds – their boundaries, their past, present, and future. To Abou Chabakeh, writing in the aftermath of France’s imperialist formation of Greater Lebanon in 1920, the fledgling nation-state contained the world in its entirety: a world in a poem. Quite tellingly, Abou Chabakeh’s planetary fantasy of national triumph is completely detached from the larger Arab struggle for decolonisation. His ideal stands alone: insular, superior, wall-erecting – one that I would escape as far as I could: socially, intellectually, and emotionally.
Teaching is like that, sometimes; it infuses memories into the texts we are mining. At its core, teaching is a form of listening – listening to others and sometimes, listening to the ghosts that haunt us. Abou Chabakeh’s nationalist poetry haunts me. I, a child of the Civil War, recall reciting this nostalgic, nativist incantation as a quasi-pledge of allegiance to a venerated world I arrived into when it had already been lost. By tracing the vocabulary of empire, borders and nation-building threading through British literary history, I reflect on the foundational fictions that the patriotic poetry of Abou Chabakeh tells itself about Lebanon and its place in the world. I thought I left this world behind, ossified and mythified, and I resent its undiminished tug on my psyche.
It seems apt that I started planning this course, one that promises to cross boundaries and generic time periods, merely weeks after returning from a harrowing trip to visit my ailing dad in Lebanon. You see, for the last few years, my country of origin has suffered calamities big and small, tragic and sometimes bordering on the farcical: from medicine shortage, to a fuel crisis, to price inflation, the list of state-sanctioned crises grows by the day. Amid rampant political and financial corruption, the losses, the ruins are hard to tally. My parents, like so many, many others, live a life of perpetual precarity: they have lost their lives’ savings; they purchase privately-hauled water; they ration their food; they self-medicate; they queue up for long hours to buy gasoline, cars clogging the highway. Perhaps metaphorically, their once happy, healthy chickens stopped laying eggs. They tell me, even if unconvincingly, that their lives are in God’s hands. Mashallah and alhamdulillah.

In preparation for my trip, I buy vitamin supplements and painkillers in bulk. I order rechargeable flashlights and batteries online. I stock my suitcases with mundane items like deodorant, shampoo, and dish soap. I bring my mother an assortment of bonbons and chocolates, now delicacies she cannot afford. I resist the urge to compare myself to a character in a dystopian novel. Fictive hellscapes are my community&#8217;s daily reality. There is no catharsis here – only a raw and visceral collision with a damaged world.
Like Abou Chabakeh fantasy of a cosmic Lebanon, Beowulf’s Herot, the fictional mead-hall where major events in the early medieval poem take place, is construed as the “wonder of the world”. I tell my students we should feel uneasy about the concept of imago mundi, or a place as the image of the world. Mythologising a place, idealising a homeland, whether it is Herot, Lebanon, or the United States, engenders hierarchy. If only a select few are deemed privy to this fantastical, edenic topography, then a de facto need for border policing and criminalisation follows suit. Put differently, border-making justifies racist violence to ensure that those considered unworthy and disposable in this hierarchy of differentiation are denied entry into this fantastical world of wonder and abundance.
My students are understandably perplexed. We are, after all, troubling the dance of power, knowledge, and resistance between the privileged and the deracinated, the entitled and the non-entitled.

The jolt of recognition returns in our lesson on pre-modern cartography, which is inspired by <a href="https://youtu.be/RGgRgHJ9AhE">Nedda Mehdizadeh</a>’s capacious pedagogy. My class examines the performative speech act of putting the word “America” on <a href="https://www.loc.gov/rr/geogmap/waldexh.html">Martin Waldseemüller&#8217;s world map</a> for the first time in 1507 as a form of violent worldmaking. Indeed, the act of naming is a power move; it inscribes the settler colonial project of white Europeans in the Americas into existence. It is an origin story, a “birth certificate” as the Library of Congress calls it, predicated on the genocide of Indigenous populations, the forced migration and labour of enslaved Africans, and the extraction of land resources. More importantly, the fiction of totality that maps communicate constitutes an act of “worlding” (cf. <a href="https://postcolonial.net/wp-content/uploads/2019/11/spivak_readingarchive.pdf">Spivak 1985</a>); one that erases the memory, subjectivity, and geography of non-white people under the holistic banner of the “world”. The same imperial forces that legitimised settler colonialism in 1492, the year Christopher Columbus reached the Americas, arbitrarily divided the Middle East after the collapse of the Ottoman empire at the outset of the twentieth century. The French and English, as victors of World War I, performed a similar act of domination that reordered the world and cemented white European imperialism at the top of the global hierarchy. They surveyed lands and drew borders across Greater Syria that aligned with their self-interest and crushed native world-building aspirations. By its very essence, the long history of map-making tells a recurrent story of power and displacement.

Further on, when we look at the <a href="https://www.themappamundi.co.uk/mappa-mundi/">Hereford Mappa Mundi</a> (ca. 1300) and <a href="https://www.nationalgeographic.org/encyclopedia/al-idrisi/">Il-Idrisi’s world map</a> (1154) side by side, my students and I grapple with what it means to have two maps that position different geographical places as their focal centres – Jerusalem in the first, and Mecca, in the second. While the Mappa Mundi follows the three divisions of Asia, Europe, and Africa common in European medieval world maps, Al-Idrissi’s world is divided into the seven climates after Ptolomy, where the geographical vistas inhabited by Arabs appear as most viable, fertile. How can we see the medieval past, my class asked, through Arab and Muslim eyes? To what extent can we trouble a hermetically-sealed system of knowledge production that lionises Europe as the epicentre of worldmaking?
Literary history affords the space and scope to ruminate over these questions. It engages in worldmaking by dwelling on the stories that shape known and imagined worlds. In other words, our worlds are animated by what we mythologise, who we alienate and dehumanise, how we define our personhood, and where from our deepest desires and fears come. I understand people’s hesitation – scepticism, even – about drawing parallels between different temporalities and geographies, seeing in this enfolding of time and space an anachronism or an oversimplification. However, unless we actively reframe the questions we ask, reconceive the stories we tell, and open up the publics we serve, we will continue to recreate that hierarchical world that has been bequeathed to us by hegemonic knowledge producers. In this light, Puck’s famous line in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, “to put a girdle round about the earth,” reveals its sinister underbelly. Puck’s colonial fantasy to circumnavigate and stake the world in forty minutes frames worldmaking in lyrical language. Indeed, Puck’s beautiful imagery conceals the colonial forces that destroy Indigenous ecologies and erect extractive systems. Encoded in the language of wonder, desire and expansion is the undercurrent of violence intrinsic to the imperial project. In other words, the back-seam of pre-modern European exploration is racial exploitation.

For another lesson, my dear friend Matthew Harrison suggested that I teach the early medieval poem, <a href="https://oldenglishpoetry.camden.rutgers.edu/the-ruin/">&#8216;The Ruin&#8217;</a> to inhabit this sense of utter loss, of living a life amid the rubble of the past. In class, we dwell on these profoundly moving lines:
     [&#8230;] The halls of the city 
     once were bright: there were many bath-houses, 
     a lofty treasury of peaked roofs, many troop-roads, many mead-halls 
     filled with human-joys until that terrible chance changed all that.
In this early medieval poem, we encounter layers of grief, echoing and multiplying. My students and I finally share a brief moment of mutual affirmation. The struggle, the “terrible chance”, that we collectively, albeit unequally, endured during the pandemic makes us empathise, albeit selectively, with this overwhelming sense of suffering. Our losses of “human joys” operate as a shared language.
And my thoughts drift back to my communities in Lebanon, and the stirring urge to affirm their lives amid the litany of devastation: the port explosion of 2020; the ongoing financial collapse; the ravages of the pandemic; and the dispossession of migrant workers and refugees. Paradoxically, their losses refuse to be romanticised: “No poetry in the ashes,” as the poet Suhair Hamad tells us. Teaching is like that, sometimes. It holds space for the impossibility of rendering tragedies as artistically coherent moments in time.
As we contemplate the value of literature in the face of calamity, my students and I wonder about the stories that will emerge out of this moment of enormous loss? What traumas will we pass down? What shapes will our ruins take? What phantoms will we release? What fragments will we leave behind, about what we had and who we lost? And then, suddenly, amid the engulfing sense of destruction, a fragile question lingers as a testament to the intense emotional bonds that poetry affords: can we open ourselves to the possibility of forging a different, more just world? In the aftermath of disaster, we are left with the fragile hope that our worldmaking would be transformed by the possibilities of a radical imagination and creative practices; by the freedom to tell stories and love fiercely; and by dreams of being with, in, and for a borderless world.
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<pre>Photo Credit: <a href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Eternal_Sabah_Mural_on_Assaf_building_in_Hamra,Beirut_-_Nightshot.jpg">Wikimedia Commons</a></pre>

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Reflecting on Lebanon’s current moment is a chance to step into multiple worlds to take down borders and forge more just ones.

The world in a poem: Notes on displacement and diaspora

On Tuesday, 20 April, this year, a jury in Minneapolis, Minnesota found police officer Dereck Chauvin guilty of murdering 45-year-old <a href="https://platformonline.uk/tag/george-floyd">George Floyd</a>. Minutes after the verdict was delivered, police in Columbus, Ohio shot and killed 16-year-old Ma’Khia Bryant. Floyd and Bryant were two human beings with full, complex lives enriched with many different kinds of relationships, struggles and triumphs. And they are now two more names in a long list of Black people killed by police and self-deputised law enforcers in a centuries-long history of anti-Black violence that demands nothing short of prison-industrial complex (PIC) abolition.
This essay is an introduction and an invitation. It is broadly written for people who witness the routine violence of the state against Black, Indigenous and other people of colour, trans and gender non-conforming people, disabled people and the poor (groups that often overlap), and who ache for a different way of doing things. It is more specifically written for people who are deeply disturbed by the converging events of 20 April, who are curious about slogans like “defund the police” and words like “abolition” and wonder, “Is justice possible if even when it seems like a victory is delivered, our reality immediately reminds us that a conviction is not enough?”
This is an essay on abolition, accountability and justice. Its central claim is that justice is not an event. That is, justice is not something that happens at a specific moment and it is certainly not something that happens in response after the fact of harm. Justice is collective improvisation grounded in unending critical, communal reflection and relationship-building. Justice is safety, not security. The two events of 20 April together articulate and necessitate our understanding of this.
The first thing to understand is that Chauvin’s conviction is not justice. More people today than ever before are recognising that jailing a single killer cop is not and cannot be a solution to the problem of police violence because the problem is not one of a few exceptional “bad apples” but rather the entire structure and function of policing itself. <a href="https://scholarsforsocialjustice.com/critical-resistance-professor-dylan-rodriguez-its-not-police-brutality/">As Dylan Rodriguez explains</a>, the phrase “police brutality” is redundant because all policing is brutality and in the specific context of 20 April, <a href="https://newsone.com/4143261/george-floyd-makhia-bryant-abolition-police/">as Mariame Kaba and Andrea J. Ritchie write</a>, “A single conviction of a single cop won’t change the system that produced and enabled him; in fact, it will embolden it to continue business as usual under the pretext that it can deliver justice.” Analyses like these are grounded both in the overwhelming evidence produced by increased scrutiny of the prison-industrial complex since Black Lives Matter has become a hyper-visible social justice framework and in the long histories of policing written and spoken about by scholars such as <a href="https://www.npr.org/2020/06/03/869046127/american-police">Khalil Gibran Muhammad</a>, <a href="http://bostonreview.net/race/garrett-felber-struggle-abolish-police-not-new">Garrett Felber</a> and <a href="https://jacobinmag.com/2017/10/police-reform-prisons-racism-vitale">Alex Vitale</a>. The police who killed Floyd and Bryant, then, are not exceptional but embodied examples of the logical extension of the function of policing in the United States.
As people begin to understand that the problem of police violence is not reducible to individual “bad cops”, often a more difficult leap to make for some is that the court and prison system is insufficient for providing justice when someone is killed by the police. That is to say, it is relatively easy to comprehend that Chauvin is not singular nor exceptional, but rather, representative of policing. Yet, to many, it remains unclear what to do about that and how to proceed from this understanding, outside of the framework he represents.
If, as Kaba and Ritchie write, Chauvin’s conviction is not justice, what would justice be?

There is a definitive answer to that question:
Justice would be a world in which George Floyd and Ma’Khia Bryant (and Breonna Taylor, Eric Garner, Michael Brown, Korryn Gaines, Tamir Rice, Aiyana Stanley-Jones, Sandra Bland, Freddie Gray and so many others) were still alive and not subject to <a href="https://www.dukeupress.edu/in-the-wake">the imminent and immanent threat of premature death</a> that structures Black life in <a href="https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374531157">the afterlife of slavery</a>. This is why justice is not an event. It is not a moment or a response.
Abolitionist thought refigures our sense of justice from something that we can point to that happens in response to harm to something that is always happening to build a world where harm is less ubiquitous and where there are mechanisms in place to respond to harm in restorative, transformational ways.
This answer is definitive, but in many ways unsatisfying. We do not live in that world and it is hard to think outside of the carceral logics of our current one. But defining justice in this way moves us away from thinking of “justice” as something that is “done” or “served” in response to harm and towards thinking of justice as a practice of worldmaking.
While “a practice of worldmaking” sounds frustratingly abstract, the rest of this essay will outline what it looks like in practice by briefly defining a few key concepts in abolitionist thought. Readers will note that there have already been quite a lot of links to other sources in this essay, and there will be many more in the next half as I fulfil my promise of only briefly defining key abolitionist concepts.

<h5>Justice, accountability and punishment </h5>
First, it is important to distinguish between justice, accountability and punishment, three terms that our current so-called justice system conflates into being near-synonyms.
For example, in the wake of the jury’s decision in the Chauvin trial, many folks took to social media to declare that while a guilty verdict was not justice, the trial offered accountability. Others went further and claimed that Chauvin’s conviction was neither justice nor accountability but merely punishment. To be clear, abolitionists absolutely believe in the importance of accountability. <a href="https://bluestockingsmag.com/2015/06/22/on-trans-and-queer-prison-abolition-and-sustaining-movements-an-interview-with-eric-a-stanley/">As Eric Stanley explains</a>, though, the imposition of carceral punishment is not actually accountability.
Chauvin shall be punished. However, that punishment is a consequence imposed by the force of law. Precisely because this process was carried out by an adversarial court system rather than through engagement with the community that Chauvin harmed, it is not an example of accountability. That is because accountability requires relationships and Chauvin has no real relationship with the people he has harmed. Accountability could come out of a long process of building a relationship between Chauvin and Floyd’s family, or the police department and the Black people of the city, but adversarial court processes, as a fundamental matter of their structure, certainly don’t build such relationships.
That is to say, we must ask: to whom is Chauvin being held accountable? Certainly not to the Black people of Minneapolis, who are absolutely in no way represented by an adversarial court system whose primary job on a normal day-to-day basis, is locking them away.
As Kaba explains throughout her work, <a href="https://thenextsystem.org/learn/stories/towards-horizon-abolition-conversation-mariame-kaba">especially in this interview</a>, relationships are the core of abolitionist worldbuilding. That is because an abolitionist conception of justice is built on the fundamental distinction between safety and security. As Kaba puts it, “Security and safety aren’t the same thing. Security is a function of the weaponised state that is using guns, weapons, [and] fear&#8230;” In this way, as Angela Davis outlines in detail in her monumentally important book <a href="https://www.akpress.org/areprisonsobsolete.html">Are Prisons Obsolete?,</a> prisons function more to create illusions of safety by disappearing people construed as ‘threats’ through a use of violence that we are all supposed to just accept.

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Abolition Detention Hassockfield

<h5>Security is not safety</h5>
Instruments of violence do not create safety; they create security. <a href="https://abolitioniststudy.wordpress.com/2019/07/19/security-does-not-mean-safety-1/">As incarcerated activist Stevie Wilson writes</a>, “as prisoners, we live in a very secure environment. But security doesn’t mean safety. There are barbed-wired fences, concrete walls, locked doors, cameras, gun towers and officers with riot gear, shock shields, tear gas and metal batons. But are we safe?” Of course not. While locking up Chauvin gives us security – a killer cop is no longer roaming the streets free to kill someone else – Ma’Khia Bryant was not made any safer by the punishment inflicted on Chauvin.
This further shows that even accountability, when it is true accountability in the sense that it is in relation to the victims of harm, on its own is still not safety, because holding Chauvin as an individual to account for the harm he has caused does not transform the conditions that allow for the kind of harm he enacted in the first place.
That is, <a href="https://transformharm.org/restorative-justice/">even the implementation of a restorative justice process</a> to hold Chauvin to account would not have kept Bryant alive. Only an even more fundamental commitment to safety over security could do that. And that commitment to safety means cultivating what Stevie Wilson calls “right relations”. While the restorative justice process hinges upon accountability as a relationship to the victimised, it is still isolated to the incident. To have relations that engender safety, Kaba contends, “necessitates a whole transformation on so many levels”.
That necessity for “a whole transformation” is why <a href="https://theintercept.com/2020/06/10/ruth-wilson-gilmore-makes-the-case-for-abolition/">Ruth Wilson Gilmore says we need to “change everything”</a> in our pursuit of abolition. Gilmore repeatedly makes the point that abolition is not merely about getting rid of the prison-industrial complex, but that “abolition is a presence”. <a href="https://www.democracynow.org/2020/6/12/angela_davis_on_abolition_calls_to">Angela Davis concurs</a>, saying that “abolition is not primarily a negative strategy. It’s not primarily about dismantling, getting rid of, but it’s about re-envisioning. It’s about building anew.” And because abolition is so comprehensive, it is also radical – as in, it gets at roots. It is beyond partisan politics and in Stanley’s words, it is, “a commitment to dreaming collectively beyond and against the pragmatism of the political as such”. Abolition is about completely uprooting our currently dominant ways of organising sociality by way of law-and-order thinking in order to plant and nurture seeds of collective care, a concept that scholars like <a href="https://www.bookforum.com/culture/an-essay-from-grief-and-grievance-art-and-mourning-in-america-24310">Christina Sharpe</a> and <a href="https://www.thewhitereview.org/feature/interview-with-saidiya-hartman/?fbclid=IwAR1Qxk1bo7e7G8SZ--7xXsdZfxZJ2KRMccQkjfgqGKrG4Z_oc6XxtqfndQc">Saidiya Hartman</a> thoughtfully meditate on in their work, as it exceeds the boundaries of the academy.
The good news is that this work of simultaneously uprooting and planting seeds is entirely practical, grounded and individually conceivable even as its aims are overwhelmingly far-reaching and conceptual. The even better news is that this work is already ongoing and there are people to join and learn from in figuring out how to organise for the world we so desperately need.

The organisation <a href="http://criticalresistance.org/">Critical Resistance</a> (CR) has done incredible work creating tools and guides for activists, including important explanations of the differences between <a href="https://static1.squarespace.com/static/59ead8f9692ebee25b72f17f/t/5b65cd58758d46d34254f22c/1533398363539/CR_NoCops_reform_vs_abolition_CRside.pdf">“reformist reforms” and “non-reformist reforms”</a> to help organisers strategise around specific policy proposals. CR has also worked with <a href="https://incite-national.org/">INCITE</a> to articulate principles of abolitionist feminism. <a href="https://trueleappress.files.wordpress.com/2017/11/cr-incite-statement-on-gender-violence-and-the-prison-industrial-complex.pdf">These principles</a> build on decades of activism, scholarship and organising, and can be seen in specific historical examples of anti-carceral feminist forms of justice outlined by <a href="https://www.jacobinmag.com/2014/10/against-carceral-feminism/">Victoria Law</a>, <a href="https://www.bitchmedia.org/article/look-feminist-forms-justice-dont-involve-police">Kristian Williams</a>, <a href="https://nyupress.org/9780814776223/arrested-justice/">Beth Richie</a> and <a href="https://www.press.uillinois.edu/books/catalog/68zcs2nd9780252042331.html">Emily Thuma</a>. They can also be seen in and are expanded upon in the principles guiding queer abolitionist organisations like <a href="https://www.prisonactivist.org/resources/black-and-pink">Black &amp; Pink</a> and in the analyses of the contributors to Stanley and Nat Smith’s anthology, <a href="https://www.akpress.org/captivegenders2.html">Captive Genders</a>. Taken together, these various sources, which only scratch the surface of on-the-ground abolitionist work, clarify that abolition is not about pretending that harm can be eradicated, but that we can completely rethink how we respond to harm as we transform the conditions which facilitate harm in the first place.

<h5>Abolition, capitalism and individualism</h5>
Many abolitionists, including Gilmore, Davis and Kaba, argue that abolition cannot be accomplished without eradicating capitalism. Consequently, some thinkers and activists focus on how the prison-industrial complex performs the logics at play in the very notions of private property. Whereas our present society presumes and takes for granted a “rugged individualism” that conceives of individual, independent subjects, an abolitionist analysis reveals the violent history enabling such a focus on the individual.
It might help to think about the verb separate to make sense of this connection between the PIC and private property within capitalism. Prisons and jails literally separate people as expendable populations, containing them within walls and cages. The notion of private property is emblematised in the instance of privately-owned land. Private property separates space with boundaries of ownership – This is mine, not yours. That is yours, not mine.

The basis of this, and what this reinforces, is the very notion of the individual Self at the heart of “rugged individualism”. That is, there can be no such thing as “private property” if there are not absolutely independent, individual, separate Selves to do the independent enjoying of individually-owned property. The logic of private property, prisons and – disturbingly for liberals – individual rights all depend upon the Western Enlightenment’s version of the liberal individual Self to cohere.
In historical terms, the very idea of a rugged individual subject was made possible by (1) the legal transformation of people into property through the system of chattel slavery and (2) the violent genocidal disavowal of indigenous conceptions of relation to land and ecosystems through the ongoing processes of settler colonialism. There is no such thing as “private property” without the liberal individual Self, and there is no liberal individual Self without slavery, land theft and attempted genocide. Abolition therefore looks towards relation rather than separation or individuation as a basis for organising society.

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TD Police Abolition France

<h5>Abolition is a collective project</h5>
One way of transforming the conditions which facilitate harm then, is to radically reconceptualise our notions of property, <a href="https://writersfestival.org/events/spring-2021-live-online-events/on-property">as Rinaldo Walcott encourages us to do</a>, and in so doing begin to practice politically conscious mutual aid, <a href="https://www.thenation.com/article/economy/interview-dean-spade/">as Dean Spade describes it.</a> Walcott builds on the historical analysis to which Gilmore and Davis are significant contributors that I allude to in the previous paragraphs to extend PIC abolition to include not only the abolition of prisons and police but also of private property itself. And Spade’s work describes ways of understanding a kind of political work beyond the horizon of elections that has been taking place among marginalised communities since before the term “mutual aid” was ever formally used. Through mutual aid, people learn to support each other’s mutual thriving outside the formal machinations of an antagonistic nation-state. In short, Spade introduces and analyses the idea that we can and must take care of each other, because, ultimately, we are not simply radically separate rugged individuals.
Of course, the radical critiques of property embedded in practices of mutual aid were made by <a href="https://africaworldpressbooks.com/blood-in-my-eye-by-george-l-jackson/">George Jackson in Blood in My Eye</a>, the book he completed just before being killed by the state in 1971. I end this long (but in relation to the project at hand, quite short) introduction and invitation to abolitionism by mentioning Jackson because fundamentally, abolition will be steered by the theorising of those who have been directly attacked by state violence. So in addition to all of the resources which I have embedded in this piece for readers to pursue, I would encourage you to seek out the <a href="https://www.sunypress.edu/p-4133-the-new-abolitionists.aspx">writings of currently and formerly-incarcerated thinkers</a> like Jackson, <a href="https://www.akpress.org/assata.html">Assata Shakur</a> and <a href="https://www.revolutionbooks.org/book/9780380727667">Mumia Abu-Jamal</a>. And even wider, to expand notions of carcerality to include (as an incomplete start): <a href="https://www.the-platform.org.uk/2021/05/14/sheikh-jarrah-is-israels-self-destruct-button/">Palestine under Israeli occupation</a>, Native American reservations in the United States and <a href="https://theconversation.com/when-good-intentions-dont-matter-the-indian-residential-school-system-165045">“Indian Boarding Schools”</a> across North America, increasingly securitised K-12 schools, slaughterhouses, and, transhistorically, slave plantations, Jewish ghettos, asylums, chain gangs and concentration camps from colonial southwest Africa to the Western US and Europe during WWII. All of these disparate examples cannot be reduced to being merely equivalent to each other, but understanding them, along with many more unnamed here, as coextensive pieces of a world that needs to be abolished, where that verb indexes both eradication and creation, enriches our understanding of abolition and opens even more possible lanes to run in this team marathon that no one of us can complete alone.
Abolition is not the work of an exceptional soloist. It is choral work. If 20 April 2021 was a day that left you feeling that this cannot be the way the world has to be, that it must be possible to make something different, then I invite you to join the chorus.

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Abolition Detention Hassockfield 2

<pre>Body Photos: <a href="https://www.instagram.com/abolishdetention/">@abolishdetention</a></pre>
<pre>Featured Photo: Elvert Barnes via <a href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/perspective/50004216227/in/photostream/">Flickr</a> [USA]</pre>

Abolition &#8211; Burn the System &#8211; Flickr

An introduction to the uprooting and planting contained in abolition, which brings in the scholarship of Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Mariame Kaba and Angela Davis, among many others.

Justice is not an event: Towards understanding abolition

<h4>A swift advance</h4>
Events have rocked Afghanistan over the past several days. The cities of Kandahar, Herat, Mazar and Kabul, the country’s major and largest cities respectively and once thought of as secure islands of government control, fell to the Taliban in a single week. On Sunday morning, the capital Kabul stood surrounded from all sides. By the evening the Taliban entered with ease while key figures, including now ex-President Ashraf Ghani, fled the country. Soon the Taliban had taken over the presidential palace, with live footage of the takeover streamed on international media. The nation’s citizens are in deep shock and worry with major changes expected in the coming days.
Kandahar city, Afghanistan&#8217;s first capital and the traditional seat of Pashtun power and culture, fell on Thursday. The three major government commanders in Kandahar, known locally as Sardar Khan, Asham Regwal and Kaaki, surrendered to the Taliban. The governor of Kandahar followed suit while Tadin, the police chief of the city, fled to India. The following day, Friday prayers and sermons at the many mosques dotted across the city were organised by the Taliban. This was particularly the case at Kandahar&#8217;s famous &#8216;Jama Omar&#8217; (Omar Mosque), adjacent to the Shaheedanu Chawk (Martyrs&#8217; Square) landmark. The mosque itself was built by the native Kandahari and Taliban founder and leader Mullah Muhammad Omar.
The sermon featured a lengthy talk, in which the khateeb (pulpit speaker) promised a better life for Kandaharis and all Afghans. The speech was notable for its lack of overt political talking points, emphasising in vague terms the new chapter and illustrious future that Afghanistan was to embark upon under the insurgent group, themselves as Kandahari as any of the locals. In particular, the khateeb was keen to focus on the corruption of President Ashraf Ghani&#8217;s government, to which he referred as the &#8216;corrupt administration&#8217;. He remarked that under the new Taliban-focused Afghanistan such blemishes and their inevitable side effects were to be relegated to the past.
The fabled city of Herat, long renowned for its historic role as a focal point of literature, art and religious study, was also captured by the Taliban on Thursday afternoon. The insurgents, now a government-in-making, seized the governor&#8217;s office while deploying fighters across the city. The capture was sudden and abrupt. Ismail Khan, known locally as the Amir of Herat, is a well-known figure: a former anti-Soviet commander and previous Governor of Herat. After offering brief resistance to the Taliban earlier in the month, he and the men loyal to him surrendered. As shown by Taliban social media channels, they were reportedly treated well.
Footage has also emerged showing that the Taliban have captured the citadel of Herat, known locally as Qala-e-Ikhtiyaruddin (Ikhtiyaruddin&#8217;s Citadel), as well as its famed Jama Masjid, or Blue Mosque. Here, too, the Taliban organised Friday prayers and sermons across the legendary city, promising the faithful a brighter future under their new government. The sermons insisted the insurgents were not the same movement that they were during their previous emirate in the late ‘90s. They maintained that with the times, they too have changed. Sources from the city report that normal life is expected to resume in the coming days. Residents will attend work as per usual, and girls will study, subject to their observing the Islamic hijab and being segregated from men.
The historical city of Balkh was also captured overnight and had white flags hung all around the famous blue mosque. Atta Mohammad Noor, now ex-Governor of Balkh, and ethnic Uzbek leader Abdul Rashid Dostum, both fled to Uzbekistan. Their armies, however, were left behind as Uzbekistan would not take them all in.
Forces in other provinces, such Zabul, Ghor, Ghazni, Badghis, Logar and Wardak, have largely surrendered in similarly swift fashion, over the course of just 12 hours. Meanwhile, in addition to Kabul, Khost, Jalalabad, Panjshir and Bamyan fell on Sunday. Khost, in the southeast, was under intense attack, and was taken by the Taliban in what appeared to be a major offensive.
Throughout the course of these events other major problems have inevitably occurred, including the cutting of electricity and telecommunications being switched off in several areas. Even bank ATMs have been closed down. It is yet to be determined whether the cutting of electricity and communications was government policy to limit the spread of information across the country as the insurgents advanced.
<h4>In search of peace</h4>
Residents in Kandahar are cautiously optimistic. Primarily, this is due to the relief that conflict and war seem to be becoming relics of the past. This is despite some disagreeing with the austere religiosity and strictness they expect to contend with under a new Taliban government. Ultimately, while far from ideal, many finding themselves put off by the excessive social conservatism now seem willing to sacrifice their previous lifestyles if it leads to a resounding calm, which has eluded the country for four decades.
The Taliban claim the city will not see major changes and affairs will progress as usual, with adjustments to make life more Islamic as they see it. This would include women needing to cover according to their version of an Islamic hijab; the hijab already by and large the manner of female dress in Afghan society. There is also potentially the need for women to be accompanied by a male chaperone from their immediate family.
Concerns about women&#8217;s rights notwithstanding, what is often sorely missed in the west are the intricacies of Afghan culture, the product of centuries of evolution of tribal or nomadic groups. These norms persisted even under government rule, with locals resistant to allowing their daughters to study, either due to security concerns or cultural reasons. The Taliban claim to be progressive through championing the values of Islam and not of Pashtun or Afghan culture. So far, the pursuit of education by girls has the Taliban&#8217;s blessing.
Meanwhile, Muharram celebrations held by Shia Muslims have also reportedly been permitted by the Taliban. Shia Muslims in Herat and Ghazni, cities under Taliban control, have been given approval to commemorate the festival by their new government. The Taliban have gone as far as publishing footage in Ghazni of the preparations by local Shias raising banners and selling merchandise for their holy day. In the clip the filmmaker, a Talib, asks the resident if the Taliban have interfered to which the man responds in the negative, asserting they are happy, safe and free of intimidation.
Those displaced from nearby Helmand and Nimroz are reported to have started making their way back to their respective homes, with their provinces too now apparently safe. Their homes and villages are now firmly under Taliban rule, with their white flags fluttering high.
Across southern Afghanistan, which has long suffered through the perpetual phases of war and Taliban insurgency, residents are relieved. The arrival of the Taliban, while abrupt, shocking and confusing to many, is also widely perceived as ushering a new phase of security, stability and a reduction in crime. Darkness at night, a long-time impediment to leaving one&#8217;s house or hut, is no longer synonymous with danger. Ultimately, for the common man, security trumps all.
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<pre>Photo Credit: Canada in Afghanistan / <a style="color: #808080;" href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/camafghanistancam/3234403944">Flickr</a></pre>

Kandahar Through Afghan Eyes -new site

As the Taliban capture Afghanistan at breakneck speed, locals are both fearful and cautiously optimistic.

The Second Rise of the Taliban

The struggle in Sheikh Jarrah is over a decade long, and is fought on many levels – legal, political and in the media. The story of a well-organised group of Jewish Israeli colonists who wish to dispossess Palestinian families of their homes is not unique to Sheikh Jarrah. It has happened thousands of times, since the Zionist movement started the colonisation of Palestine in the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Aliyah">late 19th-century</a>.
It&#8217;s not the location of Sheikh Jarrah, so close to the Old City of Jerusalem, that makes it a special case. Nor is it the timing, during the holy month of Ramadan or the brutality of the annual “Jerusalem Day” celebration of the conquest of 1967, carried out by extremists drunk on nationalism on 10 May. What makes Sheikh Jarrah stand out is that it exposes the international contradictions in the Israeli strategy of domination, and lays bare how vulnerable Israeli apartheid has become.
It started with the argument made by the colonists in the Israeli court. They contended that some of the houses in the Sheikh Jarrah neighbourhood were owned by Jews before the 1948 war, so the colonists have a claim to that property. I participated in the demonstrations in <a href="https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/israel-palestine-sheikh-jarrah-jerusalem-neighbourhood-eviction-explained">Sheikh Jarrah</a> against the evictions back in 2009 to 2010, but I felt uncomfortable there. Many of the fellow protestors, Jewish Israelis like myself, were not there out of respect for Palestinian rights to their homes, but because they were afraid that if the court recognises the colonists’ demands to regain the property from before the war (which it did), millions of Palestinian refugees would have a strong claim to their homes inside Israel, which had been taken over by the Israeli authorities after the war. The demonstrators spoke with two voices. Some called the ethnic cleansing of Sheikh Jarrah an atrocity, others called it stupidity.
The Israeli colonial system is losing its lustre and international legitimacy. Support from former US President Donald Trump made Israelis euphoric and created a sense of invulnerability. The Palestinian <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/the-end-of-this-road-the-decline-of-the-palestinian-national-movement">resistance movement was ridiculed</a> and the minister that was assigned to fight the boycott movement against Israel was <a href="https://www.timesofisrael.com/strategic-affairs-minister-says-hes-examining-shuttering-own-ministry/">fired</a>. Nevertheless, the protests at the Al-Aqsa Mosque that came in the <a href="https://theintercept.com/2017/08/03/jerusalem-al-aqsa-israel-palestine-protest-waqf/">summer of 2017</a> proved to Palestinians that stubborn and dedicated resistance can break the resolve of the Israeli authorities. The Israeli authorities devolved into squabbles over how best to preserve their honour and not show any weakness in the eyes of the restless natives. The secret police warned that security cameras and metal detectors installed at the entrance to the mosque would trigger protests that would spiral out of control, but the government was trapped in its own machismo, demanding repeatedly that Palestinians must be taught a lesson. Eventually, they surrendered and removed the cameras and metal detectors. Palestinians knew that it will end like this, but the Israelis acted impulsively and predictably.
This year, both the largest Israeli human rights organisation <a href="https://www.btselem.org/publications/fulltext/202101_this_is_apartheid">B’tselem</a>, and the international organisation <a href="https://www.hrw.org/report/2021/04/27/threshold-crossed/israeli-authorities-and-crimes-apartheid-and-persecution">Human Rights Watch</a>, published landmark reports about the <a href="https://www.hrw.org/report/2021/04/27/threshold-crossed/israeli-authorities-and-crimes-apartheid-and-persecution">Israeli apartheid system</a>. Illusions of Israeli democracy were further shattered when the Palestinian Authority was denied the right to hold elections in East Jerusalem, in violation of the Oslo Agreements, and <a href="https://www.vice.com/en/article/7kv9j9/arrests-are-happening-every-day-palestinian-elections-hang-in-the-balance">President Abbas decided to cancel the elections</a> altogether. In a country of 14 million people, only two-thirds of citizens have the right to vote and only half are Jewish with full citizen and national rights. Palestinians know, just as Black South Africans under apartheid knew, that there is no path for them to take to fight for their rights within an apartheid system. They have no choice but to shatter the existing structure and build a new democratic system to replace it.
On 11 May, Haaretz journalist <a href="https://www.haaretz.co.il/opinions/.premium-1.9793789">Yossi Melman</a> quoted the famous book by historian Barbara Tuchman, The March of Folly. As an expert on Israeli intelligence, he lamented the irrationality and hubris which drives the Israeli authorities to self-destruction. Why provoke a religious conflict in Jerusalem during Ramadan? Why allow far-right thugs to run amok in Jerusalem shouting “death to Arabs”? Why unleash the police at the holy Haram al-Sharif?
Violence spreads quickly beyond Jerusalem. Israeli forces are spread thin to crush the resistance from Gaza, which took the Israelis by surprise. The methods are the same ones which were tried countless times before: collective punishment, indiscriminate bombing of civilian neighbourhoods and wholesale killing of defenceless people. It didn’t work in the past and it is not working now. It’s not just Jerusalem and Gaza though. Palestinians everywhere feel outrage at the ethnic cleansing in Jerusalem and the Israeli security forces are not trained or equipped to deal with a large-scale uprising. They count on Palestinians remaining cowed and afraid.
Do Israelis know how fragile their system of privileges has become? At least one Israeli does – Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. He receives regular reports from a network of Israeli intelligence organisations and can tell the difference between rational strategy to prolong Israeli colonialism and populist acts of vengeance. At the moment, Netanyahu tries to prevent his political opponents from forming a coalition so it’s in his interest to create a security crisis and keep his seat during the state of emergency. He knows how to create the spark that will set-off the powder keg and no one can stop him.
In 2002, Netanyahu’s wife Sarah was recorded saying that <a href="https://www.theintelligencer.com/news/article/Netanyahu-s-Wife-Israel-Can-Burn-10544384.php">Israel cannot survive</a> without her husband. But if he can’t be prime minister, she and he will leave. “The country can burn, as far as I’m concerned,” she added. Indeed, it is burning now.
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<pre>Photo Credit: Cms-archiv / Pixabay </pre>

jerusalem-jarrah

The Israeli colonial system is losing its lustre and legitimacy amid fresh evictions in Sheikh Jarrah, but violence spreads quickly beyond Jerusalem.

Sheikh Jarrah is Israel’s Self-Destruct Button

“Haunting is one way in which abusive systems of power make themselves known and their impacts felt in everyday life, especially when they are supposedly over and done with (slavery, for instance) or when their oppressive nature is denied…” Avery F Gordon 
African Apocalypse is not your regular feature film, and throughout its <a href="https://player.bfi.org.uk/rentals/film/watch-african-apocalypse-2020-online">runtime of 88 minutes</a> it allows us to reflect and navigate the multifaceted space between documentary and historical drama in a way that is innovative, haunting and truly captivating.
The film itself is a non-fiction retelling of Joseph Conrad’s contentious novel Heart of Darkness and, like the book, the film highlights the brutal legacies of ‘civilised’ European expeditions during the height of colonial rule. I was fortunate enough to speak to both the director Rob Lemkin and the co-writer <a href="https://platformonline.uk/articles/author/femi-nylander/">Femi Nylander</a> shortly after the film’s release where we discussed the intricate plot and themes that are investigated throughout the film.
African Apocalypse starts off in Oxford as we are introduced to our narrator and guide, British-Nigerian activist and poet, Femi Nylander. Throughout the film we follow Femi and two other local guides on a personal and spiritual journey through the country of Niger to unearth the cruel legacy of the French imperial captain, Paul Voulet.
Voulet’s story begins in 1899 when he is tasked with securing the Chad Basin to unite all of the French territories in West Africa; however, whilst undertaking this mission, Voulet went rogue leaving behind a trail of death and destruction in his wake. Throughout Femi’s voyage across Niger, we encounter the Hausa people, who were deeply affected by the violence. The Hausa people are the largest ethnic group located throughout north-western Nigeria and Niger. They are well known for their agricultural practices and exquisite craftsmanship and a vast majority of the population can be found in rural locations. In order for Voulet to complete his excursion he had to cross their land and this is where things began to get worse. The story of Voulet and his destructive expedition may not be well known in the west, but the descendants of the Hausa people have not forgotten. They have not forgotten how Voulet and his men rounded up their families and committed unspeakable evils. They have not forgotten the stories of how Voulet decimated villages – and those of you who watch this film will surely not forget too.

What I found so astounding about the film was how effortlessly it explores a multitude of political issues, such as France using the <a href="https://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/2017/07/macron-francafrique-170721190500965.html">Franco-African</a> policy to mine and export Uranium ore for over 40 years, as well as the economic and political fallout that follows the creation of borders, human rights, ecological destruction, and the generational trauma that looms over the afflicted communities. The themes that African Apocalypse explores are multi-faceted and complex, but what the film achieves is that it opens up a dialogue about the repercussions of colonial violence and gives the <a href="https://www.britannica.com/topic/Hausa">Hausa people</a> a chance to tell their side of the story to the world.
In a strange way Rob and Femi’s work truly captivated me, particularly as I saw myself in Femi. As a Black British citizen with Jamaican heritage, my very existence within the British Isles is predicated on Britain’s colonial past, and the same applies to a large majority of us, as <a href="https://www.ourmigrationstory.org.uk/">migration has played a huge role</a> in shaping Britain as we know it today. To be a Black person or person of colour, exploring the forgotten histories of colonialism that intersect with one’s own history repeatedly forces one to encounter a range of emotions – emotions that more often than not lead one to feel like they are being be split in two. This moment of fragmentation is elaborated by the late <a href="https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/frantz-fanon/">Frantz Fanon</a> in his text, Black Skin, White Masks, where he recalls a similar feeling of being torn asunder by the weight of the history of race: “I was responsible not only for my body but also for my race and my ancestors. I cast an objective gaze over myself, discovered my blackness, my ethnic features; deafened by cannibalism, backwardness, fetishism, racial stigmas, slave traders, and above all, yes, above all, the grinning Y a bon Banania.” Blackness and Britishness, or even Blackness and European identity are not always understood to be synonymous. Although this is not the core focus of the film, it is a theme that is explored rather naturally, and it is a feeling that many Black people, people of colour and those with dual heritage living in the west will be able to relate to.

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AA0038 2015 trip roll 20150115235356 Old man in doorway TC 03513022

This feeling of being split in two is referred to as “double consciousness” by 20th-century thinker W. E. B.Du Bois (and, more recently, British historian Paul Gilroy). Du Bois writes in his book The Souls of Black Folk: “It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others… One ever feels his twoness, – an American, a N****; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.”
During our interview, I asked Femi how he felt the notion of double consciousness impacted him, and the way he interacted with those around him during the making of the film. “What I think is shown on screen is how transformative the experience was and that happened in such an accelerated way due to the filming process,” Femi remarked. “I became more and more comfortable, and was able to interact more naturally with the people of the region. And I think that process was made easier as being someone of West African heritage, of Nigerian heritage, so literally just from the neighbouring country. Being able to then integrate, learn more about the culture and sing with the people was much easier to do than if you’re coming in as a complete outsider.”
The fact that the film has emerged during such a pivotal <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/may/29/britain-glorify-violent-past-defensive-empire-drug">political awakening</a> in our current moment is not insignificant – Femi himself was an organising member of the ‘Rhodes Must Fall’ movement in Oxford and we’ve seen this come full circle with the international <a href="https://www.the-platform.org.uk/2020/06/07/the-closing-credits-of-black-lives/">Black Lives Matter</a> protests of 2020 and the removal of statues of slaveowners beginning with <a href="https://gal-dem.com/i-didnt-think-2020-would-have-me-crying-tears-of-joy-at-the-death-of-a-statue-but-here-we-are/">Edward Colston</a> in Bristol. I asked both Rob and Femi whether they thought the film was a salute to the decolonisation of knowledge and a challenge to European accounts of history. Rob answered, “I think that the film has a two-fold impact… In so far as we&#8217;re letting Nigerians and the Hausa people tell their own story, and we&#8217;re giving them a platform to tell their stories. And secondly, because we&#8217;re telling the story of Europe, very critically, we&#8217;re saying, this is also a story about France, and it&#8217;s not a pretty one.”
African Apocalypse perfectly slots into the conversation of ongoing colonial violence in the global context. Speaking further about the film’s timing, Femi comments: “There have been a number of conversations about colonialism happening all over the world last summer and even before. Statues of <a href="https://www.ft.com/content/a17b87ec-207d-4aa7-a839-8e17153bcf51">Leopold of Belgium</a>, who is referenced in the film, have been coming down in Belgium, and colonialism has become a hot topic. If the film had come out at another time, then the idea would have been for the film to have sparked a conversation about colonialism. Whereas now, it kind of slides into an ongoing conversation, which I think is good.”
The non-fiction re-telling African Apocalypse takes us on a historical and emotive journey. It breaks down a number of topics that some may shy away from for being too academic or too violent to explore. The film opens up the conversation of colonialism and the lasting impact that it has on particular communities around the world. If you are ready to delve into the conversation, African Apocalypse is a must watch.
African Apocalypse is now streaming on <a href="https://player.bfi.org.uk/rentals/film/watch-african-apocalypse-2020-online">BFI Player</a>.

crowd-on-hill

Crowd on hill

Femi abattoir

Our writer sits down with director Rob Lemkin and co-writer Femi Nylander to discuss their new film African Apocalypse which takes viewers on an emotive historical journey

Confronting the Heart of Darkness in New Film African Apocalypse

after Walter Benjamin
A barrel of industrial waste poured into a suit 
donated by a casino owner who knows people 
with a tangerine tea towel tossed strategically on top 
because it was the only available metaphor for hair 
was running for re-election as CEO of South Canadia 
against an old coat with holes in it.
The barrel of waste was trailing 
histrionically among professors emeritus 
whose brains were in the process of being dismantled 
by lethargy and time, and among those 
who, as and when the stock market permits, 
take a year off to celebrate their dividends 
by doing good works among brown people in far countries 
not lucky enough to have stock markets or dehumidifiers. 
Such people agreed with each other that the barrel of waste 
made the raging boil on the nation’s privates 
way too obvious, and hoped by throwing 
the old coat over it they could again 
forget it was there.
The barrel of waste said the old coat couldn’t deliver 
on the promises he wasn’t making, 
and maintained good leads among morticians, 
pimps, and police informants 
and had the total bastard vote 
ninety nine percent sewn up &#8211; 
in essence everyone except the late John DeLorean 
and perhaps Alan Dershowitz.
There was a minority faction who wanted the boil 
on the nation’s privates given free antibiotics, lanced 
with a big needle imported from Sweden 
and then cauterised. But most people found 
though they were in favour, in their hearts, 
of lancing the boil, 
in practice they were for 
allowing the boil to grow redder, angrier, more toxic 
under the old coat with holes in it.
So the minority extremist faction 
who wanted the thing treated 
were sentenced to the echo chamber 
to argue about whether the old coat 
with holes in it really 
was the lesser evil.
The midwife of history, 
grown bored with the year twenty twenty, 
had decided to play one of her jokes.
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<pre>Photo Credit: <a style="color: #999999;" href="https://unsplash.com/@jontyson?utm_source=unsplash&amp;utm_medium=referral&amp;utm_content=creditCopyText">Jon Tyson</a> on <a style="color: #999999;" href="https://unsplash.com/s/photos/trump-biden?utm_source=unsplash&amp;utm_medium=referral&amp;utm_content=creditCopyText">Unsplash</a></pre>

jon-tyson-Lmy2OAZlwb0-unsplash

Poem: The Joke

On 13 June 2020, I stood with a few French friends on the corner of Boulevard de la Villette and Rue du Faubourg du Temple discussing the rise of socialism in the United States. We had forked off from the Vérité pour Adama manifestation (“Truth for Adama” protest) and, along with <a href="https://www.lameute.info/posts/la-generation-adama-met-la-france-face-ses-ideaux">a few thousand others</a>, had marched through traffic up the hill to the Belleville neighbourhood. In this quartier – populated largely by migrants from East Asia or North Africa, or their children and grandchildren – the stalled traffic responded with cheers, honking horns and raised fists, while the protesters clapped and cheered in accord. Chants and signs echoed those originating in the Anglo world, “Black Lives Matter”, in English, alongside the familiar <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_justice,_no_peace">“Pas de Justice, Pas de Paix”</a> (“No Justice, No Peace”), as well as more local slogans such as “Vérité pour Adama” or the beloved and now time-tested “Macron, démission!” (“Macron, resignation!”). For me, the noise, discord and togetherness were a great relief after two months of one of the strictest quarantines in the world.
The Vérité pour Adama movement responds to racist policing in France and demands truth and justice after <a href="https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affaire_Adama_Traor%C3%A9">Adama Traoré</a>, a 24-year-old Black man from the Val-d&#8217;Oise department just outside of Paris, died in police custody. After four years of medical exams, the autopsies have been <a href="https://www.euronews.com/2020/06/04/france-what-happened-to-adama-traore">inconclusive</a>.
Here, I consider the similarities and differences between French and US movements around the issues of racial justice and police violence. Both movements have the same underlying demands for the respect and protection of Black lives, and these demands crystalize particularly in moments of austerity. In France, the movement addresses itself largely to the state, citing its alleged commitment to equality, welfare, justice and truth. In the US, the demands are similar but focus more on dismantling state structures that enforce racial and economic inequalities. At the same time, socialism is on the rise among younger generations in the US and the <a href="https://www.8toabolition.com/">#8toAbolition</a> platform calls for the reallocation of resources to sustaining communities as a crucial step to abolishing the police state.
As we stood at that intersection of the two main streets in Belleville, my French friends started talking about how they were interested in studying the growth of socialism in America. I was puzzled at first – it seemed strange to me, in a place where <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/dec/04/french-workers-cherish-welfare-state-strike-reforms-macron">the welfare state still has some shaky legs to stand on</a>, to be looking to the US. But there are some things the French left admires about the US left. For one, the recognition of identity as a category of oppression is still something that is resisted by the centre-left in France, although contingents of the far left and younger generations acknowledge it more. The French left won its power through socio-economic struggles – and while the <a href="https://theconversation.com/revolutionary-ideals-of-the-paris-commune-live-on-in-black-lives-matter-autonomous-zone-in-seattle-140673">radical history of France</a> also fought against colonialism, for racial justice, and for sexual and gender liberation – the prevailing left in France hangs its hat mostly on fights over union power, labour law and taxation practices.
Redistributive justice is certainly the bottom line of any struggle for liberation, but in a country plagued by a history of racism, sexism and anti-immigrant structures, focusing purely on bread and butter issues like pensions, job security or family leave excludes many comrades and contingent workers whose work is not recognised by labour laws, who don’t have pensions, and whose gender or chosen family is not acknowledged as medically, legally or existentially valid. In France, by and large, the struggle has been for equity and inclusion in these existing structures. The US, on the other hand, while one of the most <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/03/06/opinion/working-class-death-rate.html">economically punishing places in the world</a>, has also been home to some of the most beautiful and inspiring examples of mutual aid, protest culture and liberation movements, including the Black Panther Party, ACT UP, the Seattle Alterglobalization movement, Occupy Wall Street, #MeToo, and now multiple waves of Black Lives Matter protests. As one French colleague explained it to me, “it’s the only place in the world that can make these amazing movements out of total shit.”

In the working-class banlieues (“suburbs”) where the Vérité pour Adama movement began, police violence is nothing new and has been a long-running problem and trigger for unrest. In the autumn of 2005, <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2005/11/07/world/europe/behind-the-furor-the-last-moments-of-two-youths.html">a series of protests and riots</a> broke out sparked by the death of two adolescent boys who were hiding from the police in an electrical switching station and were accidentally shocked to death. The fact that the boys instinctively ran from the police – to their death – rather than expecting protection or justice was seen as an articulation of how the state treats largely Black and brown, and largely immigrant or first-generation, poorer populations in the banlieues. The banlieues went up in flames in anger: 10,000 cars were burned, 3,000 people arrested, and <a href="https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/france/11248098/The-heat-rises-in-Frances-banlieues.html">a state of emergency was declared</a>.
The lockdown has exposed further issues of inequality, including living conditions and police violence in the banlieues. French policing has drawn international criticism because of the disproportionately <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/10/world/europe/coronavirus-paris-suburbs.html">harsh policing of the poorer banlieues</a> during confinement, where admittedly, larger families live in smaller quarters and were less successful at quarantining themselves. In the midst of this, the Vérité pour Adama movement has gained traction and has become France’s “Black Lives Matter” in many ways – taking the case of Traoré as an example of the overarching threat of the police and their lack of accountability vis-à-vis these populations.
The demands of the movement differ in some ways from the Black Lives Matter movement in the US. One main difference is that there is little discussion of <a href="https://www.essence.com/feature/breonna-taylor-justice-abolition/">police abolition</a>. In addition to an urgent emphasis on the recognition of the value of Black lives, the French movement focuses on more republican themes like <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/news/letter-from-europe/assa-traore-and-the-fight-for-black-lives-in-france">justice, truth and equality</a>, which are owed to the people by the state. French anarchist platforms have indeed published <a href="https://lundi.am/Manifeste-pour-la-suppression-generale">manifestos</a>, “triggered by the assassination of George Floyd in the United States”, calling for the abolition of the police, but the comité pour Adama has focused on justice for victims of police violence, rather than on defunding.
However, budgets are still an issue – pensions, health care, public transit and education are all being contested at the moment, and all have their own protests, strikes and social movements forming in their defence. While the US left has developed strong attention to mutual aid and identity politics, this might be in part because there is barely a welfare state to hold people together and of which to make demands. But, like the police, the assaults on the welfare state in France won’t attack everyone equally – the poorest and most vulnerable will suffer the most. Some of the key demands of the US abolitionist movement <a href="https://www.8toabolition.com/invest-in-care-not-cops">call for an investment</a> into something like a welfare state, which will <a href="https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/how-defunding-abusive-institutions-goes-wrong-and-how-we-can-do-it-right/">support communities</a> before they fall victim to the social ills that the police might be called to react against.
What remains to be seen, as with all other nations struggling against austerity in our current moment, is whether we can succeed in a true convergence des luttes – whether there will be a redefining of what is “essential” to human life and whether we will recognise and protect Black lives, not just within the nation but globally. If so, it will certainly require a conflict with, and overthrowing of, the forces that exist to enforce inequality and which harvest our resources and lives. In other words, this struggle requires not just an end to police violence but a reallocation of economic resources, from institutions that operate through violence to ones that support life, education, art, childcare and health. A clear distinction needs to be made between a welfare state and a police state, and we might find that the boundaries of the nation state may be insufficient to bring about the required economic reforms. The greatest struggle of these movements may be to bridge this gap from the local, municipal or national, to the global – which is, indeed, the geopolitical terrain from which oppressive power is exercising itself.
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<pre>Photo Credit: Twitter</pre>

Justice Pour Adama

Social movements in the name of Black lives are gaining visibility internationally, but as part of this, the reallocation of economic resources must be prioritised on a global scale.

France, USA, and the Fight for Black Lives

The UK recently enacted the Global Human Rights Sanctions regime <a href="https://www.gov.uk/government/news/uk-announces-first-sanctions-under-new-global-human-rights-regime">announcing</a> the designation of “49 people and organisations for responsibility in some the worst human rights abuses in recent memory.” Notably absent from this list were those individuals responsible for one of the gravest human catastrophes of our time— the <a href="https://platformonline.uk/tag/uyghur">Uyghur</a> genocide.
When the Foreign Secretary addressed the Uyghur cause, he used watered-down language, referring to “<a href="https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-politics-53463403">gross human rights abuses</a>”, and undermining the severity and urgency of the situation. The mass enslavement, systematic forced sterilisation of Uyghur women, kidnapping of Uyghur children, internment and torture of Uyghur men, deserves an urgent response in its own right. The Chinese government is perpetrating <a href="https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/07/15/uighur-genocide-xinjiang-china-surveillance-sterilization/">genocide</a> as defined under international law, so it deserves a formal declaration as such.
Evidence of genocide is in plain sight, and can be found in Chinese government documents, political speeches, and pronouncements. In 2019, the Chinese government <a href="https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/07/15/uighur-genocide-xinjiang-china-surveillance-sterilization/https:/foreignpolicy.com/2020/07/15/uighur-genocide-xinjiang-china-surveillance-sterilization/">planned</a> to sterilise 80% of child-bearing Uyghur women in Southern Xinjiang with sufficient funding for hundreds and thousands of forced sterilisations.
In a recent<a href="https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p08l7q6z"> interview</a> with BBC’s Andrew Marr, China’s Ambassador to the UK, Liu Xiaoming, failed to refute the existence of the concentration camps, or so-called “re-education centres”, a term that now dominates public discourse due to his government’s disinformation campaign. The term “re-education” obfuscates the true nature and stated goals of the camps. The highest levels of the Chinese government repeatedly ordered officials to “<a href="https://www.lowyinstitute.org/the-interpreter/China-re-engineer-uighur">break their [Uyghur] lineage</a>”, systematically prevent Uyghur births, and “<a href="https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/11/16/world/asia/china-xinjiang-documents.html">round up everyone who should be rounded up</a>”, including <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/09/us/politics/china-uighurs-arrest.html">Ekpar Asat </a>(brother of one of the authors here, Rayhan Asat). It defies logic that a model citizen like Ekpar, who was so well-integrated into Chinese society and even extolled by the Chinese government for his achievements, would require so-called “re-education”. The term is nothing but a euphemism for the physical and mental destruction of the Uyghur people as a whole.
Shown drone footage of Uyghurs blindfolded, shaven, shackled and herded onto trains, Ambassador Liu could not deny its authenticity, but instead, stammering, he sought to downplay the footage as a standard prison transfer. The real motives behind these transfers are far more sinister. Uyghur detainees are taken to new distant concentration camps or forced labour factories in a predominantly Han Chinese environment, further uprooting them from their communities and forcing them to accept their fate. These transfers also allow the Chinese government to destroy evidence of camps where they were previously detained. Therefore, dispatching a UN-led fact-finding mission to preserve evidence of genocide becomes evermore critical.

No one should sit idle in the face of genocide, let alone be complicit. Powerful business giants, from Wall Street to Dubai’s Financial Hub, and nearly the entire apparel industry, are profiting from the use of Uyghur slavery in their supply chains. According to the latest research,<a href="https://enduyghurforcedlabour.org/"> more than 20%</a> of the world’s entire cotton supply comes from Xinjiang, almost certainly produced by forced Uyghur labour.
Some tech companies even directly provided surveillance technology to sustain what has become the world’s most <a href="https://foreignpolicy.com/2020/07/15/uighur-genocide-xinjiang-china-surveillance-sterilization/">technologically sophisticated genocide</a>. Huawei, whose network of surveillance extends to foreign markets, including the UK, is a prime example. The UK rightly imposed a freeze on the use of Huawei’s equipment in its 5G networks, although this freeze only takes place in December of this year and existing infrastructure will remain intact for another seven years. This is hardly a practical timeline to counteract technology that “<a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/14/business/huawei-uk-5g.html">presents a real cybersecurity risk</a>” as emphasised by Robert Hannigan, former head of the British digital surveillance agency, GCHQ.
The partial removal of Huawei is a start, given the clear national security concerns. But the UK must take further steps to respond to the ongoing genocide in Xinjiang.
First, the UK should formally declare that these collective mass atrocities amount to genocide. The government should also form a coalition of concerned countries to dispatch an independent fact-finding mission to Xinjiang to preserve evidence of genocide and crimes against humanity.
Second, the Foreign Office should designate the architects of the genocide for human rights sanctions. These designations will send a message to the Chinese government and influence other countries to impose similar human rights sanctions to secure a measure of accountability for the victims and survivors.
Third, UK enforcement agencies should expand their slavery investigations into investments and businesses originating in China. Nearly every industry may be tainted by Uyghur forced labour due to China’s vast trading network.
Fourth, the UK should appoint a Special Envoy to Xinjiang to monitor the developing genocide, collect evidence, pursue international mechanisms of justice and coordinate a humanitarian response.
Finally, the UK and its allies should consider boycotting the Beijing-hosted 2022 Olympics. A government that is committing genocide should never be allowed to host the community of nations at an event whose purported mission is to build a better world for us all.

<div id="about_the_author">
<div class="description"><a href="https://twitter.com/yonahdiamond">Yonah Diamond</a> is legal counsel at the Raoul Wallenberg Centre for Human Rights &amp; <a href="https://twitter.com/RayhanAsat">Rayhan Asat</a> is a lawyer and the president of the American Turkic International Lawyers Association, and sister of Ekpar Asat.</div>
</div>
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<pre>Featured Image: Ekpar Asat</pre>

Rayhan and Yonah &#8211; Uyghur Article

China’s technologically sophisticated slavery and genocide have pervaded our industries. The UK government can no longer downplay it.