Head-to-head with Palestine

A different view of convocation 2024

Convocation, 2024. Hot day. A million degrees. Hundreds packed into a single hall. Gowns touching the floor. Everyone was beautiful in their regalia, girls were adorned with glitter in their hair. Boys were stupidly charming. Parents were floating around with pride. And in the midst of all of that, a fenced-up pillowy yard with slogans of love and hatred in the background. What’s that behind the joyful family photos? Oh, right—the encampment. The one that seemed to never give in. Harrowing screams of children. Blood spilled like water, flowing without end since October 7, 2023.

On any given day that June, it was hard for many of my friends to wake up. Yes, it was their graduation and yes, they were beaming with pride and excitement, in utter disbelief that this day had finally come. For many, it seemed an impossibility to even be there, given the chances they had almost turned away, the reprieves they were given time and time again. University was a journey that started with a pen and paper, in their childhood rooms, dreaming of a distant land where freedom lay intertwined with self-discovery. They would print and cut out images of university campuses and glue them in their journals. Many filled their rooms and Pinterest accounts with posters of inspiring dorm room decorations. Yet the dreams of those kids lay in the palms of adults, as they always do.

That morning, students toed an uncomfortable line between happiness and misery. They were careful not to get too close to the fences. Careful not to see through the mist, or else it would show them its ugly teeth. For many, that’s all convocation was – a grey fog that wouldn’t lift itself over King’s College Circle’s usual soft grass. It was a dystopic moment for the likes of TV shows or The Hunger Games. It was a daunting reality painted over with extravagant costumes and smiles. Silence prevailed in the face of lies. Ammunition grazed our skin as we watched our friends and colleagues on their special day. Bullets of guilt flew overhead, but certainly not the right ones. Anger built up and weighed down the shoulders of students whose joyful day was, once again, stolen.

Anger was the most prevalent emotion of that day. The ones before hadn’t exactly been different, but they didn’t feel as unflinchingly disturbing. With horror in the background, all one could do was push apprehension away and focus hard on the foreground, full of flowers in blues and reds. It was funny and almost idiotic to sit and listen to promises made, of magnificent futures to be had, with family members gathered around a dinner table. Friends asked themselves under their breath—which family members were they talking about?

Colonialism and Western oppression are part of an unending war, one with no winners but millions upon millions of losers. For many of us growing up in Canada, systemic violence, or the cessation of one’s culture or religion, is not a foreign tale. Haunting the history books of Canadian children are the stories of residential schools, bleached white skin, and changed surnames. Nevertheless, eradication is an abstract subject to the Western child. It is merely one or two chapters in dusty bookshelves and often metaphysical. As though it never existed. Even if it did, it is etched in faraway corners, in a land that most will never visit or uncover. It goes unnoticed and never passes through the minds of children, certainly not the ones over here.

I believe “sobering” best describes those students and professors, who, for whatever reason, chose to wake up a tad bit early that morning. Unbeknownst to them were the yells that would overtake Meric Gertler’s speech and the waves of protest that travelled from one section of the convocation hall to the next. One student in a gas mask, Palestinian keffiyehs scattered everywhere, and a whole lot of noise for what sounded like a whole lot of nothing. Educational for sure. Our friends left those halls with diplomas in their hands, so grateful that it had finally ended. They weren’t quite sure what, but something was done: the ceremony and endless speeches. They had hoped for the end of another war, or another painful morning sun.