Global solidarity offers a difficult problem for progressive thinkers and activists: as we link together struggles among marginalized groups separated by geography, culture, and historical experience, it might seem easy to assume that they are fundamentally and inseparably connected.
We are navigating a time of unprecedented global interconnectivity, and thus are bound to recognize analogies between otherwise disparate struggles for justice. Ethnic cleansing and settler colonialism look remarkably similar across countries and continents — as do worker exploitation, wealth inequality, and the devastating violence of human-driven climate change. It is only natural to focus our efforts as writers and activists to form a worldwide movement with consolidated aims. There is strength in numbers, strength in a unified message, and strength in common understanding.
While these parallels are real and deserve our attention, they cannot be considered holistic. Common understanding should not be confused with common experience. To demonstrate my point, let me offer a brief textual example.
One of Mahmoud Darwish’s most enigmatic poems begins with an 1854 quote from the Duwamish chief Seattle: “Did I say, The Dead? There is no death, only a change of worlds.”
Darwish, widely regarded as Palestine’s national poet, goes on to assume the place of a Native American person, whose individual identity, tribe, and history go unidentified beyond common creation stories. The power of Darwish’s lyrical costume is clear: speaking through the mouth of an Indigenous person grants him the ability to engage the reader’s sympathies. The existence of these sympathies is taken for granted as he argues the justice of the Native American person’s cause: fighting his people’s displacement, countering efforts to “civilize” his culture, and denouncing the corruption of his ancestral land. To be Native American, Darwish assumes, is to be physically weak but rhetorically powerful.
The poem, “The ‘Red Indian’s’ Penultimate Speech to the White Man,” is littered with allusions to the Arab, Islamic, and Mediterranean worlds. Through declarations that “you have your faith, and we have ours,” Darwish evokes Surah al-Kafirun — Surah 109 of the Qur’an — even while, outwardly, he plays the part of someone who has never been exposed to Islamic teachings. As he threatens the European conquerors, he can’t help but speak in Old World terms: “you will lack Euripides one day, the Canaanite and the Babylonian poems and Solomon’s songs of Shulamit.”
One may see Darwish’s choice of metaphors as a natural extension of his Palestinian upbringing. But they go deeper, connecting the Palestinian and Indigenous struggles as one, united by the threat of racism, land loss, and genocide.
I have to admit that there is a convincing argument to be made here. But I can’t assume that such a connection — and I don’t think a perfect parallel should be presupposed — grants Darwish the right to speak through and for another group, who has faced a wholly separate set of historical circumstances and challenges. By speaking for Native American people, Darwish, in turn, makes Native American people speak for him, collapsing their vast differences into a single voice and tokenizing them as a figurehead for his own political cause.
Many attempts to deploy the voices of the oppressed in support of liberation are noble, but they run into obvious roadblocks in terms of practicality and efficacy — especially when those voices are fabricated. Darwish’s portrayal of Native American people displays a superficial knowledge of their history, a disinterest in their diversity, and a keen, almost unwavering focus on tragedy. They are his “noble savages.”
Certainly, not every deployment of Native American voices in the fight for Palestinian rights is a problematic one. Over the past 16 months, Native solidarity with Gaza has been a welcome boon for the Palestinian liberation movement. Native American people have marched with us, supported us, and spoken out for us against ethnic cleansing and military occupation. During the Democratic National Convention’s Native American Caucus in August, Gabriella Cázares-Kelly, of the Tohono O’odham Nation, voiced support for Palestinians while encouraging other Indigenous people to do the same.
“As survivors of genocide, Indigenous people know firsthand that the government can make mistakes, and they can do that with policy, and they can do that with weapons,” she said. “We have the opportunity to do something, and if we can’t push past that, what are we fighting for?”
Cázares-Kelly’s words perfectly capture the meaning of solidarity in practice — but they are her words to speak. It is not the job of activists or writers to deploy others’ voices for them, but to gather diverse voices that can speak in support and solidarity from similar, yet distinct, historical and contemporary positions.
Instead of speaking for other marginalized groups, we should speak with them — not only as a moral imperative, but as a matter of forming and maintaining a functional movement. Proposing to speak for a group of people can leave a bad taste in their mouths, souring them to ideologies their identities were deployed to support. It is far more effective to invite others to speak on their own behalf, to hear their voices and their concerns, and to allow them the space to engage in global efforts toward solidarity on their own terms. Native American sovereignty extends to peoples’ right to represent themselves in the ways they see fit. To tokenize groups of people is to strip them of agency, to dehumanize them — and that is exactly what we should be united against.
