"Our Lady Of Sorrows" By Marcos Zapata

"Our Lady of Sorrows" by Marcos Zapata

Catholic academia in October:

old rosary tangled with earphones in your pocket, reassuring texture of the beads between your fingers. cold hands and hot coffee. late blooming roses reminding you of st. Thérèse. scribbling latin phrases on the margins. reading The Interior Castle on rainy afternoons. going to the evening mass at sunset and leaving when it's already dark, crunchy leaves under your feet.

Because I needed the reminder and maybe you do too: the best way to deal with political frustration is to do something.

A real and immediate impact you can have that will directly help a Palestinian is to buy an eSIM and send it to gazaesims@gmail.com. This allows Gazans to access mobile data so they can get news out and keep in touch with their friends and family.

If you have never done this before, here is a step by step guide, complete with discount codes. It is slightly technical but still fairly easy (imo, ymmv). If you can't/don't want to buy one directly, you can donate to Crips for eSIMs and they will buy one on your behalf.

You don't have to top up the eSIMs when they get low/run out, but I find it comforting to do so. It means somebody is still alive, and that you've made a hellish experience a tiny bit less terrible.

DECOLONIAL ACTION READING

I recently compiled these to add to a comrade’s post about Land Back, but actually I think they deserve their own post as well.

Amílcar Cabral - Return To The Source

Frantz Fanon - The Wretched Of The Earth

Hô Chí Minh - archive via Marxists.org

Thomas King - The Inconvenient Indian

Abdullah Öcalan - Women’s Revolution & Democratic Confederalism

Edward Said - The Question Of Palestine

Thomas Sankara - archive via Marxists.org

Eve Tuck & K. Wayne Yang - Decolonization Is Not A Metaphor

Other key names in postcolonial theory and its practical application include:

Sara Ahmed

Homi K. Bhabha

Aimé Césaire

Albert Memmi

Jean-Paul Sartre

Léopold Séder Senghor

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak

All of these will help you interpret and confront the realities of colonisation, and ideally help us understand and extend solidarity to comrades around the globe. Decolonise your mind, and don’t stop there!

Moldova Monastery. Byzantine art of the 15th and 16th centuries

there is something so sacred about being a loser