Support & solidarity for Palestine 🙏🏽:
Palestine Emergency Relief Fund (Sheffield-based effort with all funds going directly to Gaza): donate here.
Saturday 13th January 2024 Global Day of Action for Palestine. This day MATTERS.
Poems from and for Palestine: a pdf of beautiful poetry from arablit.org.
Reflective writing session with Foluke Taylor & Dr Eiman Hussein: you are who we need to be love(d): a write-in for the days after. Proceeds will be split between Medical Aid for Palestine and Sudan Emergency Relief Fund.
Sheffield folks: coming soon ~ experimental small in-person gatherings for creative-mischiefery (zines/poetry/making notebooks/posters…). Please email hello@dalkular.com for a heads-up. All proceeds to Palestine.
The point is this: for many months now I’ve not known where to begin or how to re-enter A Wild Archive. Posts started. Posts abandoned. Repeated. Screentime was hard-on-my-head time. Sometimes it was down to lack of energy, the drag of fatigue as a result of head injury 2 of 2022 – pulling me back to bed over and over again. Other times it was the seduction of coastlines and mountains and watching darkness erase daylight, sleeping in my tiny camper, waking with the dawn chorus. And then witnessing/listening to the ongoing unbearable horrors happening to the people and land of Palestine. Anything I then had to say or write here felt (feels) utterly futile, useless and numb in comparison.
I too believe that all poetry (and poetic words) are acts of beautiful resistance. And beyond powerful. A medium for transcendental transformation. I think of the poets in Palestine who’ve been killed. Targeted. Poets are dangerous to settler colonialism. To all colonisers. I think of the journalists who’ve been killed in Palestine. 109 in 92 days. I think of the journalist Wael ElDahdouh who has now lost his son Hamza Dahdoud, also a journalist, as well as twelve other members of his family. Colonisers know the power of words. That’s why they destroy them. Destroy the poets and journalists and writers and teachers. Destroy libraries and archives and schools and universities. Destroy dissent and revolution. Except they cannot because beautiful poets and beautiful poetry lives forever – they cannot destroy beautiful resistance.
If we love words, if we love writing, we all need to care about all of this.
Maybe personal writing is beautiful resistance too? My journals and notebooks have been my writing sanctuary instead of keyboards and screens since last summer. I’ve been making my own notebooks. Making my own archives. The physical actions of measuring, folding, gluing, sewing paper and card to make a container for all the words that will flow from my pen has filled me with immense comfort, joy, healing and quiet transformation. They’re rough-arse notebooks, messy and fractured. That means I’m not precious about what goes in them. Rantings and workings out, ideas, poetic fragments, collage and colours and cut-up words and photos. Writing under mountains and sea. Writing in my attic about Palestine. Writing about ancestral trauma surfacing through watching people with the same skin as me walking, moving, being murdered and bombed apart, starving, going…where? Writing with the immense grief that toppled me for weeks. Helping me to crack open so I can sustain feeling, being, witnessing and activating. Beautiful messy resistance.
My notebooks, these writings – they hold the wildness I’m feeling in these discombobulated times. Sometimes this writing goes into the zines I make and share. My preferred mode of transmission for now. Sometimes they’re transmitted through workshops and conversations. Maybe they’re waiting to be made into something else altogether. I trust these writings and I trust my practice of writing and I trust the power that words travel in ways unknowable to me and to unknowable places and people.
In the Punjab, under the heinous rule of the British Empire, my ancestor’s books and writings and educational opportunities and archives and sacred papers were destroyed too. The freedom to write and create is sacred. It is dangerous. That is why it’s not a given. That is why they kill poets and journalists in Palestine. They are too unsettling for the settlers. And kill Palestinian people who are archives of oral knowledges, bodies of stories and recipes and longings and love and joy and poetry and prayers and hugs and resistance and survival and scars. They are too unsettling for the settlers.
If we love words, if we love writing, we ALL need to care about ALL of this.
This thing I do – making notebooks and writing my heart out – feels like a rare and astonishing freedom. Can you imagine being killed for writing poetry? Writing about the things you love? Writing about your beautiful resistance?
If I’m lucky maybe my notebooks will be found in Sheffield archives 100 years from now? By someone who felt like me when I was sixteen years old when the whole world felt like a refusal. And maybe they’ll read my journals, flip the yellowing and fragile pages and read them like instructions? They’ll go read about Palestine. Read about beautiful resistance. Read about their poets and their poetry.
I feel weird writing on a machine. My fingers cramp in a way they don’t when holding a pen or brush. I didn’t know how to title this post. I’m not sure what to write or say these days. Anything I write here feels utterly futile, useless and numb. Perhaps I’ll keep getting lost in my notebooks and not try to find myself anytime soon. Maybe my words will find their way when I get out of their way.
Maybe I could hand-write you all love letters instead?
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Even when you don't know what to say or write you still share such important and poignant words with us. ❤️ And I'd love to read handwritten letters from you 😊
Beautiful words ❤️
And totally agree that poetry and art is an act of liberation and resistance. Free Palestine 🇵🇸 ✊🏼