From Ottawa, for Palestine: Nadia Abu‐Zahra's poetry against genocide
Bibliographic record
Abstract
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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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.028 | 0.016 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".