School of Dissident Friendship

File note:

The four friends, Lamia Abukhadra, Aya Bseiso, Adam HajYahia, and Maissa Maatouk, collectively deposit a collectively written text entitled A Sequence of Alliances, which details a sequence of events initiated by a serendipitous encounter with the writings of Palestinian political prisoner Walid Daqqa. Walid Daqqa, a Palestinian writer, activist, and thinker, has been incarcerated in Israeli prisons since 1986. During his 37 years of imprisonment, he has, from the margins of space and time, written and published several texts, including A Place without a Door, Uncle, Give Me a Cigarette, Parallel Time (later adapted as a play), Dissolving Consciousness, or: Redefining Torture, alongside a children’s novel The Tale of the Oil’s Secret. Throughout his years of imprisonment, Daqqa’s writings have been smuggled, distributed, and translated through a network of untimely friendships capable of rupturing the Israeli settler colonial prison surveillance system. His writings offer critical insights into the conditions of Palestinian political prisoners, as well as speculations towards a new horizon of possibilities against hegemonic time.

On June 21, 2023, in the garden of Khan Aljanub bookstore in Berlin, the four friends attended a public reading of four texts written by Walid Daqqa. The event was organized in solidarity with Daqqa in light of his deteriorating health inside Zionist prisons, and his texts were read by Ibtisam Azem, Sinan Antoon, Haytham El Wardany, and Hanadi Zarka. Lamia Abukhadra, who grew up in the United States, and Maissa Maatouk, who attended a French school in Lebanon, had difficulty following the texts which were read aloud in classical Arabic. In response, Aya Bseiso began to translate each phrase that was read aloud in a Whatsapp text message.

One particular text titled Parallel Time, a letter written by Daqqa on the 20th anniversary of his incarcerationespecially resonated with the four friends. Read aloud by writer Haytham El Wardany, Walid Daqqa’s Parallel Time describes the temporal fractures experienced within the prison cell equidistant to the “social time” experienced outside of it and which he briefly experienced in the visitation room of the prison. The dispersive nature in which Daqqa’s texts were mediated through a series of actions that included smuggling, distribution, and spontaneous translation, became central to understanding the context in which prison literature and artistic forms of resistance exist. Following the event, Abukhadra, Bseiso, HajYahia, and Maatouk were inspired to reflect on the sequence of mediations, which made the encounter with Daqqa’s text possible.

In addition to the collectively written text A Sequence of Alliances, the deposit also contains the original letter written by Daqqa, a transcript of a WhatsApp conversation, and a bibliography that documents and transmits a series of intellectual, imaginal, and political alliances that move past boundaries of incarceration, borders, and barriers of language that formed to bring Daqqa’s words to the four friends.

Nabarun Bhattacharya’s poem evokes various textures of grief. The Grief of the father is laced with exasperation, rage and agony. This grief calls out not just to the human but also to nature, cities, infrastructure and social structures. “This Valley of Death is No Country of Mine” is a powerful reflection on the horrors of war, conflict and hostility, and the impact it has on ordinary people’s life. It destroys not just physical places, but also the emotional and spiritual connections that people have to their homes and communities.

Further, the time of mourning runs counter to the time of capital. Mourning requires an edifying stasis; this stasis threatens the time of ‘productivity’ where everything must be kept in motion perforce. Countering capital with mourning then becomes an act of resistance, it is through an insistence on mourning that we resist the onslaught of capital in our emotional and spiritual life.

Grief ought not to paralyse us, it is something that can also catalyse action. The act of sharing grief resists the atomisation of the spirit and the mind. Collective grief can also be imagined as an act of generosity and camaraderie, which can heal nations, communities, families and by extension, the whole world.

From Sujatro Ghosh

On this very warm sunday evening we gathered for the very first time during our free leisure day with five other participants of the „School Of Dissident Friendship“. A theme that has brought all of us together , but we never found out why or what were our personal motivations to apply in the first place. For me, clearly, to make new dissidents friends, or how Samuel taught me – rafeek – comrades in arabic.

So after spending an afternoon at the lake, we walked back to the metro station in this very bougie neighborhood of Dahlem, where all the historic villas are. We were talking loudly about everyday life topics, how to treat your hair, how to nurture it, about bad trips with psychedelic drugs and weed cookies. Samuel shared his drink, a special Mate-Ice-Tea and we were considering whether microdosing magic mushrooms, would support our creative practices.

Arriving at the station we missed that train „under the nose“, how you say in italian. A few of us set down, others were carrying their bikes. Maysa starting rolling a cigarette after having smoked at least ten at the lake, but collective moments of waiting eight minutes for the train had to be accompanied by a cigarette.

Maysa, who is very aware of german culture around rules and behaviors asked whether she is allowed to smoke at the train station to her german friend Lena, who doesn’t like living in constant repercussions of german authority (maybe even of German Guilt).

I didn’t hear the answer and was kind of craving for a puff of that cigarette, instead I observed how Maysa brought the litted cigarette to her mouth , inhaling-exhaling , while talking a lot to everyone around.

The moment she stopped smoking I leaned towards her, asking for a drag. Generously she offered me the whole cigarette, but given the circumstance that the small group was moving towards the incoming train, I didn’t feel like finishing it myself, and really smoking only makes sense when being together.