Disparate Parts\u00a0<\/b><\/h5>\n
As a kid, I grew up listening to my parents bicker in the hallway about C++ and Sql Server. Like many Chinese diasporic families, my parents wanted me to join the family small business, or at least, stay in the same field, which meant software engineering, computer science, or some other field in STEM. In a first-year humanities program at my alma mater, I learned about J. Robert Oppenheimer, and when I brought home some of these books, my mother took them into her room and read them, exclaiming, \u201cAah, they\u2019re making you all hate science for some reason.\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n My mother is from a generation of cultural reform, <\/span>the aftermath of June 4th<\/span><\/a>, of thousands of workers and students fighting tanks with grocery bags and a defiance against factory bosses and injustice. Students were encouraged to go into STEM, to learn technical fields, to mold themselves into something \u201cuseful\u201d to the economy, to chase the breakneck of the country until their joints faltered against blue and white collars, until their only-children fled their family nests to tentatively, and then surely, build their own. After many student leaders were blacklisted for their participation in the Tiananmen protests, Canada\u2019s points system offered some in their generation clean air and blue skies and fresh beginnings<\/span>\u2014<\/span>settler colonial lies that cherry picked immigrant workers whose intellectual and technological labour could be acquired more cheaply in a coastal city, such as in so-called Vancouver, that reminded them of a time when oceans were not polluted. <\/span>Factory workers<\/span><\/a>, migrant care workers, displaced villagers, disabled people who panhandle at night on the subways: families like mine have been, for decades, incentivized and pressured to seek out upward mobility on other people\u2019s lands.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n When the <\/span>heat wave<\/span><\/a> of 2021 in British Columbia killed over six hundred people, predominantly poor, disabled, and elderly folks, I thought about my grandpa who worked into his 90s to build air conditioners across Asia, both east and west. How such work has no demand in North American cities that refuse to face the climate consequences of their colonial occupation of Indigenous lands.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Engineers in Gaza do not have the luxury of clean air and blue skies and fresh beginnings; Israeli bombs kill them for doing their jobs, for restoring the Internet that the same bombs continue to cut off. Poets in Gaza do not have the luxury of lakeside residencies; they are assassinated and kidnapped and tortured for speaking truth and liberation.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n If poets and engineers have something in common, it\u2019s that we build things out of disparate parts. Find the most efficient use of language or machines or technology so we can live. If poets and engineers have something in common, it\u2019s that we are also used to aid and abet genocide; professions and vocations do not, inherently, offer an umbrella of solidarity, just as individualized disabled identities, often if not exclusively rooted in western medical models of diagnosis, don\u2019t either.<\/span><\/p>\n The eSim apps that <\/span>Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasina, Alice Wong and I<\/span><\/a>, alongside over 130 volunteers, have been using to connect Palestinians in Gaza to the Internet since October are designed for tourism. On one app, a birds-eye view photograph of a luxurious beach advertises their products for spring break getaways. The subject heading of a marketing email of another eSim company reads, \u201cAre your buddies out of data?\u201d Our buddies in Palestine are facing a genocide and companies are profitting off of it.<\/span><\/p>\n In <\/span>\u201cNotes on Craft: Writing in the Hour of Genocide,\u201d<\/span><\/a> Fargo Nissim Tbakhi<\/span><\/a> observes, as Noor Hindi has so incisively done as well in her poem <\/span>\u201cFuck Your Lecture on Craft, My People Are Dying,\u201d<\/span><\/a> that \u201c[c]raft success is contingent upon ethical and political failures\u201d:\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n If, as Audre Lorde taught us, the master\u2019s tools cannot dismantle the master\u2019s house, then Craft is the process by which our own real liberatory tools are dulled, confiscated, and replaced. We believe our words sharper than they turn out to be. We play with toy hammers and think we can break down concrete. We think a spoon is a saw.<\/span><\/p>\n Disabled people in the west rely on and sometimes do not question the reality that the tools of the oppressor are also tools we need to survive and navigate society, whether it is through Israeli medical supplies (i.e., Pfizer vaccines, 3M, Enovid nasal spray for COVID) or relying on big tech for accessibility tools. In many cases, we can <\/span>boycott<\/span><\/a> and <\/span>divest<\/span><\/a>, and in others, we must ask abled people in our lives to take on risks we cannot. But increasingly, as the genocide in Gaza continues unabated with our western tax dollars and with unyielding fervour and cruelty, such \u201ccan\u201ds and \u201cmust\u201ds morph into less clean-cut edges, shapes, and borders.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Take, for instance, Victor I. Cazares\u2019 strike from their HIV medications until New York Theatre Workshop calls for a ceasefire: poignantly, they <\/span>assert<\/span><\/a>, \u201cHIV has always been a part of my presence. So it became inevitable it would then become a protest.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n Take, for instance, <\/span>the self-immolation of Aaron Bushnell<\/span><\/a>, who many were quick to claim as \u201cnot mentally ill,\u201d but whose friends affirmed was traumatized from camouflaging neurodivergence throughout a childhood of surviving an abusive religious cult.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Take <\/span>Disability Divest<\/span><\/a>, in which disabled people are demanding that disability organizations divest from war profiteering and genocide.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Such acts of disabled protest invite us to consider what we are or aren\u2019t willing to do to stop a genocide. In what ways can disabled people use our experiences for protest, for refusal? In what ways can we demand that the medical supplies we need to survive are not complicit in genocide, occupation, and apartheid? And build a world in which our interdependence is interdependence for all?\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Mass disabling events, including the vaccine apartheid in Palestine and other parts of the global south, the medical and military industrial complex, and settler colonialism are deeply interwoven. To say things are interwoven is to say that, by design and with intention, disparate parts were crafted and fashioned together into something else. What\u2019s interwoven can, by design and with intention, be unraveled, destroyed, and refashioned. Medicine, care, technology, science, engineering, design are tools, for good and for empire, just as literature, poetry, art are tools, for good and for empire.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n In <\/span>\u201cPalestinian Poets on the Role of Literature in Fighting Genocide,\u201d<\/span><\/a> Priscilla Washington beautifully puts, \u201c<\/span>No matter how much we may repeat the metaphor, poetry is not water. It cannot write the bombs out of the sky. It cannot put back together the bodies of a loved one, or build a safe place for even a mouse to sleep in Gaza. But this is not to say that poetry or words in general are useless in a time of genocide.\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n What Fargo argues about craft reminds me of the fact that when I write for the public, I feel a responsibility to write hopefully, to imagine that the words I use can be useful to someone. Prisoners can use spoons to break out of jail, and the responsibility of a writer is also to be precise and clear about what our spoons do, what we do with the spoons we have.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Mirna El Helbawi of <\/span>#ConnectingGaza<\/span><\/a>, Alice, Leah and I are all writers. And yet we are not writing as if business is usual. Vocations do not predetermine how we respond to a moment, an hour, but I do believe that our work as writers gives us the insight, tools, and bravery to try things we haven\u2019t done before.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n If we choose to be the kind of poets, the kind of engineers, the kind of people who fight for life, rather than propagandists or foot soldiers for empire, then we must use all the tools at our disposal to stop the genocides and colonial violence in Palestine, in Congo, in Sudan, in Haiti, in <\/span>Dzungarstan and Altishahr<\/span><\/a>, in West Papua, on Turtle Island, and so on. We must ensure that our tools are as sharp as a saw, or as the late poet Refaat Alareer offered, an expo marker. And those tools include our refusals.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n We need all of us, which is why, week after week, Alice, Leah, and myself have been calling on disabled people everywhere (and indeed, according to Paypal – <\/span>from at least forty-four countries so far<\/span><\/a>) to help us send eSims to Gaza. Below is a call to action with different ways you can join us and get involved.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n We must use our skills, learn new skills, and as Mosab Abu Toha <\/span>says<\/span><\/a>, be \u201creal poets who can together write a single poem that stops this genocide.\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n We must all fight so Palestinians in Gaza, and oppressed people everywhere, may live.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n Jane Shi lives on the occupied, stolen, and unceded territories of the x\u02b7m\u0259\u03b8k\u02b7\u0259y\u0313\u0259m (Musqueam), Skwxw\u00fa7mesh (Squamish), and s\u0259lil\u0313ilw\u0313\u0259ta\u0294\u026c (Tsleil-Waututh) nations. Her writing has appeared in <\/span>Briarpatch Magazine<\/span><\/i>,<\/span> The Offing<\/span><\/i>, <\/span>Canthius,<\/span><\/i> Room Magazine,<\/span><\/i> and<\/span> Queer Little Nightmares: An Anthology of Monstrous Fiction and Poetry <\/span><\/i>(Arsenal Pulp Press), among others. She is the author of the forthcoming debut poetry collection <\/span>echolalia echolalia<\/span><\/i> (Brick Books, 2024). Find her on social media @pipagaopoetry or topping up eSims in a socially stressful situation. She wants to live in a world where love is not a limited resource, land is not mined, hearts are not filched, and bodies are not violated.<\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n When Alice and Leah reached out to me about organizing Crips for eSims for Gaza, I was enthusiastic. I also had no idea that we would raise over $831K Canadian Dollars (well over half a million USD), an amount I have never seen in one place in my life.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Wilder still is the fact that we were able to spend over 98% of these funds since the end of 2023, something that couldn\u2019t have happened without the support of 140 friends and community members. What this means, in practice, is that our project has been able to connect thousands of people in Gaza to the Internet, adding to efforts to connect Gaza around the world.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Some of our eSims have been topped up since January, meaning Palestinians have been able to receive continuous Internet access for more than two months despite the ongoing and targeted telecommunication blackouts.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Mirna and the Connecting Humanity team have shared that they were able to connect a journalist just a few hours before they covered the horrific Flour Massacre (and subsequent ones); hospitals that provide life-saving services for people injured and sick; students who are still continuing their studies when their schools were destroyed; families so they can let their loved ones know how they\u2019re doing. Sometimes, one eSim is hotspotted between dozens of people nearby. Some of our eSims were used by journalists covering massacres at Al Shifa hospital. Our eSims are allowing students in Gaza to continue their studies despite all universities being destroyed.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Recently, Mirna shared on Instagram that the Connecting Project may need to end due to a lack of eSim donations. We cannot let this happen.<\/span><\/p>\n On behalf of Crips for eSims for Gaza, I am sharing the following how-to guide, including steps to join us in using our funds to send eSims to people in Gaza with the funds we raised. You too, can send eSims to Palestinians in Gaza, at no cost to yourself and with just your energy and time. Our goal is to send at least 500 eSims a week.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Organizing Crips for eSims for Gaza alongside Alice and Leah has helped me relearn and affirm the idea that none of us are spectators to liberation. There is something about staring at a large spreadsheet, each active eSim being used by a person, a family, or hotspotted by dozens, and tallying up the donations from nearly ten thousand people from forty four countries, that offers clarity and assurance amidst unspeakable grief and devastation. Sending eSims from bed, troubleshooting add-ons, asking your friends who work in tech for jargon to send to an eSim company, teaching fellow poets how to send eSims, infodumping new information about each app on social media\u2013all of these are strategies of disabled organizing that we learn because we have to.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n So many years into a pandemic that has wholesale abandoned disabled people has stunned me, at times, into a sense of isolation so thunderous that it has been difficult to imagine myself part of movements for real, or really part of anything, for real. This isn\u2019t just about a lack of access or accommodations in non-disabled movement spaces, it\u2019s a spiritual sense of isolation and alienation designed to make us disabled people, particularly those of us who are racialized and queer, feel like we are not part of the world. Nonetheless, this sense of being an outsider is key to so much wisdom and internal capacity to act in solidarity with others.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n When Rasha Abdulhadi calls on us to get in the way, I consider too the importance of getting out of our own way: materially and literally, none of us are powerless. Students setting up encampments at universities around the world, prisoners donating their week of wages in solidarity with Palestinians, principled people blocking railways and weapons manufacturing, writers demanding that literary awards are not direct participants in genocide and dropping their book from such awards, mutual aid and fundraising projects like <\/span>Gaza Funds<\/span><\/a>, <\/span>Workshops4Gaza<\/span><\/a>, the <\/span>Refaat Mobile Library<\/span><\/a>, <\/span>Palestine Asdiqa<\/span><\/a>, <\/span>Operation Olive Branch<\/span><\/a>, and so on: we all have a role to play.<\/span><\/p>\n As someone who has a hard time resting (cue all my friends slow-clapping in the background), this article is also my way of saying, \u201cHelp!\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n There is so much more to do, but I\u2019m grateful that disabled people from around the world can show up for Palestinians in an easy, accessible, and tangible way. The section below outlines one way to help.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n Note: <\/b>other methods of payment can be discussed after sending your initial eSim! Paypal is currently the most time-efficient method for those outside of Canada.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n The following tutorial adds to tutorials that already exist at:\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n www.gazaesims.com<\/span><\/a>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n https:\/\/www.esimdonorsforgaza.org\/<\/span><\/a>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n Important note: do not scan and activate the eSim on your phone!\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n https:\/\/www.getnomad.app<\/span><\/a>\/\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Regions: Middle East\u00a0<\/b><\/p>\n Preferred sizes: <\/b>3GB and over, top up using 10GB once eSim is active\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Interface:\u00a0<\/b><\/p>\n QR Code:<\/b> arrives in your email or is inside the app when you click \u201cHow to use\u201d and then \u201cInstall your eSim\u201d and then \u201cScan QR Code.\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Tracking tips<\/b>: include in your email the eSim\u2019s expiry date, activation code, and order number, which can be found at the bottom of your email when it arrives in your inbox. The ICCID is also helpful for you to visit web pages for individual eSims on the desktop application. The URL for an individual eSim is https:\/\/www.getnomad.app\/esim\/%5BICCID<\/a> number].<\/span><\/p>\nThe Speaker of My Poems are Also Sending eSims to Gaza\u00a0<\/b><\/h5>\n
About\u00a0<\/b><\/h3>\n
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A Call to Action: Joining Us in #ConnectingGaza\u00a0<\/b><\/h3>\n
None of Us Are Powerless\u00a0<\/b><\/h3>\n
Joining from Canada (preferred to save on Paypal fees)<\/b><\/h3>\n
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Joining elsewhere<\/b><\/h3>\n
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How to send eSims to Palestinians in Gaza<\/b>\u00a0<\/span><\/h3>\n
Steps for Sending an eSim\u00a0<\/b><\/h4>\n
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Nomad\u00a0<\/b><\/h4>\n
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