Progressive culture since 1954
We resist through BDS so that we can return to and rebuild villages like Safsaf. We resist through BDS to stop forced ethnic displacements in villages like Sheikh Jarrah. We resist through BDS to create a unified Palestine where our rights and sovereignty are realised and respected. We resist through BDS to organise communities around the world to dismantle the systems that oppress.
It was 1980. I was writer-in-residence at a university. I had booked a meeting room for the first reading of a play. But three young men were dug in deep with each other. I became stiff and shrill. — ‘Did you book this room? I booked this room!’ —
If you’re unemployed it’s not because there isn’t any work. Just look around: a housing shortage, crime, pollution, we need better schools and parks. Whatever our needs, they all require work. And as long as we have unsatisfied needs, there’s work to be done.
She climbs into the cardboard box, curls into a foetus shape, knees by her ears, right arm tucked below. She starts folding the lid closed, blocking the room, but the left flap keeps popping open. After her sixth try, she lets it be. Wouldn’t it be funny if someone walked in now? Wouldn’t it be a great surprise? Only she lives alone. And she has no visitors either currently in her home or scheduled to visit.
The Dawn of Everything—David Graeber and David Wengrow’s ambitious revision of the Standard Narrative regarding so-called ‘pre-history’ and ‘pre-historic’ groups—is full of doors left ajar and rooms gleefully, if tentatively, explored. If it does not provide the reader with marching orders by the end of its 600+ pages, it nonetheless provides countless inspiring examples of the ways that many of our ancestors gradually built alternatives to their own societies, from within and without.