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Permission to Speculate: Death Worlds and Palestinian Literary Imaginations
Abstract
Ongoing Zionist ethnic cleansing induces different, though interconnected, embodied existential conditions on Palestinians, in both Palestine and diaspora. Adopting Mbembe’s Necropolitics (Duke University Press, 2019), the former are direct victims of a Zionist “laboratory for a number of techniques of control, surveillance, and separation” (43), while the latter, especially those living in Western states, are othered and treated as bodily excess with respect to their state’s normative imaginations of citizen populations. What ultimately unites Palestinians across geographies of exile is an Indigenous relationship to their land, despite linguistic, socio-economic, and cultural differences implicit to diasporic being, and the various relations to death induced by colonial powers, from Zionist occupation forces to US surveillance and police apparatuses. This paper explores the figurations of these relations, to and among the many worlds of death imposed unto Palestinians, in poetry. How are Palestinian poets representing their selves in relation to death in their various geographies? How are Palestinian necropolitics figured across English and Arabic? What deaths are implicit to Palestinian poetic existence in English, and how is language, itself, a site of necropolitical violence? Considering a mix of Palestinian poems in English and Arabic, this paper asks: how do these works speculate, despite these necropolitical and existential conditions, to imagine a future beyond Zionism? What linguistic potentialities and futurisms exist, despite the colonial conditions underlying diaspora, for Palestinians working in an Anglophone American context? Against the grains of archival erasures, considered both in a historical sense as well as the landscape of contemporary Anglophone media, how can poetry serve as a model for more responsible English around Palestinian (dis)embodied existence? To examine these questions, this study considers a mix of Palestinians writing in Arabic, such as Samih Al-Qasim’s Sadder than Water, Mourid Barghouti’s Midnight, and Maya Abu Al-Hayyat’s You Can Be the Last Leaf, alongside contemporary Palestinian American poetry projects such as Zaina Alsous’s A Theory of Birds, and recent Palestinian speculative literary collections with Strange Horizons, FIYAH Magazine, and Mizna. As a Palestinian poet myself, this piece weaves between cultural and necropolitical theory, critical readings of Palestinian literature, lyric meditations, and ars poetica. This paper ultimately considers the ways in which Palestinian poetry enacts a permission to speculate a future for the Palestinian people, by both confronting and imagining beyond the entangled death worlds of the Zionist project, the American settler project, and colonialist Anglophone literary canonical imaginations.
Discipline
Literature
Geographic Area
Palestine
Sub Area
Palestinian Studies