abodes that forebode.
Two photographs of tents appeared on the front of the New York Times website one day in April 2024.
In each photo, clusters of nylon fabric, green and white, were staked down in some kind of public space. At first glance, it was easy to think they were the same public space, but they were not.
In one photograph, tents were pitched on the campus at an elite university, part of a protest movement against Israeli military actions in Gaza and the ongoing fraught issue of Israeli policy toward Palestinians as well as the failure to achieve a lasting, just peace in that long-running and painful conflict.
The other photograph, however, featured tents that were not tethered at all to the protests on campuses against the war in Gaza. These other tents formed part of a homeless encampment in a West Coast city in the United States. They were featured as part of a story about a Supreme Court hearing in which municipalities were seeking (and won eventually) the right to remove temporary homeless encampments even when they were unable to house the people in them somewhere else safe.
Elsewhere in the Times a few months earlier, it should be noted, were even more photographs of tents, this time the large beige canvas ones that NGOs or the United Nations or other agencies often use. In this case, they housed Palestinians living on the beaches of Gaza itself, trying to survive amid the rubble of wartime.
What meanings did these tents conceal? What did they reveal? To be sure, at the most obvious level, they were just tents, objects for trying to keep your head dry in the rain, stay warm in the cold, and cool in the heat, no matter what the situation. The tents were places to survive, maybe to get a little privacy even when placed in public places or crowded together in unwelcome locations. In the homeless encampments and in Gaza, the tents were signs of distress, of life in peril, of precariousness. On campuses, they were more symbolic, intended to stand out against the more seemingly permanent structures of learning and living built around them. They were raised in solidarity, yet they also came to stand for a sort of signal of distress, this time the alarm at life proceeding normally close by when a disturbing conflict was going on overseas.
Perhaps tents raise tension because they mark out temporariness. Putting down stakes raises the stakes. Like little flares flickering, they mark out public territory with private dwellings, they assert a nomadic uncertainty, they point out the failures of those in power to establish more sustainable and durable living arrangements.
To be sure, tents can also be beautiful, sacred things, or pleasurable sites of social gathering. They can express a sense of living lightly on the land, a oneness with the natural world, or an eloquent mobility. The Lakota tipi, for instance, is a temporary structure not only of great practical use, but also of enormous awe and grandeur. The Bedouin beit ash-sha’ar (house of hair) tents can sometimes look more comfortable, secure, practical, and luxurious in pictures than most suburban split levels. The hiker on an expedition carries her tent with her, a home on her back. The ability to set down home at will, wherever you want, helps to produce the relaxed intensity of life on the trail. Tents can evoke a peacefulness, an adaptability, a harmony, even a feeling of abundance. Wherever you go, there you are. Or think of the circus or carnival tent, with its spectacular wonders and perhaps its whiff of a bit of exciting danger on the edge of town. You might even want to join it after it folds if you aren’t fitting in at home and desire an escape.
Not in the case of these photographs, however. In these images, tents tended to rise up in places they were not supposed to be: on fancy campus quads; in that patchy, neglected strip of park by the courthouse or downtown square; along Mediterranean beaches. They became fragile monuments, symbols of precariousness, vulnerability, suffering, shock, outrage, a growing feeling of unease. In the spring of 2024, the nylon and canvas hung on tensile poles, polarizing, stretched to the point of ripping. Flapping in the wind, they were set against the fraying social fabric.