On Mourning and Solidarities

In late October 2023, five transnational Chinese queer feminists (including two CAO Collective members) based in North Carolina, Chicago, Santa Cruz, Irvine, and New York City gathered in Baltimore for a collaborative roundtable titled “Chinese Queer Feminist Solidarities in Transnational Social Movements” at the National Women's Studies Association's (NWSA) annual conference. That sleepless night, we were inspired by the statement of conference withdrawal from Feminists for Justice in/for Palestine (F4JP), which was printed and distributed in the conference venue. Calling out NWSA for their “egregious violations of the BDS resolution,” F4JP urged fellow feminists to dedicate themselves to “unconditional solidarity and decolonial feminist praxis” (Feminists for Justice in Palestine 2023).As artists and scholar-activists, we reflected on our complicity in liberal academic institutions that continue “business as usual” during multiple genocides. As it was also approaching the one-year anniversary of the White Paper movement against COVID-19 lockdowns and Uyghur genocide in China and among overseas Chinese communities, we discussed the heavy grief that shrouded our bodies, and how that grief had reemerged as we witnessed Israel's ongoing genocide in Gaza and the occupation of Palestine backed by the US and other imperial powers.What does it mean to build embodied solidarities from shared experiences of grief across different communities? Facilitated by CAO Collective members, the roundtable group used an exquisite corpse method to write poetry on a shared online document: we each picked one page, wrote for a few minutes, and took turns continuing each other's words until everyone had contributed to every page. The next morning, we read these poems at the conference roundtable (with only partial oral translations into English) to ground our discussions of transnational movement building and organized a Palestine solidarity walkout from the conference venue. Three of the poems we collectively wrote that night are presented here, along with their English translations and images from another durational performance, Good Mourning 结哀顺变, from late December 2023 to early January 2024.This collective writing method has been used by the CAO Collective to facilitate trauma-informed, somatic-based, cocreative spaces since its founding in August 2022. The dozens of poems collectively written with over two hundred community members have witnessed the affective lives of transnational Chinese queer feminists over the past two years. Its cocreative process has taken on various formats. From Google Docs over Zoom to passing along A4-size papers in in-person workshops, to writing/drawing on eight-by-four-foot Chinese rice papers, these poems have carried our community's joy, love, grief, and longing for new modes of intimate relationalities rooted in care.In December 2023, at the transition into a “new” year, CAO Collective members gathered in Joshua Tree National Park and communed together for a few days for the second iteration of our Good Mourning performance. This durational performance of co-living, collective art-making, and shared labor was originally conceived during the winter of 2022, when many young queer/feminist protesters were arrested in China and many of our family members suffered from both COVID-19 infections and the aftermath of lockdowns. We gathered to create mourning rituals for those who are not allowed to be mourned: cooking familiar recipes from home and massaging each other, meditating on our relationships with the Land, inscribing poems our community wrote during White Paper onto ceramic and clay works, and breaking those memory objects on the reserve's weathered boulders.During this second iteration, we reflected on the changing textures of our once-explosive grief—as diasporic queer feminists committed to solidarity-building work, our mournings ebbed and flowed in never-ending tides. In the West, the framework for understanding grief is often individual based, such as the loss of a loved one. But to understand the interconnected tissues of the experiences of Chinese queer feminists, Uyghurs, and Palestinians across different movements—to recover the entangled dreams, pain, and love we have for each other—we need new ways of languaging rooted in our bodies.To do so, we found it imperative to learn from Palestinian poets and youth. Some of our friends spearheaded a translation initiative that made the following poems available in Chinese: Salma Khadra Jayyusi's ([2021] 2023) “Uprooted,” Lisa Suhair Majaj's ([2004] 2023) “What She Said,” and Farah Chamma's ([2012] 2023) “I Am No Palestinian.” We also read several poems/posts from Mosab Abu Toha (2023a, 2023b) and the Gaza Youth's (2011) “Manifesto for Change” in English. Connecting their grief with ours, we wrote poetry on eight-by-four-foot rice paper made from mulberry trees, drawing lotus flowers from our childhood, kites that remind us of Refaat Alareer's ([2011] 2023) “If I Must Die,” which the poet reshared on his social media before he and his family were killed by an Israeli air strike on December 6, 2023.We then meditated on our first encounters of grief and hand-painted the colors of our collective grief through exquisite corpse, our memories merging and transforming on another piece of rice paper. A much larger version of the commonly used A4 paper during the White Paper movement, the rice paper danced to the winds with its tenuous yet unyielding body. As the winds brushed from various directions, the paper clasped onto the boulders, fluttered to the sky, curled into its belly, and at times rested in place while making rustles and waves along its edges.The paper gently wrapped around our bodies like shared skin. From the crevices of this shared skin, grief inevitably leaks.* * *How is writing, and creating, out of shared grief relevant to movement building during a time of genocide? As artists, community organizers, and cultural workers, we hope that collective art-making can provide grounds for healing and imagination. Instead of treating cultural and healing work as an “afterthought” of social movement, we commit to community-oriented art practices as an integral part of movement building alongside direct action. Writing poetry and creating art together is a ritual for the spirits that are denied life and grievability (Butler 2015) during genocides and in social movement spaces.As diasporic/transnational beings, our liminal existence floating in between temporalities and localities demands that we constantly navigate the nuanced and intimate gaps between language, translation, and cultural containers. This in-betweenness is connected to Buddhist teachings of antara¯bhava अनतरभाव (bardo), describing the transitional state of life in between death and the beginning of next life. In folk cultures in China, unmourned spirits—including unprocessed grief from living persons—would become “spirits” and “ghosts” roaming the earth.These teachings have informed the CAO Collective's ongoing practice around grief. For example, the “Spiritual Figures” performance with sound artist Julia Santoli—the cover image for this issue—embodies queer feminist ancestors, arrested activists, and our future selves through breathing and humming. What if we see our bodies as a placeholder that holds the “ongoing work of grief” (Ahmed 2014: 161), allowing space for grief to pass through and transform?We embrace communal acts of mourning as a generative force grounded in interdependence, intentional labor, and care. Our work is an open invitation to use our bodies as an open vessel—to welcome and hold the affective weight of those who have passed and the potentialities for a future grounded in radical hope, working collectively within and through grief. When confronted with a grief that is never-ending, rethinking grief as a relational practice and a labor of love, witnessing, and survival rescues grief from an extraordinary state and resituates mourning as a fabric of our collective life.Do not turn away from that grief. Let it radicalize us, thrust us into new directions, stir up dreams and visions otherwise unavailable to us. Transform that grief into action in our communities. And always, FREE PALESTINE.* * *CAO Collective members translated the poems collaboratively with Paola Iovene. These bilingual poems, collectively written by CAO members and community members in late October 2023 under tight time constraints, are interwoven with feelings of grief, rage, and hope and social movement imagery from Hong Kong, China, Palestine, and beyond. How do we translate political richness and visceral immediacy that poetically conjure an embodied vision for solidarity? How do we juggle the need for legibility and readability in English and the need to preserve opacity and knowledge that remain inaccessible in translation? In the CAO Collective's past translations of community poetry written during the White Paper movement, we tended to prioritize the spontaneous nature of the original poems through direct translation. This time, the CAO Collective and Paola collaborated with the common goal of braiding together different forms of solidarity through poetry and art. It is our hope that the intentional choices in translation can intensify the texts’ resonances with the work of Palestinian poets and with the struggle for Palestinian liberation more generally—without losing sight of the artists’ own positionalities as Chinese transnational queer feminist activists. It is important to note that both the original texts and the translations encapsulate moments in time in which they were created. As we write this note in July 2024, nine months have passed since the poems were written. We translated with knowledge from nine more months of witnessing the ongoing atrocities and organizing solidarity actions.Our translations are not meant to be static or final, but are an invitation for conversations on the poetics and politics of collaborative writing and translation. We invite the readers to experiment with their own renditions.See Paola Iovene's companion piece in this issue, “On Mourning and Solidarities, on Poetry and Translation: A Note from the Associate Editor,” which may be accessed at https://doi.org/10.1215/10679847-11544883.