I often engage with the speculative as a language for engaging with liberatory political frameworks—let our minds wander toward the what-if and undo the bounds of the colonial structures we have learned and existed under for so long. Zaina Alsous is a poet who exemplifies this potential—her poem “The Workers Love Palestine,” first published in Jewish Currents, is the first I turn to when the rotted present makes a future seem impossible. Its futuristic setting is bare. It opens with a simple call to action:

The week before the SUN announced hospice
my great-great-great-great-grandchild the harpist announced:

              WORKERS OF THE WORLD
                    JOIN THE STRIKE FOR GUARANTEED LIGHT

In the months since Israel began its genocidal bombardment of Gaza, at least three general strikes have been called. Withhold labor, withhold patronage, disrupt business to end genocide. The figures in Alsous’s poem are grand in all-caps: SUN, LAND, WORKERS, LIGHT. I find strength in the simplicity of the allegorical work of “The Workers Love Palestine”; in the future, there are children (“The children’s council listened in wreaths of yellow iris,  / patterned leaves designating each role”), there are workers, and the presence of each suggests a path toward light within collective power, a liberatory tool. The speculative language of this power only makes this more apparent—something familiar among the fantastic. Alsous imagines a future that the colonizer hopes to take from us—one in which there are Palestinians.

Of course, the occupier, too, engages in imagination. I remember this only in the most devastating of ways. I am struck by reports that doctors in Gaza were unable to identify some of the chemical burns on patients following Israeli strikes, that new damages had been invented. Every evil that befalls the body had to be an idea first.  Consider the missile that turns into machete projectile in order to shred a body after explosion—when imagining the body into something else, must it be in pieces?

I have seen “The Workers Love Palestine” circulated often since Israel’s genocidal escalation on Gaza, heard it read at solidarity events, felt its relevance each day as people refuse complicity in these genocidal systems. This attention brought me back to Alsous’s debut, A Theory of Birds, another excellent demonstration of speculative poetry that imagines radical futures. This collection, published in 2019 as part of the Etel Adnan Poetry Prize, begins with the transformation of a body. In “Bird Prelude,” she writes, “Inside the dodo bird is a forest, Inside the forest / a peach analog, Inside the peach analog a woman, Inside / the woman a lake of funerals” and so on, a matryoshka doll of images that fold into one another. We start with the dodo, an extinct bird whose story has been warped by myth. A species that died out after human settlement on the island of Mauritius, the dodo became a legend, existing only in narrative and illustrations of those who endangered it—that is, until, its remains were “rediscovered” and displayed in museums. Birds are, naturally, main characters in this collection—the canary, the ibis, others, move as allegory for the colonized, but the dodo is, perhaps crudely, the analog for Palestinians I am most interested in. Alsous lends the dodo a lineage outside of its legacy as a punchline, her speaker guiding us toward a liberatory potential within this myth, within this creature: “Inside the algorithm blued / dynamite to dissolve the colony’s Sun, twinkle twinkle.” Through transformation, the poem presents us with a powerful what-if.

Whose narratives transform fact? Is it fair to say Palestinians are drenched in narrative, in myth? Biblical, propagandistic, nationalistic; what is the Zionist assertion of “A land with no people for a people without a land,” if not the prophecy that befell the dodo? Alsous engages with Orientalist narrativizing on a broader scale in the poem “Arab Making.” The litany builds,

Who faced us East
Who syntaxed terror
Who armed Sirhan Sirhan
Who drowned water in the Place of Ravens
Who bombed  Syria
                           Yemen
                           Iraq
                           Lebanon
                           Libya
                           Kuwait
                           Sudan

Each “Who” makes the “Arab” through violence. There are, of course, legitimate resonances and affinities between the nations and occurrences cited in each line, but the thesis of the poem signals an act of becoming through imposition. The indentation before each subsequent country is so elegant, this hanging list-making both to utter the names of nations gutted by colonialism and to give each name its own resonant space. In the essay “Notes on Craft: Writing in the Hour of Genocide,” Fargo Tbakhi writes, “Craft is a machine built to produce and reproduce ethical failures; it is a counterrevolutionary machine.” Craft, here, referring to the formal construction of a work as it pertains to the rules and regulations of the literary industries. I am interested in the way that Alsous plays with the “craft” of statehood in her poems—“who syntaxed terror” in particular links these ideas of poetic construction (“Craft”) with the nation-state, and its employment of terror narratives—these narratives, in turn, “make” a people. Tbakhi continues, “Above all, Craft is the result of market forces; it is therefore the result of imperial forces, as the two are so inextricably bound up together as to be one and the same.” The work of naming that Alsous enacts throughout the collection is a representation of what Tbakhi refers to: the market force and imperial force joined together through “creative” exploitation writes a people into something else.

In “Violence,” Alsous locates the ramifications of this Craft on a more intimate scale. The speaker methodically walks the reader through instances of fascist violence: it begins, “We know the Nazis loved / America; Hitler yearned to paint a twin.” The line breaks in these opening lines artfully highlight a sense of “yearning,” with the break after “loved” giving Nazi desire a full phrase, and the elegant hang of the comma toward the next stanza leaving the verse lingering—it is romantic in its construction, this excellent irony to propel the poem forward. The poem continues with its models of violence: “In a segregated graveyard, no stone reads / private or public; the local jail is everywhere.” Alsous’s argument is clear, this interconnectedness of fascism domestic and abroad—but, to the Western imagination, is the source of this violence clear?  “Violence” ends on these lines:

In a high school history class, white children raised
their eyebrows when I raised my voice.

I don’t know what they thought I was capable of;
I wish I was more capable of it.

In “A Practical Appraisal of Palestinian Violence,” Steve Salaita considers the responses, sensationalization, and condemnations related to Palestinian resistance following the events of October 7th, 2023; he writes of the discursiveness of Israeli notions of “self-defense,” concluding that “Israel’s hostility as an occupying power is entirely routine. [. . . ] In short, there is no such thing as Israeli self-defense” before moving into a grounded consideration of violent resistance. The raised eyebrow of the children in “Violence” is  anticipatory. They look at their classmate with expectation of escalation from a “raised voice”; when faced with the events of history, what is the response, if not at bare minimum, a raised voice? Salaita continues:

The Palestinians, like all colonized people, have to measure a hunger for dignity against the agony of retribution.  They cannot sit passively and [. . .] accept an ethno-religious narrative in which they exist only to be vanquished.  What, then, is left for them to do?  They must fight.  The fight might be ugly in accordance to the situation [. . ..]  It might challenge observers’ perception of victimhood.

This tension between dignity and retribution is how I’ve read those closing lines of “Violence”; the speaker questions the narrativizing that’s been enacted, for with what we’ve learned, surely all parties understand the source of this strife? But, it is that breaking of “etiquette,” of hegemonic expectation that positions the speaker in such a way. That last line—“I wish I was more capable of it”—is so powerful in its longing, a beautiful foil to the yearning of the opening lines: “it,” undefined, but full of what-if. To long to become what you have been mythologized as anyway is to challenge, as Salaita notes, perceptions of victimhood, to transgress Western definitions of good/bad binary thinking. Like many a Palestinian raised in the US, I have had the word “terrorist” flung at me in exactly the setting of “Violence,” and I cannot help but let it come to mind when I read that closing interaction. For what else do you expect is implied in the raised eyebrow of a white child toward an Arab one? Of the word “terrorist,” Tbakhi writes, “In trying to prove that we are not terrorists, or prove that someone else is a terrorist, we reify that the weapon of terrorism ought to exist at all, and that the problem is simply giving it the right target.” This, again, is Craft; “Violence” functions as a refusal to capitulate to these implications.

Scientific categorization is yet another framing tool that Alsous uses alongside statecraft and myth-making. The section “bird naming” immediately combines these narrative tools, opening with the poem  “Classification is a Country.” It is a taxonomy beginning in mourning: “DOMAIN: 1492, la illah ila allah.” This poem joins “Arab-Making” in a systemic deconstruction of naming—of course the colonial era begins with mourning, and of course with naming there is loss. “bird survives the death of Nature” is the final poem in the next section  titled “after bird”. I love the way “Nature” is capitalized here, reminding me of the moves she makes in “The Workers Love Palestine,” this creation of a proper concept rather than just the denotative “nature.” Nature is a classification, too, a narrative frame in which the birds exist; as Alsous pushes on possibilities of nation and borders, she pushes on even the basic constructions of reality, this divide of nature and man. In the final verse, the reader is prepped for a new future.  It begins: “Before I leave, I have a demand: a poem against / extinction. It begins in bellies. It begins in / endings.” The last line, “Listen, next time, the flowers are naming themselves,” too, is anticipatory, a budding realization of what-if. The mourning of “Classification is a Country” and the imposition of “Arab-Making” is subverted. Instead, we meet a hopeful possibility.

I find it helpful to read the last section of Alsous’s collection alongside Sophia Azeb’s essay published in The Funambulist, “Who Will We Be When We Are Free? On Palestine and Futurity.”

As A Theory of Birds transitions into a hopeful notion of becoming, this passage from Azeb provides a particularly beautiful pairing:

What if we became Palestinians, together, in catastrophe? [. . .] What if it is also true that our Palestinianness continuously manifests itself in our suspended state of catastrophe? Might we understand ourselves as always in the process of becoming Palestinian?

“Now Let’s Brainstorm !” is the last poem of A Theory of Birds. It is an invitation, yes, but I love the playfulness of this poem, the disruption of grammar, especially the simple space between “Brainstorm” and the exclamation point and the sporadic way with which ideas populate on the page. It begins, “What to call ourselves / After the empires fall.” The last line reads almost like a stuck button on a keyboard: “returnreturnreturnreturnreturnreturnreturnreturn
                  ing?” This repetition, as if “return” will be not just a word in the after, but a guarantee in crafting our next language.

If we are a people forged in catastrophe, one that has not yet ended, then of course we have the capacity to continue becoming, to forge new selves. The transformations in A Theory of Birds play with these capacities—what if we are to take on the mythologies imposed on us? What if we are to become the birds, to give the ones that are gone a new life within narrative? And, of course, in “The Workers Love Palestine,” what if we become something that survives all of this? 

© 2024 by Summer Farah. All rights reserved.