Allying Our Art & Our Action
Storytelling as a Practice in Solidarity
PHOTO BY AERAN SQUIRES
What might be some of the roles and responsibilities of creatives in this era? Inspired by conversations with the Loam community, co-editor Kate shares a few thoughts in this essay. Please read through the footnotes for further resources.
This past week, Israel massacred more than a hundred Gazans who were seeking food for their starving families.1 Every one of these lives has meaning. Every one of these losses is irreparable and unforgivable.
“The Flour Massacre” is part of Israel’s strategy to systematically destroy life-sustaining infrastructure in Palestine by targeting critical community spaces.2 For more than a century, Zionists have sought to cut off Palestinians from tending to their olive groves and wild foods.3 More recently, Israelis from across the political spectrum blocked aid trucks from reaching Gazans.4 In Israel’s ongoing genocide against the Palestinian people, the last 5 months have been some of the most brutal.
In their coverage of “The Flour Massacre,” sources such as the NYTimes invoke the dehumanizing language of “lawlessness,” “mobs,” and “swarms.” A recent headline— “Death of Gazans Desperate for Food Prompts Fresh Calls for Cease-Fire”—is proof of the invisibilizing impact of the passive voice5. Were you to only read the headlines, you might never know how someone died, or who killed them. This omission is violence.
As storytellers, surveying the news forces us to confront both the limitations and possibilities of story. Writes Hala Alyan:
“In the urgency of moments like this [...] art is not a replacement for policy. Poems will not save us. Poems will not save Gaza. I say that as a poet. They will not stop what needs stopping, or single-handedly bring about action, policy change, Palestinian self-determination, rights, and dignity….
Dialectically: a story isn’t enough, and one cannot triumph in any social justice struggle without examining the stories that have been turned into gospel. This is true for any project of imperialism, occupation, or persecution: narratives get us into them. Narratives will get us out.”6
For those of us whose creative work is rooted in narrative building—true for so many in the Loam community—this era is asking us to reimagine creativity as a practice in cultivating solidarity.
But storytelling can feel empty and unimportant in this moment. Most any act of creativity can.
This isn’t a justification for despair: we owe Gaza our endurance.
It’s more to say that if the narrative feels jumbled, it’s because everything is jumbled; also precarious, unbearable, heartbreaking. Finding our way forward in the face of escalating atrocity requires immense fortification and strategic solidarity. As Layla K. Feghali says:
“I don't believe there is a remedy for this time. I don't believe that we should be seeking [to] comfort the [hard] feelings [...] I think our task right now is to harness the grief and the rage towards action.” 7
There is no story that will soften the suffering. No single arc or frame that will make it “make sense.” To take action toward a Free Palestine—toward freedom for every place and people that has been historically brutalized—we need to release our grip on what is comfortable and safe. Writes Veera Sulaiman in “A Promise Not A Statement”:8
“Find your talents and your niche in this and every movement, for sure, but make sure you’re spending plenty of time doing hard, unglamorous things. We have been doing them for years….
You do not get to pick and choose which of them suit you the best. Be very honest with yourself and people in your life about why you’re drawn to certain actions. We may all have different roles, but all of these roles have to include the willingness to be on the frontlines—to put something, or better yet everything, on the line for each other.”
No one is exempt from the necessity of transformation. The question is how we will show up. What are our roles? Risks?
I don’t have any singular answer to these questions: finding your particular foothold is a contextual pursuit. What I will say is this: as culture workers, it’s our responsibility to critically reflect on why we create. When I talk with creatives within the Loam constellation, many agree that if we are going to ask for your attention, then what we share must have some strategy or significance. There is too much at stake.
This doesn’t mean that the dissolution of self is solidarity. Tending to our sentience, our fire, our families, our bodily needs, has its own vital intelligence.9 And whatever we conjure isn’t ours alone. I mean that on the most cellular level: our art always exists in conversation with the material and the unseen.
Creativity is a flame that can guide us toward fruitful contact. The stories we send out into the world can solidify an idea, or root us to a place, or put us on the cosmic phone with someone we thought that we’d lost long ago.
To make contact, we must continually hone in on our “why.” This helps us cultivate resilient practices so that we can stay in contact. As in: “stay with the trouble.”10 As in: stay here, in love, and in solidarity.
But a lot of us are wrestling right now with creativity: its ‘utility’, and place. We are so desperate to make it matter. Although the last few months have seen a staggering resurrection in creative protest, we’re also seeing how easy it is for creatives—like you or me—to get too comfortable in our roles. We need to be in the practice of stepping outside of ourselves. I have been learning this daily.
Something I’m working through is the idea that our creativity is as much a service as it is a survival skill. Creativity can keep us in contact. And I think this is why I continue to turn toward storytelling as one of many strategies for meeting this moment. Because creation—like an appetite—is irrefutable evidence of life. And in the face of death-making systems, I am hungry to move closer, and closer, toward life.
As Safia Elhillo shared in a recent post:
“I don’t want to have an inflated sense of my role as a poet during this time, nor do I want to absolve myself of responsibility during this time. I’m tending where I can. I am thinking about what it means to “do language,” in this moment where we are witnessing the term “human animals” wielded in an official capacity to justify ethnic cleansing, when we are witnessing respected news outlets use the passive voice to harrowing effect—describing the murdered as people who simply “have died,” as if that is just the natural order of things. Long stretches of silence about the war in Sudan, silence that is not the absence of language but a language of its own. And when the war in Sudan is mentioned, it is often referred to as “the forgotten war.” As if I or any of my people could forget. But our memory is not the one being centered by this language.
So what are the possibilities of shifting the center? If this is the language that is populating the historical record about this moment we are experiencing in real time, then is there not some responsibility as well to crowd out that language with our own? I have often experienced the act of writing poetry to be one of paying absolute attention, a commitment to radical presence, a refusal to dissociate, to go numb.”
Reading Safia, I am reminded that language has the power to shift the center. The role of any creative in this moment is particular to your positionality. It’s also true that every one of us who “does language” needs to get real on what narratives we are responsible for seeding, or joining with, or dreaming into. This is part of understanding our why. This is part of coming home to our work.
In this moment when so many are suffering, belonging to movements that matter—that have teeth, focus, reach—is life-affirming. Our creative practices, whatever they are, can help us continue to show up in these spaces as solid selves.
And it’s this act of staying solid—of solidarity—that I want to focus on. That we are here (present, solid, sentient) is such a precious, and precarious, thing. More and more, I am brought to tears by everyday mundanities: the omnipresent veil between love and grief is so thin that sometimes the two sublimate.
I cannot unsee the footage of Palestinian children—blowing out birthday candles, or saying their first words—who have since been murdered by the U.S.-backed Zionist regime. I cannot unsee the photo of a brother clawing at his beloved sister or the father carrying his child’s limbs in a bag.
The lives of these little ones were (are) precious. They mattered (matter) to someone. Their deaths are not reversible: there is no justice, or good end. They will not get to swim in the sea or nurse a first all-consuming crush or race their friends through a serpentine trail of moonlight. They will not get to love and be loved in the way that only the living can: immediately, intimately, enfleshed.
We need to stay solid for them. For the fathers, mothers, sisters, brothers, beloveds who have been killed by Israel’s genocidal campaign. We need to stay solid for the millions more who are at immediate risk of dehydration, starvation, and death at the hands of “Israel.”
We need to stay solid for Sudan, too. For Congo. For Ukraine. For every community “whose homes have been made unsafe or uninhabitable through extreme acts of war and violence.” Our struggles are interconnected.
But solidarity can feel nebulous. As Elaine Castillo writes:
“What does solidarity mean, when it comes to art? Like empathy, solidarity is another one of those exceedingly boring, crusted-over oatmeal words—so easy to ring hollow, and signal vaguely. If anything, the particular cocktail of late capitalism and selfhood in the age of the internet makes solidity, not just solidarity, feel like a relic of the past. What’s solidarity in the age of the hashtag and the protest selfie; what does art, of all things, have to do with it?
Most of us, if we are people of any kind, know that to be a person is to be patchworked: full of gaps, and lacunae, leaking and seeping at every seam. Certainly modernity has taught us that beguiling story of our porousness; being full of gaps is also a way of being full of market opportunities. And that porousness isn’t a lie. But we aren’t just pieces. It can’t just be the realm of the reactionary and the fundamentality to suggest that there might be something of worth in not being, forever, a honeycomb of hollows—in being, yes, solid: dense in places with meaning and purpose. We know this is true if we have ever met another person that we wanted to keep in our lives.
Because despite our natural human frangibility, there does come a time when we have to be solid for other people. When we have to not evade, obfuscate, be liminal, be of two minds or a thousand. When we have to try to be whole for other people—and face their messy, sewn-together wholeness—which is another way of holding other people, being held by other people; held together, usually.
Solidarity is not nothing. It is a labor—like building a person, a love, a body of knowledge. And that labor, its peopled dailiness, has a tangible, vibrating effect in the world, radiating liveliness like a furnace throws off heat in the cold.”11
In this passage, Castillo underscores solidarity as the practice of solidifying our commitments. To be in solidarity with Palestine—to be in solidarity with any liberation struggle–we need to be solid. Our creative praxises must have roots. Our word must mean something. It’s a question of integrity, really: of what it looks like to ally our art with our action so that everything we do is an embodied prayer.12
Solidifying our commitments as creatives can look like making medicine for mutual aid networks or facilitating art builds. It can look like curating actions or cooking for friends on the frontlines. It can look like protesting in the streets and supporting BDS.
This kind of artmaking as allyship will not “save what needs saving.”13 It will not be enough. It will not make us impermeable: we will continue to stumble, slip up, surrender, be humbled, made new.
But striving to ally our art with our actions can solidify us. It can give our movements shape and make our narrative animate. The act of creation makes us more real to ourselves and to each other.
And if we want to be in solidarity in this struggle, we need to be real to ourselves and to each other. We need to see one another—not as victims or ghosts or static images, not as numbers, or ‘others’, or the forgotten—but as people. Dynamic and multidimensional people. People we would do everything for, anything for, day after day, because creation is an act of care, and solidarity is an expression of love, and there is no future for any of us without this kind of continual, daily, devotional commitment.
What We’re Tracking (Jewish Currents). Accessed March 6 2024.
Read “Bread & Salt” by Amanny Ahmad. First “commissioned as part of the exhibition Cum Panis: Bread and its Ecologies curated by Adeline Lépine and Grace Gloria Denis, currently on view at Le 19 Crac, Montbéliard, France” and since published in MOLD, this essay is an essential exploration of bread baking, community care, resistance, and change in Palestine.
“As Gaza strains under a food crisis, some Israeli protesters are trying to block aid.” NPR. February 12 2024.
Critical Media Literacy with Dr. Maytha Alhassen is a powerful primer on learning how to read through headlines, recognize dehumanizing language, and deconstruct supremacist narratives.
“What a Palestinian-American Wants You To Know About Dehumanization.” Teen Vogue, Hala Alyan. December 20 2023.
“Layla K. Feghali on The Land in Our Bones.” For the Wild. January 10 2024.
Please download and distribute copies of this vital primer here. As Entangled Roots Press notes on their page: “you are invited to print this zine, but not for commercial purposes. This means that you can ask for donations to cover your printing costs. If you are raising money DIRECTLY for PALESTINIANS you are welcome to contact us (insta @impinsandimneedles or contact Ali on this page) about selling the zine. We love working with info-shops, mutual aid projects, and rad folx in general.”
We are grateful to tayla shanaye for her guidance in this work.
Throughout her book Nourishing the Nervous System, integral somatic decolonial feminist scholar and relational educator tayla shanaye shares powerful tools for staying with the trouble of these times.
This passage from How To Read Now is part of an essay, “Autobiography in Asian Film, or What We Talk About When We Talk About Representation” on the politics of representation. Although the context for this conversation is very different, Castillo’s articulation of solidarity is one of the most powerful that I’ve come across.
The digital zine Ecologizing Solidarity With Palestine from Lead to Life is a potent expression of this ethos.
Hala Alyan in Practices for Care and Endurance