The Nerve To Come Back

I thought about the distance between the people who want you dead and the people who want you gone, vanished through deportation or a more mundane form of silencing. There might not be as much distance between those two groups as we’d like there to be, especially if their members are loud, have power, and are unafraid to publicly fantasize about material violence. The distance between both populations lessens even more in cases where someone seems to be getting gone and then has the nerve to come back—to be dismissed as a loser and then win a primary, or to be jailed for pro-Palestinian speech and, when freed, speak up for Palestine at the first opportunity possible.

Hanif Abdurraqib