So today at a Palestinian solidarity fundraiser, I quietly set up a table of some 30+ different titles of zines—a handful of which are pictured here. First I used a banner reading “grief knows no borders” as the tablecloth, then aesthetically arranged piles of each zine on top of it. I added candles in little clusters here and there on the table, and lit them, then sprinkled a few red+black tissue-paper poppies nearby. Hand-lettered “free zines” on cardboard, some “free Gaza” buttons, and a donation jar for @gazasoupkitchen completed the picture.
I stood off to the side of this free lit table as more than a hundred people filtered into the room, letting the zines’ words speak for me, or indeed, rather than me.
And mostly I listened. Or rather, felt a witness to the stories that Hani, the guest speaker, shared with us—hoping that all of our ears and eyes and hearts were expansive enough to hold and honor even a fraction of his and his family in Gaza’s loss, pain, suffering, horror, rage, sorrow, trauma…
Words fail.
Every image I’ve seen from Palestinians reporting their own people’s genocide from Gaza these past 150+ days came to life in this one big room this afternoon through everything Hani’s family has lived through (or in many cases, died from).
There’s nothing to do sometimes but leave one’s own words behind—let them fail—and instead empathetically take another person’s grief into your body and not try to fix it. In a world where too many people still somehow can’t see or say “genocide,” perhaps there is power in a roomful of people who can see and name it, and not turn away from the hardest of tales and truths. Who listen attentively and solemnly. Maybe for a moment, Hani might have felt less alone—their burden made a tiny bit lighter, even if temporarily, by letting us be there with and for them to (re)tell horror stories as an act of processing and mourning. I hope as an “audience” we did that for Hani.
I hope we can all do that for each other. Because this world makes us need that a whole, whole lot.
(If you want a big folder of print-ready Palestinian solidarity zines curated by my anarchist eye, DM me your email)
