MESA Banner
Solidarity Poetics: “Why This Impulse” to “Familiar the Wind”: Poetry as a Production of Dynamical Attunement in George Abraham’s “Apology|Ploy” and Layli Long Soldier’s “Whereas Statements”
Abstract by Alexei Perry Cox On Session X-26  (Palestine and Literature)

On Saturday, November 4 at 5:30 pm

2023 Annual Meeting

Abstract
In "Solidarity Poetics," I argue that Indigenous Studies and Palestine Studies must be more central to the scholarship and activism that affects liberation in both regions, building on concepts of inter-nationalism and politics of refusal as proposed by Steven Salaita, Lila Abu Lughod, Audra Simpson and Mishuana Goeman. I present a short selection of the affective archive poetries of Palestinian-American poet George Abraham and Oglala Lakota-American poet Layli Long Soldeir in order to discuss how their dynamic attunement to difference-locating locates their/our solidarity and informs connection-building that provides symbology of their enactivism as beings in ecological transformation with/in their given and changing environments. These transformations are enacted toward a more amenable world of our imagining and, thus, creates it in doing so. This paper proposes that the Palestinian territories occupied by Israel have eroded as a landscape or as a polity and the continued American encroachment on large amounts of Oglala Lakota territory threatens the lives and lands therein, but both Palestine and this Indigenous nation have thrived as an idea, and as an ideal. This disparity informs a broader problem of the world, the maintenance of decolonial energy against violent market forces that constrict access to wealth, movement, resources, and citizenship. We can imagine better worlds, ones free of plutocracy and military occupation and extraction, but often we feel we possess too little material power to transform imagination into comprehensive results. This viewpoint is not defeatist. It augurs hopefulness and signals a motion for ordinary daily enactivism. Transmitted by the works of my inquiry, in this case poetry by George Abraham and Layli Long Soldier, is the sensibility to improvise with solidarity as a dynamic experimentation that yields and bolsters enaction from the discursive reading-work. This poetry asks us to consider the practical usefulness of inter and intra national approaches in addition to their intellectual or imaginative value that transgress such nations and borders of interest. And answers, perhaps, that the only salvageable things in this world are the futures we manage to keep alive. It is suggested by these works that our memories must therefore remain larger than the restraints of the colonizer’s imagination, for example. And that we have to create the world in which we intend to reside. That world, as we read to learn to feel spontaneously from these poetries, unlike the current one, must be amenable to our existence.
Discipline
Literature
Geographic Area
Palestine
Sub Area
None