Sumūd

blog — January 21

Excerpts from SUMŪD: A New Palestinian Reader

SUMŪD: A New Palestinian Reader is an anthology that celebrates the power of culture in Palestinian resistance, with selections of memoir, short stories, essays, book reviews, personal narrative, poetry, and art from the Markaz Review.

The Arabic word sumūd is often loosely translated as “steadfastness” or “standing fast.” It is, above all, a Palestinian cultural value of everyday perseverance in the face of Israeli occupation. Sumūd is both a personal and collective commitment; people determine their own lives, despite the environment of constant oppressions imposed upon them. 

In times of devastation, poetry, literature, and art are the mediums through which oppressed peoples reveal cherished aspects of their existences and remain defiant in the fight for self-determination. Sumūd: A New Palestinian Reader honors the Palestinian spirit and its power in the face of dispossession and war. When governments around the world enable the genocide of a people and the dilapidation of a sacred homeland, the Palestinian people stand fast and resist. The fifty-eight contributions in this collection remind readers that just as love perseveres, so do the Palestinians, and their struggles and triumphs.

This anthology spans the 20th and 21st centuries of Palestinian cultural history, and highlights writing from 2021–2024. The essays, stories, poetry, art and personal narrative collected in Sumūd: A New Palestinian Reader is a rich riposte to those who would denigrate Palestinians’ aspirations for a homeland. It also serves as a timely reminder of culture’s power and importance during occupation and war.

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PLEDGING ALLEGIANCE
NOOR HINDI

I am tired of language. I don’t want to make metaphors. About olive trees. About wearing a keffiyeh. About About About. The dream has not ended. My grandma is back in Jordan. She loves her passport. What does it mean to love? A country? A book? A people? To say “I absolutely and entirely renounce and abjure all allegiance and fidelity to any foreign prince, potentate, state, or sovereignty,” while thinking about Palestine. While holding the key to your father’s first home. While While While. The news keeps screaming. The headlines chew at our eyes. A bald eagle burdens its wings with suitcases, then drops them in another land.

*

The language isn’t enough.

Here—an image of homeland. The word colonization, a photo of a fruit so bloodied. I hold a beam of light to a wall, make shadows of Palestine I try to catch. Olive tree, Israeli soldier, a metaphor of Palestine as a woman.

In a workshop, a white classmate says some of us celebrate diversity. Someone wants to talk about hummus and falafel (pronounces them both wrong, then asks me for the labor of forgiveness).

I’m supposed to be feeding them whatever is the opposite of guilt.

I want to move beyond. Where?

There are bodies. And then there are fewer bodies. This is the formula.

Ask me about a two-state solution. About caring for a world that does not love you back. About holding a knife and tearing into a map. But oh—

There’s the cliché again. But the deaths. But the deaths. But the deaths. Have they, too, become a cliché? A transgender Palestinian teen is stabbed. Israa Ghrayeb is dead. Gazan families continue to face an electricity crisis.

And still—I didn’t even know any of this was happening. // Thank you for educating me. // Do you like living in America? // But what about those terrorists? // When you say Palestine, do you actually mean Pakistan? What comes after awareness? And then what? There’s a bird. No, it’s a drone. My tax dollars pay for the bombs that kill my people.

*

I’m locked out of my home. No, I can’t recognize my home. I grabbed the wrong keys. The house has been painted a different color. There is music inside but I don’t understand the words. There is smoke inside, but nothing is burning.

All I do is wait. I peer in from the windows. The house is inhabited by ghosts. They recognize my face but not my tongue. I try to find where it hurts.

*

The ghosts laugh. Their laughs end with a sharp pang of grief; it sounds like a fist, or a hand around my throat. I reach for them, begging to be let in. When I ring the bell, no one answers. I draw letters on the outside of the door.

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WE WILL NEVER LEAVE
HANEEN NAZZAL

 

Haneen Nazzal, We Will Never Leave, 2021. Digital illustration, 36 x 51 cm.

Courtesy of the artist.

We Will Never Leave was inspired by graffiti on the walls of Sheikh Jarrah, in occupied East Jerusalem. The poster was used in a cam- paign to save Palestinian homes that was launched by families in the area who were—and still are—facing ethnic cleansing by the Israeli authorities. Top right, the address on the poster reads: “13 Sheikh Jarrah Arab Palestinian neighborhood.”

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MY HOUSE
MAYA ABU AL-HAYYAT

TRANSLATED FROM THE ARABIC BY FADY JOUDAH

None of the many houses I lived in
concern me. After the third house
I lost interest, but lately my organs and body parts
have been complaining of unexplainable ailments.
My arms extend higher than a tree.
My acromegaly. And when I run
it’s at inconsistent speeds.
The important thing is to pass those walking
closest to me, leave them behind
before they leave me.
A Tunisian doctor
told my dad “It’s a psychiatric condition.”
I had liked her and considered her a house
before she spoke that sentence
which caused a lot of bruises
and brought down the house.
I read several texts I took for houses
and stayed in them a while: “Liquid Mirrors”
was a crazy abode in which I forgot
my first love. There were magazines, too:
Al-Karmal, Poets, and Aqwass,
then I studied engineering,
specialized in earthquakes
to build houses whose foundations
resist climates and the unpredicted.
My children dug up a trench for me
and said, “Here, rest a bit, Mom.”
But trenches leave marks on skin
as if on a field, and the birds
gathered and pecked my seeds
after the field had drowned in stagnant water.
In a text, I can build a house
with windows and balconies
that overlook galaxies and stars,
paint it with the writings of Amjad Nasser
who said that for the sake of a solid house
one should distinguish
between imagination and knowledge
even if the house is built on illusion.
I will raise my house on the backs of horses
that will carry it to the fields,
there my legs will pause.

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SHORELESS SEA #11
TAYSEER BARAKAT

Tayseer Barakat grew up by the sea, in Gaza. His series Shoreless Sea is a meditation on the large numbers of Arabs becoming refugees and crossing the perilous Mediterranean while the world watches on, indifferent to their tragedy. The artist acknowledges how the monotone tones of his paintings “reflect the hardships of our time and our present life. I think the pressure on us makes us use dark colors.”

Tayseer Barakat, Shoreless Sea #11, 2019. Acrylic on canvas, 50 x 70 cm. 
Courtesy Zawyeh Gallery.

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WATCHTOWERS
TAYSIR BATNIJI

Bernd and Hilla Becher’s photographs of Europe’s postindustrial water towers reminded Taysir Batniji of “the Israeli watchtowers that have invaded Palestinian territory.” Born in Gaza, Batniji was not allowed to enter the West Bank. So a delegated, uncredited photographer, at great danger to himself, took the images for the Watchtower series “in the manner” of the German photographers. Some of the images, blurred and in poor light, were impossible to aestheticize because of the military context. They symbolize for Batniji “a typography” of oppression. 

Taysir Batniji, Watchtowers, 2008, installation view. 
Series of twenty-six black-and-white photographs, inkjet prints on Fine Art Pearl paper, 50 x 40 cm (each). Courtesy of the artist and Sfeir-Semler Gallery (Hamburg/Beirut).