The Intimacies of Solidarity

Daniel Sarah:

Could you share a little bit about your intentions for the event that you two organized and hosted in March, “Free the People, Free the Land: Solidarity across Indigenous, Palestinian, and Tamil Struggles”? What were some of the outcomes you hoped for?

Fathima:

In 2017, May moderated the inaugural session of a community education series I’d started here in Toronto. The series showcased transnational perspectives on the genocide in Sri Lanka. That first event explored the connections between Sri Lankan and Israeli state repression of Tamils and Palestinians, especially the use of forced disappearances, mass imprisonment, and torture. 

We had a full house that afternoon, and May was as moving and incisive as she always is. By then, May and I had been friends for years. To us, it was self-evident that our communities’ struggles were intertwined. Years later, people still tell me how important those events were to them.

So I suppose when, in November 2023, our friend Anupa Mistry and I organized an event called “What does sovereignty look like?”, bringing together speakers who discussed the connections between the genocides in Sudan and Palestine, we should not have been surprised that what we had thought would be a small talk at a small cafe instead turned into a crowd of over 200 people – and yet it still felt intimate, even though it was bitterly cold and late on a weeknight. Amid the mass murder being livestreamed onto our phones, it was clear that people were turning to each other for both respite and resistance. 

Four months later, May and I were having dinner in Chinatown. We talked about how it had been half a year, and yet the genocide was still continuing. To fight despair, we decided to organize another similar event. 

And so, a month later, we were back at Pamenar Cafe, this time making the link between Indigenous, Palestinian, and Tamil resistance. Each struggle contains the echoes of the other. For example, the way that Palestine solidarity protests shut down the Gardiner Expressway over this last year evokes how Tamil protesters shut down that same highway in 2009, in an effort to draw attention to what were the bloodiest days of the genocide in Sri Lanka. 

These connections are a very Toronto story. 

May E:

I wholeheartedly agree with everything Fathima said. We have been witnessing a moment where a lot of people are making connections between different struggles, and rather than think of struggles as being in competition with each other and coming from that scarcity mindset, thinking instead about all of these struggles as being interlinked for exactly the reasons that Fathima mentioned – materially, philosophically. It was really important for me, being Palestinian in this moment, to really honour all of the folks that have been coming out in solidarity with Palestine and really showing that this is a mutual solidarity, this is a mass movement, a movement of all of us together. 

I think so much of what happens is that we pit oppressed communities against each other, we fall into these pitfalls where we’re competing for attention, not realizing that we are in fact stronger together, that we have to think about mass movement building. And in order to do that, we have to make all of these links. We have to understand that there is actually an abundance of community to be had. It’s not something that is scarce. We just need to make those connections. 

I also think it was quite a lonely time for a lot of people, just watching horror after horror, and the physical aspect of this event was really important, to be in space with each other. I think that’s why the first event that Fathima held, that was in solidarity with Sudan, had such a huge reaction to it. People really are missing that in-person, face-to-face contact – that physical community. I think it’s more important than ever that we get together to grieve as well.

Fathima: 

Yes, the loneliness is real. The hope is that these events can foster physical community to sustain us through the long years of solidarity and resistance still to come. 

So I’m grateful we could gather in person somewhere like Pamenar, which has served as a de facto SWANA (South West Asian/North African) community space for nearly two decades. In a city as rapidly gentrifying as Toronto, this is invaluable. 

Similarly, despite its limitations, this summer’s Palestine solidarity encampment at the University of Toronto was also precious for that localized reason: in a city where our council spends more money on police than literally any other municipal “service,” the People’s Circle for Palestine was instead a place that you could go for free, and you were fed, there was coffee, you were given shelter, you had political community, there was a library, film screenings happened under the stars, learning erupted outside of academia. The Circle was the city many of us had been looking for for years.

Also, many of us came to the Palestine encampment having experienced wild police violence during the anti-homeless encampment raids of 2021. So, in many senses, the encampment at U of T was also an extension of the historic, ongoing, and everyday resistance mounted by homelessness encampments throughout this city, which are rapidly growing in number.

Daniel Sarah:

What do you see as the connection between that sort of community building and left political activity more broadly? What kind of capacity is being built through those sorts of spaces? And what do you see as the relationship between those spaces or activities and more confrontational forms of organizing that target an enemy in some way, as opposed to being sort of, you know, “for us”?

May: 

I think what struck me about both the event and these other spaces that Fathima is mentioning, whether it’s Pamenar or the encampment, is just how much of a commitment to expanding consciousness and learning was built into them. Even for myself as a panelist at the event, just receiving the questions beforehand and being forced to think about what are the connections between Turtle Island to Sri Lanka to Palestine to the Tamil struggle…I was forced to really think about that, dig into it, do some research, learn. Sitting up there and listening to the other panelists, I was actively learning while I was also part of the panel, disseminating my knowledge and my experience. 

There has been such a hunger that I have witnessed for people to really go beyond the surface-level understanding of these struggles and build upon the histories and the knowledges that are already there. So much of what I saw at the encampment that was beautiful were the teach-ins that were happening across communities. It was the library. I know we’re getting outside of the event we hosted itself, but I see these as all being connected. There has been this real curiosity that I’ve been noticing, that we’ve been able to build upon. And of course, as you know, that becomes then the intellectual foundation for a broader struggle. You cannot fight an enemy if you don’t know who they are, or you can’t fight the enemy if you don’t know what it is exactly that they are doing and how they are doing it. And these spaces afford an opportunity to dig into that a little bit more, so when you’re then out on the street, on the weekend, or you’re engaging in some kind of other action, you understand why it is that you’re there. 

Fathima:

Yes, popular education is a must for us all. Because so often, as May points out, we are pit against each other. 

For example, from at least the 1990s, Israel has been selling weapons to Sri Lanka. In 2000, Israel was testing its own weapons on Sri Lankan shores. In 2009, Sri Lanka used tactics in Mullivaikkal (an ocean-side strip then densely populated with Tamil people) that mirror what Israel is now doing in Gaza and in Rafah. Both Sri Lanka and Israel funnelled people into so-called “no-fire zones,” and then shelled them indiscriminately. 

Even now, Sri Lanka is in the midst of a severe economic crisis, but is still buying weapons from Israel. We can ask the same of Canada: why are we bankrolling genocide abroad, when people are dying right here in our own neighbourhoods? 

For those of us who are not Palestinian, but who are immigrants or racialized, we are constantly warned – including sometimes by our own community members – against kinship with Palestinians. But it is counter-productive to be self-serving: to think only in terms of “my” people dooms us to failure in the long-term. We reject isolationist fearmongering from an ethical imperative, but also – as May says – an intellectual framework and a strategic imperative. It is only by understanding how our oppressors are linked that we can figure out strategies to resist. 

May:

One thing I’ve been heartened by, being Palestinian, is that even as we face genocide, even as many of the folks that I know here are worried about their family, or have lost family, or don’t even know what’s happened to their family members, whether that’s in Gaza or the West Bank or Lebanon – that they’ve really used this moment to try to build their own consciousness about what it means to be a settler here on Turtle Island. It has actually opened up that conversation and opened up that space. And that’s not to say that that’s new, because a lot of people have been doing that work for a very long time. But I have seen it at the forefront of a lot of Palestinian organizing, where folks are really making a commitment: that if we are against settler colonialism in Palestine, then we must understand what it means to be part of the settler colonial project here, and to do that work – again, even as our community faces horror after horror. This is what I mean when I say not starting from a scarcity mindset, because [such a commitment is] actually not taking anything away from anyone. It is building our power.

Daniel Sarah:

On the subject of building power, what do you feel is the relationship between mobilizing people who are already engaged, to some extent, versus growing the number of those who are newly thinking about these questions and joining social movements? In other words, what relative weight would you give to “recruitment,” aiming to increase the number of people who are on side, versus (if it is a versus) organizing or mobilizing in a way that assumes a certain level of prior political education and commitment among those you’re addressing? Particularly in this moment when we’ve seen lots of people newly politicized.

Fathima:

I’m committed to transnational solidarity here in Toronto, because I come from a place where its absence has been vicious. 

Specifically, I’m Muslim and I was born in Sri Lanka and raised in the Eastern Province in the ’80s. Muslims in Sri Lanka primarily speak Tamil. Especially in the East and North, this once meant that Muslims and Tamils had closely intertwined lives. Meanwhile, the war in Sri Lanka was a majoritarian Sinhalese Buddhist project that targeted Tamil communities, beginning with the disenfranchisement of Tamil plantation workers in the 1940s. The state used language laws as a key vector of discrimination. So when Tamil resistance groups began emerging in the ’70s, Muslims were necessarily among those ranks. Our struggle was one, we were all impacted by the same racist policies. During that period, Palestine was a leading light for anti-colonial movements across the globe, including on the island.

Then, in the ’80s, the Sri Lankan government began to pit Tamils and Muslims against each other. This strategy proved effective, and competing mass graves now pit our villages. Having committed atrocities against each other, to this day there remain deep rifts between Tamil and Muslim communities on the island and in the diaspora. We have become strangers to each other, we have lost intimacy and solidarity – and this benefits no one more than our oppressors.

So, for me, the heartbreak of that rupture is at the core of what community-building represents: it is a really difficult thing to accomplish, and its pursuit will span longer than our lives, but we must pursue it. At all costs.

But to May’s point, people have been showing up for each other across communities for a long time. The escalating activity we’re seeing now in Toronto is, visibly or not, a consequence of relationships that have existed for decades. That has been beautiful to see amid the horror. As the Tamil Feminist Collective put it, in their beautiful open letter to their parents, “It is in standing in solidarity with Palestine that we have felt closest to our ancestors, our heritage, and our homeland. For we know – as they did – that once Palestine is free, we will all be free(r).”

May: 

I guess for me, two things come to mind. [The question of recruitment versus mobilizing the already-radical] is not an either/or. There are folks that I think are quite seasoned – you know, they’ve been around a lot, and they may know a lot about one aspect of an issue, or one struggle, and they’ve been working on it for a long time. But what’s been really interesting for me is to see that although those folks are not new to struggle or to activism, they are reaching new horizons in their own understanding, or they’re deepening their own understanding. Although they’re not new recruits per se, there are these links that are continually being made, and there are new connections and new communities that are being formed out of those links being made.

And then you have a groundswell of people that have been galvanized, and they may not know a lot, or technically they may not have that deep knowledge yet, but they have a sense that something is wrong. They start from the very basic premise, for example, that genocide is wrong. They look around at what’s happening in this world and they feel alienated from it, and that there’s something wrong there. 

And how do you keep people in this moment? How do you keep them engaged? You build a community. I think we live in so much isolation and alienation all of the time because of late capitalism, and because of the pressures that people are under, and I think if you’re offering community and you’re offering a little bit of a glimpse, within the limits that unfortunately we’re working in… People are really trying to build something new. They’re trying to build new ways of knowing each other, of engaging with each other. That, I think, becomes part of what is so attractive and so powerful about this moment: that folks are coming because they have a sense of injustice that they want to dig into more, and they’re staying because they’re seeing, in action, that there are people willing to build a new world, or dreaming and imagining new futures in a new world. I think that has been so important. And I think it applies as much to people that are newer to the movement as to people that have been in it for a long time and need to be reminded why we are doing this. Yes, it’s to end all of these oppressions that we’re facing, but it’s also to build something new and better.

Daniel Sarah:

When thinking about how to build those better possibilities, I’m curious about what you see as the relationship between organizing that targets law or policy and organizing that aims to create new publics, or activate existing but disenfranchised publics. The past year’s surge in Palestine liberation struggle, the groundswell of people freshly engaged – has this altered your perspective on those dynamics at all? On the relationship between, broadly speaking, top-down and from-below ways of thinking about social change?

May:

This is a complicated one, but I think the last year or so has shown just how much top-down organizing has failed us. Speaking broadly, I do think that targeting policy and legislation is very important, and I actually don’t want to dismiss it, because it does have material consequences, often, on people’s lives. I see it more as an interim measure that is necessary, while at the same time you’re ultimately working to dismantle reliance on all of these systems and replace them with something better. But in the meantime, there are real, material consequences to fighting for things like an arms embargo. And having the language and the framework to be able to hold institutions accountable: when they say they’re doing one thing, to really be able to expose if they’re not actually doing the thing they’re supposed to be doing. For example, where we’ve fallen short in terms of continuing to export arms or weapons parts to Israel to facilitate the genocide that they’re committing against Palestinians. So, absolutely, that’s why I don’t want to dismiss all of the work that’s happening in that area. But that’s just one strategy that has not been able to galvanize people in long-lasting communities the way a more grassroots type of organizing has been able to do. 

I think what’s been really powerful about the panel we did is that while it was a successful event and there were a lot of people, it was actually an intimate space as well, that allowed for those deeper relationships to form. I saw, for example, people speaking to the person next to them, whether or not they knew them before. I was running into folks I hadn’t seen in years. Obviously these are horrendous circumstances to be running into each other again, but we were afforded a space to be able to make that connection, and to deepen our relationship to each other – so in moments where we need to come together, in moments of crisis, those relationships exist.

I don’t think I’m answering the question directly, but all that to say, I think you need both [top-down and from-below organizing]. The strategies of targeting policy and all of that, there are inherent limits to [them], being that we are working in these colonial systems that are part of the machinery that allows for all of these abuses to happen. But there are material consequences to not engaging on that level as well, in this current moment, especially when it comes to things like an arms embargo, or thinking about boycott, divestment, sanctions and the importance of that. But I think you need more. You need that deeper relationship. We need those deep relationships to each other, to really be transformative and create a long-lasting, meaningful change.

Fathima:

Yes to May’s comments about the usefulness of state-facing strategy as an interim measure. As a lawyer, I see the law as helpful for discrete tasks – such as refugee lawyers who assist people crossing militarized borders. Or if you are arrested on allegations of participation at an especially spicy direct action, having a good criminal lawyer in your corner can be key.

But the reliance on lawyers is itself proof of law’s violence. We would not need criminal lawyers if the state were not so determined and empowered to criminalize dissent. We would not need refugee lawyers if Canada’s border regime were not so racist, such as when it threw Tamil asylum seekers, including babies, into immigration detention in 2011, or its ongoing refusal to allow meaningful entry to people fleeing Sudan. 

An overreliance on top-down organizing misses the point of where violence and resistance begin. It is not the UN or prestigious NGOs that will bring truth and reconciliation, or justice or accountability. Instead, as May said, what we need is the intimacy of connection. That’s what actually galvanizes community and builds trust.

During our event, we all had prepped notes in front of us, but at one point May said, “You know what? I’m gonna go off script. At the end of the day, the question is that babies are being killed, and what am I doing here, when babies are being killed?” She said it much better than that. I regret that we didn’t record the event.

In that moment, grief was palpable in the room. Collective mourning. May’s question was not rhetorical. The intimacy of those kinds of moments – of someone laying open their pain before you – is what brings people out onto the street. It transforms resistance from an abstraction into a force within the body. It is not your grief to carry alone anymore, it is ours. We go to actions, because your grief opened us to love and care and courage. That grief and rage and despair, all of it drives us to take risks that a legalistic approach would disincentivize: yes, I am afraid, but I care about my friend so much that I feel I must be brave. 

No colonial body – not the UN, no decision rendered by a court domestic or international – will have as much power over us as the beating of our own heart.

So the law is only a very small part of the story of resistance. We must continue pursuing the more intimate spaces, conversations, and tactics that allow us to build deep trust with each other, so that we can take the risks that we need to, to protect each other.

Daniel Sarah:

When we were first discussing over email the friendship and collaboration between the two of you, you mentioned that a key question is what it means to be there for each other. I wanted to follow up on that point. You’re already both speaking to this, but is there more you might say about what it means to be there for each other, and how you try to answer that question – or embody the answer to that question – in the way you work together? The way you organize?

May:

I mean, so much of this work is emotional, right? It speaks to the core of who we are. It speaks to fighting against some of the greatest indignities that can happen to a person or to a people. So how can it not engage you on – whatever you wanna call it – on an emotional level, a spiritual level. We have to not just be there in the fight together; we have to give each other the resources and the strength, we have to rely on each other in ways that are much deeper than just organizing together or showing up for events or actions with each other. In order to do that, we have to have trust. We have to have strength. And in order to do that, we need to be able to ask for help and rely on each other. We need to practise what it is that we are fighting for. If you can’t practise it in your life – in your intimate relationships, in your friendships, with the people that are close to you in your life – then how do we hope to build it beyond that? I think we have to build those skills amongst each other. We have to be able to dream together. We have to be able to hold each other through really difficult times.

So being there for each other doesn’t just mean being there for each other on an intellectual or political level. All of these things are interconnected. I think we have to move with an ethics of care. That has to underlie all of this, and I think it does underlie all of this, because, again, fundamentally, what are we fighting for? We are fighting for something better than this. And the way you embody that, the way you practise that, is every day with the people you care about.

Fathima: 

Well…I don’t know if I’ve been a good friend. 

May:

But that’s the thing, Fathima, it’s not about perfection, right? When I say these things, I realize it sounds quite idealistic. Who can live up to all of these things all the time? The answer is probably not very many people, if anyone. It’s in the struggle, actually, that we are able to work these things out. And it’s an important point, too, because when you think about solidarity, it’s not like everybody agrees with everyone, and we all understand each other perfectly, and we’re in this together. There are real tensions that come out through this work. There are real disagreements. There are material disagreements. And there aren’t easy answers to some of these things that come out. For example, we were talking about the tension of working through colonial institutions while fighting the Israeli settler-colonial project.

I think what I’m trying to say is that everything we do is generative. The way that we work through our relationships, the way that we are in our friendships – that’s generative work, where we learn. And we are in a process of continuous learning. Learning how to work through conflict, learning how to work through tension. Addressing questions that are really, really difficult. Allowing for multiple truths, or multiple outcomes. Working through difference. And not trying to collapse all of those things, or not trying to shy away from those difficulties.

Fathima:

You’re right. Solidarity across our various political struggles means grappling with the ways in which we have been complicit in each other’s killings. That is incredibly difficult. And so if we are able, in our friendships, to practise being open about our own struggles and tensions, then that is generative towards a broader political project. 

From all the gruesome footage coming out of Palestine and Sudan, sometimes the videos that hurt me the most are when people show impossible amounts of grace and love and care in moments of extreme pain. We’ve seen footage of people looking for their loved one’s body parts, digging through rubble with bare hands, gently pulling out strangers. The terms of endearment with which they address each other, even sometimes in their last moments, or the ways they comfort each other through the innumerable massacres. 

For me, watching those moments has felt both incredibly cruel, obviously, beyond an ability to articulate it – but also forceful. If this is how other people are dying, then how do I live the kind of life that would lead to my own death being that selfless? 

I think of the resistance committees in Sudan. While UN peacekeepers fled, these young people refused to leave. Instead, they have been funnelling food, money, and medicine to besieged communities. They are being attacked by both the Sudanese Armed Forces and its paramilitary offshoot, the United Arab Emirates-funded Rapid Support Forces. And attacked for what? For running food kitchens. For coordinating safe routes.

What do these examples demand of me? How do I build in myself even a measure of that kind of courage and love? What could friendships and community look like now?

Daniel Sarah:

Thank you so much. Those are really great questions to leave this on. Is there anything else that feels urgent to share on the themes we’ve been discussing?

May:

I think the point that Fathima just ended on is so beautiful, and it’s something I’m going to be reflecting on, absorbing it.

Fathima: 

To all our comrades doing solidarity work in these devastating times, please archive as you go. One day we will look back, but the records of our kinships will have been destroyed. Israel is flattening libraries, which Sri Lanka did too, and this is also happening in Sudan right now. Canada’s residential school systems tried to eradicate Indigenous languages. 

Since the beginning of the Nakba, Palestinians have been unwavering in recording their history and their resistance. This is inspiring. History will be rewritten, so we must be our own archivists.