Hello dear ones,
Before we dive into this week’s CARESCAPES, I want to share an announcement for how you can support families in Palestine this week: Grab “Activism is Trauma Healing” coloring stickers, the latest collaboration with Disobedient Goods and Apparel. All profits ($8) will will benefit a three-generation Palestinian family who has evacuated to Cairo; profits will support their costs of living & medical expenses to repair & heal serious injuries, trauma, and illness. So far we’ve raised close to $800!!
It’s the last day of classes, and my professor has taken us out to the famous blue wall in front of California Institute of the Arts. In front of the wall, Students for Justice for Palestine had placed a banner that read: SJP CalArts Students, Faculty, Alumnx Demand that CalArts: Disclose and Divest. Free Palestine - End the Occupation - Stop Funding Genocide.
We’d come there to be in community with SJP at their tent, a space of solidarity with those at student encampments across the United States and the world. And together, we wrote a collective poem in response to the prompt: What does love look like in public?” This question was inspired by Cornel West’s words: that “Justice is what love looks like in public.”
In response, I wrote the following: Love in public looks like strangers making eye contact and smiling at each other as they pass in the street. It is protestors dancing and laughing at encampments. The links of arms in a circle to form a human chain. Grieving together. A commitment to stranger intimacy that may be fleeting but no less meaningful than our longest relationship.
On Wednesday, I asked folks on my IG to respond to the prompt, so that we too could create our own collective poem. Here’s what folks shared:
What does love in public look like for you?
Gardens. Helping someone struggling with bags. Moving towards those who are struggling instead of turning away. Crossing the street slowly with an elderly person. Taking a deep breath in the sunshine. Ramps for disabled bodies. Speaking out even when it is hard or scary. Small and daily acts of care and kindness. Putting your grocery card back thoughtfully. Marching for Palestine. People masking against airborne illnesses and eating outdoors all year around. Witnessing without judgment. Helping a parent with a stroller getting on public transportation. Laying on the grass with people watching the stars and sharing moments of peace in a world that wants us broken. Kids having meltdowns with no one judging, just holding space for them and their caretaker. Feeding people. Holding the door for the person behind you. Unique self-expression. Walking through the streets in a collective shouting for the freedom of someone will will never meet, for the place we will never stand on, for a language and culture that is not our own, so that freedom is felt. And once that is felt and known, we will be free. And our children. All of the children will have love, justice, liberation, and healing. Everyone wearing masks again. Making strangers laugh and smile by a warm joke/goofiness. Listening. Getting some food for a homeless person. Deep connections. Laughing a little too loudly with friends in a coffee shop. Standing by someone harassed or bullied. People sharing a glimmer moment together with a spark in their eyes. Radical street art. Strangers smiling at children with their caregivers, even when the kids are being extra. Compassion. Mutual masking. Help and assistance that is not conditioned or earned — it is given in love. Asking how your coworkers are and listening. Making way for someone elderly or with disability. The little slight smiles whenever people look at each other. PDAs. Homes for all. Opening a door for others. Picking up litter. Looking after each other’s kids. Acting in solidarity with every other person harmed by our system and the unhealed folks it has produced. Thanking the plants. Seeing people experiencing and sharing real moments of joy and peace together. Sharing and witnessing creative expression. Smiling eyes. Little arm touches that happen occasionally instinctively. Full access to health care for all. Learning someone’s name. Standing up for others. An energy that you can see from afar. Community meals. The realization that my neighbour and I both flourish under the same sun.
Love in public also looks like a community of humans gathered together to make art about Palestinian liberation. A few weekends ago, my partner and I sat at a table with some other humans that we just ran into inside of Armory Center for the Arts. We’re all there for an event called Posters for Palestine.
Over the span of a couple of hours, we flip through old magazines and use printed images of poppies and olive trees and keffiyehs to create our signs. As we use scissors and glue, one of the facilitators announces that it’s story time and we watch as children and adults gather around for a story of Palestinian liberation.
To be in a space with close to 100 other humans, to make art and be in community together, nourishes my heart in ways I almost can’t describe. Since the pandemic began, I have found very few opportunities to be in community — something that was so deeply a part of my life prior to COVID-19. But as an immunocompromised person in a world that largely believes that the pandemic is over, it has been hard for me to go to events knowing that I’ll be one of the only people there wearing a mask. The isolation has been and continues to be profound.
But here, in this space, even though my partner and I are amongst the very few still masking, I get to be in community with others who’re committed to the liberation of Palestine. And that is a beautiful thing.
Culture Diary
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I had no idea who Macklemore was until I heard “Hind’s Hall,” his pro-Palestinian anthem inspired by the students at Columbia University who renamed one of the hall’s after Hind Rajab, a six-year-old Palestinian girl who was killed by the Israeli military on January 29th. The song is so powerful and represents what we should be expecting of celebrities.
On Monday night, my partner and i went to see Challengers (some light spoilers ahead). We were both really hoping for a very sexy film that was gay and followed this proposed throuple. Sadly, there was very little sex, only one scene of queer intimacy, and instead of a throuple, we had two men competing over Zendaya for the whole film. We both left underwhelmed.
I’ve long been a big fan of the ever quirky Miranda July and all of the weird and beautiful intimacies that populate her worlds. So I was stoked when I saw her read from All Fours last spring. It took me literally zero seconds to grab my copy and I have been devouring the novel about a forty-five year old woman who is supposed to take a road trip from LA to NY and instead spends two weeks at hotel near home.
We love a trashy docu-series in our home, so we started and finished Ashley Madison: Sex, Lies, and Scandal on Netflix in the span of 24 hours. ICYMI, Ashley Madison was a dating site for folks who were married and wanted to have an affair. The site had 35M subscribers at the time in which it was hacked and the personal information of its patrons was released to the public.
Okay so technically I’m writing this on Thursday and Billie Eilish’s Hit Me Hard and Soft is released on Friday, but I can assure you that I will be playing this album on repeat as soon as I wake up. I know that Eilish has found herself on the Block Out lists for not using her platform to speak out on Palestine (though some say that wearing a pin for Palestine at the Grammy’s was *something*), so I totally respect your choice to unfollow.
I’m a few years late to The Unforgivable, the Netflix movie starring Sandra Bullock as Ruth Slater, a woman who is released after serving 20 years for killing a police officer. After she’s released, she goes searching for her little sister and drama ensues. Bullock’s acting is nothing short of incredible and I appreciated how the film wasn’t promoting Blue Lives Matter but still wished it was a little bit more abolitionist.
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