Week 9 (belatedly) / Fall 2023: Sights and Sounds from a Walkout
This is not about a book. But about a “reading” that I did out in the world.
Two weeks ago, I attended my first academic conference—the American Studies Annual Meeting—in Montréal. The experience, perhaps because of my own making, had an intensity that I have never experienced. In short, I was having a hard time making choices—so I just did everything. And I was worn by the end of each day. But in a way that made me feel filled and engaged and inspired.
On the second day of the conference, the day after I had presented my paper, I began hearing rumblings about a Walkout for Palestine. My reactions to this feel complicated, and like something I don’t necessarily want to publish onto the interweb without context, but suffice it to say, there was nuance. I understand the gesture. I am politically, and spiritually, aligned with the calls to action that students at Brown, for instance, have demanded of our University: for ceasefire, divestment, and protection of our Palestinian students, faculty, and staff. And, still, I could not help but to wonder about my classmates who were at the conference, black and brown folks who had paid their way to get to Montréal, maybe to present at a conference for the first time, whose panels were effectively being canceled.
And, frankly, I did not know if I wanted to participate, or if I wanted to stay behind and maybe be the lone audience member at a panel. In the weeks that have followed, I’ve had other conversations with fellow graduate students who wondered what it meant to stage a walkout that effectively cancels opportunities to engage in discussions of empire and capitalism and antiblackness and war. I have a lot of thoughts about how it was all done, and who it was for, and who it impacted, what we were walking out from (in contrast to student protestors who are staging a walkout in opposition to their institutions), but that’s not actually what I wanted to talk about here. Not today anyways.
So, the short of it is that, after a conversation with a friend on the morning of the walkout, I decided to go. It was something between resignation and curiosity: I was not sure if people would actually be holding their panels anymore that afternoon, and there was no way (that I was privy to) to find out—and, I figured I would just go and see how it felt to be out there.
And immediately, there was so much to read. The first thing I noticed was the way that people greeted each other: there was so much excitement, buzz, almost a thrill to be gathered out there. And I wondered about how such affects fit into the experience as a whole: how these affects, these feelings, expressions of emotion, fit into the point of being out there. And what we all understand the point to be. I was taken, similarly, by the chants—specifically, I was taken by the moments that followed the chants, which were filled with cheering and clapping, not dissimilar from a sporting event: a crowd singing the National Anthem, a crowd enacting The Wave™ successfully, a crowd effectively heckling the opposing team all at once—and then, cheering, celebrating the moment that preceded, the crowd congratulating itself. It felt like that: a chant about genocide, and then cheering. And I wondered how those two things could possibly map onto each other. Or what the cheering afforded the cheerers. I wondered a lot about the cops that facilitated the ability for this large crowd to take to the streets. I wondered about the majority of the chants being in English, even though most locals who I encountered throughout the week opened conversations with French. All toward wondering, I suppose, how long this had been planned.
Mostly, I wondered a lot about silence. About quiet. About what it would be like for our arrival into the space to feel solemn, instead. Like a funeral. Like a wake. Like a memorial. What it would feel like to not immediately go to find our friends, to be texting as we gathered, to be catching up as we waited for the moment to begin. What it would feel like to the cops, or the people we passed on the streets, to see hundreds? thousands? gathered in silence. I wondered if that could unsettle the things that we expect from protest. If it might open something up about how we understand the world and our places in it. And if it would feel differently in my own body. I was acutely aware of the ways that I longed for solemnity throughout the whole of it, and found my head cast downward, my hands clasped behind my back, an inward turn marked by slower, quieter steps—and I wondered what that meant about me. And my relationship to moments like these.
