I remember when the President of Colby
Told me and my Muslim community that
It is the college’s job to teach us how, not what
To think—well I think that’s bullshit.
Excuse my crassness but my craft is
Built on
Feeling—and I am reeling from the rage of being muzzled inside a cage of apathy.
Preach not the semantics of selective history when you are consciously
Choosing
Neutrality.
Silence, hatred, and an inability to listen
What ails our universities most, though?
The inability
Of our eyes to glisten the
Inability of our hearts to soften the
Inability of our ears to open—but what am I saying, playing around with passive voice—apathy is a choice.
To listen, though, is also a choice.
I, for one, am done listening, though. It is not I that needs to do the labor anymore, it is people who cannot say Palestine, people who do not say genocide, people who say “was” and not “is”, people who forget
What privilege is —
Voices and voices and voices and voices / why do I open my mouth when all I’m met with is white noise, and / I sit, biting my lip, biting the rebuttal off my tongue—as my tongue touches metal, I wonder: will these people ever touch grass? / Or will conversations forever revolve around axes of victimhood and promised lands—/ I am not so much quaking in these boots as I am shaking from anger / what is so threatening about a Palestine solidarity letter? Lifetimes later, Palestinians are living and dying and fighting through erasure—/ sidelined and silenced—somehow, some way, they hope we all remain quiet / any attempt at raising awareness is met with Zionist attempts at claiming ailment—anytime I open my mouth at all, I feel like I am talking to a goddamn wall / halfway through my unheard sentences, I stopped computing eloquence and started calculating the consequences of breaking it; the consequences / of making noise. That’s what’s wrong with this place, isn’t it. / They want us quiet, they want us to be poised—but all they are is poised to strike, and all we are is poised to mind the gap, fall in line, and let the truth get left behind—we are forcibly poised to retreat against a voice that refuses to listen, because why should it? / I scoff at the futility of these “dialogue dinners”—one side is always expected to listen and weaken while the other is constantly pandered and stiffened / and I would rather talk / to the goddamn walls, and place my hope in its plaster and floor—these walls could sooner grow into revolving doors than could these people evolve into empaths—twisted speech and desecrated faith and many empty words later, and we haven’t even said Palestine’s name. We haven’t even acknowledged who is truly in pain. We haven’t even talked about who is truly at stake—because this is all an attention game / to talk around, yet never about, the truth; they say “it’s not about us” yet that’s exactly what it always was / it’s all about them now / these walls at least absorb sound—those people simply spit back new noise, until all our voices are drowned out and
If I am to be thrown out anyway, I must ask
Is my life my safety the existence of my people
Not enough to warrant pause?
Are my family and friends of Levantine descent not
Worth even mentioning—
This school will never speak for us, but I am not
Done
Talking;
What of / the Semitic Arab? / what of / the nonliving, unborn child? / the colonized rainwater / the buildings, crumbled like feta cheese and the power lines twisted like licorice, twining together haphazard swings for the orphan children to cling to in innocent fun, fumbling for a childhood Israel robbed them of — / when will our anger be justified?
open fire is the American way—they open fire upon university students in the states, claiming civility and demanding / accountability and for protestors to / self-educate / self educate / self educate / self educate, but in regulation — self educate, but only so far as ones coffers remain lined, only so far until education becomes a crime, only so far until education begins to mobilize / the people / the students / against genocide / to divest, oh to divest / is the bare minimum, we strain to convince every privileged trustee—yes it is the bare minimum we can do whilst infernos have blown through / every / single university that once stood in Gaza / under Israel’s occupation, every structure has collapsed—where is the justice for this assault on education, where are the voices of the supposedly educated? / how paradoxical, Palestinian academics left under the rubble, whilst protesting college students are doxxed, condemned for causing trouble / trouble / trouble /
These supposed dialogues of free exchange are monologues of the apathetically deranged, and I’ll refrain from name calling, I will restrain my rage / if you can look me in the eye and recite name after name after name of every child and every mother and every sister and every brother and every father maimed under claimed indigeneity, slaughtered under Israeli martial law whilst clawing for inborn rights of autonomy—I assumed diversity, equity and inclusion / implied humanity, solidarity, and uplifting those who have been uprooted / your silence will be studied, your silence is damning / what use is learning and discovery and progress / when it is staunched and stifled by the hateful and the entitled? / what of
The
Semitic
Arab? What of
The
Visibly
Muslim? Are they, too, not Human?
Speak not to me of respectful conversations when every word of your polished, politician’s tongue is tainted by tasteless idleness, and your hands are stained green from pockets ripping at their seams, spewing money as coins pool in your hands / metallic as blood but you’ve never felt the unwanted rush of not knowing / which coin, which breath, would be your last — / it’s easy to deny divestment when you sit in a chair far away from any impact, far away from that which your own hands helped craft / education be damned if these are its antics; how dare the liberal arts be employed for such grotesque mental gymnastics — if you cannot teach students to decry genocide, then there is no saving this institution–the foundation is flawed—I
Cannot halt
The deluge that spouts from a mouth long told to stay silent— long live the student intifada long live the revolutions decades in the making long live life, yes long live the living who have not lost their ability to hear human suffering I think I’m done talking;
In the names of Rumeysa Ozturk, Mahmoud Khalil, Alireza Doroudi, Yunseo Chung, Badar Khan Suri, Momodou Taal, and Ranjani Srinivasan
I hope you were listening.
-Maaheen Shaikh `25
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