*This was authored quickly as we are laboring to access resources for victims of gender based violence, as shelters are full and protocols keep them on the streets idiling in vulnerabilities and traumas.
Fifty-two cases of COVID-19 in the West Bank. This is not including two cases identified in mainstream media, where two men with COVID-19 have returned to Gaza from Pakistan Currently the apartheid government of Israel has fixed 600 tests available for almost two million Palestinians cornered in a structural incubator fomenting catastrophe. Any interference, any imposition, or incursion in obstruction to access of medical resources, access to medical treatment, including testing, puts the entire populations of Palestine at risk. The imposition of apartheid, occupation, in Palestine, or Kashmir, that silhouettes outcomes, fallouts, is an intrusion that amends liability to an act of biological terrorism, a war crime and crime against humanity, putting the verdict of ethnic cleansing and genocide beyond dispute. Our thoughts call out for Palestine, Kashmir, all tribes, clans, people, genders, communities, displaced internally and externally, for whom retreating to safety is an impossibility.
Two explosions went off in Mogadishu just days ago. A reminder of the structural realities that will exacerbate a global crisis where more has been done to sustain violence, to transfer arms, monetize aid, than to engineer a foundation for self-determination.
One man in Kenya was already lynched after being identified as having coronavirus.
Yesterday I had a discussion with a high commissioner about host states with fragile social/public health infrastructures politically deprived of resources through proxy wars.
All it will take, is just one–, a single case of COVID-19 in one refugee camp, one individually displaced person infected, one person smuggled out of a camp seeking work in the shadow economies of delegitimization, to supplement the failures and complicity of the international community.
One person seeking migration in self-emancipation from the carceral conditions imposed by host countries–.
One situation where the sick person is burdened to battle the fallout of contaminated water, lack of sanitation, lack of protective shelter, malnutrition, non-existent medical infrastructure.
One case where displaced communities are escaping to seek dignified self asserted resettlement and protection, to create the largest bio-medical disaster atrocity to rejoin a 21st Century of smug laxity to the celebrity NGO complex of complicity, mediated fetishization to offset a lack of aggressive engagement to confront neoliberalism(s).
What has been a catastrophic lack of will, will, come to rejoin the political corruption, the mismanagement of human life, the anachronistic protocols, procedures and antiquated laws that govern conventional regulations, normative implementations, and mediated misdirections to defeat adulterated headlines, quotes and virtue signaling in an equal and opposite reminder of interconnection.
Sanctions are premeditated murder, criminal wholesale transgressions against civilian populations. Sanctions maliciously target and burden the most vulnerable populations–the poor, the elderly, women, children, vital infrastructures including public health care, social programs, education and individual public protections. Sanctions at a time of pandemic health crisis is a crime against humanity. Sanctions will deliberately source hundreds of avoidable deaths, intensify suffering, willfully exercise torture against the sick, imploding societal afflictions that will reverberate against generations unborn, deliberately.
Confronting this reality without confronting neoliberal capitalism, is like confronting gender based violence without confronting misogyny, patriarchy, and race, concurrently. We’re hustling right know to procure resources, which provides a perfect introduction to the “other” or “other’d” unsung warriors, champions, agitators, conscripts, activists, advocates, first responders, service providers–the Women of Color, Indigenous women, Black Women, the Trans communities, those persecuted to the margins for their sexualities, the spectrums over lapping identities, encircled in front lines of dual pathogens of neocolonial, neoliberal, hyper-capitalism, pandemic crises of bio-medical violence, virus and gender based violences.
Some are social workers, independent journalists, disabled women whose access to expression of their narratives are this medium/independent mediums, some are at shelters, some are opening their homes, some are running up in projects, running through rural poverty, reservations, ALL are putting their lives on the line/lines in this moment to hold space against political violences–race, caste, labor, disabilities/disability insolvency economies of marginalization, housing, mental health, religion, land, rape, domestic violence, FGM, reproductive rights, maternal rights, slavery–trafficking, refugee camps, crossing women across borders, conflict, confronting arms trade and the industries of violence those arms protect from communities, occupation, environment, forced disappearances, disrupting extrajudicial murder and torture, jailed, interrupting femicides and poverty while subjugated to poverty.
No benefits, next to no pay–no paid time off, no time off, no checks in the mail, subsisting in the gruelingly toil of plots they’ll never see the conclusions to, will never see the benefits of nourishment from the seeds they farm.
The women, who won’t even be footnotes in the parentheses of these times.
The women running organizations, ensuring they can procure funding to keep essential programing that will be intensify the fallouts of structural divisions of gender-race, tribal caste, class, existences and survival. Existences that will be targeted by magnified violences in economic systems created to exploit their existences. Women which who had they been positioned to their experiences would have built levees of action and understanding between now and tomorrow. I have a bigger thank you coming later but I really want to acknowledge, honor and make sure we’re recognizing the scale of front liners. The ones who aren’t fighting this like it is a “war” but to dismantle a war on their existences.
Take care of yourself. We are in this together. This pandemic doesn’t relieve gender based violence and a culture of violations to human rights, it compounds those realities. Remember, If you’re quarantined at home, sex can be exercise, if there’s consent. If there’s no consent it’s neither sex, nor exercise. This applies to everyone, of all spectrums of identities– political, individual, communal, social, cultural, tribal, clan, economic positions/dispositions, single, married, complicated, confused, poly, friends with benefits–first time, hundred-thousandth time.
Price of Silence 