I read entries 2300-2400 before my shaky voice gave out. No classroom carries that many children.
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The names of dead children were just names. No elaboration, no photos, an austere list of Arabic transliterations as a small courtesy to those of us who only spoke English. We read them across hours of silent attention while on a symbolic hunger strike, demanding that the Singapore government stop funding genocide, hold Israel to legal and political accountability, and to stop persecuting pro-Palestine solidarity. Every week across October, by then the second anniversary of Israel’s intensified, genocidal military campaign against Gaza, a new group of strikers would take over in a room filled with blankets, poetry, and electrolytes, protesting,over livestream, Singaporean complicity in Israel’s genocide across Palestine, billions of dollars in arms sales and investments and cultural exchange.
While Singaporean ministers claim that sanctions would not stop the war and that the country remains a small player in world diplomacy, it continues to parade Israeli drones every national day; the prominent three-towered casino complex on its postcards designed by occupation architect Moshe Safdie and owned by Zionist superdonor Las Vegas Sands. I could go on, but people have elaborated on those connections since the genocide began and long before. Groups of citizens have been gathering to meet their Members of Parliament demanding an end to Israeli ties; most of them were directed to emails with stock replies, or ignored altogether. In February last year, more than 70 people walked to the Istana, the office of the Singaporean Prime Minister, with letters urging diplomatic and economic sanctions. The government responded only by charging three organizers with illegal public assembly; the 40 students who tried the same in June received police investigations and nothing else. Singapore seems to recognize meticulous research of its own guilt only when it threatens to occupy public space, becomes an unruly, spectacular presence of watermelon umbrellas and protest T-shirts directly visible in the heart of the city, outside of labyrinthine feedback channels that evaporate dissent.
The haunting simplicity of names takes up space by refusing elaboration. They deny the government the pleasure of a request, the vulnerability of an imploration, look, please do this for us, this is why. While we read them, one after another, stopping to catch our breaths or to pass on the list in front of a projected candle and a livestream camera, each articulated name demands their own attention as an incontrovertible statement of loss, deserving of grief for their own sake. One cannot argue against a dead child. One can only hide their death, look away too quickly before guilt kicks in and hope everyone else would do the same. But in that moment, the names must be heard.
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The names of dead children try to become more than just names when a financial analyst a few years older than me takes the mic. She tells the crowd she will imagine what the children’s lives are like. Her imagined annotations to the list of names take the form of questions: Did he like the color blue? Did she enjoy soccer? And, for a pair of siblings, did they have each other when they died? She chokes up. A moment of silence punctured by sobs, a few more names, more silence. The rest of the list goes without commentary, their unlived stories inarticulable under the weight of loss.
The names of dead children compel an intimate archival encounter. Historian Saidiya Hartman, reckoning with an archive of enslavement that remembers lives only at the moment of their disappearance, writes about the loss of a marginalized life disappearing from history, of encounters with power so overwhelmingly destructive they prevent witnesses from another time or place from ever recovering what their stories could have been. There, reading the names of dead children and pressing our imagination to its limits, a similar kind of loss strangles us too. We yearn to know whatever we could about these children, speculate their places of birth, their blood relations from a shared patronymic, yet all these details that would have been matter-of-fact in a place not under siege are obviated altogether from history. The incomplete encounter with names recorded only for their death sharpens our loss for what we cannot know, for lives that, in the most literal sense, will not be lived.
The names of dead children are prayers, says a teacher in a hijab who brought everyone on strike embroidery canvases and needles. She reads them, each string of words in Arabic a prayer I do not understand. They are spoken again and, as the echoes die out, are lost to the air again.
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The names of dead children rang in my ears when, somewhere along the strike, I started questioning what it was all for. I started organizing for Palestine at my university encampment, while I was studying abroad: it was a beautiful April blooming with pear blossoms and newly unfurling leaves, Palestinian flags, picnic mats, boxes upon boxes of desserts donated in solidarity. Day after day we took over the lawn in our keffiyehs, reading poetry, rushing our finals assignments, and dreaming up visions of the future, of queer rights and climate justice and liberation for all. On Passover at sunset the Jewish students passed around plates of matzo and led prayers for peace; at night, we all cheered when someone’s relative in the West Bank announced over video that, seeing students rise up from the heart of empire, he was confident Palestine would be free in his lifetime.
A year and a half later, the binder of names.
When the livestream microphone came to me, I said I joined the strike because I thought that if a government carrying out its duties in the name of its electorate wilfully continued to collaborate with evil, then the least I could do was to refuse complicity, to demand an otherwise and even if none seemed likely. The teacher, with whom I became quick friends, said that she’s under no delusion the government wouldn’t listen; she did this so she wouldn’t be changed, herself, by the island-wide anhedonia that enabled Palestinian suffering. We were placing our bodies on the line as sites of political change, insisting our bodies become vehicles for a political vision the country we lived in tried to extinguish. We hoped refusing food while Palestine starved would quite literally embody that commitment.
I didn’t say I was used to hunger, used to starving myself. It’s difficult to say how or when it started, but at some point the dizzy hypoglycemic high became strangely addictive, a self-destructive indulgence proving I had control over my body, could make my head foggy and heart skip beats if nothing else. So when I woke up in the early morning, head dully aching, I thought the sleeplessness would be an old friend, and tried reading Palestinian accounts of hunger. What greeted me, instead of some first-world woman’s experiment in self-abnegation, were communities, families, ties of kinship pulled to breaking point by famine. I read about mothers who, dizzy and weak themselves, found their children crying from empty stomachs and not knowing what to do. Parents who are forced into impossible choices between feeding children or ageing, frail parents of their own. A father returned, crying and breadless, when Israeli soldiers at an aid point abruptly opened fire and the man next to him fell dead; he ran for miles in self-preservation before the shame and guilt of failing his fatherly duties set in. I realized even the deepest suffering I could give myself had none of the vicious, globally-funded machinery intent on the annihilation of a population, for which the astronomical pain and hunger of any person was unfeeling collateral damage.
A genocide meant death and dying on a scale my lonely, singular body could not start to hold. The next day, while I talked about political hope in front of the camera, I saw the pristine lens, the tungsten lighting of the studio, the blankets and wooden floors, and felt mildly absurd. I was beginning to fear none of this would do much in the face of so much violence, much as I couldn’t tell it to the livestream.
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The names of dead children were not the first time we did grief work. At the start of the year, a brief memorial made rounds on social media: a display of 124 empty shoes dotted the grass in front of a research building at the National University of Singapore, housing a collaborative institute with the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. The empty shoes represented the students killed in the genocide, together with a funeral shroud and an empty graduation scroll; each pair of shoes was donated by a Singaporean student and coupled with a name card, honoring a student in Gaza who did not live long enough to graduate. The empty shoes lay there for the duration of a photograph, their presence signifying more the absence of obliterated futures, the loss of the children who could easily have walked these shoes, before the installation was packed up and moved away to avoid vandalism laws. Only a trace of grief could remain, a second-order erasure.
The police responded by raiding the homes of those they suspected were involved and summoning them to an investigation the next day. I stepped out of my taxi to a buzzing crowd under a brilliant sun: people of every hair color, people I’d met, people I hadn’t, some busy in conversation, others shaking hands or finishing their lunch. Influencers and labor organizers broadcast the news all over social media, asking for people to support; it was the largest ever police accompaniment crowd, someone said. A physics student in a black T-shirt comes over and passes me a muffin; I was asked over and over again if I was okay. Hugs and more hugs; I checked on others investigated and they checked on me, how are you feeling over and over again. We walked together towards the station, overflowing from the sidewalk, without slogans or placards but a visible presence coalescing around each other in the aftermath of forbidden mourning.
Perhaps political grief is different from the sharp personal loss of a loved one. It does not have a singular face; it extends to any silhouette who could have filled those shoes, any name of a dead child filling up the roster. If grief supposes the presence of someone once loved, these spectacular, public articulations of mourning radically extend gestures of care in past tense to anyone falling victim to political violence. They become at once a statement that we have been complicit in a loss and an injunction that the same cannot happen again. We cannot approximate the intensity of a death, but acknowledging its incommensurable weight, its unknowable losses and obviated pain, forces another kind of grief and a new resolve.
Across the three weekends, more and more people showed up. Despite the closed invite list in anticipation of public assembly laws, the crowd grew each weekend, to strike, to help, or to watch. Climate organizers spoke on the ecological destruction the militarized genocide is responsible for; people squeezed into circles around giant sheets of paper, mapping Singaporean landmarks and their connections to Israel. On the last day of my strike we gathered at the roof looking over the city, smelling the onions from a neighboring kitchen and feeling the sun on our skin; we sat in a circle back indoors when the afternoon heat got too much, and talked about why we felt for people we’d never met. One of us just returned from dabke practice with a troupe in the West Bank, and together we danced to jubilant music despite hunger, 20-something pairs of legs tapping the floor in unison. It felt beautiful.
At the closing livestream, a fellow striker, a graduate student I’d been friends with, talks about Angela Davis. They quote her: I don’t know whether I would have survived had not movements survived, had not communities of resistance, communities of struggle survived. It is in collectivities that we find reservoirs of hope and optimism. They go on to say it’s been their privilege to share space with the people of Singapore who dream of a world free from violence, a world we have the power to build together. Shortly after we ended our relay strike, activists in the United Kingdom incarcerated for pro-Palestine direct action launched a hunger strike of a far larger scale across seventy-three days from their prison cells, stopping only after denying Israeli arms supplier Elbit Systems a billion-pound contract. Weeks later, a jury refused to convict their 24 comrades of destroying military research assets. Reading the news, thinking back to that room, I came to understand bearing witness from afar came with its own responsibility and power. We cannot understand the magnitude of death and destruction multiplied hundred-thousand fold. But our common failure to take on the unreckonable loss of a people enduring a genocide creates a more diffuse grief that binds us in its own way, a common recognition that what we cannot bear, we must not allow again. In our common grief, we find allies everywhere across Singapore and the world, and we have power to insist on an otherwise, however unreachable it may sometimes seem, where no more name would be added to any list of the untimely dead.
We did not finish reading the list of names, least of all bring any of them to life. But we did try, bringing our lips to each unfamiliar prayer, insisting they sound one more time. Wherever we go, the names of dead children stay with us.