We continue to honour and stand alongside the Palestinian people, who resist the ongoing colonization of their lands, apartheid, and genocide perpetuated by “Israel”.
As we sit with the ongoing violences in which we are all inextricably implicated, we are sitting with the poem “If I Must Starve,” by Nour Abdel Latif, shared to her social media on July 22, 2025 and written after her martyred teacher, Refaat Alareer, who wrote “If I Must Die” in 2011. Alareer’s poem was widely reshared after he was martyred in 2023 by an Israeli airstrike.
In “Canlit,” we continue looking to movements like CanLit Responds and No Arms in the Arts, which remind us to create art and writing in service of freedom rather than empire.
Let us continue to act in solidarity with all who resist the imperial machinery of violence.
Excerpt from “If I Must Starve,” by Nour Abdel Latif, via New York War Crimes
Let the sea carry my name
to shores that forgot my people,
and let the wind whisper:
she fed love when bread was gone.
“[Excerpt] Witness to the Hellfire of Genocide: A Testimony from Gaza” by Mousa Alsadah and Wasim Said, via Protean Magazine
…we must be cautious not to romanticize resilience—to avoid masking the scale of the tragedy, injustice, betrayal, and complicity by exporting the image of the invincible Gazan hero, as though they are anything less than human. Too often, we indulge in the fantasy of heroism as a way to ease the shame of our failure to stand with them.
Forgetting that before they are heroes, they are oppressed—utterly isolated, in a loneliness unlike any before. That is why before we weave our relationship with the hero, we must weave it with the oppressed. The former offers a false comfort; the latter demands action, discomfort, and a call for commitment to fight for justice. These two Hero/Oppressed definitions do not cancel each other out—but we must understand: these heroes are, first and foremost, oppressed. “The wretched of the earth,” in Franz Fanon’s terms.
Excerpt from “[…]” by Fady Joudah via Poets.org
The passive voice
is your killer’s voice.
From time to time, they vote.
From time to time, language dies.
It is dying now.
Who is alive to speak it?
Excerpt from “The Time Beneath the Concrete – In Conversation with Nasser Abourahme,” by Naji Safadi, via Institute for Palestinian Studies
Nasser Abourahme: “…settler colonialism everywhere is not just the struggle over land and its possession, but also a struggle over time. Time both in its organization of experience, and time also as a relationship to history, to past, present, and future. This is not restricted to Palestine, you can see this across settler colonial contexts. Settler colonies are orders that remain dogged by questions of time, foundation, and unfinished pasts. But nowhere is it more apparent than in the question of Palestine.”
Excerpt from “How My Grandmother Remembers the Nakba,” by Tareq Baconi, via The Nation
Nineteen forty-eight. A shadow—the darkest one—cast over our lives in Amman. I pull my grandma Tata’s diaries out of the weathered yellow box, which is filled with scores of letters; cards received from friends and family; old journals and pads; and paraphernalia that releases childhood smells of sugary sweetness and perfumey paper when opened. The diaries are minimal. Barely anything is divulged from this time, apart from her love for her God. Everything else documents basic events as they transpired, in a clinical and sober tone. A historian’s archive rather than a record of a lived life. Her notes help me make sense of the tales that permeated our early years in Amman—unobtrusive, undemanding—like wallpaper on the back of our consciousness.
Excerpt from “So the Light Won’t Leave Me,” by Nima Hasan, translated by Huda Fakhreddine, via Mizna
Had my father built our neighborhood window,
you would have seen me waving.
Had I learned to sow wheat in the scorched land,
my head would have become a rolling field.
Had my mother taught me to weave grief,
I would have made a sweater to shield me from this fear
and you would have heard me singing
as if I had never died.
Excerpt from “An Interview with Fargo Nissim Tbakhi,” by Summer Farah and Fargo Nissim Tbakhi, via Poetry Project
Fargo Nissim Tbakhi: Something I think about in particular in “Craft Talk,” is that every failure is also a success. What I mean by that is the ethical and political failures that I’m demonstrating in that poem are also me, or the speaker, being a successful poet. Our collective failure to stop the genocide of Palestinians is also our success at being neoliberal subjects. The understanding of the world’s foundation being contingent on the brutality against Palestinians means that every time we don’t stop it, we are being good citizens. I feel the same way about the idea of ethical failures in writing. More often than not, [that] means we are successful writers. We are good “literary citizens,” for example, a phrase that I find truly repulsive, but actually useful. It comes with all the violence that a citizenship contains.
Excerpt from “Who Is Owed Springtime,” by Rasha Abdulhadi, via Poetry Online
or that suspension right before rain,
the density of an uncoiled afternoon or morning or evening
through which we could walk as a shimmering curtain
of tinsel fringe hung at the door of a party
and steer to another evening, or morning or afternoon,
in which we are dancing always,
Excerpt from “The Burden of Imprecision: on the limitation of statistics,” by Nicki Kattoura, via Mondoweiss
But even if we possessed an accurate number, we wouldn’t understand the depth of its meaning. Can we conceptualize 680,000 martyrs when visualizing 65,000 is itself an impossible task? Statistics erase, blur, ambiguate, and rob. I think of how visceral my affective response to the individual stories of martyrs is, that extrapolating it a thousand times over is an impossibility that will inevitably dull those feelings. Muhammad Bhar, for example, was the young man with Down Syndrome who was killed after Israeli soldiers unleashed dogs on him. As they mauled him to death, Muhammad, who was non-verbal for the majority of his life, uttered his final words: “Khalas, ya habibi” — “enough, my love.” Numbers are by nature de-individuating and reduce life to an arithmetic equation, to the cold sign of 1. Our martyrs become indistinguishable because of the way numbers homogenize life into a set of data points.
Excerpt from “We Speak in the Plural: A Poem in Many Voices,” by Amanda Najib, via Protean Magazine
My daughter is four.
She brings home a worksheet with a map
where Palestine is a blank space.
“Did I miss a spot, Mama?” she asks,
her crayon still warm in her fist.
I press my lips to her curls,
and promise her that we are the map.
That every time she says her name,
a border disappears.
Excerpt from “On Parallel Time,” by Walid Daqqa, translated by Nour Eldin Hussein, via Mizna
I write to you all from Parallel Time. In Parallel Time, where there is fixity of place, we do not use the standard units of your time like minutes and hours, not unless the two lines of our time and your time meet at the visitation window, whereupon we are forced to interact with your chronological formulae. It is, anyway, the only thing that has not changed in your time and that we still remember how to use.
It has reached me on the tongue of the young delegates of the intifada—indeed, this was told to me personally—that many things have changed in your time.
Excerpt from “An American Writes a Poem,” by Fargo Nissim Tbakhi, via Action Books
The soldier will go home and surrender to the dream of militant preservation.
He will never think of this day again.
I will think of this day constantly.
Imagining and reimagining the round
hurtling through the wind, as again an American poem
just breaks somebody’s heart.
Excerpt from “Suture Fragmentations—A Note on Return,” by Sarona Abuaker, via Mizna
Return has always, then, been conceived as “unnatural,” for it is a practice of making an order beyond the state-sanctioned order which we live today of “capitalist domestication” and settler-colonial regimes. I propose return as practice, queering return so it re-aligns with orientations of possibility, a way of directing through future-thinking. Return as spatial occurrences. How does queer phenomenology help us think about living return in different spaces and being re-turned in spaces?
Take action:
- E-sims for Gaza, an initiative to ensure Palestinians can remain in contact with loved ones and the outside world as electricity is cut off.
- Resources from the Toronto Palestine Film Festival, including petitions and campaigns, where to donate, and how to support the Boycott, Divest, and Sanction (BDS) movement.
For further reading, we recommend:
- Palestine Square via the Institute for Palestine Studies, which publishes news, analysis, narrative, perspectives, and arts and culture pieces on Palestinian affairs.
- Toward a Free Palestine: Resources to Act for and Learn About Palestine, a resource list by Mizna
- Protean Magazine’s “Letters from Gaza” in partnership with the Institute for Palestine Studies.
- Hammer and Hope’s Palestine Resource Guide for a selection of readings and films on Palestine.
- Dispatches from We Are Not Numbers (WANN), a youth-led Palestinian nonprofit project in the Gaza Strip that tells the stories behind the numbers of Palestinians in the news
- We Had Dreams, a platform that uplifts the hopes, dreams, and fears of Palestinians in Gaza, available in multiple languages
- Passages Through Genocide, a compilation of collected, translated, and published texts from Palestinian writers confronting the genocide in Gaza
- A reading list on Palestinian refusal, by Briarpatch Magazine
- Verso Books’ From the River to the Sea: Essays for a Free Palestine and other resources
Let us be steadfast as we call for an end to the occupation and learn about actions to take in solidarity with Palestine.
Header image: “Until Victory,” by Zach Hussein, via Artists Against Apartheid
