3. 7. 2025

Ritual and Repetition

Jane Shi

In Octavia E. Butler’s novel Parable of the Sower, ordinary people and ordinary actions create a pocket of survival amidst apocalyptic conditions not too different from our own. I had been procrastinating finishing reading the book because I have been struggling to read, especially novels, for years. But finishing Parable of the Sower at the tail end of 2024 taught me something about my struggle to read that autistic, academic, and work burnout don’t quite account for: perhaps literature feels difficult to touch at this hour of my life because I know that reading changes me fundamentally, just like it does for the characters of the novel. “All you touch you change.” And internal change, when the external world is everything but steady, feels scary, unstable, and unforgiving.

1 

For more than a year, I have been organizing a project called Crips for eSims for Gaza, alongside authors and disability justice luminaries Alice Wong and Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha and over 160 volunteers. 

After the IOF destroyed local cell towers in Gaza in October 2023, Egyptian writer and activist Mirna El Helbawi sent eSIMs – electronic SIM cards that can be scanned virtually to access wifi signals and data – to journalists Hind Khoudary and Ahmed El-Madhoun. Initially focused on connecting journalists in Gaza, Mirna came together with a small team of volunteers to form the organization Connecting Humanity, creating a way for people around the world to send eSIMs to doctors, paramedics, students, professors, teachers, and many other people in Gaza and, later, the West Bank. Those eSIM cards ranged in price and could be topped up to allow for continuous usage. They gave Palestinians cut off from local Internet a way to contact each other and the rest of the world during communications blackouts. 

Shortly after, Alice and Leah reached out to me to organize a fundraiser to send as many eSIMs as possible to Gazans through Connecting Humanity, in the spirit of the disability justice crowdfunding work of the late Stacey Park Milbern and others. After raising tens of thousands of dollars initially, a small group of people sending eSIMs together grew to a team of 160. For the first few months of 2024, Alice, Leah, and I shared graphics online almost every week, eventually raising over two million Canadian dollars while keeping thousands of eSIMs active. Most of the news we’ve seen from Gaza in the last 15 months has been shared through eSIMs that everyday people around the world have been donating and keeping topped up through projects like ours, Connecting Humanity, Watermelon Warriors, Najungi (a Malaysian fan group for the South Korean boy band BTS), and more. 

All of us who are sending eSIMs and creating graphics to fundraise have a little bit of time and energy, and a whole lot of desire for an end to the genocide against Palestinian people that the West is funding – the latest iteration of a harrowing catastrophe (Nakba) spanning more than 76 years. This multifaceted, disability justice-rooted work has taught me a lot about organizing, but more importantly it has solidified a core belief that Butler advances in her work and that I also hold: it is possible and, indeed, necessary for a small group of people to alchemize strengths and skills and knowledge into something bigger, more powerful than one person’s words or actions alone. Despite the fact that I needed to learn a whole new set of skills, the work involved in Crips for eSims for Gaza now feels like second nature. 

In organizing this project, part of what I have been learning and can feel changing within myself is that the notion of Real Organizers over there and unenlightened non-organizers over here no longer has significant sway over me. As researchers and journalists Mia Wong and James Stout argue in an episode of the podcast episode It Could Happen Here, everyone who knows how to make genuine connections with others and has ordinary skills already knows how to organize – ordinary skills such as listening to stories of intimate partner violence from high school peers who could tell no one else, hosting dumpling-folding gatherings in my 20s, or doing boring administrative work while living in a queer collective house. Ordinary efforts, as Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarsinha writes in The Future is Disabled, “to survive and work to keep [our] disabled kin and communities alive.” Such gendered, disabled, and invisibilized labour has prepared me for everything I am doing today. 

In the past, the Myth of Real Organizers has halted me on many levels and knotted together several myths about organizing in general: 1) those other organizers are organizing around realer, harder issues; 2) those other organizers come from a lineage and foundation of organizing that I don’t have; 3) those other organizers have people skills I don’t have; 4) those other organizers are in professional circles with resources that I don’t have; and the ever-gnarly 5) those other, realer organizers move in ways that betray my values and are counter to my safety, and there’s nothing I can do about it. 

The idea that there’s nothing I can do to effectively respond to betrayal has stopped me in my tracks more times I can count, a source of sometimes unrelenting anger, grief, and trauma. Scarcity, elite capture, and abuse of power permeate everything in our ableist, capitalist, imperialist, colonial world. Organizing is no exception. When it comes to Palestine solidarity work, if I or any of us stopped ourselves with Who am I to do this?, Crips for eSims for Gaza would have never purchased and sent more than 43,000 eSims and top-ups to Palestinians in Gaza – roughly 650,000 gigabytes of data. Rocks, bricks: neither would be thrown if such a question mired the psyche of the thrower and weighed them down. After all, there are no organizers without organizing; there are no writers without weaving words to page; there are no agents without actions; there are no dreamers without acts of dreaming.

2

The other night, I had a dream. In my dream, I was at a large, round dinner table. To my trepidation, many people I knew showed up who had conflicts (or worse) with each other and with me. And to my surprise, many of the people at the table who had conflicts with each other decided to forgive each other. At the end of the dinner, those people who had conflicts with one another made up and seemingly got along. I was the only one who could not forgive, could not start those conversations. For years, I feared I was cowardly for not being able to forgive people or talk through conflict. Was this dream jolting me from my cowardliness or teaching me about my fear of being cowardly? Is it really true that I never forgive or work through conflict? 

Wendy Trevino’s poem “Revolutionary Letter” ends with: 

“tl;dr: you don’t need or want 
the people who you know 
aren’t ‘with you’ to be
with you. really, you don’t”

What was scary about the dream is that I couldn’t choose to be at the table, couldn’t choose who I was at the table with, and couldn’t choose the terms of engagement. Those people who were making up with each other were not making up with me. The table I have set in life and in organizing does not have to include people who are not truly with me. It also does not mean that those organizers who are not truly with me are not real organizers or that they are disposable. They just aren’t, as Trevino writes, with me.

3 

My feeling of Who am I to do this? comes partly from a sense of reverence for others’ organizing experience and, in the work of Palestine solidarity, knowing that only Palestinians will free Palestine. But the more insidious origin of this instinct is the way the world infantilizes queer, disabled racialized people, just as the broader non-disabled “left” infantilizes disability justice and disability politics. Such infantilization erases disability justice organizers’ political agency, commitment to cross-movement solidarity, and everyday disabled QTIBIPOC power, wisdom, and time-tested strategies in the fight for liberation. To counter Who am I to do this? with I am here to do this is to say that the world will not leave the sick, old, and disabled behind, and to fight for futures where we thrive alongside the land, from every river to every sea. 

Indeed, often it is when it is too late, such as when the multimillion-dollar homes of the wealthy in the greater Los Angeles area burn down in devastating wildfires, that institutions and governments fall back on the tools and resources that disabled people have been relying on for survival. In the recent LA fires, groups such as Mask Bloc LA, Clean Air LA, and AirgasmicLA activated in moments of extreme crisis to distribute N95s and other respirators to their communities. Such mutual aid groups, composed mostly of young, queer, disabled organizers, recognize their work is crucial for surviving both pandemics and climate catastrophes – even when that recognition isn’t shared by abled organizers and the broader COVID- and climate crisis-denying public, who too often treat them with ridicule and dismissiveness. 

Fewer still may recognize how disability justice has a divinatory element, or as Alice Wong would say, that disabled people are modern-day oracles. The protagonist of Parable of the Sower, Lauren Olamina, intuits as a teenage girl that her communities need to start preparing for disaster. She possesses a hyper-empathy syndrome that connects her to others’ pain and also helps her do unthinkable tasks for the survival of those she loves. She acknowledges her syndrome is a form of madness that she needs to mask, and only carefully choose to disclose to others, for fear of being mistreated and persecuted. Lauren is a disabled oracle. 

In their essay “madness is a strategy,” organizer and poet Jody Chan writes that “the symptoms we pathologize as madness are so often strategies for survival, learned by our bodies, our ancestors’ bodies, over lifetimes of individual and collective trauma.” Disability justice’s call to embrace our wholeness asks that we recognize such survival strategies as spiritual gifts in each person, and that we recognize our connectedness to the universe and to each other. What if we mad, sick, neurodivergent, and disabled people are not empty receptacles for prayer and divine healing, but authors, critics, and diviners of spiritual insights? If empire wages not only a material and economic warfare on the oppressed but also a spiritual one, what would it mean to fight back with our own kind of spiritual weapon, one that is impossible to destroy because it is decentralized, incommensurable, and too idiosyncratic to co-opt?

4 

People come into a particular politics because there is nothing else that holds all of them. Coming to understand disability justice and mad liberation as spiritual frameworks – or at the very least, operating on a spiritual level – has had a powerful impact on my understanding of my role in the world. 

There is something delicate and precious about coming to spiritual truths through movements – something that feels dangerous to speak out loud. And yet I want to introspect on the internal, personal, and even spiritual elements of organizing work, publicly. It feels important, especially now, to record what goes on behind the curtains, for all of us working towards liberation to tend to our hearts and spirits and share notes when we do so. Not to be confused with escaping into spirituality (or worse, as poet and writer Cyrée Jarelle Johnson describes, spiritual ableism), tracing this internal shift is to acknowledge that organizing – like literature – changes us. The question is: how will it change us? Can we shape this change? 

Everything around us is striving to break us, one corrosive myth at a time. What if we were to keep going with our organizing, even when we don’t always have faith in ourselves? In Parable of the Sower, Lauren Olamina creates a religion out of a dream and out of poetry written in her diary. When I read an interview with Octavia E. Butler where she revealed that the novel’s religion, Earthseed, was influenced by the poetic form of the Dao De Jing (Tao Te Ching), I understood why this religion felt seamless and intuitive: Daoism has been an important background spiritual presence in my life, despite the towering colonial influence of Christianity. Dreamworlds and poetry are clays that Lauren uses to shape her future. Without either, we are bereft and unable to plan, prepare, or build with others. 

Last year, at a local student encampment for Palestine, I held up keffiyehs and scarves for privacy during prayer. It was a moment in which I understood a person’s role in society as fluid: despite not being religious or understanding the theological significance of the moment, I was there holding up the scarves, performing a duty, playing a role. I was there and that was what mattered. 

That’s what organizing is. Being there when it matters.

5

Are our current mutual aid networks enough? When thousands of Palestinians’ survival fundraisers don’t reach their targets, when the scale of need balloons at the scale of military atrocity and intentional economic deprivation, when everyday technology is blood-soaked from the exploitation of Congolese people and beyond, when people set unhoused neighbours on fire or allow them to die in the cold, when governments create jail beds for drug users and destroy their life-saving harm reduction networks, when mask blocs offer but small spaces of reprieve and access in a sea of COVID denial and mask bans, when Black and Indigenous communities face the most direct impacts of climate catastrophes they have been warning the world about yet are the last to receive aid, when the legalized euthanasia of poor disabled people is normalized, when prisoners are enslaved to fight fires, when an openly fascist US administration is prepared to obliterate medical and scientific research for its transphobic, technocratic ends, when news and information are bent towards a white supremacist algorithm, the answer is clearly no. 

The hard truth is that Crips for eSims for Gaza’s $2-million dollar expenditure in the last year or so is a drop in the ocean of the need on the ground. This is the biggest, most widely known project I have ever worked on with others, and I feel strange celebrating its successes while understanding fundamentally that it will not be needed when there is a permanent ceasefire, when engineers can rebuild Gaza’s Internet infrastructure without fear of being killed, and when Palestine is free. 

Can we build on existing models of care networks while slowing down and stopping the genocidal, colonial, capitalist machinery of our current world in its tracks? As Palestinian poet Rasha Abdulhadi says about throwing sand into the gears of genocide, “We must.”

6

In his essay “Faith, or The Stories We Tell,” scholar and editor Salar Mohandesi argues that “grounding our politics in faith instead of allegedly rational proofs is liberating.” He points to the ways that “revolutionary rituals” helped communists imprisoned in Nazi camps to “renew one’s faith during times of adversity.” Boldly, he asserts, 

If we do not believe we can win, then we will not. We cannot create a new world unless millions of people decide to fight for it, and outside of a handful of diehards who have made perennial struggle the purpose of their existence, most people will not seriously commit themselves to what will be a long and costly struggle unless they thought they could win. Simply put: belief in victory is the crucial ingredient needed to motivate people who desire something better to risk everything – their time, their jobs, their comfort, their health, everything – to change the world.

It feels truer than ever that many people around me struggle in one way or another to have faith in our collective power, our collective strength, and our collective will. We may not really feel, or may have lost faith, that there is an Earthseed or Lauren Olamina to guide us. Or we may feel that whatever it is we once had faith in is more cult-like than we can stomach. 

That crisis of faith is rooted in a contradictory condition of struggle: whether we fight or not, the boots of capitalism will squash us, and many of us feel that we have sacrificed too much already. We have seen how abuse of power permeates organizing against power, and we are too raw from its pains and betrayals to continue. Or we fear the ways we may replicate that abuse ourselves, like a new parent who feels overwhelmed with their responsibility to love a child when their own parents have let them down. Who am I to do this… when I am bound to fail?

We notice how organizing spaces can operate like cisheteropatriarchal evangelical Christianity, where we worship activist-influencers and theory instead of God or celebrities. Evangelical vanguardism is a losing strategy, in part for the simple, plausible historical and psychological reason that people who have experienced violence from North American evangelism or in the name of communist or socialist revolutions do not want to risk experiencing it again.

Both societal and interpersonal spiritual abuse have hampered my capacity to have faith that we will win. (After all, who is “we”?) But if faith is not only an internal disposition or belief but also a strategy, a way of relating to the external and material, one in which repeated actions bring forth alternative worlds, I can’t say that there is none left.

7

In Recognizing the Stranger: On Palestine and Narrative, novelist Isabella Hammad muses that “there is a relationship between novels and what for want of a better phrase you might call our spiritual lives.” To immerse ourselves in a novel is to let ourselves get carried away – lost, riveted, enthralled, remade – in a world that doesn’t formally exist until it does so in our imagination. For a brief moment, with the suspension of disbelief, readers inherit Lauren Olamina’s hyper-empathy syndrome and feel the pain of a novel’s characters as their own. We situate ourselves in another universe. We come out understanding ours more fully. 

Mohandesi observes that “today, when activists encounter defeat, despair, and exhaustion, many tend to retreat into their apartments to stream television shows alone.” To me, this scene is not a wasteland of nihilism or hedonism but another resource from which to learn and prepare. Take for instance how TV and solitude offered author and disability justice organizer Alice Wong a formative sanctuary – a “first true safe space,” as she writes in her memoir Year of the Tiger: An Activist’s Life about skipping Chinese and Sunday school as a young person. If TV – like novels, film, art, and poetry – allows us to cultivate our imaginations, what is sometimes seen as a practice of individualism and passive consumption becomes a space for reprieve, reflection, and even action. Viewers have the power to heed the BDS movement’s call to boycott Disney, and draw attention to how the 2024 Super Bowl coincided with Israeli airstrikes on Rafah and the murder of Sidra Hassouna, a seven-year-old Palestinian girl whose lifeless body was dangling from the ceiling in images circulated online that day. This year, a single dancer named Zül-Qarnain Nantambu held up a joint Sudanese and Palestinian flag during Kendrick Lamar’s Super Bowl halftime performance, disrupting the curated white, red, and blue of viewers’ line of vision. He was called to do so because of faith.  

What I learn from Parable of the Sower is also what I learned once from a survivor group: we are the protagonists and narrator of our lives. Unlike characters in novels, we can change the plot. 

This is organizing, too.

8

Change is scary. The changing belief within myself that maybe, just maybe, I’m not powerless – to change the world, to change myself – is scary in a new way. Who would I be without trepidation, skepticism, and doubt? Who would I be without raising an eyebrow at the back of a march, rolling my eyes at something someone with the mic said, or snapping back when I or my loved ones are physically, emotionally, or sexually harassed within the so-called utopias of organizing spaces, or leaving those spaces to create new ones?

But then I remember: to witness and honour and inhabit who I am growing to be, I do not have to let any part of myself go. I would not doubt if I did not have faith; I would not have faith if I did not doubt. I believe we will win, and I also know that we will lose much along the way. Maybe I do not believe that victory is tomorrow-near, but I do know that droplets of water can carve holes in a boulder over time. I believe, I know, that someone is using the eSIMs we’re sending. Sending and topping up eSIMs every day has become a ritual, a repetition of ethic and spirit that keeps hope alive – one that is stunningly easy to do. I can know and believe at the same time. I don’t believe or know alone.