This short text was read aloud as a teach-out to those gathered at the Apartheid Off Campus encampment at Newcastle University on 3rd May 2024.
Hello. My name is Matt Colquhoun. I’m an adoptee, a writer and currently a philosophy PhD student here at Newcastle. I’m researching the politics of family abolition and its centrality to a lot of philosophy that emerged around the revolutionary fervour of May 1968 in France and elsewhere, as well as the neoliberal reaction that came afterwards, and what we must do about it today.
It has been a strange time to engage in this research the last six months, as the spirit of ’68 is once again in the air today – perhaps more so than any point in my lifetime, and my first year as an undergraduate was defined by Occupy, the student fees protests, as well as Israel’s assault on Gaza in 2011. But I don’t think many of us have seen anything like this before – not since the 1960s.
Many statements released by encampments just like this one, over in the US, have referenced ’68 repeatedly. A viral anonymous letter published by students at Yale and Columbia is notable for the ways it harks back to campus occupations from that time explicitly, reflecting on their problems and their power. Because there is, of course, a tension felt in occupying to protest an occupation. But this is part of the spirit of that moment. Nothing dies from its contradictions, and the tactics used against us are no less available for us to take up and use against the oppressor. We occupy this space to disrupt the lives of the powerful, just as our own lives have been disrupted. We resist as others suppress. We use our power to reject the power used against us. We act to challenge the ways we ourselves are acted upon. This is all necessary work.
The challenge – which Israel itself has failed to address for 75 years – is how to act in ways that do not reproduce the horrors that have been enacted against us; how we disrupt power that tells us how to live, and instead produce other forms of living, which are more just but do not replicate the enclosures we are otherwise forced into.
A politics of family abolition is essential here, although it may not appear as such from a first glance. But so-called ‘traditional family values’ are the bedrock of social oppression, and for many writing in 1968, the family was understood as the primary mechanism of social reproduction – that is, not just biological reproduction, but the reproduction of subjectivities.
These arguments were not new, even in 1968. The family has long been understood as that most basic form of living-together that defines our sense of communality for the rest of our lives, but power’s shaping of the family-form also has much to answer for. Friedrich Engels, for example, in his book The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, writes the following:
The first class opposition that appears in history coincides with the development of the antagonism between man and woman in monogamous marriage, and the first class oppression coincides with that of the female sex by the male … [T]ogether with slavery and private wealth, it opens the period that has lasted until today in which every step forward is also relatively a step backwards, in which prosperity and development for some is won through the misery and frustration of others.
The family, in being that most basic and seemingly universal form of social life, is also the beating heart of capitalist reaction, and it is appealed to everywhere today, across our attempts to escape the categorical repressions of race, class, and gender. The family, then, must be thought otherwise if we are to rethink our social structures in general, because, as Engels again writes, the family is “the cellular form of civilized society, in which the nature of the oppositions and contradictions fully active in that society can be already studied”.
This sort of politics shines an uncomfortable light on how many have been discussing the horrors in Gaza, appealing to Western notions of family life, and so I would like to offer you a provocation here. In speeches I have heard delivered around the world, I hear so many appeals made to disrupted motherhood, as if it were mothers who felt these horrors most palpably. But I think this is a misstep. I say this not to diminish or disregard that horror, but when we defer to disruptions of parenthood, we risk ignoring what is all the more pressing about the situation in Gaza, which will define the future of Palestinian life for generations. It is the experiences of children themselves.
What will define the future of Palestine, then, is not the Palestinian family, since so many families have already been obliterated, but rather the orphans left behind, who desperately require far more expansive forms of care than those otherwise given by immediate relatives. This is what has already defined Palestinian life for so long. We all know that the Palestinians are a terrifying “young” people – not in terms of their history, but quite literally. “In Palestine, the median age of the population was 19.6 years in 2023,” writes Aaron O’Neill, “meaning that almost half of the total population is comprised of children.” It was this fact led Ted Chaiban, speaking as the deputy chief of UNICEF in January this year, to describe Israel’s so-called war on Hamas as explicitly a “war on children.”
Those who wander parentless are where our attentions must be focussed, not simply because children are so vulnerable, but because they require forms of care that may be unimaginable to many of us here, who cannot imagine a life lived outside the bounds of families we know and love. Indeed, in deferring to motherhood, we risk resting a pro-Palestinian politics on our own lack of imagination, on our inability to think the family otherwise, which is not, in fact, a luxury that the Palestinian people have for themselves at the moment.
Speaking as an adoptee, who has felt the pain of being displaced from one family to then be raised by another, we all too often ignore, even in this country, the difficulties experienced by individuals who, for whatever reason, find themselves estranged from a point of origin. It is not an experience that defines childhood alone, but the whole of life. It is an experience that makes moving through the world so much more difficult, as we contend with the disruption of a lineage, without one clear example to follow. But this is not to say that we must acquire new mother- or father-figures for ourselves; such difficulties can, on the contrary, allow us to think social life completely differently.
We know this, perhaps subconsciously. Orphans and adoptees are everywhere in popular culture. We look to Peter Pan, Harry Potter, Oliver Twist, Little Orphan Annie, E.T. the Extraterrestrial, Luke Skywalker, and so many orphaned animated animals, treasuring their examples, the essential nature of their difference, the necessity of their wandering through social structures from which they have been displaced, changing and adapting all social enclosures they encounter. But despite our literary love of the orphaned child, we ignore the plight of those who actually live through these difficulties in reality, or otherwise pity them for not experiencing the care and security we otherwise take for granted. This must change, for the future of Palestine, for its orphaned people, but also for the rest of us. It is a situation that demands a sense of solidarity that goes beyond the normative becoming of the Oedipal family. We must proceed otherwise to the family, for the sake of all those who do not have the luxury of its narrow example. We must acquire, not only a new social consciousness, but in the words of two central thinkers from May ’68, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, we must also acquire an “orphan-consciousness”.
It is a sort of consciousness we have all had at one point. Who among us did not once dream of our own solitude as children, leaving the family home, navigating the world in ways that ignore social norms we were not yet beholden to? As Deleuze and Guattari write, “children don’t live as our adult memories would have us believe … Memory yells ‘Father! Mother!’” But childhood is not lived entirely within the family enclosure; it is lived, they continue,
in the highest intensities that the child constructs with his sisters, his pal, his projects and his toys, and all the nonparental figures through which he deterritorialises his parents every chance he gets … in his activities, as in his passions, he is simultaneously the most deterritorialised and deterritorializing figure – the Orphan.
I do not have the time here today to run you through my own recommendations for working through such a situation, for constructing an orphan-consciousness. My thesis is too long, and it is also presently unfinished. But I would like to end here by giving you an example to explore in your own time. Read the work of Jean Genet. His final book, Prisoner of Love, describes his experiences with Palestinian refugees in the 1970s, but is sadly underread today, as is his work in general.
Genet is interesting because he was, for a time, France’s most treasured orphan. He lived a difficult life. He began his life as a thief, stealing to survive, fending only for himself, and was later imprisoned. But in prison, he began to write. Jean-Paul Sartre once wrote that
Genet began to write in order to affirm his solitude, to be self-sufficient, and it was the writing itself that, by virtue of its problems, gradually led him to seek readers. As a result of the virtues – and the inadequacies – of words, this onanist transformed himself into a writer.
Genet himself may have disagreed, however. He did not let even literature imprison him, and although he was a darling of the French intellectual bourgeoisie, or at least of its most culturally radical individuals, he continued to wander. He turned to reportage, and through an affirmation of his solitude, he found not only readers but a community, a paradoxical community, a community of orphans. He travelled to America and lived with the Black Panthers; he travelled to Lebanon and lived with the Fedayeen. He embraced a madness he felt in his orphaning, but attached it to others mad like him, others orphaned by war, by history, by oppression. All of those cast out, in one way or another.
Jean Genet must be read, not because he understands the Palestinian plight as well as they themselves do, but because he is a Western nomad who was so deeply immersed in a solidarity without similarity. He is an example to those of us who are not Palestinian, who cannot yet imagine – not really – the demands that their defiance makes on the forms of life we otherwise think are universal, ineluctable, natural. Genet is a thinker of disidentity politics, you could say, who does not turn to markers of identity that might make him more recognisable to power, but to the forces of imagination that become all the more necessary when one is an absolute outcast, without family, without institution, without statehood.
It is of course integral, in these moments, that we listen to Palestinian voices themselves. We should pay great attention to their needs and desires. But at the same time, we should recognise that not all of us are Palestinians. We do not share their experiences, nor do we help our cause or theirs when we graft their traumas onto the solidities of our lives, which we cannot imagine living outside of. This phrase, “We are all Palestinians,” expresses a fundamental solidarity, but we must also not dismiss the particularity of their situation. Most of us are not orphans; we have not experienced these horrors; this repetitive displacement. We must start from a solidarity that is without similarity, a solidarity that pays attention to and extends across difference. It is only then – when we are finally aware of how different their lives already are, following this genocide in Gaza and the ones that have preceded it, in ways that cannot be grafted onto our familial sympathies – that we may come to develop an even more forceful solidarity, an “orphan-consciousness”, allowing us to give up even those most fundamental examples of how our lives must be lived, and join the Palestinian people in first imagining, then building, worlds that must be more radically different from our own.
Thank you.
Free Palestine.
