Hey folks, want to let you know up top that this one is about genocide in Gaza and the police brutality in response to the student protests across the country. If that’s not for you or your nervous system today or ever please take care of yourself.
I wrote y’all a whole essay about the bittersweetness of mapping a psychogeography of the place where I have lived and where I am leaving this summer, as I have left many other places before. But before I could finish there was an interruption and I don’t really know how to talk about it but I also don’t really know how not to talk about it.
News breaks about the horrifying and extremely disproportionate use of force by police against student and faculty protesters who put tents on the quad at Emory University and who supported those doing so. Videos emerge of cops throwing people on the ground, viciously putting a student in a chokehold, kneeling on backs and zip-tying hands together in a way that is known to cause permanent damage. In one video, you see an officer grab at a woman - white, in her 60s, well-to-do, possibly a faculty member - all these things that may have protected her from a moment like this in the past, that she may have believed would protect her in this instance - and scream at her to get on the ground. As she backs away from him in terror, you can see her understanding of police violence go from hypothetical to embodied in real time.
I worked at Emory for years when I lived in Atlanta, in one of the pink Italian marble buildings that faces the quad. I traversed that space daily. Students read with their backs against one of the big trees there, or set up hammocks or slack lines, or threw frisbees, or put up art installations. There is a huge magnolia tree in one corner that bursts into gigantic, luscious, magenta blossoms every April. I still have ties to people there, so when I receive the news about what has happened it is through text messages from friends who were there, who saw their peaceful occupation of the space and the violent aftermath with their own eyes.
I can’t tell you quite what it does to me to see the space that I know so well, a space that was steadfastly mundane at all times, become a site of police aggression - to see it transformed by unchecked police brutality - but it breaks something in me. It contaminates all of my memories of that place like film celluloid under heat. Like so many of us I have been wrecked about the ongoing genocide in Gaza, but this is a new wave, a new level unlocked. To see this and to be so far away, to not be able to do anything there, the strangling sense of powerlessness. For the Emory administration and the police to decide that students setting up a few tents on a lawn is threatening enough to warrant using pepper balls and tasers just shows (again, again, again) that they have the monopoly on violence, and will use it, no matter how insanely disproportionate to the situation at hand.
This is the way that space can be changed forever, the way lives can be changed forever by the embodied knowledge that the spaces purported to be safe havens of thought and discourse can be turned into zones under attack at a moment’s notice.
However, I have seen this go in the other direction as well. Some years ago there was a protest and march through a city where I lived and thousands of people came out for it. It was a collective expression of rage and grief, before anyone had had a chance to think too much about strategy or the long-term or what to do next, people came together and walked together and shouted together in the streets. What I remember is how much space we took up. Every lane of the roads through town in both directions. People walking on the elevated medians, the sound of our voices echoing so loud in the tunnels.
On the one hand, you might say that this event was purely symbolic, that we took the space because we were permitted to, that it was a one-time venting of emotion. However, I will say to you that with that number of people there the only thing the cops could really do was block us from walking en masse onto the highway (and they had to stop traffic themselves to even do that). We were too many to kettle, too many to possibly arrest or control. I will say that it changes your understanding of the world, your bodily knowledge of the city where you live, to be a part of something like that. You see it and feel it differently forever, and you see all of the strangers around you differently too.
For ever afterwards in my time there, biking home from work on the roads where, now, just days ago, now just last week or a few months or a few years ago, I still remember - I remember how these streets were transformed by thousands of people filled with love and grief and rage. I remember my friend holding me up the whole last mile to keep going, leaning on her with my twisted ankle as we shouted the call-and-response chants with hoarse throats. The city is changed forever by the residue of our gathering. How many strangers that I pass on that commute home from work were there in the streets with us that night? Or weren’t there but wanted to be? Who came later, showed up to meetings or gave testimony at City Hall or painted banners or donated to a bail fund? How many people around me at any given time are secretly my allies?
No protest I’ve been to has ever affected me that way, changed me on a cellular, electric level the way that that one did.
We don’t know what will happen next - if the encampment will last through the rainy night, if our efforts will have an effect, if the children in another country will cease to be senselessly bombed and murdered by weapons our taxes pay for. Whatever happens, I carry the feeling of that one night with me, it lives in my body forever now, and with that feeling I hope to be of use. Being of use is the only antidote that I know of to the strangling feeling of helplessness, and wherever I am I know there is something I can do. Wherever you are, there is something you can do, too.
Thanks for reading. Free Palestine.