“I Hear The Voice of My Ancestor’s Calling”: From The Camps to The Campus

“I hear the voice of my ancestor’s calling,
I hear the voice of my ancestors call.

I hear the voice of my ancestor’s calling,
I hear the voice of my ancestors call. 

Singing wake up, wake up child, 
wake up wake up, 
listen, listen, 
listen listen 

Singing wake up, wake up child, 
wake up wake up, 
listen, listen, 
listen listen” 

Author’s Note: The lyrics come from “Ancestors Song” popularized by the student movement for Palestine at Brown University. Versions vary. Adopted from the original “Grandmother Song” by Sandy Vaughn. 

In the cold, early days of February 2024 in Providence, Rhode Island, I sat on the ground nestled among hundreds of my peers in a room at Brown University’s campus center. Leaning on each other, we filled the little space between us with our hands rocking back and forth in unison, striking our bodies and creating the loud percussion accompanying our chants. Those of us who were standing tapped the ground; the whole room was vibrating with music, emotion, and tactility. We had just announced the end of an eight-day hunger strike by 19 of my fellow brave student comrades, but there was something more in the air. As the genocide in Gaza continued to unfold, we held our grief in our collective solidarity and yelled out, from the deepest parts of ourselves, for a glimmer of hope. From Turtle Island to Palestine, we called upon the strength of our ancestor’s spirits to fuel the sumud (Arabic for steadfastness) of our resilient kin in Gaza. With the bittersweet end of the hunger strike as the third major action after two student sit-ins were met with arrest by the university, we left the campus center with the painful knowledge of our Palestinian kin’s inability to escape the forced Israeli blockade. This realization, though sobering, fueled our belief that this movement has only witnessed its beginning. We affirmed our commitment to continue on, unyielding, until Palestine attains its freedom. As the tune of the ancestor’s song grew louder and louder every time another person joined the crowd, an uneasy feeling fluttered in my chest: is this hope? 

In the weeks after, I struggled with what to feel and think of the idea of hope. I mulled over its applicability in a context of genocide. I questioned the possibility of hope, and whether or not it holds any serious power in animating transformation on an individual level and a collective one — for the movement and the world. I talked with my parents, friends, and fellow organizers about it; I discussed it with peers in class and I read works by scholars from various geographies and temporalities. Being born and raised as a third-generation stateless Palestinian refugee in Lebanon, I came to realize early on in life what hope, or the lack thereof, means for many of us. My existence, like many others, constitutes a loophole in the nation-state project and therefore continues to threaten its sustainability and the regulated exclusions on which it is formed. Growing up like an ivy plant between the cracks of the systems that govern our world, I had pushed away hope in any endeavor as a feeble excuse for accepting powerlessness. Looking toward my exhausted and overworked father and mother has always reminded me that hope has never been a part of our familial lexicon. As Ahmad Diab eloquently puts it, “Rather than enduring existential crises, Palestinians learn to deal with existence as a crisis.” 

Despite this vexed relationship with the notion of hope, as the student movement grew on campus, I felt forced to reckon with a new orientation to hope and the feelings of guilt it procured at times. How dare I feel a sense of hope stemming from the hunger strike on a safe U.S. campus while my people continue to be forcefully starved and slaughtered in the thousands? My parents and grandparents’ consistent experiences of betrayal by their leaders and the settler-colonial regime taught them better than to frivolously hope to take center stage. I believe the intergenerational cynicism I have inherited taught me to reject hope to preserve my own sanity and avoid disappointment as I navigate survival when denied existence.

How do I then grapple with a sense of intergenerational, existential hopelessness — passed on like a wretched inheritance — while tens of students from all walks of life, some of whom I have never met, put their academic lives, careers, and bodies at risk? How do I reject hope when my student comrades, who are not Palestinian, give their time, effort, and resources generously to this collective cause? How dare I not feel hope when they dare to scream in the hundreds, demanding the university divest its endowment from companies associated with the settler colony’s violence; when they dare to imagine a better, more caring, more just, and more equitable world that safeguards Palestinian life? How do I reject hope when my peers practice sustainable world-building practices from inside the campus movement that holds powerful implications for our communities, from the local to the global?