sister sylvester

Thank-you so much for the news that Drinking Brecht has been chosen for the Breakthrough in Storytelling award. Thank-you for the time you’ve taken to consider the work. I am unable to accept at the present time, because of the actions of Columbia University over the past year and a half, and specifically over the past month with the abduction of Mahmoud Khalil from the Columbia campus, the termination of visas and degrees of pro-Palestinian students; and the current boycott of Columbia University.

I went to Columbia School of the Arts for graduate school and I taught in the academic writing program. I loved my time there, and so this award, in different circumstances, would be a greatly appreciated full-circle moment. But if I had been at Columbia during last year, I hope I would have been brave enough to be part of that encampment. I hope I would have been fighting for and with the students who were arrested, against an institution that allowed police to brutally attack its own students, and now has allowed the abduction of the people they should have been protecting.

One of the collaborators of this work is a current doctoral candidate at Columbia. They have asked that their name be removed from this statement for safety reasons, but have expressed their full support. They wrote:

‘The recent abduction of a student from campus is not an isolated incident—it echoes broader patterns of state violence and institutional complicity seen globally and historically. As someone whose background is marked by a history of disappearances, government repression, and the use of fear as a tactic to silence dissent, I feel a deep personal resonance with what is happening now. The word 'example' haunts me—it recalls how institutions make examples of individuals to maintain control. I think of my peer, Mahmoud Khalil, who explicitly asked the university for protection. If Columbia could not protect him, who will this institution protect? I am grateful that this work has been recognized. Still, I cannot accept this award under these conditions,’

Drinking Brecht, which you have chosen for this award, is a work about the weaponization of science under fascism. The work ends by asking the audience to consider the uses of science by Israel in the ongoing occupation and genocide in Palestine. It is not possible to accept an award for this work from an institution that has prioritized its relationship with a fascist government over its duty of care to students. 

The projects that receive this award are included in an online archive. In lieu of inclusion in the archive we’ve requested that the Bertolt Brecht Poem ‘The Sign Of The Tortoise’ be included. The poem is about the power of many small acts of resistance that can happen from within institutions.

The Digital Storytelling Lab and the students from the School of The Arts that choose the recipients of this award are not the university administration.  We are grateful that they have chosen to link to this statement from the award website, and we look forward to inclusion in the archive when the University responds to the demands of its students, and of the current boycott of Columbia University.

Free Mahmoud Khalil. Free Leqaa Kordia.Free Mohsen Mahdawi. Free Palestine.

sister sylvester