The following is the address published as delivered by Professor Ananya Roy at the commencement of the People’s University for a Liberated Palestine on June 13, 2024 at McCarty Memorial Christian Church in Los Angeles, CA.
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Good evening. I am Ananya Roy, a member of the UCLA Faculty for Justice in Palestine and it is my great pleasure to welcome you to the People’s Commencement.
Graduates, mabruk.
We are here today at this beautiful church rather than at UCLA because, well, the number-one public university in the country has turned out to be the number-one university in assaulting students and workers.
And so this is the People’s University for a Liberated Palestine. We will not be divided. We will not be silenced. We shall not be moved.
As the People’s University for a Liberated Palestine, we honor and remember our fallen comrades across universities in Gaza—students, faculty, deans, poets, artists, writers, doctors.
They have been martyred but their legacy lives on, lives with us. In the words of Refaat Alareer we are reminded:
If I must die, let it bring hope, let it be a tale.
As the People’s University for a Liberated Palestine, we refuse the colonial-racial logics of the imperial university, of the university that markets us as academic capital and tuition streams but disregards our humanity.
We charge the imperial university, the land-grab university, the neoliberal university, with complicity in genocide.
And as the People’s University for a Liberated Palestine, we teach each other the philosophy and praxis of abolition and decolonization and we do so as the damned of the earth.
To the damned of the earth, Frantz Fanon writes: “Let us leave this Europe which never stops talking of man yet massacres him at every one of its street corners, at every corner of the world. Humanity expects other things from us than this grotesque and generally obscene emulation.”
And as the People’s University for a Liberated Palestine, we build. You, the student creators of the People’s University, have built so much, including the Gaza solidarity encampment and other liberated zones.
The encampment is a stark reminder of the deterritorialization of Palestine, of the urbicide and domicide, and now genocide, perpetrated by Israel and its enablers. It is the camp rather than the city, the camp rather than the nation that has become the global geography of Palestine.
But the camp, as Palestinian liberation struggle has demonstrated, is also the space of return, of collective memory, of exile. Edward Said, reflecting on the poetry of Mahmoud Darwish, notes that exile is “the transformation of the lyrics of loss into the indefinitely postponed drama of return.” For Said exile is also a form of inhabitation.
“Exile is life led outside habitual order. It is nomadic, decentred, contrapuntal; but no sooner does one get accustomed to it than its unsettling force erupts anew.”
We charge the imperial university, the land-grab university, the neoliberal university, with complicity in genocide.
The liberated zones, the encampment, have been this unsettling force erupting anew, over and over and over again.
You have permanently transformed the university into the people’s university, altering the established conditions of learning, teaching, being, communicating.
And of course such transformation has been cast as a security threat, even an existential threat. Well over a century ago, W.E.B. Du Bois wrote of the damned of the earth: “There is ever an unasked question: How does it feel to be a problem?”
But in becoming the problem, you all have shown us what the problem actually is: the color line that girds the world, encircles Gaza, shreds the West Bank, burrows deep into the psyche of the colonial state and its settlers, legitimizes genocide.
And it is against this genocide, and against the long arc of colonialism, that we gather here today as the People’s University for a Liberated Palestine.
When I think of the People’s University for a Liberated Palestine, I think about revolutionary love, the revolutionary love that abolitionists, especially feminist abolitionists, have taught us about, from bell hooks to Angela Davis to Ruthie Gilmore.
I think about revolutionary love as the scaffolding of the university we want and deserve, of the world we want and deserve.
Assia Djebar says of love: “Love, if I managed to write it down, would approach a critical point: there where lies the risk of exhuming buried cries, those of yesterday and as well as those of a hundred years ago.”
May we do justice to this legacy, to this long arc of struggle, and the unfinished work of liberation.
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Roll call:
- If you helped set up the encampment and liberation zones, please stand.
- If you defended the encampment and liberation zones, please stand.
- If you fed our community at the encampment and liberation zones, please stand.
- If you were a medic at the encampment and liberation zones, please stand.
- If you are not a medic but became one at the encampment and liberation zones, please stand.
- If you helped carry supplies that sustained life and community at the encampment and liberation zones, please stand.
- If you’ve experienced academic repression, please stand.
- If your degree is being withheld, please stand.
- If you were pushed, shoved, beaten, harassed, kettled, kidnapped by the cops, please stand.
- If you attended or programmed people’s university, please stand.
- If you have chanted for freedom, please stand.
- If you demand cops off campus, please stand.
- If you will continue to take up the struggle and remain steadfast in the movement for the liberation of Palestine, in our lifetimes, please stand.
Illustration by Athena Greenleaf.
