The way we walk down Faryon Bridge is obscene. 

The very mundanity of the act, travelling from one seminar to another, feels inappropriate. Walking along Faryon Bridge should not be as casual an act as it is. Faryon Bridge compels us to sit still, to take a moment to grieve, yet every rushed footstep along its surface refuses to comply, persisting in its routine. 

Around the start of the 2024 Fall Semester, Trent's Students for Palestine group (S4P) organized a chalking of Faryon Bridge, covering its barrier rails with the names of Palestinian students and children murdered by the state of Israel. 

Claims that Israel’s assault on Palestinians constitutes a genocide have been met favourably by the International Court of Justice, and polling has shown that over 45% of Canadians agree with this assertion.

In the time since S4P’s latest chalking, more writing has sprung up around the barrier rails, with a variety of messages in starkly lighter tone. 

Alongside the names of murdered Palestinian children, one can find promotion for Trent’s Graduate Expo; advertisements for the Trent Choir and various Trent Central Student Association (TCSA) fall by-election candidates; drawings of butterflies; and miscellaneous messages such as “call your mom (she loves you)”.

At the time of writing, Trent has also put up Christmas lights around the guard railings, adding some—shall we say gauche—festive spirit to the bridge’s decor. 

I feel it is important to state here that my point is not to single out any of the specific organizations or individuals who chose to write over and around these names. Some of the writing I’ve pointed to predates the chalking. 

This is not an essay about the miscellany on Faryon Bridge. Rather, I want to use the coexistence of these messages with S4P’s as a conduit to a larger thesis.

When faced with the markers of mass death, aided and abetted by our own tax dollars and the politicians who purport to represent our interests, we do not grieve. 

How is it that opposition to genocide, a position held by more Canadians than not, has been so thoroughly decoupled from action? Beyond their immobility, how have so many become apathetic to the slaughter? Fundamentally, I am asking one question: why don’t we grieve?

Jesus Christ

Last summer, around the end of the academic year, I participated in the first chalking of Faryon Bridge organized by S4P. I recall chalking for about three or four hours, uninterrupted for the most part.

After about two hours of work, I was stopped by a man walking by who asked me what I was doing. I tried to calmly explain the point of the action, believing I had run into a discontented Zionist.

Instead, the man asked me about my relationship to his Lord and savior Jesus Christ. 

Funnily enough, “Jesus Christ” were the very first words that came to my mind at that moment, but I chose to keep my composure.

Over the span of about fifteen minutes—which felt like an eternity—he proceeded to ask for my name, and offered to pray for the cause on my behalf. 

After reminding me of Jesus’ love for me, he slowly made his way down the bridge, making sure to stop nearly every single participant.

I found it striking, how casually he went about treating the murder of thousands as leverage for an unrelated religious mission. Most obscene was the mundanity of the act—the total lack of consideration for the lives we were trying to honor, the absolute refusal to allow even a single second of his time to be about them.

We Do Not Grieve

The ‘we’ I refer to when I say that we do not grieve is not any kind of numerical majority. More Canadians have stated their opposition to Israel’s genocidal policy than have supported it. 

Rather, this ‘we’ is a state of hegemony.

‘We’ do not grieve in the sense that, despite stated positions, ‘we’ have not put a stop to the current political status quo—massively funding Israel’s genocidal efforts, and perhaps most damningly, ‘we’ continue to live on, unbothered by that fact.

This ‘we’ is the product of the cold-blooded, supposedly pragmatic political calculations that make up the realm of what gets called ‘serious’ politics; what career politicians are willing to accept in order to achieve ‘slow and steady’ change. 

It is what those being represented (in theory, at least) by those politicians are willing to accept, because marginal parties or, God forbid, withdrawal from the electoral song and dance are not ‘serious’ political positions.

Swathes of euphemisms, from talk of “Conflict in Israel and Gaza” to qualifiers such as “unfortunate” allow those in power to perform a kind of pastiche of empathy for Palestinians, characteristically more tame than the empathy proffered to the Israelis killed on October 7^th.

I would argue that this kind of restrained empathy is a characteristic of a distinctly Canadian kind of Realpolitik.

While we have little to no qualms with funding genocidal fanatics, for whom the deaths of Palestinian children is something to be celebrated, our own justification for this policy is more convoluted.

Precarious Life

Bound in some self-righteous Enlightenment-era notion of rationalism is the designation of precarious lives. I derive this term from Judith Butler’s eponymous book, which presents precariousness as a fundamental characteristic of life. 

In this context, I want to focus on precarious life as a (covert, but nonetheless tangible) rhetorical device.

Surely, life is by nature, interdependent, penetrable, and vulnerable. It remains, however, that a certain precariousness is assigned to Palestinians in our most ‘serious’ political discourses: in death they are considered less worthy of grief, because their Palestinian ethnicity predisposes them to death or injury.

Precarious life is then, for our purposes, a vague notion of predisposition to death, injury, and broader violence assigned to Palestinians and retroactively leveraged as an excuse for their murder. 

What we see on Faryon Bridge are not the markers of living beings who were murdered by Zionist forces, but rather a mass of precarious, vulnerable lives. The increased penetrability assigned to these names makes them less arresting, less dead.

Again and again, Palestinian-Canadians have made their grievances clear: their dehumanization operates by denying them individuality, collapsing them into a statistic.

To be perfectly clear, I do not want to draw attention to distinctly Canadian modes of dehumanization in order to make us appear kinder, softer, or more empathetic than the more overtly genocidal racists cheering on this genocide from within Israel. 

For one, if the flow of Canadian money is any indication, those in our government calling for a ceasefire and those enacting the genocide have no real qualms about working together.

I might put forth that for Israelis, the murder of Palestinians is both an act of state-building, but also an affirmation of life itself. Indeed, Palestinian life is, in the Israeli cultural zeitgeist “a living embodiment of the threat to life itself” says Butler in Frames of War.

Because we take for granted the legitimacy of Israel, we take for granted the destruction of Palestinian life. Because we do not oppose the existence of a state which fuels itself on genocide, we cannot view Palestinians as anything but fodder for that genocide. In our minds, death, injury have been made the default conditions of Palestinian selfhood.

This is why there is no condemnation of “the violence on both sides”, or any other euphemism which collapses genocide and reaction to genocide into one single phenomenon. 

Israel can only be legitimate if we are able to walk by the names of its thousands of victims unfazed every single day, and see them as merely precarious lives.

Granting Life

Of the lives that we refuse to grieve, Butler writes in Precarious Life, “they have a strange way of remaining animated, and so must be negated again (and again).”

Indeed, every time we pass by their names inscribed in concrete, they seem as lively as ourselves, calling to be grieved, to be recognized as people who have lived.

Our current condition is a direct result of trying to hold two mutually exclusive beliefs at the same time. We cannot grieve Palestinians while granting legitimacy to the state of Israel.

Our minds have been marked with the kind of false grief that accompanies complacency in the genocide. What I am asking is not for anyone to suddenly undergo some emotional epiphany, or to undo the effect of years of desensitization to mass death. 

For some of us, it may be too late for that, but that does not mean that we cannot act against this genocide.

I am asking you to take a moment and grieve the lives on Faryon Bridge. Not because feeling grief is equivalent to political action, but because grief takes you somewhere.

Grief takes you to an event organized by S4P, or Nogojiwanong 2 Palestine, or any other organization currently fighting against Israel. Grief tells you that it cannot coexist with acceptance of those engineering mass death.

This is a call to focus our attention onto the deaths marked on Faryon Bridge, and perhaps most importantly, to leave Faryon Bridge and go act on the real world. Genocidal systems can feel immense, beyond the grasp of our understanding, but there are real people putting their energy behind the continuance of Israel’s genocide. 

There must be real people here, fighting against Israel and its genocide.