THEIR BORDERS, OUR WORLD: SOLIDARITY with MAHDI SABBAGH and ELLEN VAN NEERVEN

Read on below for our conversation with SABBAGH and VAN NEERVEN. Click here to learn more about Their Borders, Our World.

MAHDI SABBAGH: Ellen, how are you? It's nice to finally see your face.

VAN NEERVEN: Yeah, absolutely. It's amazing to finally see you. I'm well, thank you. How are you?

SABBAGH: I was gonna apologize for being kind of low-energy because it's 6 PM, but the reality is that I would have been low-energy in the morning too and in the afternoon and so it doesn't matter. When I was trying to think of which questions to ask you or how to do this conversation, I was thinking a bit about your essay and the book, did you ever receive the physical copy?

VAN NEERVEN: I did.

SABBAGH: You did, finally? Oh my God.

VAN NEERVEN: I received it maybe about a week ago, and I was so happy to... it's such an amazing book. And so congratulations. I know it's probably a bit of a late congratulations because the book has been out since June.

SABBAGH: Congratulations to you, as well. I think something about this coming out now… it was a little difficult to do launch events but then the themes in it continue to feel relevant. I think something that you do in your piece, and other people have done as well, is show that this is a continuous struggle and you talk about ongoing colonization. So, in many ways, whether it comes out right before a genocide starts or during or after, it continues to be relevant in the same way, I think. And yeah, I've been excited to see it at student libraries and people's libraries and just kind of popping up in student encampments. That was always the point of this book, so I'm happy with it. Let me see. I have a few questions for you. 

So I was just thinking about your essay again on football and your Land and Palestine. It's been an incredible teaching tool, I think, to both show how solidarity politics can be almost grafted out of one's unique sensibilities, but also that maybe one doesn't need to be in Palestine to understand Palestine. 

For context, you were supposed to be with us at the Palestine Festival of Literature (PalFest) that year. Basically, COVID started and then we did not do a festival so you never got to go there. But it felt almost like the essay didn't need you to be there. I'm sure it would have looked different had you been there, but there was something about how you were able to write about it that shows, I think, our instinct that there's some sort of solidarity politics that we can all access wherever we are and at whatever stage we're at and from whatever community and place we come from… that it's always accessible to us. Of course, I hope you come to Palestine soon and that we can get you there. But until then, I was wondering your thoughts on that.

VAN NEERVEN: I was really looking forward to coming and it was such an honor to be invited and be part of a legacy of writers that have come and had a solidarity visit, and there would be so much that I would understand being there in Palestine that I felt like I couldn't grasp not being there. So when you asked me to write a piece, I was trying to sort of ground it in what I knew. And so coming from the perspective of being here at home, I decided to write about football, which is one of my life's passions. And I was thinking about how football and colonialism intersect and sport and colonialism intersect here in Australia. And then I sort of brought in the question of how settler colonialism and ongoing genocide affect football in Palestine. And so I was thinking about Palestinian footballers and fans of football in Palestine and the solidarity movement in football. Yeah, so I think I wrote it from the perspective of what I knew and what I wanted to know. And you definitely helped me put the essay together in the times that I had doubts. So thank you for that.

SABBAGH: Of course. I also learned so much through this essay because football is huge where I grew up in Palestine and it continues to be a big part of leisure and coming together. My brother works in football data, goes to matches and records the game and all of that. And then I play it sometimes as well, even though I'm very bad at it, but there's something collective and collaborative that I like. As I research Palestinian space and Palestinian cities, I have come across this one story again and again. Palestinian collectives that were forbidden from forming political groups or from expressing themselves politically would meet under the cover of sports clubs and games. That they would, in the sports game, talk about politics, right? So there's something there political there too. It has so many angles through which one can understand how our people survive, but also how people relate to land. I keep coming back to it. I really, really loved your piece. So thank you for that. 

Maybe I can ask you about your experience – you also give us a window into your world in so-called Australia. As a Mununjali person, you talk about ongoing colonization there. And I think that's very important for people to understand. I was thinking for us Palestinians, often people talk about Palestine as a grave injustice, which it is, but they also sometimes single it out and place it in an almost ahistorical frame as if this has never happened before. When in reality there are things that are happening in Palestine today that have happened to many other populations around the planet. Maybe not televised and maybe not happening on the same scale or in the same place. But it's a story that's unfortunately familiar to many. 

In a lot of the solidarity activism and writing that's coming out now, people are evoking their ancestors in explaining how they understand Palestine today. So I think it's important for Palestinians to understand this too. And I was wondering if you could say a few words about that. When did you first learn about the history of genocide in your country?

VAN NEERVEN: I think about my grandmother and the conditions that she lived under as she grew up in the assimilation era. And I think about how she was not able to assert her Indigenous identity for fear of having her children removed or losing her home. So she used to speak the language with her hand covering her mouth to pass on what she could to my mum and her siblings. She grew up in a time where there were real limitations on what she could do, and where she could go, because of who she was as an Aboriginal person and the color of her skin. I grew up with some understanding of why, but it felt like it was only a full picture when I was a teenager because this history isn't taught in schools. Still to this day, no school is saying that more than 90% of my people and the Aboriginal people of this region were killed at that time of colonialism through violence and the spread of disease. So to have such an absence and to such a legacy of genocide to be not something that everyone spoke about, to be construed into a colonial narrative of there weren't people here, there wasn't a presence here, or these people deserved what happened to them, was something that really, really sort of shapes you when you're an Indigenous person trying to navigate the world. 

And then of course, when I read the works of other Indigenous writers globally, in Palestine, in Turtle Island, across the Pacific, and from other places, those experiences really ring true to me. There's no direct comparison, but I feel it in my heart. I really, really like how you framed solidarity in this book.

SABBAGH: There was something that I was grappling with with the term solidarity because it's a term that came to the forefront of the Black Lives Matter uprising and then became this term that people use to describe a lot of different acts. And then very quickly in academic circles, it gets hollowed out of its meaning. There was a moment where we were considering, you know, do we still want to use the word? And I stuck to it kind of aggressively because to me it meant something else and it meant something that was a practice that felt familiar to me.

So this is why I evoked my childhood, my upbringing in the introduction. And then you brought up some of that as well in your essay and I thought it was important to talk about it. Solidarity not as an abstract skill that you come across only when you fight for something specific or you try to stand with someone once or twice. It is a way of living in our day to day, intertwined with what it means to be Palestinian, right? There was something in it, in that very term, that to me is a sensibility that some of us already have, that some of us grew up on and relied on for survival. 

And I have felt this with other Indigenous folks as well. I had the honor to go to a community called Dettah in the northwestern territories of so-called Canada. And this is a completely different environment to mine. I had never been this far north. It's a different history, different timeline, different kind of colonialism. But something about being there and speaking to people, including their elders, felt incredibly right to me. It felt familiar, even though it was not familiar, right? And that's not something I can necessarily explain with logic or with a clearly delineated history, you know, it's something else. I wonder if it has to do with the realization that we were perhaps confronting the same kind of monster? Yes, it's different timeframes, different geographies, different societies, but ultimately we were both fighting for a future that to me felt inevitable. And there's maybe a future world in which our different societies are able to meet without the mediation of a white European, white supremacist empire? Maybe there's a world in which our societies are just able to meet and interact without this shared monster that we're grappling with. So there was a warmth and a kind of embrace that I recognized. And that's not my academic brain. That's just me as a Palestinian going there and being welcomed.

VAN NEERVEN: Yeah, I think mobs would get along and connect. Speaking of timeline, sans colonizers. So if our communities connected at a previous time, I think we would have found a sense of warmth and connection through a worldview and through what we value. I think that would have already been there. Of course, as you mentioned, we connect in all of these other ways as well… the shared monster. I'm thinking about what you wrote in your email about the things that Palestinians would want to ask other Indigenous people, and other nations, but seldom get the chance because of travel. And when I read that in your email, I just had this image already of my elders and your elders sitting together, sharing stories, our children playing together, our craftspeople crafting together, all sort of sharing cups of tea and coffee and sharing food together. How do you see that?

SABBAGH: Palestinians, as you might know, are known to be incredibly hospitable to guests. And it's true–people are welcoming of guests and that is something in our culture and our society, but it's not the same with all guests. Some guests come and they receive minimal hospitality and others are fully embraced and welcomed. In my experience of being home with friends, particularly folks who are Indigenous from Turtle Island or from South Africa, where people recognize them and understand that we are kind of in this together, right? There's this sense that people are incredibly curious about others’ struggles. 

Before leaving Palestine, I had not met other people who were Indigenous to the place that they came from, right? People whose ancestries, but also whose connection to land exists in what I consider an Indigenous position, right? And there's this sense that you're kind of alone and that the only way to reach the world is through the colonizer, through learning certain languages, through going to the metropole. So something about these direct interactions between colonized people, I think, is incredibly empowering, but it also allows the imagination to flow, allows a version of the future to flourish. 

I know Palestinians today, we're incredibly burdened, haunted, and grappling with what's happening. I've had this discussion a couple of times… maybe we need to ask other people how they continued to live after a genocide was committed against them but also how they managed to form a lineage with that past and move forward and bring it with them to the future? I know that no one has the answer. This is a very big question. It's not like there's an answer to it. But there's a lot of interest in understanding how others have managed, right? A lot of the fear that I'm seeing is around both losing lives, losing families, losing entire bloodlines, but also losing cities, losing our knowledge, our understanding of place. Genocide is an elimination of life in every form and it also cuts us off from our past. The fear, the thing that haunts me, is that then it cuts us off from our future as well, that our future then will not have all these aspects that make us who we are. 

So I think that's, I mean, that would be the question: how is that done? It's something that both pains me and I see a lot of hope when I see different communities that have both survived genocide and have managed to not forget it. 

VAN NEERVEN: Yeah that’s a really big question. You know, you talk about living in multiple times, both as a necessity, but also to have hope for a future. I feel the sense of loss and feeling something can be lost but can we also get it back? And that's such a pressing question for Indigenous communities worldwide. 

I can think about some of the things our community have tried to hold on to and have worked to revitalise during what has been an Indigenous renaissance. One of the things is our Yugambeh language. About thirty years ago there were a lot of languages on the East Coast of so-called Australia that had been really at the brink of potentially dying out. And language holds so much culture. My community has managed to incorporate strategies to try and keep the language alive and to teach children language in schools. So I feel a sense of needing to incorporate culture, language, and story in my day-to-day. 

Sometimes I feel a sense of guilt that I’m not doing more. Especially when elders are passing away and I feel a sense of what we're losing when they pass away. But really sort of trying to take as much time as I can. That's one thing that my elders are always saying actually, that they want more time and they want more time with me. And I'm like, okay, all right, I need to make that time to listen and to learn and pass on what they have. How we can keep song and dance and culture and story about the place that we're from alive, even though our existence as Indigenous people is conditional because we can't necessarily practice culture and we can't necessarily look after our country, our ancestral lands, in the ways that we want to. But how can we live under that conditional acceptance of us being here? Yeah.

SABBAGH: It is like you're taking care of the place where you’re from when you’re practicing this. What you just said reminded me of the beginning of the genocide in Palestine. I called one of my elders who is not a family member but someone in his nineties and someone who I speak with about my research and he has been giving me incredible advice and incredible knowledge and someone I very much admire and speak with every now and then. So I called him to check on him and he was up at four in the morning reading poetry. That is what he was doing.

VAN NEERVEN:  Right.

SABBAGH: I kind of learn from him in that way, as well. The idea that his impulse to do that is reduced to escapism or to some sort of denial; it's none of that. It's actually a very intimate understanding of this kind of violence and understanding also that in the face of it, there are a few things you can do, but one of them is you maintain yourself, you maintain your connection to your past and your language and your culture. And so every one of those acts I think is incredibly valuable. This is something I felt when I was back in Palestine in the summer. Every act that we were doing from eating together to speaking with one another felt defiant. 

VAN NEERVEN: Yeah absolutely.

SABBAGH: So it's like taking cues from that practice in order to then understand what it means to survive this genocide.