My desire to use papermaking as a form of protest initially began as an act of defiance—an act that helped steer a sliver of my pent-up energy away from angst and dread toward a bright patch of mischievousness. I became involved in organizing and protesting for Palestinian liberation in late 2023, as universities across the country began to restrict students’ rights to protest and free speech. Campus life felt as though it had become increasingly volatile, not due to student activism but from egregious administrative reaction. There was some small part of me that believed institutions would go against their capital interests to do the right thing, that morality could mean more than money. A pit had formed in my stomach and I felt sick. I felt a growing sense of disillusionment and despair as 2023 became 2024 and restrictions on protesting on college campuses against the Israeli bombardment of Gaza intensified. Papermaking, which had always been such a grounding part of my life, now seemed trivial, and I felt selfish working to fit the craft into my schedule. I felt completely unmoored.
By spring 2024, encampments were filling lawns at college campuses across the US. These encampments were peaceful but were met with intense hostility from university administrators and violent counterprotests. On my own campus at the University of Iowa, weekly protests occurred and letters of demand for disclosure and divestment were delivered to the administration with no response. Protestors escalated their tactics by disrupting the college president’s holiday party, resulting in nine arrests; the staging of a three-day People’s University drew fierce criticism from Iowa state representatives; and one attempted encampment was quickly shut down by the University of Iowa Police Department.
My thoughts swirled. I could not make sense of the logic behind disallowing peaceful encampments on campus, while allowing thousands of football tailgaters to set up on the grounds, causing disruption and damage to the university’s campus. Protesters’ questions were met with an infuriating silence from university administrators who had always claimed to be on the side of justice. As an act of defiance, I decided to make the genocide of Palestinians as unavoidable a fact as possible on campus. I wanted to make something that could convey the weight of what was happening, with a sense of respect for the martyrs and a strong commitment to seeing this project through to the end.
This is when I realized there had been a release valve to soothe the growing pressure inside me all along: papermaking. Rather than trying to separate papermaking and my art practice from the activist-organizing side of my life, I needed to allow them to coalesce and see how they could work in tandem.
Making paper slows me down and helps me to reconnect to the earth and nature around me. When I am at the vat and pulling sheets, my body and brain fall into a rhythm that otherwise escapes me. My thoughts, which typically spiral at a rate faster than I can control, miraculously slow down. There is a spiritual retreat in making paper that I have never found in a church or place of worship, a sense of communion with my surroundings and the fiber in front of me. This same sense of communion can be found at protests: when I protest with my comrades I feel as though an invisible thread ties us all together. Anytime the thread is disturbed it reverberates through us all, granting a heightened awareness that helps keep us safe. In these moments, the need to be flexible for the collective good pushes us past our individualistic sense of self and, instead, toward each other.
Communitas, a phenomenon coined by the anthropologist Victor Turner, occurs notably during periods of liminality. Protests are a notoriously liminal space, existing outside the typical confines of bureaucratic institutions and social norms, bringing together people from various economic, social, religious, and even political backgrounds. Paper’s long period of liminality—the time when it is no longer slurry in a vat but not yet a dry sheet—creates magic pockets of endless possibility for interaction among the fibers, as well as time for deep thought. The connections between my papermaking practice and protest activities were becoming clearer than ever.
With these connections in mind, I embarked on a project to represent the deaths of those in Gaza with tally marks on paper. My goal was to raise awareness about the sheer scale of the genocide by making the sheets large and impossible to ignore. I began the process of making these sheets in early September 2024, when the identified death toll hovered around 42,000. Like nearly everything about this most recent conflict between Israel and Gaza, the death toll itself has been a point of contention, with Israel consistently refuting the numbers provided by the Palestinian Health Ministry, which may be providing inaccurate numbers owing to a strict set of criteria used to count those who have been killed in war coupled with the dwindling numbers of workers for the Health Ministry itself.
I designed a process to make twenty sheets of 80 x 36-inch handmade paper that in total would hold 42,000 tally marks. It was important to me that the process be replicable without making it overly simple, fast, or easy. I created a registration jig of 5 columns and 42 rows for a total of 210 cells. Each cell holds ten tally marks made with black-pigmented cotton pulp paint. I made the first four sheets indoors; the remaining sixteen sheets were made outdoors. Although this initially was a solution proposed by my professor Nicholas Cladis at University of Iowa’s Center for the Book to save on studio space for other students, it quickly came to represent much more. Making the sheets outdoors required me to transport a large and unruly amount of equipment outdoors each time I made sheets. I dedicated this time to think of the families walking across the Gaza Strip carrying as many belongings as they were able. The videos, photographs, and interviews I had seen in the news and on social media were on my mind the whole time. Each night after making sheets I would eat a large, protein-dense dinner and remind myself that while I was becoming more muscular from consistently moving equipment, families in Gaza were starving and losing functional and vital muscle mass each day.
Making the tally marks themselves was an emotional and heavy process. While conceptualizing the project I had considered making a large stencil using Mylar but decided against it after noting that this could feel impersonal and would make the sheets too uniform. Placing each tally mark by hand took a substantial amount of time but results in each mark being as distinct as the human being it represents. Additionally, each tally mark was painted twice due to my use of rather thin pulp paint; however, this ended up becoming a crucial part of the process even after I adjusted the paint’s concentration. The double marking became a way to further honor both the birth date and death date of each martyr—a time to consider each one of these lives and how long (or devastatingly short) they had lived. During these liminal periods of making, I felt as though I existed alongside the memory of each martyr. Every tally mark began to speak to me in a reciprocal offering of love and respect. I would say to them as I worked: I love you, I’m sorry, I hope you are safe now, I will not forget you and I will not look away from what is happening.
After spending so much time communing with each piece of paper and each life lost, I felt that keeping the sheets stiff would be unnatural. I decided to knead the sheets of paper into momigami, to continue to imbue each one with love, anger, outrage, sorrow, and a whole soul of its own. Additionally, the choice to transform the paper into momigami serves as an ongoing commitment and reminder of the project. Although I finished making all twenty sheets in a month and a half, the kneading of each sheet to softness is such a massive undertaking that I am still working on their completion nearly a year later.
While I was making the sheets outdoors and later kneading them, passersby would often stop to ask questions, a process I have decided to handle as vulnerably as possible. I ask those who stop if they remember when they first learned about Palestine or what image comes to their mind when they hear the word. I always offer to go first, and they always take me up on that. In today’s political climate, being asked about Palestine so openly is surprising, like a splash of cold water on a hot summer day. In offering to go first, I hope to relieve some of the pressure in that moment. Their surprise coupled with their curiosity about the papermaking process creates another liminal moment that invites connection and a possible shift in perspective.
Each time I go first, I say this: I first learned about Palestine my freshman year of high school. I had just moved to a new state and on my very first day of Honors Geometry I sat down next to a Palestinian girl who would become one of my best friends. When I think of the word “Palestine,” I think of her. I think of her curly hair and how she gestures wildly with her hands when she talks. I think of her warm home and kind family, in particular her mother who always made us hot food and cold smoothies for long study sessions and group projects. I think about getting older and hearing her mother talk about growing up in El-Bireh, next to Ramallah. I think about her stories of the Israeli military entering her childhood home to cut open bags of flour and dump them on the floor. When I think about Palestine, I think about this family and about who and what all of us should be fighting for. We are fighting to make up for so much complicity and silence while the Nakba has continued for more than 70 years. We have a duty to help end the genocide and create an environment for Palestinian self-determination.
The response from my community members and comrades has been incredibly overwhelming. I am showered with so much support and affection, I often worry I don’t deserve it. My Palestinian comrades tell me that my project makes them feel seen. It has become a common occurrence for Palestinians to introduce themselves to me after seeing the sheets, put a hand on my shoulder, and thank me with tears in their eyes. They thank me for seeing them and their families as human.
What kind of world is this? Who have we allowed ourselves to become, that by asserting the dignity of all humans we are considered radicals? I feel assured knowing that I am doing what I can to fight for Palestinian liberation with my arts and talents. How are you feeling? What is the death toll, as 2025 becomes 2026, when you pull this brand-new copy of Hand Papermaking out of your mailbox? And what are you doing to stop it?
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NOTES
1. Jonathan Friedman, “Suspensions of Students for Justice in Palestine Chapters Raise Questions and Concerns about Chilled Campus Environments,” on PEN America website, December 8, 2023, https://pen.org/suspensions-of-students-
for-justice-in-palestine-chapters-raise-questions-and-concerns-about-chilledcampus-environments/ (accessed July 2, 2025); Stephen Gruber-Miller, “Iowa Democratic Party chair rips UI students over ‘anti-Semitic’ post,” Des Moines Register, November 2, 2023, https://www.desmoinesregister.com/story/news/politics/2023/11/02/iowa-democratic-party-chair-rita-hart-rips-university-iowa-students-over-anti-semitic-post/71421457007/ (accessed July 2, 2025).
2. Tural Ahmedzade, Bryony Moore, Alex Olorenshaw, and Lucy Swan, “The pro-Palestine US campus protests in maps, videos and photos,” The Guardian, May 2, 2024, https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/article/2024/may/02/the-pro-palestinian-us-campus-protests-in-maps-videos-and-photos (accessed July 2, 2025).
3. Grace Katzer, “Pro-Palestine students present open letter to UI President Barbara Wilson, walk out of classes,” The Daily Iowan, November 9, 2023, https://dailyiowan.com/2023/11/09/pro-palestine-students-present-open-
letter-to-university-of-iowa-president-barbara-wilson-walk-out-of-classes/
(accessed July 2, 2025); Roxy Ekberg, “Students walk out in support of Palestine, issue second open letter to UI,” The Daily Iowan, November 17, 2023, https://
dailyiowan.com/2023/11/17/students-walk-out-in-support-of-palestine-issue-
second-open-letter-to-ui/ (accessed July 2, 2025); Alejandro Rojas, “Over 100 people gather on Pentacrest to protest Israel-Hamas war,” The Daily Iowan, November 4, 2023, https://dailyiowan.com/2023/11/04/over-100-people-gather-
on-pentacrest-to-protest-israel-hamas-war/ (accessed July 2, 2025).
4. Ryan Hansen, “Nine arrested after chaining themselves to Kinnick Stadium in pro-Palestine protest,” Iowa City Press-Citizen, December 12, 2023, https://
www.press-citizen.com/story/news/local/2023/12/12/palestine-protest-chain-
themselves-to-iowa-city-kinnick-stadium-protest-israel-war/71893619007/
(accessed July 2, 2025); Adam Carros, “Pro-Palestine protest underway on
U of Iowa campus,” KCRG, May 3, 2023, https://www.kcrg.com/2024/05/03/pro-palestine-protest-underway-u-iowa-campus/ (accessed July 2, 2025); Sabine Martin and Liam Halawith, “First pro-Palestine encampment on UI campus shut down by police,” The Daily Iowan, May 6, 2024, https://
dailyiowan.com/2024/05/06/first-pro-palestine-encampment-on-university-of-iowa-campus-shut-down-by-police/ (accessed July 2, 2025).
5. In the context of the genocide of Palestinians, the term ‘martyr’ is used to convey the deep commitment, risk, and sacrifice that Palestinians endure in order to remain on the land they are indigenous to. For more, see Norman Finkelstein, Gaza: An Inquest into Martyrdom (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2018), Preface and Chapter 11. Also, see Columbia University Apartheid Divest’s “THE MEANING OF MARTYRDOM | HINDS HOUSE | THE CONSTRAINTS OF ELECTORAL POLITICS,” CUAD BARRICADE (blog), November 21, 2024, https://cuapartheiddivest.substack.com/p/the-meaning-of-martyrdom-hinds-house.
6. Victor W. Turner, The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure (Chicago: Aldine Pub. Co., 1969).
7. Riyad Mansour, “One-year of Israel’s genocide against the Palestinians – Letter from the State of Palestine,” October 8, 2024, posted on the United Nations website, https://www.un.org/unispal/document/palestine-letter-08oct24/ (accessed July 2, 2025).
8. Rasha Khatib, Martin McKee, and Salim Yusuf, “Counting the dead in Gaza: difficult but essential,” The Lancet, vol. 404, issue 10449, 237–238, July 20, 2024, https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(24)01169-3/fulltext.
