I'm Speaking Now: Poetry of Palestine

Before I push up my sleeves and plunge into the murk after what wound up being a very long break, I want to talk about a ritual that happens outside my window every other day or so. Since Al-Aqsa Flood on October 7th, the signpost on the corner has been covered and then uncovered, over and over, by dozens of pro-Israel stickers.

Appearing and then disappearing, along with some spray-painted counter-squiggles and slogans like "Free Palestine," in a cycle that takes, at times, mere hours to complete. Each side trying and failing to permanently erase the others' words, the others' rage, the others' existence. Some of the stickers that go up and come down are familiar ones—posters naming those who were abducted or murdered that day, pleading for their safe return. Why am I a hostage, reads one beneath a drawing of little Kfir Bibas. ( Why am I dead? She doesn't merit a sticker.) Others are ones ordered from this place, a Zionist e-tailer that churns out stuff like the one below, copyrights be damned:

Signposts

Another one reads "F*ck UNRWA!" referring to the UN relief organization in Palestine falsely and maliciously accused by Israel of harboring Hamas terrorists who took part In the Al-Aqsa Flood (the asterisk is replaced by a Jewish star). And one I recall but didn't photograph vaguely threatens those who support Palestine, a land of rapists or so it claims, with something even worse.

I have never clapped eyes on the people ripping down the stickers. But the people putting them up comprise a small cadre of middle-aged women, one of whom resembles Ruth Buzzi in her relative youth and who lives in my apartment complex.

One day while I was chatting with neighbors on the corner, she approached our group, pushing a stroller with a slack-jawed child clambering over the side and an older one in tow, and began slapping some of those stickers to the sides of the signpost. "It's just a small thing I can do with my family," she explained with a sort of faux-bashful self-righteousness. Teaching her child to learn that all Palestinians are rapists, killers and homophobes and to threaten their supporters with things worse than rape. How charming. I remained silent as she finished and pushed the stroller across the street. No words.

Listening Post

And now some words. This past week I went to hear British-Palestinian writer Isabella Hammad interview Palestinian poet Mosab Abu Toha at the Brooklyn Public Library. Hammad is the author of, among other works, the excellent novel Enter Ghost—about a Palestinian-British actress who returns to her homeland to visit her sister and gets talked into performing in a local production of Hamlet. Its themes center on art as a tool of liberation, on cultural identity and erasure, on the history of oppression in Palestine (it takes place during the Second Intifada), as well as on family, community and freedom.

Abu Toha is a young poet, born in the Al-Shati refugee camp, who has been awarded several prizes for his work, including an American Book Award, and the Walcott Poetry Prize and who wrote of his experiences in Gaza after the Al-Aqsa Flood for The New Yorker. He was in the news last year after being abducted and detained for two days by the Israeli Defense Forces while trying to flee northern Gaza with his family. His new collection of poetry called Forest of Noise is just out.

The event took place at the Stevan Dweck Cultural Center, an auditorium in the basement beneath the grand, curving, Art Deco fantasy of the library's facade. It holds a little over 200 people and that night it was standing room only. The crowd was a mix of ages, races and ethnicities; several people wore keffiyehs draped over their shoulders. When the speakers were announced (by my cousin-in-law Joel, who runs the event series), everyone rose to their feet and gave them both a long, spontaneous standing ovation.

Truth in Darkness

I suddenly felt like I was where I belonged. A place safe from from cowardly equivocations like "it's complicated" and "both sides are evil" and from dishonest words and phrases like "human shield" and "self-defense" and "the world's most moral army." Here, truthful ones like "genocide" and "colonialism" and "war crimes" and "apartheid" could be spoken without fear of retribution, without someone yelling in response, "I hope you get raped!" (Did you know that apartheid is actually pronounced apart-HATE and not apart-HIDE? It's a Dutch word that English speakers mangle. Like "lingerie" or "sauvignon blanc.")

Something burned hard and bright in that room, and it felt extraordinary to bask in its warmth after I'd spent so long alone in the silence and darkness on the other side of a smudged pane of complicity, watching and saying nothing while ugly, hectoring stickers appear and disappear on the signpost outside my window.

Abu Toha read quickly, in a voice that conveyed both pain and urgency, in between responding to questions from Hammad. In response to a question from the audience, he talked about the meaning of words and which ones now seemed as empty to him as a child's skull scooped out by shrapnel from a bunker-busting bomb. The word "humanity," for instance. What does humanity mean if it describes something that seemingly doesn't exist in a time that demands it? What does it mean, to borrow two images from his poem "Under the Rubble," when a bed is a grave? When a piggy bank is a coffin filled with bits of flesh? How can words contain what can't be fathomed? "They burned our hearts," said Dr. Hussam Abu Safiya in a video released a few days later. Abu Safiya, the director of Kamal Adwan hospital in northern Gaza, refused to leave his patients when ordered to do so by IDF soldiers. His 8-year-old son was killed in retaliation.

Abu Toha talked frankly about his uneasiness over having to now live in a country that is funding the slaughter of his own family. (A few days later, he announced on X that his wife's family's home in Gaza had been bombed and that medical workers were not allowed to reach the scene; he pleaded with anyone listening to help them.) He also talked about how important it is for him to write as a way to share the burden of grief and despair, and that writing in English, his second language, ensured those who most needed to hear his words understood them.

I felt that obligation to hear and understand keenly.

Post-Script

The event ended just as it began, in sustained applause. I thought about what it all meant as I walked back towards the subway, under the gauzy light of the street lamps, wine-scented leaves rustling underfoot. Suddenly, I heard drums beating and people singing. As I got closer, I could see there was a group gathered near Prospect Park celebrating Simchat Torah. Someone hoisted a giant blue-and-white ark above peoples' heads while others clapped and danced to the music in spooling and unspooling skeins.

I felt a jolt; my brain yanked hard. Of course, these people had a right to joy amidst all the fear and for all I knew, they didn't support the genocide being committed in their name. But I couldn't help but think that there is no joy for the people of Palestine. Will there ever be joy again? Will there ever be Palestine again?

As I stood waiting for the light to change on one of the spokes of the elm-lined wheel that is Grand Army Plaza, I noticed a young woman standing next to me, apart from the others, swaying in time to the music, her eyes closed. She seemed unaware of everything around her, caught up in her own bliss, perhaps wanting to escape from blame and blame-casting, from the world and from everything it has become.

The light changed. I checked my phone. My husband was meeting me at a Tex-Mex place near our apartment. Should he order a quesadilla to split? Yes, I texted back. I'm starving. I looked at what I'd written in disbelief. No, I wasn't starving. I had just thrown out into the world another word cheapened and divested of meaning. The people of Gaza are starving. The only sustenance I need now is justice. Justice and hope. And the words to make them real.

This post is dedicated to Mosab Abu Toha and, as always, to the children of Gaza.