My friend's article, One body, one fight: the hunger strike as abolitionist praxis went out in Shado Mag a couple of weeks ago. It opens with:
The visits hall of HMP Bronzefield is a place of dizzying contradictions. Leaflets celebrating neurodiversity sit next to airlock doors. Colourful, kid-friendly posters hang above laminated sheets specifying that prisoners and visitors may hug exactly twice per visit. Face and fingerprint scans must be taken before visitors can buy their oat lattes at the Vita Nova cafe – staffed, naturally, by prisoners, paid under £1 an hour.
These securitised pleasantries disorient me every time I go to visit my friend Amu Gib, who is on Day 25 of a collective prisoners’ hunger strike to demand both justice and freedom for Palestine solidarity protestors and an end to the UK operations of Elbit Systems, Israel’s largest weapons manufacturer.
Whenever I pass through the hall, I think about the words ‘care and custody’, a slick bit of alliteration used in the branding of several British private custodial service providers. Care: warm, tender, intimate. Custody: stern, authoritative, immovable. A neat encapsulation of both the hall’s jangling aesthetics and the bind within which British prisoners find themselves – held by chains of custody, with no one but their jailers to turn to for care.
Over the past 25 days, however, six hunger strikers – Qesser Zuhrah, Heba Muraisi, Jon Cink, T Hoxha and Kamran Ahmed, alongside Amu – all incarcerated for allegedly acting in solidarity with Palestine, have given the lie to those tidy words. There is no ‘care’ in a prison system that allows those locked within it to starve. There is no possibility of ‘custody’ – of containment – for the unruly bodies that, every day, are communicating across walls and borders the irrepressibility of resistance and the utter failure of incarceration as a technology of social death.
The hunger strike does not only indict the UK’s incarceration without trial of 33 pro-Palestine protesters. It indicts the global carceral system that entangles both Britain’s lock-ups and the occupation-administered dungeons of Palestine. In heightening the contradictions and refusing the logics of incarceration, the hunger strike is a form of abolitionist praxis – one which demands both the attention and action of those of us who move freely outside.
There's also now a toolkit with a list of different tips on how to get involved with publicising the hunger strike. There is also one for people based in the US, which can also be repurposed for anyone in any other country (very important - please share).
It's jarring to go into places where people don't actually know about the strike at all, even though they're ostensibly plugged in. And then there's David Lammy pretending to hear about it for the first time from Kamran Ahmed's sister Shahmina: "In the UK?!" he asks, remembering to widen his eyes in mock surprise. Perhaps that's also the facial expression he will make when he one day gets his comeuppance.