Syeda Khadeeja —

The idea for this text came from thinking about debates. Mostly about inane debates. The ridiculous debates. The ludicrous debates. The red-herring debates. The debates that debate that which is undebatable. It stems from the insistence that “room” must be created for debate, as if genocide is a matter of opinion and that conversations on whether to condemn it or not deserve space to take up. As if Palestinians must endure the indignity of debating those who think [their] only life choices should be to leave [their] homeland, submit to [Zionist] supremacy, or die quietly and politely.¹ As if genocide necessitates that a room full of academics agree or disagree with the reality we see with our own eyes.

I offer a poem instead. 

I offer a poem because my thinking about this more-than-past year—as I write, we’re more than 600 days into the genocide of Palestine—has been inspired by the poetry I’ve read. Poetry that defies the bureaucratic formality of diplomatic reports and evasive headlines; poetry that confronts the senseless condemnations of the Palestinians’ right to life. A poem for stones, a poem for paint. A poem for geodes hewn from the Earth. For the colorful rivers that erode prisons. A poem for seeds.² A poem for cloth / and some strings.³ For thirsty roots, /… tunneling deep, deep, into the land!⁴ A poem for [teaching] life.⁵ For women chanting, drumming / on pots and pans / with goddamns and hasbiyallahs.⁶ A poem for that which makes life worth living.⁷ For necks. For steel. A poem for poems:

In September 2021, six Palestinian prisoners escaped from Gilboa Prison by tunneling out with a spoon. Among them was Zakaria Zubeidi of the Freedom Theater, further reminding us that the cultural revolt is inseparable from the material one. One of the other escapees, Mohammed al-Ardah, said they did it to show “the occupation is a mere illusion made of dust.” This illusion of dust coating our bodies, drowning us in cruelty. We move with Intifada to shatter the illusion.⁸⁹

I write this poem and transform this page, this weapon, beyond the preconceptions I myself once held. Beyond a notion of poetry as something that merely rhymes nicely, or stanzas and prose that craft beautiful sentences, beautiful words, beautiful somethings or others. Beyond poetry that is not unlike those reports and headlines, and those calls to accept the oppressor’s “peace.”

I wonder if this poem could become a well from which to draw—as boundless and uncontrollable as the falling rain.

This poem will grow across our cities, across entire landscapes, unfolding into times that run alongside, rather than over each other. I imagine it growing until every encampment—from across our campuses to those of the houseless, from the in-progress ruins of cop cities and detention centers—and the various uptowns and midtowns and downtowns will blend into each other, dissolving our many Omelases, bright-towered by the sea.¹⁰

Omelas: an archetypal city of fabricated joy where the utopic bliss of many is enjoyed at the expense of a single, miserable child condemned to squalor. Omelas: guiltless and happy: with its avenues of trees and settlements of houses with red roofs and painted walls.¹¹ Omelas with its magnificent fields and meadows, with its many old moss-grown gardens, and the cheerful faint sweetness of [its] air. Omelas and its free, happy people, but also: Omelas and its lone, cobwebbed cellar; Omelas and the child suffering in abominable misery within.

Ursula K. Le Guin wrote to us some time ago of Omelas, of the many inane debates and justifications given to rationalize this lone child’s pain, of those who keep it locked away in its windowless room. Never mind the cost of their happiness, the people of Omelas. Never mind how fragile that freedom really is that even the mere threat of guilt is enough to shatter their walls of illusions. Never mind the many hidden basements of our many Omelases; how damning the terms are; never mind all that is stowed away behind our finely crafted facades.

And yet, of those who choose to stay and make a life among injustice, there are always those who choose to walk away, reminds Le Guin.

Omelas is not our city by choice, per se, but it is what we have indeed made for ourselves. In this, our world, I ask: Who dares walk away with me? Who walks alone? Do we walk away together, toward a place even less imaginable to most of us than the city of happiness?¹² Will we walk away from this sham of a utopia toward something real, something gritty and painful? Toward healing… imperfect, but capable of growth? When will we walk out of these damning cellars of ours and away from the gilded walls and gates? With purpose? With promise?

Empathy is selective in these Omelas cities, dissolving the pursuit of justice into muddled middle grounds where some farce of “understanding” is ushered in with crafted characters sharpened into words that slash through sense and solidarity.

Death to pity! And death to despair! It is time to act.

We maintained these middle grounds—grounds bombarded by 2,000-pound bombs; grounds desecrated by bulldozers carving Stars of David into Palestinian land;¹³ grounds grafted with invasive forests planted atop cavities where the roots of olive trees once tunneled;¹⁴ grounds, precious earth, poisoned by white phosphorus;¹⁵¹⁶¹⁷ grounds seized by Zionist capitalist interests across Lebanon, Yemen, and Syria in defiance of their sovereignties—simply to keep the asinine tradition of debate alive. As if middle grounds can be found between a child clutching a stone and a tank. Middle grounds—these debates of ours—are arbitrarily placed in the somewhereness of the “middle” and on the distant, abstract elsewhere of “grounds,” together ripe with the neutral rationality required of deathmaking.


But middle grounds do not exist in genocide. I refuse to enable or entertain any notion of “neutrality.” Grow your encampments, reject the selective empathy these grounds require of you, and defy the apoliticality this genocide demands.

One thing I know there is none of in Omelas is guilt.

In these cities of ours, death seems to be the only option that our democracies dare dream of. The Western fetish for death, the sadism it inflicts, sans consent, upon the world, shatters with every action crafted to remind them of their fragility. Their cities of death die with them, and life makes its way through every warehouse window shattered, through every drop of red acrylic paint splashed across weapons depots by activists. It breathes through every stone thrown from tiny hands, and through bodies that are also earths, airs, waters, olives, and sunbirds. Red stains their hands, their eyes, and their ears. Death may be the only option available to these manufacturers—the Raytheons, Lockheed Martins, Elbit Systems, and Boeings of the world, gorging themselves on the profits from besieged bodies and lands—but the right to dignified life is the only reality, in truth.

To them, a message: Your world is a fiction. We exist on real land, upon real stories, among flesh—there is no more time and no more space for your fabrications; those who pass between fleeting words, it is time for you to be gone.¹⁸

Liberation is fact. Resistance is fact. Emancipation is fact. Reparations are fact.

So, what then becomes of resistance? Circle saw becomes praxis¹⁹—as it cuts through “impenetrable” border walls. Paint becomes praxis²⁰—as it stains the facades of weapons manufacturers and complicit universities. Markers, chalk, stones—all become praxis. As do spoons, shoes, and sticks. The chain-linked fences of neutrality and deathmaking, backed as they are by earth-burning AI networks,²¹ mines of artillery,²²²³ and pages of vague-as-ever text²⁴²⁵²⁶ are undone by the simplest of things. In their so-called complexity they are weak and inferior—after all, that “smart wall” was taken down by a lone bulldozer, was it not? The instruments of deathmaking become tools of resistance. Metal and machinery forged from the earth and forced into aesthetics of so-called power are co-opted. Power bends and breaks via its very own rigidity.


The stone shatters the tank (and the tank becomes a clothesline).
The paint melts away the glass (and the glass becomes sand that fills the beaches again).
The circle saw cuts down the fence (and the fence becomes a grape trellis).


I belong there. I have many memories. I was born as everyone is born.
I have a mother, a house with many windows, brothers, friends, and a prison cell
with a chilly window! I have a wave snatched by seagulls, a panorama of my own.
I have a saturated meadow. In the deep horizon of my word, I have a moon,
a bird’s sustenance, and an immortal olive tree.
I have lived on the land long before swords turned man into prey.
I belong there. When heaven mourns for her mother, I return heaven to her mother.
And I cry so that a returning cloud might carry my tears.
To break the rules, I have learned all the words needed for a trial by blood.
I have learned and dismantled all the words in order to draw from them a
single word: Home.²⁷

What is required here is not only the dismantling of this oppression but the dismantling of the language that props it up as well. If everything is spatial, then there is no more space for the occupiers’ words—or the permanence they supposedly impose. Ceasefires, the “right to defend,” demands of condemnations, antisemitism, the privatized public sidewalk—fleeting words in bureaucratic conversations, and fleeting worlds denying their own fragility—brittle.

We must begin by loosening our own tongues. We must begin by freeing them for those who can’t, for those burdened and besieged for the audacity to bring poetry into this world that exists beyond pretty rhymes and pretty craft. We must speak our ugly truths, be irritatingly loud and respond in the extreme. What new vocabulary rings true with stones and paint in hand? What lingua franca is manifested when we abandon neutral mouths and create new, radical glossaries with our whole bodies? A landscape woven of laughing and crying and Sunbird and Bulbul and sea and fisherman’s net and nasheed and and and and and and and?

With these new languages, we build toward new dimensions, and reconnect with those obscured and severed from us. In sifting through semantics, we bring in new desks and do away with the old ones. We might, you could argue, even get rid of the desks completely, along with the old words dipped from their inkpots. After all, the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. Still, perhaps, the desk could be thrown through the front windows drenched in red paint, to let more new language (and breath) in. The new language is, I’m sure, of mesmerizing composition, painting the city red in broad, literal strokes, beating to the lovely rhythm of stones crashing upon hardened panes of sand imprisoned within architecture’s cheap curtain-walled warehouses of complicity.

Look where they tell you not to look and see everything. Speak where they tell you not to speak and say everything. Hear it all, drown out the trite, the polished, the sanitized (neutralized). Feel what they tell you not to feel and sit with it, move with it. The moment we refuse to look, to speak, to hear, to feel is at once too our complicity with their linguistic machinations, their manipulations.

We must reject that.

Words create space—they become the point of reference for how we move about these lands and understand from what and whence we came.

The value of an individual life a credo they taught us
to instil fear, and inaction, “you only live once”
a fog in our eyes, we are
endless as the sea, not separate, we die
a million times a day, we are born
a million times, each breath life and death:
get up, put on your shoes, get
started, someone will finish.²⁸

And with this we will create the new radical,²⁹ a root city—a non-Omelas—that is designed to break and fall apart. Become the “legitimate target” and paint bullseyes onto the storefronts and sidewalks and campuses so that the arrow finds its mark.

Become a legitimate target: Be Palestinian. Be Lebanese. Be Syrian. Be Yemeni. Be Congolese. Be Sudanese. Be someone. Be a mosque or a church³⁰ standing for thousands of years on land being blown apart by the greed for oil, for coal, for lithium, for copper, for metals precious enough to kill that which actually is real and true and precious.³¹ Be a poet³²—be someone whose words move millions and live on through every mouth who remembers your name and remembers the words that came from your heart. Be a garden of flowers or of vegetables. Be an olive tree—be someone/thing that sustains life, something that feeds, something that provides shelter, something that provides shade.³³ Be a doctor^34353637— be someone who risks their life to ensure that others might live and impart comfort in the final moments of a child martyr. Be a journalist³⁸³⁹⁴⁰—be they whose truth, words, reporting, photographs are incessantly censored and scrutinized. Be steadfast. Be resistant. Be someone who loves life more than the death craved on your behalf. Be human despite their attempts to degrade your character with their perversions and propaganda.

If it isn’t obvious now, then let it be known that this new radical is a form of love, the roots to which our humanity tethers itself. That love is spatial—embodied in signs and stones and marches and screams and anger and happiness and tears and laughs and cries—encompassed, as it is, in everything that makes us human. A boundless type of love can be held in anger and rage. Because your anger is not like theirs. Their anger is a soulless thing incapable of discerning right from wrong, good from bad. Theirs is a rage invested in reproducing, prolonging, the hostility to keep their utopias alive by instilling indifference and defeat within us. Keeping us from each other.

No.

This anger of ours is an olive tree, rooted and steadfast. This rage is life, defiant.⁴¹

Their anger comes after us all, along with their borders and their walls and their nations and their surveillance, locating themselves by dislocating others. And so, we will throw stones at it and drench it with paint. We will saw through it, will throw markers⁴² and sticks at it. Chip away at it with spoons. Overwrite it with poetry written in chalk. We will throw our shoes, and our sandals too. Vibrate the air with the clanking of pots and pans and the steady rhythms of knives upon a chopping board. Hold out our hands and form Dabke circles and lines that trace paths from street to street. They come after you with bordering logics that you refuse to accept.

You cease the border, and it ceases to exist. Begin the poem this way. 

There is a saying my parents taught me, Qatra qatra, mil ke darya banta hai, or: Drop by drop, they meet to become a river.⁴³ This river doesn’t just suddenly appear, I’ve learned; it is an amalgamation of raindrops that have come down together, one by one, over time, seeping into the cracks and fissures, making their ways into the ever-growing stream that will eventually come to the surface Earthside. Along these lines, Adam HajYahia writes, “The event of return does not take place after the fact, in a ‘post’-temporality where the Zionist regime no longer exists. Instead, the act springs from within the time of its reign, cracking its walls and fracturing its frame.”⁴⁴

Grab them by their deceitful forelocks!⁴⁵ Based on this Qu’ranic verse, my dad shares an Urdu saying—Jab kisi qaum ko Allah ne saza dehni hoti hai, to uskay peshani (matha) se khanch ta hai, or: When Allah wants to punish a people/nation/tribe, He pulls/grabs them by their forehead. By this my dad means grabbing them by their economy and structures of power, for these deathmakers’ hearts don’t exist—they can only think with the greed in them, so that is where you grab them by, and pull hard.

From destroying the carefully crafted head-busts of dead men whose terms and rules continue to plague us, defying their preserved death masks and wrapping them up in keffiyehs to further obfuscate them into oblivion—we continue to grab the Zionist entity by the ficklest of things that they continue to attribute their legacies and identities to. With every university renamed in the solidarity encampments, every statue toppled, and every move toward divestment, our pull grows ever more taut, their lies more exposed, more damning in the ever-growing charge for Palestinian liberation.

Let’s build our Madhafas⁴⁶ on their ruins, rip open the roofs and let the rain pour in. Let’s rearrange these rooms—and exhume their cellars—with stones and paint becoming our medium of choice for a people [grown] tired.⁴⁷

This space, I imagine, will quickly begin to renew. Land back, it will say, with the understanding that it does not mean dispossession—but rather land that is once again stewarded—cared for. Caregiving (not taking). The room, this space, no longer has permission over memory—and history no longer begins at the moment of the flood.

Mahmoud Darwish writes:

O those who pass between fleeting words
Carry your names, and be gone
Rid our time of your hours, and be gone
Steal what you will from the blueness of the sea and the sand of memory
Take what pictures you will, so that you understand
That which you never will:
How a stone from our land builds the ceiling of our sky.

To the stones and the paint, I write this poem to you—
something unwavering,
emboldening you to build Darwish’s skies:

Hands hold out your tools of praxis in wait
To begin that boundless creation
Of raining clouds and shimmering moonbeams

That sky could be painted in watercolors and shower down drops
That fall gently onto the stones and wash away the glass shards dusting it.

Shards created by the collective hands of many
Fingertips stained with acrylic holding stones awaiting, in solidarity,
For the moment we begin to un-make and re-build

The shards shift in the sand and become enveloped by the sea,
As the ebbs and flows erode its sharpness and leave you with crystals of sea glass
Capable of lying together with the stones
As drops continue to fall out of that watercolor sky

The sky is re-made with stars and sunset hues and midnight tones
The shining city no longer occupying its vastness
And the moon shines to welcome you to another tomorrow

And
The stones and the paint
No longer left to interpretation
Can simply
Be.