This is a project about time, mutant capitalism and life. Its tempo has changed from the epoch to the day. For the remainder of the dignity strike, there will be daily posts.
It is now a month since Palestinians in Israeli regime incarceration began. On #day31 of his hunger strike, Bobby Sands was nominated as Sinn Fein candidate for MP in the by-election for Fermanagh and South Tyrone that he would go on to win. Having started his strike two weeks ahead of his fellow strikers, Sands was already half way to death. I don’t think there was anyone in the UK or Ireland that did not know his name. On #day66 he died and 100,000 people attended his funeral.
Today is also #day31 of the hunger strike of over 1000 Palestinian prisoners, a hunger strike for political status, known as the Dignity Strike. Over 100 men are in hospital and they are refusing water. This will become critical imminently. The Guardian has no mention. Nor does the New York Times or Washington Post. All the attention goes to the circus in Washington.
The Bobby Sands Trust has two articles on its front page about Palestine. 400 immigrants are being arrested every day. Dozens if not hundreds of strikers are at risk of starving themselves to death.
A year ago today I was about to go to Palestine, totally unprepared, despite my own sense of knowing, for what I would see and learn there. A year later, it will be the Trump circus that arrives, leading Abbas to make nice in the delusion of preference or perhaps just to further feather his nest.
Often people cite Judith Butler’s work about grievable lives to understand such situations. Recently, she has put it like this:
we are compelled to find the specific forms in which grievability is asserted. Indeed, one question I hope to pose is: what counts as a militant assertion of grievability?
I understand and appreciate Butler’s position, which is brilliant as ever. And yet.
Biologist Michelle Callard-Stone has summarized the effects of hunger:
Roughly speaking, at the end of thirty days without food, the body is dying. Humans are not meant to starve for prolonged periods, hungry cavemen ate bushes and roots instead of going without food. The body is well-into starvation mode, which means that your body has depleted its glycogen stores in the liver and muscle, and has also reduced its use of ketones, which are the body’s short term solution for lack of food. At this point the body is surviving primarily by degrading muscles and bones, even in the presence of adipose (fat) tissue.
Damage to the immune system is permanent, even if food is restored. Sight and hearing may be affected forever.
In his book Hunger: An Unnatural History, Sharman Apt Russell sees forty days as the key turning point for hunger strikes, depending on the condition of the striker at the beginning of the protest. At this point, the body loses the ability to function at a cellular level, unable to form new cells or transfer across cellular membranes. Sight and hearing fail. At some point, the person cannot fully recover even if the strike is abandoned. The Yad Vashem museum documents that “tens of thousands” of Holocaust survivors died from the effects of returning to eating and overeating.
To read such paragraphs takes us to a place beyond even grief and grieving to question how life is lived and how there are ways to protest–how small that word feels here–even when every option has been foreclosed. It makes us feel the force of words like “dignity” that seem so old-fashioned in our worlds of precarity, state-enforced self-reliance and permanent attrition of social welfare. Dignity was what Frantz Fanon saw as the goal of decolonizing.
In Washington, Tel Aviv and official Ramallah, dignity has been so lost, it no longer has any meaning. Try and imagine denying yourself all food and water for over thirty days in pursuit of dignity. What would I do for my dignity, I ask myself? Do I have a claim to dignity, when the elected leader of my country is visiting the regime that perpetrates the occupation that has removed all dignity for an entire people? What is the psychic damage to me and to all of us to live without dignity? Is that a hunger so deep-rooted and so systemic that, like the long-term hunger striker, we no longer feel it?
