Author: Farrah Abdel-Latif
At the 2009 Palestine Festival of Literature—an initiative also known as PalFest that takes place across cities of Palestine—Suheir Hammad performed a set of five poems dedicated to Palestine, crafted during the Gaza War of 2008-2009. Hammad is a Palestinian poet who grew up in the Bronx—her writing symbolic of her love affair with her heritage. Perhaps most telling of her rooted connection to Palestine are her poems performed at PalFest, titled Ayyam Gaza (The Gaza Suite).
In this set, each poem is named after a city in Palestine: “Gaza”; “Rafah”; “Tel Al-Hawa”; “Jabalya”; “Zaytoun”. Each poem is a mourning. A vivid snapshot of the death. The dying. The trying to survive. The faith that lives amidst the loss. Each poem is a call to help. A call to prayer. A call to the public for change. And yet, eleven years later, these poems remain applicable to today’s Palestinian conflict. Today, Palestine still suffers inhumane checkpoints. Theft of land. Bulldozing of ancestry. Lives lost. Love lost. Unfortunately, Hammad’s words of trauma, death—and the Palestinian resilience that meets these atrocities—continue to resonate.
It does not seem like the situation is set to change any time soon. Sadly, the administration of the current American president has diminished the hope of a brighter future for Palestine, as it has done to so many other humanitarian crises. With the Republican plan to allow Israel’s annexation of Palestine, this president has once again showed his blatant disregard for the people of Palestine, as this move would break international law. Annexation is a euphemism for segregation or apartheid—it is the act of allowing Israel to take control of Palestine while allowing Palestine to exist as its own “state” (of course, without according Palestine with the power normally attributed to an independent nation). This would render Palestine legally at the hands of the Israeli government, under the guise of peace and prosperity.
While it is tempting to reiterate the many injustices endured by the Palestinian people, in a bid to raise awareness and help gain support for the cause, the intent of this article is to remember Hammad’s The Gaza Suite. In this remembering, I hope to do something different than share statistics or facts or broken policies of the dead and the dying Palestinian people. I hope to remind you that Palestinians are more than just data. More than just poetry. As I summarize each poem, I hope to inspire you to listen to them, to let them speak to you, to let them paint a picture of a people that exist outside of articles about political injustice.
Gaza
The opening poem is an elegy. It is a vivid depiction of the dead, the dying, the barely alive. Hammad begins the poem stating, “I have come to everyday Armageddon.” Every day a battle. Every day a fight for life. Every day as if it is the last day—as if it is the end of the world. Hammad repeats the word death as if it is inevitable. Because it is inevitable. She cries, “some must die to send a signal.” This is the truth in Gaza. Some must die. Out of necessity. Out of betrayal. Out of fear that no one will remember their loss. Some must die to call for help.
Rafah
“Rafah” is an acknowledgement of the bleak reality of a war-torn country. Here, Hammad describes the mundanity that lives amongst chaos. Death and making tea. Death and washing clothes. Death and taking care of the kids. Death and daily chores. So much death alongside so much living – it becomes hard to tell where one ends and the other begins. It is the normalcy of death that is most disturbing: the reality that, in some places, death becomes so normal that it begins to live between lists of things to do.
Tel Al-Hawa
In “Tel Al-Hawa”, Hammad asks, “what day is it?” There is a senselessness in the mess of death. An inability to tell time. A movement from day to day that is countless. What day is it? Who can tell anymore? When nothing differentiates the days but the rise and fall of the sun—when there is only death and mourning—how can one tell the day? How can one keep track? What motivation is there to differentiate one day from the next, when they are all drenched in death?
Jabalya
Lists of bulldozed cities are remembered in “Jabalya”. A repetition of “I’m sorry Gaza”, as if repeating it can heal. As if apologizing in a poem can bring back lands lost. As if saying sorry can turn refugee camps back into flourishing neighbourhoods. Hammad describes the whole world as “powerless” in the face of this crises – a testament to the world’s lack of action. Lack of help. Lack of support. A whole world, powerless, in the face of Israeli’s theft.
Zaytoun
Hammad’s fifth and final poem, “Zaytoun”, desperately begs the question: “where from here?” She stresses that there are bodies buried—so many bodies. So much loss. So much trauma. So much pain. So, where does one go? After all of this atrocity? How does one move forward? How can we imagine peace? How can we forget the death? How can two people divided by disaster become one? Where from here?
I love these poems. But I also hate that they are now timeless. Poetry with an enduring message is—in this case—a crime. I hate that these same poems could have been written in 2020. I hate that nothing has changed. And yet, I recognize that, without poems such as these, the Palestinian legacy would be simplified into death tolls and news broadcasts. The complexity of the Palestinian struggle is so much more than media articles and political debriefings. Theirs is a story of ancestry, culture, resilience, survival—and poetry.