Cindy Milstein (they)In what felt the “perfect” metaphor for the sorrow of today, October 7, 2024, the many thousands of names of the dead this past year—those “killed in Gaza,” as this enormous wheatpaste spelled out just two days ago—were buffed out. Literally whitewashed. Only bits and pieces barely recognizable were left.
The sacred desecrated. Again. First in life, then in death, and now in remembrance. The necropolitics of genocide, in which even naming, much less grieving, the dead is a threat.
I marched past this wheatpaste on the stolen lands of Tiohtià:ke/Mooniyang with thousands of others this afternoon. A river of humans creating a sea of keffiyehs. A soundscape of solidarity. A demonstration of what it means to walk side by side for 365 days, even if it seems we’re getting nowhere.
So many of those days—all of them, really—have seen a battle between those who can name the simple truth and those who want to paper it over. Those who can see right from wrong, and those who want to pile more wrongs on top of other wrongs, obscuring any sense of an ethical compass.
I stared at the now painted-over wall—thousands of martyrs honored just two days ago now disappeared, and with a precision of brushstroke and straight lines that chilled my soul.
It, too, is part of this battlefield. Even if it’s just a wall. A wall of barely readable names pasted onto plywood boards covering up the renovation of yet another fancy store on a business-as-usual shopping area in downtown Montreal.
Yet the persistent, resistant ghosts of the dead—those who should not have been killed in Gaza—nonetheless peeked through the whitewash. A remembrance of sorts to us, the still living, that we walk side by side with them, our chosen ancestors in the long, hard road to liberation.