In 2006, a year after Palestinian civil society made the call for Boycott Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) as a strategy to respond to the formation of Israel as inherently eliminatory to Palestinian people, Patrick Wolfe wrote that settler colonialism should be understood as an indicator for genocide. He concluded that, since “settler colonialism persists over extended periods of time, structural genocide should be easier to interrupt.”

Wolfe conceived of this as theoretically optimistic. Its application would require, that imperial formations had an interest in interrupting destruction. In 1955, just seven years into the ongoing occupation of Palestine, Aimé Césaire wrote in Discourse on Colonialism that it was not an unintended consequence but rather the character of imperialism which is responsible “for the highest heap of corpses in history.”

One of the superpowers of oppressed people (how hard won) is an intimate understanding of structural rather than piecemeal oppression. rock flight is an articulation of that prescience. As a scholar of Arabic literature recently reflected: “Palestinian resistance in this moment of genocide has a centuries-old language with an ethnically, religiously, socially, and politically diverse vocabulary.”

The origin of Hasib Hourani’s debut, rock flight, pre-dates the now multi-year genocide of the Palestinian people in Gaza that began in October 2023. It is located as a response to the suffocating effects of empire and settler coloniality, which Hourani explicitly grounds in the BDS movement. This interest is economically articulated on a placard Hourani held at the Zionist Federation in Naarm during the 2021 Unity Intifada: “you choke palestine, we choke back.” In his own words, this “is both a book about protests, and one that acts as a protest”. Though published in a time more dreadful than Hourani might have contemplated as he drafted the work, the poem’s conceptual terrain is equipped to both address the structures enabling of genocide, and to demand that we — as part of a civil society more related to the authors of BDS than to a political elite — eschew the hollow rhetoric of that dissolute class: “the more time i spend with words the more i realise that they do not mean anything at all.”

Yet despite its overt politics, the poem is not propelled by the language of the rally or the protest. Rather, Hourani’s book is framed by a conversation with a woman most often described as a poet and artist, Etel Adnan (1925-2021). Adnan was still living when Hourani commenced work on his project, when he “saw the cattle egret in the dumpster,” or a year earlier when he “stood breathless watching the Great March of Return” from his phone.

Palestinian artist and art historian Kamal Boullata (1942-2019) once introduced an extract from Adnan’s The Arab Apocalypse on the occasion of the poem’s translation into English in 1989, comparing her work to Allan Ginsburg’s Howl. Boullata predicted that the effect of this long form poem would be — as Howl proved for its audience — a lightning rod, “as the poetic mirror of the sensibilities of a generation of Arab exiles.” Hourani opens rock flight with an extract from stanza XXXVIII:

the Palestinians are dumped in a space-craft heading for the moon
They sing their own requiem in the launched rocket

Of this sequence, Adnan recounted that while she had begun work two months before the outbreak of the Lebanese civil war in 1975, it was ultimately the war that wrote The Arab Apocalypse. Structured through fifty-nine verses, it corresponded in Adnan’s words to the “59 days of the Tal-el-Zaatar (a Palestinian camp in the outskirts of Beirut …) siege and destruction” in 1976. This massacre, committed by Phalangists collaborating with Israel, was one of several precursors to the infamous 1982 Sabra and Shatila massacre. The stanza selected by Hourani speaks both to a bleak abandonment of Palestinian people and to their agency, creating a frame in which rock flight is at home, negotiating this uneasy virtue and vital Palestinian cultural idiom, sumud.

Hourani ends rock flight with a line of acknowledgement to Adnan: “whose mountains ground me.” This economy points to the decades Adnan spent working with mountains, indeed a particular mountain, Mount Tamalpais in California. At one time she describes this work as an addiction, though such bon mots are less illuminating of either her own work or of her role in Hourani’s, than when she writes:

The Indian called the Mountain Tamal-Pa, “The One close to the Sea”. The Spaniard called it Mal-Pais, “Bad Country”! The difference between the native and the conqueror is readable in these two different perceptions of the same reality. Let us be the Indian and let be! What is close to the sea is close to the sea.

Since each line of Hourani’s work is exacting, I have no doubt that he wished to frame the book with Adnan’s influence as a kind of intellectual palindrome that enfolds the body of his poem. In choosing such a frame he makes a subtle comparative argument about the question of enclosures. While rock flight operates through metonymic and sometimes literal palimpsests of enclosure, Adnan stands in important contrast as a framework that is generative to Hourani’s vision. And in allowing Adnan this honour, Hourani honours also a legacy of Arab cultural production.

This expansive legacy is indicated in the poem’s prologue, which locates the author in a playful taxonomic and geographic exercise, situating him beyond nation states. In this way, when we learn that “houran” is a designation of place depicting “syria’s south to jordan’s north directly east of palestine,” we are offered an illustration of the largess of Levantine autochthony which exceeds the “frail and hand drawn” borders of colonial and imperial interests in the region. rock flight’s dialogue with Adnan reflects the way in which Adnan was herself a product of Levantine plurality, which the ethnonyms applied to her typically fail to capture. Adnan, then, is located by Hourani as a metonym: her person stands in for a Levantine intersectionality impoverished by colonial imperatives that degrade the region to fit its own logic. Or, as Hourani remarks in his afterword, “once palestine is free, we will fold our flags and place them back in the cupboard.”

Thus, from its opening, rock flight engages two distinct modes: an acutely drawn colonial reality — “the reason I am elsewhere”— and the power of the anti-colonial imagination to resist. Resistance is propulsive, pursued through a series of trajectories across lines of confinement. In one sequence, it is expressed through the metaphor of the cattle egret inked onto the right leg of the protagonist who promises “when I move you move.” Later we meet the pfeilstorch whose lines of flight advance nineteenth-century knowledge of migration and whose unlikely survival finds resonance (and builds a metaphor) with Palestinian resilience.

Hourani observes that the significance of the pfeilstorch is first appreciated in 1822. This is eight years after Napoleon was forced to abdicate (he will a second time the following year) and twenty-three years after his failed siege of Acre. But this is a failure that matters:

because empires threatened in 1799 joined
            empires and created their mannequin
                        state to break the body …

It is these machinations of empire, seen through the lens Hourani applies to history, that conceive of “the jewish ethnostate”… “one hundred years before Zionism.” What is a rock to the “entity”? Not much when the “entity” is a thing “being breathed alive/ by bigger empires.” This exposes the labyrinthine nature of Palestinian enclosure which Hourani earlier writes of at the human scale: “i can break through the plastic barrier of the thing i’m in but then I will just be trapped again, this time in something bigger.”

Hourani’s stylistic choices — the repetition of phrases, the building of lists, the instructional guides and the recurrent images he distils into sections of prose poetry or free verse — are mimetic of the constraints, literal and conceptual, with which the text is concerned. We are returned throughout the poem to a set of images in constantly modified forms, shifted and transposed so that one is made aware that the poet and not the empire, at least within the cardboard confines of a book, is in control. This is how rock flight accumulates a velocity to disrupt the replications of empire’s omnipotence.

In this way we experience the protagonist returning (home) twice. In the first version, he is uncomprehending as his family whizz through the landscape of a geography that is his inheritance and also alien, and he repeats “i don’t get it.” Much later and as an act now embedded in observations of particularity he will remember the Jericho Road and notice the boulders and reflect at last “yes i get it now because it is about the earth.” 

If Hourani’s arid history lesson illustrates why it is apt that Adnan’s Palestinians, shot to the moon, should sing their own requiem, it is the rocks — which in the recent history of Palestinian resistance evoke the imagery of intifada — that defy constraint. With rocks, Hourani leads us to the malleability of things — rubble, columns, even mountains:

one more rock
right on the top

            if it stays put: a mountain
if it topples over: a dismantling.

The rock is a slippery metaphor, a thing the colonised have access to — recalling the elasticity of uses to which colonised people the world over have made of the resources endemic to their country — and a thing also that can be used to weight, hamper and suffocate. Hourani fashions a story of Gibril, who in this telling is a messenger without flight and subjected to the mortal travails of human fallibility. Here he trips

on the taut string border into palestine and his bag of rocks spilled and now our country is a monument of stones, and a garden of stones, and a reminder of do not fall over.

What is the nature of home to a Palestinian? rock flight canvases many possibilities: places like Palestine and Naarm, and people, like parents and a sister, all create a sense of home to Hourani’s protagonist. And there is also the diasporic rendering of home that is obliged to transform anyplace one finds themselves. Hourani echoes Mahmoud Darwish’s beloved “Now, in exile,” when he lands on this last formula: “i make it/ so that every place i live is my home.” Home, like everything else in rock flight, is unstable. It, too, can entrap and obstruct such as the effect of a sealed bedroom window which transforms a haven into another suffocating imprisonment. Nevertheless, Hourani’s origami leaves us with an escape line, this time in the disquieting instruction for reversal: “everything is dough if you’re strong enough/ eat the window open.”

Throughout rock flight, Hourani negotiates the many structural impositions on Palestinian life that demonstrate how “the odds can’t be good.” This is expressed in the permutations of boxes, figured as all manner of nimbly conceived enclosures, and suffocation (figured as all manner of nimbly conceived enclosures), but also in the capacity of the poet to take the simplest of tools — the inherent abilities of a body — and conjure a strident agency for the oppressed. This latter imagery resonates with a lineage of Palestinian resistance fantasies, such as where the pit of the date becomes a powerful munition in the entry “How to make a sling.” Yet resistance only makes sense derived from its context (a thing often denied Palestinian people on the news), and Hourani illustrates the intensification of the “entity’s” restrictions through representing aspects of the brutal occupation Palestinian people have endured since 1948. For instance, he evokes intimate details of Israel’s “interrogation” of Palestinians, a series of practices that both appear as torture and which “leave less compelling physical evidence of abuse,” making prosecution more elusive. In another series of recurrences, Hourani recounts the pervasive encounters he has with technology, which is  implicated in the surveillance infrastructure of occupation, and to which the only suitable answer he alights on is “DELETE”. 

Colonialism brings with it myths of belonging and myths which it builds into a system of legal fictions. All of this is used to obtain “the earth”, or what Wolfe identifies as “settler colonialism’s specific, irreducible element.” At one point, Hourani tells us of the last of his bloodline who “belonged to palestine on paper.” Later, he asks how one might again become Palestinian on paper. But the question is quite unimportant, even if the answer, “our liberation”, matters. Hourani undermines even the tool of language, telling us, “the more time i spend with words/the more I realise that they just won’t do.”

Nothing obtains its nature in rock flight until it is used. By this means, unlikely items modified become weapons, much as the modification of a child-size chair is employed as a method of torture by the state of Israel. Hourani seems to delight in the infinity mirrors of definition such that in one instance the sub categorisation of a box is explained as something that stops you from moving, which he illustrates with reference to a slippery floor. rock flight urges its reader to turn the object of the poem into another kind of tool in which a poem is not just a poem but an action. And an action is part of an arc that will one day allow us to wake up and do as we please. Because that is what liberation means.

Image: a detail from the cover of rock flight
 

This review is part a series of critical essays supported by the Copyright Agency’s Cultural Fund.