Sabrin delivered this speech at a panel as part of the Mix Tape Poetry Festival at Palestine House London on the 10th October 2025, organised by Carcazan publishing.
The panel was titled The Power of Imagination: Palestinian Poetry as Resistance based on some of Sabirin’s previous talks. I posted the latest of those presentations here on substack too - View previous lecture
This time Sabrin presented a different and more personal reflection on the prompt.
I am posting more or less the whole transcription of her speech below with added links and references.
Sabrin:
So the title of today’s evening is The Power of Imagination: Palestinian Poetry as Resistance, and it’s a title that is actually coming from one of my open lectures about Palestine.
When I first gave this title to one of my presentations, my main idea was to give an overview of Palestinian literature and especially poetry and how it talks back to Israeli oppression and violence (and British oppression and violence). I spoke about all its various functions that I listed as witnessing history, connecting internationally, defying the oppressor, encouraging and enabling resistance, reclaiming indigeneity, affirming life. It was October 2023; the peak of this wave of genocide had just started, and I still believed in Literature.
Then we saw dismembered children hanging from walls, only half of their bodies left, no head, a little arm keeping it there as on the verge of a precipice, small legs, had no feet, but ended in ribbons of flesh like paper dolls. It was found out that the body was of a 12-year-old girl.
Sidra was her name.
And then we saw the defiance of a man, stripped, completely naked, and tied to a chair, but still looking in the eyes the soldier that just captured him.
Hamza is his name. (Link to image)
We saw people burning alive looking just like blackened silhouettes in our phone screens.
And I stopped believing in the idea of Literature, or at least how Literature is expected here in the imperial core, or what Palestinian-American Nissim Tbakhi calls the Craft with capital C. He writes:
“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 Craft which is taught in Western institutions, taken up and reproduced by Western publishers, literary institutions, and awards bodies, is a set of regulatory ideas which curtail forms of speech that might enact real danger to the constellation of economic and social values which are, as I write this, facilitating genocide in Palestine and elsewhere across the globe.”
- Nissim Tbakhi, Notes on Craft: Writing in the Hour of Genocide
Then one year into the genocide I was asked to deliver a similar presentation again because it’s easier for people to listen about poetry as resistance, than resistance to the genocide.
I went and did the speech and tried to be honest and talked about how Palestinian poetry is first for Palestinians, how we write to each other first and foremost, how we are all starting to realise that our words – the real one that we can only tell to each other – do not count that much in the “art industry” especially if they are still attached to our bodies. If our bodies are still alive.
But I was still nice, I still made a category for it to add to the ones I listed one year prior: I called it seeing each other. I also added a category called envisioning because then I still believed in language. I still believe that an honest, radical language could save us and our sense of meaning, it could bring us forward.
But sentences like “Hind Rajab, 6, found dead” written by the BBC (Link to article)
Or the Guardian: “Palestinian journalist hit in head by bullet during raid on terror suspect’s home” (from June 2023) (Link to article)
“accidentally, a stray bullet found its way into the van ahead, and that killed a three or four year old young lady” reported by Sky News ( Link to related article). Her name was Ruqaya Ahmad Odeh Jahalin.
All these sentences were written and pronounced on national and international media.
The rhetoric around the peace of a ceasefire we are given these last days, the declarations of recognition of a Palestinian state belong to the same language.
What do we do with a language that not only is complicit, but has made this genocide possible, a language that has been preparing this genocide for years and decades?
Omar El Akkad in his book One day everyone will have always been against this says:
“To watch the description of Palestinian suffering in much of mainstream Western media is to watch language employed for the exact opposite of language’s purpose – to watch the unmaking of meaning.”
- Omar El Akkad, One day everyone will have always been against this
In the past two years as a writer and as a Palestinian the loss of meaning has been constant and all-encompassing. Every day, every single day, there is at least one moment where language reminds me, reminds us, that we are not human enough, that the language that is acceptable by Western civilisation does not accept us.
In the past weeks, a moment from the Second Intifada keeps coming back to me again and again.
On the 30th of September was the 25th anniversary of the murder of Mohammad al-Durrah. He was killed by the Israeli military just a few days after the beginning of the second intifada. The images of that moment will stay with me and with many Palestinians forever. On Wednesday I was participating at a vigil and another Palestinian woman shared this memory: she was 15 when the second intifada started and she was one of the few Muslims in her class and the only Palestinian; She had to print images from Mohammad al-durrah murder on her t-shirt and went to school wearing it to show what was happening in Gaza because the news were not covering it, no one was talking about it. She became the physical embodiment of witnessing, her body the screen for the images of our death.
Poet Fady Joudah says that the killing of Mohammad al-Durrah is the moment when he realised that, using his words:
“a gruesome, more spectacular edition of genocide would befall the Palestinians”
- Fady Joudah, Exhibit G: Baby Moses & Khalas, or Notes on Palestinian Interiority
I was 11 when those images reached my family probably through one of the satellite channels that my father had installed. I was in Italy with my mum and brothers and my father was in Palestine. His whereabouts not always clear because internet was not omnipresent then and phone lines were often cut off by the occupation. I remember watching the video of the killing again and again and how I was not able to take my eyes from the eyes of Jamal al-Durrah, the father of Mohammad, who had tried in vain to cover with his body the body of his son. And I could not stop, I cannot stop even now to think about Jamal and see my father.
Of course the media followed the murder with the usual discreditation rulebook: it’s a fake video (the French journalist who started that lie was fined in 2013 – he paid €7,000 euros) (Link to BBC article), it was Palestinian gunmen, it was a mistake… and even if it wasn’t a mistake, who cares.
The emptiness left in Jamal’s eyes is the same emptiness I see now in all my Palestinian friends and family’s eyes.
We knew in that moment and we know now more than ever that our lives do not matter, not within Western conscience, not within Western language.
So why am I talking again to the prompt: the power of imagination: poetry as resistance?
Because there is still something that we can do with it, but not maybe in the way I thought the first time.
In the same article Fady writes:
“I am not visionary. I am not ahead of my time. I am a Palestinian in a world blind to its time.”
- Fady Joudah, Exhibit G: Baby Moses & Khalas, or Notes on Palestinian Interiority
This is a whole article about Palestinian interiority and the possibility for that interiority not to be completely swallowed by the empire not only through genocide but also the taming process of capitalism. In this article Fady says that Palestinian liberation can only happen in Arabic and I see what he means by that, but as a Palestinian in the diaspora immersed in the language that kills my people and eradicates our bodies daily, I also need to believe that we need to work at liberation from here. We need to resist the language that devours us into the genocide, that make us complicit in that genocide.
And when I say us, here, I don’t mean only Palestinians. I mean everyone. If you are using language, if you speak, if you listen to language, and even more if you write with it, without questioning at each step, then you are complicit.
We have a powerful responsibility here, we need to break the language that makes oppression possible. To do that it requires imagination.
In a recent speech Francesca Albanese talked about army expos and military festivals in Italy (but not only) and how these festivals are often opened to the public as family events where children can take pictures with tanks and are showed how to use them.
Today I read on Al Jazeera that the majority of children in Gaza cannot imagine a future without war.
Imaginations, our and those of our children, are being shaped constantly and in daylight and they are shaped towards violence, a future and a present where one can be a perpetuator or a victim of violence, and there is nothing else.
We have a powerful responsibility here, we need to work against this single imagination, single narrative that has been fed to us. To do that it requires poetry.
Poetry as a space where we break language, where we take it apart, where we force its cage bars wide open. And I am using poetry here not as the form, opposed to prose, but rather as a way of dealing with language applicable also to prose, and to any linguistic moment in general, even when we speak in our everyday, especially when we speak in our everyday.
Poetry needs to be a place of refusal. I’m thinking more and more about the idea of negative resistance. Negative as in saying no, as in refusal, refusal as resistance.
If we live in a world where we are of value only if we feed the machine, maybe we should stop feeding the machine. How can we do so in language? How can we stop speaking the language that feeds the system?
Omar El-akkad in the same book talks about how this act of refusal is well-known by the system which is very fast and effective in withholding money and stop funding from those who are not acting in line and yet is also very quick at condemning our own refusal of using our money, of boycotting, as strategic resistance. When we do we are childish at best, economic terrorist as worst. But, and I quote from the book,
“the idea that walking away is childish and unproductive is predicated on the inability of imagining anything but a walking away from, never a walking away towards.”
- Omar El Akkad, One day everyone will have always been against this
Poetry is our way of walking away towards.
We have a duty as writers, as people writing from the centre of empire, as people speaking the language of the empire, to splatter that language. To walk away from it and towards a language that does not harbour a genocide. It is possible that this means silence. It is possible that this means un-learning.
Back in June I was organising a poetry event and I asked an important poetry group in the area if they could please share the event with their members. This is the answer I received:
“I have visited and explored your website and can see how deeply committed you and your colleagues are to the Palestinian cause. I passionately believe that the centuries long art of true poetry should never go into harness with partisan politics which by its nature is committed to dehumanising people who see the world in a different way. Unlike politics, true poetry is not broad brush. It is probing, open-minded, delicate and full of surprise. It goes beneath surfaces. It questions. It opens doors. To my understanding, the word you use on your website, ‘genocide’, leaves too many questions unanswered because it seems chosen expressly to make sure they are not asked. I don’t feel I can promote your event without seeming to support one side at the expense of the other in this truly terrible war.”
This is what language does when it becomes complicit. This is Craft with capital C. It’s a language that makes sure to talk about the possibilities of language only when in control of which language possibilities are tolerated. It opens doors but only when it deems acceptable those who are knocking.
(The irony is that the person who wrote that email spent time and wrote poetry for the Holocaust Museum in the occupied land in Jerusalem.)
My only way to answer that email was to use that text to write a black-out poem. Refusal.
A refusal to use more words to protect my world, my words.
(“I have visited and explored your website and can see how deeply committed you and your colleagues are to the Palestinian cause. I passionately believe that the centuries long art of true poetry should never go into harness with partisan politics which by its nature is committed to dehumanising people who see the world in a different way. Unlike politics, true poetry is not broad brush. It is probing, open-minded, delicate and full of surprise. It goes beneath surfaces. It questions. It open doors. To my understanding, the word you use on your website, ‘genocide’, leaves too many questions unanswered because it seems chosen expressly to makes sure they are not asked. I don’t feel I can promote your event without seeming to support one side at the expense of the other in this truly terrible war.”)
I have visited and explored and can see you are Palestinian passionately, centuries-long poetry by its nature commited to people, delicate and full of open doors.
To my understanding, your genocide makes sure I don’t feel.
I know I am leaving this with very little concrete advice on how to splatter this genocidal language besides to simply start trying. At this moment language escapes me or maybe it’s me who is escaping language. Maybe I have started this refusal. I know it has something to do with unlearning the language of Literature and remembering our mother tongue which embraces our bodies in fullness rather than forcing our bodies into shields, screens, clogs in the machine for a hope of survival. I know it has something to do with love.
“Old Song”
by Nima Hasan
translated by Huda Fakhreddine“I love you” is enough.
A longer phrase requires sprawling walls, refugee camps,
and a girl with braids long as wheat fields,
a candy swirl the color of a rainbow cloud
between her fingers.A longer phrase requires a season
when sugarcane grows.
“I love you” is enough,
so write it then,
on a large piece of cloth,
to sustain the mosque-goers,
those servants of the Merciful,
and the peddlers of sweetened drinks.
“I love you” will become a litany
for the ruined street.
All will recite it,
the loose tobacco seller,
the flour thief,
and those who own
a loaf of bread
or an empty bullet
and a donkey with a broken cart.I will also provide you another list—
the names of those who were killed,
those who left the city without “I love you,”
those who breathed through stuffed holes,
longed for a trace of perfume
in a smuggled bottle.
See there, the checkpoints are opening their arms.
I love you—
say it again
like a rebel
or a soldier
who misread the map.Mothers are searching for henna,
for the Zawiya market,
for the t̩asht of dough in the darkness of tents.
I love you—
say it again.
Give an old song
a chance to explain itself.
A white strand of hair
will light your path.
A lantern,
a sprig of basil,
and a country
that walks alone
without losing its way
will then be yours.I love you—
Force the city to hear it out loud.
Doesn’t the tribal code grant men a minaret?
Then raise your voice to the greater one,
before sin falls and the last leaf drops.
Shadows betray their trees,
their heads bare,
their necks a guide for the hungry.
This fear—burn it.And squeeze the mothers’ breasts,
mix their milk with the fig’s.
Let the child grow wild and strong.
Let him collect his baby teeth
behind pursed lips
and swallow the tumbling words,
before he speaks them
in a fit of tears.
I love you—
until the child cries himself to sleep.Throw your instincts wide open.
Summon the notary
before he swears the oath,
and leave all your inheritance
to a man who waged a war
he had nothing to do with,
a man who called out across the land:
“I love you,”
and then set all the gardens ablaze.
and as always - Free Palestine.
Best wishes,
Sergio
