Rifqa

Mohammed El-Kurd

• Publisher: Haymarket Books
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781642596830
• Topic: Littérature
• Subtopic: Poésie du Moyen-Orient

Rifqa is Mohammed El-Kurd's debut collection of poetry, written in the tradition of Ghassan Kanafani's Palestinian Resistance Literature. The book narrates the author's own experience of dispossession in Sheikh Jarrah--an infamous neighborhood in Jerusalem, Palestine, whose population of refugees continues to live on the brink of homelessness at the hands of the Israeli government and US-based settler organizations. The book, named after the author's late grandmother who was forced to flee from Haifa upon the genocidal establishment of Israel, makes the observation that home takeovers and demolitions across historical Palestine are not reminiscent of 1948 Nakba, but are in fact a continuation of it: a legalized, ideologically-driven practice of ethnic cleansing.

I am Sheikh Jarrah.

There’s a spear in my waist

and spears in my back.

My resilience is an edifice.

I am Jerusalem’s northern gate.

When treachery occurs,

I am fields of coal

and the wind will certainly blow

in the direction my ships covet.

—Maysoon Abu Dweih El-Kurd

ONE

In Jerusalem

God has become a refugee, sir.

—Rashid Hussein

“Fireworks or bombs?”

Loren often asked

in fresh, concerned American breath.

I’d respond with “A wedding, probably,”

or “There are no weddings in December.”

After she’s worn Jerusalem

and been worn by it,

“Fireworks or bombs?”

Loren asks. A giggling tornado

escapes our mouths

touched by our numbness

in fatal ways.

My mother has always said:

“The most tragic of disasters

are those that cause laughter.”

WHO LIVES IN SHEIKH JARRAH?¹

1 Erasure of an article with the same name, published in the New York Times, April 2010.

Born on Nakba Day²

Your unkindness rewrote my autobiography

into punch lines in guts,

blades for tongues,

a mouth pregnant with

thunder.

Your unkindness told me to push

through,

look,

listen.

I was born on the fiftieth anniversary of the Nakba

to a mother who reaped olives

and figs

and other Quranic verses,

watteeni wazzaytoon.³

My name: a bomb in a white room,

a walking suspicion

in an airport,

choiceless politics.

I was born on the fiftieth anniversary of the Nakba.

Outside the hospital room:

protests, burnt rubber,

Kuffiyah’ed faces, and bare bodies,

stones thrown onto tanks,

tanks imprinted with US flags,

lands

smelling of tear gas, skies tiled with

rubber-coated bullets,

a few bodies shot, dead—died

numbers in a headline.

I

and my sister

were born.

Birth lasts longer than death.

In Palestine death is sudden,

instant,

constant,

happens in between breaths.

I was born among poetry

on the fiftieth anniversary.

The liberation chants outside the hospital room

told my mother

to push.

2 The term Nakba (Arabic for catastrophe) refers to the occupation of 78 percent of Palestine through ethnic cleansing and massacres and the creation of “Israel” on that territory in 1948. The Palestinian people commemorate the Nakba on May 15th every year. Though defined by historians as the war...