The muck and beauty of everyday struggle, praxis, and resistance

Art by anonymous.

Late summer, 2023. I visit an exhibition at Kettle’s Yard titled ‘Material Power: Palestinian Embroidery’, which aims to display the cultural significance of women’s embroidery within the Palestinian cultural sphere. I remember seeing traditional dresses on lifeless mannequins; I remember a keffiyeh, tied just as it is supposed to be, headless and preserved within sterile glass; I remember small pouches with beads and fringes, flat and empty. These remind me of the women in our villages that I’ve seen in old movies, I say; Kurdish people wear this, too, I say; my sister bought one of these bags in the motherland, I remember it collecting dust in one of the nooks of our wardrobes, I say. It seems odd to me that materials so closely tied to our everyday cultural existence could be emptied and neatly separated from us behind a wall of glass.

I remember the objects, but I don’t remember the life.

It is a trite yet consistent fact of cultural institutions that their ways of displaying, categorising, and valuing are often too imbued with colonial and capitalist legacy to truly represent any sincere cultural existence. Back then, the Kettle’s Yard exhibition made me think of an anecdote recounted by a Sámi scholar, curator, and duojár, who told the story of their grandfather’s visit to a museum exhibition on the Sámi people, a patronising show of curiosity, esteem, and othering that one might pervertedly bestow upon an object of cultural enquiry. The storyteller’s grandfather’s worn-out shoes, placed outside his house for repair, had recently disappeared only to mysteriously appear in this exhibition. Upon seeing his shoes on display, he simply asked, ‘Why are they showing garbage?’, and walked away.

Though the objects displayed at Kettle’s Yard were certainly no garbage, they were meant to form a material part of lived life, to be used, embedded in the muck and beauty of everyday struggle, praxis, and resistance. Why do they still keep exoticizing and isolating customary parts of our cultures for their own purposes of intellectual and cultural sophistication? I think back to the Middle Eastern plates I’ve seen at the Fitzwilliam Museum, and I think back to all the collections of the British Museum. Today, the ironies of this type of cultural and institutional regard for other(ed) cultures have become much more tangible with the ongoing genocide in Palestine and the University’s silence and complicity surrounding it – the very same University in whose art gallery Palestinian embroidery and women’s revolutionary agency was prominently displayed only a few months before as well as during October 7.

And I cannot understand how they can never seem to afford our peoples the same protection and esteem, the same dignity that they give to our objects.

April 2024. I am attending a lecture titled ‘Arabic Poetry as a Weapon of Jihad’. I am standing in the foyer leading to the auditorium at Pembroke. I witness a conversation between two Western members of the University, one a student, the other a scholar. As I listen to these white English and American people – one fawning over a necklace consisting of their name written in Arabic to express how profoundly passionate they feel about the language they study, the other downplaying the importance of their own necklace which appears to be a gift from a local person met through actual presence in the Middle East – I cannot help but think about the cultural absurdity of the situation.

In the days preceding the lecture, my Palestinian friend made a particularly apt comment: ‘I keep going back to the title, Arabic poetry as a weapon of jihad… What is this militarised language?’ they asked. While my initial thoughts on the strange interaction on jewellery revolved around the tokenisation of our cultures, our languages, as exotic signifiers to be carried miles away from their actual cultural locus in an elitist institution with a colonial legacy, I also found myself returning to the question of militarism that my friend had raised. It seemed to me, in that moment, that the only two approaches to Middle Eastern cultures and languages have always been either exoticisation or a discourse of terror and weaponisation – or a combination of the two. The situation turned even more absurd when the American participant in the conversation rather nonchalantly stated that they are part of the United States Armed Forces and of that surprisingly large group of students on leave to study at Cambridge only to return to the Armed Forces once they graduate.

And I cannot understand how someone who claimed with such clear and sparkling eyes to love and care for the Arabic language, Arabic culture so very deeply can with such ease proclaim their position within machinery that seeks to destroy those same beings for profit.

May 2024. The Cambridge solidarity encampment for Palestine is established. Students and community members dance, sing, paint, and play instruments, regardless of their skill levels. Various forms of art unite them as they turn chants for Palestine into discernible melodies. The encampment hosts an open mic night where people sing and recite poetry. It collates a library on Palestinian and other fiction, poetry, essays, history, writing, and photography. Amid soul-tearing news, exacerbating genocide, clamorous demands, long days, and endless rainproofing it is these moments of pure creative expression – whether joyful, lamenting, or raging, far from therapeutic but somehow intensely cathartic – that sustain the encampment in deeply significant ways. The cultural aspects of the encampment become almost as important to the resistance as concrete demands for divestment and disclosure, and serious effort is put into preserving, archiving, and extending the cultural and artistic practices which the encampment has offered a tangible place for beyond the current action.

Importantly, the encampment is a visible testament to what honouring Palestinian culture really looks like – in stark contrast with the irony between Kettle’s Yard and the University’s ongoing (in)actions. The enclosed keffiyeh of the art gallery regains its vitality, refusing to be contained by the parameters of an imperialist system.

‘What’s different – and I think you’ll be able to appreciate this – is that this movement has been able to rise above identity politics’, a friend keenly observes. Their words linger on my mind, and every day their acuteness becomes more and more clear: going beyond identity politics and thinking collectively is crucial in realising a more genuine network aimed at cultural and communal liberation. What’s more, this type of cultural commitment does not stop at Palestinian culture; rather, it is remarkably capable of encapsulating both Palestinian and other cultural struggles simultaneously.

This is what I’m feeling – epitomised by Palestinians, shared by us all.

Within such an interrelated set of struggles, labels of activism and concerns of activism burnout seem increasingly strange, particularly when that word is incapable of expressing what is really happening: this is not just activism, but a way of existence (one might even argue that the only way of existence for many of us), whether a conscious choice or not. It is a way to breathe, to think, to speak, and crucially, to create (science, art, philosophy, culture – in all their senses!). Whether directly or indirectly, every word we utter is about Palestine, is about Sudan, about Yemen, about Kurdistan, about Congo, about Indigenous rights, about ecological, cultural, and decolonial justice. With the urgency of Palestinian liberation, ‘business as usual’ has lost any remaining vestiges of meaning and the interconnectedness of all our spheres of activity, including work, cultural production, and activism, has unequivocally asserted itself over any artificial separation. If we burn out, it is not because of our activism, but because of the oppressive systems we are forced to exist in in the first place.

‘It’s so absurd to be us at these times. Keep writing. Make them uncomfortable’, my friend says to me.

And I try to keep writing, because the absurdity of Cambridge takes its most acute and affective form in its cultural sphere; and it is only by embroiling myself thoroughly in the cultural forms of resistance that I can make sense of it.