“Web of Resistance” by Maryah Converse

 

To the reporter on the Columbia campus

Overlooking the Liberated Zone,

He was inspired, he said,

At seven years old on Tahrir Square

Cairo, Egypt, 2011

 

We adopted the raised black fist, they said,

For the people power in Tahrir Square

From the Otpor movement 

That liberated Serbia, 2000

 

They raised their Black fists in Ferguson

As the Panthers did, 1968

And learned to protect themselves from tear gas

With milk and onions and oven mitts

From Twitter #FromGazaToFerguson

 

On Tahrir Square they passed the hat

For solidarity pizzas dispatched to the occupied statehouse

In Madison, Wisconsin

Who passed the hat for Pizza Hut delivery

Back to occupied Tahrir Square

 

To Tahrir Square – maidan at-taHreer in Arabic

Like the Maidan that hosted demands for democracy

In Kiev, Ukraine, 2014

 

Emerson wrote Civil Disobedience from jail

Opposing an unjust war abroad

Discovered by Ghandi reading law at Oxford

King studied them both 

And wrote in A Letter from Birmingham Jail

“Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”

 

*

 

They’re using the public mic, he said,

That we pioneered in Zuccotti Square

Occupy Wall Street, 2011

A failed movement, they said,

But we still talk about the one percent

 

And when hurricane and fire hit 

Red Hook and Sandy Point

Occupy alumni crowdsourced the cleanup 

Weeks before and long after 

FEMA and the Red Cross could

 

Their schools taught them to hide from bullets

Now their schools are aiming the police right at them

And they stand arm in arm

Standing strong for each other

 

They Marched for Their Lives

Applauded for their organizing

But they gather for Gazan lives

And they’re organizing the wrong cause

 

Gazans marched for their lives, too,

The Great March of Return, 2018

Marched peacefully as the world has always exhorted

Women, children, amputees, elders,

Two hundred souls mown down with prejudice

Hundreds more knee-capped

The blockade tightened

But why won’t Gazans choose peaceful protest? 

 

King knew the arc of the moral universe was long

But bends towards justice. 

Jewish activists have long sought to Bend the Arc

Tikkun Olam – repair the world

Love your neighbor as yourself

For you, too, were strangers in Egypt once

Thirty-eight commandments in the Torah

To welcome the marginalized

 

*

 

Every year on the first day of class, she says,

I challenge my students to build a barricade

From only what they find in the room

I’m so proud, she says,

Spliced atop video of students barricading

Newly-christened Hind’s Hall

Columbia University, New York, 2024

 

They couldn’t have high-school graduation in quarantine

Now college commencement is cancelled 

In protest of their protests

 

As the rabbis have said,

If I am not for myself, who will be? 

If I am not for others, who am I?

If not me, then who?

#IfNotNow, then when?

 

We are not obligated to complete the work

Neither are we free to abandon it

Because none of us are free 

until all of us are free.

 

***

Maryah Converse was a Peace Corps educator in Jordan, 2004–2006, and was studying in Cairo during the 2011 Arab Spring. Her publications include New Madrid Journal, Silk Road Review, The Matador Review, and Michigan Quarterly Review. She holds a masters in Near Eastern Languages and Cultures, teaches Arabic, and is working on a PhD in linguistics. She is currently finishing a book-length memoir.