We enter the new year full of desires for a new and different world, a truly human world that honours our interconnectedness and “right relations” as Indigenous teachings put it. In this world, genocide would not exist because the power and powerlessness engendered by relations of exploitation, oppression, empire-building would not be the filters through which all capitalist societies are socially engineered.

In this non-capitalist world, art, education, safe child care and health-care, building safe and affordable homes, having flourishing green spaces and honouring the waters and the skies would be the organizing principles. Equality would be seen through action, not rhetoric, and liberations would not compete in a hierarchy of oppression within the very oppressive system they seek to unshackle themselves from. Long ago, Audre Lorde told us that we cannot expect the “master’s tools to take down the master’s house” and I fear she is absolutely right.

Even if the International Court of Justice were to concur with the finding of genocide as presented in the South African case, the enforcement mechanisms through the UN Security Council are nil. So this is a symbolic gesture, a plea for humanity. Below I share some poems and art that I find relevant to the current conjuncture. I hope that you also will get something out of these art works and literary offerings! In 2024, our task is to stay human by any means necessary!

MOSAB ABU TOHA

My Dreams as a Child

I still have dreams about 
a room filled with toys
my mother always promised
we could have
if we were rich.
I still have dreams about
seeing the refugee camp
from a window on a plane.
I still have dreams about
seeing the animals
I learnt about in third grade:
elephant, giraffe, kangaroo,
and wolf.
I still have dreams about
running for miles and miles
with no border blocking
my feet,
with no unexploded bombs
scaring me off.
I still have dreams about
watching my favorite team
playing soccer on the beach,
me standing and waiting for the ball
to come my way
and run away with it.
I still have dreams about
my grandfather, how much
I want to pick oranges
with him in Yaffa.
But my grandfather died,
Yaffa is occupied,
and the oranges no longer grow
on his weeping groves.

MAYA ANGELOU

A Brave and Startling Truth

We, this people, on a small and lonely planet
Traveling through casual space
Past aloof stars, across the way of indifferent suns
To a destination where all signs tell us
It is possible and imperative that we learn
A brave and startling truth
And when we come to it
To the day of peacemaking
When we release our fingers
From fists of hostility
And allow the pure air to cool our palms
When we come to it
When the curtain falls on the minstrel show of hate
And faces sooted with scorn are scrubbed clean
When battlefields and coliseum
No longer rake our unique and particular sons and daughters
Up with the bruised and bloody grass
To lie in identical plots in foreign soil
When the rapacious storming of the churches
The screaming racket in the temples have ceased
When the pennants are waving gaily
When the banners of the world tremble
Stoutly in the good, clean breeze
When we come to it
When we let the rifles fall from our shoulders
And children dress their dolls in flags of truce
When land mines of death have been removed
And the aged can walk into evenings of peace
When religious ritual is not perfumed
By the incense of burning flesh
And childhood dreams are not kicked awake
By nightmares of abuse
When we come to it
Then we will confess that not the Pyramids
With their stones set in mysterious perfection
Nor the Gardens of Babylon
Hanging as eternal beauty
In our collective memory
Not the Grand Canyon
Kindled into delicious color
By Western sunsets
Nor the Danube, flowing its blue soul into Europe
Not the sacred peak of Mount Fuji
Stretching to the Rising Sun
Neither Father Amazon nor Mother Mississippi who, without favor,
Nurture all creatures in the depths and on the shores
These are not the only wonders of the world
When we come to it
We, this people, on this minuscule and kithless globe
Who reach daily for the bomb, the blade and the dagger
Yet who petition in the dark for tokens of peace
We, this people on this mote of matter
In whose mouths abide cankerous words
Which challenge our very existence
Yet out of those same mouths
Come songs of such exquisite sweetness
That the heart falters in its labor
And the body is quieted into awe
We, this people, on this small and drifting planet
Whose hands can strike with such abandon
That in a twinkling, life is sapped from the living
Yet those same hands can touch with such healing, irresistible tenderness
That the haughty neck is happy to bow
And the proud back is glad to bend
Out of such chaos, of such contradiction
We learn that we are neither devils nor divines
When we come to it
We, this people, on this wayward, floating body
Created on this earth, of this earth
Have the power to fashion for this earth
A climate where every man and every woman
Can live freely without sanctimonious piety
Without crippling fear
When we come to it
We must confess that we are the possible
We are the miraculous, the true wonder of this world
That is when, and only when
We come to it.