EVERYDAY RESISTANCE
-by Luna Al-Mousli
Everyday Resistance has become a commodity. Especially in the art and cultural world, it is worn like a costume — a look to buy, a set of slogans memorized and dropped into conversations and presentations for credibility. Radical vocabularies are rehearsed until they become performance, stripped of urgency, followed by no action. This version of resistance circulates easily in the Global North, safe and decorative, another accessory to polish one’s progressive identity, to add “Activist” to their CV and post about it on social media. However, resistance cannot be reduced to aesthetics. For those of us whose lives are marked by war, exile, and colonial violence, resistance is not a style — it is survival carried in the body, anger that refuses to be extinguished, memory that insists on being passed down even when the world demands forgetting. It is the endurance of watching genocide live-streamed in Gaza, or as a Syrian, the heartbreak of seeing one dictatorship fall only to be replaced by another. It is the exhaustion of sending and receiving the same message, again and again: Are you ok? Is your family ok? My phone has learned this sentence as though it were a natural law — the only way people like me can begin a conversation.
No, I have not found rituals to cope with this reality. No routine shields me from the rage that rises every morning, or from the collapse of my body each time a passing virus forces me into bed for weeks. My body knows survival more intimately than I do. It inherited this mode of being from my mother and grandmother, who learned to live with brokenness. Forgetting might bring relief, but forgetting is not an option here.
This is why we all should no longer look for approval or recognition from the West. Too much time and energy have been wasted trying to prove our humanity — opening our homes, sharing our culture, explaining ourselves endlessly, contributing to their knowledge and careers, only to be dismissed. For me, it was like a toxic relationship: dressing like them, moving like them, internalizing their disdain until it became my own. But the West cannot be the measure of our worth.
Everyday resistance now means turning inward, to community. We need to reimagine the future together, without begging for permission to exist. That requires difficult conversations: about hierarchies, wars, and hostilities within our own communities; about internalized racism and class structures; about the prejudices that creep into family conversations unchallenged. Resistance without naming our own contradictions is incomplete.
We must educate ourselves with histories told from our own perspectives, not those curated by colonial powers. We must exchange more with each other — especially across art and culture — to expose the complicities of institutions, festivals, and fundings that hide their bloody traces behind progressive facades. True resistance is not performative activism that flashes across social media for a day. It is the slow, consistent work of care, accountability, and listening. It is refusing false solidarities, even when that means walking away.
Witnessing how things are developing, one truth is clear: a shift is needed. Every dream of a new world begins by admitting that we have been broken by the old. And oh, have we been broken. But out of this brokenness we must cultivate radical imagination. What do we mean when we chant Free Palestine, Free Sudan, Free Congo? What concrete steps follow those words? How do we learn from each other’s experiences, not only to resist but to build?
For me, resistance has become threefold. First, it is community. Liberation will not come from the West’s validation but from us confronting our own wounds and building alliances that are uncomfortable, honest, and accountable. True change demands that we find comfort in discomfort, that we sit inside hard conversations and ask who is speaking, and from what place of privilege.
Second, resistance is hope. I once stood before graffiti in Beirut that read: Hope must never die. Cars rushed past, the city pulsed around me, and I felt the truth of it. Hope is heavy, exhausting, often unbearable — but it is as necessary as breathing. Without it, we surrender to despair, and despair is precisely what oppression feeds on.
Finally, resistance is radical imagination. To imagine is to refuse the inevitability of this world, to craft new questions: Are you happy? Are you hope-full? Are you dreaming? Are you in love? What would it mean to ask these questions of each other, instead of only Are you ok? What would our answers look like in a world we have dared to imagine into being?
Everyday resistance is not universal, not for sale, and never comfortable. It is survival carried in the body, the refusal of false peace, and the insistence on liberation. It is hope, fragile but necessary. And it is the audacity to dream — radically, collectively — of a world beyond the one that continues to break us.
Luna Al-Mousli is a freelance author, graphic designer, and curator whose award-winning books explore identity, politics, and memory, including Around Me Stories (Edition W, 2022). By night, as قamareen (Qamareen), she’s a DJ mixing feel-good SWANA pop, indie, and electronic sounds into immersive, lyrical sets. She co-founded Raqsouna, an event series that is celebrating SWANA music, dance, and the BIPOC diaspora in Vienna, creating an inclusive, evolving space for connection and care. Across all her work, Al-Mousli sparks change through interdisciplinary collaborations that challenge and enrich cultural and political conversations.
