We had the honour of supporting the students in response to their encampment for disclosure and divestment from Israel at Universities across the U.S, Canada, and internationally. This blog is dedicated to the young people who show us that conscience and compassion are still bringing hope to those who wish for justice against settler colonialism and butchery.

Although the encampment was left up in our town last night, it seems that administrations are only too eager to suppress critical thinking. But the student solidarity movement has shown both courage and remarkable restraint as in yesterday’s event, where provocateurs tried to provoke and disrupt proceedings. The students’ demands for full disclosure in arms, research, and financial support for the genocide, is a heroic act. Building on previous student movements against injustice, it draws on the venerable tradition of students as activists and agents of history. Drawing attention to the plight of the Palestinians and to our economic entanglements with apartheid and genocide as societies, they are indeed speaking “truth to power”.

It’s heartening to see the beauty that is solidarity and kindness and humanity in the face of ruling tactics to turn us into the same walking dead as rulers and militarists would much prefer. But when we see revealed that the emperor has no clothes, we realize that just as humans have built the world through so much exploitation and sheer ugliness, we can transform it to one that nourishes human potential, healing, art, education, and most of all, a future ; one that is entwined with our living natural world.

The poems in today’s selection are from Palestinians. I share too the music of Violeta Parra, in her lively and fun song written for the Chilean student movement, a movement that ushered in the Allende years of hope and social justice in Chile —until it was crushed by the U.S. led coup of Augusto Pinochet and assassination of President Salvador Allende in 1973.

Noor Hindi, a Palestinian-American poet, has published her debut collection of poems, Dear God. Dear Bones. Dear Yellow, in 2022. She has been an ardent advocate of the Palestinian liberation—and the liberation of all those oppressed people. This is a poem of her reminder about the condition of Palestinian children and men and women.

“Fuck Your Lecture on Craft, My People Are Dying”

Colonizers write about flowers.
I tell you about children throwing rocks at Israeli tanks
seconds before becoming daisies.
I want to be like those poets who care about the moon.
Palestinians don’t see the moon from jail cells
and prisons.
It’s so beautiful, the moon.
They’re so beautiful, the flowers.
I pick flowers for my dead father when I’m sad.
He watches Al Jazeera all day.
I wish Jessica would stop texting me Happy Ramadan.
I know I’m American because when I walk into a room
something dies.
Metaphors about death are for poets who think ghosts
care about sound.
When I die, I promise to haunt your forever.
One day, I’ll write about the flowers like we own them.

I Write the Land,  Najwan Darwish, Trans. Kareem James Abu-Zeid

Wikipedia describes him thus, “Najwan Darwish (Arabic: نجواندرويش); born December 8, 1978, in Jerusalem, is a Palestinian poet, whom the New York Review of Books has described as “one of the foremost Arabic-language poets”.

In 2009, Hay Festival Beirut pronounced him one of the 39 best Arab writers under the age of 40. In 2014, NPR included his book Nothing More To Lose as one of the best books of the year. Named as “one of Arabic literature’s biggest new stars” Darwish’s work has been translated into over 20 languages.

I Write the Land

I want to write the land,
I want the words
to be the land itself.
But I’m just a statue the Romans carved
and the Arabs forgot.
Colonizers stole my severed hand
and stuck it in a museum.
No matter. I still want to write it –
the land.
My words are everywhere
and silence is my story.

Rasha Abdulhadi is a queer Palestinian Southerner and the author of Who Is Owed Springtime (Neon Hemlock, 2021) and Shell Houses (The Head & The Hand Press, 2017). 

a litany of refusals to become ghostly

all the women are dying or forming battalions in the mountains
all the women are dying or going underground
all the women are dying or going into exile
all the women are dying or giving birth at the checkpoint
all the women are dying or in prison
all the women are dying or taking detours over the homes they can’t go back to
all the women are dead or else they are embroidering
                                                       money and food to stitch to their children’s tongues

all the children are dying or they are in protest
all the children are dead or they are reading poems at the border
all the children are dead or they are taking pieces of the wall home in their pockets
all the children are dead or they are flying kites against fighter jets
all the children are dying or they are becoming the adults who are dead

all the men are dead and on posters or they are in prison
all the men are dead or they are writing books
all the men are dying or they are digging escape tunnels with spoons
all the men are dying or they are leading songs along the wall
all the men are dying or they are flipping ladders over fences
all the men are dying or flying over every border
all the men are dead or else they are against the wall

all the students are dying or else they are organizing
all the students are dying or they are being gassed
all the students are dead or they are losing their scholarships
all the students are dying or they are stealing food for each other
all the students are dead or they are doxxed

all the women have been arrested or they are driving themselves
all the women have been assaulted or they are leading the people gathered in the square
all the women have been assassinated or else they are arresting the police

all the queers are dying or they are taking the old mens’ microphones

all the people are dying or they are refusing to go home
they are dying and dying and dead or they are refusing
we are dying we are dying we are dying we are dead
or else we are refusing to our last breath

Rasha Abdulhadi is calling on you—yes you, even as you read this—to renew your commitment to refusing and resisting genocide everywhere you find it. May your commitment to Palestinian liberation deepen your commitment to your own. May your exhaustion deepen your resolve and make you immovable. May we all be drawn irresistibly closer to refusals that are as spectacular as the violence waged against our peoples.