November Chronicle by Eglė Agnė Benkunskytė and Zhuang Leng

How do we become atheists? Or are we atheists? 

Z: The statue of God has been replaced, smashed, pulverized, less concretely visible. 

Yet the fragments remain lodged in the walls, and its dust still floats in the air. 

We had a conversation:  

Modernised version of ancient gods, Religion, and the value system; From Japanese specialty cafes to hunters gathering; Hunger inherited through generations; We live through immense amount of layers; Tracing back. Did we fully change, but what about the essence; It’s hard to find the words for it. Even the language is lacking; It's hard to think beyond your upbringing; Are we trying to see how Christianity is used for imperial power, or are we going back to our gods as an…  

E: What did we inherit through generation. You convinced me, that hunger can be one of one those things, after I joked about a dinner I had, that satisfied even my ancestors, the hunters and the gatherers.  

As we live through immense amounts of layers that came to be through time, I think we both agree that the Ancient Gods can be felt in a busy, loud market in China. I never been, but you convinced me. I did not tell you this, but looking at this back now, I think the Ancient Gods can also reside in a deep old forest or a small, but deep river creek. It’s hard to find the words for it, even the language is lacking trying to describe certain feelings, ideas? It’s hard to try to think beyond our upbringing. Tracing back the history, did we fully changed, but what about the essence? 

Suffered Twister by Muyang 

the one who suffers is thus the one who isn’t allowed to suffer and the one who suffers has also been the one who isn’t seen to suffer therefore if the one who suffers wants to be seen suffering then the one who isn’t allowed to suffer being seen suffering or the one who isn’t seen to suffer being seen suffering or the one who isn’t allowed to suffer being seen not suffering or the one who isn’t seen to suffer being seen not suffering matters not— 

Notes by Ratri 

Considering the limits of empathy, 3 letters to the widow of a police officer  

I 

What does it mean to engage with each other through solidarity? 
I am unravelling the state of our collective condition.  

What does it take for us to understand how our liberation may be tied up in each other's power?  

Isolated victims means isolated struggles, individualizing our experiences and distancing one from the other. How do we map the individual suffering into the broader context?  

Empathy does not stem from a void; violence does not compare like weights on a scale. An impartial idea of justice acknowledges historical struggles and how power circulates. 

What do you mean by justice? Is it justice or retribution? 

I am aware of scale and asymmetry: the timescale of subjugation at the hands of colonial white capital.  

I am aware of the scale of violence, one that lives beyond the lifetimes of the revolutionary and the police, but which comes to define both of their conditions. 

Policing is an inherently violent capitalist tool that extends the aggression of white supremacy and capitalist interests by using the rule of law, as a continuation of the same system that upheld and justified slavery in the United States. In whose name did your husband exert violence onto others? 

What you call a legal process, a revolutionary experiences as a legal lynching.  

Revolutionary militants redefine justice outside of a morally illegitimate system, a life-affirming struggle to reclaim humanity under oppression.  

Will another person/s suffering repair what has been broken? To what extent does her entrapment bring you the justice you long for? What does it bring back? Will that undo the suffering he caused? The agony she responded to? Are they both victim of the ruthless unfolding of capitalist aggression? 

I can’t get past the fact that you are painted as the perfect victim, a grieving mother, lamenting the loss of a husband, of your son’s childhood. Thirst for revenge does not bring back the dead. 

You say you doubt she knows suffering and so I know that you have already swallowed the lie, one which conditions us to think that punishment is a zero-sum game.  

For your suffering to exist, her suffering must be denied. 

Does one suffering always have to mute the other’s? 

What does the visibilisation of your suffering conceal?  

What caused the invisibility of the other’s suffering? 

Two sides of the same coin – two subjectivities pitted against one another, only one deemed human enough to be seen as legitimate pain.  

Your identity as a mother has been weaponized as a legitimate form of pain, granted power over others, obscuring the violence inflicted upon generations, a collective grief that has barely been acknowledged and is to this day being struck with the force of power systems still at work. 

We are being fed a narrative of legitimate pain, one that is recognized within a system of power that uses this pain to justify violence.  

The narrative constructed to hunt the revolutionary is part of a broader plot to demolish the organized struggle for a revolutionary change of a system. 

Revolutionary militancy will be the only antidote.  

We must only turn suffering into struggle and struggle into hope.  

We 

We carry sugarcubes while monuments rise from stone. 

We heard Colonel Williams threaten to kidnap us from Cuba. We heard Rose Forester doubt our sorrow. We watched memorial walls being built, timeless, natural, innocent, as if grief were ancient rock, disconnected from the sugar that sweetened empire. 

We carry sugarcubes: small, white, pure on the outside, each crystallized from our ancestors' bones. We know what each requires: stolen Indigenous land, African slavery, Chinese coolie labor, refining fires that burned our dead into lime to whiten brown sugar. Industrial colonial violence in crystalline form. 

Grief turns into stone and gets called natural. Stone monuments erase cane fields, auction blocks, coolie barracks. Stone claims innocence, stands forever, hides history. 

We carry sugarcubes and get called toxic. We embody the filth of refinement. We hold proof in our palms: four continents connected by sugar, bodies burned to achieve that white exterior, sweetness that cost our lives. We are contamination not because we're dirty, but because we carry the violence refined away. 

Rose Forester's stone grief justifies $50,000 rewards, decades hunting one grandmother, threats to "stop at nothing." Our sugarcube grief, small enough to carry, white enough to look pure, dense enough to hold centuries, is marked as threat. 

We walk in Cuba where sugarcane once meant death. We carry Assata almost unnoticed through Havana streets, a grandmother carrying what was meant to be refined away. The sugarcube is portable, crosses oceans, dissolves slowly but never disappears. We carry four continents: the field, the ship, the refinery, the table. 

We refuse to let monuments stand unchallenged. We carry the sugarcube back to the island where it was produced. Survival proves that what was refined into pure white sweetness was always soaked in blood. 

We carry sugarcubes, compressed from our ancestors' bones. Poison, we get called. Carrying their crime, we call it. 

27 November 2025, St. Erme, France 

To: Rose Forester, widow of Werner Forester 

From: They Collective 

Dear Rose, 

They want you to play a victim of a victim.  

They heard that you are suffering, still grieving. 

*Victim of a victim of a victim 

They don’t want you to forgive - nor understand. 
They say that their justice is fair. 
Don’t you think that their justice reproduces suffering? 

*Victim of a victim of a victim of a victim* 

They say that trauma can be personal, collective or transgenerational. 
They are trying to focus on the safe trauma.  

*Victim of a victim of a victim of a victim of a victim 

They encourage you to find comfort in suffering. 
Can you treasure a memory of a beloved person in other ways? 

*Victim of a victim of a victim of a victim of a victim of a victim 

How can suffering be measured? You say that only you know about suffering. 
They say it’s not a competition. They taught us to emotionally compete. 
They believe that comparison is not a way to tackle suffering.  

They believe that some can afford to show emotions. While others are forced to be objective. 

*Victim of a victim of a victim of a victim of a victim of a victim of a victim 

They are using your tears of personal suffering to justify the suffering they impose on racialized bodies.This is a story of centuries.  

Another question: are you aware that your tears are being used? They are playing with your grief.  

Dear Rose, 
They want you to play a victim of a victim. 

Despina’s recommendations for further reading: 

From “Weapon or Considering the Evidence Against Me” By Justin Rovillos Monson 

Truth Is Never Finished by Fady Joudah 

History Is A Weapon: An Open Letter to my Sister, Angela Davis by James Baldwin