We continue to honour and stand alongside the Palestinian people, who resist the ongoing colonization of their lands, apartheid, and genocide perpetuated by “Israel”.
In this moment of crucial conversations in “CanLit,” we find it instructive to look 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. To quote Toni Morrison, “If you are free, you need to free somebody else. If you have some power, then your job is to empower somebody else.”
Let us continue to act in solidarity with all who resist the imperial machinery of violence; may these testimonies, poems, and essays guide us.
“On the Eve of yet another Nakba, a Dream,” by George Abraham, via Scalawag Magazine
of abandoning this shithole called American life
& teleporting to the largest Filasteeni potluck
imaginable: no shelling, no blockades or walls,
no post-9/11 era terrors of surveillance, no wild
-fire lies to feed the American public, no America
to need feeding — everyone will eat here & have
their fill. The teitas will find more pans, flip pot
after pot of maqloobeh, taking 4, no 6, hands
to pull off — this small collectivism of rice, its rise,
& steam & laugh, against a world turned already
upside-down. We’ll abandon the doom scroll & feed,
instead, the masses of us, as our beloveds return
& return only to be put to this work of miraculous
care: yes, even in dreaming, this world requires
the work of everybody, & what better way to say
I love you than to pluck the mint or rinse the rice —
“Gaza Diary: The Privilege of Survival,” by Malak Hijazi, via Institute of Palestine Studies
I loved pouring olive oil on my hummus. I used to pour more than I should because I’m Palestinian, and I don’t care. But this year, there’s no olive oil. The olive harvest season bore no fruit because the Israeli regime controls most of the olive groves in Al-Zaytoun, the neighborhood famous for its olives. They have uprooted trees, displaced inhabitants, and denied people the labor of olive picking and pickling.
My dad jokes, “How can a Palestinian house not have olives or olive oil?” I replied, “How can a Palestinian man get cheated and buy olive oil mixed with sunflower oil?” He laughs and says, “It’s the same color as the original one, and I didn’t even smell it. I didn’t imagine this would happen.”
“Death Seeks Us in Exile,” by Yumna Hamidi, via Institute of Palestine Studies
“How many of you are there?” Silence and fear filled the place. Nobody uttered a single word for fear that the soldiers would hit the house and kill everyone.
“‘Who’s there?’ they started calling,” Tasneem said to Iman. “We signaled to each other that we shouldn’t talk, but there was a baby boy who started crying. A man among those present took a pillow and started smothering the child. ‘One dies so 75 can live,’ he said to the baby’s mother as she went to stop him.”
“Pass It,” by Najwan Darwish, translated by Kareem James Abu-Zeid, via Granta
Pass it to me, I said.
I want to make long and delicate incisions
in which these gathering clouds can sleep –
they’re hoarding up fatigue
as they travel from one end of themselves
to the other.
Pass me this hazy bit of sky
hung
above a sea that’s been dead since forever,
though no one knew it.
“Letter to June Jordan in September,” by Lena Khalaf Tuffaha, via Mizna
I cannot pass without your words. Something about witnessing twice removed. About distances magnified by the shift into language. Of dailyness and my own children’s vernacular and the machine. Grinding us all in its jaws. I met a girl from the camp at a reading in Beirut. She asked if we could talk about the life of poetry. Our families are hauled off to the world of the dead, and every day it is on screen. In Gaza, we’re watching Ferguson, and in Atlanta we’re watching Jerusalem watching Minneapolis watching.
“I Don’t Want to Be Civil Anymore,” By Mariam Masud, via Fikra Magazine
The fundamentals of civility do not serve this man and others like us. They were not made for the wretched of the earth. Civility is the oppressor’s way of policing our behavior. It keeps us docile in the shackles of structures that were never built for us.
We saw this during the protests over the murder of George Floyd in the summer of 2020, when news outlets and politicians condemned Black people’s violent reactions. Activists and allies took to social media to demand: Do not tell Black people how to react.
We saw this when Israel launched heavy airstrikes on Gaza, the world’s largest open-air prison, in May 2021 – not to mention every bombardment since 2008. Western liberals and Zionists alike criticized Palestinian resistance groups for launching rockets into Israel. Palestinians demanded: Do not tell a colonized people how to react.
“The Committed,” by Hazem Fahmy via Split This Rock
When I say “a Free Palestine in our lifetime” I mean it
is your moral duty to believe the last shekel has already been printed,
its destiny a glass frame in a museum next to a dollar,
euro and sterling, all reduced to mere paper, fragile
memory, small thing you walk by and might not
even notice.
“A Glass of Water, a Burning Boy: Fady Joudah on Images From Gaza,” by Fady Joudah, via Lit Hub
A young man burning alive in his makeshift hospital bed singed the unspeakable into world memory—a short memory, a hyperactive memory with attention-deficit, a deliberately porous memory without industrial chronicity behind it—and do you think the executioners care? Culture of the aftermath of images and the lives they contained. National Geographic with blazing green eyes. Gender and the environment. A vulture objectively giving a moribund child his space to die of starvation. A corpse is a corpse. A naked girl screaming in pain on the road of her forced displacement, half her body burnt by an army of a people who perpetually protest what they refuse to topple. The risk-benefit ratio demands it. How many genocides were not called by their names? Anachronism or denial?
“Roundtable: The Palestinian Speculative,” by Fargo Nissim Tbakhi, N. A. Mansour, and Rasha Abdulhadi via Strange Horizons
Fargo: The Palestinian speculative is a spider’s web. It is a tunnel dug through the murderous fence of discourse and into the good clean air. It is a fishnet. It is the song that illuminates the made world and its necessary unmaking. It is the way we live like porcupines and fight like fleas, in the words of the martyr Basel Al-Araj. It is fishnet stockings. The Palestinian speculative is the way that rubble speaks to us when it says: !! It is the slingshot hurled against capital and its many faces. It is the joyful and inevitable dissolution of all nations and all banks. The Palestinian speculative is alive in food and protest and bricks and kites and taxi cabs and burning tires. It is the bone-deep certainty that the fence is bound to break; it is the many ways we hurl ourselves towards the breaking.
“Inimitable,” by Fady Joudah, via Mizna
Did you vote to make it great again
or was genocide never genocide to you?
Is there a light inside you dying
to go out? Who will you mine
to keep your night bright? How are you
always unprecedented
even as echo? Am I, a Palestinian, ever not
an analogy whose progenitor you are? What
makes your common decency heroic?
Why are you so often the baby
and I’m the bathwater?
Excerpts from Love is an Ex-Country, by Randa Jarrar, via Los Angeles Review of Books
Children get their first taste of invisibility before they can even remember. Then, they thrill in magic tricks. A parent can hide and then surprise them with their sudden return. Birthday clowns make coins disappear. Children watch cartoons where a mouse takes a dip in a paint pot that holds invisibility ink. Harry Potter wears a cloak, women in Canada and America and Afghanistan and Lebanon and France wear niqabs, humans are surveilled through closed-caption video cameras, drones can spy activities from high above and can also strike men dead, or hit a wedding party. Once the wedding party is gone, so are the children. If you kill all the children in one family, you have made invisible all the more Arabs, because now the entire lineage has been erased. Death becomes, as my mother says, a return to that amniotic nothingness.
“Vietnam, Algeria, Palestine: Passing on the torch of the anti-colonial struggle,” by Hamza Hamouchene, via Mondoweiss
No discussion of decolonization and anti-imperialism can be complete without understanding the importance of Vietnam and Algeria, and how their revolutionary liberation struggles were (and continue to be) so inspiring to oppressed people all over the world, including the Palestinians.
No one revolution exactly resembles another. This is because all revolutions are rooted in a specific national or regional history, are led by particular social and generational forces, and happen at a given moment in the development of a country. However, revolutions all share a common element, without which they would not be called revolutions: the arrival of a new bloc of classes who take up leadership of the state, or the transition from colonial dependence to national independence. In Lenin’s words, “For a revolution to take place, it is usually insufficient for the lower classes not to want to live in the old way; it is also necessary that the upper classes should be unable to live in the old way.” Despite all the elements that might point to continuity, it is this rupture that marks a revolutionary change.
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.
- Operation Olive Branch, a spreadsheet (and soon-to-be website) about calls for mutual aid, actions to take for Palestine, solidarity projects, resources, and more.
- 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: “Untitled,” by Ryookyung Kim, via Artists Against Apartheid
