Clayton DeweyMade some prints with my friend using a snake skin I found. This particular one really spoke to the profound loss and transformation I'm feeling alongside others this year of the snake.
Cindy Milstein (they)CALL for contributions!
PLEASE read & share!
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I’ve walked by this wheat-paste numerous times. It always elicits grief—from the malicious rips—along with the sense that “they tried to bury us; they didn’t know we were seeds”—seen in the rebellious love that survives the fascistic vandalism. It reminds me too of the grief I felt when hearing a now-martyred female fighter in Rojava say, in a film, that she gave up her life for the liberation struggle so that others in the future could savor a world structured by love.
These are glimpses of what I understand to be “antifascist grief”—feelings specific to this moment in human history, and the sensibilities and practices that such sorrow can generate in us. I see it as crucial that we engage in “rebellious mourning” not merely to honor our dead but also to see them as inseparable from the life we’re striving for together. And because if we don’t grieve… well, they will bury us—disappear us and our beautiful aspirations, whether directly or indirectly. Because grief can and does tear us apart when done alone or unacknowledged. But it can—as one contributor wrote in a piece I said yes to—be key to weaving “communal bonds,” which in turn are key to seeding possibilities.
Hence why the next zine in my curated series revolves around “The Heart Is a Muscle: Embodiments of Antifascist Grief.” Per usual with these zines featuring numerous voices, it takes two or three “calls” to get enough submissions that are good fits. So here goes again:
Length: 75 to 250 words
Deadline: Aug 14 or sooner
Email to: cbmilstein [at] yahoo
See prior posts for more detail! For now, I want to share an excerpt from a piece going in the zine:
“Almost every week, for twenty-two months, we‘ve been marching for Gaza en masse—our cup of grief full. … Large numbers of people in one place seemed to have less and less impact. Meanwhile, our sorrow only increased as the atrocities multiplied. Our cup spilled over, time and again, with seemingly nowhere to go. … But like charged ions, our energy, catalyzed by our grief, … has dispersed us across the landscape and drawn us onto the lesser-traveled streets, touching people and places that hold the heaviness of these times” (Lesley Wood).
#TheHeartIsAMuscle
#AntifascistGrief
#RebelliousMourning
(photo taken in Montreal/Tio’tià:ke, July 25)
Call for contributions to the next curated zine in my “series” aimed at countering this christofascist era:
“The Heart Is a Muscle:
XX Embodiments of Antifascist Grief”
Length: approx. 75 to 250 words
Due: by or before August 4
Email: cbmilstein [at] yahoo [dot] com
Please read my previous post for more details on this zine, including a series of prompts that hopefully will generate contributions coming at the overall theme from varied directions. As another aid—or rather, some inspiration—in nudging you to consider submitting an anecdote, here’s a story I said “yes” to already for inclusion in this zine:
🖤🌹🖤
“Grief is a tightrope I walk. On the one end, there’s the seemingly surreal amount of suffering, loss, death, pain, and hate. On the other, the connections, love, resistance, and refusal of my networks of kin and comrades. For my own well-being, balance is essential. To fall off this tightrope means to enter into crisis. And crises for me are the hopeless places of despair, suicidality, and addiction. I do not want to go back there, for I’ve worked too hard to get out.
“This moment is challenging: it seems incomprehensible, yet demands that we live it. To accept reality yet not consent to its impositions is a difficult proposition. To be awake in a world awash in pain is to risk drowning in it. So I must set boundaries. I limit my intake of news. I make space for play. I reach out to others.
“At my best, all I have done is say, ‘Friend, you don’t need to carry this alone.’ I believe it is through collectively carrying the infinite weight of stolen lives, the weight of loss, injustice, fear, genocide, state terror, and fascism, that we forge collective memory. It is how we fight back against forgetting. And it is how together, we can walk forward, balanced in defiant grief. No one can hold all of this alone. We must all lend a hand to keep one another from falling.”
—Scott Campbell
#RebelliousMourning
#CollectiveWorkOfGrief
(photo: “Revolutionary love” tag, red on a concrete barrier, seen in Montreal, July 2025—because we only grieve what we love, and by mourning our losses, we put our love into “direct action” to fight for the living)
Call for contributions to the next curated zine in my “series” aimed at countering this christofascist era:
“The Heart Is a Muscle:
XX Embodiments of Antifascist Grief”
Length: approx. 75 to 250 words
Due: by or before August 4
Email: cbmilstein [at] yahoo [dot] com
This next collection of (your) voices revolves around the rivers of rage and seas of sorrow that are distinctive to this moment. It aims to both name the myriad and specific types of grief we feel in light of neofascisms taking hold across this imperiled earth, and share stories of how grief fuels our resolve and generates new ways to struggle against fascism.
As prompts to help shape your contributions:
1. What’s particular about the form(s) grief and losses that you’re experiencing at present? How does grief feel different and even surprising? What is it bringing up for you? What novel or surprising losses are you suddenly facing?
2. How do you embody that grief? Where do you see and feel it?
3. Where are your feelings of grief over fascism leading you? What are they generating? What are they compelling you to do, want to do, or not do? And with whom? Or where? Or how?
4. In what ways has your antifascist grief showed up—especially publicly, politically, and/or collectively—as practices of “rebellious mourning”?
5. What example from your own life, circles, or communities can you share that embody a “direct action of the grieving”? How have our shared patterns of losses and griefs under fascism fueled rituals of resistance, community self-defense, collective care, and/or solidarity?
Please only send me pieces that speak to grief and mourning that explicitly arise from an anarchistic as well as antifascist impulse, and center on “antifascist grief,” not timeless or decontextualed grief (crucial as that is too).
#RebelliousMourning
#CollectiveWorkOfGrief
(photo: “mourn the dead & fight like hell for the living” sticker, Pittsburgh, 2025)
Call for contributions to the next curated zine in my “series” to counter this christofascist era:
“The Heart Is a Muscle:
XX Embodiments of Antifascist Grief”
Length: approx. 75 to 250 words
Due: by or before August 1
Email: cbmilstein [at] yahoo [dot] com
Of late—or rather, for many months—it feels sadly routine to get one or several texts daily in which a friend, old or new, says: “I’m struggling.” Those two words are like clockwork in their regularity, as if counting out how the days, hours, or seconds of these sadistic times tear at our very souls. They are followed, invariably, by more detail of why that particular person is struggling, and how much it’s breaking their body, heart, and spirit. And while each “I’m struggling” is an individual story, there are patterns among these tales that transcend a lone experience, revealing a collective impact that can be summarized, I’d argue, in one word.
Grief.
“Grief” is shorthand for the impossible-to-summarize mountains of our losses, which in turn carve out rivers of rage and seas of sorrow. It’s healthy, given all of this, to know one is struggling. It means you still have a heart and are busily exercising that muscle. And by sending off a *simple* text or leaving a voicemail or penning a letter or posting on social media that you’re having a rough go of it, you’re showing others that you still have a heart, and you’re being met in turn by those who still have a heart too, and together, our grief is held by our love.
For we only grieve what we love, and despite the slogan “grief is love with no place to go,” it does take us places; it does have a place to go.
Through grief-as-love, we can find each other, naming the dimensions of how we embody antifascist mourning, so we can share and cope with it. We can take better care of each other, whether via communal rituals, social solidarity, or community self-defense. Grief can fuel our resolve and generate new ways to struggle against fascism.
Long story short: I’m seeking your musings on how you’re embodying your antifascist grief—what it feels like, where it leads you, with whom, and/or how.
For previous (free and downloadable!) zines in this series, see:
https://itsgoingdown.org/author/cindy-milstein/
#RebelliousMourning
#CollectiveWorkOfGrief
#DirectActionOfTheAggrieved
(photo: circle A heart, tag, Montreal, 2025)
Sparks of rebellious inspiration have a funny way of not staying put in one time or space. They traverse borders. They congregate without permission in all sorts of unexpected places. They defy the logics of commodification, freely sharing with and borrowing from each other, while also defying the logics of colonialism and states, offering life-giving solidarity to weather and contest their death machinery.
We never know, when we release tiny sparks into the enormous darkness of this social order, where they will end up, if they manage to stay alighted at all. Or who will see them, or where or when, much less what they will make of those sparks. Most often, we never know, and don’t really need to.
Yet we do need to remember that each and every one of us who aspires to kindle the flames of a new world does indeed put out sparks into the night via all our many gifts. And just as we find inspiration in those random sparks that we stumble on and run with, others will likely do the same with what we release into the wind to stir up social transformation.
But occasionally, we get to see and feel the fruits of reciprocal inspiration—proof positive that our liberatory strivings can soar above walls and fences to magnify resistance. Or simply to supply each other with the further inspiration to keep fighting and dreaming.
The past two days in Montreal, some 85,000 students went on strike in solidarity with Palestinians, timed to coincide with NATO meetings in that city. This student strike, in turn, finds echoes of inspiration in years of powerful student and social strikes in Montreal. And just as I was feeling FOMO that I couldn’t be there for this strike, a Concordia student texted me these photos (used with consent) of an altar they’d set up as both a blockade in their classroom and collective space of grief, inspired by the stories in my edited anthology #RebelliousMourning (@akpressdistro, with striking design by @eff_charm).
May our arts of inspiration, resistance, and remembrance burst into rebel bonfires, illuminating our ancestors there alongside us and honoring them as we journey toward freedom.
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.
Mourning the martyrs, fighting for and with the living.
+ + +
Killed in Gaza / tuées a Gaza
“This dataset provides daily values for those killed in the Gaza Strip since October 7th, 2023. There are currently 362 days of reports from 2023-10-07 to 2024-10-02.”
Source: data.techforpalestine.org
+ + +
Collaboration
@collages_feministes_montreal_
@collages_feminicides_montreal_
+ + +
The unquiet dead. Fresh, lengthy wheatpaste on the busy shopping area of Rue Ste-Catherine O in Montreal, on the stolen lands of Tiohtià:ke/Mooniyang, as seen on October 5, 2024.
+ + +
#RebelliousMourning
#ArtOfResistance
#ArtOfRemembrance
#UntilAllAreFree
Mourning the martyrs, fighting for and with the living.
+ + +
Killed in Gaza / tuées a Gaza
“This dataset provides daily values for those killed in the Gaza Strip since October 7th, 2023. There are currently 362 days of reports from 2023-10-07 to 2024-10-02.”
Source: data.techforpalestine.org
+ + +
Collaboration
@collages_feministes_montreal_
@collages_feminicides_montreal_
+ + +
The unquiet dead. Fresh, lengthy wheatpaste on the busy shopping area of Rue Ste-Catherine O in Montreal, on the stolen lands of Tiohtià:ke/Mooniyang, as seen on October 5, 2024.
+ + +
#RebelliousMourning
#ArtOfResistance
#ArtOfRemembrance
#UntilAllAreFree
Aaron Bushnell’s act touched me in profound ways as a fellow anarchist. Foremost was the intricate way he self-organized the numerous details to be sure to care for the beloveds he left behind while also assuring his self-immolation was precisely and unequivocally read as care for Palestinians, and how he took a strategic direct action based on a clear-eyed anarchist understanding of hierarchical power and side-by-side solidarity in a time of fascism and its genocidal logic—and it succeeded, perhaps beyond his own hopes.
I needed to process and honor his death, and without thinking it through, called for a vigil by a river, and suddenly it was clear that lots of folks needed it too and were going to show up. I’d done zero planning; I’d only been feeling.
These days, feelings can be plenty—if we listen to them, and let them shape and hold the spaces our bodies communally crave amid this nightmarish era.
My emotions lead me to craft a circle A out of sticks. It lead my friend @shadow_patterns to paint a portrait of Aaron, and with our friend @zoziebee, we made a DIY altar on the grass.
As twilight came, some 75 people appeared from all sides, clustering around the altar, adding flowers, hand-written notes and art, and home-baked cookies. I offered some words, then many hands lit many candles, which punctuated the now-darkness with warmth. Silence fell for some minutes, until one brave person took up my offer to share; they read a poem they’d just written. Their vulnerability encouraged others to speak from the heart. Someone lead us in learning a song to sing aloud. Ducks flew directly past us, adding their voices. A person laid down a Palestinian flag, then created a “river” on it from fabric and a “sea” with shells, lighting candles in them.
Mourning Aaron became inseparable from mourning every destroyed or lost life in Gaza. Aaron’s calculated risk and loving intentionality had woven that tight bond.
Folks lingered after the vigil, solemnly extinguishing the candles. “Hey, why don’t we leave the organic parts of the altar here, for others to see tomorrow?”
Today, Aaron’s portrait found a spot in @firestorm.