It has been two years since October 7, which is but one link in a bloody chain of genocide and occupation spanning decades. Despite a nominal ceasefire, the death toll rises, and so too does fatigue and perceived powerlessness. At a time of growing apathy, when on-screen violence has become commonplace and eyes begin to turn shamefully away, only a select few mediums continue to resist desensitisation. Omar Sakr and Safdar Ahmed’s The Nightmare Sequence employs two of them.

The project is a multi-media excursion into apartheid violence. Through poetry and illustrations, Sakr and Ahmed render the genocide in Gaza in unapologetic and devastating brushstrokes. The collection daringly bridges the gap between the aesthetic and the ethical to pierce the veil of history’s ignorance.

Poets and visual artists work within traditions that can be tempted to glorify suffering. Indeed, in her poem “Fuck Your Lecture on Craft, My People Are Dying”, Palestinian-American poet Noor Hindi laments the desire of the artist to colour violence in romantic strokes:

I want to be like those poets who care about the moon.
Palestinians don’t see the moon from jail cells
and prisons.

Yet, Sakr’s poetic style is forthright and concise in the way that blood stains are — leaving some room for imagination but only after insisting that violence has been done here:

Arabs aren’t people, they say.
I delight in this for I have seen
What people do. I do not
Want to be among them.

The collection’s eponymous poem spans ten pages and is the literary equivalent of a throat screaming until it is hoarse. Pained refrains of “I keep telling you” echo in the settling dust from which Sakr writes, this unclean place of safety:

I keep telling you the genocide began
before I was born, and with each strike of these keys
another child is murdered, another head bursts,
another angel shrieks in the void of heaven …

Ahmed’s illustrations mimic the irony and symbolism of political cartoons, though caricaturing events as vile as these requires little hyperbole. Sakr and Ahmed’s project resists the temptation of which Hindi speaks. While poetry and illustration are often used to romanticise, The Nightmare Sequence clarifies.

Resistance poetry requires the artist to make a choice: take up the perspective of the oppressed, or of an onlooker to oppression. Sakr owns his Arabic heritage while accepting its geographical distance from Palestinian suffering. He is unafraid to explore the tensions in his positionality, acknowledging:

Some will mutter
This is not your genocide
To write poems about.

His response is to place himself firmly in the position of an ally, to avoid writing “from the position of the dead”. We see this clearly through poems like “Bluey in the Genocide”, which brings an oxymoronic clarity to the position of the privileged Australian. Nobody bats an eye when a familiar and fun-loving children’s show plays in the background of a genocide — until the name of a children’s show and the word genocide appear side-by-side on the page.

Sakr characterises himself as living amongst those of us who are asked to carry on with our lives while there are “somewhere / Out of frame, Arabs being put down”. Yet, The Nightmare Sequence refocuses the frame, attempting to shift the lens of popular consciousness. It insists upon the word “genocide” in the titles of almost every poem in the collection, unwavering in its vilification of this gory moment in history.

When Sakr characterises his poems as “a blunt fist … a tear-Shaped note to press into / A Molotov cocktail”, he enters into the evolving history of resistance poets like Mahmoud Darwish, Samih al-Qasim, Fadwa Tuqan and many others. While these original Palestinian poets led the resistance poetry movement from the ground, Sakr joins the continuum from the perspective of a witness. Yet, as Darwish writes in “I Have a Seat in the Abandoned Theater”:

No spectators at chasm’s door … and no
one is neutral here. And you must choose
your part in the end

Thus, through his poetry, Sakr turns passive spectatorship into active allyship — a feat racked with complexity. For instance, when he employs the collective pronoun to write that “History is an angel with seven faces / All of them turned away from us”, Sakr seems to characterise allies (perhaps his fellow Arabs specifically) and Palestinians as a collective. However, the word “us” cannot quite capture the paradox of unity in distance. In such instances, the English language reveals its lack, as it is often unequipped to make nuanced distinctions. Resistance poets writing in English are left with few ways to express solidarity beyond collective pronouns that linguistically risk to level the playing field of experience.

Yet, there is also something powerful about Sakr’s careful use of “us” that nods to Darwish’s sentiment that crisis leaves no spectators, and to the radical “with-ness” Palestinian poet George Abraham highlights in his introduction to the text. That is, the only method of being with tragedy that allows one to move beyond an act of mere witness and into the space of true allyship is a willingness to abandon the safety of a distant identity — to move from sitting across the room from violence and instead enter emotionally into its midst. Indeed, moral philosopher Martha Nussbaum writes that

In the activity of literary imagining, we are led to imagine and describe with greater precision, focusing our attention on each word, feeling each event more keenly.

Through literature, we can spend more careful time negotiating difficult ethical scenarios than we can in everyday life or by passively watching violence unfold on a screen. Sakr describes his own project in a similar way, writing that “Each line is my fist striking your chest… hoping / To hear a single beat”.

Ahmed’s bold illustrations strike the heart all the same. One drawing, based on an actual social media trend, exposes Israeli soldiers’ glee as they dress up in lingerie on the fields of Palestinian suffering. As the reader negotiates the greyscale devastation evoked by the artist’s pen, they enter into a proximity with tragedy that, in today’s age of desensitisation, perhaps not even photojournalism can achieve.

What distinguishes creative art from more journalistic mediums is its ability to more strongly evoke what Simone Weil described as the ethically salient “attention”. Attention, according to Weil, is the most generous and pure form of love humans can afford each other —when it is given wholeheartedly, she saw it as powerful as prayer. Sakr seems to anticipate this possibility through the question:

Say my feeling meets yours
And together they deepen,
Is that enough?

The uncertainty of the final line permeates the entire collection, Sakr’s narrators lamenting their poetic efforts as futile time and time again. “I snap the pen” he writes, “Give me a spade, God, give me a spear”. Yet, Sakr and Ahmed collectively contribute a form of cultural resistance that makes them key players on the Monopoly board of this political moment. As Ghassan Kanafani has said:

The cultural form of resistance is no less valuable than armed resistance itself.

Perhaps to insist that cultural resistance come only from Palestinians — a sentiment tiredly revisited in Abraham’s introduction — is to place on them an unwarranted epistemic burden and demand for emotional labour on a people who are already shouldering enough. Sakr and Ahmed’s project is a class act in solidarity: it shares the epistemic burden without demanding anything of Palestinians, raises funds for relief efforts and resists the neoliberal impulse to commodify suffering for the artists’ own validation. While clearly plagued by his perceived powerlessness, Sakr recognises that “Silence is the wrong shape for this”. In one of the final poems, he bemoans:

Poetry fails daily, laughs, and gets up again with
a cracked face.

Yet in the fissure of these words, Sakr leaves us with an act of creative resistance that will bring eyes and ears to the cause… again and again and again, until the day we see a free Palestine.

Image: a detail from the cover of the book
 

Part of a series of critical essays supported by the Copyright Agency’s Cultural Fund.