Once again I find myself still reeling from not only the onslaught of terror that is being perpetrated in the name of Israeli expansionism, but also the apathetic and two-faced world in which we dwell. The disconnect between the kleptocrats who rule us (disguised thinly as bourgeois democrats) and those of us who appear to be still human — from London to Germany to the United States, to South-East Asia to South Africa– is mind-boggling. This is not manufactured consent but now a genocide by any means necessary. The extermination of a people based on ethnic/racial/religious characteristics is simply that. Other communicators– journalists– are being killed at high rates in this invasion of Gaza. 0ver 45 have died, not to mention the many citizen journalists that have been documenting life under occupation through social media. Many have died or been wounded.

In the face of this inhumanity, the poets below strive to remake and revision another world where justice, equality, and dignity are granted to all, in particular those who pay for Europe’s monstrous colonial project of economic plunder and cultural and physical destruction of peoples and lands. Years ago, when Aime Cesaire, in Discourse on Colonialism, said, “Europe is indefensible” he already outlined for us the Manichean struggle between the dominating universalism of a failed and flawed bourgeois liberalism/individualism and the particularities of colonized and classed histories, which, by their very nature, are collective. Poetry, visual art, music, and literature spring from that collective impetus–to express, to connect, and to perceive. These poems all say, in their way, never again– to war, apartheid, genocide, anywhere.