Their Borders, Our World: Building new solidarities with Palestine ed. by Mahdi Sabbagh
Their Borders, Our World: Building new solidarities with Palestine (2024) is an urgent and moving anthology of contemporary global voices chronicling the struggles of resistance against settler colonialism. Edited by Mahdi Sabbagh, co-curator of the Palestine Festival of Literature, the collection features essays by both organisers and writers from the festival, including Yasmin El-Rifae, Jehan Bseiso, Kelly Easterling, Dina Omar, Ellen van Neerven and many more. Situated at a critical moment when settler colonialism is resurging in different parts of the world, the collection serves as a cultural pollination ground for discourse, particularly around ideas of global freedom and solidarity.
The contributors to Their Borders, Our World rally from across the globe. Musings on art, literature and philosophy sit alongside dissections of the nation-state and stances against violence and destruction. There is also poetry, with moving inclusions like Jehan Bseiso’s ‘Gaza Lovesong’:
“You call to say: even the dead grow old without a homeland.
(this is)
You call to say: we cross the borders with our blood
(this is how)”
The poetic form here is harrowing in both function and structure. Bseiso intentionally sets up a call-and-response structure, bracketing the unspoken – or perhaps unliving – voices. Her language is punctuated cleanly without embellishment. There is no need to in the relentlessness of media reportage that has come out of Palestine over the last year.
Then there is Keller Easterling’s meditation on activist solidarity, ‘Try to be in Palestine’ which explores the power of collective action. Drawing on Pan-African civil movements as well as South-South solidarity during the Global North American movements, Easterling is concerned with the idea of multiple situated sovereignties, which mobilises people to act. His robust analysis of movements across the world highlights the necessary practices we (all) ought to undertake. Of Gramdan movements in India, or the Black cooperative movement in the Black Belt of Southern United States, Easterling says:
“A mobility commons not only returns ten seeds for everyone that is planted, it is a limitless resource that can always find a way to spread through ideas, practices, and unexpected forms of kinship… Palestinian protests have been linking arms with other victims of settler colonialism, of any race, tribe or identity.”
Easterling has honed in on the communal prerogative of mutual struggle. There is no alliance or practice of it disconnected from the Palestinian struggle, whether that be due to its history, or simply because the protest for Gaza has long been interlinked with colonialism, sexism and all its other offshoots.
Their Borders, Our World is effective precisely because it centres the voices that must be heard – voices that demand repetition and collective reckoning. It is an important volume of thinkers that challenges binary notions of how a movement can grow, but also grounds all commentary on the Palestinian struggle in Palestinian voices and their allies.
This article has been commissioned in partnership with Diversity Arts Australia’s StoryCaster project, supported by Multicultural NSW, Creative Australia and Create NSW.
Karen Leong is a Hong Kong-born writer, journalist and critic with over eight years of experience in Australia. With a background of English Literature and Gender Studies from the University of Sydney, she specialises in fields of fashion, art and cultural commentary across editorial and earned media spheres. In print and digital, you can find Karen’s bylines in GQ, Vice Asia, InStyle, RUSSHMagazine, ArtsHub and Multicultural NSW. She was awarded as a 2023 recipient of the Meta X Walkley Grant for Australian Art Journalism.
Karen is also a writer of creative non-fiction, prose and poetry and has profiled memoir pieces with Another Magazine, Astrophe Magazine, Leste Magazine, Vice Asia and more. In 2024, she was elected as a StoryCaster with Diversity Arts Australia, Multicultural NSW and Sweatshop Literary Movement for a commissioned Creative Nonfiction body of work. She was also selected as a finalist in the CHANEL x RUSSH Literary Showcase for her Nonfiction piece ‘Predilection & Pain’. She is the editor of A-M Journal and UMENCO’s ‘a playbook’.
She currently works and writes on unceded Gadigal land.