But what can *I* do? And other myths about your lack of power

Kia ora! This post deals with settler colonial violence and in particular sexual violence against women. It's not the angriest thing I've ever written, but definitely the angriest blog I've ever pushed myself to share. Part of the reason I'm doing it as that I'm asking others to do the same. Resisting alone is difficult, not to mention dangerous. We're stronger and braver as a collective. I'm also bringing you a specific tono - if you don't have much time or would rather skip over the Heavy bits, just scroll to the end. And please! If you only do one thing next, make sure you subscribe to Nadia Abu-Shanab who has just launched her new Substack. Nadia is a brilliant writer, thinker, activist and organiser from Palestine, based here in Aotearoa. Her very first Substack discusses the strategy behind the new campaign for Palestine (you may have already seen this campaign) which I urge you to read and share. Everything we do in a unified way, however small your efforts might seem, makes a difference. Arohanui, friends, and thanks for receiving these big feelings that needed somewhere to land.

I'm not the same person I was a year ago. I remember when I started counting, and I remember when I stopped. The obscenity of numbers felt like a paradoxical erasure, the same way I feel gaslit by the suicide rate of 2020. When lives are reduced to numbers I think people stop feeling.

I remember the dissonance in December. We were marching every week, we were taking to streets all over the country, raising money and writing poetry and bearing witness. But it wasn't enough. The horror went on.

and on

and on.

Still it goes on. 76 years later.*

I remember sitting down at my kitchen table with the ruin of my conscience. I had understood something incredibly profound for the first time in my life - something that represents basic knowledge all Palestinians are born with:

Resistance isn't a choice, it is a requirement of survival.

In Aotearoa, I think there a lot of people who still feel like resistance is a choice. A year ago, I remember feeling undone and ill-equipped. I had an intellectual and moral understanding of the history of Palestine and the formation of the state of Israel after World War 2, but I knew very little about Zionism. I had spent time living in the Middle East and had Palestinian friends, and I was familiar with New Zealand's ability to be really fucking far away when it wants to be, but I still felt woefully inarticulate in advocating for Palestinian liberation.

As a writer with an independent platform - however insignificant in scale it might be - I knew I had to address this lack. I had to submit to being changed. I had a requirement and a responsibility.

Those early weeks were fraught. I remember the caution people had before they spoke. The care taken to preface statements with a denouncement of the attack of October 7th. I remember too, the social media punch-ups. The objection to the use of the word Genocide; and reservations about the phrase "From the River to the Sea, Palestine will be free." Always, the insistence that Hamas be condemned before speaking about the mass murder of children.**

Months passed. The work went on. The work goes on still.

One of the biggest struggles many of us have spoken about is the feeling of powerlessness. But what can we do? What can I do?

Writers especially needed to console ourselves and each other for the lack of words, the loss of words, the futility of words. Sitting in front of blank screens staring at our mute reflection knowing the extent of the harm that words have done in this world. What words have condoned and justified and excused.

I have fallen hard out of love with language this year. On the skids, we've been. I have looked at their power and seen right through them. Disgusted. Repulsed. All year long I have been purging nouns like bile after a three day bender:

atrocities
horror
impunity
casualty
collateral

Words mean nothing! Words are the problem!

If there's one thing a lack of faith does, it's demand you pay attention to what is real. The most powerful thing I've learned this year, which leaves me fundamentally changed, is that our struggles are connected. Genocidal wars, the climate crisis, fast-track legislation, Te Tiriti erasure - these are all part of the same struggle. We are deeply connected through the fibre and muscle and tissue of this one earth that sustains us all. I couldn't have articulated it clearly a year ago, but I can now, and I don't even think it's as complicated as some say it is.

Some days I see it so clearly it takes my breath away.

As an idea, colonialism is abstract. It conceals - conveniently - concrete decisions and actions. It is an opaque word with opposite meanings that freight-in hidden values. To the settler, colonialism is both inevitable and benevolent. To the settled, it is violence.

I prefer a more literal definition: Colonialism is a lust for land. It is a lust for land and a belief in the entitlement to take it without consent.

Is it any wonder that the experience of women throughout history, and still, directly reflects the abuse and mistreatment of the land? I don't know why it took me so long to see it:

Barren land
Fertile soil
Tame mother nature
Virgin forests

The land is slipping and the sea is rising and people are dying, not because the "climate is changing" but because the land has been abused and abused and abused and abused and abused and abused.

And now the land that is being blamed! Treated as a threat to which humans are vulnerable!

This madness has to be seen clearly to articulate it. Because colonial violence is NOT abstract. It is extolled and funded and carried out by men. Predominantly but not exclusively, white men. This is historical record. It is also personal experience. How many vagina-havers feel relaxed walking around at night by choice? How many of us walk alone along the beach on a starry night without a partner or vicious dog at our side? How many of us have been violated and first blamed ourselves?

I asked Haimana - who loves the dark, who prefers the night - if he can imagine inhabiting a body in which he could not enjoy a sunset, not even a tiny bit, unless and until he knew exactly how he was going to get home safely afterwards?

As if we might be safe at home!

Polkinghorne. P.Diddy.

The lives of Pauline Hanna and Breanna Muriwai and Grace Millane, three autonomous silenced women whose names just happen to be nearest my fingertips today. Every day there are thousands.

Please don't mistake me for a het up toxic feminist confusing things that aren't connected. I know exactly what words I am choosing. And I feel sickened by them. We should all feel sickened, knowing we are all walking around in a world that has been allowed to become so unsafe, so dangerous, so violent.

In a post on Facebook, Tina Ngata connects the sinking of the Manawanui to calls to demilitarise the Pacific, to the misogyny sitting at the heart of the navy that has for centuries abducted, raped and killed girls and women all over the world, and if you can't keep up with that, you've got a ways to go yet.

Shane Jones, speaking this week on RNZ about mining permits, sounds like one of the Mama Hooch brothers who slipped powder into the drinks of women before helping themselves to whatever the hell they goddam pleased.

"Conflict of interest is just one process we have to go through in order to inject more momentum into the economy. Fast Track is coming whether the naysayers like it or not."*

Meanwhile, Luxon promises to "crash through consents"* while Seymour gnaws at the Principles, because the lust for land is unashamed in its disrespect for boundaries. It might be impolite to state so concretely, but too many women have experienced the helping of oneself to be an untruth. The evidence tells us some men will take exactly what they want, justify themselves all the way to the dock, then claim their victimhood as a defence - if they are held accountable at all. Netanyahu is both product and consequence. He represents with explicit pride a colonial value system that celebrates and rewards the domination and unconsented exploitation of land and women.

In Aotearoa, companies will soon be given "permission" to mine the seabed - by men who have precisely no right to grant it. Shane Jones quips that there'll be jobs flowing from fast-track, which is like suggesting to a rape victim that they might enjoy it. As though Grace Millane asked to be strangled (literally what her murderer said.)

If you're a parent of a teenage girl, you will be in a state of hyper awareness about colonial violence right now, even if you wouldn't use those words and don't recognise it as that. Yet there she goes, your girl, your moko, walking around the streets at night, oxygen flowing into the temple of her lungs, cotton skirt, long legs "fresh" and "ripe" as the soil itself, and you will caution her, you will say, be careful, watch your drink, stick with your friends, call me I don't care what time it is.

But is not women lurking in alleyways we are warning her about.

"Not all men!" I hear Greg objecting in the comments. Yes, sure, sure. I am speaking about specific men. Would you like me to say that I also love men? I do. I love men, hopelessly and without shame, and I equally grieve the pain and cruelty that some men have meted out to their sons in the tragic history of colonialism. I love my two boys, I love my father, I love my brothers, I love my partner.

Now will you join the resistance?

If there's one thing I wished to see this year it is more men changed by what we have all witnessed. More men in this country articulating fluently the misogyny embedded within colonialism, for which they too are harmed and suffer. It's upsetting when some men are more offended by women speaking articulately and explicitly about the violence they've experienced, than the violence itself. I wish and wait to see more men routinely speaking up and holding each other to account for the micro-aggressions and casual subjugations against women which sit at one end of a continuum of violence that does not even end with death.

Last week, Polkinghorne wished his wife a peaceful afterlife before stepping into the sunshine an unshackled smile.

The violence we have witnessed this year in Gaza may be unlike anything many of us in Aotearoa have ever seen, in living memory at least, but make no mistake that its roots have a firm grip in the soil here. Settler colonialism persists today, in plain language on the radio every single morning, often completely unchallenged.

So let us stop feeling as though there is nothing we can do. There is SO much we can do. We may not be able to intercept a bullet to save a child in Gaza, but we must not think ourselves powerless. We have so much power. Language controls our lives. Words instruct us how how to feel and what to think. Words are the fuel of stories, and stories ultimately justify bullets. That is what makes language dangerous.

But the same thing that makes stories dangerous makes them wondrous. Because every single one of us has access to language. The power is at the tip of our tongues, the tips of our fingers. We need to be courageous and start naming colonialism concretely, using verbs rather than nouns. We need to dispense with hollow, overused and misappropriated words and grasp for every single syllable of truth.

Every time we open our mouths, or sit before a screen or a blank page, or unmute ourselves on zoom, we have the power to resist. We have the power to name things. Everything we do to educate ourselves about the roots of colonial violence develops our fluency to identify it, resist it, end it.

This is daily work. We have to keep doing it until resistance is no longer a choice but a reflex, a muscle as strong and natural and dogged as the one in our chests.

AND: There IS something more we can do today!!

Something concrete. Something exciting and powerful. Justice 4 Palestine has just launched a targeted campaign against ASB. You've probably been following the Boycott, Divestment and Sanction (BDS) movement, but this is a particular strategy for Aotearoa that involves collectivising our power.

My friend and writer, Nadia Abu-Shanab, explains the strategy behind the campaign in more detail here and I urge you to read it then share it. This is a very targeted, very strategic campaign. It's really important to understand how and why it will work, so please take the time to do your research so that you have the fluency to get others on board.

When you sign the petition, you will be asked to indicate if you bank with ASB.

Why ASB? Of all of New Zealand’s KiwiSaver funds, ASB has the most investments in Motorola Solutions Inc. A whopping $14 million dollars! This makes their KiwiSaver fund one of the biggest investors in the occupation of the Kiwisaver providers. Do you want to know something else sickening? Our KiwiSaver funds' investments were up 20% in the first 5 months after October 2023. These are investments in companies that finance and construct illegal Israeli settlements in Palestine. It's estimated that KiwiSavers have an estimated $200 million collectively invested in these companies.

What does Motorola Solutions Inc do? Specifically, Motorola Solutions Inc provides telecommunications, surveillance and military technology to the Israeli military and illegal Israeli settlements - effectively operating as the IDF’s technology arm and enabling the maintenance and expansion of these settlements. The company also provides technology for operating Israel’s checkpoints and separation wall, two key pieces of Israel's apartheid infrastructure.***{taken from campaign info - see here for references}

Sanctions work. The campaign will give ASB a deadline to divest from arming Israel. If you're doubtful in any way that this will be effective, just refresh yourself on the history of apartheid. Everyone said that regime could not be defeated as well, but it was, decisively - and New Zealand played its part. We will again play our part in ending the genocide in Palestine, but people first have to understand our collective power.

If you bank with ASB, awesome. But don't shift straight away! The strategy is to pressure ASB to divest: that's what the deadline is for. If you don't bank with ASB, there are plenty of others out there who do. Reach out to your whānau and friends. Talk to them about the campaign. Help them understand what we can do.

Here is the petition - sign, it, share it, then look out for updates.

I am changed after this year. I am changed and I'm glad to be. I might be sick with madness half the time, prone to outbursts, shook with rage and grief, scared for daughter, but I am grateful in a way I have never truly been before.

The question is, who is not changed?

*The genocide did not start on October 7th. Check out Justice 4 Palestine for a timeline.

** Mainstream media in Aotearoa still does not use the term "genocide" and privileges pro-Israeli commentators in its coverage.

** * All information including references can be found here.