In her stunning, unpublished poem, “Other Gaza,” Palestinian American poet Suheir Hammad contemplates,

what is it that remains of us now
then what is recyclable in us

Written in the wake of the 2014 Gaza War, Hammad’s words ring with an awful, sickening resonance in the Israeli war on Palestine. They call us to consider how are we to persist? What will come afterwards? What can be salvaged of our collective humanity after a call for recognition meets abstention, indecision, whataboutism, and a point of infinite equivocation? Will the notion of an ‘us’ persist and if so, how will we possibly come to identify to it?

Hammad was writing in response to an earlier example of the Israeli government “mowing the lawn” — a brutal colonial counterinsurgency in retribution for the kidnapping and murder of three Israeli teenagers in the West Bank by Hamas-affiliated militants. Given the sheer scale of destruction wrought over the last forty weeks following Hamas’ deadly raid into Southern Israel, it may now be impossible to consider or imagine an “afterwards” in which to ask these questions.

The denial of this possibility is precisely the temporal state offered by the poem, a suspended moment in pursuit of an event that will bring about the sort of clarity that could allow a public collective to look to the future and feel as if they have begun anew. Hammad’s image of a recycled collective brings attention to the waning place of universal or absolute moral values in relation to the Israel-Palestinian conflict, to the very impossibility of defining an “us” that can be salvaged through degrees of relation to it.

Writing as I am at a distance from Gaza in unceded, stolen land in Bidjigal Country, I’m uncomfortably aware that my words  represent the luxury of what it means to witness crisis from afar through a literary object: to be able to imagine or wish for an afterwards while writing in an Australian nation-state that has wrongly defined itself as the “afterwards” of a settler-colonial invasion; to work and write on a poem as Gaza’s 2.3 million residents are displaced and shot at, all hospitals and universities destroyed, as families are forced to survive on the equivalent of 245 calories a day, while aid packages trampled and blocked at the border and aid companies themselves surveilled and bombed.

To consider an ‘us’ through these historical conditions is to work with and against the logics by which a state of legal and political exception is created within the discursive logics mediated by Hammad’s poem.  Indeed, Hammad’s poetry reflects the creation of this state of exception by dwelling in a suspended temporal mode straddling twinned, inextricable timelines symbolised in the enjambment of “now” and ”then”. The poem mirrors phrases across this spatial and temporal gulf: “what is it” and “what is”, “remains” and “recyclable”, “of us now” and “in us”. Hammad ends the poem with a series of images reflecting the digital hellscape that is “other Gaza” in which we remain as witnesses:

the people run into themselves for refuge
they catch up to their ghosts
between devastate and displace
what is destroyed again is everything
what is created is a hole
an other

The poem’s portrayal of a suspended state of existence is an answer of sorts to its central question, which could be paraphrased as, “what have we leave behind, what do we carry with us?” They are one and the same – what we leave and what we carry – internalised, unassimilable memory, leaving us unable to either remain or be unburdened, within the vacuum created by a state of exception.

In its response to the gaps and silences of state violence, Hammad’s work has a striking, prophetic resonance with current events. However, her literary oeuvre can be read in the state of suspension symbolised in “a hole” in “Other Gaza”, given her prolific production in the early 2000s and relatively scarce publications in the time since 2014. This break may suggest a turn in her understanding of the place of poetry in trauma, the personal and collective demands of acting in relation to a distant event, and a greater concern for the limits of the public eye.

Despite this, Hammad’s poetry has continued to be read publicly as the horrific events in Gaza unfold. While current events demand a sense of historical specificity, the resonance of Hammad’s poem calls for a return to the suspended times of “Other Gaza”, to the historical dynamics of the conflict and to the cycles of excessive retaliatory violence to which current events are inextricably tied. Hammad writes “Other Gaza” from beyond Gaza, in Brooklyn, after considerable time spent travelling the region in 2014 following the publication of her poetry collection, breaking poems (2008), and her performance of Soraya in the Annemarie Jacir film, The Salt of this Sea (2008), leading to her televised performances in the Palestinian Festival for Literature in 2009. The year Hammad performed, the Israeli police, acting on a court order, forcibly prevented the festival from taking place due to the Palestinian Authority’s involvement. The festival was forced to relocate to neutral territory — the French Cultural Institute and the British Council.

All this is to suggest that Hammad’s poem emerged in creative witness to the dehumanisation, persecution, and denialism that shaped the lead-up to the 2014 conflict. Hammad first articulated an answer to state violence in the poem for which she is most celebrated, “first writing since”:

you are either with life, or against it
affirm life.

The line destabilises the false binary of Former United States President Bush’s inflammatory claim, “Either you are with us or you are with the terrorists”, in order to establish a singular ethical claim: always, and forever, to reclaim our shared humanity. However, Hammad gives a different claim in the opening of her 2008 poetry collection, breaking poems, in which she consciously reflects on working within new and inherited languages, “the body of words and spaces I found to re-construct my home.” If Hammad’s earliest poems have a peculiar ring of yesteryear when read today, as if naively committed to the binding unity of universal or singular ethical relations to others, breaking poems signifies a coming to terms with the limits of the universal, a breaking point that would be met and surpassed in each new violent cycle of the conflict, culminating in “Other Gaza”.

Hammad’s poetic turn in breaking poems mirrors the realisation of a state of exception from oppositional political ideology, culminating in the erasure of children’s rights altogether — whether in terms of withdrawn aid or food or targeted violence justified by the potential of the child becoming a ‘future terrorist’

The changes in Hammad’s poetic writing reflect a much wider sea change in how universal and essential concepts of ethics are understood and acted on in public discourse. One remembers that in Australia at least the idea of a ceasefire was by no means a centrally held position, at times demonised as a symptom of radical activism. The same sea-change has brought about a parallel shift in the interpretation of the works of Emmanuel Lévinas, the French philosopher of Lithuanian Jewish ancestry best known for his work within philosophy, existentialism, and phenomenology, as well as for his commitment to Zionism through public interviews in the 1980s. For Lévinas, the ethical moment of the encounter forces the subject to consider the absolute alterity of the other, as “the fellow human being’s existential adventures matters to the ‘I’ more than its own, posing from the start the I as responsible for the being of the other” (Entre Nous). For Mari Ruti, Lévinas prioritises ethics before ontology, “an unconditional and asyemmetrcial ethical accountability that makes me answerable to the other regardless of how the other behaves” (Distillations). The ultimate sign of Lévinasian accountability is known to be the human face, “a being beyond all attributes”, in that absolute alterity forces us to acknowledge the singularity of the human face beyond any process of categorisation or reduction. One can understand Hammad’s post-9/11 subversion of political rhetoric as activating this premise in emphasizing the absolute alterity of the Other, “you are either with life or against life / affirm life.”

Lévinas’ ethical claims have been questioned with the demands of witnessing the Israeli Palestine conflict, as scholars situate his universal claims within particular sociopolitical contexts (as Lévinas himself has been located in the specificity of his own religious vision). In a remarkable interview with Shloma Malka in 1982, Lévinas was asked to reconcile his philosophy with Zionism given that the Other is “above all the Palestinian”, to which he replied:

The other is the neighbor, who is not necessarily kin, but who can be. And in that sense, if you’re for the other, you’re for the neighbor. But if your neighbor attacks another neighbor or treats him unjustly, what can you do? Then alterity takes on another character, in alterity we can find an enemy, or at least we are faced with the problem of knowing who is right and who is wrong, who is just and who is unjust. There are people who are wrong. (“Ethics and Politics”)

Lévinas’ admission of distinctions in alterity has received sharp critique, most notably by Judith Butler in Parting Ways, where they describe Lévinas depicting the Palestinian as “faceless” and not the Other. While Butler’s work may have overlooked Levinas’ attentiveness to a changing definition of Zionism and a phenomenology over politics, it is clear that the philosopher broadly praised the State of Israel, even as his model of ethics necessitated a critique of its political ideology given his opposition to all forms of political ideology in general. This leaves a contradiction that has been taken up by a number of philosophers and historians, whereby, according to Lévinas’ own work, the State of Israel must only ever serve as a means by which to offer universal and altruistic justice beyond the state to those alienated by its existence.

Lévinas’ concept of alterity has subsequently been located in the historical specificity of the Israel-Palestinian conflict. As John Drabinski writes in Levinas and the Postcolonial: Race, Nation, Other:

Levinas’s own work … is always already entangled in the prejudices of historical experience – something he seems to take seriously only when it comes to the role of Judaism in thinking about otherness.

Following Drabinski, Mari Ruti adapts Lévinas’ statement to make sense of the manipulation of moral claims towards the Other within the context of state violence, repeating the idea that “there may even be times when it is necessary not to respect the difference of those who refuse to respect difference”, but recognising that this very idea is often used “as an excuse for questionable state violence” and as “a facade for Western imperialism.” Read collectively, these scholars express the gap between the universalist humanism of a “first writing since” and the delinking required to think through the ‘recyclable’ traumas of “Other Gaza.” In this specific sense, Hammad’s poems suggest the importance of uncoupling an earlier universalist ethics from a specifically European project towards the historical specificity and connective structures that determine “a hole / an other.”

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To read Hammad today is to return to a suspended state of existence within and beyond a state of exception.. Hammad’s poetic claims upon the public manipulation of our relation to the Other is definitively shaped by these dynamics. In a public performance at PalFest in 2009, Hammad praises the value of popular circulation in the hope that circulation would become synonymous with recognition. Before delivering her poem “Gaza Suite”, she states: “I worked really hard on these poems … because I wanted them to go anywhere”, before continuing:

a great miracle happened here
a festival of lights
a casting of lead upon children
an army feasting on epiphany

i know nothing under the sun, over the wall no one mentions

some must die wrapped in floral petroleum blanket
no coverage

i have come to everyday armageddon

A ladder left unattended

Six candles burn down a house

A horse tied to smoke
Some must die to send a signal.

As with “break (clustered)” and “break (is this)” — which were written in response to the Israeli bombardment of Lebanon — Hammad yokes together innumerable images in a whirlwind staccato delivery reminiscent of a hip-hop break. The specific references to the events of the Gaza War (the bombing of a Kindergarten classroom in Sderot), linger as traces of insensible events “some must die wrapped in floral petroleum blanket … a horse tied to smoke.” The reference to Israeli military operations, “a casting of lead upon children/an army feasting on epiphany” double the ambiguity over reported truth, and therefore, the construction of the face in public discourse. What we can know of our neighbour, of the universal, of the Other is shaped and undermined, as “i know nothing under the sun, over the wall no one mentions”. The sending of the message is still, however, enshrined within the poem, an ethical terrain in which universal claims may still yet to be acted on, in which the recognition of alterity may yet be possible, contingent upon the fact of a message being received.

However, Hammad’s post-2014 “Other Gaza” presents a different ethical landscape — one marked by the times of “wall and wait” presented in the lines on “women’s faces”, the transformations of “skin flamed to ash” and “dust was people.” We glimpse a poet confronted by “raising horizon in coffins” for someone who had become famous for rejecting the codification of bodies in service of national mythologies, and, she writes, “there is no recovery.”

Confronted by this tragic irony, I sought to find another more recently published poem to trace the ethical gap presented by “Other Gaza”, another lens by which to think through the traumatic events unfolding in Palestine. In December 2014, Hammad publishes “Three Sequins” with Wasafiri in what is to my knowledge her last public piece of writing. “Three Sequins” uses a complex, staccato rhythm that is reminiscent of a hip-hop break, a technique that is indicative of her poetic style:

a body startled open
disavowed split vowel moon
grit meat craving clay her name

Hammad represents the body as a receptacle of a unity that cannot be claimed or spoken. It is, in fact, the space in which the poem can be heard, rather than spoken or performed to a crowd, in the style of Hammad’s early spoken word work.

Hammad writes in a note at the bottom of the poem,

the new work aims to be read aloud to oneself. the sounds of the words in the body. each sequin can be read top to bottom & also from the bottom line to the top.

The body is, for Hammad, the space in which what remains in us lingers and haunts, even in the rhythmic continuity allowed for in rhyme and assonance, the studding of sequins together: “startled open disavowed split vowel.” A single line forces disparate particles together in this shared, embodied space of sonic connection and distanced likeness, as in the half rhyme of “a shadow a swallow coal” or in the half rhymes of “open/disavowed” and “vowel.” Three dashes distinguish the three parts and sequins (sequences) of the poem: two make out separate eight-line stanzas, one concentrated on a woman’s body and the other the juxtaposition of medicine and poison, and a final dash highlights an 8-4-8 stanza sequence focused upon a plea to be heard. It is in this final sequin/sequence that Hammad relinquishes the body to the structures that condition that which is visible or recognisable:

all this shell a bitch to kick
this cycle know war is come
pattern flatten cover up
bed laid web someone else’s
tragedy history made
a maze chronic survival
have absorbed beyond mane frame
holding shook all flame no spark

In the desire to “kick / this cycle”, and act out of ‘recyclability’ (if we were to read “Other Gaza” alongside “Three Sequins”), Hammad creates a new rhythm of progression beyond the limits of ethical moments of recognition. Her alternative vision comes in resistance to a series of three syllable sequences (“cover up”, “bed laid web”, “tragedy”, “history”, “made / a maze”), and towards an infective, insistent, unassimilable life force that almost appears to take on the properties of an unassimilable traumatic memory in a “chronic survival” — in the sense that it encompasses its own beginnings and origins, and thus acts outside of prescribed narratives of narration, attention and recognition, “all flame no spark”.

Hammad’s poetic turns from the ethical visions of “first writing since” provide us with a way of living and working through the demands of witnessing trauma. She refrains from prescribing universal or singular ethics, instead advocating for an embodied, self-driven perspective that mirrors its own conditions, specificities, and connections. The flame of her poetry scorches the states of exceptions that allow individual and state-sponsored violence to continue, unjustified, and unhistoricised. As we engage with her work, we are reminded that “chronic survival” is not merely an act of enduring but a profound declaration of existence: “all flame no spark.”

Image: Suheir Hammad in 2009 (PalFest)