As a global pandemic joins a long list of catastrophes that have simply become a fact of ordinary life, it seems more urgent than ever to revisit and reimagine the fictions governing the accident. Conditions of debilitation, and the bodies that suffer them, deserve nothing less.

The spectre ofIslamogauchisme – or ‘Islamo-leftism’ – was evoked last month as the French government launched an inquiry targeting universities. Frederique Vidal, the Minister for Higher Education and Research, used the phrase when announcing a probe into the ‘influence’ of Islamo-leftism and postcolonialism in higher education, and again when defending it against the salvo of criticism it subsequently received. After a group of 600 university professors called for her resignation, Vidal insisted that – while Islamogauchisme may not have a ‘scientific definition’ – it corresponds to a wider ‘feeling’ in the general public.

To bear witness is to enter a pact with the dead, not to repair the injuries of the world by which they were forsaken, but to bring about a new one in which theirs might have been, and could still be, a life held sacrosanct.'

There is no community, because communities don’t simply exist, they are achieved every day, held in the world through the labour, skill, and determination of individuals in real relationships of care, love, and solidarity.

For those of us in the diaspora, it’s impossible to look at these images and see only the masses, the revolutionaries, or the wretched of the earth. It’s impossible to see fictionalised, fetishised caricatures, because we also see ourselves, in one way or another. We see ourselves in those we look at. We imagine being there, but we also imagine having always been there.

We are in shock and mourning, so I’ll keep this brief as I can. On Friday we learned, in the most horrific way, that we live in a country where a man can walk down the street in broad daylight fully armed and livestream his massacre of Muslims at our place of worship.

Whether it’s the hot takes around the film’s ‘Islamophobia’ and stereotypical representations of ‘people of colour’, on the one hand, or derision of its ‘liberalism’ from the left on the other, the film’s varied reception demonstrates that any form of black achievement and visibility, small or large, will incur the wrath of a ‘critique’ industry geared towards shaming and ‘calling out’ the easiest and most obvious targets.

For some time now, Muslim activists have been increasingly aware and vocal about how their identity continues to be evacuated of political content. That this identity has momentarily exhausted its political potential can be gleaned from its consistently exhausted looking ambassadors, like Abdel-Magied, as they desperately try to affect the right composure, the pithy expressions, and the sufficient expertise to make themselves heard and taken seriously, not least by their opponents.

If there is one theme encompassing the various protest movements over the past several years, it is that of occupation. The revolutions and Occupy collectives that sprang up between 2011 and 2013 were a manifestation of a very basic idea: in occupying public spaces, the people are fashioning it into a place of alternatives, of other possibilities. In this sense, occupation is a progressive, often non-violent movement that acts on behalf of the majority of people by laying claim to what has been appropriated, privatised or exploited by a small number of bankers, politicians, elites, etc.

The interesting thing about living in an ideologically ‘post-racial’ society - which is nevertheless dependent to the extreme on structures and practices of racism and racial violence - is that talking about racism is equivalent to perpetuating it.

Much like the apartheid state it avidly supports, this government reserves its designations of ‘terrorism’ for the Muslim alone: a body that is always potentially suspect and dangerous.

I often stay up late, trying and always failing to catch up on reading and study, only looking up every now and then to watch the workers across the road. It’s my own way of standing in solidarity, a pathetic gesture if ever there was one. On one such an occasion, I came across a tragic news article: having just finished a three-hour cleaning shift, a worker in one of Sydney’s shipping yards walked out of the premises and then doused himself in petrol and set himself alight.

A video recently went viral on social media. It depicts the vile and repugnant behaviour of two Australian women terrorising the passengers of a bus in the Gold Coast. In the recording, as obscenities and fists go flying about, it becomes clear that foremost among the victims is a partially blind and elderly man who is beaten and verbally abused after he is suspected by his attackers of being an ‘Abo’.