Pretty Heady Stuff

Nadia Yaqub is Professor of Arabic Language and Culture and at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her research has examined Arab medieval literature and contemporary oral poetry, as well as modern prose fiction and visual culture. I spoke to her about three of her books: Bad Girls of the Arab World, which is about women and transgression in the Arab world, Palestinian Cinema in the Days of Revolution, which is an invaluable study of Palestinian resistance through the lens of Third Cinema, and her most recent edited anthology, Gaza on Screen. I learned a lot in this conversation about humility, opacity and the limits of solidarity across distance and across gaps in exposure to vulnerability. Yaqub has a deep understanding of the politics of the so-called “humanitarian image,” which is something she is very conflicted about in her work. She asks whether humanitarian images of Palestinian suffering “are always depoliticizing or victimizing, or whether the depoliticization occurs through the inherently ideological frameworks in which such images circulate.” I ask, as my first question to Nadia, what that idea of the framework means in the current moment, where Palestinians are limited in using artistic practices to demand freedom. I think a lot of us are wondering about the political forces that exist around the overwhelmingly terrifying images we’re receiving of total war being waged on Palestine’s civilian population and infrastructure. Nadia’s insight are really helpful here. There’s this idea in her work that the visual practices of Palestinians make up what she calls an “image archive of steadfastness.” Steadfastness is a core value in Palestinian culture. Yaqub is picking it up in a unique way to say that, especially in terms of art and storytelling, steadfastness is about trying to sustain a sense of community. There’s power in this idea for thinking about the role that communication plays in providing the conditions for political sympathy with Palestinian liberation.

Jeff Karabanow is Professor and Associate Director in the School of Social Work at Dalhousie University. He has worked with homeless populations in Toronto, Montreal, Halifax and Guatemala. His research focuses primarily upon housing stability, service delivery systems, trauma, and homeless youth culture. I want to say, first, that right now we don’t even really know how many people are currently experiencing homelessness in so-called Canada. The number could be anywhere between 150,000 to 300,000, according to the Homeless Hub, a research centre at York University. That is too wide of a range. What that range says is that our system cannot see unhoused people. The tools we are using—for example, Homeless Hub is using AI now to predict that the number will swell to over half a million people by 2030—the tools we are using to measure and respond to the problem are fundamentally broken. One of the big themes in this conversation is the idea of vulnerability, or rawness. It’s clear to anyone who is paying attention that the people who are living unhoused are vulnerable. They’re vulnerable to extreme weather, to so-called “deaths of despair,” they’re vulnerable to violence, among other forms of harassment and precarity. But the other side of vulnerability has to do with those of us who are housed, and who are buffered from the serious social issues that exist right outside our door. Much of what Jeff does is about breaking down barriers. The visible and invisible barriers to radical social change that keep the solvable problem of homelessness in a state of perpetual disaster. We break down those barriers in this conversation: they include systems of policymaking that exclude first voices, academic research practices that don’t authentically include a community-based aspect, a reticence about cultivating what Jeff calls “caring, authentic spaces” in a world that sometimes punishes us for trying. Engaging with everyone is really what’s required to get answers pushed into place, but that means looking seriously at the hierarchies, the opaque strategies of exhaustion, that privilege some and punish others. It also means taking seriously the effects of our histories of colonialism and racial capitalism that are about extraction and exploitation of the land and people. I know it’s a lot, but that is where the language that Jeff uses for outlining the problem becomes so valuable. At the heart of it is just this idea that, actually, housing is the “foundation of… healthy, dignified living.” As much as he gestures to the importance of being raw and real and letting emotion be an acceptable part of political communication, Jeff is also really emphatic about the fundamental question of dignity and dignified living, which is the crux of recognizing the displacement of people onto the streets by an unfeeling system as a clear and present disaster. People shouldn’t have to show their resilience the way this system makes them. People need homes, they need subsistence, they need a proliferation of spaces where a strong culture of care exists. They do not need a system that seeks to silence and sideline them, push them aside. Maybe the most striking thing that Karabonow explains in this conversation is that the solutions are simple. What’s complicated is the matter of building the relationships necessary to influence policy. This is why he drives home the fact that political action is crucial, collective struggle is important, making sure we’re using tactics that move people is essential. Because, in his words, “homelessness has always been a disaster.” When that disaster is visible, that is the time to act with a sense of urgency, but even and especially when that disaster is invisibilized, it is still time to act with a sense of urgency.

Veronica Post is a furniture maker, teacher and an award-winning graphic novelist based in Nova Scotia. She’s written two graphic novels so far, published by Conundrum Press; the books are part of a planned trilogy focused on the trials and tribulations of their title character Langosh and his trusty dog Peppi. The first two titles, Fugitive Days and Hot to Trot, are journalistic explorations of Veronica’s experiences that think through the realities of war, history, migration and trauma. In this conversation we talk about Langosh, Peppi and Yeva: Hot to Trot, an adventurous, ponderous romp that takes the reader across the United States on a tour not only of different spaces and cities, but also the characters’ emotional lives. The book is a thoughtful study of how relationships evolve often through friction. I thought the friction that came out of differences people had about specific social issues was really relatable. People argue about religion, about capitalism, about the crisis of unhoused people that has spread like wildfire since the outbreak of COVID. There are triumphant moments, too, where splash pages take us into heroic moments of women leading with care, people connecting over their shared outrage, and linking up in spite of significant differences to be there for each other. It’s a great book. It’s also beautifully drawn. Veronica has a real eye for landscapes, and because Hot to Trot is taking you on this big adventure, she has an opportunity to capture all kinds of different sunsets, spaces and methods of movement. People don’t stay in one place very long, and the characters in the book have a pretty restless attitude toward time. Especially Langosh. Langosh doesn’t want to think about the future, but the future has him. He can’t avoid it. But this isn’t his fatal flaw. Veronica reveals what that is, from her perspective, in this conversation. If you read the book, though, you’ll pick up on it. It’s a lot of fun, but it’s also really full of sympathy, speculation on how people work (or don’t work) as social beings, and some of the ways that time takes us through a meandering path toward something like realization and connection.

Gideon Levy is an Israeli journalist and author. Levy writes opinion pieces and a weekly column for the newspaper Haaretz that often focuses on the Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territories. He’s won numerous awards for his writing on human rights abuses in the occupied territories. Levy is known for insisting that being an Israeli patriot requires one to be critical of the occupation. When he said recently that he has never been more ashamed of his country, he was defending his country against what he sees as an increasing tendency toward fascism. It must be unbelievably difficult to stay the course and speak from his conscience about the scale of the violence Israel is perpetrating in Palestine. In fact, Levy says it feels “exasperating to write from this perspective and not have the impact he would like. He still maintains that “words are on the front line” of this struggle. How the violence is understood and what can be said has a significant impact on what sort of violence is permitted. So, too, does the form of resistance. Levy maintains that “If the Gazans were sitting quietly, as Israel expects them to do, their case would disappear… from the agenda.” This is a people that are waged war against within an occupied territory enclosed by a wall. Why is there a boycott against the occupied rather than the occupier? His writing is incredibly useful for people that want to understand the strategies of the Israeli leadership, which often uses provocation and assassination, a kind of brinksmanship designed, he suggests, to renew the license for widespread destruction and pacification of the Palestinian people. In this sense, Levy says that Israel “the peace objector.” Israel has imprisoned Gaza for many years, blocked them off from the sea, the air and the land. It regularly uses “violence and force” to subjugate Gaza, rather than coordinating a just withdrawal. Israel should not be “amazed,” Gideon says, “by the violence and hatred that [it has] sowed with [its] own hands.” The response has not been an attempt to understand the root causes or to reflect critically on its complicity. Instead, the IDF is waging a war on the civilian population, showing “contempt for the lives of Palestinian children” in its pursuit of “vengeance.” This collective punishment is forbidden by international law, and at the current moment, and likely for several years, Israel will be on trial for genocide at the International Court of Justice. Increasingly, the world is opposed to the Zionist regime in Israel and knows that there can be no military solution. Forcing an understanding of that into Israeli consciousness is extremely difficult, though, Levy says. In his experience, people in Israel are not bothered by the “moral aspects of the war.” This is why he has shifted toward focusing on the security and pragmatic reasons why this genocidal bombardment, this fascist fixation on punishing Gaza, is a failing strategy. He says that October 7th has created a bloodbath by opening the floodgates to a collective, vindictive military campaign that must be stopped. Given his family history, the fact that his grandparents were killed in the Holocaust, and the fact that he understands the specific forms that fascism has taken historically, it’s significant that he has said that Israel is slipping further into fascism. It will continue if the US, Canada, Europe all keep averting their eyes. If the blindness continues, Israel will keep killing, destroying and settling in the region. This wretched situation will be addressed by aggressive action by the peace movement, by all of us raising our voices in opposition, and given the inaction, by those in Palestine rising up where necessary to defend their lives. This is because critics like Levy have the disturbing sense that “if Israel wiped Gaza off the face of the earth… one can assume that there would be no protest” within the settler colonial Zionist state.

Licypriya Kangujam is an environmental activist from Manipur, India. On December 11th of last year, she marched onto the plenary stage as COP28 came to a close in the UAE and demanded that leaders acknowledge the state of emergency we are in, and the fact that there is no time to waste, as millions of people are already being directly impacted by the climate crisis and the situation is sure to get worse. Although she admits that COP28 was “99% a failure,” as most of these UN summits have been, COP will have a central role in determining our collective future, so it has to be changed from a “fossil fuel summit” into an actual “climate summit” where the right priorities and a sober assessment of the sort of investment that will be required take centre stage. The example she gives is the early agreement at COP28 on a loss and damage fund for the nations in the Global South that are, now and into the future, most impacted by climate change. She says that the loss and damage fund is obviously a “good idea,” but it could still turn out to be an “empty” promise, especially if the amount of investment promised by the wealthy nations who are most responsible for the situation remains so pitifully low. It should be said that Licypriya is among the youngest prominent climate activists in the world, and is, in many ways, a model for what’s possible when it comes to young people getting involved in climate politics at the local and the global level. So, while she has addressed world leaders at multiple COPs, she’s also been campaigning for climate action and climate education in India since 2018. She is a visionary, by the way, in this regard: she’s stated many times that there can be no climate movement without climate education. There’s been a really moving push to make climate education mandatory, in no small part because of the organizing that Licypriya has done. In this conversation we cover a lot of ground, and that includes talking about the climate disasters that drove her to get involved in the movement. We talk about the implications of comparing her to Greta Thunberg, which she rightly sees as reductive. More than anything maybe, we talk about the conspicuous lack of political will at the highest levels of power and their callous disregard for those most affected by the emergency. The disruption she decided to create in Dubai could not have happened, she says, without the love and support of her compatriots in the climate movement. They gave her the courage to push powerful people, committed as they clearly are to dragging their feet and running out the clock, to act now. Licypriya insists that she’s not a member of any particular political party. What’s important to her is the truth, and so she’s focused on changing the dominant mindset. Protesting, for her, is a kind of “last resort.” She has been forced to protest constantly, to learn how to fight in a world on fire, and she’s gotten good at it. But she feels like she’s been robbed of a childhood as a consequence. Thankfully, though, there is more positive energy and more concentrated anger in the climate movement now. She doesn’t have to do it alone. Young people are getting radicalized by the reality, and then acting as a source of inspiration to others as they demonstrate how you can demand a better world.

Hadil Kamal works as a surgeon at Al Quds University in Ramallah. For years, Hadil has been lecturing and practicing in Palestine. In this conversation, she offers a brilliant account of why she feels an intense moral obligation to oppose the oppression of Palestinian people. Ramallah is at a unique vantage point when it comes to understanding and resisting Israel's occupation of Palestine. As the central city in the West Bank and the administrative capital of Palestine, it is at a certain distance from direct occupation. Hadil describes the labyrinth of military checkpoints that she has to navigate within Palestine, and what she contemplates during those long, circuitous journey through the countryside. At the core of the conversation is the question of how Palestine can be free and how Hadil experiences everyday life in the context of Israel’s illegal occupation. We also discuss the ways that Israel has codified its callous indifference to Palestinian life in laws that enshrine the expansion of settlements and Islamophobia as core parts of the Zionist nation-building project. October 7th and coordinated attack on Israel by the paramilitary wings of Hamas, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, and the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine, is a globally misunderstood event. This is largely because of the layers of propaganda and political polarization that are screening the reality on the ground from view. That event, with its deplorable acts of violence, should be seen as a response to violent subjugation. As Hadil points out, Gaza is a concentration camp where human beings are denied rights and deemed disposable by an oppressive regime. The right to resist an occupying force is a human right, even if it is controversial to say so. Only 42 countries recognize the right to resist oppression. Since 2004, the African Union has identified the right to resist as a basic human right in the African Charter on Human and Peoples' Rights. From everything I have learned, read and seen secondhand, those of us who have not experienced the violence of Israeli apartheid directly cannot legitimately condemn the right of Palestinians to resist this violence. Palestinians have, in the words of Andreas Malm, “tried every conceivable form of resistance. They’ve tried peaceful marches, in the Great March of Return in 2018, which only resulted in Israeli snipers killing 223 unarmed demonstrators, they’ve tried strikes and boycotts. They’ve tried writing poetry and posting on social media. They’ve tried throwing stones. They’ve tried diplomacy, including recognizing the state of Israel and giving it all it demands without getting anything back. They tried to go to court. They tried the international community endlessly and, yes, they have tried various forms of armed resistance.” So what are the people supposed to do? When the IDF announced that it was launching a ground invasion of Gaza, it ordered over a million people to evacuate, adding that they will “be able to return to Gaza City only when another announcement permitting it is made.” As Ian Parmeter told Al Jazeera, Israel “is under no illusions” that one million people can simply move within 24 hours. “It’s simply a warning that they’re coming in.” So now, one million Palestinians are faced with a petrifying situation. As Nebal Farsakh, the spokesperson for the Palestinian Red Crescent in Gaza City, expressed it: “Forget about food, forget about electricity, forget about fuel, the only concern now is just if you’ll make it, if you’re going to live.” This tyranny is completely unacceptable. We should all be ashamed that it has gone on this long and that the situation has become apocalyptic. Hadil offers an extraordinary message of hope and resilience by emphasizing that Palestinian people continue to create and connect while devoting themselves to the preservation of Palestinian culture in an extremely hostile world.

Michael Hardt teaches political theory in the Literature Program at Duke University. He is co-author, with Antonio Negri, of the Empire trilogy and, most recently, Assembly. He is also the co-director of The Social Movements Lab. Toni Negri sadly died just recently, on December 16th, at the age of 90. He was a towering intellectual and political figure in modern Marxism and will be missed deeply for his radical philosophy and energy. In this conversation Michael talks about their collaboration on the Empire trilogy, what Toni meant to the process of learning together, and some of the spirited ways that they endeavoured to inform the conversation about the most effective and enduring ways to resist oppression. There’s no questioning the impact of the books Michael wrote with Negri, but for Hardt, it was all about learning. He recalls that Slavoj Zizek once said that this is the thing that most impressed him about each successive text: that the point was not to suggest that they had everything figured out in some airtight way, but to offer an invitation to rethink and rejuvenate democracy, and to wonder about why that term in particular seems to have this enduring power, despite so many efforts to inoculate its meaning and displace its place in politics. What I’ll take away from this discussion, maybe more than anything else, is the stuff I learned about how people learned. Listening again, I was struck by how crucial this part of movements is: the way we learn to be democratic subjects is through that transformative process of learning alongside others. It’s a process that can easily be corrupted and co-opted, but it is extremely important. The Subversive Seventies, Michael’s new book, was published in September by Oxford University Press. It’s the first book he’s written as a solo author in decades. For that reason, he says that he wanted it to be a different sort of exploration. There is much in it that is obviously historical, but it’s not historiographical. It’s about his own desires for insight into contemporary movements. We discuss, then, how the book communicates with the contemporary climate movement, what it might say about the struggle for survival and for freedom in Palestine. And the difference between the struggle for power and the struggle for liberation historically. Ultimately, this is in many ways a book that prioritizes participation over representation: universal participation in political decision-making rather than existing schemes of representation that leave power in the hands of the few. Hardt writes that, in this sense, “Liberation is not just emancipation— that is, releasing people from their chains in order to participate in the existing society. Liberation requires, in addition, a radical transformation of that society, overturning its structures of domination and creating new institutions that foster freedom.”

Mark Paul is an assistant professor and a member of the Climate Institute at Rutgers University. His research looks at the causes and effects of inequality, and tries to work through some of the material remedies for inequality in the context of neoliberal capitalism. He’s written a great deal on the climate crisis, focusing on economic pathways to crash decarbonization that also take into account the need for economic and environmental justice. His first book, The Ends of Freedom: Reclaiming America’s Lost Promise of Economic Rights was published in May of this year. This is now a moment when the existential threat of climate change is felt really intensely across the world. The remaining carbon budget for a 50% likelihood to limit global warming to 1.5, 1.7, and 2C has dwindled in the years since the first COP in 1995. Assuming that our 2023 emission levels continue at their current record-setting rate – and the Global Carbon Project has said that total CO2 emissions in 2023 reached a disturbing 40.9 gigatons – we will burn through the budget for keeping global heating to 1.5C above pre-industrial levels by 2030. In 15 years, the carbon budget for 1.7C will be gone too. In planetary terms, that’s a split second. We need crash decarbonization now because, as Paul has pointed out, “climate change is not a problem for future generations—it is a clear and present danger.” So much time has been intentionally wasted, and due to that deadly strategy of delay, Paul says that “we have four times the work to do to decarbonize the planet and dwindling time to do it in.” A lot of the work, within a capitalist economy, is going to take the form of fighting for the appropriate level of investment. It makes all kinds of economic sense to phase-out fossil fuels, and yet because the system has incubated and grown in the toxic stuff, we’re stuck in it. Mark argues that if we wait just one decade more to really make the disruptive changes that are needed to decarbonize the fossil economy, we “will drive up the costs associated with decarbonization by 40-70%, which amounts to well over $3 trillion in additional costs.” One of the questions I had to ask him, though, was why is this still such a hard sell? It often feels Sisyphean to try to communicate projected losses in a system that demands and yet resists change. How to frame it in a resonant sort of way? How do we dislodge the presentist attachment to the status quo? There are some answers in this interview, and obviously some real questions remaining. Some of it centres on the question of growth, which Mark seems to feel is often the wrong question. Shrinking the economy, he suggests, needs to be taken seriously from the perspective of its social costs. I’m sympathetic to that because there is the political problem of ensuring that a mass mobilization for climate action doesn’t leave people behind. So, for that reason, we also spend time talking about the divisive ways that putting a price on carbon has been tried, and some of the ways it could be done progressively. He says that “a simple carbon tax is, as a form of a consumption tax,” very regressive. It is going to unfairly hit low-income people harder when it should be a luxury tax that targets the wealthy specifically. On this, I would quote Alexis Shotwell’s book Against Purity, where she writes that the world must be shared, and with the non-human parts of this world maybe especially. She says that the world, in fact, “offers finite freedom, adequate abundance, modest meaning, and limited happiness. Partial, finite, adequate, modest, limited—and yet worth working on, with, and for.”

Seth Klein is a public policy researcher and writer based in Vancouver, BC. He’s the Director of Strategy with the Climate Emergency Unit and the author of A Good War: Mobilizing Canada for the Climate Emergency, which is the basis of a lot of the questions that I ask in this interview. He talks about how the focus of the book was not always the sorts of lessons we can take from the Second World War. He was looking for reminders that we have done this before, mobilized to address a real existential threat. So, as COP28 concludes, we are confronted with a “Global Stocktake” that shows we are not on track to limit catastrophic climate change. Barbara Creecy and Dan Joergensen made this clear recently in their presentation to delegates there. They also emphasized, importantly, that equity is not the opposite of ambition when it comes to the radical action necessary to fight climate change. In fact, they argued that, because we can’t negotiate with nature and the laws of physics, we are going to have to negotiate with and within the laws and policies that determine the scope of climate action. That means we have to negotiate with each other. And there are some reasonable concerns about whether COP is a place where people can meet and actually figure out ways to navigate the planet into a livable future. But was it worth it? Did this clearly very compromised COP28 achieve anything tangible to offset all of these serious issues? One of the biggest risks is that the army of oil and gas lobbyists that have descended on COP28 will succeed in extending their careers and the lifespan of toxic fuels by adjusting the language of any deals, any regulations that are established. Emissions reduction is what we need, and energy producers want, instead, to go in a senselessly destructive direction. All of this distraction and delay is part of what Seth Klein calls the “new climate denialism,” a technique of obstruction that doesn’t care in the least about the health of our environment, about human life, or about what we used to call “sustainability,” but now increasingly should be described as “survivability.” One of the “curses,” Seth explains, about climate action is that we don’t actually feel the emergency for a period that is long enough to warrant the kind of radical action we have witnessed during wars or pandemics. The disaster is diffuse, spread out, and somewhat sporadic, so it doesn’t “galvanize us all at once.” And just as troubling is the fact that our “memories” of these traumatic events “tend to recede fairly quickly,” until they occur again. This speaks to the fact that, as Klein puts it, phase-out of fossil fuels and the post-carbon revolution is “not largely a technical problem,” it is a problem of a lack of political will. In this context, he says that we simply “don’t know the answer” to the question of whether we have people who can collectively rise to the challenge, hold extractive regimes accountable, and lead us out of the path to disaster.

Margaret Galvan, an Assistant Professor of visual rhetoric, delves into the intersection of art, memory, and activism within feminist and queer movements. She discusses how artists like Nan Goldin harnessed their work to confront the stigma surrounding HIV/AIDS during its devastating emergence. Galvan emphasizes the crucial role of archiving in preserving these narratives and highlights the challenges of maintaining queer histories in a politically charged environment. Her insights reveal how art fosters a deeper understanding of identity, collective memory, and survival.