The Weekly Dispatch: The centennial of Muin Bseiso's birth | Yahya Ashour in The Key | A new translation of May Ziadeh

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This past weekend marked the centennial of the birthday of Mu’in Bseiso, the acclaimed Palestinian poet and playwright born in Gaza on October 10, 1926.

Bseiso’s personal and family history are a microcosm of Gaza’s modern political identity. Born in the Shujāʿiyya neighborhood in the eastern outskirts of Gaza City to a family that was active in the Palestinian national struggle, Bseiso’s family had been opposed to both Ottoman and British Mandatory rule. Bseiso himself became involved in the National Liberation League, a group of Palestinian communists, in the 1940s.

After the Nakba, Bseiso led protests against the expulsion of Palestinians. He was imprisoned by Egyptian authorities and, upon his release in 1963, lived and wrote in exile from Beirut, Damascus, and Cairo. He died in London in 1984, and was buried near Cairo, after Israeli authorities prevented his repatriation to Gaza.

A contemporary and collaborator of Mahmoud Darwish, Bseiso attained widespread popularity for his poetry and his plays, and is remembered as a poet of the Palestinian resistance. Bseiso’s singular focus, in the words of Darwish, was “to translate Gaza into all the languages of the world.”

Below you can read Bseiso’s poem, “A Poem to Barbed Wire,” from his collection Palestine in the Heart (فلسطين في القلب) published in 1963 and translated into English by Mohamed Wajdi Ben Hammed:

Read the poem, alongside other translations as well as Mohamed Wajdi Ben Hammed’s commentary, here.

The new issue of The Key features “The Violence of English,” the first-ever published essay in English by the Gazan poet Yahya Ashour. Somewhere between prose and poetry, this visceral, haunting essay captures the violence and sorrow not only of his exile but also of the struggle to articulate those myriad feelings in a language that is, in many ways, synonymous with the destruction of his homeland. You can read an excerpt of his essay below:

Growing up by the sea, I wrote the waves. Blue was the color of my pages. My words were water. Salty, hurting, hurt. They never put out any fires; they were fire. The sun was always recycling them. They were always becoming clouds. They belonged to whomever the clouds belonged to. I was still learning the taste of rain, but I never really caught any of it. I knew it was falling. Raindrops, not rain. Something like tears that never quite leave.

Home, Gaza, was the sea: the waves, the nets. Not bathing suits and umbrellas. Home was a child who has now become a teenager who left and never turned back.

I left, and I was forced to forget the way back so I could shut my eyes every night. Since then, I have longed to talk about words, not language. Words that I flip over, words that trip me over, not translation. I want to keep on walking with words and never go anywhere. Maybe if I keep going nowhere, I’ll remember the way home.

Mawwal – A poem by Mahmoud Darwish, which confronts immeasurable grief with unbending steadfastness: “The stabs of daggers I prefer, / to being ruled by the vile. / I lost the best part of sunrise, / but did not waste the nights.”

Stones Are the First Words We Speak – Nasser Abourahme writes, in this long essay, against the idea of anti-Zionism as “relational ethics” instead of “liberatory praxis.”

Covering Palestine – A new initiative that assembles a digital archive of American newspaper coverage of Palestine from 1799 to 2023. 

Palestinian Resistance Literature Under Occupation, 1948–1968 [Excerpt] – An excerpt from the newly-translated book by Ghassan Kanafani: “the poetry of resistance began from the ground of commitment and commitment to the land, and through practice and confrontation has come to reveal its depths.” 

Shooting and Craving: On NAZA and the Mediated Obscene – Abdaljawad Omar reviews the new Israeli film NAZA, which follows the predictable script of the regretful soldier, though its subjects express something darker: mourning the loss of power.

“Every Moment Is a Life”: susan abulhawa on the Authority to Narrate – Shiva Akhavan Rad interviews susan abulhawa about the anthology Every Moment Is A Life that she edited, a collection of testimonies and stories from writing workshops she organized in Gaza amid the genocide. 

Gaza and the Geopolitics of Affect – Nouri Gana reviews the film The Voice of Hind Rajab, reading its emotional and aesthetic experience within a broader geopolitical management of Palestinian life and pain.

The Possibility of Paradise in Eden at Dawn – Gaar Adams reviews Karim Kattan’s novel Eden at Dawn, which weaves Palestinian folklore, mythology, and queer desire into a powerful reimagining of love and liberation. 

The Israeli Elections Can’t Save Liberal Zionism – Mari Cohen argues that, when it comes to the upcoming elections in Israel, the question “is less whether an opposition victory on October 27th will transform Israel’s approach to the millions of Palestinians under its rule than whether it will slow the gathering tide of international pressure Israel faces.” 

Why Palestinians will Continue to Resist – Writing on the anniversary of October 7, Khaled El-Hissy describes the many emergent forms of resistance that have multiplied over the past three years.

Noura Erakat on Three Years of Genocide and the Board of Peace's "New World Order" – Sharif Abdel Kouddous interviews Noura Erakat on the Board of Peace, which she argues "matters less for whether it succeeds than for what it reveals: a political project, driven by market fundamentalists and a tech elite, to exit international law and popular democracy altogether."

War Diary: Notes from Lebanon – Jara Nassar shares excerpts from the diary she kept as a humanitarian aid volunteer during two weeks she spent under bombardment in Beirut in March and April: “Behind the tarmac there is only blinding white light, as if the rest of the world had ceased to exist, as if there was only me and Lebanon and all the people I love so much, this tiny, beautiful piece of earth, racing to the unknown.”

They Were Born Into War. Now They’re Turning Three. – Issam Adwan profiles some of the children – as well as their families – born in Gaza on October 7, 2023, marking both how much has changed and how much has remained the same. 

Marking Three Years of Genocide in Gaza: Hug Machine – Eman Basher remembers giving her teacher, Refaat Alareer, a children’s book called Hug Machine: “I think it’s time for me to accept that Dr. Refaat is gone, that he gave all the hugs he could. He hugged us all in his own way, and I guess he’s finally been given one in return. Maybe he knew he’d done enough. It’s time for me to admit that too, and let him rest.”

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