A SWANA Space to Exist

We met organizing jail support for a comrade who was arrested protesting a Zionist speaker, and I soon found myself in a group chat with dozens of others in Chicago’s Southwest Asia and North Africa (SWANA) diaspora. (SWANA is a decolonial term for what’s often called the Middle East and North Africa region, or MENA.) 

In this bustling WhatsApp group of personalities I would come to know, I was met with warmth. I shared my amateur cooking photos and was invited for dinners. When I bemoaned the difficulties of getting a solid curly cut, recommendations poured in.

It’s such a Chicago story, friendships starting from shared politics, a desire to gather and good humor. It’s not uncommon to feel disconnected in the city, especially for folks exploring their culture and queerness. This was also true for me, and although I grew up in and around Chicago, my deepest familial systems to my own Persian roots waned and tangled. To organically fall into new family felt like a cliché, a secret dream come to reality.

After a couple months, I was unceremoniously dropped into another WhatsApp group with a welcome and an ask that formalized the beginnings of a new SWANA collective, the heart of which was similarly dreamed over breakfast chats among roommate-friends living in Hyde Park. Then, from one WhatsApp to another to another, a small group of dedicated cultural organizers emerged.

Over the past two years, this small group of SWANA diaspora friends has grown to become an active builder of space across arts, education and action. We came together organically, but sprouted from a lineage of relationships formed in the Chicago Dyke March Collective and Aywa Hafla, home to Palestinian-led community gatherings like beach hangs and dance parties. Both have held space for a range of emotions and resources as the world ruptures.

Our emergent collective, Salon Kawakib, is now a volunteer-led community of SWANA organizers hosting monthly art, education and action-oriented events across Chicago. But what I’ve found over the last two years is that fundamentally our collective thrives and is so critical because we don’t take our existence lightly, especially as genocide persists in Palestine, and now as Israel invades and terrorizes Lebanon.

During a genocide streaming on our phones, we are even more attuned to the privilege of gathering, sharing crafts, meals, prayers and more in the face of harsh realities that aim to exterminate us.

We are also more attuned to the repression of Palestinian voices and around Palestinian solidarity that we have seen increase so much since October 7, 2023. We recently experienced that repression as a collective when the concert venue we were planning to use to celebrate our two-year anniversary was cancelled.

“Epiphany Center for the Arts will be closed on Monday, October 7, 2024 in recognition of and in solidarity with the greater Chicago community who wish to grieve the atrocities resulting from the Israeli-Palestinian conflict,” reads a post on the venue’s website.

“Cancelled-Salon Kawakib presents Clarissa Bitar, a US-based Palestinian Oud musician and composer,” it reads in a further description underneath.

We refuse to be silenced and have found another venue.

We named our collective after a character in one of our favorite books, Everything for Everyone: An Oral History of the New York Commune, by authors Eman Abdelhadi (another Salon Kawakib organizer and In These Times columnist) and M.E. O’Brien. The character, Kawkab, participates in a successful liberation struggle for a free Palestine, a revolution that then precipitates an end to capitalism across the globe.

In Arabic, kawakib means planets, and our organizing style models orbiting around our shared spaces and each other. As a small, volunteer-led crew, we bounce event ideas off each other and always consider collaborations. We function itinerantly and with deep trust in each other, often with two people taking lead on an event and the rest of the collective plugging in as needed to search for venues, fundraising, marketing and more all along the way.

Salon Kawakib’s inaugural event was in Andersonville’s Eli Tea Bar on Clark Street in the heart of a Chicago neighborhood known for its queer and feminist energies. Our first comedy night was standing-room only, and our monthly events can sometimes pack the rooms we are in, proving our community rolls deep and crave events like these.

From that first night on, we could be found at Eli’s every second Saturday with book talks, Palestinian tatreez (embroidery), film nights, iftars during Ramadan, speed dating, Nowruz celebrations, intimate concerts and more. We would often pack the back of the tea shop, sitting shoulder to shoulder, bent over with thread and indecision on which colors to choose. Our ​“Awya Drag” night turned aisles into a dance floor with singles waved generously in the air. And for performance nights, musicians used every inch of the small stage to share a piece of their hearts through Middle Eastern instruments.

We had longingly witnessed SWANA dance spaces lauded on the coasts, so we worked to carve out our own haven at Dorothy’s Downstairs, a cozy, plush lesbian bar with vibes emanating from the 1970s. One strategy we had around our events was to build spaces where both non-queer and queer SWANA diaspora folks could gather in ways they hadn’t before, a process we hoped would slowly normalize queerness.

Our community intentions center us as a collective building for connection and liberation with our most marginalized comrades. Some of those intentions include using our platform to facilitate community empowerment, growth and solidarity. We are also excited that there has been a surge in gatherings from other cultural groups across the city, too, knowing there is enough space and a demand for all of us to build together.

October 7 and the genocide that ensued, and continues, personally impacted many members of our collective and our SWANA community. Our anger and grief catalyzed community responses with workshops on Palestine Activism 101 for Allies and Palestine 201 on Collective Organizing, in addition to vigils for our martyrs. As the global push for a cease-fire accelerated, we wanted to teach people how to plug into Chicago’s organizing efforts. For events, Pilsen Community Books (PCB) often cleared out space and set-up rows and rows of chairs to accommodate our engaged groups looking for connection to the cause.

Our vigils similarly welcomed SWANA community and allies for a somatic experience to release rage, hold each other and honor lives taken, in part by sharing their pictures and stories. We shifted our cultural events to hold space for what our grieving community needs, and also to support resistance efforts, leaning more into action-oriented and resource-forward workshops.

But we never halted our cultural gathering spaces or programming, because we know we deserve space to just be, to exist.

PCB, the worker-owned co-op bookstore, became quick supporters as the genocide began. October 7, 2023 necessitated an expansion in our programming and vision to foreground the liberation work we centered in our intentions.

PCB became our home for political education as we worked to sustain a range of opportunities for SWANA diaspora and our allies to mobilize against the continued bombardment, mass murder and displacement of Palestinians. We developed teach-ins on the celebrated refugee journalist Ghassan Kanafani’s pamphlet The 1936-39 Revolt in Palestine on legacies of resistance, a panel with George Abraham, Eman Abdelhadi and Bazeed to launch the new poetry text Al Ghurabaa: A Queer & Trans Collection of Oddities to combat pinkwashing (i.e. weaponizing queerness for gain), led Palestinian flag making workshops, and more. 

We also found a home on the West Side at the Honeycomb Network in Humboldt Park, a Puerto Rican woman-owned community space in Chicago’s historic Paseo Boricua cultural district. We co-hosted postcards for cease-fire, where we wrote letters to politicians urging them to find their moral compass and halt the complicity represented by our tax dollars funding the bombs used in the genocide. 

We embraced cross-cultural solidarity in an anti-imperialist cooking event with local chefs Roberto Pérez (Urban Pilón) and Sabrina Beydoun (Nourished), making visible the shared history of colonization between Puerto Rico and Palestine and embodying it with a special twist on the meat, vegetables and rice dish Maqluba.

We believe food and nourishment is deeply important because in order to sustain a movement for a Free Palestine, we must demand a better world while sustaining the self.

Last October, we were preparing to celebrate our one-year anniversary back at Eli Tea Bar with U.S.-based Palestinian oud musician and composer Clarissa Bitar, but we postponed our evening of maqam music in the face of active and rising genocide.

But this year, we will not postpone our anniversary event, and we will not let it be cancelled.

This year, we’ve learned that in order to continue fighting to stop the genocide, we need to remember everything we are fighting for.

We hear and honor the principle that every person is someone’s whole world. The spaces we build aim to make space for hope and grief to co-exist. 

It’s no small feat to pull together our second anniversary event on Monday where we expect to have hundreds present, where we have a clear vision for mourning and solidarity.

Space was taken away from us, but with Salon Kawakib, we take back our space and power.

Our collective will mark another revolution around the sun on Monday, October 7, by mourning a year of genocide, honoring a year of resistance, and holding in gratitude two years of community-building with Salon Kawakib.

We don’t take for granted the power in gathering with each other, even in a city like Chicago with immense SWANA populations. Our night will be a space to reflect, to honor martyrs with art, share poetry and nourish our souls through music so that we exercise the strength we need to keep going.

Like our namesake Kawkab dreams of and manifests, we too will build a world where we are what we need. And we won’t apologize for it.