We Remember What They Tried to Erase:  Call for Zine Submissions

For more than twenty-five years, the “War on Terror” has relied not only on violence, but on forgetting. It has depended on the erasure of lives, the distortion of histories, and the silencing of those most impacted. Muslim communities have been surveilled, detained, displaced, and criminalized and their stories pushed to the margins, stripped of context and memory.

As we surface and reclaim our histories, we recognize that oppression of Muslim communities began long before 2001—and the weight of  injustice has had an enduring impact on the  lives of Muslim communities across generations and geographies, and resistance struggles.

We refuse to be erased. 

We Remember What They Tried to Erase is a zine project that centers memory as resistance. We are seeking submissions that document, reflect, and reckon with the enduring impact of the War on Terror on Muslim communities in the United States and across the globe.  The conditions we are living through have been sustained not only through violence, but through a public memory that is partial, selective, and deliberately short. In the midst of ongoing state violence, it is critical that we document and preserve our histories—ensuring they are not excluded, silenced, forgotten or erased.

We ask: What does it mean to live in a world where harm is ongoing, but memory is fleeting? What does it mean for those most impacted to define justice on their own terms, rather than have it imposed upon them?

We invite contributions that engage with:

⋆Personal or collective experiences of surveillance, detention, displacement, or criminalization
⋆Stories of resistance, survival, and solidarity
⋆Reflections on grief, mourning, and memory
⋆Analyses of Islamophobia, state violence, and the normalization of war
⋆The making of public memory: what is remembered, what is forgotten, and who decides
⋆Intersections between the War on Terror and other systems of oppression
⋆What it means for those most impacted to define justice, accountability, and repair
⋆Visions for justice, accountability, and abolition

We welcome a range of formats, including:

⋆Essays and reflections
⋆Poetry and spoken word
⋆Visual art, collage, photography, and illustration
⋆Oral histories and testimonies
⋆Experimental or hybrid forms

This zine is both backward-looking and forward-reaching. It seeks not only to document harm, but to interrupt forgetting—to honor those who have been targeted, disappeared, and lost, and to build a living archive of memory that sustains our ongoing demands for justice and our visions beyond it.

Submission Guidelines:

⋆Open to Muslims and those directly impacted by the War on Terror
⋆750 word maximum

In a world that depends on our forgetting, we refuse silence. We remember and name justice on our own terms.