Dear Reader,
In May 2020, almost a year ago, the George Floyd protests began in Minneapolis, Minnesota then quickly spread across and outside the boundaries of the United States. We watched as protests took hold in other countries, as people around the world rallied against police brutality, white supremacy, and corrupt systems of governance.
Bryan took part in a protest in Ann Arbor, Michigan while noting the disparate response of law enforcement against protestors in his hometown of Chicago. Joumana, like many Iraqis inside and outside the country, watched nervously, excitedly, proudly as Iraq’s October Revolution took hold. Then, civil demonstrators were teargassed, kidnapped, and murdered by government and militia forces as they created art and music, shared their demands on social media, and chanted “We want a homeland. We want a homeland.”
As poets, we both began to wonder how art would respond to such moments, how art resists and continues to resist injustice. We wondered: what can resistance look like when one can’t be involved in protests or uprisings in the traditional sense? In what ways do people revolt in their ordinary lives, in what way is art itself resistance, and how does it inevitably fail? We became interested in work that complicates, and helps grow, our understanding of these moments of revolt.
We are excited for you to read reflections from Yazan ElHaj whose wrenching essay explores his life as a writer and translator in Syria where electricity has become one of the arbiters of daily life, from Cynthia Oka’s fiction which renders the sweeping tale of an abusive boss at a non-profit who is held accountable by her staff and fired, Sam Preminger’s evocative poems which document the collagic imagery and passion of the Portland protests, and Santiago Vargas Cárdenas photographs taken in the heart of the #21N protests in Medellín, Colombia. Engaging with these works has expanded our definition of resistance; resistance is abstract, indirect, singular, non-linear. Anyone can resist. Everyone can resist.
We are grateful to MQR Editor Khaled Mattawa for giving us the opportunity to work on this project and H. R. Webster for providing crucial support throughout the publication process. We want to sincerely thank Annesha Mitha, Michael Weinstein, and Logan Lane for their assistance as this year’s team of guest editors for MQR Mixtape. Finally, we would like to thank our contributors for sharing their work. We hope you enjoy!
Joumana Altallal, Bryan Byrdlong | Guest Editors