CALL for contributions!
PLEASE read & share!
***
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)
Deadline
Cindy Milstein (they)