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/
