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Papua Merdeka
Koteka Wenda on Resisting Occupation in Exile
Since the onset of the U.S.-sanctioned Israeli genocidal campaign against Palestinians in Gaza in October 2023, we have witnessed a global rise in awareness of the pervasive violence of colonialism and how necessary it is for life on this planet to dismantle it. This momentum has also led to the emergence of new forms of organizing in solidarity with oppressed peoples worldwide.
West Papua, unjustly annexed by the Indonesian state beginning in 1961, is the site of one of many Indigenous freedom struggles fighting against settler violence today: an estimated 500,000 West Papuans have been killed by Indonesian occupation forces over the last sixty years.
In this interview, Koteka Wenda—a West Papuan storyteller and cultural performer living in exile with her family in the United Kingdom—speaks with maya finoh about the ongoing occupation of West Papua at the hands of Indonesia; the current state of the Free West Papua/Papua Merdeka Movement, which resists genocide, ecocide, and forced cultural assimilation; solidarity with other liberation fights; and what it means to her to be an artist-activist fighting for the autonomy of the West Papuan people in diaspora.





maya finoh: I’m grateful to you for raising my awareness of the West Papuan struggle. It made me think about the solidarity between Black Atlantic and Black Pacific liberation struggles. I’d love to know what your personal connection to West Papua is.
Koteka Wenda: My birth was political, because I was born in what was basically a refugee camp on the border of Papua New Guinea and West Papua. This is a border that was envisioned by white Western men sitting around a table, cutting our island as if it were a cake. I think of how difficult it was for my mother to have to leave her village, her family home, to cross the border and give birth in a settlement or in a town far away from her ancestral lands. And how Indonesian colonialism rips apart families. It displaces people and takes away the safety of community.
That being said, when I was born, I was surrounded by a lot of strangers, who sooner or later, became family. I can’t go back to my homeland. I’m 23 going on 24 and it’s been more than 20 years since I freely roamed my ancestral lands. West Papua is home to wildlife and imagination. We are a Pacific Island nation. Our people are melanated. We have curly hair. We are ethnically, linguistically, culturally, Melanesian. We are distinct from the population of our colonizers, who are Southeast Asian, Javanese. I’ve always felt proud to be West Papuan despite living in exile overseas. I’ve been raised to love my heritage, and I think it’s this love for my land that is the foundation for my activism. I give credit to my parents, who have had to raise West Papuan children away from their lands.
I say we live in exile because my father, Benny Wenda, was and is a well-respected West Papuan liberation leader in the Free West Papua movement. He was arrested in the early 2000s for mobilizing the people of West Papua to speak up about the injustices. And for that, he was arrested and charged with 25 years. Next year would be his “release date.” My early childhood memories are quite traumatic. I remember some of my family photo albums of me visiting my father behind prison bars. My mother and I would visit every now and then and my mother would smuggle food to my father because there were rumors of him being poisoned.
The West Papuan colonial history is textbook colonialism. West Papua, alongside Papua New Guinea, are the custodians of the world’s third largest rainforest. It’s pure, virgin rainforest, and so naturally it was and is ripe for colonial exploitation. We are still experiencing colonialism and imperialism in the modern century. During the ‘60s, our brothers and sisters in the African continent experienced decolonization and many nations were birthed. West Papua was meant to be amongst the nations that benefitted from the UN Special Committee on Decolonization. We were a nation in waiting, ready to be born. But Indonesia stole that from us. The western half the Island, New Guinea, attracted many European powers. The Germans came along at one point, the Australians took administrative control of the island. Then we had the Japanese invasion. And then the Dutch prior to Indonesia.
Indonesia, who are our current colonizers, have gone through their own independence story and their own struggles. They were colonized and oppressed by the Dutch. But in 1945 they were able to liberate themselves, and they are now the independent nation we know today. But during that period of transition, the Dutch had their own Empire, which extended from Indonesia to the Southeast Asian islands all the way to the western half of the island of West Papua. Once Indonesia declared independence, the Dutch recognized that Indonesia was not going to give them West Papua because they saw them as ethnically, linguistically, and culturally distinct, therefore they were going to keep them separate and aid them in their journey toward independence and sovereignty. I think that’s important to recognize. We fought for Indonesian independence. The Dutch were adamant that we had our own self-governing territory. The first West Papuan Congress was in 1961. This was when our national flag, the Morning Star flag, was created and when our national anthem came to be… and then the carving up of our territory happened.
Papuans recognize the 1st of December as our should-have-been Independence Day. This National Day was attended by Dutch and other European observers, but it was literally a few weeks later that the Indonesian military invaded our land using paratroopers. Indonesia dropped hundreds of paratroopers onto West Papuan soil, and that’s when we essentially got into a short war with the Dutch and the Indonesians. The result of this was various agreements, the most significant agreement being the New York agreement of 1962 which, by the way, no West Papuans were consulted about. This agreement was signed by Indonesia and the Netherlands in a conference in New York. The agreement was that West Papua wouldn’t give away our sovereignty, but we would be under temporary administrative control by Indonesia. In the transitioning from the Dutch to Indonesia, a promise was made that there would be a referendum which would give the people of West Papua the right to self-determination, in other words, one man, one vote.
It was during that same time that multinational companies like Freeport Sulfur, a US company, came along and were given licenses to begin mining operations in West Papua. In 1969, during the so-called Act of Free Choice, the people of West Papua were denied the freedom to truly decide the fate of their land. Indonesia, instead of using the one man, one vote referendum procedure, adopted their own version called the Mushawarat system, which is completely different from what was decided in the New York agreement. Essentially, they hand-picked over 1000 elders and community leaders and forced them at gunpoint to agree to sell their land and integrate with Indonesia. Many of them were threatened and told that they would have their tongues cut out, or that they’d be killed if they voted against integration with Indonesia. I mention this because the sham referendum was witnessed by the United Nations, and by many Western observers, and yet they all turned a blind eye. Indonesia’s claiming of West Papua is completely illegal. It was essentially the theft of our land, of our sovereignty.
I do want to highlight the fact that it was during this whole colonial transfer that the licenses for the mines were given to US and British companies like British Petroleum.
It was never really about the people of West Papua getting their rights of determination. The main reason for our land being given to Indonesia was so that multinational companies could profit by exploiting our beautiful, beautiful land.
maya: This is incredibly heavy. I was really struck emotionally when you said that West Papua was supposed to be among the nations to be decolonized and liberated during the 1960s African liberation movement.
Koteka: Many of the newly born African nations, including Ghana, were very vocal about this. They were the ones who were pushing West Papua to be next. They brought West Papua up at UN meetings. I also want to speak to institutionalized racism and the mindset of Papuans. I think of how West Papuans weren’t even allowed in these big meetings, the New York agreement meetings or the round table conferences in the Netherlands, or any these big meetings that were deciding the fate of our land. Papuans were never consulted or invited into the rooms. It was because of racist ideologies around Black Melanesians, that we couldn’t be trusted to govern our own affairs, we needed Western intervention. I think as a young West Papuan descendant, I found myself having to prove my intellect, to prove my capabilities in in in the world. There is still a narrative that we West Papuans are primitive, living in the Stone Age.
maya: Could you speak to some of the historical and ongoing ways in which Indonesia continues to infringe upon West Papuans freedom and sovereignty. As you said, your father was a political prisoner. But I wonder if you could speak to some of the other tools and strategies they use against Papuans.
Koteka: I can use my name as an example. Koteka was a name that was gifted to me by my father. And when most Papuans hear my name, they’re shocked, because my name means penis gourd; it’s a traditional covering worn by the men from the highlands, which is where I’m from. It’s a covering for the male private parts, mostly worn as an ornamental piece. It’s aggressively anti-European, anti-Western. It’s aggressively indigenous. In looking into the history of my name, and Indonesia’s relationship with this piece of clothing, I came across a campaign that was led by colonial powers in the 1960s called Operation Koteka, or Operasi Koteka.
Indonesian forces would come into the highlands and force the men in our villages to swap their kotekas for Western European clothing. Operasi koteka, which was enforced in the ‘60s, is like a metaphor for what is still ongoing today. We’re now living in a modern Operasi Koteka era, where we can only wear traditional clothes during festivals, which are mostly sponsored by BP and mining groups. They basically only want us to wear our clothes when it suits their agenda. Or it paints a picture of a peaceful, happy West Papua, which is why it’s beautiful as an act of resistance. West Papuan men, when they protest in the capital Jayapura, will wear kotekas. They will go into the streets wearing penis gourds, and traditional headdresses. They paint their bodies and bring their bows and arrows. I’ve seen it, and I think it’s beautiful.
Bear in mind, I did get bullied and teased at school for having this name, but I’ve learned to love and embrace it, and it just shows that West Papuan people are not only facing genocide, ecocide, but also ethnicide. With the sudden influx of Japanese migrants through the Indonesian Asian transmigration program, we’re becoming a minority in our own land. This raises other issues such as cultural appropriation. Our culture being seen as more beautiful when it’s on the bodies of Japanese Indonesian migrants.
maya: Could you speak to the current state of the ongoing Free West Papuan movement.
Koteka: With the new Indonesian President Prabowo, who is guilty of crimes against humanity, there’s a big fear that with his new rule 1000s of hectares of our land is going to be sold to companies to make way for palm oil plantations, to make way for deforestation, to make way for sugar cane plantations. It’s heartbreaking because a lot of our people have a deep ancestral connection to their land. And a lot of our stories, our songs are connected to our land. When you displace and remove indigenous people from the land; you destroy that sacred relationship.
That’s why we have a boycott campaign, and that’s why we have the Green State Vision. My father came up with the Green State Vision to challenge the world to look to indigenous leaders for ideas about climate justice. When we’re fighting for climate justice, we also have to include indigenous liberation struggles, because once you liberate the people, you liberate new ideas and new visions, like the Green State Vision. When West Papua is an independent nation, we hope to become the world’s first green state, which will make ecocide a crime.
Our nation will be built based around Indigenous ideas and knowledge and Melanesian philosophies, which the world hasn’t seen before. When we liberate indigenous people, we liberate new visions of how to make the world a better, more sustainable place.
More than 500,000 men, women and children have been killed by the Indonesian state since the initial invasion. It’s been more than 60 years now, and nothing’s changed. Our people are still dying. Our children are still being murdered and kidnapped. Our women are still being raped and buried alive. The dramatic stories we heard our grandparents tell are still the headlines of papers today in West Papua. Media is still banned, and journalists are still banned from reporting freely. And what’s even worse is that the United Nations Human Rights Office cannot enter freely and do a thorough investigation into the human rights abuses. The stories we hear from inside West Papua are so valuable and so important, but they don’t have mainstream attention, and that’s why I think my platform is really important, because it does. It packages the struggle to wider audiences, modern audiences, in a more digestible, holistic way. I talk about my struggle through storytelling, visuals, music, songs, and dance.
maya: What does it mean to be an artist in the face of your people’s ongoing occupation at the hands of Indonesia?
Koteka: I think growing up, I thought stories were primitive mediums of activism. I thought that I had to use big, fancy words and be able to give a one-hour PowerPoint presentation with graphs and statistics to convince audiences to listen to the Message. Those are obviously useful and important in the struggle. But I felt really worried about young people not feeling empowered. I didn’t want them to feel apathetic and then just leave the freedom fight to the elders. I realized that storytelling could be a good tool… and music, dance and art could be useful tools to encourage my brothers and sisters to not feel intimidated to enter into this space when I sit down and play freedom songs.
My mother is a phenomenal songwriter. I was literally sung freedom songs from a very early age in my mother tongue, thanks to my mum. My father has a belief that music contains the human spirit. That’s why I often share these songs on social media. I do series or clips, and a lot of our old people are surprised. ‘How does she know our old songs? How can she can sing in our language?’ I love it because my accent disappears when I’m singing in my language, and people can’t tell that I’m living in the belly of colonial abuse. My sisters and I are dancers as well. We have performed at cultural festivals, music festivals, our school’s international evening, people’s weddings, and people’s birthday parties. It’s healing for us. It’s the best feeling when you can turn something traumatic into something beautiful. Music is a universal language. Even though some people can’t understand the freedom songs I sing, they can feel it.
maya: Like you said, I think that the cultural aspect of revolution, of our movement, is also how we build an identity outside of what our colonizers, our occupiers have said we are. I’m so mindful of the necessity of uplifting this ongoing freedom movement. During this time, we’re also seeing this genocidal campaign against Gaza and Palestinians. Israel is employing some of these same strategies that Indonesia is employing, like ecocide, cultural genocide, as well as the genociding of life.
Koteka: Gaza is the world’s most well documented genocide. And West Papua is the least well documented genocide. It’s really concerning when we see the world turning a blind eye to the suffering of our Palestinian brothers. It’s concerning… but it’s actually really beautiful to see the world and the West stand up for oppressed and colonized people, despite the leaders turning a blind eye.
maya: I don’t see a world in which we can have solidarity or liberation for just one colonized people. It’s necessary for us to see our liberation, our lives, as intertwined with one another.
Koteka: That’s why I also want to take time to acknowledge other liberation struggles in the Pacific. Besides West Papua, there’s the French, who obviously have their foot in the Pacific. We had our first ever protest outside the French Embassy in solidarity with our Kanaki brothers and sisters. The territory is called New Caledonia, and the indigenous people are fighting for a referendum for their own liberation. We have other territories in the Pacific, like Rapa Nui, which is currently a territory of Chile. And then we also have Bougainville, which is a Papua Guinean province. They are hoping to get their referendum soon. The Pacific has some really cool Black liberation struggles, movements that need more attention. West Papua deserves attention, but then we have these other minority struggles in the region. We do have a cross-solidarity relationship with our other island brothers and sisters. Black liberation struggles matter in the Pacific as much as they do in the in the rest of the world.
{
"article":
{
"title" : "Papua Merdeka: Koteka Wenda on Resisting Occupation in Exile",
"author" : "Koteka Wenda, maya finoh",
"category" : "interviews",
"url" : "https://everythingispolitical.com/readings/papua-merdeka-koteka-wenda-resisting-occupation-in-exile",
"date" : "2025-06-17 14:26:00 -0400",
"img" : "https://everythingispolitical.com/uploads/IMG_3867.jpg",
"excerpt" : "Since the onset of the U.S.-sanctioned Israeli genocidal campaign against Palestinians in Gaza in October 2023, we have witnessed a global rise in awareness of the pervasive violence of colonialism and how necessary it is for life on this planet to dismantle it. This momentum has also led to the emergence of new forms of organizing in solidarity with oppressed peoples worldwide.",
"content" : "Since the onset of the U.S.-sanctioned Israeli genocidal campaign against Palestinians in Gaza in October 2023, we have witnessed a global rise in awareness of the pervasive violence of colonialism and how necessary it is for life on this planet to dismantle it. This momentum has also led to the emergence of new forms of organizing in solidarity with oppressed peoples worldwide.West Papua, unjustly annexed by the Indonesian state beginning in 1961, is the site of one of many Indigenous freedom struggles fighting against settler violence today: an estimated 500,000 West Papuans have been killed by Indonesian occupation forces over the last sixty years.In this interview, Koteka Wenda—a West Papuan storyteller and cultural performer living in exile with her family in the United Kingdom—speaks with maya finoh about the ongoing occupation of West Papua at the hands of Indonesia; the current state of the Free West Papua/Papua Merdeka Movement, which resists genocide, ecocide, and forced cultural assimilation; solidarity with other liberation fights; and what it means to her to be an artist-activist fighting for the autonomy of the West Papuan people in diaspora.maya finoh: I’m grateful to you for raising my awareness of the West Papuan struggle. It made me think about the solidarity between Black Atlantic and Black Pacific liberation struggles. I’d love to know what your personal connection to West Papua is.Koteka Wenda: My birth was political, because I was born in what was basically a refugee camp on the border of Papua New Guinea and West Papua. This is a border that was envisioned by white Western men sitting around a table, cutting our island as if it were a cake. I think of how difficult it was for my mother to have to leave her village, her family home, to cross the border and give birth in a settlement or in a town far away from her ancestral lands. And how Indonesian colonialism rips apart families. It displaces people and takes away the safety of community.That being said, when I was born, I was surrounded by a lot of strangers, who sooner or later, became family. I can’t go back to my homeland. I’m 23 going on 24 and it’s been more than 20 years since I freely roamed my ancestral lands. West Papua is home to wildlife and imagination. We are a Pacific Island nation. Our people are melanated. We have curly hair. We are ethnically, linguistically, culturally, Melanesian. We are distinct from the population of our colonizers, who are Southeast Asian, Javanese. I’ve always felt proud to be West Papuan despite living in exile overseas. I’ve been raised to love my heritage, and I think it’s this love for my land that is the foundation for my activism. I give credit to my parents, who have had to raise West Papuan children away from their lands.I say we live in exile because my father, Benny Wenda, was and is a well-respected West Papuan liberation leader in the Free West Papua movement. He was arrested in the early 2000s for mobilizing the people of West Papua to speak up about the injustices. And for that, he was arrested and charged with 25 years. Next year would be his “release date.” My early childhood memories are quite traumatic. I remember some of my family photo albums of me visiting my father behind prison bars. My mother and I would visit every now and then and my mother would smuggle food to my father because there were rumors of him being poisoned.The West Papuan colonial history is textbook colonialism. West Papua, alongside Papua New Guinea, are the custodians of the world’s third largest rainforest. It’s pure, virgin rainforest, and so naturally it was and is ripe for colonial exploitation. We are still experiencing colonialism and imperialism in the modern century. During the ‘60s, our brothers and sisters in the African continent experienced decolonization and many nations were birthed. West Papua was meant to be amongst the nations that benefitted from the UN Special Committee on Decolonization. We were a nation in waiting, ready to be born. But Indonesia stole that from us. The western half the Island, New Guinea, attracted many European powers. The Germans came along at one point, the Australians took administrative control of the island. Then we had the Japanese invasion. And then the Dutch prior to Indonesia.Indonesia, who are our current colonizers, have gone through their own independence story and their own struggles. They were colonized and oppressed by the Dutch. But in 1945 they were able to liberate themselves, and they are now the independent nation we know today. But during that period of transition, the Dutch had their own Empire, which extended from Indonesia to the Southeast Asian islands all the way to the western half of the island of West Papua. Once Indonesia declared independence, the Dutch recognized that Indonesia was not going to give them West Papua because they saw them as ethnically, linguistically, and culturally distinct, therefore they were going to keep them separate and aid them in their journey toward independence and sovereignty. I think that’s important to recognize. We fought for Indonesian independence. The Dutch were adamant that we had our own self-governing territory. The first West Papuan Congress was in 1961. This was when our national flag, the Morning Star flag, was created and when our national anthem came to be… and then the carving up of our territory happened.Papuans recognize the 1st of December as our should-have-been Independence Day. This National Day was attended by Dutch and other European observers, but it was literally a few weeks later that the Indonesian military invaded our land using paratroopers. Indonesia dropped hundreds of paratroopers onto West Papuan soil, and that’s when we essentially got into a short war with the Dutch and the Indonesians. The result of this was various agreements, the most significant agreement being the New York agreement of 1962 which, by the way, no West Papuans were consulted about. This agreement was signed by Indonesia and the Netherlands in a conference in New York. The agreement was that West Papua wouldn’t give away our sovereignty, but we would be under temporary administrative control by Indonesia. In the transitioning from the Dutch to Indonesia, a promise was made that there would be a referendum which would give the people of West Papua the right to self-determination, in other words, one man, one vote.It was during that same time that multinational companies like Freeport Sulfur, a US company, came along and were given licenses to begin mining operations in West Papua. In 1969, during the so-called Act of Free Choice, the people of West Papua were denied the freedom to truly decide the fate of their land. Indonesia, instead of using the one man, one vote referendum procedure, adopted their own version called the Mushawarat system, which is completely different from what was decided in the New York agreement. Essentially, they hand-picked over 1000 elders and community leaders and forced them at gunpoint to agree to sell their land and integrate with Indonesia. Many of them were threatened and told that they would have their tongues cut out, or that they’d be killed if they voted against integration with Indonesia. I mention this because the sham referendum was witnessed by the United Nations, and by many Western observers, and yet they all turned a blind eye. Indonesia’s claiming of West Papua is completely illegal. It was essentially the theft of our land, of our sovereignty.I do want to highlight the fact that it was during this whole colonial transfer that the licenses for the mines were given to US and British companies like British Petroleum. It was never really about the people of West Papua getting their rights of determination. The main reason for our land being given to Indonesia was so that multinational companies could profit by exploiting our beautiful, beautiful land.maya: This is incredibly heavy. I was really struck emotionally when you said that West Papua was supposed to be among the nations to be decolonized and liberated during the 1960s African liberation movement.Koteka: Many of the newly born African nations, including Ghana, were very vocal about this. They were the ones who were pushing West Papua to be next. They brought West Papua up at UN meetings. I also want to speak to institutionalized racism and the mindset of Papuans. I think of how West Papuans weren’t even allowed in these big meetings, the New York agreement meetings or the round table conferences in the Netherlands, or any these big meetings that were deciding the fate of our land. Papuans were never consulted or invited into the rooms. It was because of racist ideologies around Black Melanesians, that we couldn’t be trusted to govern our own affairs, we needed Western intervention. I think as a young West Papuan descendant, I found myself having to prove my intellect, to prove my capabilities in in in the world. There is still a narrative that we West Papuans are primitive, living in the Stone Age.maya: Could you speak to some of the historical and ongoing ways in which Indonesia continues to infringe upon West Papuans freedom and sovereignty. As you said, your father was a political prisoner. But I wonder if you could speak to some of the other tools and strategies they use against Papuans.Koteka: I can use my name as an example. Koteka was a name that was gifted to me by my father. And when most Papuans hear my name, they’re shocked, because my name means penis gourd; it’s a traditional covering worn by the men from the highlands, which is where I’m from. It’s a covering for the male private parts, mostly worn as an ornamental piece. It’s aggressively anti-European, anti-Western. It’s aggressively indigenous. In looking into the history of my name, and Indonesia’s relationship with this piece of clothing, I came across a campaign that was led by colonial powers in the 1960s called Operation Koteka, or Operasi Koteka.Indonesian forces would come into the highlands and force the men in our villages to swap their kotekas for Western European clothing. Operasi koteka, which was enforced in the ‘60s, is like a metaphor for what is still ongoing today. We’re now living in a modern Operasi Koteka era, where we can only wear traditional clothes during festivals, which are mostly sponsored by BP and mining groups. They basically only want us to wear our clothes when it suits their agenda. Or it paints a picture of a peaceful, happy West Papua, which is why it’s beautiful as an act of resistance. West Papuan men, when they protest in the capital Jayapura, will wear kotekas. They will go into the streets wearing penis gourds, and traditional headdresses. They paint their bodies and bring their bows and arrows. I’ve seen it, and I think it’s beautiful.Bear in mind, I did get bullied and teased at school for having this name, but I’ve learned to love and embrace it, and it just shows that West Papuan people are not only facing genocide, ecocide, but also ethnicide. With the sudden influx of Japanese migrants through the Indonesian Asian transmigration program, we’re becoming a minority in our own land. This raises other issues such as cultural appropriation. Our culture being seen as more beautiful when it’s on the bodies of Japanese Indonesian migrants.maya: Could you speak to the current state of the ongoing Free West Papuan movement.Koteka: With the new Indonesian President Prabowo, who is guilty of crimes against humanity, there’s a big fear that with his new rule 1000s of hectares of our land is going to be sold to companies to make way for palm oil plantations, to make way for deforestation, to make way for sugar cane plantations. It’s heartbreaking because a lot of our people have a deep ancestral connection to their land. And a lot of our stories, our songs are connected to our land. When you displace and remove indigenous people from the land; you destroy that sacred relationship.That’s why we have a boycott campaign, and that’s why we have the Green State Vision. My father came up with the Green State Vision to challenge the world to look to indigenous leaders for ideas about climate justice. When we’re fighting for climate justice, we also have to include indigenous liberation struggles, because once you liberate the people, you liberate new ideas and new visions, like the Green State Vision. When West Papua is an independent nation, we hope to become the world’s first green state, which will make ecocide a crime. Our nation will be built based around Indigenous ideas and knowledge and Melanesian philosophies, which the world hasn’t seen before. When we liberate indigenous people, we liberate new visions of how to make the world a better, more sustainable place.More than 500,000 men, women and children have been killed by the Indonesian state since the initial invasion. It’s been more than 60 years now, and nothing’s changed. Our people are still dying. Our children are still being murdered and kidnapped. Our women are still being raped and buried alive. The dramatic stories we heard our grandparents tell are still the headlines of papers today in West Papua. Media is still banned, and journalists are still banned from reporting freely. And what’s even worse is that the United Nations Human Rights Office cannot enter freely and do a thorough investigation into the human rights abuses. The stories we hear from inside West Papua are so valuable and so important, but they don’t have mainstream attention, and that’s why I think my platform is really important, because it does. It packages the struggle to wider audiences, modern audiences, in a more digestible, holistic way. I talk about my struggle through storytelling, visuals, music, songs, and dance.maya: What does it mean to be an artist in the face of your people’s ongoing occupation at the hands of Indonesia?Koteka: I think growing up, I thought stories were primitive mediums of activism. I thought that I had to use big, fancy words and be able to give a one-hour PowerPoint presentation with graphs and statistics to convince audiences to listen to the Message. Those are obviously useful and important in the struggle. But I felt really worried about young people not feeling empowered. I didn’t want them to feel apathetic and then just leave the freedom fight to the elders. I realized that storytelling could be a good tool… and music, dance and art could be useful tools to encourage my brothers and sisters to not feel intimidated to enter into this space when I sit down and play freedom songs.My mother is a phenomenal songwriter. I was literally sung freedom songs from a very early age in my mother tongue, thanks to my mum. My father has a belief that music contains the human spirit. That’s why I often share these songs on social media. I do series or clips, and a lot of our old people are surprised. ‘How does she know our old songs? How can she can sing in our language?’ I love it because my accent disappears when I’m singing in my language, and people can’t tell that I’m living in the belly of colonial abuse. My sisters and I are dancers as well. We have performed at cultural festivals, music festivals, our school’s international evening, people’s weddings, and people’s birthday parties. It’s healing for us. It’s the best feeling when you can turn something traumatic into something beautiful. Music is a universal language. Even though some people can’t understand the freedom songs I sing, they can feel it.maya: Like you said, I think that the cultural aspect of revolution, of our movement, is also how we build an identity outside of what our colonizers, our occupiers have said we are. I’m so mindful of the necessity of uplifting this ongoing freedom movement. During this time, we’re also seeing this genocidal campaign against Gaza and Palestinians. Israel is employing some of these same strategies that Indonesia is employing, like ecocide, cultural genocide, as well as the genociding of life.Koteka: Gaza is the world’s most well documented genocide. And West Papua is the least well documented genocide. It’s really concerning when we see the world turning a blind eye to the suffering of our Palestinian brothers. It’s concerning… but it’s actually really beautiful to see the world and the West stand up for oppressed and colonized people, despite the leaders turning a blind eye.maya: I don’t see a world in which we can have solidarity or liberation for just one colonized people. It’s necessary for us to see our liberation, our lives, as intertwined with one another.Koteka: That’s why I also want to take time to acknowledge other liberation struggles in the Pacific. Besides West Papua, there’s the French, who obviously have their foot in the Pacific. We had our first ever protest outside the French Embassy in solidarity with our Kanaki brothers and sisters. The territory is called New Caledonia, and the indigenous people are fighting for a referendum for their own liberation. We have other territories in the Pacific, like Rapa Nui, which is currently a territory of Chile. And then we also have Bougainville, which is a Papua Guinean province. They are hoping to get their referendum soon. The Pacific has some really cool Black liberation struggles, movements that need more attention. West Papua deserves attention, but then we have these other minority struggles in the region. We do have a cross-solidarity relationship with our other island brothers and sisters. Black liberation struggles matter in the Pacific as much as they do in the in the rest of the world."
}
,
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{
"title" : "Ziad Rahbani and the Art of Creative Rebellion",
"author" : "Céline Semaan",
"category" : "essays",
"url" : "https://everythingispolitical.com/readings/ziad-rahbani-creative-rebellion",
"date" : "2025-07-28 07:01:00 -0400",
"img" : "https://everythingispolitical.com/uploads/2025_7_for-EIP-ziad-rahbani.jpg",
"excerpt" : "When I turned fourteen in Beirut, I came across Ziad Rahbani’s groundbreaking work. I immediately felt connected to him, his words, his perspective and his unflinching commitment to liberation for our people and for Palestine. My first love introduced me to his revolutionary plays, his unique contributions to Arab music and very soon I had listened to all of his plays and expanded my understanding of our own culture and history.",
"content" : "When I turned fourteen in Beirut, I came across Ziad Rahbani’s groundbreaking work. I immediately felt connected to him, his words, his perspective and his unflinching commitment to liberation for our people and for Palestine. My first love introduced me to his revolutionary plays, his unique contributions to Arab music and very soon I had listened to all of his plays and expanded my understanding of our own culture and history.Ziad Rahbani’s passing marks more than the end of a brilliant life—it marks the closing of a chapter in the cultural history of our region. His funeral wasn’t just a ceremony, it was a collective reckoning; crowds following his exit from the hospital to the cemetery. The streets knew what many governments tried to forget: that he gave voice to the people’s truths, to our frustrations, our absurdities, our grief, and our undying hope for justice. Yet he died as an unsung hero.Born into a family that shaped the musical soul of Lebanon, Ziad could have taken the easy path of replication. Instead, he shattered the mold. From his early plays like Sahriyye and Nazl el-Surour, he upended the elitism of classical Arabic theatre by placing the working class, the absurdity of war, and the contradictions of society at the center of his work. He spoke like the people spoke. He made art in the language of the taxi driver, the student, the mother waiting for news of her son.In his film work Film Ameriki Tawil, Ziad used satire not only as critique, but as rebellion. He exposed the rot of sectarian politics in Lebanon with surgical precision, never sparing anyone, including the leftist circles he moved in. He saw clearly: that political purity was a myth, and liberation required uncomfortable truths. His work, deeply rooted in class consciousness, refused to glorify any side of a war that tore his country apart.And yet, Ziad Rahbani never lost his clarity on Palestine. While others wavered, diluted their positions, or folded into diplomacy, Ziad remained steadfast. His support for the Palestinian struggle was not an aesthetic position—it was a political and ethical commitment. And he did so not as an outsider or savior, but as someone who understood that our futures are intertwined. That the liberation of Palestine is integral to the liberation of Lebanon. That anti-sectarianism and anti-Zionism are not contradictions, but extensions of each other.He brought jazz into Arabic music not as a novelty, but as a defiant act of cultural fusion—proof that our identities are not fixed, but fluid, diasporic, ever-evolving. He blurred the lines between Western musical forms and Arabic lyricism with intention, not mimicry. His collaborations with his mother, the legendary Fairuz, carried the weight of generational dialogue, but his own voice always broke through—wry, melancholic, grounded in the everyday.Ziad taught us that being a revolutionary doesn’t require a uniform or a slogan. It requires listening. It requires holding complexity, laughing in the face of despair, and making room for joy even when the world is on fire. He reminded us that culture is the deepest infrastructure of any resistance movement. He refused to be sanitized, censored, or simplified.As we mourn him, we also inherit his clarity. For artists, for organizers, for thinkers: Ziad Rahbani gave us a blueprint. Create without permission. Tell the truth. Fight for Palestine without compromising your own roots. And never forget that the people will always hear what is real.He was, and will always be, a compass for creative rebellion."
}
,
{
"title" : "Saul Williams: Nothing is Just a Song",
"author" : "Saul Williams, Collis Browne",
"category" : "interviews",
"url" : "https://everythingispolitical.com/readings/saul-williams-interview",
"date" : "2025-07-21 21:35:46 -0400",
"img" : "https://everythingispolitical.com/uploads/EIP_SaulWilliams_Shot_7_0218.jpg",
"excerpt" : "Saul Williams: Many artists would like to believe that there is some sort of sublime neutrality that art can deliver, that it is beyond or above the idea of politics. However, art is sometimes used as a tool of Empire, and if we are not careful, then our art is used as propaganda, and thus, it becomes essential for us to arm our art with our viewpoints, with our perspective, so that it cannot be misused. I have always operated from the position that all my work carries politics in it, that there are politics embedded in it. And I’ve never really understood, if you are aiming to be an artist, why you wouldn’t aim to speak directly to the times. Addressing the political doesn’t have to take away from the personal intimacy of your work.",
"content" : "Collis Browne: Is all music and art really political?Saul Williams: Many artists would like to believe that there is some sort of sublime neutrality that art can deliver, that it is beyond or above the idea of politics. However, art is sometimes used as a tool of Empire, and if we are not careful, then our art is used as propaganda, and thus, it becomes essential for us to arm our art with our viewpoints, with our perspective, so that it cannot be misused. I have always operated from the position that all my work carries politics in it, that there are politics embedded in it. And I’ve never really understood, if you are aiming to be an artist, why you wouldn’t aim to speak directly to the times. Addressing the political doesn’t have to take away from the personal intimacy of your work.Even now, we are reading the writings of Palestinian poets in Gaza and the West Bank, not to mention those who are part of the diaspora, who are charting their feelings and intimate experiences while living through a genocide. These works of art are all politically charged because they are charged with a reality that is fully suppressed by oppressive networks and powers that control them.Shakespeare’s work was always political. He found a way to speak about power to the face of power, knowing they would be in the audience. But also found a way to play with and talk to the “groundlings,” the common people who were in the audience as well.Collis Browne: Was there a moment when you realized that your music could be used as a tool of resistance?Saul Williams: Yeah, I was in third grade, about eight or nine years old. I had been cast in a play in my elementary school. I loved the process of not only performing, but of sitting around the table and breaking down what the language meant and what the objective and the psychology of the character was, and what that meant during the time it was written. I came home and told my parents that I wanted to be an actor when I grew up. My father had the typical response: “I’ll support you as an actor if you get a law degree.” My mother responded by saying, “You should do your next school report on Paul Robeson, he was an actor and a lawyer.”So I did my next school report on Paul Robeson. And what I discovered was that here was an African American man, born in 1898, who had come to an early realization as an actor that the messages of the films he was being cast in—and he was a huge star—went against his own beliefs, his own anti-colonial and anti-imperial beliefs. In the 1930s, he started talking about why we needed to invest in independent cinema. In 1949, during the McCarthy era, he had his passport taken from him so he could no longer travel outside of the US, because he refused to acknowledge that the enemies of the US were his enemies as well. He felt there was no reason Black people should be signing up to fight for the US Empire when they were going home and getting lynched.In 1951, he presented a mandate to the UN called “We Charge Genocide.” In it he charged the US Government with the genocide of African Americans because of the white mobs who were lynching Black Americans on a regular basis. [Editor’s note: the petition charges the US Government with genocide through the endorsement of both racism and “monopoly capitalism,” without which “the persistent, constant, widespread, institutionalized commission of the crime of genocide would be impossible.”] When Robeson met with President Truman, Truman said, “I’d like to respond, but there’s an election coming up, so I have to be careful.”Paul Robeson sang songs of working-class people, songs that trade unionists sang, songs that miners sang, songs that all types of workers sang across the world. He identified with the workers and with the working class, regardless of his fame. He was ridiculed by the American Government and even had his passport revoked for his activism. At that early age, I learned that you could sing songs that could get you labeled as an enemy of the state.I grew up in Newburgh, New York, which is about an hour upstate from New York City. One of my neighbors would often come sing at my father’s church. At the time, I did not understand why my dad would allow this white guy with his guitar or banjo to come sing at our church when we had an amazing gospel choir. I couldn’t understand why we were singing these school songs with this dude. When I finally asked my parents, they said, “You have to understand that Pete—they were talking about Pete Seeger—is responsible for popularizing some of the songs you sing in school.” He wrote songs like “If I Had a Hammer,” and he too was blacklisted by the US government because of the songs he chose to sing and the people he chose to sing them for, and the people he chose to sing them with. I learned at a very early age that music and art were full of politics. Enough politics to get you labeled as the enemy of the state. Enough politics to get your passport taken, or to be imprisoned.I was also learning about my parents’ peers, artists whom they loved and adored. Artists like Sonia Sanchez, Amiri Baraka, and Nikki Giovanni, all from the Black Arts Movement. Larry Neal and Amiri Baraka made a statement when they started the Black Arts Repertory Theatre School in Harlem that said essentially that all art should serve a function, and that function should be to liberate Black minds.It is from that movement that hip-hop was born. I was lucky enough to witness the birth of hip-hop. At first, it was playful, it was fun, but by the mid to late 1980s, it began finding its voice with groups like Public Enemy, KRS-One, Queen Latifa, Rakim, and the Jungle Brothers. These are groups that started using and expressing Black Liberation politics in the music, which uplifted it, made it sound better, and made it hit harder. The first gangster rap was that… when it was gangster, when it was directly challenging the country it was being born in.As a teenager, I identified as a rapper and an actor. I would argue with school kids who insisted, “It’s not even music. They’re just talking.” I would have to defend hip-hop as music, sometimes even to my parents, who found the language crass. But when I played artists like KRS-One and Public Enemy for my parents, they said, “Oh, I see what they’re doing here.”When Public Enemy rapped, “Elvis was a hero to most, But he never meant shit to me you see, Straight up racist that sucker was, Simple and plain, Motherfuck him and John Wayne, ‘Cause I’m Black and I’m proud, I’m ready and hyped plus I’m amped, Most of my heroes don’t appear on no stamps,” my parents were like Amen. They understood. They understood why I needed to blast that music in my room 24/7. They understood.When the music spoke to me in that way, suddenly I could pull off moves on the dance floor like doing a flip that I couldn’t do before. That’s the power of music. That’s power embedded in music. That’s why Fela Kuti said that music is the weapon of the future. And, of course, there’s Nina Simone and Billie Holiday. What’s Billie Holiday’s most memorable song? “Strange Fruit.” That voice connected, was speaking directly to the times she was living in. It transcended the times, where to this day, when you hear this song and you understand that the “strange fruit” hanging from Southern trees are Black people who have been lynched, you understand how the power of the voice, when you connect it to something that is charged with the reality of the times, takes on a greater shape.Collis Browne: Public Enemy broke open so much. I grew up in Toronto, in a mostly white community, but I was into some of the bigger American hip-hop acts who were coming out. Public Enemy rose to a new level. Before them, we were only connecting with punk and hardcore music as the music of rebellion.Saul Williams: Public Enemy laid down the groundwork for what hip-hop is: “the voice of the voiceless.” It was only after Public Enemy that you saw the emergence of huge groups in France, Germany, Bulgaria, Egypt, and across the world. There were big acts before them. Run DMC, for instance, but when Public Enemy came out, marginalized groups heard their music and said, “That’s for us. Yes, that’s for us.” It was immediately understood as music of resistance.Collis Browne: What have you seen or listened to out in the world that has a clear political goal, but has been appropriated and watered down?Saul Williams: We can stay on Public Enemy for that. Under Secretary Blinken, Chuck D became a US Global Music Ambassador during the genocide in Gaza. There are photos of him standing beside Secretary Blinken, accepting that role, while understanding that the US has always used music as a cultural propaganda tool to express soft power. I remember learning about how the US uses this “soft power” when I was working in the mid-2000s with a Swiss composer, who has now passed, named Thomas Kessler. He wrote a symphony based on one of my books, Said the Shotgun to the Head, and we were performing it with the Cologne, Germany symphony orchestra, when I heard from the head of the orchestra that, in fact, their main financier was the US Government through the CIA.During the Cold War, it was crucial for the American Government to put money into the arts throughout Western Europe to try to express this idea of “freedom,” as opposed to what was happening in the Eastern (Communist) Bloc. So it was a long time between when the US Government started enlisting musicians and other artists in their propaganda campaigns and when I encountered this information.There’s a documentary called Soundtrack to a Coup d’État, which talks about how the US Government used (uses) music and musicians to co-opt movements and propagate the idea of American freedom and democracy outside the US in the hope of winning over the citizens of other countries without them even realizing that so much of that art is there to question the system itself, not to celebrate it. Unfortunately, there are situations in which an artist’s work is co-opted to be used as propaganda, and the artist buys into it. They become indoctrinated, and you realize that we’re all susceptible to the possibility of taking that bait."
}
,
{
"title" : "The Culture of Artificial Intelligence",
"author" : "Sinead Bovell, Céline Semaan",
"category" : "interviews",
"url" : "https://everythingispolitical.com/readings/sinead-bovell-on-ai-artifial-intelligence",
"date" : "2025-07-20 21:35:46 -0400",
"img" : "https://everythingispolitical.com/uploads/sinead-bovell-headshot.jpg",
"excerpt" : "Céline Semaan: It is being reported that AI will make humans dumber than ever, that it is here to rule the world, and to subjugate us all by bringing on a climate apocalypse. Being an AI and tech expert, how can you help people better understand AI as a phenomenon that will impact us but that we shouldn’t necessarily fear?",
"content" : "Céline Semaan: It is being reported that AI will make humans dumber than ever, that it is here to rule the world, and to subjugate us all by bringing on a climate apocalypse. Being an AI and tech expert, how can you help people better understand AI as a phenomenon that will impact us but that we shouldn’t necessarily fear?Sinead Bovell: It depends on where you are… in the Global North, and particularly in the US, perspectives on artificial intelligence and advanced technologies are more broadly negative. When you look at regions in the Global South, when you look at regions in Asia, AI is seen in a much more positive light. Their societies tend to focus on the benefits new technology can bring and what it can do for their quality of life. The social media ecosystem thrives on negative content, but it really does depend on where you are in the world as to how negatively you’re going to view AI. When it comes to the actual fears and the threats themselves, most of them have some validity. Humans could become less intelligent over time if they’re overly reliant on artificial intelligence systems, and the data does show that AI can erode core cognitive capacities.For example, most of us can’t read maps anymore. If you are in the military and your satellite gets knocked down and you need to understand your coordinates, that might be a problem. But for the average person, not reading a map has allowed us to optimize our time; we can get from A to B much more quickly. What do we fill the time with that AI gives us back with? That’s a really important question.Another important question is: How do we purposely engineer cognitive friction into the learning and thinking environment so we don’t erode that core capability? That’s not something that is just going to happen. We are humans, we take the path of least resistance, like all evolutionary species do. If you look at the printing press, the chaotic abundance of information eventually led to the scientific method and the peer review. Educators, academics, scientists, and creators needed to figure out a way to sort through the valuable information and the nonsense, and that led to more cognitive friction. Those pathways haven’t been developed yet for AI. How we use and assimilate AI depends on the actions we take when it comes to the climate apocalypse, for instance. As of now, how AI uses water and energy is nothing short of a nightmare. However, it’s not really AI in isolation. It’s our social media habits in general. When you look at them in aggregate and globally, our digital habits and patterns aren’t good for the climate in general. And then AI just exacerbates all of that.AI is not a technology that you are going to tap into and tap out of. It’s not like Uber where maybe you don’t use the app because you would prefer to bike, and that’s the choice that you make. AI is a general-purpose technology, and it’s important that we get that distinction, because general-purpose technologies, over time, become infrastructure, like the steam engine, electricity, and the internet. We rebuild our societies on top of them, and it’s important that we see it that way, so people don’t just unsubscribe out of protest. That only impedes their ability to make sure they keep up with the technology, and give adequate feedback and critiques of the technology.Céline Semaan: I recently saw you on stage and heard your response to a question about whether AI and its ramifications could be written into an episode of the TV show Black Mirror. Would you be able to repeat the answer you gave?Sinead Bovell: The stories we see and read about AI are usually dystopian. Arguably, there are choices we continue to make over and over again that we know will lead to negative outcomes, yet we don’t make different choices. To me, that’s the real Black Mirror episode… can we rely on ourselves? In some circumstances, we continually pick the more harmful thing. Most of the big challenges we face are complicated but not unsolvable. Even with climate, a lot of the solutions exist, and actually most of them are grounded in technology. What isn’t happening is the choice to leverage them, or the choice to subsidize them so they become more accessible, or the choice to even believe in them. That scares me a lot more than a particular use case of technology. Most of the biggest challenges we face are down to human choices, and we’re not making the right choices.Céline Semaan: Are you afraid of AI taking over the world and rendering all of our jobs useless? How do you see that?Sinead Bovell: There’s AI taking over the world, and that’s AI having its own desire and randomly rising up out of the laptop or out of some robot. I’m not necessarily concerned about that. You can’t say anything is a 0% chance, right? We don’t know. There are so many things you can’t say with 100% certainty. I mean, are we alone the universe? It’s really hard to prove or disprove those types of things. Where I stand on that is… sure allocate research dollars to a select group of scientists who can work on that problem. However, I am quite concerned about the impact AI is going to have on the workforce. We can see the destruction of certain jobs coming. It’s going to happen quickly, and we’re not preparing for it properly. Every general-purpose technology has led to automation and reconfiguration of the shape of the workforce. Let’s look at the first industrial revolution which lasted from approximately 1760-1840. If we were to zoom in on people working in agriculture, by the end of the 19th Century, around 70-80% of those people were doing something different. That is an astounding change. People had jobs, they just looked very different from working on the farm. But what if that happens in seven years rather than 80 years? That’s what scares me. I think the transition will be quite chaotic because it’s going to be quite quick, but it doesn’t have to be. History isn’t a great predictor of the future, but it does give you a lot of examples of what you don’t need to do again.The reason the industrial revolution turned out to be a good thing in the end, in terms of the life we all live, is that, for instance, we have MRIs and don’t have to have our blood drained to see if we’re sick. But people were just left to fend for themselves. It was chaos, and it turned into this kind of every person for themselves. Kind of figure it out. Get to the city. Bring your family. Don’t bring your family. It was really chaotic. How are we going to not repeat that? I don’t know if we are putting the security measures in place to make sure people are protecting that transition.The most obvious one to me is health care in the United States. I don’t know the exact number, maybe it’s around 60% of people, but don’t quote me on that, are reliant on their job for health care. That’s where their insurance comes from. What is going to happen to their insurance if their job goes away or if they transition to being self-employed? How do we help people transition? People don’t even dare go down that road, but those are the types of conversations that need to happen.Céline Semaan: In 10 years from now, will we look at AI as just another super calculator. And we will be asking the same questions that we are asking today, meaning that the change we’re seeking is not necessarily technological, but philosophical and cultural. How do you see that?Sinead Bovell: AI will look like much more of a philosophical, cultural, and social transition than solely a technological one. This is true of a lot of general-purpose technologies.The inventions in technology lead to how we organize our societies and how we govern them. If you look at the printing press, it led to a secular movement and gave power to that engine. You get big social, philosophical, cultural changes, and revolutions in society when you experience this scale of technical disruption. I think we will look back on the AI inflection point as one of the most pivotal transitions in human history in the past couple 100 years. I would say it’s going to be as disruptive as the printing press and maybe steam engine combined. And we made it through both of those. There was a lot of turmoil and chaos, but we did make it through both of those.We are a much more vibrant, healthy society now. We live longer and, relatively speaking, we have much more equality. There is a path where it works out, but we have to be making the decisions to make that happen. However, it’s not practical that a subset of the population makes the decisions on behalf of everyone. And that’s why I think it’s so important for people to get in the game and not see AI as this really technical device or technology, but instead, as a big social, cultural and philosophical transition. Your lived experience qualifies you to participate in these conversations; there’s nobody who can carry the weight of this on their own."
}
]
}