There’s an opinion piece in the New York Times today called “To Focus on Hamas Is to Miss the Point.” In it, Basma Ghalayini discusses growing up in Gaza, where experiences or near misses with violence are not a novel experience, but instead are a fundamental part of living in what is effectively an open-air prison. Towards the end, she relays a story of a game she played as a child:
As kids, one of our favorite games was “shuhada’a.” It was a bit like “doctors and nurses,” in that one kid had to just lie there, doing nothing. But “shuhada’a” means “martyrs,” and in our game, one of us would lie perfectly still in a pretend coffin while the others carried it around chanting “Filistin Hurra” (Free Palestine).
This story stood out to me for two reasons. One, it is incredibly tragic that children in Gaza are playing make-believe martyrdom. Two, it’s not all that surprising given the way that children’s play often emulates and reflects the reality in which they live.
In 2016, in the summer prior to the Presidential election, I was volunteering at a community center in Madison, Wisconsin that served predominantly Mexican-American elementary-aged youth. One day, supervising them play outside, I listened as one of the kids introduced the form of tag they were going to play as they negotiated the rules as a group. It went something like this: two kids would play la migra (border patrol agents) at the border wall, and the rest of them had to play as migrants trying to get across the wall and into the United States without being caught. The game would begin with the two border kids playing la migra shouting, “Build the wall! Trump! Trump! Trump!” On the third “Trump,” the kids could begin to run. I remember being simultaneously disturbed and fascinated by this evolution of the game of tag, especially since the parents of some of these students were undocumented and had crossed into the United States by evading the border patrol. Students were embodying the lived experiences of these parents, and laying their reality and the proliferation of Trump’s anti-immigration message into their game.
In contrast to Ghalayini’s childhood game which directly focused on the ideal resolution to conflict for Palestinians, a free Palestine, the game I witnessed instead embodied an element of the Trump (and Obama, and Bush) border policies of border apprehension rather than a radical solution. This got me thinking: of course, children’s games have limited interpretive power in terms of making sense of conflict, but the regular martyrdom of innocent Palestinians no doubt mirrored children’s lived experiences, and thus the solution in the game is a free Palestine. Anyone can imagine this idea. In the United States, there was (and is) no popular unifying cry for the resolution of our border issue (except perhaps the popular push to “end kids in cages” popularized during the Trump years that was so limited in its imagination as to be appalling), and so instead students adopted the popular Trump chant and the game mirrored reality sans a popular cry for resolution. Perhaps if I’d been at the community center over the next couple of years, the kids would have been playing an even more grotesque version of the game where ‘jail’ was a detention center and the kids, mixing their metaphors, would have shouted “Lock her up!”
That’s obviously not a serious, realistic, or hopeful sentiment to end on, so what’s the takeaway here? Popular movements need popular goals and slogans to mobilize behind, and for the young and the old to extend our imaginations of the possible. Over the last decade, the most high-profile immigrant rights movement has focused on the so-called Dreamers, but there is no iconic slogan of imagination for the future that has taken in the public consciousness. What are they dreaming of? Obviously, a future where Dreamers have citizenship – a powerful image but not obvious from the name – is still somewhat limited in its imagination.
Part of the power of “Black Lives Matter,” “Defund the Police,” “Build the Wall” and “Stop the Steal” is that they are easily repeated and shared, quickly capturing a particular message and worldview. They convey a specific image, simple enough as to be widely shared and understood, but also up for interpretation. “Free Palestine” is unequivocally clear in its inditement of occupation and settler colonialism. What slogan will mobilize a generation of people to fight for migrant rights and build the capacity of young people to imagine a better future?
“No human is illegal” is strong, but it can be interpreted too narrowly. “No Borders, No Nations,” is very clear, but framed in the negative. Framed in the positive, it’s “One World, One People,” which I find incredibly evocative. Unlikely to catch on, but a powerful image of the possible, even if I’m not sure I can see young people using it except as a reference to the very same slogan used by the ostensibly terrorist group the Flag Smashers who served as the primary antagonists of Captain America and the forces of the United States government in The Falcon and the Winter Soldier.