For this publication, we invited queer Palestinian comrades to curate a small archive of queer Palestinian life. Against the annihilatory Zionist drive targeting Palestinian life in general, which ratified itself perversely in the name of its queers, we wanted to host a record of that which was said to be a contradiction in terms. Curated and designed by an editorial team of queer Palestinians, all proceeds from the book will go to direct relief efforts for contributors on the ground in Gaza.
For those who know how to read it, the archive is a record of class power and of its transformations, which structure colonial and gender domination to reproduce capital. This is manifestly clear to both Palestinians and to queer people. In its intended form, the archive is a record of truth that we are expunged from. It reifies not just silences, but lies and slanders about us amongst the strategically chosen ephemera and detritus of material culture.
Remembering and forgetting are twinned forces in the articulation of Palestinian selfhood, their reproduction crisscross both sadness and hope. Across individual experiences, these forces coalesce into a Palestinian national consciousness, which has been cultivated and reproduced under conditions of statelessness, siege, genocide, and diasporic assimilation. From the flows atop its material base emerges a popular archive, which responds to and problematizes The Archive as such; among politically-committed Palestinians, one can be certain of the appropriate collection, context, geographic thread, whose sum approximates the truth.
The queer archival impulse, too, has been shaped against strategies of removal. Erasable and erased, historical violence gives way to novel paradigms of gendered dispossession. So, we’ve learned to reproduce our own social history. We know the power in remembering. We know too that we have power in forgetting, the power in denying the archivists and curators access to our histories.
We hope that this zine can serve as an invitation to become archivists and curators ourselves. We know the contours of the debates well: What stories are ours to hold? What stories are our responsibility to tell? In the context of accelerated genocide, the impulse to collect, to save elements of the worlds under siege and bombardment can also serve to exceptionalize the assault and increase its stature as the determining factor of our existence.
This collection of elements of queer life in Palestine shows something different. Queer life often finds itself as one unfortunate crucible for changing relations of property and ideological hegemony, a metric for a society’s delusions about its changing conditions. The Zionist occupation touts a liberalism towards sexuality as proof of kinship to the remainder of the West. And they are kin, inasmuch as death and extraction are the siblings and children of Europe and America. The Zionists brandish the supposed sexual conservatism of their enemies as proof they deserve destruction. We will destroy them. Their blackmail and their torture are strategies marshaled in the aggregate; queer or not, social vulnerability becomes an instrument for the destruction of a popular cradle. From this violent root stems temporal horizons—queer life passes in a blur.
We end, then, with Gaza. Month on month of annihilatory violence and an unbowed resistance. Jabalia and Khan Younis have brought the Zionist army to its knees. Our people deserve more, they deserve to live in dignity, free of siege and amputation and cameras. This zine assembles a queer Palestinian existence as one part of collective Palestinian existence—itself a threat, itself an articulation of all those around the world who resist extermination. ⊱
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