The Workers Love Palestine
A few weeks ago, on Land Day the anniversary of the 1976 general strike across Palestine to protest settler land theft I heard Zaina Alsous speak at a tribute to the late Palestinian poet Mourid Barghouti. She quoted Barghouti’s I Saw Ramallah
, translated by Ahdaf Souief: “Writing is a displacement, a displacement from the normal social contract . . . If a person is touched by poetry or art or literature in general, his soul throngs with these displacements and cannot be cured by anything, not even the homeland.” These words come back to me as I read Alsous’s poem “The Workers Love Palestine.” If work is a linchpin of “the normal social contract,” then a strike, like a poem, might be a displacement from the ordinary directives of global capital, with its settler occupations of land and language. In Barghouti’s vision, freedom is not the end of all forms of displacement; rather, freedom learns from what displacement teaches about the u