This presentation pertains to the examination of selected poetry and writings that operate within established literary forms and conventions, that serves as a call for social change. Naomi Shihab Nye works has been widely recognized for its accessibility and its ability to inspire hope and resilience through using language in bridging gaps and blur the lines between the local and the global and poetry and activism. In her extensive literary repertoire, the author explores a wide range of topics, including nature and the environment. Given her profound contemplation of the world, Nye grapples with unconventional poetry writing the relentless influx of environmental catastrophes.

Olive Trees in Mornings in Jenin: More than just Plants The opening scenes in Susan Abulhawa’s Mornings in Jenin portray the planting of olives and their harvest in the pre-Nakba days. Abulhawa portrays in intricate detail the process of planting and harvesting olives, illustrating how it is part and parcel of the Palestinian culture. This is to be contrasted in the novel with Israeli colonialists who cannot engage in the planting of olives as it is not a major part of their culture. Olive agriculture also gradually deteriorates from the scene in the later post-Nakba days. The vivid pictures of the fields and the pungent smell of olives described in the first parts of the novel gradually disappear. My contribution to this roundtable focuses on how olive agriculture is part of the idyllic pre-Nakba times, and it appears with the atrocities committed on the land. Thus, Olive trees and their plantation become synonymous with the bounty that the freed land used to produce. By interconnecting the post-Nakba with the Post-colonial I attempt to read Mornings in Jenin from an ecofeminist perspective that looks at Palestine as a woman’s body that gets harassed by the colonizer just as what happened with the dying olive trees.

My presentation will discuss the environmental justice movement in Morocco though an examination of Nadir Bouhmouh’s documentary Amussu (2016) which revolves around the “Movement on the Road” protest movement in Imider, a region in Southeast Morocco, where a silver mine operated by Ona has depleted the region of its water resources. I will discuss women’s central role in the movement and how they have shown their resilience and agency not only through their lyrical poetry and songs in which they denounce the silver mine and its anti-environmental practices, but also through their key participation at Agraw, an ancient Amazigh democratic system of governance.

An ecocritical reading of Raja Alem’s the Dove’s Necklace (2014) provides a nuanced view of anthropocene. In this round table discussion, I explore the bond between the characters and non-human creatures in the novel and the custom of society in relation to nature. the Dove’s Necklace is a mixture of history, the current situation, and fantasy. The characters a combination of people with flesh and blood and non-human characters. The novel is narrated by ‘the Lane of Many Heads,’ sitting in the darkness, holding his breath to avoid the smell of the stink of trash and sewage; he also evades the clamor of discordant voices. The lane reveals that he used to be a tranquil garden, yet now he is like any old forgotten backstreet. This personification of the lane breaks the anthropocentric method of narrating stories to give subjectivity to non-humans to highlight the imbalance between human and the environment. Throughout the text, plants, animals, birds, and human beings do not live in harmony since people dominate and destroy their milieu. Another tool to illustrate the impact of man on nature is the names of the streets: the ‘Funeral Lane, Mortal Alley, Wretches Lane, and Coal or Red Alley’. These streets are depicted as places full of beggars despite the wealth and modernity in the main streets. By the end of the text ‘the Lane of Many Heads’ has been swept away and replaced by skyscrapers that look like spaceships landing on Earth. Keeping in tune with the present environmental crisis, Alem sends a message that we should behave with nature in a proper way to preserve it in its pristine beauty.

Colonial Fantasizing: Israel’s Imperial Gaze and Larissa Sansour’s Ecological Decolonialism In her futuristic political art, Palestinian artist Larissa Sansour prophesized that Israel, beyond its settler-colonial violence in Gaza and in Palestine, aspires to become empire. In my presentation, I will discuss how these imperial aspirations are imagined in Plan 2035, an AI-generated image of post-destruction Gaza that was developed by unnamed businesspeople and released by Netanyahu in May of 2024. I will then discuss the ecologically oriented forms of resistance that Sansour’s work offers in relation to Israeli imperialist fantasies of dominion. The works by Larissa Sansour that I will discuss are Nation Estate, Soup Over Bethlehem, and to a lesser degree In Vitro. I will consider the following questions: What is the relationship between the imperial gaze and the manipulation (decimation and reconstruction) of environmental, religious, and social landscapes? What is the significance of artificiality (Artificial Intelligence) as a human proxy and the human-less neoliberal space in the AI-generated image? How does this relate to the culture-nature binary in colonial fantasies and imperial interests? How does Larissa Sansour imagine the role of the natural environment in resistance to this Israeli imperialism? What is the role of gender, family, and community? How do cultural texts become political imaginaries, and what is their role in coloniality and decoloniality?