From Ottawa, for Palestine: Nadia Abu‐Zahra's poetry against genocide

We are colleagues who came together in Ottawa during a genocide.We came together on our university campus where, despite our collective expertise in the region, critical race theory, and settler-colonialism, we could not discuss the ongoing genocide in Palestine, could not refer to history before October 7th, and could not even call for a ceasefire.We came together in the streets of our city where weekly protests organized by a local coalition marked and still mark the time long past which the bombardment of Gaza should have stopped, as fall became winter, spring, and summer.We came together in each other's houses and over the phone, where we shared good coffee and bad news, to form what Robyn Maynard and Leanne Simpson call "constellations of co-resistance"relationships that affirm life and world-making in a time of acute violence (Maynard & Simpson, 2022, p. 1).Through poetry, dance, and song, we forged new camaraderies, secret committees, and informal spaces of knowledge-sharing to connect to Palestine in ways that contrast with the racist depictions of Palestinian life as violent, scary, and even worthless that dominated the airwaves and leached into our classrooms.In this piece we position ourselves within and against the continuities of settler-colonial violence that also link us to Palestine and to the stolen land beneath our feet.Here in Canada, in 2024, we do not stand apart from settler-colonialism; we are in the midst of a genocide, and therefore, we eschew traditional methods of writing that do not have the words for what we are seeing Palestinians endure in Gaza.Instead, we present our colleague Nadia Abu-Zahra's poetry along with creative reflections from other colleagues and students to center "humanness, spirit, heart, and creativity into how we come to know" (Absolon, 2022, p. xv).Together we embrace what David McDonald calls the poetics of Palestinian resistance (McDonald, 2013) to subvert the intellectual gaslighting that frames Palestinian experiences of settler colonialism as "exceptional."We explicitly write to find solace in the thick of this hypocrisy, leaning into the slippages of our positionalities and turning away from the legibility of academic writing in order to push back against the shrinking limits of acceptable speech and attempted suppression of academic freedom on university campuses.Key to our reckoning with this genocidal moment is Refaat Alareer's poem "If I Must Die," which foretold his assassination by an IDF airstrike on December 6, 2023 (Figure 1).The first lines of the poem are, "If I must die, you must live to tell my story."It goes on to describe the making of a kitelong a symbol of Palestinian resistance-which brings a father's love back to a child in Gaza after he

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