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Poets & Writers (4)
Suheir Hammad is a Palestinian- American poet, author and political activist. Her parents were Palestinian refugees who immigrated along with their daughter to Brooklyn, New York City when she was five years old.
She grew up absorbing the stories of her family and the life they had in the hometown of Lydda before the 1948 Palestinian exodus. She was raised with traditional family values and the idea to keep “looking for the other side of the story” by her parents who are refugees.
Her first introduction to poetry was through the Koran, which her mother described as the most perfect poetry in the world. Poetry has always played a significant role in her life; she recollects writing poems as soon as she could read. Her literary influences are broad and expansive including June Jordan, Alice Walker and some of the many Palestinians who risked their lives daring to be Palestinian.
Her family´s experience is reflected in her writing and we can see that in her two first books, “Born Palestinian, Born Black” and “Drops of this Story,” a memoir detailing her experiences growing up as a Palestinian-American. Hammad is known to tackle issues like sexism, violence and the challenges facing women in her writing.
From her experience in life she learned to use language as a tool to provide a voice to the Palestinians people but also to all those who are displaced and without a voice.
She is now working on her third publication which will be a book of prose.
Her many awards include a Tony Award for Special Theatrical Event for Russell Simmons Presents Def Poetry Jam on Broadway (2003), the Emerging Artist Award from the Asian/Pacific/American Studies Institute at NYU (2001), the Morris Center for Healing Poetry Award (1996) and the Audre Lorde Writing Award at Hunter College (1995 and 2000).
Daughter
Leaves and leaving call october home
her daughter releases wood
smoke from her skin
rich in scorpio
blood survived the first
flood each new year marks
a circle around her
thick bark middle
this the month summer and
winter fall into each
other and leave orange
yellow ashes
the vibrancy of death
carry it all
coiled in my belly
cut on the cusp
of libra tail
tips the scales
tonight it is raining in
the tradition of my parents
wanted a daughter not a writer
happy birthday poet
who loves you baby
the way your mama did
under her breast the way your
father did under his breath
leaves and leaving have known
my name intimately
i harvest pumpkins
to offer the river eat
buttered phoenix meat
to celebrate a new year
new cipher for my belly
i got a new name
secret nobody knows
the cold can’t call me
leaving won’t know
where to find me
october gonna hide me
in her harvest in
her seasons
happy birthday daughter
of the falling
Video
Suheir Hammad: Poems of war, peace, women, power
Further reading:
– Drops of Suheir Hammad: A Talk with a Palestinian Poet Born Black
– Suheir Hammad: Poet and Author
– Interview with Suheir Hammad
Source:
–http://globalartscentral.com/
Deema Shehabi (born 1970) is a Kuwaiti-born poet and writer. The daughter of Palestinian parents, she relocated to the United States in 1988. Her poems, for which she has been nominated for a Pushcart prize, have been widely published in literary journals and compiled in anthologies. She now lives in California.
Achievements and Awards
– She was nominated for a Pushcart prize
– Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in numerous literary journals including The Atlanta Review, Bat City Review, Crab Orchard, The Mississippi Review, Drunken Boat, Valparaiso Poetry Review, and the Kenyon Review.
She has published works in anthologies such as The Poetry of Arab Women and Contemporary Arab-American Poetry . Deema Shehabi has also worked in writing and editing for several book publishers and magazines, including Ulysses Press, Nuclear Times, and most recently, Veggie Life where she was managing editor.
Gate of Freedom
Lovers of asparagus, alive
as hummingbirds, place their nostrils
over a low cloud, wet of air.
It’s the year of green hills
in California that early spring;
the evening is blue-split between the first
snow on the mountain top,
and a computer screen, where news of a man
whose body is eating itself, scythes
the long-stemmed breaths in the room.
“Do not weep if my heart fails,” he writes.
“I am your son.”
Gate of Love
Son I have. Your hands bulge
with pear tree blossoms.
You are bellow and sweat,
hunger and bread.
I part the fog to find you
through a grimy crowd of kids.
Before you give in to the affection
that soils you in public
Of harvest and flight
Beneath a wet harvest of stars in a Gaza sky,
my mother tells me how orchards
once hid the breach of fallen oranges,
and how during a glowing night
of beseeching God in prayer,
when the night nets every breath
of every prayer,
my uncle, a child then, took flight
from the roof of the house.
The vigilant earth had softened
just before his body fell to the ground,
but still there’s no succumbing to flight’s abandon;
our bodies keep falling on mattresses,
piles of them are laid out on living room floors
to sleep multitudes of wedding visitors:
the men in their gowns
taunt roosters until dusk,
while women taunt
with liquid harvest in their eyes,
and night spirits and soldiers
continue to search the house
between midnight and three in the morning.
On the night of my uncle’s nuptial,
I watch my mother as she passes
a tray of cigarettes to rows of radiant guests
with a fuschia flower in her hair . . . .
Years before this, I found a photograph
of her sitting on my father’s lap,
slender legs swept beneath her,
like willow filaments in river light.
His arm was firm around her waist;
his eyes bristled, as though the years of his youth
were borders holding him back
and waiting to be scattered.
Those were the years when my mother
drew curtains tightly over Windows
to shut out the frost world of the Potomac;
she sifted through pieces of news
with her chest hunched over a radio,
as though each piece when found
became a story and within it
a space for holding our endless
debris. But in truth,
it was only 1967, during the war,
three years before I was born . . . .
But tonight, in Gaza beneath the stars,
I turn towards my mother
and ask her how a daughter
can possibly grow beyond
her mother’s flight. There’s no answer;
instead she leans over me
with unreadable long-ago eyes
and points to the old wall:
the unbolting of our roots there,
beside this bitter lemon tree,
and here was the crumbling
of the house of jasmine
arching over doorways,
the house of roosters
and child-flight legends,
this house of girls
with eyes like simmering seeds.
Further Reading:
–Deema Shehabi’s debut poetry book is Thirteen Departures from the Moon
Sources:
Remi Kanazi (born 1981) is a Palestinian-American performance poet and human rights activist based in New York.
He is the editor of the anthology of hip hop, poetry and art, Poets for Palestine (2008), and the author of the collection of poetry, Poetic Injustice: Writings on Resistance and Palestine (2011). He has toured hundreds of venues across the US, Canada, Europe and the Middle East.
Kanazi’s father, a physician, fled from Haifa, Palestine with his family at a young age before the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948. His maternal grandmother was seven months pregnant with Kanazi’s mother when she was forced out of her home in Jaffa, Palestine. Although his family was deeply affected by Palestinian dispossession, Kanazi felt almost entirely disconnected from his Palestinian heritage but he never forgot the stories he heard from his family. Years later, all these stories were the inspiration for his work.
Kanazi writes and performs political poetry addressing topics such as human rights, Palestine, Iraq, and islamophobia. He talks in his work about a system of oppression and what´s being done to a people.
He is the editor of Poets for Palestine (Al Jisser Group, August 2008), a collection of hip hop, poetry and art featuring Palestinian poets such as Suheir Hammad, Nathalie Handal, Fady Joudah, Annemarie Jacir, Mahmoud Darwish, Naomi Shihab and Kanazi himself, as well as African American poets Patricia Smith and Amiri Baraka.
In 2011, Kanazi came out with his first collection, Poetic Injustice: Writings on Resistance and Palestine, a volume of poetry including a CD; he has also been a writer in residence and an advisory board member for the Palestine Writing Workshop, teaching spoken word poetry to youngsters in Palestine.
A Poem for Gaza
I never knew death
until I saw the bombing
of a refugee camp
craters
filled with
dismembered legs
and splattered torsos
but no sign of a face
the only impression
a fading scream
I never understood pain
until a seven-year-old gir
lclutched my hand
stared up at mewith soft brown eyes
waiting for answers
I didn’t have any
I had muted breath
and dry pens in my back pocket
that couldn’t fill pages
of understanding or resolution
in her other hand
she held a key
to her grandmother’s house
but I couldn’t unlock the cell
that caged her older brothers
they said:we slingshot dreams
so the other side
will feel our father’s presence!
a craftsman
built homes
in areaswhere no one was building
when he fell
silence
a .50 caliber bullet
tore through his neck
shredding his vocal cords
too close to the wallhis hammer
must have been a weapon
he must have been a weapon
encroaching on settlement hill
sand demographics
so his daughter
studies mathematics
seven explosions
times
eight bodies
equals
four congressional resolutions
seven Apache helicopters
times
eight Palestinian villages
equals
silence and a second Nakba
our birthrate
minus
their birthrate
equals
one sea and 400 villages re-erected
one state
plus
two peoples
…and she can’t stop crying
never knew revolution
or the proper equation
tears at the paper
with her fingertip
ssearching for answers
but only has teachers
looks up to the sky
to see Stars of David
demolishing squalor
with Hellfire missiles
she thinks back
words and memories
of his last hug
before he turned and fell
now she pumps
dirty water from wells
while settlements
divide and conquer
and her father’s killer
sits beachfront
with European vernacular
this is our land!, she said
she’s seven years old
this is our land!
she doesn’t need history books
or a schoolroom teacher
she has these walls
this skyher refugee camp
she doesn’t know the proper equation
but she sees my dry pens
no longer waiting for my answers
just holding her grandmother’s key
searching
for ink
Video
Normalize This!
Further Reading:
–Interview: Remi Kanazi on BDS and ‘hurt feelings’
Source:
http://www.poeticinjustice.net/
Rafeef Ziadah is a Palestinian performance poet and human rights activist based in London. Her performances of poems like ‘We Teach Life, Sir’ and ‘Shades of Anger’ went viral online within days of their release.
She received an Ontario Arts Council Grant from the Word of Mouth programme to create her debut spoken-word album Hadeel. Since releasing her album, she has toured many countries, performing poetry and conducting workshops. She was chosen to represent Palestine at the South Bank center Poets Olympiad in 2012.
Although Ziadah began writing at a very early age, her first public performance was not until 2004, while studying at York University. Since her poetic debut, she has done much over the past decade to raise awareness of Palestinian suffering, both the oppression within Palestine as well as Palestinian displacement across the globe.
Ziadah was born in Beirut, a third generation refugee. Some of her first childhood memories were of the 1982 siege and bombing of Beirut.
As an active member of the Boycotts, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) campaign, Ziadah’s primary purpose is to seek equality and justice against racism and extreme Zionist ideologies.
Cultivate Hope
Our Spring in Palestine is born in a prison cell
Our Spring in Palestine is born shackled to a hospital bed
Our Spring in Palestine is born with an administrative detention order against it.
But, it blossoms even in hunger!
I pray you strength
I pray you justice
I pray you freedom
Hana’, I pray your heart muscle, holding all of us tonight
holds on a day stronger – a sunrise longer – a day longer – a sunrise stronger
Though forgive me sister, I forgot prayers some time ago
lost them in allies in refugee camps
too crowded with shrapnel memory
when sound barrier breaking – skies breaking – sound breaking
wasn’t sure our voices would reach god anymore
That same year 82 you were born.
But you cultivate hope in me
so I light candles and kneel to whisper:
I pray you strength
I pray you justice
I pray you freedom
You cultivate hope in the rest of us.
Cultivate that part hungry for freedom – hungry for justice.
Lost in roadmaps to nowhere – to anywhere but the shores of Akka.
You cultivate hope long lost in their “pragmatic” solutions.
In your hunger – we find our own.
You cultivate hope in the rest of us.
In your strength – we are no longer
67 – Palestinians
48 – Palestinians
No numbers dividing us by massacres attached to our skin
No numbers for years dividing us by massacres attached to our skin
No negotiating tables to dine over in silence
No negotiating tables to dine over in silence and
No intellectual conversations to argue how lucky Israeli women are
how lucky / how free they serve in the army?
One of them handcuffed you as others beat you
One ordered you to strip naked
One dragged you across the floor
One promised severe punishment
In your silence you are stronger than each of them.
But You cultivate hope in the rest of us.
What do your captures know of heart muscles
Born to the beat of bombs over Beirut?
Born against a state of siege?
Born to a rhythm louder than guns?
Born free
What do they know of us?
Hearts as soft as child hands
learned to pick up rock
with the care of farmers loving harvest
Our Spring in Palestine is born in a prison cell
Our Spring in Palestine is born shackled to a hospital bed
Our Spring in Palestine is born with an administrative order against it.
But, our Spring in Palestine blossoms even in hunger
Their walls can only surround them.
Their prisons can only hold their dreams still.
Your spirit – like Spring – will always be free
Your spirit – our spirit – like Spring – will always be free
I pray us strength I pray us justice I pray us freedom
Achievements and Awards
Rafeef started performing poetry in Toronto in 2004 with the spoken word collective Pueblo Unido and is the winner of the 2007 Mayworks Festival Poetry Face-Off. Rafeef Ziadah launched her album of collected spoken word poetry put to music at Toronto’s Concord Cafe late last fall. She performed a few selected poems to an audience of friends, fans, musicians and of course Palestinian political activists. On Ziadah’s anticipated debut album Hadeel, you’ll find a selection of 10 poems that established this Palestinian spoken word artist’s reputation as a political poet in Toronto over the past six years. Her work is accompanied by a diverse range of musicians, adding a new layer of depth to the work.
Video
Rafeef Ziadah – ‘We teach life, sir’
Rafeef Ziadah – ‘Shades of anger’
Further reading:
– Rafeef Ziadah – ‘We teach life, sir’
– An interview with Palestinian poet, Rafeef Ziadah
Sources:
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