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 (Figure 1). 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. 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 kite—long a symbol of Palestinian resistance—which brings a father's love back to a child in Gaza after he has been killed. Following Alareer's death, white kites, often with the poem inked on one side, became a regular feature of protest marches in Ottawa and other cities worldwide. The poem, which was first published in 2011, thus simultaneously evokes the continuity of the Palestinian genocide and the Palestinian humanity that must transcend it. As his friend, the poet Mosab Abu Toha, wrote shortly after Alareer's death, “what Refaat asked of every one of us was to tell his tale. And his tale and those of others need to change this world, need to stop the genocide. It is not fiction. It is not poetry. It is his life,” (Abu Toha, 2024). This project is rooted in a series of moments when we encountered others—colleagues, students, and neighbors—in the halls and in the streets in acts of Palestinian life-making that defy death and annihilation. One particularly important moment that encouraged us to record these events in writing was a gathering organized by a few brave graduate students in our department who—dancing around a brand-new prohibition on circulating “political” emails over the department listserv—organized an event called, “Palestine: Restoration, Understanding and Communal Healing” on December 7, 2023. When we entered the space they had created, we saw each other across a table strewn with Mahmoud Darwish's poems, a map of historic Palestine, as well as bread and salt. More than just a metaphoric gesture, the students hosting us explained the important role of salt on the table—one often evoked as a covenant of peace and community-making over a meal—to invite us into a space of grief, public intimacy and camaraderie through storytelling, poetry, and reflection. The news of Alareer's death, coming on the heels of this event, further compelled us to heed his call and make these stories known. Although in this piece we represent a collective experience larger than ourselves, the four of us who are listed as authors do so because we want to take responsibility for how we have written about our experiences, presented these poems, and documented these moments. We recognize the fraught racial politics of sounding our experiences here, especially in the context of the stickiness (Ahmed, 2004) of anti-Palestinian racism on campus, and how it sticks differently to Palestinians, and those racialized as being from the region. Our differing bodies have brought us into this writing in different ways, and yet that difference explains why we have come to write this piece, and to do so together. And so, we slip between the I/we, to mark this coming together across and through our differences and most especially, in a difficult time. Below we move through the ethnographic moments that have shaped our collective making and, in sharing the effects that the poems and artwork have had on us, invite others to reflect on the moment and even to join the collective in spirit.1 One did not have to be an expert in international affairs or Palestinian history to know that the Israeli response to Hamas' October 7th incursion was going to be devastatingly violent. The expectation, instilled over 70 years of occupation and explicit Israeli and US policy, was so deeply entrenched that it verged on acceptance. It seemed like everyone around me was just holding their breath, waiting for the bombing to start and, then, waiting for it to end. (We'd talk about it afterwards, assess the damage, listen to the experts situate this latest tragic episode in the violent history of the region, go back to worrying about the next time.) But then it didn't end. It wasn't ever going to end. Raz Segal named it a genocide as early as October 13th (Segal, 2023). Silence became complicity. And still I was speechless: What could I say and how and to whom that would mean anything in the face of what we were witnessing? Of what we were becoming? I felt that silence too. The chill. The terrifying feeling of seeing what is to come, a fissure opening, and the impossibility of speech. Even on campus with folks I thought would talk, could talk, should talk. The fear that the silence sets in as the world watches in real time Palestinian life annihilated. Until I saw that you saw the same thing as I did. Until I saw you too. Until I gathered with others, at a protest organized by a local coalition, and another, until weeks after weeks, more and more came to the streets, and saw more and more of you and you and you. On that Sunday in November, I went to Parliament Hill with you, other friends and my two brothers, who were both visiting from out of town. I had told them that I'd be going to the march, and they had both decided to hop along. I was not sure how they felt about being there, and that uncertainty was eating me. And so we stood on the Hill, listening to the speeches. At some point, I recognized the voice of Nadia. I did not know that Nadia, a renowned Palestinian colleague in International Development and Global Studies who specializes in Palestinian studies, wrote poetry. I turned to my brothers, to tell them I knew her, and saw them both intently listening, I saw that they could see too. Her words cut across the space, her poem offering a way to say otherwise the destruction, the dehumanization, and the way we are part of this story, Canada's complicity. Against the feeling of falling in darkness in a country that could not say the words, Palestine-Genocide-Ceasefire, on November 12, 2023 I marched shoulder to shoulder with my two brothers, and you, alive with the deadly truth of Nadia's off-rhyme. Settler Canada: We understand why you have shied away from seeing what is before all our eyes. We knew you would not abhor genocide – nor honour those on October 7th who died – by listening to the families and those who survived who said: not in our name – we are not on the side of death and destruction – we say this worldwide. There are letters from experts in academia, law and medicine, all duly signed, urging governments to stand up and decide, how they will uphold international law and turn the tide of global leaders’ support for what is so clear and simplified as attacking and cutting the power for babies in incubators aligned now on blankets on the floor, as the hospital on every side is surrounded by the Israeli armed forces who are shooting rounds of live ammunition from snipers into the windows killing a nurse and only intensified the fear and struggle to stay alive. One hundred and twenty health facilities, to be safe, clean and sanitised, 18 hospitals, 40 centres – all instead bombed and trying to ride out the flames and the siege and the travails of births and wounds and learning to thrive to see life and hope and joy despite 193 medical staff killed, 45 ambulances destroyed, a generation demoralised. Never has the United Nations leadership been so horrified, the most staff killed in a month since its creation, 1945. UN shelters, the GPS coordinates they did provide to the Israeli army who tossed warnings aside and bombed the shelters anyway with everyone inside. White phosphorus is banned for this use, the burns never subside, slow deaths of days, as loved ones stand by. The beloved body still smoking even after they expired. Families wrap them in shrouds that countries supplied; shrouds were the substitute for protection and safety fortified. World leaders have shrugged their shoulders and sighed: They stand with Israel and for its favour they've vied: one sends gas, another conduits weapons, another sends destroyers in plain sight. All block refugees: no special scholarships, visas, dignity or pride; these countries determined instead to deride Palestinians’ pleas for humanity, to not be dehumanised. Israel cuts necessities from Gaza like water – a war crime, with rare precedent throughout any time. Even imported water bottles to replace sea brine, Israel bombs those too before they can find the hospitals and parched throats waiting dried from a drop of clean water so cruelly denied. No fuel, no power, no medical supplies, no beans, no fries, no eggs sunny side, no roasts, no vegetables stir-fried, no fragment of scents so strongly desired. And above all this the silence tells us our ears have lied when we thought we heard the Canadian government decried the wrongs, the harms, against humanity the crime, that 880 experts say Israel commits genocide. Israel fabricates stories of beheaded babies and cyanide (which Israel may have used in a refugee camp in 1982 in July). 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