August Full of Questions

On a week of Edinburgh festival & the questions I should have asked

At this years Edinburgh International book festival Ali Smith spoke of language, of the flatness of the language of our times, of words being pulled from meaning and if I hadn’t been so ferverently making notes I wish I’d asked her about the words genocide, of death to the idf, of palestine action I wish I’d asked who gets to have the word holacaust, who gets to say that our taxes are directly supporting the death of children and who must take responsibility for it

Do you think the true meaning of the word will return Ali? I want to ask in earnest, while there are people looking at invisible lines of borders with empty pots and empty bellies, while there are people that are being systematically starved and we’re calling it famine as if it is a natural disaster and not an entirely human one

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I chaired a session on nature by global majority poets, the anthology was full of expansive notions of nature, that traversed from reverence, to concrete jungles to relationships between the human and non human, spirit and concrete world.

One of the speakers thanked me after the session for mentioning palestine as if i had done the labour she wanted but was afraid to. another spoke of hiroshima without making the correlation to six times as many bombs presently dropped on Gaza, offering the perfect segway for me to.

I don’t know what i’m doing here, celebrating words if they are doing nothing but fanning the unprovoked imagination & making us feel good about ourselves .

Art should function not Appease runs round my head, militent drum beat on repeat. In this time art must function we can no longer afford to appease

I fell short this week. I didn’t ask the question I should have asked at every session which was what do you think the role of a writer or a poet is in genocidial times to which we are all complicit ? That would have been the most generative and generous of all questions I think.

I bump into Sunny Singh in the green room. I’ve never met her before. She is dressed in the bright full colour of a warm sun, wearing her palestine scarf. we fall into conversation like friends, she talks with self awareness, speaks to her privilege, enacts care in her approach to storytelling, is loud on principle. In her session she begins by reading a statement calling out the white supermacist cultural institutions we sit in, speaking in solidarity with Fady Joudah the palestinian poet who pulled out of the festival after hearing of another event where a pro Israel speaker would be in attendance. she speaks without a hint of appeasing anyone in her voice, without want for validation.

The question unsaid but heard is a provocation, a daring, what will you do now, she says, what is your response to the challenge of truth?

I clap hard and loud when she ends her statement and the audience are not sure whether to clap at acknowledging the complicity, the audience don’t quite know what to do with the word white supremacy unsure if this predominantly white space implicates them. The language creates unease and the unease feels like breathing.

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I go to see Khalid’ Abdullah’s one person show Nowhere at The Traverse Theatre. He weaves his biography with the egyptian uprising, he pulls death and joy and inheritance and legacy into the room. The stage direction is so smart so poetic in gesture I think of it for days after. He holds palestine in his mouth in his heart in his eyes he provokes the audience through play and through self reflection - what now, what will you do now he says without saying it

I go to see a play based on the title alone

The Beautiful Future is coming

it is in the same building as Khaleds play, so for some reason I assume it will be good. I sit through an outdated story of climate change of white washing, of once upon a time to just care about a concept was acceptable, to only care for western women’s rights. It felt like storytelling from the time before -a man sets himself on fire because the water is rising and I want to say do you mean the bodies do you mean the blood?

you mean something else please mean something else, this lack of true care to say something more connected than to connect the story of a woman in the early americas whose research wouldn’t get published because she was a woman isn’t the story right now, the story she sits on is the story the people of the land that were displaced so she could complain about being a woman in a man’s world , the implications on climate when you cut people from a true relationship with nature that’s the story. Forget about the flood, which is more imminent now than ever with Israels incessant bombs our tax money have paid for, the climate crisis is being expedited every minute by human hands, hungry and insatiable for the resource of now with no thought to what comes next

FORGET ABOUT THE FLOOD WHAT ABOUT THE BLOOD I want to ask

A week long Palestine fringe festival is taking place down in Portabello town hall and in the unseasonably consistent warmth of scottish summer I walk to the beach, sit by the sea, think about the words haunting me.

I write a poem to Haia, to the daughter of the sea, who hasn’t been online for the last 4 days. In March this year as fellow poet we worked together to ready a collection of her poems for publication. Having spent so long immersed in her manuscript, her words continue to live intimately with me. The last time we speak is Monday. She tells me she is brave, that she will continue to use her words that’s shes grateful for my belief in them. I tell her she’s a true poet, warrior of Allah, her words are weapons, I tell her to keep writing, her pulse so strong when she does I can feel it from all the way over here. She asks why her words are powerful and I tell her because they speak straight from your heart, reach around the world, have the power to move people to action.

I know words can do many things in this moment and sometimes in the abscene of touch in the silence that extends itself between us now they can offer a hand or a hug to my friend. Words can be a lifeline, a comfort, a witness- words in this moment I think if reclaimed for correct purpose, if revived with care and intimacy can do so much, they have to.

I write poems to Haia now, because the rest of language, of what to say to her is failing me. We are waiting to hear on a decision for the UK government to waive biometric testing for 40 students including Haia to enter the country. These 40 students still in Gaza have been offered full scholarhsips for top UK universites with no way to enter the country due to this arbitrary ruling.

There is a black out happening, the silence is so loud, the sea so steadily insistent. The genocide and total ethnic cleanisng rages on.

What now sea I want to ask. Tell me sea, please, what now?

POEM FOR HAIA 2.

Daughter of the Sea

I wish I could give you the sea like this

beach clean, sky clear, the shadow

of kites and birds dancing on the sand

I wish I could give you air like this

cool and light not weighed down by memory

not witness to blood, to bombing, to clouds that still burn

There is a mother with her child running

into the sea care free, a child tasting

ice cream for the first time, a hole being

dug for nothing more important than sand castles

Is this life a sand castle?

What is it that I wish for you that doesn’t already

live in you?

Daughter of the sea

The sea refuses interruption

refuses horror refuses judgement

the sea is a mother steady breath

arms steadfast and strong, engulfing every storm

daughter of the sea- your mother is calling me

she is telling me to remind you, to remember

what you come from

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I go to see Randa Jarrar’s one person play The Last Palestinian Alive with no expectations expect to sit in brace postion.

Portabello town hall is completely full and the old theatre is spacious and cavernous that lends itself to Randas performance, her singular presence surrounded by so much space, you truly feel transported to her being the last person left on earth.

What follows is an act of deep imagination of speculative thinking, dreaming, fuelled by rage and grief the moment beyond the moment requires your laughter, a step back, pause for breath, allows us to look at the present again, fresh, new, not static, not forever yawning a slow scream stuck heart aching, the grief the humour the imagined future held together affirmed the necessity of imagination the necessity to radically shift out of the peramiters within which we are told we can dream, the edges beyond which we dare not.

Dare Randa says, I dare you to approach the future to know it is here to look back on this moment, to be braver.

Are you brave enough to dream Randa asks without asking?

The temperature of the room at Palestinian events is one of such warmth and community and solidarity driven by the shared care for humanity within its walls it’s entirely possible to know with certainty that the beautiful future is here that the pinnicale of darkness is reconfiguring us all, that there are spaces fuelled by justice and it’s enough that shared humanity, it’s enough to believe in the best of us. Stay close to this I tell myself, there’s enough silence in the world, stay close to the dreamers, the makers, the public grievers, stay away from the dance around the edgers. Enough with the pretence of civility - it’s consequences are too loud

We need raw, true, hearts held outside of ourselves, we need messy ness, the answer to the obliteration of humanity isn’t a stiff upper lip, or keep calm and carry on or any slogan designed to ensure that the power of emotional resonance, the power of empathy and collective care & self reflection is squashed. More disruption, more grief more laughter more aliveness in the face of murder more faith please more TRUTH.

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Ali Smith speaks of the machine vs and the human the rise of ai. She was emphatic that the machine may over take us in task but not in heart because the human has a soul and the soul cannot be contained or replicated. But what about a society that doesn’t acknowledge the soul Ali? I should have asked, what of the exceptionalism of the liberal mind.

We need societies that recognise the soul, not just the ego, that make space for sacredness not just intellectualism, for presence not just progress. We need to listen deeper., speak less first.

We hummed a note together at the end of Ali Smiths session, a packed auditorium, we hummed a note and I felt the sigh of ease from the audience that followed, the touching of human sound the token of hope.

I wondered what it would have been had she said the note that’s most needed now, the universal frequency we need to tune ourselves to is FREE PALESTINE, what that chorus of rage in the heart of the literary institution would have sounded like bouncing off these old institutional walls.

BBC Article About Biometrics If you haven’t already done so, please email your local MP now to put further pressure on government to drop the Visa biometrics and let Palestinian students in