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
Mary
jewishcurrents.org - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from jewishcurrents.org Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
Newly Arranged Appetite
jewishcurrents.org - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from jewishcurrents.org Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
The Collective Work of Abolition
jewishcurrents.org - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from jewishcurrents.org Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
[I tried early moving]
I’ve recently been thinking of the sentence fragment as a record of exhaustion what happens when you can’t quite finish a thought, or can only catch a glimpse of some half-formed idea inexplicably protruding from the dense fog of your mind. Jane Huffman’s “[I tried early moving]” enacts this fatigued syntax. The poem opens with a subject and predicate, but swiftly dissembles into less conventional grammar. A sentence, Huffman’s poem reminds me, is at once a temporal and grammatical unit. The productive day demands the orderly, sequential structure of a sentence; to mess meaning is to mess time. The poem, tired by order, searches for a different kind of temporality one “[b]efore the day could hide away its time” and finds a zone where basic distinctions don’t pertain, where “night is so much like day.” Here, words bleed into one another like dye into water.