Rifqa

by Mohammed El-Kurd

Unsettling the colonial project of lies, Mohammed is a truth teller. He wields his arsenal: a living room of poems seats us in the home of what remains, what cannot be photographed or tweeted but is in the spirit of enduring strength, the will to fight, to create, and, most importantly, to love.

Solidarity is a feeling and a doing. It is a series of choices we make with one another. It can only be felt. It cannot be contrived or manipulated. Solidarity is not just about our shared pain or struggle but also, most importantly, about our shared joy, visions, and dreams. It is an energetic force and a resounding love.

I walk the world with his words tattooed on my right leg: “I cried not for the house but for the memories I could have had inside it.” These words remind me that home is a series of shared memories, not brick and mortar. Home is where we go to remember and revisit who we’ve always been. Mohammed El-Kurd’s poetry is a home returned to us. His poems call us home.

A giggling tornado escapes our mouths touched by our numbness in fatal ways.

In Palestine death is sudden, instant, constant, happens in between breaths.

Your tongue genders as it needs in barbershops and bureaucracy—

A soldier as old as a leaf born yesterday pulls a trigger on a woman older than his heritage.

Here, every footstep is a grave, every grandmother is a Jerusalem.

Seven decades later they harvestorgans of the martyred, feed their warriors our own.5

Solidarity often is a refuted revolution.

Which me will console the dead’s loved ones with prevention, not mourning, bottle our Jordan River to smack American thirst, for greed and grief. Waterstolen or neglected.

Atlanta taught me that people will still applaud the bullets puncturing them if they have the right rhythm. This taught me how to look.

This isn’t an epiphany, though Poems aren’t for that

I live by people whose mattressesare memory, are substance, are made featherless, fatherless with springs, elusive

No Poetry in This

My poems become mosaicsunintentionally, messy roomshabitually. A cluttered bedroom isn’t poetic it’s melodrama.

In truth I’m ashamed of my dreams.

I am but my obedience to my mother. God said it,apparently. I keep my secrets to keep her sane. Not breaking cycles if that’ll break her heart. She’s had a tough life. These are her years to rest.

I can only describe this guilt with similes that would invalidate it. I no longer want to language, no longer want to tongue.

She’s a straight spine in theory. I got from herher hunch and her hunch.

Her spine will recover, I hope. It is those who are spineless who cannot buy themselves a spine.

The youth remind me with firework spectacle: decolonization is not an abstract theory. See: The soldier with a stone in his fascist face. The colonizer car in flames. Surveillance cameras smashed. “Checkpoints” emptied out of their gatekeepers. I stand in awe of the hail.

My grandmother suffered from dementia for a year before her death. But despite sometimes forgetting my name, her political conviction stuck. The atrocities she witnessed blanketed her subconscious, so much so that, amid her memory’s decay, her stories of the Nakba were still highly detailed, her comments hurled at TV news coherent and complex.

In truth, I am not ready to eulogize her. Even in writing this, I find myself having trouble with tenses. Some people cannot exist in the past tense.

I will only agree to leave Sheikh Jarrah to go back to my Haifa house that I was forced to flee in 1948, she famously said, demanding her right of return.

I realize now that a poetry book formed as a didactic tool became one whose merit relies on negating the politics of appeal.

The second mistake is what I will call “humanization”: I portrayed my people only in the ways that adhere to ethnocentric civility, robbing them of their agency. It is to “women and children” Palestinians to death—to infantilize Palestinians in hopes of determining that, indeed, they deserve liberation. This practice of infantilization stems from the ahistorical depictions of Palestinians and Zionists in the media.

The transition from naïveté to blatancy stemmed from tackling things at the root. I knew to address the disease rather than punish the symptom. Punished symptoms worsen. The validity of my resistance is no longer an interesting topic. My mother once said in a (later censored) poem: Does a rooster seek permission to crow? My political convictions crystalized when I began peacocking my people’s claim to dignity instead of burrowing within it.