The Silence
Shary Boyle | November 2024
I write this because Jewish resistance teaches us never again, Indigenous warriors teach us land back, Black leaders teach us silence is complicity, and Palestinian poets write when hope of survival is gone. I write this for my Jewish Canadian friends whom I love dearly, who live with the imprinted trauma of pogrom and Holocaust and the weight of benefitting from stolen Indigenous land - like all of us who settled here. I hold in my heart the Jewish voices for peace, who carry the painful dream of a safe homeland, poisoned by apartheid and vicious wars in their name. May all suffering end.
In 2019 I made an oversized, head-spinning sculpture called White Elephant, with the intention of encouraging white people to think and talk openly about Whiteness. What we have learned about white supremacy, colonialism, and the oppression Canada is capable of, is difficult to acknowledge and speak about. In white, polite Canadian society, it has been the elephant in the room.
In 2013 I created an exhibition about silence for the 55th Venice Biennial. Music for Silence questioned universal experience beyond words, wondered if shared inner worlds are possible, and asked if we are ever truly alone. Alongside these poetic solitudes, I explored the kind of silence we think of as a verb. To be silenced. Silencing.
The light I have shone on uncomfortable truths is small, but the list of artists who have risked their careers or lives to reveal and confront oppression is long.
The artist group Pussy Riot has operated in and out of Putin’s Russia for decades, risking imprisonment, beatings, and death. Ai Wei Wei has circumvented Xi Jinping’s authority to do the same. Mi’kmaq songwriter Willie Dunn wrote the evergreen anthem I Pity the Country during a groundswell of violently suppressed Indigenous activism across North America in 1971. His song was covered with equal relevance by Anishinaabe writer, academic, activist and musician Leanne Betasamosake Simpson fifty years later. After an assassination attempt in 1978, Jamaican singer Bob Marley risked his life again at the One Love Concert in near-civil war Kingston, calling the two rival political leaders to the stage to join their hands above his head. Filmmaker Mohammad Rasoulof completed 2024’s The Seed of the Sacred Fig while in hiding from the Iranian government seeking his arrest. Charlie Chaplin released the Great Dictator in the early days of WWII, five years before Jewish set designer Alexandre Trauner and composer Joseph Kosma risked their lives working undercover in Nazi-occupied France on the 1945 film Les Enfants du Paradis. Over forty-five Palestinian writers, artists, and cultural heritage activists have been killed since the start of Israel’s war on Gaza, including renowned artist Fathi Ghaben, and writer and professor Refaat Alareer who authored the widely shared resistance poem, If I Must Die.
Michael Manley, Bob Marley and Edward Seaga at the One Love Concert, Jamaica, 1978
Grief stuns us. Lies isolate us. Honesty, compassion, courage, dialogue, and self-awareness clarifies and connects. The role of artists in societies- the poets, musicians, dancers, image makers, actors, writers- is to keep our minds and hearts open, on the ground, in the moment. Artist’s witness and speak truth, document beauty, question authority. We are the torch-keepers of imagination, which enables us to create alternatives, take risks and engage what is difficult. To craft solace for pain.
We are trained by our work to embrace contradiction and complexity, and importantly: to withstand discomfort. We hold a mirror to our current moment by archiving our inner realities, our emotional and intellectual responses to the time we live in. We are non-conformists and activists by nature as we embody creation, and liberation. We keep the flame and seed alive to come back to, after destruction and war.
Since Hamas’s vicious attack on October 7, 2023, Israel’s government and nationalists have defined public criticism of the slaughter and starvation of Palestinian civilians as ‘anti-Semitic hate’. Propelled by a tribal sense of existential threat, some organizations of Jewish faith are threatening economic, social and legal repercussions to silence public critics of the Israeli government. Vocal support for Palestinian rights to life, safety and land have been branded as racist threats against the Jewish people. International, Christian-based governments and media have adopted this definition of anti-Semitism. Arts organizations are withdrawing support for artists who are critical of Israel’s military actions. The fear of being accused of anti-Semitism has cast a frightened, silent chill between colleagues, friends, and families.
work in progress, 2024 by Shary Boyle
Twelve hundred Jewish people were murdered and stolen as hostages by Hamas on October 7, 2023. By October 2024 over forty-two thousand Palestinian people had been murdered by the Israeli Defense Force. Oxfam reports that more women and children have been killed in Gaza by the IDF over the past year than the equivalent period of any other world conflict over the past two decades. I will not claim to argue the complex history of Israel’s statehood or ‘right to exist’. What I am writing about is the current mass murder and destruction of the Palestinian people by a country that my country is allied with. Israel is a democratic nation that is supposed to share our values, whose tanks and bombs my taxes subsidize.
There wasn’t a moment in October 2023 to breath or cry for the victims of the brutal Hamas attack before the Israel military began its deadly retaliation. The crucial space to publicly focus on, share and support Jewish grief was tragically stolen by a grotesque military response. The immediate IDF slaughter of tens of thousands of impoverished Palestinian civilians, without end, answer or consequence, has so struck the conscience of the world that global citizens have revolted against this war.
So-called democracies like United States and Canada are using taxpayer money without consent to supply mass weapons to an ally, permitting them to destroy innocent civilians and their life-sustaining infrastructure. Anyone with a stable moral centre that values human life knows this is wrong. The toxic pressure for North Americans to silently ignore occupation, ethnic cleansing and land annexation by an ally is erupting into political chaos, and further damaging faith in our democratic systems.
Canadians feel the Israel/Palestine conflict doubly, as this country was also built on land taken by violent expansion against the will of those living here. The repercussions of Indigenous genocide haunt us today. Just as Canada has real work waiting to heal our painful roots and ongoing inner conflicts, so does Israel.
For the first time in my experience, Canadian academics, artists, curators, activists, and students risk losing their jobs, reputations, and relationships by criticizing the deadly actions of a military or State. Sharing this essay risks my livelihood, and deeply meaningful friendships with beloved Jewish people in my life. Anti-Semitism is a real and violent force. As is anti-Muslim or any racism. No harm is justified against Jewish people by criticizing Israel’s military actions. Pro-Palestinian is not Anti-Jewish. I refuse that equation.
2024 Instagram posts by an art collector on the Curatorial Committee of the Art Gallery of Ontario
I share my words here, after my original draft was outright rejected for publication by a journal for philanthropists and the non-profit sector. I want to talk about the destructive power of tribalism, nationalism, and capitalism. This is about censorship.
I stand against racist, anti-Muslim and anti-Jewish hate. Canada is not allied with Hamas, and my taxes are not funding their violence. No Palestinians are threatening my right to publicly criticize or protest Hamas. I am free to detest Hamas methods publicly, without repercussion.
Let us reflect on the North Americans of the 1940’s who stayed quiet when they heard rumours of what was happening to European Jews. Imagine for a moment, what is set in motion by silencing artists now who openly protest war. Russian, Chinese and North Korean citizens have lived that reality for generations. In this era of collective powerlessness in the face of corrupt world leadership during crushing planetary problems, to persecute grassroot voices is to openly court a new dark age.
In October 2023, Wanda Nanibush, Anishinaabe-kwe writer, activist, and the first Indigenous Curator at the Art Gallery of Ontario, silently left her position at the museum, after her longstanding public support of Palestinian liberation prompted a complaint letter from Israel Museum & Arts (Canada IMAC); a group of cultural philanthropists who support the AGO. The AGO is mid-campaign to raise funds for a building expansion. So Nanibush’s celebratory work at the museum was quickly scrubbed from their walls and website, and her social media accounts disappeared. Wanda Nanibush, an Anishinaabe woman in her own territory, was one of the Art Gallery of Ontario’s honoured hosts. She was hired under the premise of ‘decolonizing the museum’. The details of her departure have never been made public, the usual hallmark of a Non-Disclosure Agreement. The AGO has refused to engage this situation in open public dialogue. Silencing Nanibush’s Indigenous, anti-colonial voice is wrong: historically, and now.
The Story of Jane Doe, Random House of Canada, 2003. Drawing by Shary Boyle
Sexual violence writer, feminist, educator and activist “Jane Doe” is an Honorary Doctor from the University of Ottawa. In June 2024 she had her almost thirty-year annual guest lecture on sexual assault cancelled by UOttawa’s Dean of Law based on a defamatory shadow accusation of anti-Semitism. New generations of legal scholars have been robbed of Doe’s wisdom and voice, due to these exact words from her Oct.11th, 2023 lecture on consent (paragraph included below for context):
“Rape is as old as man, as old as war. In fact, it is a tool and bounty of war historically and currently. It is an act of occupation of female identified person's bodies, a violent attempt to rewrite their identities and the trajectories of their lives without their consent. Indigenous nations did not consent to becoming part of this county. African people and nations did not consent to slavery. The rape of Black and Indigenous women was a key weapon in both barbarisms, and the crime continues to be committed against those same women at alarming rates - in our homes, at work, on the streets, on campus and in the media - social and otherwise. Palestinians did not consent when the US and British forces gave their land to the State of Israel in 1948, and Jewish people did not consent to the Holocaust and the genocide they have experienced.”
Through a Freedom of Information Act request, Doe learned of an organized campaign by Jewish University of Ottawa alumni, students and staff directed towards the Faculty of Law, demanding her dismissal for that single sentence. The alumni lobbyists pressured the President of the university when Doe was not immediately fired, as shown in this email excerpt:
“…I’d like to reiterate that I am extremely disappointed in the way this has been handled by the Faculty of Law. These events have prompted discussions amongst my other UOttawa alumni as to whether we can continue to support UOttawa both financially and in reputation.”
Their threats were effective. Doe was dismissed for her simple, honest words- successfully silencing a woman who has devoted her life to empowering rape survivors and addressing systemic oppression.
I believe in Jewish safety and life. I believe in Arab safety and life. There is no black or white. The hierarchies and binaries of our world are killing us.
unverified Banksy
In 2024, leaders across the world who identify as victims wage rapacious, vengeful atrocities against their neighbours, in the name of ‘security’ and land. We must hold the complicated truth that one can be a victim, and an oppressor. And that our dangerous capacity for tribal bias applies to every human identity on our abused, suffering planet. As we cry out against Russia’s military assault on Ukraine, and Iran’s brutal military actions against its own citizen critics and protestors, we also cry out against funding an allied nation’s border expansions and deadly oppression of their neighbour.
By protesting IDF’s destruction and annexation of Palestine one is rejecting an inequality that has become grotesque. War is about land, power, and wealth. Governments have been manipulating the common public through fear mongering, cultural identity, and religious loyalties to soldier their wars since the dawn of time. The only way to stop the ancient violent cycle of Us vs Them is to soften our iron fist around identity and nationalism.
Centuries of oppressed peoples have given their lives for the term “racist” and “anti-Semite” to hold serious disapprobation in our society. We cannot allow the sanctity of those terms to be used as a blunt-force instrument to silence those critical of military violence. No lives are worth more than others. The Jewish intellectuals who celebrated cultural and artistic expression and shaped my thinking taught me never again: for anyone.
If we don’t speak up against what we know is morally wrong, history will judge us.
Wealthy, influential donors are changing the course of our politics, social reality, and history. As they always have, regardless of their racial or religious identity. Donor influence affects the ability of artists and activists to speak truth and publicly imagine alternatives to the dominant narrative.
When it comes to private or corporate philanthropy, on whose generosity our publicly tax-subsidized Canadian cultural institutions are dependent: what exactly are the limits of interference?
Gott Mit Uns series, by Georg Grosz, 1920’s
Chilling political pressure can be exerted by boards stacked with philanthropists, organized lobbyists of a privileged or corporate class, or by influential private funders. The issue of ‘Pro-Palestine’ silencing has become so aggressive that CARFAC National and curatorial collective Aisle 4 are currently surveying those in the Canadian art sector who have experienced professional consequences, or have been pressured to sign NDA’s due to speaking out about the war on Gaza.
If a private patron or group donates to a publicly funded museum or university operating budget, have they also bought the right to direct that institution’s policies or programs according to their political preferences? And if philanthropists threaten to retract promised funding, does that exchange happen in a transparent manner, so the public can understand the relationships and reasons? Most decisions in the boardrooms and backrooms of government and cultural institutions happen privately, away from the eyes or knowledge of the public. Many are hidden by the signing of NDA’s. Yet the effects of these decisions most profoundly affect the health and freedom of the public, whom those very institutions exist to serve.
Artists, educators, and culture-workers are calling for the funders of public arts and culture, the government of Canada, the Boards and Deans of public institutions and universities, and the media, to enforce strict limitations on donor interference, and nationalist propaganda, and to respect and safeguard our voices.
I have a Canadian passport, but I am an artist first. I am a Canadian and will criticize Canada’s violent colonial origins, land theft and ongoing oppressions. I have a moral obligation to protest state-sanctioned violence if my taxes fund it. Publicly voicing a belief that Palestinians deserve to live free and healthy lives on their own land is not anti-Semitism. Our thinking is wrong when we identify entire populations as our enemies to justify the slaughter of children, hospitals, schools, and mass starvation. In this conflict, one group of people are afraid of mass murder, the other group of people are being murdered en masse.
Silencing the truth will not make it go away.
To be truly alive we need to speak, dance, sing and paint our conscience freely. Artists will talk of ethics, injustice, and of moral injury. We will publicly protest war and violence. We will say no to supremacy, and yes to collaboration and creation, as the opposite of suspicion and apathy. We must communicate joy and resistance, for the loving sake of all, and for our planets spiritual and bodily survival.
Rosa Luxemburg by RedWantsCandy