Rifqa

Mohammed El-Kurd

• Publisher: Haymarket Books
• Year: 2021
• eBook ISBN: 9781642596830
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Middle Eastern History
• Index: Literature

Each day after school, Mohammed El-Kurd's grandmother welcomed him at the door of his home with a bouquet of jasmine. Her name was Rifqa—she was older than Israel itself and an icon of Palestinian resilience. With razor-sharp wit and glistening moral clarity, El-Kurd lays bare the brutality of Israeli settler colonialism. His poems trace Rifqa's exile from Haifa to his family's current dispossession in Sheikh Jarrah, Jerusalem, exposing the cyclical and relentless horror of the Nakba. El-Kurd's debut collection definitively shows that the Palestinian struggle is a revolution, until victory.

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...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Copyright
• Contents
• Foreword: Love Is Older Than “Israel” by aja monet
• One
• Two
• Three
• Four
• Farewell, Palestine’s Jasmine
• Afterword: Lest There Be Unclarity
• Acknowledgments
• Gratitude
• Back Cover