Feminists In Conversation: Messages Across Checkpoints and Borders

We are five women, carrying five different experiences, shaped by three countries, distinct encounters of oppression, and different journeys of resistance shaped by our feminist activism. Our histories might be very different but in our daily realities, we find ourselves bound together. There is a thread running through us, a shared struggle and a shared sense of purpose, whether the struggle manifests as exhaustion from being overworked or as the relentless obstacles placed on the road toward liberation, equality, and equity.

We find ourselves returning – again and again – to conversations about the concepts that shape our movements, the theories that give our activism clarity, and the lived experiences that ground everything we do. We exchange reflections on private moments of feminist struggle: the kind that rarely make it into reports or public statements. And we share glimmers of respite: the small triumphs, the reasons we persist, and the joy that comes from doing the work we believe in.

This is, in essence, what feminists do in conversation: we think, we feel, we critique, we hold space, and we refuse to be silent.

From Nairobi to Jerusalem to Beirut, we share, we communicate, and we keep moving. Each of us against forces much larger than any individual, yet never alone – because every message, every exchange, becomes part of a collective pulse keeping us moving.

Good morning friends, 

Across continents, 

May our day begin

With sweet sentiments.

Healing the wounds,

Of a solidarity broken,

Narrating our stories,

As heroines, not tokens.

Nour (14th November 2025)

How This Began

This is a story of journaling: Five women coming together and choosing to show up for one another in solidarity. It is about the conversations we forged, the ones that unfolded almost by accident, and the ones that sustained us deliberately. Our piece today aims to offer a glimpse into what it truly means to be part of a global feminist movement shaped by different intersections, different urgencies, and different emotional landscapes, all of which somehow connect.

Journaling as Counter-Archive

What emerged through this practice of journaling was not merely an emotional exchange. It became aform of feminist method-making under conditions of constraint. 

In political landscapes that consistently demand legibility, productivity, and coherence from feminist movements – often through reports, papers and policy language, our scattered notes, voice messages, poems, and unfinished reflections functioned as a refusal. They refused extraction. They refused the imperative to render suffering consumable or neatly narratable. 

Instead, journaling became a counter-archive: a space where exhaustion could remain unproductive, where contradictions did not have to be resolved for clarity’s sake, and where political analysis unfolded through intimacy rather than abstraction. 

Our conversations were sites of knowledge production, grounded in material realities and sustained through care labour that is rarely recognised as such. What circulated between us, across borders, checkpoints, and time zones, was not only solidarity as feeling, but solidarity as practice: slow, uneven, and deliberately resistant to the violences of urgency that so often govern feminist organising under crisis.

Fragments from Our Days

We journaled together, sending fragments into the group chat like small dispatches from our various frontlines. Some entries were light, soft, or mundane; others were heavy, urgent, or quietly devastating.

At times, we wrote about days off, long-awaited breaks, visits to relatives, moments with children or family members that reminded us of tenderness and belonging. At other times, we wrote aboutemergencies: supporting an illegal abortion in a refugee camp so that a young woman might secure safety and the chance to divorce her husband before he discovered her pregnancy; rushing across neighbourhoods where state institutions fail women, attempting to create safety where official systems refuse to. There were stories of entering informal settlements and slums to raise awareness about SGBV, providing young women with access to protection mechanisms and service pathways, and small interventions in places where the state has long abandoned them.

Good afternoon,

Today at the gym, I had such an insightful discussion with my brain. It was back day, very tough, so I was mad at my trainer.

As I was doing my dead lifts, I thought about how holding the weights and lifting them symbolises the global burdens and shared resilience of women across the globe, regardless of location or class and also the heavy, often invisible, social and systemic burdens that women collectively carry all over the world.

Angie (14th November 2025)

We shared intimate moments in our lives, whether dark or bright, painful or exhilarating. And every message sent – across borders, across checkpoints, across time zones – was met with responses full of love, affirmation, and solidarity. 

What began as a brief late-night conversation on a hotel rooftop in Nairobi, during a feminist convening that brought us together by chance, slowly transformed into a small, living space of safety and mutual care.

“I am reading the conversations and drinking my morning coffee. I have been thinking a lot about homophobia, sexism and misogyny. Lately after moving to Palestine four years ago, I started witnessing and experiencing it a lot, it is not that I did not experience all of those in the UK, it is just that the practices look so much different. And I think my immigration status in the UK felt more prominent than all other forms of marginalisation, it felt bigger and much harder to experience.  It is also making me think about how women themselves are so complacent and complicit to those structures – I understand where it comes from, but my mind does not want to accept it!!

I have also been doing a placement at a women’s organisation as part of my psychotherapy course – the stories I hear about the violence women are exposed to are horrible – women get divorced without their knowledge and the men still live with them and their children and have sex with them, and at the same time have second wives. It makes me think people are so hungry for power that they are willing to destroy lives.”

Nof (21 November 2025)

Joy as Contested Terrain

We lifted each other up in moments of despair, when the world felt unbearably heavy, and celebrated together whenever pride or joy found its way into our days. But we also asked ourselves: How much space is there for joy in our lives?

Joy, in our conversations, did not appear as abundance or ease. It surfaced tentatively, often with hesitation, and sometimes with guilt. Undersustained violence, whether enacted through occupation, war, patriarchal structures, or racialised state abandonment, joy is rarely neutral. It is rationed, postponed, or quietly disciplined, particularly for women whose lives are already overdetermined by responsibility and care.

In this sense, joy is not simply an affective counterweight to suffering. It is a contested terrain shaped by power: who is permitted to experience it, when, and at what cost. 

For us, moments of joy, laughter exchanged across time zones, pride in a small intervention, relief after a crisis narrowly contained, did not dissolve the structures we confront daily. Rather, they functioned as fragile interruptions, brief reassertions of liveability in contexts designed to exhaust. To name joy here is therefore not to romanticise resilience, but to insist that survival itself is political, and that the capacity to feel otherwise, even momentarily, constitutes a refusal of the logics that seek to reduce our lives to endurance alone.

For five women all experiencing oppression, whether it is the looming threat of war in Lebanon, the suffocating reality of occupation in Palestine, or the colonial legacies and ongoing patriarchal violence in Kenya, joy can feel like something we must fiercely protect.

“Sometimes I realise how epic our networks, our feminist resistance are. I know someone living in a refugee camp. She is only 17 and married into an unhappy marriage. She ran away twice but keeps getting dragged back. Now she finally has a court date next week to get the divorce. BUT she is pregnant and needs an abortion before the court day… Her husband suspects the pregnancy and can force her to take a pregnancy test by court order, which would destroy her chance of finally getting the divorce. Abortions in Lebanon are illegal, and it is really hard to find the medication. In the camps, they sell expired or fake abortion meds that can cause dangerous side effects. It took me only 30 minutes and three phone calls to feminist friends, and I will be able to pick up the medication tomorrow and get them into the camp to ensure the girl has her abortion over this weekend so she will be able to see her divorce through.”

Dara (20 November 2025)

We are each navigating daily encounters with violence,  the kind enacted by white supremacy, patriarchy, and colonial powers,  systems that manifest differently in our contexts but share a common logic of domination.

Good evening.

Today, as I continue doing grassroots education with survivors of SGBV in one of Nairobi’s slums, something struck me deeply. Most victims of intimate-partner violence don’t report — not because they don’t want justice, but because the system still fails to understand their reality.

Physical violence from a partner is often dismissed as “just a domestic issue.”

Sexual violence within relationships is even worse — reduced to “a story,” ridiculed, doubted, or treated as impossible.

Yet these are crimes.

Crimes committed in homes where love was supposed to live.

Crimes hidden behind culture, silence, and fear of being shamed.

Kemunto (1. December 2025)

What We Learned from Staying in Conversation

This is where our experiences truly intersected most clearly: in the recognition that while our oppressions are not identical, they are structurally connected; and so are our resistances. 

What this collective journaling ultimately made visible is not a singular feminist experience, nor a unified narrative of struggle, but a shared political orientation forged through difference. Our solidarities did not emerge from sameness, nor from a seamless alignment of contexts. They grew from a sustained attentiveness to how structures of domination, patriarchy, colonialism, racialised governance, and militarised power recur across geographies while reorganising themselves locally. 

In choosing to remain in conversation – to witness one another without collapsing difference or demanding coherence – we practised a form of feminismthat is neither heroic nor complete. It is provisional, relational, and necessarily unfinished. Yet, it is precisely this incompleteness that sustains it: a solidarity that does not promise liberation as an endpoint, but insists on staying present within struggle – generating knowledge, care, and refusal in the midst of ongoing violence. 

In this sense, our journaling is not a record of what has been achieved, but a commitment to continue thinking, feeling, and acting together, across borders, across fractures, and without the comfort of closure.

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