Politics & performance

May we always gravitate towards those who challenge the status quo.

Alaa Albaba, 2023

Over Christmas dinner last year, my stepfather called me an extremist. I had been recounting a powerful play I had seen several years earlier called Klątwa (The Curse) at the Teatr Powszechny in Warsaw. 

The first scene opens up with a massive statue of John Paul II with a sign over his neck saying “protector of pedophiles.” He is adorned with a dildo while an actor proceeds to give him a very slow, very long blow-job. The audience sits in stunned silence.

It was an unapologetic (and risky!) critique of the Catholic Church in Poland, a country without the separation of church and state. Most compelling to me was how the play pushed the boundaries of freedom of expression in a public theater, how it asked us to consider the difference between art and reality. In one scene, an actor breaks the fourth wall and delivers a speech where she explains how she is raising money for the assassination of Jarosław Kaczyński, the leader of the ruling right-wing political party. Would anyone like to contribute? She asks us.

The actor cites the criminal code that prevents her from requesting money from the audience for this assassination and does it anyway. My stepdad jumps in to berate me, how would I like it if someone wanted me dead? They do, I explain. I am queer and trans. I look like a woman. I have a father who I’m afraid of giving my home address to, an ex-boyfriend who reaches out to me every few years to tell me to go back to my fascist country, and a former colleague who sent death threats so vulgar that my job suggested I leave town for a while. This doesn’t include all the strangers, online and offline.

The play drew thousands of protestors over the course of a year. There was a criminal investigation opened. There were smoke bombs and clashes. The theater staff and the actors received countless death threats. 

I went from being called naive as a teenager for daring to act for a better world to being called an extremist as an adult for the same thing. I’ve been called a Russian spy for de-platforming Polish nazis. I’ve been called a terrorist for supporting Palestine. I’ve been called a cunt for existing.

I spent all morning listening to Macklemore’s Hind’s Hall grateful for our arts and culture workers, grateful for the power of performance. Tens of thousands of Palestinians have been murdered and we are debating whether or not students are creating unsafe conditions on their own campuses, whether or not they are wide-eyed and uninformed, whether or not their organizing is effective.

There are many parallels between this moment and student protest movements of the past but one in particular stands out. In a poll in 1961, researchers asked “Do you think sit-ins at lunch counters, freedom busses, and other demonstrations by Negroes will hurt or help the Negro’s chances of being integrated in the South?” Over 57% of people responded hurt. Only 27% responded help.

Some of the arguments I’ve heard against taking action for liberation at this moment is that we can’t possibly “care about everything happening in the world.” But we do not need to choose between these so-called “issues” of racial justice, environmental justice, or gender justice, between the end of white supremacy, settler colonialism, or racial capitalism. It’s the same fight.  

This is the gift that Black Communists have given us—the permission and framework that these aren’t mutually exclusive but mutually reinforcing visions for justice. The forces against us are united, and we must be too.

We are witnessing unimaginable grief and sorrow. We are also witnessing a movement moment, a breaking with centuries of white supremacist dehumanization.

When I think back to that play I saw in Poland all those years ago, I remember feeling that I too was part of this performance sitting in the audience. And all those people outside, yelling at us for worshiping the devil, for daring to hear the truth, were too.

The performance was a loose adaptation of a play written more than a hundred years earlier, in 1899, about a severe drought thought to be brought on by the sexual relationship between a local girl and the village priest. The people of the town turn not on the priest but on the girl, stoning her to death.

The girl, just like the protesting students, didn’t say or do everything perfectly. We shouldn’t expect them to and we shouldn’t scrutinize their every single word choice as a way to cast doubt on the whole project of liberation. We can’t give in to the moral panic that conflates anti-semitism with anti-zionism, that conflates protest with violence.

The imperialist project is facing a crisis of legitimacy. May we always gravitate towards those who challenge the status quo.

P.S. A trusted source is raising funds to help a scholar named Mona Ameen and her family rebuild their life in Egypt after fleeing Gaza. Mercifully, all nine of them made it out and now they need support to resettle, as they navigate the impossibility of survivor’s guilt. As my friend Lissy says, some of us know what it's like not to be able to sleep for generations.