What is the role of collective memory in creating identity and belonging? Is it even possible to imagine a belonging that does not require flattened identities that pit one group against another? And most urgently, what are the narratives that can support bridging and solidarity, and repair and rehumanization, even during this time of unimaginable destruction, division, and dehumanization.
Cecilie Surasky of the Othering & Belonging Institute discusses these questions with three of our sharpest chroniclers, observers, and witnesses: Palestinian historian Sherene Seikaly, acclaimed author and activist Naomi Klein, and Pulitzer-Prize winning novelist Viet Nguyen. This rich conversation will connect the people, places, struggles, and history of Europe, Israel/Palestine, Vietnam, Asia, and the United States. It will bring into sharp focus how structures of othering such as colonialism, US militarism, ethnonationalism, racism, and patriarchy strip us of our humanity and mobilize fear and trauma to create an other. And most importantly, it will explore the liberatory possibilities of reconceptualizing identity and aspiring toward belonging without othering for the Othering and Belonging Institute at UC Berkeley
Read below for the transcript.
Besima Sisemore:
Good morning everyone, and thank you Destiny Arts. Thank you Warriors for that incredible and powerful introduction and opening to the day. That was incredible. Got me pumped. My name is Besima Sisemore. I’m a senior researcher in the global justice program at the Othering & Belonging Institute, and I’d like to share a little bit about myself before I go too far. I was born and raised in rural northern California on Pomo land, I’m Palestinian-American, and I’m a member of the Palestinian Feminist Collective. I am a light brown skinned… I’m a light skinned brown woman with very dark curly hair. I’m wearing glasses, I have on dark gray pants, a black turtleneck sweater, and a Palestinian embroidered shawl. And it is truly my pleasure to be here with you all today. We’ve had two full days of thought-provoking main stage and breakout session discussions that were guided by themes of places of belonging and belonging economies. And I’m here to introduce our third track of the conference for our closing day together, what we’re calling a greater story of we, bridging for a shared future.
And I’m going to help ground some of the larger themes that will be coming into conversation today on the main stage and in the breakout sessions. For some context, today’s track, a greater story of we is a thread woven throughout all three days of the conference and it spans our research programmatic areas of work at the Othering & Belonging Institute and is part of our aspirational goal and vision to create a world of belonging without othering. The theme recognizes the power of narratives and the profound ways we create meaning with stories. It also examines the stories and narratives that are currently circulating about our present, collective past, and our future. Narratives that solidify and perpetuate the illusion of the other and foment fragmentation and narratives that are instrumental in building strategies, solidarity, and recognizing the inherent humanity in everyone. Underlying the discussions today are the need for new stories, for new strategies and pathways that strive toward a collective we, that embrace our multifaceted and changing identities and that guide us toward recognizing our shared humanity and moving from a place of our shared humanity rather than what divides us.
The touchstone sessions that you can look forward to in today’s track include our morning main stage session on collective memory, identity, trauma and belonging, which will bring into focus our interconnectedness as humans throughout history, place, and struggle, and how structures of othering strip us all of our humanity. The afternoon session on long bridging for belonging and democracy will offer practical applications for long bridging and we’ll focus on the value of bridging as a prerequisite condition for belonging. And our closing session, a global arc toward belonging will highlight what is needed to make belonging a global norm. And we have a number of amazing breakout sessions that offer rich and diverse connections to today’s theme. Before I have the great honor to introduce our incredible line of speakers for our next session, I want to reflect on this moment in history and to acknowledge the immense suffering and injustice we are witnessing in Palestine-Israel. Naming this moment connects to the overarching theme of the conference, belonging without othering and is a segue to our next session.
Speaking as a Palestinian, Gaza ways heavy on my mind, heart, and spirit, and I know I’m not alone in my grief or feeling that way.
Speaker 7:
You’re not alone.
Besima Sisemore:
And I am going to read an excerpt from a statement that was collectively written by myself and my colleagues in response to the violence that erupted in Palestine-Israel last October. And this is what I would like to share with you all, “As we’re thinking about belonging without othering, we want to acknowledge the suffering and loss of lives that are happening around us and around the world. We at the Othering & Belonging Institute reiterate our opposition to structural othering, which tolerates widespread killing. We can only end structural othering when we join efforts to create structures built on belonging and peaceful coexistence under conditions of mutuality, agency, dignity and non-domination. Globally intertwined structures of othering such as genocide and settler colonialism underpin a torturous history and logic of hierarchy of life that has caused unspeakable swath of death, domination and trauma among everyday people across the world, including Palestinians, Jews, Arab of all faiths, Africans, indigenous peoples, poor whites, women, LGBTQ people, and many, many more. In that sense, we are enmeshed in these structures and must bear responsibility for transforming them.
As we bear witness to Palestinians suffering under collective punishment and Gaza is made increasingly unrecognizable and uninhabitable and Jews suffer from attacks and worry about loved ones being taken as pawns in a political fight, we as a community will also be unrecognizable to future generations if we do not stand up for Palestinian and Jewish humanity.” I think we all needed this, I needed this, we needed this. We as a community will also be unrecognizable to future generations if we do not stand up for Palestinian and Jewish humanity and our shared unequivocal right to live and belong without othering. I have a little bit more. Instead of allowing powerful forces and flattening narratives to pit us against each other, now more than ever we, the people across the globe and from every community who stand on the side of humanity must demand an end to the violence and appose all forms of supremacy and hierarchy of life and we must turn towards each other if we are to have a future.
I want to acknowledge that there is so much more that can be said here and that the next session will expand, complicate and sharpen some of the points I just spoke to. And I have the great privilege to introduce our speakers who are incredibly brilliant and accomplished storytellers, historians and truthtellers. The first speaker I am so proud to introduce is Sherene Seikaly, an associate professor of history at the University of California in Santa Barbara. She’s the co-founder and co-editor of Jadaliyya and an editor of the Journal of Palestine Studies, a policy member of Al-Shabaka and the author of the book, Men of Capital: Scarcity and Economy in Mandate Palestine. She also has a forthcoming book titled From Baltimore to Beirut: On the Question of Palestine. The next speaker is Viet Thanh Nguyen, whose novel The Sympathizer won the Pulitzer Prize and was just made into a miniseries on HBO. Yes. Can’t wait to watch it. He’s a university professor at the University of Southern California, and his most recent book is A Man of Two Faces: A Memoir, A History, A Memorial.
And the third speaker on the panel is Naomi Klein, the award-winning journalist who has written numerous books including No Logo, The Shock Doctrine, This Changes Everything. And her latest bestseller, Doppelganger: A Trip into the Mirror World. She’s an associate professor in the Department of Geography at the University of British Columbia and the founding co-director of UBC Center for Climate Justice. And I have also the great, great pleasure to introduce and welcome to the stage and to introduce my dear friend, colleague, and the Othering & Belonging Institutes director of communications and narrative, Cecilie Surasky, who will be moderating this discussion. Yes. Cecilie is a storyteller, a long-time movement builder, and was the founding communications and deputy director of Jewish Voice for Peace. Powerhouse panel coming up. And I have to add that Cecilie played a huge role in writing the statement I just shared with you all. And I have so much love, respect, and gratitude for her work and the work that we get to do together. Please help me welcome our guests to the stage.
Cecilie Surasky:
I wanted to come out and hug Besima while she was talking. We’ve all been doing a lot of crying together and also there’s been a lot of joy and the joy of doing the work together. There’s nothing like that, nothing like that. This panel is a dream and it’s a dream during a time that is a nightmare. And I want to say before we get started that in a sense it is a bridging conversation. And bridging if you hold the complexity, the beautiful, multifaceted, gorgeous complexity of each of the people on this stage, it makes sense that there’s alignment. It makes sense that we can be here, but if you run our identities through the steam press iron flattening process of popular culture of news headlines, of congressional hearings, we shouldn’t even be here, let alone having a conversation that has the capacity to bind us together. When we talk about bridging, and I really want to underscore this at the institute, when John talks about bridging, when we talk about bridging, it’s not to avoid the really tough conversations that are necessary for repair, it’s to create the conditions to have them.
And the condition to have that conversation always and for us here is to have deep care and love for each other and deep recognition of each other’s humanity. It does not require that we agree, but it does require that we hold each other’s humanity sacred. I am hoping this can be a little more like a kitchen table conversation than lectures, kitchen table conversation with thousands of people watching and really cool lights and mics, but a kitchen table conversation nonetheless. I would encourage you to interrupt, follow up with each other, share stories, share who you are. Again, I can’t at this moment in history in this week, I can’t imagine three people I’d more rather have this conversation with to help us make sense of what’s going on in the world. I’m going to start with you, Viet.
This is the part where you each get to tell us who you are. This is a conversation about narratives. You’ve called yourself a scholar of memory. I think in many ways that is true for Naomi and Sherene as well. Can you share a bit about the narratives and sacred values, familial, cultural, that shape your sense of belonging and identity? Also, is there a story or moment in your life when you realized your world was or became more complicated than those narratives? This is a softball, you literally just wrote a memoir, The Man of Two Faces, but-
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
A memoir is the hardest thing to write actually.
Cecilie Surasky:
Is it?
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
It is very, very, very difficult. First I just want to say it’s such an honor and a privilege and a joy to be here on this panel with you, all of you, but also to be sharing this space with this audience as well. I went to school at UC Berkeley, so this is home for me to come back. My origin story is that I am a refugee from Vietnam and I was raised as a devout Catholic. And I like to say that being a refugee and being a Vietnamese Catholic has given me the requisite emotional damage necessary to be a writer. I came to the United States when I was four years old and we ended up in a refugee camp in Pennsylvania. And in order to leave that refugee camp, you had to have a sponsor. There was no sponsor willing to take my entire family, so one sponsor took my parents, one sponsor took my ten-year-old brother, one sponsor took me. And so my first memories actually are howling and screaming as I’m being taken away from my parents.
And I thought I’d put that behind me but I think it always stayed with me as this really deep, emotionally radioactive core. And that came back to me not long ago in 2017 when my son turned four years of age. And this was the time when the Trump administration was detaining children in cages and separating families. And I had spent the last 45 years of my life trying to forget what happened to me when I was four years of age. But at that moment, looking at my son when he was four, I understood very viscerally that in fact I had never forgotten that family separation. And I realized that all those children and all those families who were being detained and separated, they would never forget what had happened to them. And that moment of trauma would mark them forever as it had marked me. And it also offers something of a test because I can’t tell you how many Vietnamese refugees I’ve encountered who have said at that moment that we Vietnamese refugees were the good refugees.
These new people, the brown people, the Muslims, those are the bad refugees. And I grew up in the Vietnamese refugee community of San Jose, California in the 1970s and 1980s. And let me tell you something, there were a lot of bad Vietnamese refugees, did all kinds of not so good things. But all that has been forgotten because we’ve gone through the typical Americanization process. We were the others, and then we assimilated. We embodied the American dream, some of us, and then we get to close the door on the new others who are coming. That personal narrative for me has been very important both for myself, autobiographically, but also as a test. What does it mean to be an other? To be an other means sometimes that you want to stop being an other.
And for me, being an other has always been about trying to figure out how otherness continues to replicate itself, the fear of the other within me, the fear of the other within society. And how those of us who have been marked as others have the opportunity not to just dwell on our own traumatization, our own identity, our own community, but to try to figure out how otherness is always replicating itself and therefore offering us an opportunity to affiliate with the new others.
Cecilie Surasky:
That’s a perfect tip for you, Naomi, I think, these themes?
Naomi Klein:
Yeah. Well, I also just want to express my deep appreciation for this beautiful, beautiful space that you have created for everybody at Othering & Belonging, the visionary, John Powell and his incredible team. I spoke at the very first Othering & Belonging conference many years ago, and this is my first time back, so I’m thrilled to be here. Zoom doesn’t count. And I’m so moved to be part of this panel of just people who have been beacons of courage, new frames, new ways of thinking, just shaking up brains. Cecilie Surasky is an old friend of mine, by the way. I’m just going to cop to that. Also, a teacher I quote Cecilie in my latest book a couple of times, helping me unlearn some of the ways that I thought I was being educated and realized that I was being indoctrinated in a certain narrative around Zionism, so thank you, Cec.
I grew up, my life yet is shaped by the same war as yours, but from a very different perspective, but maybe not that different, some commonalities. My parents are American. I was born in Canada because my father was a war resister and a deserter from the US military because he refused to go to Vietnam and they were part of a wave of war resisters who came to Canada. It was very easy for them to migrate compared to the Vietnamese refugees. They always tell this story about how they all knew that there was… Well, the only reason we moved to Montreal, which is where I grew up, they didn’t even know that… They were Americans, so they didn’t know anything about other countries. They didn’t even know they spoke French there, but they knew that it was an easy border to get across and that there was this one border agent if you went around midnight who was sympathetic and he would just wave you through.
And they had permanent residency I think within a few hours, but there was a huge amount privilege in why that happened, as my father was a medical student and there was a kind of brain drain that was happening as these relatively privileged American college students were coming to Canada. I grew up with these stories with social justice really as our secular religion. They were really stories of innocence to be honest. The moral of a lot of the stories were great, including those stories of draft dodging of refuse. And I don’t want to belittle it because it was hugely important for my own political understandings to have those models that you make choices, that there are consequences. It was always very stressful to cross the border. My grandfather on my father’s side was fired from Disney for union organizing and then was blacklisted and was unable to work as an artist for the rest of his life, so I grew up with these stories about you take stands, there are consequences.
But if I think about it now and understand the kinds of consequences, what Viet was just sharing about being wrenched from his parents at age four, these consequences were lighter. And I think that had a lot to do with whiteness and privilege. And so I’m always sort of reexamining these stories and interrogating the innocence that was built into them the way they washed us. And being raised by Americans in Canada also has this sort of story around innocence because it was a big part of our identity that we were not American. And that created this whole narrative around innocence around what Canada is because it was all about… It was kind of like the Michael Moore version of Canada, “Oh, they don’t lock their doors.” And so it was only much later that I learned about the genocidal history of Canada. That’s a little about me and what shaped me. I feel really lucky to have been raised in a family of radicals who are also interrogating their own stories.
My mom is a feminist filmmaker and grew up with consciousness raising meetings in our living room, watching films, crying, arguing, changing minds. I feel lucky to have watched minds change, including my own in my upbringing.
Sherene Seikaly:
Hi everybody. I’m so humbled and honored to be here and thank you all so much. Really this is very humbling. My relationship to Othering & Belonging is born of being a child of a Palestinian man and woman who became refugees in 1948 in Palestine as one moment of our ongoing Nakba or catastrophe, so I often say I am both a product and a scholar of this ongoing Nakba. And I think in this context it’s important to think of the dynamic in the Palestinian context. It’s important to think of the dynamic of belonging and othering as really material, concrete structures in my parents’ experience as in the experience of 750,000 Palestinians who would become stateless refugees in 1948 and 150,000 who would become minoritized, displaced people inside the green line of what became Israel in 1948. They’re othering, our othering from home, from land, from belongings, from knickknacks, from the basic means of everyday life were the very material grounds for another’s belonging, so I think that dynamic is a really important one to keep in mind.
My first memory stretches to the early 1970s when my parents took me to the border of Jordan and Palestine and we paused at the border and my dad pointed to a place in the horizon and said, “This is where we belong and this is where we can’t be.” And I think that horizon that is within view, but just out of reach has been my relationship to belonging as an aspiration. At that time we lived in Lebanon in a period of time known as the Palestinian Revolution, which was contemporaneous with the Lebanese civil war. And there our sense of belonging was balanced with the certainty of death. And I think that is a really important thing to think about in the present moment, so I think for Palestinians, as for so many people in this room and far beyond it, that balance of the possibility and aspiration of belonging with the certainty of death is really formative. And here I want to name apartheid, settler colonialism, ethnic cleansing, and the brutal genocide of which we are in day 204 at this moment.
I think in that context, it’s really important to understand belonging as both a lack and at the same time an aspiration, as well as seeing that fragility as a strength in and of itself. I think for me, I would say three basic principles that have really guided me in my own aspirational journey. One has been to ground everything in a commitment to joint struggle, to think and act by centering Palestine and also Sudan, Congo and Haiti. To think and act by learning from various traditions, anarchist, communist, disability justice, environmental justice, Arab, Black, Latinx, Indigenous liberation. I really believe that that is our duty at this moment. The second thing that I feel has enabled me to move forward and continue the struggle has been to really center productive discomfort. Recently I learned that I had written… And no one has really taught me this as well as my ancestors. And so recently I learned that I have been guided by my great-grandparents for the last two decades. I realized I had written a book about them without knowing it.
And right now I’m writing that story and that story is a difficult one because it’s trying to narrate how a Palestinian man, my great-grandfather could be in one lifetime, a native subject and a colonial official, a slave holder and a refugee. And the way to tell this story is to be committed to critiquing, honoring, and loving my ancestors. And the guidance I always take is from Audre Lorde to sit in the cold winds of self-scrutiny. And I think that would be the third anchor. And I try to really sit in those cold winds also in our political organizing work. And here I want to really honor the beautiful movement at UCSB that I’m so grateful to be part of, and the beautiful encampment at UC Berkeley that I got to visit yesterday. And the way that these movements are really pushing us to remember and to hold and to center that no one is free until we are all free.
Cecilie Surasky:
Sherene, there are so many things in what you’ve said, there are moments of mirroring that it raises for me when I think about loving my ancestors. And it’s a very common story of my grandfather being the only survivor in his family. And his answer was to commit to Zionism and your deep understanding that your othering was to create someone else’s belonging. And how can we love our ancestors and all their complexity and love ourselves and work to do the repair, so I’m wondering, you understand more than anyone when we start the clock matters, but it is undeniable that October 7th has changed so much for everyone across the world. Could you share a little bit about what it’s changed for you? And I also feel a need to almost ask forgiveness because there is no way to contain the grief in the planet. And so-
Sherene Seikaly:
Thank you. I want to say, and we’re going to talk more about this later, I know, but I also want to say that this kind of expansive kinship of working across difference has been really crucial to even envisioning liberation, so I think that is a kind of mutual project of liberation in terms of critiquing and honoring and loving our ancestors. October 7 meant for me waking up to a massacre and going to bed to a massacre. It’s meant an interminable cycle of grief of what Christina Sharpe would call living in the wake, of being exposed to what I would say is a changing notion of both space and time. And so an expansive and… It’s both expanding and constricting at the same time, this expanse of suffering in a constricted space. And I think the meaning of it has also been about, how do we think about rupture and continuity? I think October 7 was a break, but also for Palestinians, the grief has been ongoing.
And 2023 was a really brutal year, 2023 before even October 7 was the bloodiest year on record in the West Bank since the early 2000s where we really saw a marriage between settler acts of vigilante terror and the Israeli Army. And so here in February, it’s an important… February 2023, if people remember, was the time when settlers rained down on the village of Hawara in the West Bank and burned hundreds of homes and properties and belongings with the impunity and aid of the Israeli Army. We also had the Gaza Strip, which many of us… And here I just want to remind people that the Gaza Strip is itself a product of partition as a space, the partition of 1948 that the province of Gaza before 1948 was a much larger one that was a really crucial space of commercial exchange. Gaza is actually 4,000 years old, so the destruction that you’re seeing now is that level of destruction.
And I think what’s important to remember is that many of us thought that 17 years of a full blockade and siege of the Gaza Strip and the kind of impoverishment and malnourishment that you see, if you notice when you look at the children of Gaza, you see that they are already smaller. And that’s because of 17 years of malnourishment. That’s 17 years of Israel keeping account on the basic minimum of calories that can go into the Strip. And many of us thought that this situation could not get any worse, but actually Palestinian history has taught us that things can always get worse. And here I would quote Lara Elborno who said since October 7th, every day is the worst day, every day has been the worst day. I also think that we’ve… For me, I’ve been for a while thinking a lot about the parallels between climate catastrophe and Palestine, how to think of those two catastrophes together. And I think it’s really important to think of the time since October 7 as also an environmental catastrophe.
In the first three months of this genocide alone, we saw 150,000 tons of coal being burned. And again, I’ll remind you that we are in day 204. We know that experts have seen, have assessed from satellite imagery what the genocide has done to the land. It’s changed the earth itself, the texture of it, the color of it. And I would also say that since October 7, what life has meant really being in a state of constant rapid response, constant emergency of counting our dead without being able to fully mourn, of being gaslit for counting our dead, of being told that we’re especially in this country, that we’re violent for using the word genocide. That what is violent is the word, not the genocide. And to take heed again what it has meant, and we were talking about this before we came on, that even in the darkest of times, you see the formations and experiments with togetherness and possibilities of other forms of belonging that have been so effervescent in this moment. And it’s that effervescence that gives us the courage to keep saying words like river, sea, Palestine and free.
Cecilie Surasky:
Naomi, speaking of this collective effervescence of joint struggle, what has changed for you since October 7th?
Naomi Klein:
Well, first of all, Sherene, thank you so much for your words and just finding them again and again and again with such heart and specificity and holding so much. You spoke by Zoom to our campus at UBC and reiterated this love for the people you organize with. And that’s been so important for me. I quote you all the time because I feel so strongly that when we are up against multiple states, gaslighting media, mute and worse administrations missing in action, freedom of expression organizations, that the spaces in which we organize are really all that we have. And so building cultures that are nurturing and joyful and allow for people to fall apart and come back is just so important, so I thank you so much for also sharing that, and I think we can’t say it enough. Obviously this question around when we start the clock is absurd. Sherene was just reminding me that we met in 2009 in Haifa. You were there, Cec. We had just come back from Gaza from the rubble of cast lead, which was the first post-siege, massive aerial bombardment.
And I think there have been… There were five after, and now we’re in day 2004 of a genocide. It always can get worse, but I agree, I do see October 7th as a rupture in the sense that it does feel like a tear in the whole of the universe and a rawness, a body rawness for me. And when I think about what’s changed, I feel time has changed somehow. I have trouble thinking about it, but there’s been three main through lines for me in terms of the work that I’ve been doing. One is just the work with JVP calling for a ceasefire from the beginning of the declarations of all of Gaza will pay, all of Palestine will pay. And so just the work of the bare minimum of make it stop. And I’ve been so grateful for the JVP community, and I really do want to say that Cecilie Surasky helped build this extraordinary organization that when Cec was there, they had a staff person and a half or two staff people. And now you see chapters on every campus, you see this huge, what it means to build an infrastructure.
And if there hadn’t have been that infrastructure there… I think we’re just so lucky that people made those investments for years. The work of stop, the work of ceasefire, which we know is only the barest of beginnings, but there’s another kind of work that I’ve been involved in which has been, it’s hard to find the time for or even feel that it’s right to do, but it is this work of how the hell did we get there? And this is work that I’ve been doing with a cherished group of fellow Jews who… My friend Molly Crabapple, who’s a wonderful visual artist, many of you, you know her work. I asked her permission if I could quote her, which is from a text she sent me. She gave me permission a couple of months ago where she said, “Every morning I wake up and remember Jews are committing genocide.” And that is the starting of all of our conversations. How is this possible? And we’re trying to answer that question with tools, new tools, because we don’t understand it.
We don’t truly understand how a people who suffered genocide 80 years ago could be committing genocide now. We don’t understand it. We need more tools than we have. And so we’re reading psychoanalysis and we’re reading the texts of… Viet speaks so powerfully about remembering putting the pieces of ourselves back together and understanding that we did the opposite of that, that our Jewish education was an education in re-traumatization and keeping us in a frozen state and trying to keep the trauma as alive as possible so it cannot be transmuted and turned into something else. The third piece of it… There’s make it stop, how the hell did we get here? And the third piece I would describe as, and this very much relates to what Sherene was speaking about around connecting with climate, but I would also say connecting with history and how do we both hold the specificity of this moment and the horror and challenge narratives of exceptionalism that are part of how we got here.
Because the story of the Holocaust, the story of the Shoah that I grew up with in my Jewish day school, which was different than my Jewish lefty home was a story of exceptionalism, was a rupture in space and time, was planet Auschwitz literally another planet. Or using Claude Lanzmann or Elie Wiesel’s terms, which they talked about having a ring of fire around the Holocaust, which forbade comparison, which literally lifted this event out of space and time and said that it came from something primordial under the crust of the earth and to put it in time was to diminish it, so that is a dismembering, that is a severing. And anybody who knows anything about trauma, and this is where I mean getting tools that I didn’t have before, I feel like I need to know much more about trauma to understand how this could be happening. And the more I read, the more I realize that anyone who’s serious about helping somebody out of trauma, whether individually or collectively, helps them find their space and time and place and somehow collectively a story set in.
And I think it’s set in for a very specific reason because that exceptionalism is what rationalized passing the mantle of whiteness and settler colonialism and calling it reparation when it was a re-inscribing and a repetition. A part of putting the Holocaust back in space in time means really studying what the Nazis learned from imperialism, German imperialism, British imperialism, settler colonialism in what is now Namibia and in the Americas. And there’s so much literature on this, none of which was part of my Jewish education, so there’s all of these bodies of knowledge that don’t speak to each other, and there’s so much work to do. And some of you know most of my work is around climate, and I think about Gustavo Petro, the president of Colombia saying, I think it was mid-October that what he and many people in the global south saw in Gaza was their future, a future of fortress borders, of normalized mass death to protect this bubble of comfort and a model of consumption.
And I think that we cannot understand, and yes, this is Israel’s genocide, but it is also the U.S.’s. It is also Canada’s, it is also Germany’s. The way our governments have lined up and that it’s Trump and Biden, that it’s Giorgia Meloni and Rishi Sunak and Keir Starmer, it’s all of them, it is across the political divide. And how do we understand this? The way it helps me to understand is that I believe that the Iron Dome is global. Israel’s Iron Dome is a paradigm for the most violent kind of belonging and othering. And when that Iron Dome failed on October 7th, it scared the shit out of every other government that believes in that model of so-called safety for the very few. Because they’re all using the same technologies and they’re all building their offshore detention centers, and they’re all trading strategies, whether it’s Australia or Britain or Italy.
And I think that we can’t understand the ferocity of the attacks on expression, truth and activism without understanding the investments in what I’ll call the Global Iron Dome. I think we’re at the very beginnings of understanding this, but we have to do this weaving, and I’m really grateful to be able to do this with you.
Cecilie Surasky:
Viet, I feel there are so many themes for you to pick up on from the cost of belonging in some cases, to generating in other to trauma. You’ve also said that all wars are fought twice. Once in the battlefield and once in memory. Offer us some bits of wisdom here. What are you thinking? What can you share?
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
Well, I do want to respond to the October 7th prompt because what I’ve learned over the past several months has been a really, I think, important lesson about fear and about conviction and about clarity, because I’m a writer and a scholar and my work over the past several months has taken me to the University of Pennsylvania to Harvard University repeatedly and to Columbia. And in all three of these cases we’ve seen university presidents being tested and I think failing. And I think they’ve been tested and they failed precisely around the question of belonging. They want to belong so much to this institution of academia and the power that they’ve accumulated, that they’ve been willing to sacrifice their academic principles to that desire to belong to an institution that itself is a part of the genocidal mechanism that we’ve been talking about. And I belong to that institution. I’m about as high in the academic hierarchy as a professor as you can get at this point.
And yet what I learned is that it’s important to sacrifice your belonging if it comes into conflict with your convictions, but you have to know what your convictions are in order to stand up for them. And October 7th has been a very important test for me in that regard. And a test of what Sherene called expansive kinship and what I’ve called expansive solidarity. It’s been very important for me to be in solidarity with Palestinians in this moment, so in September, I participated in Palestine Writes festival at UPenn, which was very controversial in September, so controversial I was the only person on the stage. The other two, Roger Waters had to call it in from Zoom because he was banned from campus. And Gary Young, who was supposed to come in from the UK, had his visa revoked the day he was supposed to fly, so it was just me and the two of them on screen. And then Palestine Writes would come back in the defenestration of the UPenn president just a few months later. And then at Harvard, of course, the president was forced to resign.
And I serve on the Pulitzer Prize board with the Columbia University president, so I will be at Columbia next week for our next Pulitzer Prize board meeting. I’m not sure if I’ll see Minouche Shafik there, but I think the lesson that I’ve learned from looking at all of them is you’re going to be fired anyway, so you should be fired for standing up for your beliefs, not for kowtowing to people’s demands. My own test of that was immediately after October 7th, I signed a letter along with 700 or so other writers from around the world calling for a ceasefire. I don’t think it was a very radical letter, but I did go on Instagram to explain why I signed the letter and I said two things that would also get me into trouble. I said, “Number one, I endorsed BDS in 2016. I still endorse BDS now.” And then I said, “There are some in the Israeli government who are calling Palestinians human animals.” And I said, “Count me among the human animals.” And as a result, I was canceled for this event in New York City, which is not important to me.
But what was important to me was my realization that I think a lot of people do not speak up for their convictions if they have the convictions out of a sense of fear. They fear losing the belonging, they fear losing relationships, they fear losing opportunities. And I’m sure I’ve lost relationships and I’ve lost opportunities because of what I’ve said. And at the same time, new relationships and new opportunities have opened up, new solidarities have opened up. The last thing I’ll say here is that this past week, I participated, on Wednesday, with the USC students who put up their own encampment at the very center of the campus. And I was so moved by that because I think sometimes we don’t speak up because we fear that we’re alone and I’ve been able to speak up because I know I’m not alone.
And those students, it was so important for them to claim the public space there at Berkeley and as at so many other places, it was important to claim the public space in solidarity with a community so that they wouldn’t be alone. They could conquer their fear, they could express their convictions and their courage with moral and political clarity. I so admire them for that. And I think that’s why people are so threatened by them for doing that.
Cecilie Surasky:
This time is going by very fast. There are two questions that I want to make sure we get to. And one, Naomi you started to touch on this, which is this idea of retelling our histories as though they are bound together instead of in competition with one another. And the other question that I really want us to end with is this is a time of unprecedented instability on every level. And we see old containers and models dissolving in front of us that also includes older models of liberation, Zionism, ethnonationalism is a model of liberation.
And we are seeing it’s crumbling, it is for everyone, but I think that there is something happening that is quite widespread now. And so I also want to make sure we close with your sense of what are you ready to see go and what are these new models that we want to see? But the first question, Sherene can we write… There are many teachers in the audience, ethnic studies teachers, students, can we teach in a different way? Can we reweave a story that doesn’t put us in competition with each other and actually tells a story you think is the right one and the right lesson?
Sherene Seikaly:
Thank you so much. I want to answer this question about how do we weave our stories with a big hat tip to all the teachers in the room. You’re amazing, and I’m honored to be a teacher. One of the most inspiring things in this moment of generalized catastrophe is being humbled by all of the lessons that students teach us every single day. And I think this point about fear that you brought up Viet is so profound because it is a point, it’s just shocking sometimes. You’re really sending out the National Guard to an encampment. The things we saw at UT Austin, the plethora of policies and laws to prohibit speech, passing on the floor of Congress, the kinds of incredible fear of this transcending of what you’re calling the Global Iron Dome. There is a new moment of possibility of creating something different here in front of us. And it’s exciting and terrifying and we can only do it together, and we can only do it through rejecting ignorance time and time again. There’s so many people invested in making us stupid, so many institutions invested in keeping us in stupidity.
And I think the three lessons that Palestine has offered me in again with great gratitude to Naomi for bringing in the historical, I would say, I think it’s really important to remember the deep history of the movements that we’re seeing at this moment. It’s not just a result of the last six months. Students for Justice in Palestine has been a 25-year project that has been that kind of commitment. And the kinship between anti-Zionist Jewish organizers and people standing up for Palestinian liberation is at least that old, if not older. And at the head of that, in my experience, have also been queer movements, so the first organization that I worked with in New York was Queer Jews Against the Occupation, that became Jews Against the Occupation. The three lessons for how do we weave history together, one, I think that Palestine teaches us that your problem cannot also be your solution. And the problem is the nation-state and or its lack. And I think we must begin thinking beyond territorial sovereignty as the horizon for our liberation.
And I think the second lesson is about how do we embrace radical empathy and the necessity of embracing radical empathy. And the choice among us now is do we exceptionalize our suffering or do we transcend that exceptionalization in order to really think differently about these hierarchies of suffering? The Holocaust or the Shoah, which means catastrophe in Hebrew, and the Nakba, which means catastrophe in Arabic, are often posed as oppositional. They are not oppositional. They must be held together in the same analytical and conceptual frame. And that isn’t to say that they’re comparable or that they are in any way similar that would be shallow and ahistorical. That is to say that we have to center and understand how catastrophe has been central to Palestinian and Jewish experience. And there is the third lesson where I’m saying Israeli and not Jewish. And that reminds us that language itself is a product of history. It is a product that we must dismantle.
And so Jewish and Zionist are not synonyms and Arab and Jewish are not antonyms. They are terms with histories that we have to dismantle and transcend. And I think the way we do it… I’ll just take one more minute in that there was a question about narration. And here I just want to really remind people that knowledge has been a target in the Gaza Strip and that every single university has been destroyed. 70% of every single school has been reduced to rubble, archives, bookstores, publishing houses, cultural centers. Why? Because narrating our past to understand our present and imagine a future is threatening to settler colonialism. But it doesn’t matter how much they try to destroy, we will always rebuild our archives. We will always narrate our histories because the lands that we belong to reside in us.
Cecilie Surasky:
I wish we had all day. Yeah. Well, maybe we’ll figure out a way to do this online. All right, Naomi, I know you’ve been thinking writing about this a lot.
Naomi Klein:
Where to start? And I do, I wish we could just sit and have this conversation for a week. I’m learning so much. I’m just scribbling notes. There’s a certain kind of shame that I feel and rage that I feel at a state that claims to speak on behalf of Jews engaging in what Sherene has just described and has used the term epistemicide to express the systematic nature and scholasticide the systematic nature of the infrastructures of knowing and learning. Not that it will be successful, but that it is an attempt, it’s systematic. JVP organized a Seder in the streets, an emergency Seder in the streets for the second night of Passover a few days ago in New York City. And they had it just outside Chuck Schumer’s place in Brooklyn. And I gave a speech there called Exodus from Zionism, and it was a bit of a coming out for me less as an anti-Zionist Jew, I’d already done that, or a counter-Zionist or a post-Zionist Jew.
But more just as somebody who has a right to these traditions who grew up in these traditions, including traditions that place tremendous value on text and on books and on questioning. I’ve always loved Passover and the Passover Seder, it’s my favorite holiday. And I love the expressions of the value on narrative, on creating a portable container to grieve. To have a Seder you don’t need walls, you don’t need a rabbi, you don’t need a temple. You can do it with a blanket. You don’t even need a table. And at the center of the Seder are the smallest child asking the four questions. And to have that Seder at a time when universities were calling in police, were barricading themselves against their students who were daring to ask questions. I don’t think that these people understand that they’re losing their kids, but they’re losing their kids. If you’re willing to do that for an ideology, something is very wrong.
And so I think we are telling new stories, we’re telling old stories, we’re laying claim to the right, to our own traditions. I think that the ICJ case, which is ongoing, Israel is under investigations in The Hague for genocide. A courtroom is always a classroom. But I think we should pay very close attention to the kind of classroom that this case has become because it really is a rendezvous with history. Yes, it is a classroom for learning about what is actually going on in Gaza, but it is also this extraordinary classroom of de-exceptionalizing the Holocaust. You think about this moment where Germany announces they’re going to intervene on Israel’s behalf and the government of Namibia intervenes and says, “Wait a minute, who is Germany to lecture the world on what is and is not genocide?” When the first genocide of the 20th century took place in what is now Namibia in the genocide of the Nama and Ovaherero people between 1904 and 1908.
And you can draw a straight line from the doctors who were measuring and collecting skulls on Shark Island, which was a death camp, a concentration camp where some of the technologies of assigning every prisoner a number were developed by the German colonists. And the race science that was used in the Nazi Holocaust was developed by the same doctors who trained Mengele, who then joined the Nazi party. It’s not six degrees of separation, it’s no degrees of separation. When Germany lost those colonies after the first World War, they had excess uniforms. They were tan to match the desert, and they became the brown shirts. They just put a different logo on the sleeve. There’s a straight line, so I think we are… So many suppressed stories are coming up. You can’t suppress history in this way. You can’t suppress connections in this way. And I think there is a healing in finding this long arc of othering and fascism and saying, not only did it not start on October 7th, and it didn’t start in the Holocaust, it is so long. It is hundreds of years long, it goes back to the Inquisition.
But that’s not a good enough story. The story is what do we do instead? But I don’t think we can tell that story unless we are weaving together some of these paths. And I really believe Zionism is a lesson in some of the perils of a certain kind of identity politics, a certain kind of using trauma as a weapon to separate instead, as Olufemi Taiwo says, a bridge to connect us. I’ll just end there. I have so much gratitude for the fact that you’ve created a frame that has these principles embedded in them, and we just have so much work to do, and we need to be courageous. I feel so grateful to be among such courageous people. What Viet was saying about teachers, fear gets taught too, when you shut up, you’re teaching a lesson. Silence is a weapon, silence is a lesson.
And when you don’t, and the world doesn’t end because you spoke, maybe you lost a gig, maybe you lost a job, but the fact that you’re still standing and speaking, that’s the most important lesson, and we have to do it. And the more of us who do it, the safer we’ll be, so let’s do that.
Cecilie Surasky:
Viet, how about you tell this broader story?
Viet Thanh Nguyen:
Well, I want to start with Naomi’s example of the Global Iron Dome, because I think it’s a good metaphor for how power operates. The powerful are always building alliances, building solidarities, doing trade agreements, so-called peace agreements and so on, so they’re very interested in broad-based alliances and networks and coalitions. And the flip side of that is that they want to divide and conquer, and part of how they divide and conquer is through literally colonization and exploitation and so on. But part of how they divide and conquer is also through separating us through stories, through our stories. Here within the United States, it’s not exactly like we’re silenced. In fact, those of us who come from so-called minoritized or exploited populations, we’re incited to speak. However, we’re incited to speak about our one trauma. You’re allowed one trauma in this country. It’s not as if Americans are in a propagandistic denial that there is no trauma in the United States or no racism. In fact, Americans will say, yes, of course there’s racism. You talk about your one traumatic experience with racism.
And we’re not allowed, or we’re not encouraged to connect our traumas with other people’s traumas. Because if we did, then we could see exactly how we’re not separated but these traumas are produced from the same network and constellations and intersections of exploitation. My own personal trauma is obviously the Vietnam War. And I could have made a very wealthy career for myself by only speaking about the Vietnam War over and over and over again. But in fact, what’s been important for me in talking about the war is not to not talk about it, because that’s the other incentive is like, well, we know we’re only allowed one trauma, so let’s not talk about the trauma. Let’s talk about white people instead. That’s the other option that were offered. But in fact, I felt like I had to talk about the Vietnam War, but in a way that would be the opposition to the Global Iron Dome. Because for Americans, when they think about the Vietnam War, and this is not unusual, they isolate wars.
They have the wars of a beginning, and wars have an ending, so we know exactly how to contain the symbolic significance of wars. But when I look at the Vietnam War, what I see is that it was only an episode in a very long history of American imperialism that if we go back to the very origins of the country, our country, if we’re Americans, is built on a contradiction between freedom and democracy on the one hand, and genocide, enslavement and colonization and warfare on the other. And that contradiction has produced a country that has been continually at war ever since its very beginning. And the Vietnam War was only one episode in that. And when I think about it in that way, that allows me to think not only about the wars that preceded the wars in Vietnam, the Philippine-American War, World War II, the Korean War, the wars in Laos and Cambodia, but then to move forward in time to the wars in Iraq, in Afghanistan, in Palestine. And so that continuity across time has been very crucial.
And also the continuity across space as well, because myself as an Asian American, we’ve been subjected to anti-Asian violence in this country. And that reached a recent peak during the COVID era. And of course, most people would say anti-Asian violence is bad. But for the United States and for Americans, typically it’s to say, anti-Asian violence in this country is bad. But when I think about the wars in Vietnam, in Laos, in Cambodia, in Korea, in Japan, in the Philippines, what I realized is that the greatest acts of anti-Asian violence have been in America’s wars in Asia. And so storytelling becomes really crucial here to connect all of these different kinds of violence, these different kinds of trauma. I think about how the most dangerous speech that Martin Luther King Jr. ever gave wasn’t I Have a Dream, it was Beyond Vietnam, where he connected the experiences of Black Americans to the Vietnamese, where he connected the racial and class exploitation of Black people in the United States to a racist and imperialist war in Vietnam. That’s the kind of narratives that we should be telling.
Cecilie Surasky:
We have one minute, and I want to give Sherene the last word. You’re part of the Palestinian Feminist Collective, what is a call to action or a paradigm that you can leave us with?
Sherene Seikaly:
Thank you so much. I want to say one paradigm that we can break is the idea that we understand from indigenous studies of land as not being property, land is not property. And here I want to lift up what my dear friend Rana Barakat has taught me to ask, not who Palestine belongs to, but insist that we belong to her. And second, to lift up the, and honor the lessons of the Black radical tradition in dismantling white supremacy and understanding Zionism in its initial moment as one of many responses to white supremacy that then reified the very hierarchies that it sought refuge from and in that sense a cautionary tale.
Third, I want to say that in this age of generalized catastrophe, we forget how much happened in 2023, Lahaina, the earthquakes, the flooding, and Libya, and Rwanda and Malawi that were so intense that in this age Palestine is not an object of sympathy. Even as we grieve the 35,000 people and the tens of thousands of people under the rubble, it is not a sight of salvation, it is a paradigm. It is a place abundant with lessons on living in the permanent temporary that we are all in. And I would say that the Palestinian Feminist Collective would say to all of us, liberation is within reach, and the way that we reach it is through love, love for each other, and love for liberation.
About Viet Thanh Nguyen
Viet Thanh Nguyen’s novel The Sympathizer won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and numerous other awards. His most recent publication is A Man of Two Faces: A Memoir, A History, A Memorial. His other books are the sequel to The Sympathizer, The Committed; a short story collection, The Refugees; Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War (a finalist for the National Book Award in nonfiction and the National Book Critics Circle Award in General Nonfiction); and Race and Resistance: Literature and Politics in Asian America. He has also published Chicken of the Sea, a children’s book written in collaboration with his son, Ellison. He is a University Professor at the University of Southern California. A recipient of fellowships from the Guggenheim and MacArthur Foundations, he is also the editor of The Displaced: Refugee Writers on Refugee Lives.