In the YouTube caption to her music video “Stick of Gum,” the Palestinian-Canadian recording artist Nemahsis (Nemah Hasan) tells her audience it’s a love song: “what more can I care for than where I come from and who I come from?” The tempo of the song and video builds gradually. The opening frame is an intimate scene of the musician sitting beside an older female relative on a balcony in Jericho. As the camera pulls back, a web of laundry lines on the roof comes into view, and Hasan joins in taking down the socks and dish towels.

The video, Nemahsis recently explained in an interview with Tom Power, was shot in one day on a longer visit to family this spring. The cast are her relations. Soon, she is out of the house, racing a little boy down Jericho streets, then she’s swinging from the passenger window of a car in motion—a posture which recalls the rapturous irreverence of M.I.A. in her music video “Bad Girls” (2012). A question sits at the heart of the song: “Are you capable to reciprocate?” asks Nemahsis, “no matter how high or heavy the take?” And the song’s title erupts: “A stick of gum, or dynamite / You could plead guilty and I will do the time.”

Love, here, is free from what the poet and abolitionist academic Jackie Wang calls a “politics of innocence.” Empathy, Wang points out, and a commitment to fighting for justice for others, too-often hinges on a perception of so-called “innocence” defined by the powerful; in other words, if you are not innocent then you do not deserve solidarity. This is a formulation that fails to account for how settler-colonial societies project guilt and criminality onto certain bodies and not others. It also fails to account for love’s disregard for categories of judgment.

In a recent article for The Guardian on the growing numbness toward the ongoing destruction of Gaza, the Palestinian-American poet and clinical psychologist Hala Alyan defines the “seed of true accountability” as an ability to remain “committed in the face of enormous cost.” Nemahsis’s declaration of commitment is more than a feeling. The artist’s record deal was terminated last October within days of her reposting early documentation of Israel’s siege on Gaza. This was before her viral video remake of Lorde’s “Teams,” in which she sings the New Zealander’s lyrics over a video collage of Gaza’s architecture intact, then under attack.

We live in cities you’ll never see on screen

Not very pretty, but we sure know how to run things

Livin’ in ruins of a palace within my dreams

And you know, we’re on each other’s team.

The resonance of Nemahsis’s gesture was amplified when Lorde shared the video with a statement of gratitude that her music could speak at a time when she herself felt she could not.

“Stick of Gum” premiered in late May 2024, one week before American R&B singer and queer icon Kehlani released her video for “Next 2 U,” another love song. “Next 2 U” opens with the text of a poem by Alyan:

Keep your moon

We have our own

Keep your army

We have our name

Keep your flag

We have fruit and in

All the right colors.

The video starts with two femme dancers crouched low, twisting their limbs and whipping their hair on the hood and roof of a car in a dark warehouse. They are dressed in black suits adorned with keffiyehs. In Kehlani’s video, a queer cast of dancers come together and slide between gestures of strength and softness, alternately arm wrestling and grinding on each other. Together they form a sovereign collective preparing for battle and pleasure in equal measure.

Kehlani’s lyrics rhyme in spirit with Nemahsis’s, as she defines solidarity outside the “politics of innocence.”

They gon’, they gon’ have to come get me

They gon’ have to see about me to get next to you

They gon’, they gon’ have to call the law

I don’t care what they offer, I’m protecting you

’Cause I never

Never, no, no, thought I could put anybody before me.

This kind of selflessness is a theme we are used to hearing applied to romantic love. In this case, the intimacy is multiple. It is flamboyantly gay; the dancers sweat together and hold each other close. It is communal, not bound to a monogamous duo. And it is political; the only colour in the video is the red and green of oversized Palestinian flags the dancers wave. Describing the song and video on Instagram, Kehlani wrote, “I listened to this song enough to recognize a love song IS a protector’s song IS revolution.” The gay dance floor is always beyond the confines of normative ideology. It is a harbor and a stage for action. Dancers find each other there to practice living otherwise.

In her new book Imperfect Solidarities, art critic and essayist Aruna D’Souza makes an argument not only against innocence but against empathy itself as a prerequisite for political solidarity. Empathy, she writes, hinges on an “identification of and with pure innocence.” Like Wang, D’Souza points out that to attain this, “we put the burden on those who are being dehumanized to argue for their worthiness of empathy.” Building on Dylan Robinson’s Hungry Listening—“a listening which prioritizes the capture and certainty of information”—D’Souza calls this “Western ontology’s demand for transparency.”

From elementary school classrooms onward, white Western notions of empathy often boil down to the cliché of taking “a walk in someone else’s shoes.” Why should anyone invite you to step into their shoes? Why take someone’s place instead of walking alongside them or at a respectful distance? This prerequisite of understanding is both extractive and impractical—it results in a continuous deferral, an acceptance that eventually “change will come when we understand each other better.”

The shoes framework makes basic demands for the right to life with dignity dependent on the interpersonal feelings, fears, and whims of the powerful. It also does not account for what is lost in attempts at translation between one person’s lived reality and another. “Empathy,” writes D’Souza, “doesn’t account for that which overflows the translation of the other into the terms of the self. It works to contain or, if containing fails, to reject that excess.”

Over a photograph on fabric, the Cantonese-Canadian artist Lan Florence Yee asks, in embroidered words, What do we lose when we describe ourselves. Yee’s question is rhetorical, a guarantee that something is always lost in description. The “we” includes you, in an invitation to consider what you too might gain through categorical evasion. “The opposite of empathy,” writes D’Souza, “is a failure to comprehend the other. This sounds like a terrible thing, perhaps, but I want to think about the possibilities of a politics that can accommodate, even thrive on, incomprehensibility.” What forms of collective solidarity would be possible if our ability to stand up for justice was not predicated on understanding?         

In this, D'Souza echoes Édouard Glissant’s edict that the global majority must assert the “right to opacity,” the right to remain beyond the grasp of hegemonic thought and institutional categorization; the right to not appeal to what Jackie Wang terms “the white imaginary.” Instead of false equivalence, D’Souza imagines a world “in which the friction produced by multiplicity produces a spark, and that spark starts a fire.”

The four essays that form Imperfect Solidarities find examples of this spark in the multilingual literature of Amitav Ghosh, the visual arts of Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Stephanie Syjuco, and Candice Breitz, and the 1980 exhibition Dialectics of Isolation: An Exhibition of Third World Women Artists in the United States curated by Ana Mendieta, Zarina, and Kayuko Miyamoto. Gonzalez-Torres’s candy-pile installations about queer love and grief, for instance, do not put queer pain on display but rather invite another mode of relation based on abundance. In retaining this opacity, D’Souza shows how the artist found a way not to “retreat into silence or disengagement, without being caught up in, or grasped by, a language he had never agreed to speak.” These curatorial and artistic gestures, like “Stick of Gum” and “Next 2 U,” imagine ways of coming together which refuse to translate, reduce, or demand coherence of one another. 

We now watch in real time what  D’Souza calls “the first genocide taking place on social media.” We listen to calls in the US to “vote blue no matter who,” from the party that claims to be “working tirelessly” for a ceasefire, all the while sending the bombs that make the daily violence against civilian life in Gaza possible. In Canada, we have realized that the embargo on arms shipments to Israel announced in early 2024 failed to acknowledge that hundreds of preexisting permits would continue to be honoured, and that new shipments would simply be rerouted via the US. The time for deferred solidarity is over. 

In her article in The Guardian, Alyan accounts for Western silence and continued complicity in the indiscriminate attacks in Gaza via Audre Lorde’s 1977 observation that “we have been socialized to respect fear more than our own needs for language and definition.” Alyan left out the second clause of Lorde’s sentence, in which she goes on to say, “while we wait in silence for that final luxury of fearlessness”—for that penultimate confirmation of innocence, of coherence, of legibility, for the moment when speech holds no risk—“the weight of that silence will choke us.”

Songs of solidarity and unapologetic love offer blueprints beyond the empathy D’Souza critiques, and a way out of the deafening silence now twelve months and counting.