While PEN America has organized a street rally in support of Ukrainian writers imprisoned and killed by Russia and taken a delegation of Ukrainian writers to meet with Congress, it has yet to organize any public event on behalf of Palestinian writers who have been imprisoned and killed by Israel. PEN International, English PEN, and PEN South Africa called for a ceasefire in Gaza five full months before PEN America did, and PEN America’s call came only after over a thousand writers had signed a letter denouncing the organization for its inaction. PEN America’s priorities so often align with the U.S. government’s own foreign policy goals that one writer quipped, ‘PEN America has been turned into an outpost of the U.S. State Department.’
While the leadership at PEN America is being roundly denounced for its double standards on Israel and Palestine, many of its staff members’ work in this area and on other issues is being stymied and undermined. We would like to give a shout out to PEN America United, the union representing PEN America’s staff, which has been trying to get a fair contract for over eighteen months. PEN’s Chief Executive Officer’s salary was disclosed to be $465,000 in 2022, and in recent contract negotiations management proposed a $48,500 minimum starting salary for staff, well below industry standards and hardly a living wage in New York City. In addition to her annual salary, which has likely increased over the past two years, PEN’s CEO earns an additional undisclosed six-figure yearly sum for serving on Meta’s Oversight Board. As one sign at a PEN America United rally phrased it, “Are fair wages banned too?”
The evening raised over $8,000 for We Are Not Numbers (WANN), a youth-led organization in Gaza that trains a new generation of Palestinian writers. At the top of the program, Michelle Alexander read a poem by my friend and WANN mentee Haya Abu Nasser. When WANN alumni Mahmoud Alyazji read a remembrance with an accompanying film about his best friend Mohammed Zaher Hammo, who was killed in an Israeli airstrike with his family, there were audible sounds of weeping in the audience, and I venture to say there was not a dry eye in the house. After musician Huda Asfourplayed a final song to close out the evening, which was by turns inspiring, moving, and galvanizing, we all headed out into the world with firm resolve to continue fighting for Palestinian freedom.
In the meantime, the situation in Gaza has grown increasingly catastrophic as Israel drops bombs on displaced, starving people living in tents, and gives confusing, impossible evacuation orders to families with no place to go. Repression at home continues to be brutal as riot police are summoned to break up peaceful student Gaza solidarity encampments. I have made a chant by the Columbia students a new motto, “Disclose, Divest. We will not stop. We will not rest.”
Several weeks ago I saw a post on X (formerly Twitter) that asked, “Anyone else struggling to maintain ‘Work-Genocide’ balance lately?” Watching mass murder in real time on social media is a circle of hell I never thought to inhabit. I cycle between grief, rage, and shame as I witness U.S.-made “bunker buster” bombs raining down on trapped civilians in Gaza while our government underwrites, arms, and provides diplomatic cover for Israel’s genocidal campaign.
Right now, we are engaged in two struggles—one is to get what UNICEF has called a war against children in Gaza to stop, and the other is to push back against McCarthyite repression on campuses and in workplaces. Close to home, Columbia University’s administration has been using repressive tactics against student groups, and our friends at Palestine Legal have been working from dawn until dusk to defend people around the country who are being doxxed, harassed, threatened, and fired for speaking out against what is happening in Gaza.
And while eyes are focused on Gaza, settler and Israeli army violence in the West Bank has reached unseen levels. At the same time, the Armenians of Jerusalem are facing an existential threat as a despicable land grab is underway in the Armenian Quarter.
Tired of my own hand-wringing and too many hours spent on Instagram looking at horrific images, I joined a large pro-ceasefire demonstration last Sunday that shut down the Manhattan Bridge for over three hours. As horrible as the situation is in Gaza, there was joy and power in joining with 1,500 like-minded people to chant, “Down, down with occupation! Up, up with liberation!” The only antidote to despair is action—and the most powerful and effective actions are taken with others.
P.S. For further reading, I recommend the articles below.
Anne Boyer’s beautifully written letter announcing her resignation as the poetry editor of the New York Times Sunday Magazine because of the paper’s poor and biased coverage.
My friend Adania Shibli interviewed by The Guardian’s John Freeman on language, writing, silence, and Palestine
My friend and former mentee Hossam on Life and Death Under the Bombs in Gaza. You can follow him on Instagram.
My friend Patty Kaishian’s beautiful piece, “Guardians of the Land: Understanding the Genocide Against Armenians in Artsakh.”
I don’t need to enumerate the newspaper headlines that make the world feel like a dark and calamitous place right now. Everyone I know is struggling to keep from sinking under the weight of so much cruelty and venality. One case in point is the leaked draft decision indicating that the Supreme Court is on the verge of overturning Roe v Wade, which would undo 50 years of legal precedent and allow the banning of abortion by any state government with the will to do it. Alito’s draft decision states that “the Constitution makes no reference to abortion, and no such right is implicitly protected by any constitutional provision,” so if the all white, all male drafters of the constitution hadn’t intended it at the time, we are afforded no protections by the document. If that isn’t scary enough, some legal analysts say that Alito’s draft opinion, by referring to fetuses as human beings, grants them rights that could give momentum to efforts to enact a federal ban on abortion. And to be clear, that is the stated goal of the forces behind this decision.
An interesting piece in The Lever shines a light on anti-abortion zealot Leo Leonard who has been working for many years to undermine Roe. His Judicial Crisis Network and its anonymous donors have toiled long and hard to build an ultra-conservative majority in the Supreme Court that could now rule for decades. The piece goes on to detail the dithering of the Democrats that allowed this to happen, but then offers strategies for what that party might yet do to protect reproductive freedom. One promising tactic is federal protection for and expanding the reach of medication abortion.
In this week’s Special Edition of the At Liberty Podcast Brigitte Amiri, the Deputy Director of the ACLU’s Reproductive Freedom Project, recommended that each of us connect with our local reproductive health, right, and justice organizations, as well as practical community support groups and abortion funds. She further suggested that now is the time to contact our elected officials to let them know where we stand on this issue. While I will certainly support electoral organizing to put progressive and leftist candidates into office, much of my attention will be focused on radical grassroots groups such as New York City for Abortion and mutual aid efforts such as the New York Abortion Access Fund and the Mississippi Reproductive Freedom Fund. On The Cut, Bridget Read and Claire Lampen put together a helpful annotated list of abortion funds in states with the most restrictive abortion laws.
Yesterday I read a beautiful and scary piece by Grace Paley about what life was like before Roe. Paley wrote, “I think women died all the time when abortions were illegal. The horrible abortions were one way; the other was the refusal of institutions—medical, church, and state—to care for you, their willingness to let you die.” The upcoming Supreme Court ruling will not outlaw abortions altogether throughout the entire country at this time. Access to this essential medical care will be determined by where you live and how much money you have, which is already the case in many places, and on our battle to maintain and even expand this access. As Melissa Gira Grant points out in this excellent piece The Real Fight for Abortion Rights Is Not in the Courts or Congress, even before the court strikes down Roe 89% of U.S. counties do not currently have a clinic that provides abortions.
Melissa Gira Grant concludes her piece with this paragraph:
As true as it might be to say, “If they come for Roe tonight, they’re coming for marriage equality tomorrow,” there are plenty of people they have come for already, from trans kids seeking health care to people giving birth in jails to sex workers sharing harm-reduction information to criminalized survivors of intimate partner violence. If you are today feeling for this first time like the government is demanding control over your gender and sexuality and bodily autonomy, you are, sadly, in numerous company. But that also means that there are countless people around you who already know that freedom, certainly now and maybe always, will not come solely from what the law can recognize. Either the law must be pushed to recognize those rights, or those rights must be won despite the law.
Abortion rights were won in this country because tens of thousands of people took to the streets and millions of others were organized to support the cause. We must continue the fight because as Angela Davis put it, “Freedom is a constant struggle.” But our organizing can’t be narrowly focused on abortion—it must include all those vulnerable to concerted right-wing assaults on autonomy and dignity. As Reverend Jacqui Lewis put it, “Liberation is collective. We only get free when we fight for all of us.”
I recently listened to a podcast interview with geographer and prison abolitionist Ruth Wilson Gilmore in which she said, “And while I think a feeling of despair in this day and age is not difficult to understand, I also feel that, as my grandparents taught me, that despair was a luxury that I didn’t get to sport.” Let’s shrug off the coat of mourning and get to work.
The past few days I’ve been saddened and appalled by the Turkish invasion of the Kurdish region of northeastern Syria. When I see in the news the name Ras al-Ain, a place that was bombed by Turkey yesterday, my heart clenches. Ras al-Ain was where my grandmother ended up in a tent camp, along with eight thousand other Armenian orphans, after the death marches of 1915. This most recent U.S. betrayal of the Kurds is seemingly the result of an impetuous decision by Trump on a phone call with Turkey’s president. I thought of the Kurdish proverb, “Kurds have no friends but the mountains.” The Turkish assault will likely bring an end to the Rojava experiment in democracy, and could well result in the resurgence of the Islamic State in the area. When I read that Armenian-inhabited areas of Syria had come under attack, I thought of the Armenian proverb, “Land of Armenians, land of sorrows.” By the end of Thursday, it was reported that most of the Armenian families had relocated from the conflict areas.
Many, including Republican U.S.
Senators, the Armenian
government, The European
Union, and others,
have denounced the Turkish incursion, recognizing it as an attempt to drive out
the Kurds and repopulate
the area with Syrian Arab refugees, who are increasingly unpopular in Turkey.
When questioned about the Turkish offensive, euphemistically dubbed “Operation
Peace Spring,” and the heavy losses the Kurdish people will likely suffer,
Trump said that the
Kurds had never helped us in World War II, “they didn’t help us in
Normandy,” therefore he wasn’t worried about it.
In response to widespread denunciation, Turkish President
Erdogan lashed out at his EU critics, threatening to allow millions of Syrian
refugees to “flood
Europe.” As Ronan Burtenshaw, editor of The Tribune in the UK, pointed out
on Twitter,
“The EU has no moral high ground on this issue—it did a grubby refugee deal
with Erdogan, leaving hundreds of thousands of people in his camps. Now he can
use them to threaten us, and deliver talking points for the Far-Right in the
process. Reap what you sow.”
The whole thing is gutting and infuriating, and with the
garbage mountain of cruelty piling up around us on all sides and with regard to
so many issues and causes, it’s hard to know what to do but sputter with
helplessness and rage. But there are things to do—demonstrations to organize and attend, electoral
campaigns to work on, and ways to help those in our communities targeted for harm.
There’s another Armenian proverb I like to remember: “The voice of the people
is louder than the roar of the cannon.”
Each day there is some new racist anti-immigrant policy
announced by Trump and the cartoon villains who are running our country. As is
by now apparent, with the Trump Administration’s immigration policies and
practices, cruelty
is the point. Their theater
of cruelty is meant to rally their so-called base and to send a message to
immigrants and would-be immigrants that they aren’t wanted in this country,
unless they can, as acting director of U.S. Immigration and Citizenship
Services Ken Cuccinelli put it, “stand
on their own two feet,” by which he means unless they are wealthy,
able-bodied, and preferably white.
Last week when ICE
raided workplaces in Mississippi, arresting 680 people, the videos,
photographs, and news reports about distraught children whose parents had been
detained, leaving many kids without family care, were terrible. One little
girl, who sobbed
on camera begging for the release of her father, was particularly heartbreaking.
That night, I had nightmares about the three little
Albanian girls whose family I have worked with through the New Sanctuary Coalition (NSC) for
18 months and two little Honduran girls whose mother I had helped fill out an
asylum application in early June at the NSC Pro Se Legal Clinic. In my dreams,
the little girls were crying for their parents the way the kids in the
Mississippi videos had done. But I actually know these kids. I have heard in
great detail about the violence their parents had fled, and I have learned about
the dire conditions in the countries from which they come. I also know about
how fearful their parents are about the possibility of being detained and
deported.
As part of her asylum application, J., the Honduran mom,
wrote about the domestic violence she had suffered, and her reluctance to go to
the police to report the abuse, which meant she didn’t have documentary
evidence to support her claim. She said, “In
countries like ours the only record of these violent events is in our memory.
Unfortunately in my family there was a lot of domestic violence. I saw that my
aunts were often beaten by their partners, and if they called the police, the
abusers would go to jail for maybe one night. Unfortunately, in my country the
police only believe you once you are put into a box and buried in a hole.”
Last Monday, as part of a NSC accompaniment, I went to
immigration court with J. and her two girls, aged eight and six. The girls were
hungry and bored because of the long wait outside the courtroom. People with
attorneys are seen first, and those without lawyers can wait several hours or
more for their turn. No food is allowed in the waiting area or in the
courtroom, so I offered to take the girls to the cafeteria in the federal
building while their mother awaited her turn before the immigration judge. The so-called
cafeteria sold only chips, candy bars, cookies, and soft drinks, so they
selected chocolate and chips. As we sat at the table eating and talking, the
older girl said, “Would you be our grandma?” The little one said, “Can you also
be our auntie?” I laughed. They laughed. But we were now friends.
The only way I can keep from descending into despair is by taking action, whether it is by helping people fill out asylum applications, by accompanying friends to immigration court, or by working with groups organizing against the cruelty. In New York City on August 10, over 100 people, among them members of the NYC DSA Immigrant Justice Working Group (to which I belong) were arrested in a #CloseTheCamps action that shut down the West Side Highway near an ICE field office on 26th Street. The next day, a coalition of #JewsAgainstICE protestors, including Never Again is Now and Jews for Racial and Economic Justice, occupied an Amazon store in Manhattan to demand that Amazon cancel its contracts with ICE. In upstate New York, the Columbia County Sanctuary Movement has a rapid response network that sends out texts when ICE agents are spotted in town so people can drive to the location, offering support to their targeted neighbors, and often preventing detentions. This is the time to mobilize radical kindness and militant refusal in the face of their relentless cruelty.
My daughter Djuna, her friend Hannah, and I recently spent a week at the U.S. southern border between San Diego and Tijuana as part of a large network of solidarity and support responding to the humanitarian crisisthere and organized by, among others, the New Sanctuary Coalition(NSC) and its Sanctuary Caravan, Al Otro Lado, and the San Diego Rapid Response Network. Here follow some impressions from that week.
Each morning at El Chaparral Plaza in Tijuana, some men set up a small red pop-up canopy tent, and other members of the Central American Exodus and other asylum seekers gather around. There is a table, a megaphone, and a battered notebook that contains numbers associated with the names of people who are on a list of those waiting for a chance to present themselves at the U.S. border to request asylum. Each number represents ten people. By law—both U.S. and international—people should be able to go to any port of entry to request asylum, but the current administration has enacted a “metering” systemwhere only a specified number of people is allowed to cross each port on any given day. Since there is a huge backlog of people waiting—at this point the wait can be up to two months—the asylum seekers have self-organized, and a family or a group of men who have been on the list for a while take charge of the notebook. In addition to calling out two batches of names—one in the early morning and one an hour or so later—they give out new numbers every day until noon. When it is their turn to cross, they pass the notebook along to people who are lower down on the list.
Each morning a member of Grupos Beta, a service of the Mexican National Institute of Migration, relays from U.S. Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) to the notebook keepers the total number of asylum seekers who will be allowed to cross that day. The total might be 80, or it might be none. It is important to understand that this entire system is illegal, and has arisen out of desperation. A member of the notebook team will use a megaphone to read out the names of people whose numbers have come up. People must keep track of their numbers and when they are likely to be called. Many of them are living in shelters and encampments far from Chaparral, and have to get themselves to the plaza or risk losing their chance to cross. There is an informal grace period of two days, so if your number is called and you miss it, if you can get there within two days, you might still go across. The mornings that I was at Chaparral I saw lots of young mothers with small kids, toddlers, and even infants. In addition to members of the Central American Exodus, many of them from Honduras, there were single men from Haiti and West Africa.
After the names are called—and they often have to call two hundred names to assemble a desired 20 people—people line up along one side of the plaza to wait for the shuttle vans driven by Grupos Beta. The vans take people to the other San Ysidro checkpoint where they cross the border to face the bureaucratic nightmare created by the CPB—detention in the Ice Box, separation of fathers from their wives and children, the “credible fear interview,” and so on. The San Diego detention facilities are over capacity, and before we arrived people were being released from detention in the middle of the night, just dropped off at a bus stationor in a public park. The San Diego Rapid Response Network organized shuttle buses to drive around after midnight looking for people who had been dumped, and taking them to shelters. Because of bad publicity, this practice of “dumping” has apparently been suspended.
The Sanctuary Caravan has two programs running concurrently. One is the Pro Se Clinic where volunteers fill out intake forms with people who are scheduled to cross the border and help them prep for their credible fear interviews, which is the first step in the asylum process. The Pro Se Clinic’s borrowed storefront has turned into a de facto community center where families hang out and volunteers play with the kids while their parents are interviewed. Volunteers also go to the El Barretal refugee camp, twenty minutes out of Tijuana, to let people know about available services and to do intake.
The Accompaniment Program in Tijuana is in some ways more extensive than its counterpart in New York City. In addition to waiting with friends at Chaparral until they board the Grupos Beta shuttles, Sanctuary Caravan also keeps track of friends’ numbers, and has a van that picks people up from El Barretal each morning to take them to the plaza where the names are called.
Because Djuna, Hannah, and I don’t speak Spanish, we had a hard time in the beginning figuring out how to plug into the work that was going on. We were cursing ourselves for having chosen French as our second language. Our first afternoon I was called to the clinic to translate for some Haitians, but when I got there it turned out they were Creole speakers and my French was still useless.
Djuna and Hannah ended up working with the World Central Kitchen, an organization of chefs addressing hunger and poverty, where they didn’t need Spanish to scrub pots and chop vegetables. I joined them a couple of afternoons and was wildly impressed by the work that was going on. In Tijuana, the World Central Kitchen prepares and delivers three thousand meals a day—feeding 1,500 people at lunch and dinner. The food is fresh, inventive, and made with love. One evening Djuna and Hannah went to deliver dinner to El Barretal, where they saw a thousand people living in tents. Hannah said, “They get meals, UNICEF is there, and Doctors Without Borders, but it’s still no way to live.” If it rains, they get wet. If it’s cold, they are cold. Djuna reported that women and children are fed first, and that everyone pitches in to help out with serving the meals.
Meanwhile, back at the volunteer hub, I was assigned to work as a “Story Steward,” which was a data entry and clerical gig supporting the Pro Se Clinic. One afternoon I spent a few hours prepping a large stack of intake files with all the needed forms and materials.
On Sunday afternoon, we went to Faro Playas de Tijuana, a beachfront recreation area, for a religious service that usually occurs on both sides of the hideous and immoralborder wall, which traverses the land, travels down across the sand, and continues into the ocean. Only the gulls could move freely from one side to the other. Of late, because of ‘security concerns,’ CBP has closed access to the International Friendship Parkthat connects both sides of the border and has created a no-go zone on the U.S. side of the fence, so the service occurred only on the Mexican side that day. Through the steel slats, razor wire, and cyclone fencing on the U.S. side, we saw at a distance CBP agents blocking access to the border, and beyond them we made out some of our Sanctuary Caravan colleagues, including NSC Executive Director Ravi Ragbir, who was visiting from NYC. On the Mexican side, there were cafes, restaurants and benches. Couples strolled, families picnicked, and children played in the surf under the shadow of the wall.
When we landed in New York City, Djuna and I discussed how it would take a while for us to process all that we had seen and experienced. We had been moved by the dignity and perseverance of the members of the Exodus. We had admired the dedication, humor, and intelligence of the Sanctuary Caravan’s volunteer coordinators. We had been disgusted by the violence, both physical and bureaucratic, of our government’s policies and agents.
Two days after we got back from the border, I picked up my work here in New York with NSC, and found out that my local Congressman, who had requested deferred action of removal for my Albanian friends (basically asking that they not be deported), had heard back from U.S. Customs and Immigration Services (USCIS). The request was denied, and USCIS told the parents that they have thirty-three days to leave the country that they have called home for fourteen years. Brooklyn is the only home their three young daughters, two of them U.S. citizens and one with DACA, have known. I sat in a cafe with my Albanian friend and the Congressman’s caseworker as we fought back tears and plotted our next moves. The struggle continues.
