by SARA AWARTANI, PABLO SEWARD DELAPORTE, LINDA QUIQUIVIX, & GEORGE YGARZA
The Winter 2024 issue of the NACLA Report explores transcontinental encounters between the land of historical Palestine and the land we know as the Americas.
This piece appeared in the Winter 2024 issue of NACLA’s quarterly print magazine, the NACLA Report.
How do we even begin
to open our mouths
when all we can do
is scream
only to be met
with deafening silence
– Leslieann Hobayan, “Scattered”
When this is over there is no over but quiet.
Coworkers will congratulate me on the ceasefire
and I will stretch my teeth into a country.
As though I don’t take Al Jazeera to the bath.
As though I don’t pray in broken Arabic.
It’s okay. They like me. They like me in a museum.
– Hala Alyan, “Naturalized”
Ante la muerte, las palabras solo atestiguan.
– Yamil Maldonado Pérez, “Esta noche todos mis muertos me acompañan”
In 2014, when Palestinian Chilean novelist, essayist, and scholar Lina Meruane returned to Palestine “in place of the other,” of her father and grandfather, to whom the Israeli state had repeatedly denied the right to return, what most shocked her was the silence. Yet as she ponders in her 2023 book Palestina en pedazos, surely there must have been “an incessant bustle” before the displacement. Back in New York after her trip, Meruane’s elderly neighbor, a “Russian-Jewish-woman-from-the-diaspora,” shares just such a memory: “that the pogroms her mother had escaped were preceded by noise. Horseshoes on the cobblestones. Shattered glass.” Meruane observes: “Only then did the silence break… The silence weighed on them as it does now on the streets of Hebron.”
As a member of the 500,000-strong diaspora in Chile, Meruane forms part of the largest community of Palestinians not only in Latin America and the Caribbean, but outside the Arab world. For her, as for many other Palestinians born in exile in the region, the silence that accompanies genocide is not simply a mark of absence and loss; it reveals something about the world. Just months after Meruane returned from her 2014 visit, the Israeli state killed more than 2,000 Palestinians during its so-called Operation Protective Edge. A decade later, the writing and editing of these pages happened as we, collectively, bore witness to yet another Israeli assault on Palestine, this time of genocidal proportions.
Attending to collective realities, interconnected struggles, and geographies of violence, authors examine solidarities extended by states and pueblos, from above and below, from Abya Yala to Palestine.This issue of the NACLA Report explores transcontinental encounters between the land from the river and the sea and the land we know as the Americas. Attending to collective realities, interconnected struggles, and geographies of violence, authors examine solidarities extended by states and pueblos, from above and below, from Abya Yala to Palestine. At a time when news from Gaza presents seemingly endless horrors, and frustration with political leaders here in the heart of empire continues to deepen, these pieces chart nodes in a global network of anticolonial consciousness and solidarity.
More than 500 years into the colonization of the Americas, an important project within the “Indigenous renaissance,” as Maya Jakaltek scholar Víctor Montejo has termed it, has been to reconceptualize these lands as Abya Yala or Abiayala. Loosely translated to “land of full maturity,” Abya Yala is the word the Guna people of the region otherwise known as Panama and Colombia used to refer to the present world. Since the late 1970s, when the Guna offered the term to Aymara leader Takir Mamani of Kolla Suyu (Bolivia), the concept has taken on a hemispheric significance. As we put this region in conversation with another land suffering under a violent settler colonial project, we intentionally use Abya Yala to read through colonial impositions, such as borders, and to elevate the societies creating and sustaining life in the face of dispossession. While many authors in this issue speak of Latin America and the realities of the colonial state and politics as they exist today, others engage with Abya Yala as a prism through which to view the connections among pueblos, or peoples, in spite of and in opposition to the state.
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