The Journal of Multimodal Rhetorics

Yanira Rodriguez, West Chester University

I made these pieces in response to the Artist Against Apartheid art call back in late October 2023. We had been marching, writing, teaching about what was happening in Gaza and the West Bank while trying to continuously cultivate the care that is needed to counter such heinous, brutal, calculated violence foundational to the occupation. 

As we all witnessed so much death and destruction, I clung to Mariame Kaba's words: “hope is a discipline.” I created these pieces grounded in my commitment and responsibility as an artist, in this political continuum, to create reproducible work that documents and cultivates radical hope (not optimism or denial) among those in the struggle for a free Palestine. I thought of creating work that functions as breath against the suffocating scales of compounded violence. 

As so many of us sought to attend to the very material impacts of this violence, I was reflecting on a few crucial questions: How do we not let the violence be the story that defines the breath of life of our Palestinian siblings? How do we project our comrades into futures long denied to them? How do we affirm, seed and manifest those futures? How do we create work that refuses genocide? 

Through this work I also found myself responding to US mainstream media circles that exploit images of the suffering of women and children while denying the source of their suffering and simultaneously labeling Palestinian men as monstrous and deserving of such violence.

These pieces sought to affirm all Palestinian life, to queer the landscape and challenge the rhetorical fixing and boxing of identity used to dehumanize and murder with impunity. I made these pieces alongside my partner and our son, who contributed the heart over Gaza.

Ten years ago, as a graduate student at Syracuse University, my partner and I did a wheat pasting campaign titled LOVE GAZA throughout the city. I reflect now on that work and these current pieces as wanting to reach audiences who do not understand the complete history of all that is happening. How do we speak to those folks, who find themselves at a threshold of understanding? How do we create invitations into wanting to know more? In a visit with my mother, I watched as mainstream Latin American media engaged in similar normalizing of the genocide through lack of coverage, misinformation, and rhetorical stylings. I wanted to create pieces that seeded a counter sense for folks like my mother. I wanted to create an opening for folks, that even if they don’t know all the history and rhetoric, they can trust what their heart is telling them—that what is happening to Palestinians and to their land is a heinous crime against all life and it must stop. 

Our work is multi-pronged and long-haul work. Lately it feels like a clock has sped up. Two years ago, we were marching in the streets after the murder of journalist Shireen Abu Akleh by an IDF soldier. I then had to enter my journalism classrooms to share with students on the principles that guide our work as journalist. Last year, when we brought Mohammed el-Kurd to speak on campus as a powerful model of a grounded journalist and poet, I and other colleagues were harassed, surveilled and threatened. The struggle for Palestinian liberation has long been a litmus test in our organizing for justice. I remember sitting in rooms with administrators urging them to read some of the history, to become acquainted with how these issues play out on college campuses and all the rhetorical stylings, manipulation and pressure meant to keep us from engaging with the historical truth of what is happening in Palestine and specifically in Gaza. Threats, harassment and surveillance are not the full story of doing this work. There were also comrades I could turn to, folks who had been engaged in the struggle for a free Palestine long before me, who freely offered their knowledge, care, and brilliant strategies. 

Last year feels like lifetimes ago. It is such a dissonant experience to witness such violent disregard for human life and at such scales, to have the truth you are witnessing continuously denied and distorted. But if we are forced to dwell in dissonance, we will counter it with all the tools, including art, that our comrades in Palestine have long been sharing with us, tools that help us remain steadfast in our struggle to uphold life, in our cultivation of possible futures. 

Yanira Rodriguez is an artist, organizer, and Associate Professor of English and Journalism at West Chester University.