Originally Published in McGill University's Arts Life Magazine, 2018

SAGE is a bi-weekly series by Zahra Habib that explores the complexity of McGill Arts students through conversations about their experiences. Everyone’s got a story to tell, and every story is worth telling.

Thirty-six years ago, a Lebanese militia known as Phalangists ravaged the Sabra and Shatila refugee camp in West Beirut, killing thousands of Palestinian refugees and internally displaced peoples in the Lebanese Civil War. The indiscriminate killings, many activists and historians believe, marked a major point in the Palestinian resistance movement, while revealing a dark capacity of humans to stand watch as innocent people are killed. Memorializing the Sabra and Shatila massacre is important on several layers; the horrific tragedy represents how an injustice transcends time, place, and nationality, even beyond the victims directly affected by it.

From September 17-18, McGill’s Institute of Islamic Studies and Department of History and Classical Studies partnered with the Arab and Muslim Ethnicities and Diasporas Studies Program at San Francisco State University to host ‘Narrations of Women and War: Commemorating Sabra and Shatila’. The two-day symposium “[aimed] to remember and honour its victims and works to build knowledge about women and war”, but also presented an ethos of collective organization and movement for justice, particularly in the closing roundtable discussion, ‘Black and Puerto-Rican Solidarity with Palestine Activism’.

The activist-academic panel comprised of three veteran voices from Black-American and Puerto-Rican communities to discuss what a life dedicated to ‘the struggle’ meant, and how Palestine was an issue that each of their respective groups took passionately to heart from several continents away. Two panellists, Sam Anderson and Rosemarie Mealy, were original members of the Black Panther Party, and Jaime Veve was deeply involved in New York City’s public school de-segregation and curricula reform movement in Brooklyn’s Brownsville neighbourhood. Moderating was SFSU’s Arab and Muslim Ethnicities Professor Rabab Adulhadi, another academic-activist with strong international coverage.

In the 60’s, college and university students in the Black Liberation Movement felt a moral push to self-determination in Palestine. Anderson recounted firsthand how taking that particular moral stance incurred institutional costs - losing funding and forceful eviction because of their stance on Palestine were normal, though difficult, circumstances. Nevertheless, he maintained, they were resolute and firm in their beliefs.

Counterintuitively, a youthful lack of wisdom can prove a huge asset in community and revolutionary organizing. Veve recounted with amazement “how young the leaders [of revolutions] were”. From Chileans fighting for democracy, to the Cuban revolution, to the Black Liberation Movement, Veve reminded how leaders of the new world are often new leaders themselves, while commending today’s generation of young activists for their “better understanding the intersection of different struggles”. He also gave the same credit to the Black Panther Party founder Huey P. Newton, whose 1970 speech on women’s and homosexual rights movements were “advanced thinking for the dominant ideas at the time”.

In Mealy’s eyes, the conviction of an impending revolution made “brave, young people ready to accept death”; it was the sense of urgency that gave strength in both numbers and in bodies to withstand the daily tribulations and “trauma of war that made some people go crazy, or commit suicide”. It was this dedicated determinism that also empowered women to withstand the oppressive workings of sexism and machismo within their own movement, in addition to society’s larger fixtures.
 

In an evening dedicated to commemorating the victims of a horrific violent tragedy, the discussion that followed guided the room through a series of heavy topics.
 

Is it possible to feel nostalgia for a time that one never lived? As the talk came to its end, concerns over romanticizing the revolution echoed in the questions posed by several young audience members. The panellists, in recognizing the sea of experience which separated them from their youthful interlocutors, left on thoughtful, sobering notes of advice: if you don’t know, engage instead of just wonder; solidarity is not charity; support one another by carrying on each other’s legacies, and remember that progress in struggle is never linear. Every life incurs varying experiences of oppression and that no struggle is more important than another. It is acknowledging this that a truly intersectional approach to social justice is possible.