Jérôme Melançon : On the Gaza Poets Society

 

 

 

 

Even now, at the height of Israel’s attack through containment, military means, and the weaponization or withholding of aid, Palestinian poets are meeting in Gaza to read their poems, do spoken word poetry, and find a respite from the loss, pain, and fear that makes up everyday life as a target of genocide. Young poets, specifically, meet as the Gaza Poets Society, escaping the futurelessness the state of Israel is imposing on Palestinians. They have been doing so since 2018, though their situation has changed considerably over the last two years. They have published two anthologies so far: Love and Loss (2019) and My Death is Not a Song for You to Sing (2024). They are available on the Society’s Buy Me A Coffee page, and buying them is a way to support not just individual lives, or poetry, but a part of humanity as well. Their poems also regularly appear on their Facebook and Instagram pages, easily shareable. And very recently they have launched the poetry journal Gaza Verse.

The Gaza Poets Society is Mohammed Moussa’s vehicle – meaning both that his poetry is a central aspect of what it publishes, with many of his poems featured in the anthologies, but also and much more importantly that he selflessly spends a great amount of time driving others to places for which they yearn, or only had thought possible. This poet from Jabalia Camp, in the north of the Gaza strip, works to share the young poets’ writing, helping weave a thread between them and us by translating them and inserting his own poems. It is he who warns us with the title of the 2024 anthology: the Gaza Poets Society asks that we share voices and songs, that we support them – and, through the Creative Allies page, to join them with our own poets and songs – all this without waiting for their deaths and bemoaning their departure. His poem “My Death Is Not a Song” asks that we remember the children who are still alive and the land that is being turned into a site of destruction in this very moment. To do this, Moussa destabilizes the forgetting of attention and memory that comes so easily and addresses a you that forces the reader to decide whether they have belonged to those who kill children and whether they will continue to do so.

The first anthology includes Basman Elderawi’s love letter to a drone, which is a reflection on and onto the obsession of those who track Palestinians. Amal Saqer shows the continuation of patriarchy and love all at once, adding further contradictions and forms of violence to the tally. Hanin Alholy speaks of the permanence of death installed by its repetition. And Moussa describes his attitude and writes of his efforts, which are those of countless Gazans and other Palestinians: “I still wait to shade you / so I don’t have to write another lament.” These are poems of ash, dust, pieces, fragments; of cages and walls; but also of sea and sky and land, always greater than the narrowing that colonialism imposes. They show us a world that is now in shambles, though still they keep it together in part by reaching out for others. They were written before 2019, at a time when standing together to read poems, for spoken poetry events, still made it possible to outrun pursuers, for a while, when poetry could still act as a refuge.

Since 2023, that world had changed considerably (as has that of the West Bank). In the second anthology, published in 2024, poetry serves to chronicle sorrows. As Bara’ah and Fatimah al-Kilani write:

We write to quiet the rush of anger burning our souls.
We write so that we may thaw the silence that thwarts our uprising. 

We write so that we may stay,
so we may leave memories behind when we inevitably pass through you. 

We are annihilated and we live despite our death.
We remain despite our disappearance. We dream of being read even if in eternal silence.
[...]
We write because happiness has become a forlorn emotion in this city,
my city, where love is a feeling constrained underneath layers of morbid dreams.

With the complementary binaries like thaw/thwart, stay/leave/pass, live/death, remain/disappearance, read/silence, the speakers refuse to pretend that death is absent and to accept it as inevitable, as entirely present. They push against what remains avoidable. They move through the barriers emotions like guilt and helplessness create. They make present themselves as fully human even as they are being starved and regularly in danger.

As we can see in this part of a longer poem, there is much happening in this anthology beyond chronicling. There are attempts here to find words for what seeks to annihilate Gazans, not as a reflection or a look back, not to learn lessons or contain memories, but as death is directed at the poets, at their families, at their neighbours, and as the occupying force continues its genocide. Moussa’s own reflections on writing highlight the imminence of death, the brief character of words and life that burst out in these poems.

And so time is woven into the poems – and especially its splicing. Nadin Murtaja’s “Here” accompanies the slowing down of time, the end of night spreading past the arrival of morning: “time changes, hours pass, / and the darkness grows / until the morning arrives, the sky sheds dimness.” Raneen Azzazi’s speaker instead lives in the short present of repetition and refuses a temporality where bombs are forever falling: “But fear does not mature with age / to the voices that sound the coming of bombs / For the bombs sound different to my ears // every time / And the nerves in my body feel them anew / every time / reacting as though they are hearing the bombs for the first time / every time // I will not let myself get used to the sound of bombs” – the future is claimed as a new present, already contained in the present decision.

Just as remarkable is Murtaja’s “Besieged Sadness.” In long breaths, the poem is exhaled peacefully, even in its grasping and throwing the worst moments at us: “You scream and hit the face of the wall with your tendons and then your voice returns, disappointed because your walls isolate your voice.” Here too, the experience of writing is a matter of attention to the acute present, even as the self becomes ever thinner: “Your write poems and then you burn them, fearful that their letters will fly and be revealed. / You play the tune of your sadness on your thin body, with the broken shards of your mirror on the floor of your room.”

Beyond the chronicle, beyond the telling of stories, on the thin path that allows the poets to maintain their presence what can be cut out and either appropriated and taken away or isolated and left behind, we find love for a people and a land. Hana Hazaim’s “Love of an Olive Tree” wraps the reader not in love for the land, but in the love of the land, the love the land extends to the people who know where to sit, how to look, how to align their body with a place – even if they are cut away from it: “There is a stillness in my back / garden as I lie here drying clothes / swaying to eastern breeze gentle / humming of machine cut grass // There is a similar stillness / amidst the rubble of a Palestinian / home. The loud thunderous drone overhead of machine killed souls.”

The same project carries on through social media posts, where poems live as literary objects and as propaganda (in the best sense of the word) meant to agitate, meant to awaken and move us, as in this poem that interrogates the act of writing through its political intentions:

In “Free Bird,” Taqwa Al Wawi deploys oppositions in couplets to underline the distance between the life of a bird and life in Gaza, making avian life seem the most human of the two: “You eat what grows. / You eat what resists rot.” The speaker envies the bird’s capacity to sing, given the stories they hold back and the words the world will not speak.

In the careful and devastating images of “The Night Refused to Fade” – "screaming dust,” “half-buried in fear” – Ruba Khalid gives part of the feeling that comes with getting bombed, and above all a shattered relationship with space and home.

Affirming life and possibility against a permanently unsettled, hope-crushing present, Hala Al-Khatib narrates the many reversals of the immediate future in “A Half-Hour in Gaza.” The poems maintains and elongates the steadfastness of a moment, the refusal to feel guilt or disappointment, and the love for self and family that make them possible.

In three poems, Mariam Al Khateeb describes precise locations, holding them up as lived places and sites of life against their transformation into targets. Here she threads a series of weary similes; there she names the boredom of heat and survival; elsewhere she writes that “The sea is there as if it doesn’t know that a war has passed; that the world cracked open at night without its knowledge.”

The repetition of knowing, added to an entity that at the very least cognates outside of human ways of knowing, is a reminder of the desire for connection, for the very world and its elements to be more than aware of the reality of life in Gaza.

 

 

 

 

 

Jérôme Melançon wants Palestine to be free and Palestinians to stay alive, thrive, self-determine, and return to their land. He writes and teaches and writes and lives in oskana kâ-asastêki / Regina, SK. His fourth collection, Prairial·es, will be out in October 2025 with Prise de parole. Let us not forget his three chapbooks with above/ground press: Bridges Under the Water (2023), Tomorrow’s Going to Be Bright (2022), and Coup (2020), his occasional translations, and his book of philosophy, La politique dans l’adversité (Metispresses, 2018). He has also edited books and journal issues, and keeps publishing academic articles that sometimes have to do with some of this. He is on various social media under variations of @lethejerome, notably at bsky.social.

 

Kate Rogers : Notes from the Field : Poetry of Witness

 

 

 

“Notes from the Field” with its journalistic association seems a good category for my piece on poet-journalists and poetry of witness. Being a poet myself, Co-director of Toronto’s Art Bar poetry series and a frequent emcee, brings me into contact with poets from Toronto and around the country. I listen to and read a lot of poetry. I was away teaching in Hong Kong for just over 20 years and I have been actively catching up on Canadian poetry and other writing since I re-patriated just before the pandemic. That is the primary way I have learned that many Canadian poets are or have been journalists. Here is a list of those I have met or discovered in other ways. (I am sure there are other poet-journalists who I am not aware of.)

- Alice Major (Edmonton, Alberta )
- Joe Fiorito (Toronto, Ont)
- Marsha Barber (Toronto, Ont)
- Anita Lahey (Ottawa, Ont)
- El Jones (Halifax, N.S)
- Mohammed Moussa (Turkey /Gaza)
- Rosa Deerchild (Winnipeg, Manitoba)

And there’s me: trained as a journalist although I became an academic—a college and university instructor. I include a poem of witness of my own from my new collection, The Meaning of Leaving, near the end of this piece.

In her 2015 interview with Quill and Quire Canadian poet Emily Pohl Weary shared her thoughts on ‘poetry of witness’:

 

“We are all observers, in the sense that living is a process of witnessing. As a writer, I’ve always had an insatiable need to understand the why of situations that might seem senseless. The first time I encountered the term was in the work of human-rights activist and poet Carolyn Forché, whose brave and beautiful collection The Country Between Us inspired me at a critical time.”

It interests me that poetry can be a kind of witnessing, just as journalism can be. Not all journalists are advocates, although advocacy journalism is a growing trend in Canada. Some of the poems I have chosen for this article advocate for a point of view.

With this as my premise I have hunted for one poem of witness by each of the poet-journalists featured here. As I write this during another Canadian summer where our forests and nearby communities are ravaged by wildfire it seems appropriate to start with a timely poem of witness about the fire storm that devastated Fort McMurray, Alberta in May 2016. In her powerful poetry collection, Knife on Snow, poet-journalist Alice Major describes residents’ struggle to escape:

From “A fate for fire”

Ninety thousand   now in flight
through the choked throat   and thick smoke
of that one road out,   walls of fire
on either hand.   Hell-mile, hellscape—
vehicles draining   through a downpour of flame,
raining embers,   the roaring lungs
of flames fifty feet high.   Fire-whirls of dust. …
… Meanwhile the monster   makes its weather.
Perilous updrafts   lift pyrocumulus—
that cloud-fist,   inferno’s club—     
into the air.   Arrows flicker
of dry lightning,   but no downpour follows,
no rain-relief.   Only the roil
of Thor’s thunder   thrashing the landscape
with a hazardous hail,   hot ember-seeds
that sprout new shoots.   Fire’s spawn spreads
ever further   into green forest.

And the long road   logjammed
with crawling trucks,   creeping cars.
Drivers gaze   at dropping gauges,
emptying tanks.    
                        How ironic!
Stranded for fuel   in forest terrain
that floats on petroleum.   This fragile thread—
the one route out,    the one-horsed
engine of economy—    all encircled
by boreal forest   designed to burn.

***

With a deft touch journalist Anita Lahey writes about how the climate crisis is altering our seasons. (She is also co-author of the collaborative graphic-novel-in-verse Fire Monster, co-created with artist Pauline Conley.)

Seasonal Affective Disorder

An altered season’s
having her way
with every shapely
cloud. She’s got all
this stuff to throw at us:
midnight furies, fervour
and floods, white-hot
rends in afternoon skies.
Summer’s never been
so cumulo-
nimbus-charmed.
She blows
through the window, simmering
bodies to a salt broth.
Wouldn’t we
fall over ourselves
to be like that, devastating,
once in our lives?

–from While Supplies Last (Véhicule Press, 2024)

I think many of us are struggling with ecological grief about the fires which regularly rage across Canada’s western forests. Another issue many Canadians are grappling with is homelessness. In our chapbook “Homeless City” poet friend Donna Langevin and I were inspired to write poetry about our encounters with unhoused people we regularly meet in Toronto and Cobourg, Ontario. Former Toronto Star journalist Joe Fiorito has written a whole poetry collection about people living on the streets of Toronto. Here is one poem from that collection:

My Pal Al by Joe Fiorito

To the market once a week
for a week of frozen mini-meals,
a coffee and the paper.

In a puddle of daylight
on white arborite he tore his Star
into long thin strips.

“Nobody reads the news
on my dime.” He was the news
when he came home:

new lock, no key; no microwave,
no plastic fork and spoon, no
coffee pot, no cot.

In a stairwell, blue-eyed, rough,
he said he was – until he was
not – well enough.

-30-

- from City Poems; Exile Editions, 2018

When we discussed which poem Joe would like to share he chose this one based on the death of Al Gosling, who died after being kicked out of public housing for refusing to sign some forms.

***

Marsha Barber, a poet/journalist/professor of journalism at Toronto Metropolitan University, was moved to describe an experience of witness in the following poem set in Israel:

Suicide Bomber —Marsha Barber

“Suicide Bomb Kills 3 in Bakery in Israel” – The New York Times

Somewhere a young man 
the same age as my son
wants to blow me up.

Oblivious,
I apply lipstick, blood red,
the day is filled with hope.

I leave for the market to buy bread:
thick crusted, warm from the oven.
When it happens, I’m thinking how good
a slice will taste after I spread fresh butter
and share it with you. 

I note the boy. He has dark curls just like
my son, which makes me smile.
In a second, the sunshine through the bakery window
becomes too bright, as bright as fire.

Yesterday the boy ate with gusto
the hummus and olives his mother served,
was tender in the way of sons,
teased his mother, told her she was the best cook
in all the world, and she blushed.

He held her tight
when he hugged her close
for the last time.

This morning he shaved carefully,
washed with rose water,
repeated prayers, rhythmic as rain,
the soothing notes
bracing him for the light-filled path ahead. 

In a second
we are on the floor
in pieces,
the bakery now a butcher’s shop. 

How strange that
his blood, muscle, sinew,
last breath,
mix with mine,
in a puddle on the tiles,
which means
he is now
part Jew.

***

Empathy for the suicide bomber, horror at the death and destruction and irony are handled so effectively in these brief lines.

In her unflinching poem, “Canada is so polite,” Halifax spoken word poet and journalist El Jones describes “Canada as so bland, just miles upon miles of stolen Indigenous land.” Her poem is a lengthy, unflinching list of all the ways Canada does not live up to its image as courteous and kind. This poem was shared on the League of Canadian Poets Spoken Word Saturday, May 25^th, 2024. I was unable to find a transcript, so please follow the link to watch and hear El perform “Canada is so polite.”

El Jones is a spoken word poet, an educator, journalist, and a community activist living in African Nova Scotia. She was the fifth Poet Laureate of Halifax. She is a co-founder of the Black Power Hour, a live radio show with incarcerated people on CKDU that creates space for people inside to share their creative work and discuss contemporary social and political issues, and along with this work, she supports women in Nova Institution in writing and sharing their voices. Her book of spoken word poetry, Live from the Afrikan Resistance! was published by Roseway Press in 2014.

Another spoken word poet who performs poetry of witness is Mohammed Moussa. He is a Palestinian freelance journalist, host of Gaza Guy Podcast, and founder of the Gaza Poets Society. His debut poetry collection, Flamingo, was recently published in English. He grew up in Gaza and attended Alazhar University before beginning his career as a reporter for various international news outlets. He is based in Istanbul, Turkey. Here is the Spotify link to his poem, “The Wind doesn’t look like me” which evokes the constant change and instability of life in exile.

***

 

In her poetry of witness about her mother’s life in residential school poet-journalist Rosanna Deerchild got to know her mother in new ways. That collection of poems became calling down the sky.

 

In Prairie Fire Magazine (2016) Deerchild shared some of those poems from calling down the sky:

 

“It is a poetically and narratively powerful collection in which Deerchild bears witness to her mother’s experience in residential school, the long-term impacts of that trauma, and both women’s resiliency. From the opening pages of the collection, she encounters the difficulties of telling a story long kept silent, of witnessing the story as it is told, and of living the consequences of that story. In addition to telling the residential school story, the work of the collection strengthens the connection between mother and daughter.

The first poem, “mama’s testimony: truth and reconciliation,” opens with the following lines: “people ask me all the time/ about residential schools/ as if it’s their business or something” (5). Deerchild makes an important political and cultural statement by highlighting the implicit violence we do in insisting that Indigenous people put their pain on display for the sake of white settler education.

In calling down the sky, she encounters the trauma, and she simultaneously resists voyeurism, in part by drawing attention to the difficulty of speaking and of hearing.

In that first poem, Deerchild’s mother goes on to say why this request that she speak now, after so many years, is so presumptuous and so intrusive. From the speaker’s childhood, community denial has accumulated on official denial:

don’t make up stories
that’s what they told us kids
when we went back home
told them what was going on
in those schools (7)

Furthermore, empty apologies pile words onto an already “unnameable” experience (9):

there is no word for what they did
in our language
to speak it is to become torn
from the choking (9)”

(https://www.prairiefire.ca/calling-down-the-sky/)

 

***

Writing poetry of witness does not mean poets who choose to write it presume to speak for others. Rosanna Deerchild collaborated with her mother on the story of her Residential School experience.

Sam Cheuk, Vancouver-based poet and Hong Kong Yan (Hong Konger), wrote brilliantly about the 2019 Hong Kong pro-democracy protests in his collection, Postscripts from a City Burning. I was glad to have Sam Cheuk as my sensitivity reader for the Hong Kong poems of witness in my new poetry collection, The Meaning of Leaving. Although he is not a journalist, Sam helped shape my poetry about Hong Kong both directly, and indirectly through example.

After teaching in Hong Kong for twenty years myself I can relate to Sam’s remorse about leaving his former students behind. “I used to be a teacher,” he tells us (55), “What am I to say / when a student responds, / after confessing  I am / too chicken shit to stay / ‘We’ll fight for all of us’?”

In the next stanza of the poem Sam Cheuk shows us the bravery of young protesters facing possible reprisals in prison: “They announce their names, / yelling ‘I will not kill myself’ / while being dragged away.”

Cheuk’s guilt and grief come through strongly in the final stanza of that poem: “The student is still / messaging me via / an encrypted app, assuring / he’s safe for my sake.”

Here is my poem about witnessing student protests among other responses to the crackdown on freedoms by the Hong Kong government, especially in 2019:

 

Migration                                                                            

 I hope to exchange my life for the wishes
of two million—we can never forget our beliefs, must keep persisting….
--“Lo”, 21 year-old Hong Kong pro-democracy protester

The moths are most active at night.
Their black-clad bodies
swarm the streets,
like a miracle hatching
defying extinction.

A black moth trembles
on a window ledge,
framed by a police spotlight.
“Never give up!”
she shouts, falls backwards,
merging with dark sky.
Well-wishers leave pots
of night-blooming jasmine
on pavement
where she fell.

One month ago, another black moth
wings torn by the teeth of the wind
probed a vein, painted
her last composition
on the wall in blood. At 21
she must have felt old,
her lungs singed
by tear gas and pepper spray.
Careful to slip past the webbing
of the stairwell net,
she jumped.

A few students come
for my nine o’clock class.
Shuffling in their black hoodies,
barely whispering “Here”
when I call their names.
I let the absent ones
hand in their essays late.
They might graduate.

The state forbids them
to choose their leaders,
so they seem to be leaderless.
On the streets of Mong Kok
they remind each other,
“Be like water,”
as Bruce Lee said.

Moths do not need the sun,
their wings vibrating
to heat their muscles.
Many moths, their lives
so short, do not eat.

What do they live on?
In my dream, the Prometheus
silk moth eats fire.
It burns from within,
lands on fire
to burn the old city down.

***

In her Quill and Quire interview Emily Pohl Weary refers to Carolyn Forché’s anthology, Against Forgetting: Twentieth-Century Poetry of Witness, which contains writing by poets who had experienced ‘conditions of social and historical extremity.’ She sees writing as a political act. Forché goes so far as to assert that the poem itself is a form of witnessing, and ‘might be our only evidence that an event has occurred: it exists for us as the sole trace of an occurrence.’

 

I agree that our witnessing through poetry is a record of an event and of the feelings it inspires. Witnessing is often a political act, whether through poetry or some other medium. For a large part of her career, Forché, who is now seventy-three, has been described as a political poet. She says she prefers the term ‘poetry of witness.’ Her poems ask again and again, What can we do with what we see and live through? In a New Yorker magazine piece about her, Forché’s writing is described as “a kind of dialectic, one in which the truth of experience burns as brightly as the author’s intuition and imagination.”

As you read this you might have been asking, why poetry of witness and not creative non-fiction or memoir? Traditional journalism has eschewed emotion. Margaret Atwood once said, “Poetry is condensed emotion.” There is a kind of answer.

 

 

 

 

In 2023 Kate Rogers won first place in the subTerrain magazine Lush Triumphant Contest for her five-poem suite, “My Mother’s House.” Her poetry also recently appeared in Where Else? An International Hong Kong Poetry Anthology. Kate’s poems have been published in such notable journals as World Literature Today; Cha: An Asian Literary Journal and The Windsor Review. She has work forthcoming in Writers Resist. Homeless City, a chapbook co-authored with Donna Langevin, launched in the first week of January 2024. The Meaning of Leaving is Kate’s most recent poetry collection. She is Director of Art Bar, Toronto’s oldest poetry reading series. More at: katerogers.ca/