Decolonial Love

I respond to Narrating Humanity: Life Writing and Movement Politics from Palestine to Mauna Kea as a writer of experimental memoir and queered biography, as well as a reader and teacher of these forms. I live grappling with the enmeshed poetics and politics of this work, on the page and in human relation. By “this work,” I mean practices of connecting individual and collective struggles—and of making the sentences that might not only hold these struggles but bring them to sensory understanding.

Cynthia G. Franklin’s committed study of life writing and movement politics often focuses on how life and work unfold together, are cocreated. Studying scholarship, memoirs, and their reception; looking at blogs, internet trolling, neoliberal university practices, and a child’s drawing; thinking about storytelling and activist organizing; taking into account talk that happens during a meal, on the beach, and in the interstices of an academic conference, she attends to all as part of a material ethics that she practices even in the ways that she acknowledges photo permissions. Narrating Humanity interrogates what counts as scholarly writing, what counts as memoir, what counts as a story, what counts as activism, as well as who is deemed human and how, under what genre and state regimes. Throughout the book, Franklin is powerfully believing in, pointing out, and thereby building connections among liberation movements. In the process, she moves toward thinking the “human” as a nonfixed, not wholly known or knowable entity, inspired in this understanding by Indigenous writers, activists, and scholars. She lays out what true and useful solidarity with freedom struggles looks like—on the ground, in our shared air, on the page.

She is asking: What worlds and possibilities can writing about the self both encompass and change? How can we understand certain stories about one person as communal texts and undertakings? How can activism not only give rise to but be understood as a form of personal writing? As she writes of Steven Salaita’s work:

It suggests how immersion in activism that is personal can generate new ways to narrate the human that, as they sustain political movements and community building, can rework, refuse, and provide alternatives to existing narrative codes, genres, and conventions that advance bourgeois individualist and settler ideologies. (160)

For me, experiments with biographical and autobiographical writing have been fundamental to challenging historical erasures and to complicating celebrations of who and what has been erased. In All We Know: Three Lives, about the ephemeral works of several forgotten queer modernist women, I approached biographical writing as a kind of critical friendship, a survival of care, curiosity, and connection across and over time.1 Loving friendships have made my own survival possible. For many years, I have been writing a book about friendship, in part about how some of my friends lived and died from and with HIV/AIDS. I have been living with what it is to write about one friend in particular, whose love I still feel and whose absence I mourn, after more than fifteen years. He was accomplished in his field, in which he mostly supported others’ work. Not long before his death, he referred to “my own projects, none of them yet realized.” I am representing some of this unrealized work, not finishing it; proposing some of the syntax and historical relations that shaped his making and my re-presentations of it; asking which intimacies and whose unrealized dreams count as history.

In Narrating Humanity, Franklin returns to moments of connection and ritual again and again. In fact, love is in play, interwoven with argument, from the beginning of her book. Solidarities across movements and geographies, yes, but also the transformative power of love, understood as both interpersonal and collective, as making meaning and creating resistance.

Love is not a word that appears often in scholarly studies, or in contexts like the one we’re participating in here, or (with a couple of notable exceptions, see bell hooks, see Stefano Harney and Fred Moten) in thinking about pedagogy and work at the university level, which is most often structured around so-called critical thinking.2 I say “so-called,” informed as I am in part by Steven Salaita’s embodied understanding of that construct and its extreme exceptions, his thinking about the “difference between critical thinking as an unbounded practice, capable of disrupting orthodoxy, and critical thinking as a rhetorical commodity,” as he writes in “Punishment and Reward in the Corporate University.”3 Informed also by Franklin’s passionate journey through Salaita’s work and “commitment to mutual liberation”—his words, which she quotes, from his book Inter/Nationalism: Decolonizing Native America and Palestine (169).4

Love comes into sharp focus in chapter 4 of Narrating Humanity, on BDS and Salaita’s work. In this chapter she honors not just his writing but his love of his son, every child, and his people in exile and in carceral conditions at home, and she shares her experiences of his way of being in the world. She calls them all his “practices of decolonial love” (148). Her crucial point here is that “his belief in a revolutionary politics premised on love and imagination” is entirely compatible with “his acerbic responses to Zionism, settlerism, racial capitalism, the corporate academy” (145). His Uncivil Rites: Palestine and the Limits of Academic Freedom, she argues, “exposes and resists the violence that civil discourse disguises, as [it] advances a humanism premised on all people living together in safety and love” (145). It is in this chapter of Narrating Humanity, too, that Franklin moves into some life writing of her own: making plain her decision to turn from critique of Zionism toward Palestine solidarity work, her commitments to “those I respect and am connected to through political solidarity, friendship, and love” (167). Again, I am drawn to the fact that she is working through a political as well as expansively human version of friendship and love, not a sentimental one. “It is because Palestine solidarity work proffers more ethical and loving ways to be human,” she writes, “that BDS, as its most important expression, is under such concerted attack” (157).

Narrating Humanity was published in the early summer of 2023, and I wrote this response then. In the gravity of the present moment, which is also decades long, affirming the urgency of friendship across time and across borders, in the horror of genocide and ongoing human suffering, it has been telling to revisit this chapter of her book—its arguments, readings, and feelings.

Near its close, Franklin quotes from Salaita’s essay “The Inhumanity of Academic Freedom.” He writes, “I want to take up residence with you in a world of impossible ideas. And the main idea we must nurture isn’t academic freedom; it’s simply freedom, unadorned, unmediated, unmodified” (179).5 Loving language, in all of its freedoms and constraints, I will close with those compelling sentences. They are Salaita’s, but they stand beautifully for the spirit of Franklin’s book and for what is at stake in thinking life, love, writing, and mutual liberation.