hearthwrm - Tumblr blog

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theyre called “meadowsweets” hahsisngqhdjxnsudufj 😭

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Holy shit. The Israeli whistleblower story CNN just broke is insane. I cannot believe what I’m reading

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Hanif Abdurraqib, from "The Art of Disappearance", pub. The New York Times [ID'd]

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Please help Kenan and his family flee Gaza

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nobody does chapter titles like charles dickens

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First Intifada. This particular picture used to be everywhere back in the day.

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on earth by Franz Wright

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Gaza - Occupied Palestine 1993.

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boycotting eurovision is not simply about israeli participation. you have to understand that, the presenting sponsor of eurovision is moroccan oil, an israeli brand. israel’s money is all over eurovision. i keep seeing people hoping for israel to be banned from participating, but lbr it’s never going to happen. i’ve seen people post evidence of israel having paid advertising telling people to vote for them etc. the whole show is israeli propaganda and i am begging you not to watch it and to keep your eyes on gaza tonight, keep your eyes on rafah

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"Israeli 'quad copter' drones targeted shelter centers and residential buildings in the Jabalia camp. ... Occupation bullets are targeting individuals moving around the shelter schools in the northern Gaza Strip."

12 May 24

Gaza Funds

Help Gaza Children

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Dunya Mikhail, Diary of a wave outside the sea (trans. Elizabeth Winslow & Dunya Mikhail) [ID'd]

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"We have on this land all of that which makes life worth living On this land, the lady of our land The mother of all beginnings, and the mother of all ends She was called Palestine, her name later became Palestine" - Mahmoud Darwish

I'm giving away free art prints of this piece to anyone who donates $50+ to relief organizations in support of Palestine. More info on my instagram.

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Mariette Pathy Allen, TransCuba (a series capturing the daily lives of the transgender and GNC community in Cuba), 2012-2014.

In 2005, Castro proposed a project, which became law three years later, to allow transgender individuals to receive free, legal sex reassignment surgery and change their legal gender.

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"How many of you like have you ever been to Jerusalem? Raise your hand if you have ever been to Jerusalem. We have 60 students here, and we have one... two, probably three... That's that's very few of you! I've never been to Jerusalem. We're Palestinians; we live in Gaza; we can't go to Jerusalem because of the Israeli occupation.

But we love Jerusalem, right? [A chorus of students saying "yes".] We love Jerusalem because of what it means to us. We've never been there, but believe me, when you go there you will feel that you've been there hundreds of times. Because you read about Jerusalem in literature, in stories. Of course it doesn't mean that that's it, that we should take the Jerusalem that's in the stories and that's it, no.

But in literature, Jerusalem comes back to us. It's true that there is suffering; there is pain; there is occupation, and that's why Tamim Al-Barghouti, as a young Palestinian poet, I think is doing a great service to the Palestinian cause and the Palestinian struggle.

When you listen to him reciting his poem from Al-Quds, or other poems, he takes you to Jerusalem. You live in Jerusalem. He takes you back to it. You liberate it for just a little bit of time.

And if there is hope; if you can imagine a free Palestine, a free Jerusalem, probably you will work towards that, and the same thing applies to occupied Palestine. We've never been to other parts of Palestine because of the Israeli occupation, but we've been told so many times by our parents and our grandparents, especially our mothers, they've been telling us stories about Palestine in the past, the good old days, when Palestine was all beautiful, unoccupied, unraped.

Therefore, I say in in this case how our homeland turns into a story. In reality, we can't have it; we don't have it, but it can turn into poems, into literature, into stories, so our homeland turns into a story. We love our homeland because of the story. We love our homeland because of the story, and we love the story because it's about our homeland, and this connection is significant.

Israel wants to sever this relationship, for example between Palestinians and the land; Palestinians and Jerusalem, and other places and cities, and literature attaches us back - connects us strongly to Palestine, so in my thinking, this is a very significant thing that literature contributes to. Creating realities; making the impossible sound possible.

In real life, again because we are here in Palestine and Gaza, I'll be giving you examples from Palestinian and Arab literature so we can compare and make things clearer. We all know Fadwa Tuqan, the Palestinian poet - and please do not introduce her as Ibrahim Tuqan's sister, let's talk about her as Fadwa Tuqan and then somewhere else mention that, "by the way, Ibrahim Tuqan was her brother". Let's not throw her under the shadow of a man, even if it's her brother, who was a great poet, we can't deny that.

So this is Fadwa Tuqan, a Palestinian poet, 40 years ago or 50 years ago, writing poetry... Of course, we always fall into this trap of saying "she was arrested for just writing poetry!" We do this, even us believers in literature, "Why would Israel arrest somebody or put somebody under house arrest if she only wrote a poem?!"

So we contradict ourselves sometimes. We believe in the power of literature, changing life as a means of resistance, a means of fighting back and in the end we say, "She just wrote a poem!" We shouldn't be saying that.

Moshe Daya, an Israeli general, said that the poems of Fadwa Tuqan were like facing 20 enemy fighters. Wow.

She didn't throw stones; she didn't shoot at the invading Israeli military jeeps. She just wrote poetry. And I'm falling for that again, I'm saying "she just wrote poetry".

So this is what how Israel's dealing with Palestinian poets, and the same thing happened to Palestinian poet Dareen Tatour. She wrote poetry celebrating Palestinian struggle; encouraging Palestinians to resist, not to give up, to fight back. She was put under house arrest. She was sent to prison for years.

And therefore I end here with a very significant point. Don't forget that Palestine was first and foremost occupied in Zionist literature and Zionist poetry.

Palestine was presented as these things, I'll be mentioning some of them, but there's a contradiction here, there's a paradox always. "Palestine is a land without a people to our people without a land", "Palestine flows with milk and honey", "there's no one there, so let's go". We'll see how later on, how many even Jewish people were disappointed when they came to Palestine. Number one, there was no milk and honey, because "flowing with milk and honey" sounds like you're just going to be groping around, and milk and honey will be thrown at you - and there were people! There have always been people in Palestine.

The fact that Israel worked hard to ethnically cleanse Palestine, to kick Palestinians out, first and foremost in literature - yes, in politics and everything - shows how significant poetry is.

To sum up, Palestine was occupied metaphorically in the poem long before it was physically and militarily occupied in your life, so let's do the same. Let's fight back; let's restore Palestine in in our writings; in our poetry; in our stories."

-Professor Refaat Alareer explaining to his students the power of poetry as a means of resistance, and why the occupation targets poets, during one of his lectures at IUG.