BY AMIR HUSSAIN

The Trump administration is trafficking in a grand narrative about American intellectuals: Universities are hiding “foreign aliens,” and outside agitators are disrupting campus operations in support of terrorist organizations. Scholars and students are being labeled as leftist protesters or, more brazenly, as so-called Hamas supporters and are being persecuted, detained, deported, and deprived of their human and constitutional rights.

The detainment of Columbia University graduate Mahmoud Khalil, the deportation of Brown University Professor Rasha Alawieh to Lebanon, the detainment of Georgetown University fellow Badar Khan Suri, the suspension of Yale University scholar Helyeh Doutaghi, the detainment of Tufts University graduate student Rumeysa Ozturk, and the threats of deportation directed at Cornell University graduate student Momodou Taal, Columbia University graduate student Ranjani Srinivasan, and Columbia University student Yunseo Chung all demonstrate the targeted persecution of critics and dissenters underway today.

Photo by Amir Hussain

“We have accomplished more in 43 days than most administrations accomplished in four years or eight years,” Trump narrated in his speech before Congress, palpably lying silent on the crimes of the state. For Bertolt Brecht, lamenting the spread of fascism and state propaganda in 1930s Germany and fleeing the Nazi regime, the “horror at the house-painter’s speeches” compelled him to continue to write counternarratives rich with perspectives and satiric wit, despite knowing and bemoaning that the impulse towards lyrical poetry about the “apple tree in blossom” would be overweighed by the times.

Other persecuted critics too like Oscar Wilde, whom much of my research has examined, wrote extensive narratives from the prison situation, occupying himself with the blurred lines between the art of story and life story and the way in which narratives string together an orientation to the world, themselves shaping, rather than merely reporting on, history and truth-telling. In De Profundis, Wilde writes over the state’s official narrative about him, asserting that “the laws under which I am convicted are wrong and unjust laws, and the system under which I have suffered a wrong and unjust system.” While the state may not have listened to his story, the world did.

It should not be forgotten today that the state of persecution continues to depend on grand narratives to mobilize the immense engine of state power toward manufactured crises, forcing actors to act and react immediately. In this mass crisis mode, statis, rule of law, moral accountability, and statutory rights are provisionally repealed, and swapped in their place is a climate of fear, illegitimate authority, and persecution of the other intended to become the permanent condition. As Columbia University Professor Rashid Khalidi describes it, “We are approaching the status of Chilean universities under Pinochet.”

Consider Ranjani Srinivasan, who was forced into exile and hiding in an undisclosed location in Canada when Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents came searching for them in campus housing. Homeland Security abruptly revoked Srinivasan’s visa, labeling them a “terrorist sympathizer” and Hamas supporter. Responding to the state’s narrative in an interview, the former Fulbright Scholar wishing to complete their PhD degree said, “Even if I wanted to go to a protest, I mostly don’t have time because I’m busy grading papers.”

In the manner of Wildean skepticism, Srinivasan’s counternarrative of international exile, of the urban situation, and of mundane academic workload cannot get lost on us. Neither can the somber words of a student protester turned into a state prisoner, “I am writing to you from a detention facility in Louisiana where I wake to cold mornings and spend long days bearing witness to the quiet injustices underway against a great many people precluded from the protections of the law.” Srinivasan, Khalil, and the many other unnamed are victims of state persecution, but their words have not been silenced.

Dissenting thoughts, heterogenous voices, and counternarratives opposed to a monolithic narrative need to remain present in the culture, lest culture is to become binarized from history in a way that capitulates to the agenda of the state. To pause, to think, to cooperate, to dialogue, perhaps one day to see the poetry of flowers bloom—these intellectual activities too cannot become mere reminiscences, the other fatalities of a repressive state of persecution. If present history is to change, then stories have to change.

Amir Hussain is a scholar writing and living in eastern Pennsylvania. His research has examined, among other related topics, the relevance of Oscar Wilde’s prison poetry and writings.