Solidarity

Produced by Kumar Butler and Amanda Machado

Solidarity II: Palestine

Devon McKnight:

To me what people miss with the idea of disability is they think wheelchair, but you being depressed could be a disability because it's limiting your ability to function. 

The only way to kind of better ourselves in that way I guess is to be practicing it everyday and it's tied to every other social injustice that you can think of. Even the way we think about trying to fix it. A lot of people aren't really...they're like well instead of just medicating me and numbing me out why don't you let me be who I am and you change. What if society changes to work with people?

Alice Wong:

For all the challenges I face with my body and health, abelism is by far the greatest barrier in my life. If you're wondering what I mean by ableism, I describe it as a form of oppression that systematically devalues disabled people who are considered non-normative in the way they look, behave, move, think, or their way of being in the world. And the ideas of what is considered 'normal' constantly evolves. 

One example of abelism within the context of healthcare is to look at the language of disability. Speaking broadly, the focus is on a person's functional limitations, impairments, or deficits. Discussions on quality of life tend equate well-being and health as the absence of illness and disability. Because of my apparent physical disabilities, many people, both strangers and acquaintances, presume that my life is one that's difficult and full of suffering. 

I am totally dependent on personal assistance for my daily activities and cannot breathe without ventilatory support. For some people, that is an undignified, unimaginable, and pitiful way of living. Some of these people would rather be dead than be in my position based on perceived loss of control, weakness, or fragility. And that's ableism.

Mia Mingus:

Ableism and other forms of oppression have left their mark on us. We cant on the one hand understand how devastating capitalism, misogyny, and criminalization are and then on the other hand pretend as if they don't affect how we treat each other and ourselves. Our lives are illustrations of disability and intersectionality and there is a wealth of knowledge there for us to learn from and use and for so many of us we don't tell our stories. 

If we don't tell our stories who will? If we can't share our stories with each other then who can we share them with? Who is that person? Who are those people? 

How do we build more and more of these kinds of folks and more and more of these kinds of spaces to be able to hold all of our stories because I wonder what the things needed to hold your stories are. I wonder how many pieces of your stories weren't told because there wasn't anybody who could understand and hold them. And I wonder how many parts of all of our stories that we still have never told anybody because of this. 

I wish that I had known that there was so much more out there especially during my hardest times. Especially when I was inside the medical industrial complex experiencing so much violence. Especially on those mornings when my blisters were still so raw from the days and weeks before, but I was still forced to put on my painful brace. A brace that I didn't need to be whole. That I didn't need to be whole, but others needed me to wear so that I could be the right kind of disabled child, right. One who they needed to be seen as trying to be as able bodied as possible. Trying to fix myself and walk and make my body be something other than it was. Something other than I was. Something other than I am.

This Is Love Too Feat. Devon McKnight, Alice Wong & Mia Mingus

A speech Angela Davis made in 1989 about reproductive rights.

reproductive rights feat. angela davis

05 - The Proxy Ft. Gabor Mate, Noam Chomsky, Angela Davis & Toni Morrison

Words by Rafeef Ziadah

Additional Production by Amanda Machado

04 - The Poet Ft. Rafeef Ziadah's Poem "We Teach Life, Sir"

English translation:

The camp? I swear I would sacrifice my life for the camp. The camp means everything to me and to all its inhabitants. The camp is our soul, our life and it will stand high and proud forever; it has always been so anyway.

03 - The People Ft. Manal Elkarra, Zeiad Abbas & Unknown Girl From Jenin

English translation:

1st section

The Jews and the Arabs cohabitated a lot. The Jews who were from Arab families, whether from al-Mashriq or al-Maghrib, from Tunisia, or Algeria, or Halab, or Aleppo, or Damascus or Lebanon … They all lived there and spoke Arabic, and some of them didn’t even know how to speak Hebrew; they would learn it in school. They lived like us, their weddings were like the Arabs’, their celebrations were like the Arabs’. They threw weddings and sang, and everything. All those who sang for them were Arabs, and were my friends. They invited us and we would attend the wedding, and they would dance and sing and all. We blended together in a very lovely way.

2nd section

There was no separation. And during the matzah celebrations, they would bring us the matzah themselves and feed it to us. They would attend our holidays and we would attend theirs. There were no problems at all between us; it was all bullshit. But some of them were very fanatical. My father had borrowed 100 gineh with interest from a Jew, an Ashkenazi Jew, from those who curled their sideburns like this. And the guy liked my father a lot. When my father passed away, he came and hugged me and kissed me and cried. I did not know him. He said, ‘I swear on my religion that I love your father more than I love my kham.’ And the kham for them is sacred.

3rd section

It was all bullshit. Because they could in fact cohabitate with us. But the Palestinians acted wrongly from the beginning. Had they formed a state from the start, just like Cyprus accepted the partition, there would have been a chance. There was no … (he points to his head) none, whatsoever. The British government itself would place a bomb wherever it could cause a massacre. The police station in Haifa was here and the hisbeh was facing it. There was a junction on that road. They placed a bomb after which not a soul survived; there was meat stuck on the zinco. Just a minute earlier, the police station guard had gone in and closed the door. And it blew up. What does it mean? They wanted to achieve this and they did. They succeeded. That’s politics. Blasphemous! Whatever they wanted, they could do. So many stories, a lot of them.

Kumar Butler

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