As I finish reading the last essay of Their Borders, Our World: Building New Solidarities with Palestine—an anthology of texts edited by Mahdi Sabbagh, architect and writer from Jerusalem—I cannot help but think of borders and their manifestations as walls, tools for reinforcing enclosure. Walls, not only physical, but those which also obscure certain perspectives, that do not allow recounting certain facts; since the very existence of these walls means that there are experiences contained within that cannot be known outside of these. The book, put together by the organisers of The Palestine Festival of Literature and published by Haymarket Books, lays exactly these perspectives bare, bringing forth the multiplicities of being in/with Palestine and the Palestinian peoples' call for liberation.

To return to the last essay, in On the Violence of Architecture, architectural historian Mabel O Wilson invokes these walls/borders in reiterating the creation of two separate worlds with a narration of the journey through the many borders and checkpoints she and a delegation of writers and academics encountered on their tour to Palestine for PalFest 2019, framed by the words of Frantz Fanon’s Wretched of the Earth. "This world divided into compartments, this world cut in two is inhabited by two different species," Fanon invokes the separation of ways of being, of people and those less than through these words.

With Fanon’s words serving as a critical lens, she provides readers with a first-hand account of the walls that have governed self-determination for much of the indigenous population of the region since 1948 and the Nakba, which propelled the state into a condition of constant surveillance by the settler colonial regime. This surveillance deployed by the racialising assemblages of policies, identities, practices and material conditions like infrastructures, continues to other the Indigenous population, taking away the fundamental rights they have to their lands and history by demarcating them through fluvial borders. These borders, as demonstrated by Forensic Architecture’s documentation of Gaza, shrink with every year, till all that is left is a bare strip.

In such a state, Palestine and more specifically Gaza—viewed from the outside—has typically been portrayed as a place of unspeakable horror, a testing ground for weapons and technologies of surveillance and oppression for the West and home to a population affected by what Achille Mbembe terms necropolitics¹; a view that has perhaps intensified in the last year amidst the ongoing annihilation of Palestinians laid bare for all to witness. Even this act of witnessing is in a way governed by borders, where the annihilation of life is happening there and not here, thus allowing for a certain objectivity and distancing in how the situation is often talked about. This obstructive border, manifests also in how Palestinians witness the everyday reality and how the Western world, for the most part, chooses to see it - an idea further explored in another essay from the anthology, anthropologist Dina Omar’s Reflections on Structural Gaslighting.

As Sabbagh, one of the organisers and co-curators of The Palestine Festival of Literature, previously mentioned when speaking about the book, the texts in the volume hope to push back against such a violent portrayal of the region, by presenting different ways of being in Palestine, exploring the worlds that have been cut off from us (or them depending on whose gaze it is). Further, one may think of such a portrayal of Gaza through the lens of Julia Kristeva’s notion of the abject², as journalist Tareq Baconi invokes in his essay, Wretched Gaza: Confronting the Abject.

In the essay, Baconi argues that the abject exists as a necessary construction for the colonial project since the very idea of an oppressive system needs something/someone to oppress. “The abject is persistent, ever-present, unerasable," he reinforces. However, as he also points out, a state of abjection also forces the subject of oppression to be an instrument in the laboratory for emancipation. By drawing a connection between Gaza's abjection and that of other marginalised communities around the world, Baconi urges readers to recognise in the condition of abjection our “capacity to disrupt and ultimately destroy structures of oppression, as a precursor to rebuilding more just futures.”

Undefeated despair³

To position oneself amongst Palestinians is to position oneself amidst a longue durée of resistance against systems of oppression, as American architect and urbanist Keller Easterling’s piece in the book, Try to Be in Palestine reminds us. Setting the tone for the texts to follow, it asks readers to centre Palestine in how we think about the world, by placing it within networks of solidarity that connect the Non-Aligned Movement, the Pan-African Movement and the Civil Rights Movement, among others.

Everyday and commonplace acts of resistance, solidarity and perseverance—what Sabbagh here refers to as sumud (صمود)—also forms the central theme of his introduction, Renewing Solidarity. In invoking the idea of sumud, Sabbagh argues for a distinctly spatial form of resistance. He writes about the practice as acts that hold "beyond submission or exile." Sumud, to him, means the will to stay put on one’s land, to build and rebuild one’s home even as it is destroyed. He writes, “This architectural sumud is a defiant practice that puts the needs of the residents before the bureaucracy that illegalises the very act of building on one’s own land.” Protest, resistance and an indefatigability to relinquish one’s terrain against the 'architecture of occupation' thus characterises the idea of sumud as distinctly spatial.

The work of sumud, from childbearing and building to testifying and fighting, continues. – Edward Said, After the Last Sky: Palestinian lives

In his invocation of sumud, Sabbagh hopes to underscore its relevance in different struggles against injustice as a way of latching onto solidarity and an act of engagement with the idea of resistance. Hence, many of the essays in the book speak not only to the Palestinian experience but relate it to other struggles of oppressed peoples globally, proposing ways of doing, acting and positioning in mutual solidarity. This mutuality—which Sabbagh argues is borne from the simple fact that most of our struggles occur concurrently against colonialism or the (after)effects of colonial occupation—becomes a tactic for him to allow different perspectives to listen to and learn from each other.

He urges the reader to reflect on a pertinent line of questioning through the essays: “What does one do, how does one act and where does one position oneself vis-à-vis the banality of inequality, vis-à-vis injustice?” Through this enquiry, Sabbagh implores that we must recognise our common struggles, and in recognising this mutuality, reveal new possibilities and new ways of being.

Good solidarity work is continuous: it doesn’t cease to move and expand; it builds, it amasses people and knowledge. – Mahdi Sabbagh, ‘Renewing Solidarity’ from Their Borders, Our World

For this argument, the symbol of Palestine, of Gaza, implied to be the mother of resistance in Baconi’s essay, the laboratory of the future reduced to a state of “frontier,” invites us to not only think through the idea of mutuality but also to bear witness, recognise our common injustices and to hold forth at the frontier. This “frontier”, where we see the struggle for liberation play out presents itself in the form of architectural thought in the role it comes to play on both the oppressor’s and the oppressed sides; in occupying space through force and in resisting that occupation through more continued occupation as a way of being that, in Sabbagh's words, "eclipses much of what we believed and simultaneously provided us with a painful clarity that we are not safe from genocide. This ongoing Nakba propels us to organize even more, and proudly". What concerns architecture, architecture must concern itself with; rendering the project of solidarity architectural.

Unbuilding walls

The idea after all, through the inclusion of a multiplicity of voices in the volume is to answer the question: how can we help? As Sabbagh points out, perhaps this answer lies in harnessing the possibility of solidarity. To think and learn with/alongside, not from or of. For instance, in the current Festival Director of PalFest Omar Robert Hamilton’s essay, City and Anti-City, he draws parallels between Cairo and Jerusalem, reflecting on the urban changes transforming both cities into ugly, hyper-surveilled, anti-cities. Through the comparison, he unravels the not-so-subtle ways in which settler colonialism invokes democracy through borders. Similarly, a close relationship to the land, which is disrupted by settler violence is seen through the lens of football in writer Ellen van Neerven’s Wounds in Place: Football as a Manual for Survival in Ongoing Colonization. Through the essay, van Neerven looks at spatial sporting geographies and how Israel’s football clubs are built on land that has been unlawfully taken from Palestinians, while Palestinians are denied the right to play.

Both these essays invoke mutuality by relating the Palestinian condition to larger systems of exclusion. In this, they also invoke the practice of sumud that Sabbagh lays out for us, an encouraging notion that seems to crop up throughout the book in varied but primarily spatial, architectural forms. Sumud then, in the form of counter-occupation or re-occupation, must form the central core of our responses to collective and individual injustices. It becomes a lens through which to bridge the still existent and growing disparities between their borders and our world, their abjection and our morality, their liberation and our virtue, between ‘their’ and ‘our’. But one must persevere.

Occupying any space that one does against, in the face of, or coexistent with the banality of injustice is an act of sumud. This book review, in its commentaries on space—occupied, bordered, demarcated, appropriated, organised—as well as itself occupying the space it does is an act of sumud as well. It is the reason I am tempted to turn this review into an exquisite corpse that collages the different times I had to pause, underline a line in the book and pay attention to the voices presented in the text—the echoes of several writers, poets and scholars sans the terrible abjection of Palestinian lived reality—often gatekept.

Witnessing must be integrated into a practice of solidarity to formulate meaningful change. To witness injustice, seared into the landscape, into the built environment, allows the mind to ask a cascade of questions [and] helps us begin to tackle them, as the answer lies right in front of us. – ‘Renewing Solidarity’, Mahdi Sabbagh from Their Borders, Our World

It is the reason I am tempted also to turn this review into a series of statements, words, illustrations, or gazetted numbers; abstractions whose gravity is immeasurably, solemnly profound, but that coalesce the continued suffering of a people. 76 years since the Nakba. More than 6000 acres of land were seized from Palestinians this year alone. A death toll of over 180,000 people in one year. Mahmoud Darwish’s solemn lines invoking borders that inhibit Palestine come to mind, “Where should we go after the last border? Where should birds fly after the last sky?”

References

^1.In Mbembe’s influential text Necropolitics, he writes about how the ultimate expression of sovereignty resides, to a large degree, in the power and the capacity to dictate who may live and who must die. In this instance, the very existence of Gaza is to exist as the dead.
^2.As Baconi cites in his text from Julia Kristeva’s Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, “What is abject . . . is radically excluded and draws me toward the place where meaning collapses. . . . And yet, from its place of banishment, the abject does not cease challenging its master”
^3.In John Berger’s essay Undefeated Despair, he writes about the resilience and creativity of Palestinian olive farmers, a notion akin to how Sabbagh talks about sumud.