Read a Poem for Gaza

Abstract

"Read a Poem for Gaza" discusses the censorship and silencing of calls for decolonial justice by Palestinian academics and writers at institutions and in public forums following October 7th, 2023. It considers the liberatory impact (and limitations) of poetic and epistemic forms of resistance for displaced Palestinians in the global north who were dispossessed of their lands and homes by Israeli settler-colonial violence funded by U.S. imperial investments, while being privileged in their situation within the global north as mobile American citizens. It asks: What about the silenced voices of those martyred in Gaza? Should we speak for them, how do break barriers to speak alongside them, and do their words deconstruct the temporal and spatial borders of the nation-state to allow us to challenge in our own speech acts the violence of settler-colonialism and the politics and economics of empire?

It is also an examination of the role of memory and maternality, the passing down of knowledge of collective and felt trauma and the Muslim and Palestinian ethos of care and struggle beyond institutional erasure of this trauma from official history.