White Flag Protest Lullaby-Chant
Jessica Shumake, University of Notre Dame
A former student described growing up in occupied Palestine as akin to living in an open-air prison. Her friend was shot and killed, while she and her brother sustained only injuries. She told me she rarely thinks about the day her friend was murdered after escaping the lack of water, food, jobs, electricity, educational infrastructure, and everything else as a result of the siege on Palestinians by the Israeli government. I trust my student’s recollections about the airstrikes, sniper bullets, tear gas, and tank shells and stand in solidarity with her and the Gazan people in opposition to the ongoing Israeli genocide of Palestinians.
On April 28, 2024, I planned to join student activists on the campus where I teach, through a Student Voices for Palestine chapter, in putting up white flags to represent the thousands of children who have been killed in Israel’s assault on Gaza. The event was approved by the Student Activities Office on my campus and hence exempt from a rule that prohibits unapproved campus demonstrations that exceed fifteen minutes in length. On the morning of the memorial action, I fell down a staircase while carrying my infant daughter and needless to say did not participate. I was able to protect my daughter during the fall and two months later the only visible evidence of the accident is a bulge from torn muscle tissue on my upper thigh.
The fight for Palestinian liberation and calls for the university where I teach to reconsider its investment in weapons manufacturing companies, namely Raytheon, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, Boeing, and General Dynamics, resulted in the arrest of seventeen peaceful student protesters. Some of the arrested were elbowed in the face by police and all bear the burden of significant legal fees to fight criminal charges of trespassing on campus. The call to the university president and provost, from more than three hundred concerned faculty and staff members, was met with a refusal to drop the charges and a letter from the president explaining that dropping the charges would have been an abnegation of the university’s ostensible obligation to educate students on the consequences of their decisions to protest on private property and to disrupt other students studying for their exams with loud chants (300+ Concerned ND Faculty and Staff, 2024; Jenkins, 2024).
Adrienne Rich wrote that reckoning with “disaster, desperation, and exhaustion—these, too, are materials” for confronting violence and the exploitation of power (2007, p. 44). To find hope amidst dehumanization, injustice, discouragement, antagonism, and frustration, some of us try to hold onto language—that is, hold fast to gestures of solidarity that enable throats to unclench and burdens of silence to lift. Some of us sing lullabies in a heap of tangled limbs at the bottom of a staircase, others hold onto tears when remembering the void left in the world by a friend’s hope that he might see the other side of an open-air prison he died wishing to escape.
When I stand at the top of a flight of stairs, I grasp for a handrail. Fear makes my feet tingle. My fear does not compare to the grief, loss, and sadness my student carries each day when, unbidden, she is hit with memories of near-misses with bullets from an Israeli soldier’s gun. My former student’s friend deserves so much more than a white flag on the immaculate lawn of a private university campus in the Midwest he never visited, but this is one gesture of solidarity and vulnerability I have ready at hand and so I offer it as repetitively as a lullaby and as fiercely as a protest chant.
References
Jenkins, J. Fr. (2024, May 13). Office of the President, University of Notre Dame. Retrieved from https://tinyurl.com/49v2pbdx
Rich, A.C. (2007). Poetry and Commitment: An Essay. W.W. Norton & Co.
300+ Concerned ND Faculty and Staff (2024, May 10). Concern for our Students. Retrieved from https://tinyurl.com/muyyrsr3
Jessica Shumake (she/they) is an assistant teaching professor of writing and rhetoric at the University of Notre Dame. Their research draws from community-engaged writing, archives and public memory, and gender and sexuality studies.
