OtherNarratives is an initiative founded by four friends around their common love of books and film. But not any book or film: those that resist dominant discourses of power and injustice; that weave the beauty of poetry and image into the fabric of oppression until it unravels, thread by thread, knot by knot. Books and films that speak truth to power.

There are many issues and struggles in the world--what humanity is doing to our planet, our rivers, mountains, oceans, air, flora and fauna, commonly called ‘climate change', being perhaps the most pressing of all, as our very survival as a species depends on it; but no issue or struggle has been denied legitimacy with the same rage and brutality as the Palestinian struggle. None have been so brazenly disconnected from truth and justice than the 76 year-old colonization, ethnic cleansing and occupation of Palestine. And there is a connection between the withering away of our ecosystem and the systemic and systematic destruction of indigenous land and culture, not just in Palestine, but all over the world.

The Palestinian struggle for existence and self-determination has been the subject of a century-old campaign of disinformation, defamation and delegitimization. Racist discourses have represented Palestinians (Arabs and Muslims in general) as savages, terrorists, sub-humans who must be defeated in a battle of civilization against barbarism. The Palestinians’ legitimate resistance against a settler-colonial, ethno-centric project became shrouded in verbose terminology and mystifying concepts to justify their continued oppression and ethnic cleansing at the hands of a colonial enterprise created by the West, Israel.

In his seminal work of literary criticism, Orientalism, Edward Said exposes how Western literary and artistic representation of the Other—the Muslim, the Arab, the African, the Asian—as savage, irrational, lustful and vengeful, was part and parcel of its Imperialist project of subjugation and control. And in so doing, he masterfully showed the deep connection between art and literature and hegemonic structures of power.

In the 20th and 21st century, the Orientalist ideology remained firmly embedded in high-brow cultural productions, policy and academia, but now also expanded into the entertainment industry: in film, books, cartoons, the media. Mass media productions circulate the idea of the Arab and the Muslim as savage, fanatic, violent, of Arab women as submissive and lacking agency, of our societies as steeped in religious fundamentalism and a denial of peace and freedom.

For more than a century, colonial interplays of racist discourse and material and symbolic power have dominated the world’s understanding of the Palestinian struggle. Whilst other peoples were breaking the chains of colonial empires, the Palestinians found themselves in the stranglehold of a new, brutal ethnocentric and settler-colonial project that oppresses them and denies them their fundamental right to self-determination, day after day, to this day.

The on-going genocide in Gaza (we have passed the one-year mark), the ethnic cleansing of the Occupied West bank, as well as the risk of regional and even global war, have revealed that we are not yet in the postcolonial era, that colonization and western imperialism are still present, albeit via different, sometimes more pernicious and hidden channels. The genocide in Gaza, the continued Apartheid and Occupation of Palestine, and the turmoil in the entire Middle East, appear to the world as the nexus of an oppressive global system that refuses, for the moment, to let go.

It is time we push forward and elevate other voices. Our voices. It is time we raise our voices, and create spaces for our experiences, our subjectivities, our struggles. It is time we counter these dominant, racist, ethnocentric narratives. It is time we tell our stories, and create spaces for their diffusion. It is time, and it has begun, all over the world, including in Europe and the United States, where people have started to question these narratives and refuse to have their names and bodies used to justify crimes against humanity. A refusal and resistance in Western nations that are being systematically repressed and punished by the oppressive state apparatuses, creating an environment akin to the McCarthy era and revealing the cracks in their wavering democracies.

OtherNarratives inscribes itself in this emerging global, heterogenous, multi-faceted movement to topple these dominant narratives and create spaces for other voices to emerge and rise.

OtherNarratives is based on the idea that narratives influence the way we see the world and react to it, that symbolic representations shape our world and participate in the structuring of power relations and, finally, that to dismantle dominant narratives, other stories must be given the space  and opportunity to emerge.

Finally, there’s another power that resides in book and film: they tap into the universality of human experience, our interconnectedness, our shared goodness and aspirations for peace and kindness, our yearning for justice and equality. Palestine has put at the forefront what is wrong with our world, but it has also shown us a way forward: through collective action, shared values, independent critical thinking and a deep-rooted belief in justice, we can aim to make the world, and ourselves, better. No-one is free until everyone is free, and for as long as it takes.