Someday, with my hands
I will transform the image.
Samih Al-Qasim, “I, The Pronoun of the Speaker”
I gave my first lecture, at my first academic job, behind a wall of plexiglass, speaking to an awkwardly spaced out group of masked students who had maybe already given up – and honestly, who could blame them? I walked in sweating and late because my building’s social distancing protocol required me to run up five floors and down two to get to my third floor classroom. Leaning into the mic, I opened with the joke: “Welcome to apocalyptic poetry!”
My students chuckled nervously. Maybe the joke was that it was day one of the fall semester, and who really wanted to be in a required advanced poetic form class? Or maybe it was my way of cutting the tension of our gathering, united by the sole purpose of discussing poetry in a time that, back then, felt newly apocalyptic to some.
Soon, apocalypse became a tired punchline. Languishing through mere existence, I did what any young Palestinian instructor of literature would likely do: I returned to Audre Lorde, who reminds us “poetry is not a luxury,” and June Jordan, who gives us models for writing against and despite the state. I returned to extensive traditions of Indigenous ecopoets who have been resisting western colonialism’s devastation of the Land since the beginning of the settler project. I turned and returned to Don Mee Choi, Etel Adnan, Anthony Cody, and Bradley Trumpfheller: living poets who are building new language for apocalxypse by breaking capital-E-English – English as a state actor, English as a colonial accomplice, in our apocalypse.
Teaching poetry while witnessing the horrors of ongoing murders of Black Americans by the police, anti-Asian violence surging in the pandemic, and medical apartheid policies of the Israeli state in the vaccine rollout, I often returned to Franny Choi’s “The World Keeps Ending and The World Goes On” to open my lectures. The poem travels from the apocalypse of boats to the apocalypse of bombed mosques; from radioactive rain to settlement and soda machine (a reference to the Palestinian boycott campaign against the settler company SodaStream). In naming the collective(s) built in catastrophe’s shadow, the poem offered my students and I new possibilities of language for our grief, and for our survival of an apocalypse which mutates daily and without warning.
Choi’s poem is a window into a here where apocalypse is not stagnant and singular, but a continuous environmental catastrophe we (are) return(ed) to again and again: “by the time the apocalypse began, the world had already/ended. It ended every day for a century or two. It ended, and another ending/world spun in its place.” Here, Choi’s imagination of apocalyptic time as cyclic and nonlinear calls readers to question the colonialist assumptions of immortality implicit to white & Western understandings of apocalypse.
To fear apocalypse as a singular moment in time is to imply that one’s own world has never been in danger of ending. This line of thought is unimaginable to someone with my history and ancestry, to victims of colonialism and other apocalyptic crimes. Impending planet-wide catastrophes such as COVID or our climate crisis were the first time some (read: people with proximity to Western power) reckoned with the possibility of their world ending; many of these same people continuously fail to see that capitalism and colonialism are to blame for these catastrophes, and that nearly all of this could have been avoided by listening to victims of colonialism. To those who call today’s state of affairs newly apocalyptic, I ask: where have you been? Who have you been (failing at) listening to?
So maybe it’s not a universal Capital-A-Apocalypse I want to excavate language for, but a lowercase-a-apocalypse that colonialism has imposed on Indigenous and dispossessed peoples since the beginning of the settler project. The tired apocalypse. The assumed apocalypse. An apocalypse that keeps (a notion of) their world alive, at the expense of (a notion of) our own.
Massacres teach me not to wait
for those who’ll be pulled out of the rubble,
and not to follow the stories of survivors
Maya Abu-Alhayyat, “Massacres” (trans. Fady Joudah)
In preparing for a recent reading, I returned to some lyric essay fragments which were written during my first and only trip to Palestine and published in my latest poetry collection, Birthright. The sequence focuses on moments during the trip that lingered with me: the Israeli politician who accused Palestinians demanding return of “advocating for the state’s suicide;” talking to families in Nabi Saleh actively protesting state-sponsored home demolitions (tell me, dear reader, where have we heard that before?). In returning to this piece in 2021, and all the apocalypses I’ve both survived and been suspended in since writing it, I saw, at its heart, a reckoning with witness and complications thereof – the irreconcilables of “Western diplomacy” as a language for and gaze asserted unto Palestine.
I was struck, in this revisiting, by the second section, in particular, which describes my visit to the ethnically cleansed Palestinian village of Lifta: the desecrated remains of former homes; the Israeli settlers bathing in the ruins, sitting among the remains casually reading newspapers; the tour guide named Yacoub who told us about the sewage leaking down from Jerusalem and erasing his father’s grave marker. The detail that is perhaps most heavy in my heart: “In the distance, there is a playground with a newly renovated park, speckles of white children running around. [Yacoub said,] ‘The government started building a, a… ya’ani, a new Israeli Quarter at the base of our village. This is our land, but they want to pave over it. We are fighting them, ya’ani, in the courts… But the construction has already begun.’”
The present day: an ad for Lifta Boutique appears on my Instagram feed. Marketed with filtered pictures of romanticized sunsets and hillsides, it is a resort for tourists supporting the settler economy built over the paved wreckage of our village. When I wrote down Yacoub’s words, I didn’t know that they would, in essence, become vessels for a shattered memory of my land. That they would witness our land, suspended at once in pre- and post-apocalypse of a different now, a different here. Language as a collective offering, in the midst of our (lowercase-a) apocalypse.
As Palestinians have been tweeting and otherwise telling the world, every single city in Palestine was once Sheikh Jarrah, and Silwan, and Lifta, and and and. As a Palestinian living in the United States, I witness my homeland’s cyclic apocalypse, as newer victims of Israeli ethnic cleansing replace older ones in the hashtags; as news met with Western apathy and zionist suppression dissolves into silence. Palestinians – having no choice but that which the West fetishizes as “bravery” – rebuild, survive in ways the West couldn’t begin to imagine, and above all, continue resisting. Every year, this organized resistance peaks on or around May 15 – the day we mourn the ethnic cleansing of Palestine, from the Nakba of 1948 to the Nakba of present day. And, on nearly every Nakba day of my adult life, I have witnessed the same pattern of Israeli aggression towards Palestinians, namely Gazans; Israeli aggression births Palestinian resistance births an excuse for further Israeli aggression.
The cycle – already unsustainable given the power imbalance between a Western, imperialist-funded, nuclear state and an Indigenous dispossessed people – intensifies with the years, pushing Palestinians into an even more desperate, catastrophic state of being. Israel knows the West will not hold them accountable, and furthermore, knows that its very ideology, its settler apparatus’ survival, depends upon its ability to force Palestinians into this unsustainable cycle of violence.
As much as this cycle is a problem of “diplomacy,” and Western failures therein, it is also a problem of (colonial imaginations of) language itself. Within this cycle, Palestinians witness repeating patterns of both-sides-isms and revisionist erasures of our struggle’s ongoing memory emerging from the American media. In their syntactical patterns and use of passive voice, in every statement divorced from the transparent and well-documented reality of Israeli ethnic cleansing, in every failure to contextualize the ongoing history of Palestinian resistance, the US media contorts the English language into a supremacist enactor of the colonial project. Many Palestinians, including myself, have written against this irresponsibility of language time and time again. We say so, often, but, nowadays, it feels as if we are shouting into the void.
The void is deep, dare I say, the very heart of this nation itself. This abusive pattern of language that has been documented and studied for decades with little substantial effort to platform Palestinians in the US mainstream. June Jordan’s “Problems of Language in a Democratic State,” for example, documents a similar pattern of passive voice and lack of accountability-driven language in the US media (on Palestine and beyond) back in the 1980s, identifying an American capital-E-English which is not merely stagnant, but comfortable in our cyclic apocalypse. Jordan advocates for eliminating the passive voice from our English (especially in the media) and for critically deconstructing the ways English can become a state actor. She reminds us, as Palestinians are saying now: “Our lives depend on it.”
Language is merely the placeholder
for what the LAND has always known
Zaina Alsous, “The Workers Love Palestine”
Although these problems of language have been extensively critiqued and studied, the fact that little has materially changed for Palestinians with regards to victimization by the US media is, itself, a reflection on how deeply entrenched institutions of the English language are within the colonial project. What, then, can our future look like if Palestinians must exist within the English language? How can we build a better elsewhere, for all of us, in language if our current institutional imaginations continue to fail us?
One potential answer lies within the English(es) passed down to us from traditions of Black, Indigenous, and diasporic resistance poetry. My returnings to June Jordan this past year have been both balm and wind; both a reminder that Palestinians are not alone in apocalypse or (the problems of) language and a force to push us towards home. Never in the history of English have I felt as held, loved, and Seen, as a Palestinian, than in June Jordan’s work, especially her poem “Moving Towards Home,” which ends with the legendary lines:
I was born a Black woman,
and now
I am become a Palestinian
against the relentless laughter of evil
there is less and less living room
and where are my loved ones?It is time to make our way home.
Here, Jordan’s lyric “I” is both one and many – less a self among a collective than a self that is a collective, intimately tied to the Land and its people. The poet demands that we see Palestinians beyond images of bulldozers, beyond white problems of language, beyond victims suspended in eternal and cyclic apocalypse. Instead, Jordan chooses the more difficult and transgressive path: to See, to Build with, to Love Palestinians. What better way to say “I love you” to a people than to say, not “I am you” or “I beyond you,” but “I am become you?” Or “I future you?”
And here, Jordan exposes a truth about the apocalyptic self: the contradiction of our many I’s. I’ve always hated the lyric “I,” or at least, the imagination of a lyric “I” instilled in and upheld by white canonical English poetry. Jordan gives me permission to find not a singular “lyric I” in my writing, but the existence of many consciousnesses, my many selves: the “I” that witnessed Lifta in 2017, the “I” that is witnessing Lifta Botique in 2021, the “I” that will see Lifta Returned to all of us in a future – these I’s that I don’t yet have a name for. My poetry is a reckoning with the disembodiments of the many selves housed within my body; the selves I survived to work towards the self I am becoming. The selves I had to kill to become.
Implicit to this apocalyptic “I” is the notion of a lyric collective, which calls forward my fears regarding the violence committed in the name of a white colonial imagination of a “lyric we.” So maybe, with a multitudinous “I,” I advocate not for the (universal) lyric “we” but a lyric “we” – one that is fluid and unknowably expansive, though precise, and always beyond my (and my (and my(and all my my’s’))) reach. A lyric-we I dare to call impossible if only to imply that we are always doing the work of (re(dis))becoming. The essence of this lyric-we would be solidarity – to show up in language and off the page. A poetics not just of theoretical insurgence, but that demands the poet, the readers, and all listeners enact the poem with our lives.
To say, I love we so much I’d burn this country down for us.
To say, I love we apocalyptically.
Earlier in 2021, I opened the Radius of Arab American Writers’ (RAWI) festival by reading Al-Qasim’s “Enemy of the Sun” and telling the story of its lyric collective. Among the items found in Black revolutionary George Jackson’s prison cell after his assassination in 1971 was a collection of Palestinian resistance poetry carrying the same title. After his death, contemporary scholar Greg Thomas discovered that Al-Qasim’s poem had been accidentally published by the Black Panther Party’s newspaper under Jackson’s name. Here, two radical political prisoner poets and lineages thereof, separated by countries and oceans, converge in a language of poetry, of history, of enemy:
It is the return of the sun,
Of my exiled ones,
And for her sake, and his
I swear,
I shall not compromise
And to the last pulse in my veins,
I shall resist,
Resist – and resist.
(Al-Qasim, “Enemy of the Sun”)
These are words both Jackson and Al-Qasim lived and embodied with every breath in their lungs, in their brief, brief time on this earth. When Al-Qasim writes “I shall not compromise,” he staked the lives of his many selves on it: the self that survived Nakba, the self before and after his imprisonment for refusing Israeli military service – for refusing to allow the state to force him to ethnically cleanse his own land. And when Al-Qasim’s lyric “I” was found in Jackson’s cell, it became Jackson’s lyric “I” too. A lyric “I” entangled between the Israeli Occupation Forces and the military force that is the US police. A lyric “I” entangled between the singular corporate mechanism supplying the military and surveillance technology to both the US and Israel. A lyric “I” apocalyptic in its insistence of survival, despite.
And so I opened the space of RAWI’s gathering of more than 600 beloveds, in celebration of Arab, Southwest Asian, North African, and the shared and multitudinous lyric “I’s” of diasporic literature writ large – with the only words I could fathom in the apocalypse of now:
Reflecting on these words, this history, this moment, I cannot help but return to my Brother Fargo Tbakhi’s words: “the past is a future we return to.” How can we find a language of returning, of un-compromise, in our work as writers? If our language isn’t freeing the Land, we are doing something wrong. If our language isn’t echoing in protest, we are doing something wrong. If our language isn’t setting fire to the nations who have stolen everything but the breath in our lungs, we must be doing something wrong. I ask you, fellow beloveds, to consider: what worlds need to end for us to begin?
We are living in apocalyptic times, yes, so may apocalypse be a friend in time. Despite time. May this space be a balm, yes, but the opening of a new and un-countried wound. May our gathering, itself, be apocalyptic.
we will return
that is not a threat
not a wish
a hope
or a dream
but a promise
Remi Kanazi, “Nakba”
Carrying Jordan, Al-Qasim, Jackson, Choi, and a long line of revolutionary diasporic poetics speaking beyond the singular canonical lyric I, I arrive at a truth poets and theorists have long engaged with: that by traveling deep enough into apocalypse, a colonized people will inevitably find a new world in the rubble and aftermath of our current one. It’s an idea my students and I returned to with Etel Adnan’s Arab Apocalypse, for example; how Adnan’s speaker paints the sun into a symbol of empire, writing through the Lebanese Civil War, building toward her 59-sectioned poem’s monumental ending: “Matter-Spirit will become the NIGHT / in the night in the night we shall find knowledge love and peace.”
As I witness the ongoing Nakba in Palestine, behind a thousand notions of window, I find comfort in this framing of apocalypse. That the Nakba of Sheikh Jarrah, of Al Aqsa, of Al-Lydd unsilenced, of Gaza, of a united Palestine – a unity intifada from river to sea, from diaspora to Land – are in the process of birthing a new world despite our current light of day. Today’s is an apocalypse made possible by the tireless work of grassroots organizers, the youth paving our way forward, the Black Lives Matter movement, and the long history of Black radical support for Palestine. It is an apocalypse the English of colonial institutions will fail to embody.
The air is weighing differently on my lungs now, witnessing the unprecedented turnout to Boston’s Nakba Day protest in May, the Italian workers refusing to load ships of weapons to Israel, and the sheer volume of international vocal support for the Palestinian and our demands – calls to action from US academics, thousands of people protesting from London to Baghdad, words of solidarity from leaders in Bolivia to US celebrities. In this language of apocalypse, I do not see destruction, but a difficult love, a justice-centered reconstruction.
In an English of Western journalism, I do not know how to name the apocalypse in my chest, witnessing Palestinian youth climb the entrance of the Israeli consulate in Boston at our Nakba day protest, holding an image of our Al Quds and waving our flag in pride. That would require both a language of returning, and a returning to language.
Allow me to Return:
Because تعبان, I.
Because I began with apocalypse but found, instead, an ars poetica.
Because I believe in a better elsewhere for language.
Because the apocalypse of Capital-E-English, I believe, begins in poetry, and not the poetry of Capital-E-English, but in our breakage of.
Because I am writing to a future Palestine I know will exist and beyond what I can know will exist.
Because the only Palestinian future I believe in is apocalypse.
Because, in the hearts and minds and spirits of my every beloved student, I see apocalypse.
Because, in every student, I see a window with which we can gaze and speak towards our future lyric selves.
Because, in our every youth, there is a future ancestor both in and beyond English.
Because the English we are building is an English beyond the passive voice, an English beyond the capital E.
Because the future ancestors of English will look back upon the failures of today’s capital-E-English, and the small terrorisms we were able to commit against it, as a way of staying rooted in their work.
Because terror[(i)sm].
Because freeing Palestine would mean freeing ourselves from America and I don’t know if some of y’all, let alone your English, are ready for that.
Because some of you are behaving like you’re terrified.
Because you should be.
Because I am inviting the rest of you into a lyric collective beyond our present selves; a collective of who we are and are become.
