The Case for a Global Strike
A letter written for Bisan, circulated to my constituency: Peace. I write to you from the floor of my bedroom in Sierra Leone. Two days ago, Iran launched successful counter-attacks against the apartheid regime occupying the land of Palestine, currently known as Israel (which bombed their embassy in an open act of war on April 1). I can hear construction workers breaking rocks outside my window and the children of the house playing and running and the noise of Freetown traffic in an endless rise and fall. I always find it pertinent to name the moment clearly, as I am always certain tomorrow will not look like today; the things I consider commonplace will be precious and long gone. Some of my mind firmly plants itself in yesterday already: gone are the days where I can see children running and playing in the street— in any street, anywhere in the world— and I do not think of Palestinian children massacred in front of each other. I am in a permanent after. I kneel to pray and recall accounts of young Sudanese women messaging their local religious leaders, asking if they will still be permitted into paradise if they commit suicide to avoid rape from occupying soldiers. I am in a permanent after. Today is April 15, 2024. Tomorrow will not look like today. Bisan Owda, a filmmaker, journalist and storyteller, has called the world to strike on several occasions for the liberation of her homeland, Palestine. I feel about Bisan (and Hind, and Motaz, and many others) like I feel about my cousins: I pray for them before bed, asking for their continued protection, wondering for them— the same way I prayed for my family as a child, during Sierra Leone’s own neocolonial war of attrition, or when Ebola came like the angel of death. This is the way I pray for Bisan, and for Palestine: with this heart beating in me that is both theirs and mine. She is my age. Bisan! You are my age! I wish we could have met at university, or at an artists workshop; I feel we would have long conversation. I understand more now about what my auntie dequi means when she says sister in the struggle— that’s how she speaks of indigenous womyn, about Palestinian womyn, about womyn across the colonized world that use every tool they have to resist. Sisters in the struggle. It’s never felt like an understatement— I just feel it in my body now. Sisters (n.): someone who you most ardently for. Someone who you care for such that it compels you to action. I’m certain many of you feel this for me—this long distance, cross-cultural, transcontinental kinship. Rhita, a stranger turned friend via instagram DMs, had me over for tea on a long layover in Morocco, and we spent at least two hours talking about blooming revolution and healing through art (she’s a musician and she helps pave the way for musicians in Morocco, who fight for their royalties as well as their right to exist. Brilliant). Sisters in struggle: your lens on the world changes mine, and I am grateful for it. Today we are among war; I mobilize and I organize and I pray for a day where we might sit down for tea. I write to Bisan with the attention of my own constituency to shine light on her calls for a general strike, one of which occurs today, April 15 2024. These urgent asks have been met with lots of skepticism across the Western world: how do we organize something this fast? Does it really matter if I participate? How will one strike solve anything? I write to throw my pen and my circumstance behind you, Bisan. I lend you all (my constituency) my lenses as a teacher, in hopes that I make plain to you why these questions of feasibility assume there is another way out of our current standing oppressions. We have no other option for worldwide liberation that does not include a mass refusal to produce capital. We occupy a crucial moment of pivot as a species. Victory for the masses feels impossible from the complete waste they lay on anyone who dissents to their power. This feeling is ma
