SOFT BOMBS
Poetry refuses and softly refutes the violence of dehumanising discourses: war, fundamentalist ideology, absolutist politics. That is its politics, and it happens to our hearts. It does not enmify; it takes life’s side; it knows no idiom of revenge. Poetry over the centuries has borne witness to what being feels like and what it may mean to live a finite life in an infinite universe, especially when the living is hard: as it is for the poets in this book, women and men and children carrying on under unrelenting siege in Gaza. Poetry restores dignity to death and sorrow and bitterness and abjection, to hope and survival and daily bread and to carrying on notwithstanding. It divines what is human, and therefore sacred, in moments particular to those who suffer (or are blessed by) them, and it invites us (readers) to know those moments as our own. Good poems implicate their readers; in a sense they turn the reader into their subject. This is the work of metaphor and speech music and form. The deeper speaking of poetry.
From often unbearable, chaotic, ecstatic or unimaginably awful eventualities, from suffering and privation, poetry fashions, in the voices of those who survive those moments, habitable forms, beautiful coherences, in which hope is possible again and violence falls well short of its aim. A poem is a soft bomb. A small incendiary device, a poem goes off and doesn’t stop; but its work, unlike the bombs raining on Gaza, is to give life, not to take it, to dismantle ignorance and unsettle apathy, to transfigure rage into something more useful, to practise and engender compassion, to implicate the reader in both the cause of the trouble (or delight) and in its consequence and in the possible futures the poem helps us imagine. A good poem, like these remarkable pieces, recruits the reader to help “write the ending” of this war.
Wars pursue and depend upon ideological abstractions (ideas about victory and homeland and enemy and patriotism and vengeance and so forth); they cheapen life in order to take it and to make that okay. Poetry should be all that war is not—innately human, relational, particular, contradictory, various and generative. As these poems are. A poem is not just a bullet; it is a mother and a father and a hearth and something unearned and unendurable to endure.
These poems are partisan for peace and for life and for mothers and fathers and children. For hope and home. Even if you forget the circumstances under which they are written, they are remarkable instances of poetry’s peace-making work, its soul-making, heart-breaking, mind-altering work: the way it has kept humanity (each of us and all of us) sane, made sense of senselessness, taught readers to find their own selves in the faces of the enemy (and the enemy’s victim), to love better for being implicated in both the violence and the resilience. These poems count their children, name their dead, remember the sky and the ramshackle city by the sea; they feed the cats, laugh at calamity, despair and keep going; they give in and cry out and find a way to wake again and refuse to fall silent. They throw soft bombs. They restart the revolution in the heart, which will in the end write the end of this genocidal war.
This is why, the beauty of what is achieved here, and the hope these poems yield, we are proud to publish Denise Howell’s loving collection of these poems from Gaza.
Editor’s Note: Gazan Voices
Here are Gazan voices defying attempts to carve up our shared humanity. Ranging from emerging to established writers, these contributors come together from diverse backgrounds reminding us how (extra)ordinary we can be in the most horrific of circumstances.
Translated by the writers themselves, their stories are both painfully familiar and unimaginably raw. Deprived of basic resources, a doctor offers hope instead of truth to a pregnant patient with severe anaemia. A scholar and father grapples with the habituation of grief, while a young woman yearns to “forget the stench of torn flesh.”
Many of these poems, diaries and testimonials were discovered online, where I collected them, as if precious. I didn’t understand their value then, only that I didn’t want them lost. How much attention we pay these works is how much we believe humanity is worth.
While many Palestinian writers fly across the vast space of social media, like fiery sparks, this book offers solid ground on which to land and spark anew. The heat is palpable. These writers allow us to feel their shame, pain, despair, rage and still, even still, hope and love.
Denise Howell
No contributor asked for payment. All gave their works freely. Please help them refuse the silence that otherwise would fall, as many wish it to, on Gaza and what transpires there. Support these poets and their work through their personal channels: @khaled_from_gaza @munira_elnajar @ezzideenshehab @___fateena @dr.hassan_al_qatrawey @ah___maad @belalsalamgaza @palestinian.shahd @jehadalfara @halakkhatib @asmaabukhatro1994
Each Night I Count my Children: Poems from Gaza
The first in 5 Islands Press new chapbook series.
Ed. Denise Howell
Available early November.
