Genocide shakes the language question at its core. Worn out by repeated abuse, words are reduced to an obsolete currency. Silence is as cheap as its counterpart. We’re assaulted by a barrage of repeated nonsense: the dominant discourse, the rhetoric of war and peace, words contending for signification and reduced, in most cases, to serve the plight of a ruthless capitalist world order. How, then, do writers reinstate value or life into a material that’s been fundamentally devalued, or cowardly surrendered in its own compliance? As we struggle to make sense of how we speak and write in the face of true horror—what can be said, thought, written, and heard—some of the most powerful poetry has emerged from Gaza. Powerful poetry has also emerged from the epicenter of empire. By powerful, we mean a kind of writing that rethinks the foundations of what it says through how it says it. Writing that knows its own artifice, and by knowing it, prevents us from being entirely crushed by the conditions it diagnoses. A language that reinvigorates “liberation” by refusing to be reduced to obsolescence and insisting that, against all evidence, it matters.

Last fall, The Palestine Festival of Literature and The Poetry Project invited six writers, editors, and book workers to talk about the connections between writing, action, and refusal. We are publishing three of those texts here in the newsletter, with the addition of a new response by Adam HajYahia to Abdeljawwad Omar. Authors have responded to our prompt through critique and refusal of bourgeois literary values, by lamenting the failure of words to cross over into deed, by scavenging, like mosquitos or raccoons into what’s left of surplus life. Their approaches align and diverge, creating a field in which ideas can move with and against one another, animating discourse through poetry and antagonism alike.