As we bear witness to the immeasurable ills and horrors of this world unfolding in Gaza, the totality of violence, seismic destruction, and multigenerational sufferings inflicted upon Palestinian bodies, I cannot escape the idea that, as Fanon sensed, authentic struggle, in its primacy, is a matter of reparation, beginning with the repairing of that which has been broken[1]. And that our ongoing quest for decolonization takes up the key question of land. From Palestine to South Africa, from Cabinda to Turtle Island, from the Amazonas, and Abya Yala to Katanga, from British Columbia to Australia, whether we’re grabbling with settler colonialism or the relentless plundering of precious minerals and resources, the struggle for land remains the primary object of our collective struggles for liberation.
This 40th thematic issue of The Funambulist brings to the fore land restitution in the struggle for decolonization. While struggles for land transcend geographical boundaries, representing a fundamental demand for justice, sovereignty, and the right to self-determination, it is also one that is marked by long and enduring histories of colonization and dispossession. This, inevitably, brings to mind Brenna Bhandar’s seminal book Colonial Lives of Property[2], equally mobilized in this issue. Bhandar’s work undertakes the crucial task of mapping the commonalities that thread together these struggles through the lens of abstract juridical systems, modern property laws, and racial superiority and hierarchies that render land a mere commodity. This colonial logic that continues to shape contemporary systems of property and ownership dismisses any notion of ancestral, co-constitutive, and kindred relations that fall outside of capitalist imaginaries and confines to legitimize the theft of land.
Amid these contested intricacies of belonging and loss, perhaps the collective love song we might take upon ourselves to write to our homelands might be held in these stanzas by Gaza-born poet, Moen Bseiso:
That I would see you again for the first time, homeland
a sail lost at sea, found by the storm.’[3]
Margarida Waco
[1] Achille Mbembe, Brutalism. 2024. Duke University Press.
[2] Brenna Bhandar, Colonial Lives of Property: Law, Land, and Racial Regimes of Ownership. 2018. Duke University Press.
[3] Moen Bseiso, A Letter to the Barbed Wire. Translated from Arabic by Jehan Bseiso. Year(s) unknown.
