Building Transnational Solidarity w/ Chkoun? Collective

For episode 168, Elia and Leila are joined by the Chkoun? Collective, a collective of people from “North Africa” resisting anti-Black racism and its intersections with migration and the fight for freedom of movement in the region. We discussed their statement “Solidarities are not a given, they need to be built” and how it relates to our experiences covering Syria, Israel-Palestine, and Lebanon.

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Transcript via Antidote Zine:

It felt inauthentic to talk about racism in Germany or Palestine in northern Africa; what are we doing if we separate these things? It needs to be all together at once, everywhere.

Chkoun? Collective: We are two members of the collective Chkoun?, currently based in Berlin. We are a small collective of people of African descent, mainly from the region of the north of Africa (we try to always reflect on saying “North Africa” as if it’s a separate entity). We came together last year after the escalations that happened by the racist discourse of the [Tunisian] president Kais Saied; we came together to try to do something from where we are. We will get more into what’s happening in Tusinia later.

Most of our work is focusing on visibilizing and deconstructing discourse focused on anti-Black racism in the northern African region. This is at the heart of our topics, and we try to relate it to international solidarity in general by keeping the lens of anti-Blackness always in front of us.

Elia J. Ayoub: The first question is a bit of a background question. What prompted you to write this article at this specific time? What was the context in which it was written and what did you have in mind? Can you elaborate on what you called “thunderous silence” in the piece?

CC: We started working on this and trying to talk about this topic before October last year; we were preparing events and collaborating with Black activists in Tunisia and here in Berlin and Europe. We had an event planned also. The whole time, this interconnects—but what’s happening in Gaza and Palestine made us really think about how everything is interconnected, and that was the initial idea for us to write this.

Concretely, it was the enormous repression that we faced from the beginning, especially in the first week. We started working on it in early November, and in those few weeks there was huge repression: Palestinian demos were banned, wearing a kuffiyeh was a crime in itself, and the flag and so on—we really felt like this topic is being pronounced taboo and we’re not allowed to talk about it, and whoever is in solidarity is being criminalized; whoever talks about it is being criminalized. The most affected people are silenced completely. 

Concretely, it was an instance where there was a panel on the topic of migration and anti-Black racism in Tunisia by a famous German foundation here; there were people we know and work with who were invited to this panel, Black feminists from Tunisia—and this panel got canceled because the panelists insisted on wearing kuffiyehs during the panel while talking about racism in our society and how the majority in our society is also complicit in this crime, and giving excuses for the horrible things happening. We were very celebrated when we were talking about that, but at the same time when we were linking it to racism that we experience here or how it all connects, or to migration in the broader sense in all of its aspects, we were being silenced and not allowed to talk.

For us, there were so many similarities and parallels to how quickly it comes, the silencing and criminalization, and how majorities take over marginalized voices. It also wasn’t an easy process to write it; we were thinking a lot and discussing, and always keeping in mind our focus and how we want to center anti-Black racism in our society but still in its interactions with all the other aspects. So for us this was very clear, the parallels and simultaneity of these different kinds of repression.

Leila Al-Shami: It was a great statement. It’s so good to see people trying to build these connections between struggles and build more intersectional solidarity. I was very pleased to see that.

I’m interested in what you’re saying about the situation in Germany right now, because it’s a very frightening time, with the rise of the far right and the restrictions on activism.

EA: We should say that we’re recording this on June 11 [2024], so the elections were a couple of days ago.

LS: What’s the feeling there in Germany among the activist community? How are people responding to this in terms of the way they’re organizing?

CC: For us, this statement was a way to deal with how communities are dealing with things since October and before. It has always been tense to address questions of colonization and questions of Palestine in Germany. It has always affected racialized communities more, queer communities more, and so on. But since October, the way we’re dealing with it is that a lot of communities are feeling the tension and a lot of communities are struggling among each other and within each other.

This is why we wanted to focus, in this statement, on keeping the bigger picture in front of us: that a lot of things are about colonial struggles and about racism. This is at the heart of the issue, and a lot of us around the world share this, and we need to keep this frame going so we can have solidarity between us. We don’t need to understand the details of each struggle, we don’t need to know deeply about things to relate to them in that way and to all be together from a decolonial, anti-colonial perspective.

We talk about it a lot, and we feel that each community is pressured by the state and the media, and then it reverberates into the communities themselves, and we don’t feel like we’re doing the work we would like to do. Even grieving spaces are not available, because they get tense. It hasn’t been allowed to take a moment to grieve and give humanity back through all of this.

LS: You talk about that in your article, about multi-directional grief. This is something I discuss a lot with Elia and others: that we don’t even have time to grieve at the moment, because the violence is so systematic and continuous. How do you see multi-directional grief?

EA: I did an episode with another co-host, Ayman Makarem, who also does a separate podcast called Politically Depressed on this network. We did an episode on Gaza—not our first episode on Gaza, but the first one where it was just me and him talking about it raw. One of the things Ayman pointed out is that there’s been no time to grieve Gaza (he’s in Vienna, and for similar reasons historically, there’s been a similar crackdown in Austria on that) and also because the violence itself is so systematic and intense, every day feels worse than the day before. Whenever you think it might stop, something else happens.

I’ve been curious about the term too. In my own research I work a lot on memory and hauntings, and there is a term called multi-directional memory, which essentially says that we are affected by multiple forces of history at the same time, and they don’t always affect us at the same time. Sometimes one affects us more than another; sometimes maybe a certain component of our existence or our positionality is what defines us or at least what impacts us most today, compared to next week. It might be that today being a male is good for me; tomorrow being a male Arab is very bad for me. Stuff like that.

I connect a lot with that concept. I just wanted to add that to what Leila was asking.

CC: For us it was also this, feeling like one puts on different hats depending on what’s happening. We were here grieving everything that’s been going on in Palestine, but then also back home the really big threat to the little democracy that was there. At the same time, many people are dying through these deportations that are happening and are excused through society and the state. So it’s exactly like you put it, Elia: in different times feeling different things, and this continuous aspect of it—when we wrote “multi-directional grief” it was to express something we felt, and we didn’t think about it in any theoretical way.

What we felt is that all of these places in the world are burning; we hear this news and we don’t know what to do with it; and then comes the next horrible news. We didn’t know what to do with all of that. And at the same time, if we wanted to do something about it, if it was Palestine we would face this huge repression here in Germany; if it was about our topic relating to Tunisia, for example, we would also be facing criminalization. It’s really all these different aspects.

For us, we needed to find the word for it, and that’s what came out, out of what we were experiencing. It was also different phases. In the beginning it was this shock about how everything is bad or criminalized all of the sudden; then it’s feeling the power of defying it, doing something; then in the long term, that doesn’t work, and you feel the grief taking over.

It also came from a thought of—I don’t know if it’s our generation, millennials and our surroundings, or maybe it’s just the millennial century. But since the twenty-first century there is research that talks about how armed conflicts and wars change, and it’s not about the numbers, but it’s about how wars do not end anymore. Every armed conflict, every catastrophe that we grew up with, that \somehow we related to as northern Africans or whatever—none of them really stopped. If the foreign invaders are not there anymore for one reason or another, the destruction is still there.

When we came together about Tunisia, we were already feeling too much at that point, and then it just kept winding up. Also with how we felt from the time of what happened in Ukraine and how it touched different people. Here in Germany it was very visible how every “refugee crisis” is treated, and it was very distressing to see how Brown people in Ukraine were treated. So it was a very long accumulation of upsets and hopelessness and not knowing what to do.

I wanted to add something about the cognitive dissonance of what you can say where—it’s getting really confusing—and where you can be upset about what. It felt inauthentic to talk about racism in Germany or Palestine in northern Africa; what are we doing if we separate these things? It needs to be all together at once, everywhere. That was the point of what we were trying to say.

The point about grief was a reflection about how we think about death as a society, or as societies. There is a whole conversation about necropolitics and which bodies matter more; it’s very visible today with Gaza, but it has been there. With our collective, the whole point is to talk about the politics of erasure, visibilizing what is happening. For example, the genocide in Sudan is not talked about enough. There are connections there—for a long time that one did not stop. The number of Black bodies in the Mediterranean is incredible and overlooked from both sides of the Mediterranean; it just became so normalized to see bodies dying in the Sahara and in the Mediterranean. It’s overlooked by everybody.

LS: You make a very powerful statement: “Some lives are more grievable than others.” We certainly see that hierarchy in which causes or issues get given attention, both by politicians and by states, but also within the activist community in terms of solidarity.

CC: What we’re seeing now is that nothing puts something on the global agenda as when white lives are targeted. This is what always brings it back to the agenda. This is what adds to seeing really clearly how some lives are more grievable than others; other lives are stripped of humanity—you don’t see them as human until you prove it somehow, it has to be proven. But also that’s too late.

EA: I’m from Lebanon and mostly work on Lebanon, and there are some parallels. Lebanon has a large refugee population, overwhelmingly Syrians. And the way Syrians have been racialized in the past decade or so has echoes in Lebanon in the way Palestinians were racialized before. When I say “racialized,” I mean where most people would identify as roughly the same ethnicity, but then there’s a process of separating one group from the other and putting one group over the other—in the case of Lebanon, putting the Lebanese (and especially the Lebanese middle and upper classes) above the rest.

Lebanon also has something called the Kafala system. We’ve done a number of episodes on this in the past. “Kafala” means “sponsorship” in Arabic, and it’s part of the process of racialization in Lebanon, specifically targeting migrant domestic workers, who are overwhelmingly women, mostly from Ethiopia, Sri Lanka, and the Philippines, but also other parts of Africa and southeast Asia. There’s been a racial hierarchy, with them and migrants and refugees at the bottom. 

The way this is now being systematized—I just finished an article for Al Jazeera on how the EU recently sent a billion euros to the Lebanese state to join the EU’s border regime (they were already doing it, but now it’s more official). What the EU has been doing with Tunisia, Libya, and Egypt, they now want to do with Lebanon. It’s very interesting—someone who has patience can go through the discourse and how it has shifted the last decade, even within the EU. I’m sure someone has done a quantitative analysis of the words used: words like democracy and human rights being used less and less while words like security and borders are used more and more.

Of course the securitization of migration itself is kind of the elephant in the room in a lot of political discussions within Europe—when not made explicit, as the far right obviously does. The “center” tries to appeal to that, to dogwhistle, or by mentioning it directly, as they’ve been doing more and more, including Labour in the UK and center-leftists in the EU, and essentially ceding ground to the far right—only strengthening it, while they think that they are weakening it.

If you have reflections on that, please feel free.

LS: I’m interested in linking into what Elia’s just been talking about, because the EU has given massive amounts of funding to Tunisia, Lebanon, and Turkey to curb migration and to stop migrants reaching Fortress Europe. And there’s very little discussion here in the West about how that’s fueling mass human rights violations abroad. 

I’m interested to hear a little bit about Tunisia and how people in Tunisia are organizing against that, and whether they are taking actions directly on this issue around the EU. Also Sudan—the EU is giving money to the Rapid Support Forces, which have been carrying out mass human rights violations in Sudan. So it’s a very sensitive issue. Europe doesn’t want the human rights abuses on its soil, but it’s just externalizing them and pushing the problem elsewhere.

EA: I think Europe is increasingly okay with human rights abuses on its soil, but point made regardless.

CC: The narrative is always, We didn’t know about these abuses that were taking place. But then, quick investigative research (not to undermine how thorough they are) shows how much in the know Europe really is about what is happening, like the recent Lighthouse report on Morocco, Mauritania, and Tunisia.

I relate a lot when you say “security” has become the word here in Europe. That’s also what the Tunisian president always says. Whoever is helping migrants is against state security. That’s really dangerous; it’s related to very high charges, of treason and whatnot. Also framing it as a conspiracy—whenever that argument comes up, you can’t discuss it any further. Facts and reason and logic don’t help so much.

LS: He’s really refashioned the white far-right Great Replacement Theory to suit Tunisia, basically saying that Black migrants are creating a demographic threat and changing the cultural makeup of Tunisia.

CC: And that they want to “invade” the country. This is clearly fascist ideology. Some people don’t want to call it fascism, that’s specific maybe to Europe—but it has a lot of that. 

Obviously this affects solidarity a lot on the ground. Last year there were lots of mobilizations against this, also explicitly naming that they were against racism, they were against the whole conspiratorial discourse, for freedom of movement. There were many movements and many protests. At the same time that this started happening, the state discourse changed; there was an immediate criminalization of helping migrants who don’t yet have legal status (whatever that means; almost no migrant has legal status in Tunisia, including European “expats,” but they are never bothered about that).

What we were witnessing last year was that the frame of where we could take action was narrowed down so much it had to be through other ways of trying to help, even with basic necessities like water and food and shelter. Most recently, the criminalization also escalated in that people who work on racial justice and migration issues were arrested for doing this work. Those most vocal are now sitting in jail as of the beginning of May.

For example, Saadia Mosbah, the very outspoken Tunisian Black feminist who is the head of an association called M’nemty, who worked on racial justice for years—decades, I would say—has been in jail. The pattern is to arrest without charges at first, jail someone, and then somehow find the charges. Other people working in NGOs have also been arrested. Also Sherifa Riahi was in jail while having a two-month-old baby, for example. There are also many others; we only hear about the people who are a bit more famous, but many other people are being investigated right now. Not being in the country, we don’t get how bad it is, because here we can still kind of talk and mobilize some stuff. But it’s affecting the protests a lot. 

I personally still see a lot of hope: these past two weeks, there was also a massive demonstration for the first time linking this to the EU deals, and more and more people are talking about the deals being made with the EU and Meloni, the Italian prime minister. It’s more and more in the consciousness of society, and that’s a good development. There was a big demo, in light of all this repression, and to see that many people went out and protested and directly criticized the government was something that at least recharged our efforts a little bit.

EA: Since this podcast is in English and all listeners will have heard of Black Lives Matter in 2020, one thing that’s less known is that in Lebanon, there were people protesting on the streets—people who were not Black—saying “Lebanese lives matter,” and what was ironic (which many pointed out immediately) is that there is an argument to be made that in Lebanon anyone who is not rich or connected to the government, their lives don’t matter, but there is also a racial hierarchy, and none of the folks holding that banner were migrant domestic workers or Syrian refugees. There are actual Black people in Lebanon whose lives do not matter to the Lebanese state or, to a significant extent, to the rest of the population.

This is part of the way racialization becomes internalized, it becomes part of the culture. Untangling that is difficult, but it must be done. Otherwise there is a hypocritical air to talking about justice. In October 2019 in Lebanon, we had a big uprising; I was there, and I know from friends of mine who are Syrians that they were also there with us but they couldn’t say so. They couldn’t say they were Syrians among us. They could chant, but not be visibly Syrian. This is a layer of privilege as well, because most Syrians will not be perceived as Black in Lebanon. If you were Sudanese it would be even more difficult for you to take part in those protests, because you would immediately stand out, and you would be a target, if not by the protesters themselves then by the security forces.

These layers are easy to comprehend, because it is power and oppression, but it’s not easy, in the sense that people don’t want to talk about it. Your specific positionality is worth digging through a bit, because you come from a very specific community in Tunisia and now in the diaspora. Do you think this gives you a sense of perspective, for better or worse, to understand the suffering or experiences that Palestinians in Gaza are going through (even if it’s not “the same”)? How have you been reflecting on this? Because you released this statement at least partly with Gaza in mind.

CC: There is a bottom line we wanted to convey in this conversation that should not be lost: first of all it’s very important for us, in terms of positionality, to not be supporting out of identity affinity or something like that; it’s about anti-colonial struggle in Palestine, or in Sudan—it’s not only Black people killing each other, it’s a colonial struggle. Everything that’s happening everywhere is about an anti-colonial framework and we are in solidarity because of that. That’s a really important point we want to emphasize. 

There is a danger to be in support, just because Palestinians are Arabs or Muslims, which is the rhetoric that we grew up with in our countries. It’s dangerous not only for the Palestinian cause, but also for the support of Africans who are our neighbors, our ancestors. There’s a lot of connection there, so we should not stop at that. We need to be in support to be in resistance to coloniality.

For example, we were talking about, when we were preparing this, that there is a big element of performativity in our countries when it comes to supporting Palestine. It’s not just because we share a majority, or we share heritage or religion, that it makes us feel it more. We also have a different responsibility of allyship to show in this respect, without forgetting what we’re doing to our neighbors and to Black people in our countries.

Another thing, in connection to what you were saying, is that we forget that it’s not because you are oppressed that you would have the same oppression as a Black person, for example. There are Black Jewish populations that are being treated horribly at the moment, and historically in the creation of the state of Israel, and even before that. There are always layers to take into consideration, and they are racist and colonial. It’s by keeping this idea in mind that we need to be in solidarity, not because we identify with some moral community; it’s because human rights are important, and the human dignity of people who have been stripped of that historically does matter.

We also relate to Africa a lot and to Black identities a lot, but it’s also important for us that the Palestinian support rhetoric enters into that; it’s about coloniality. 

We were discussing this also: we really think that if it’s outside of this anti-colonial frame, which is what we think is true solidarity, then it is depoliticizing in the long term to make it about this affinity or this identity that just resonates with us. When we were talking about this statement and preparing for it, it came to us a lot, this concept of What context are we in? Because it really shifts. Back home we have citizen privileges, compared to the migrants or the Black people passing through the country. Here we don’t, so it’s also about positionality in terms of context, in terms of where and when this is happening. 

That’s what we came to realize about how we want this to be perceived, and to always keep ourselves in check also. Where are we, and when is all of this happening, and what is the history of all of this?

LS: This is a bit related to what you’ve just been talking about: in the statement you talk about how also the state instrumentalizes the Palestinian cause and uses the Palestinian cause for its own political agenda, while Palestinian migrants in Tunisia are facing a lot of problems. That’s very interesting for me, because we see that very much in Syria, where my family is from, where the Syrian state likes to present itself as the protector of Palestinian rights, part of the “axis of resistance,” but then of course many Palestinians are rotting in the regime’s prisons; many Palestinians have been killed.

Also in Lebanon, Palestine is very much part of their political discourse, but Palestinian refugees live in really horrific conditions inside the camps in Lebanon.

EA: An easy way to frame it in Lebanon is: Palestine is easy to talk about as long as there aren’t any Palestinians in the room.

CC: This was very clear to us also, since always. The solidarity that we’re building between Palestinian migrants and Black and African migrants in Tunisia is something that—how they’re facing the same conditions of not getting legal status. Palestinian migrants were also saying, in their testimony, how really this is nothing compared to someone who is from Gambia or Guinea. Because it’s really affecting everyone, including Palestinians (who the state really likes to vent about how great this has been forever), that visas are denied, procedures are delayed, and everything that brings along with it, to not have “regular status.”

Especially after October, we’ve seen them really instrumentalizing this image of bringing in some injured people from Gaza—and it’s really few people who were brought in, first of all. That’s nothing that someone should get a pat on the shoulder for. And after that, it was just for the PR image. Just now, some new reports and people who followed up were saying that those who were brought in for treatment are now not getting the treatment, or the treatment is being delayed, or the promised financial help was not delivered. So we see again that the true solidarity with migrants is not there. It’s really pure instrumentalization; it’s really performative.

It’s the same in Morocco, just to make a point about “as long as it’s not political, we’re all in support of Palestine.” The demos are free to a certain extent, but at the moment university students are organizing to ask for enforcement of cutting ties with the academic and knowledge influence of Israel, and cutting ties with university partnerships. That gets really complicated. That gets a lot of pushback, especially at private universities.

It’s okay unless it’s asking the state something, or demanding something from the state. 

EA: In Syria there was this term called “tanfeez,” and we’ve mentioned this on the podcast a few times. It’s a tactic that the regime, Hafez and then Bashar, would use. It means “letting out steam” in English. They would allow things from time to time; they would allow one small protest as long as it doesn’t do anything or go anywhere. The crucial thing about tanfeez that’s interesting is that sometimes the protest “gets out of hand” from the perspective of the regime, and then they regret allowing it. 

But we see regimes learning from this. The Sisi regime allowed a tiny bit of this during the COP27, but now with Gaza is cracking down immediately. For me, when we speak of performativity, the Qatar World Cup always comes to mind. There was a moment of “pan-Arabism,” so there you could have Palestine flags no problem, and you’d have people online very happy about some Israeli journalist being yelled at, but that is in contrast with no one really wanting to talk about the migrant workers who built the Qatar World Cup in the first place, who overwhelmingly come from countries like India and Bangladesh.

LS: Or the states pursuing normalization with Israel at the time.

EA: Exactly. I think you put it perfectly. There are different levels to this, but: It’s fine if you talk about it, it’s fine if you say this is not nice. Just as long as you don’t ask us to do anything specifically. More importantly, don’t disagree with us publicly, and don’t accuse us of anything. Don’t accuse us of being complicit in the genocide. Which if course they are—this is where it gets tricky.

In Lebanon there are the same sectarian politicians in the same sentence saying that We are with our Palestinian brothers and sisters against the Zionists—but also they cannot stay in Lebanon. And they don’t see a contradiction to that, because they frame it within a nationalist discourse. For me, this is where the trap comes in. Whether it’s nationalism or pan-nationalism, whatever. There are caveats, but as a general rule I’m skeptical of where these ideologies lead, because they’re usually captured by state forces.

I want to leave the floor to you to reflect, if you want. If there’s anything we didn’t get to, please feel free to bring it up now. And tell folks where they can find your work.

CC: As one of the last words, coming back to the colonization situation, it’s important in connection with Europe and keeping Europe’s responsibility in all of this in mind: sometimes it’s funny to hear Europeans saying they feel outraged about some stuff that is part of the narratives we grew up within; we’re not surprised if things are happening. With the situation with Palestine for example in Germany, a lot of people are scared about what is going to happen to freedom of speech and basic human rights—and now it’s racialized Europeans who are starting to get really scared, because they know they will be next to be affected by these things.

But it’s important to keep in mind the reminder that this is history repeating itself, in the same way that colonization started by trying techniques on African populations, by learning how to operationalize genocide in Namibia, for example, or how Le Pen started his career in torturing people in Algeria—this is the source of what led to World War Two. All of this was learned on the backs of Black bodies and racialized bodies.

It’s really important not to detach each issue or keep it separated, or even calling it the Israel-Palestine issue, or the Near East issue, or the migrant issue (when what we mean by “migrant” is Black people dying in the Mediterranean). It’s all coming from the same history; it’s all going to affect all of us at some point. And in the same way that happened throughout colonization and decolonization: it did affect people in Europe too. If people are feeling safe right now, may they be racialized or white, they will be affected eventually. This is really important to remind people about.

All these issues are not happening in a vacuum. The horrors that happened to our ancestors a hundred, two hundred years ago, have taught regimes to do what is happening today. The externalization of borders in Africa is a clear example of this coloniality that is still happening. They just don’t want things to be happening in their backyard in Europe and the West. If it’s not seen, it doesn’t mean it’s not happening.

The same way that the left could not stop colonization even though they thought it was not moral or whatever, but they did not fight strongly enough to stop it—it’s the same as what’s happening now. It’s not because it’s going to happen in Africa; there will be detention centers in northern Africa, in Uganda, in Senegal and so on. There are a lot of countries involved in this process. I did not know that Lebanon is also going for that now. The whole majority world is going to start holding these horrors so that people in the West do not see them—this does not mean that it’s not going to come to them at some point.

EA: I have so much to add, but the way you ended it is perfect. So on that note, thank you a lot for doing this. This was really an amazing conversation.

CC: I feel like it could go on forever. Thank you for inviting us.

LS: Thank you for joining us. It was a great conversation, a lot to think about.

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