The world is burning, and the smoke is all the proof we need. Over 18,000 Palestinians have been killed, “collateral damage” in the ongoing war, and over 1.5 million Gazans have been displaced from their homes. In Sudan, the civil war has resulted in a mass ethnic cleansing. Since April of 2023, more than 18,800 people have died in the civil war. And half of the population, 25 million people, are in desperate need of humanitarian assistance and protection.
We have witnessed in these past few months apocalyptic scenes of Palestinians being starved to death and the indiscriminate bombings of helpless children, women and men with no place to flee, their bodies burnt to ashes while schools and hospitals are destroyed, becoming a graveyard of rubble.
To metabolize grief and suffering of this magnitude is an excruciating experience, but poetry can offer us a space for reflection, healing, and activism. To borrow Mahmoud Darwish’s words: “all beautiful poetry is an act of resistance” and “language is the greatest weapon against oppression.”
“In silence, we become accomplices,” Darwish iterates, and so in these collections below, the writers, defiant in the face of oppression and persecution, have chosen to rebel and fight against tyranny. Every collection is an outcry of indignation and a rallying call for peace, justice, and liberation:
Dear God. Dear Bones. Dear Yellow. by Noor Hindi
Palestinian American poet and journalist Hindi asks “Might we define this as a collective trauma? a. Whose trauma? b. A gathering of bodies might be called a circus to some // and a graveyard to others.” On many occasions in the collection, Hindi communicates as one who has witnessed the cruelest forms of oppressions firsthand. The collection triumphs for its urgency, and its searing, honest and unapologetic rebellion in the face of decades-long persecution against Palestinians. Hindi seeks to instigate us into rebellion against oppression, showing us that writing can be a medium to start a revolution.
Dark Testament: Blackout Poems by Crystal Simone Smith
In her book, Smith focuses on Black Americans who have suffered from the poison of racism: from Oscar Grant, the doting father; Tamir Rice, the lanky, lovable son; to Breonna Taylor, the decorated first responder. Dark Testament is an interactive text and she beseeches the reader to engage with the blacked out spaces on the page as a pause of remembrance: “silence is often an act in which those still living undertake to be worthy of those who died.” The collection aches in the sensibilities of what it means to be human in a dying, burning world. Smith questions the worth of a life and the commonality with which we treat genocide like an everyday accident. Smith mourns a massacre of people with families, hopes and dreams: “each of whom was once dear to someone”. She tasks the reader with the duty of lighting a flame of conscience in honor of those killed by violence, and carrying that torch into a brighter and more just future.
Footnotes in Order of Disappearance by Fady Joudah
Fady Joudah is a Palestinian American physician, poet, and translator and his collection, Footnotes in Order of Disappearance, captivates its readers for its lyrical allegory and unflinching examination of the violence and terror wrought by Israeli and American occupation. The most wrenching line in the collection is a reminder that “We were / granted the right to exist.” Joudah’s language serves as an anatomical inquiry into what connects and what breaks us apart, examining the aftermath of war in footnotes. The collection is an archaeology into the fossils of a dystopian world. In the titular poem, he writes “I call the finding of certain things loss.” Joudah articulates rage and grief with an attention to the body and language, mixing magic, science, and skepticism to tame the heart’s machinery.
Bloodfresh by Ebony Stewart
In this book, Stewart rebels against stereotypes, against objectification, against -isms, and against cages. She refuses to be tamed. She refuses to have her freedom barred. And so she rages, rabidly, with sharp teeth. Here is a book of unfathomable intensity that triumphs in its colloquialisms to create a voice that exudes fear-defying confidence and is wickedly unapologetic about going all out uncensored. Ebony writes: “break the patterns / write on shredded paper / do not become complacent in the holocaust.”
Black Movie by Danez Smith
Danez begins the collection, saying: “In the film, townsfolk name themselves Prince Charming, queue up to wake the sleeping beauty.” The collection challenges white supremacy and societal prejudices against Black bodies, bringing attention to the epidemic of police brutality on Black Americans. Trayvon Martin, Mike Brown, Renisha McBride, Brandon Zachary, and a host of others who have fallen to this oppression are mourned, commiserated with, and fought for in vengeance. They demand the justice they deserve, so the dead can receive a proper elegy. This collection is half-elegy, half-protest. Danez fantasizes about a world where their people are safe, free and alive, or in their words: “a safe house / made of ox tails & pork rinds / a place to be black & not dead.”
If They Come For Us by Fatimah Asghar
This poetry collection, written from a formalist lens, is filled with grief and loss, and begins with a history lesson about the Partition of India and Pakistan. Asghar interrogates the borders created by colonial powers, examining how countries, identities, and citizenship can shift and change overnight: “you’re kashmiri until they burn your home. take your orchards. stake a different flag.” Exploring the many ways in which violence manifests, they question what it means to be safe as a Pakistani Muslim woman in post-9/11 America: “…you’re muslim until it’s too dangerous. you’re safe until you’re alone. you’re american until the towers fall. until there’s a border on your back.” If They Come For Us is an education on the harsh realities of the world: an education on ancestral trauma, on losing your homeland, on being an orphan.
Things You May Find Hidden in My Ear by Mosab Abu Toha
Abu Toha’s lyricism dwells in a marriage of soul between poetry and politics in which the verse is a weapon of resistance. In the company of a new generation of Palestinian poets, Abu Toha’s poems are a testament to the plight and the resilience of the Palestinian people. A native Gazan, Abu Toha writes about life in an open-air prison, constantly under surveillance, with the ever-present threat of destruction and assault looming large: “The drone’s buzzing sound, / the roar of an F-16, / the screams of bombs falling on houses, / on fields, and on bodies, / of rockets flying away— / rid my small ear canal of them all.”
On November 19th, 2023, Abu Toha was detained by the Israeli Defense Forces on suspicion of “terror” while attempting to flee Gaza with his wife and children. Two days later, Abu Toha was released but not without wounds from his time in custody. He writes: “In Gaza you don’t know what you’re guilty of. It feels like living in a Kafka novel.”