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 was a student at Columbia, and so under other circumstances this award would be a greatly appreciated full-circle moment. But I came here on a student visa, and have stayed here on a greencard.  If I had been at Columbia during the 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 want to add: ‘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.’

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. I’m grateful that they have chosen to link to this statement from the award website, and take it as an act of hope, and solidarity with them, that this is not a refusal, but a postponement - I look forward to accepting the award when the University administration prioritizes the safety of its students, stands up to this administration, and meets the conditions of the boycott.

The recipients of this award are included in an online archive, as a way of maintaining a record, and creating a history of these new, often ephemeral, ways of telling stories. Israel explicitly targets places where cultural knowledge are held in both Gaza and the West Bank - universities, libraries, cultural institutions. And the current US administration is endangering stores of knowledge and memory, with the takeover of the National Archive, the attacks on universities, the purging of libraries, the destruction of public records. And so in lieu of inclusion in the archive we’ve requested that the site host the Bertolt Brecht poem ‘The Sign Of The Tortoise’. It’s a poem about the power of many small acts of resistance that can happen from within institutions.

No business as usual in a genocide. 

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

Free Palestine.

sister sylvester