In 2013, a Palestinian fisherman recovered a bronze statue of the Greek god Apollo off the coast of Gaza. Soon afterward, the god disappeared, and the edifice became a fugitive in a besieged country.
Since then, I’ve been writing poems that imagine a time-traveling Apollo, escaping history, making his way to Palestine, and trying to comprehend what had become of the place and its people. When the genocide began, my concept of time collapsed. After nearly three years of relentless violence against Palestine’s people, ideas, and history, and the determination of so many cultural and arts institutions to enable this violence through silence, have changed my relationship to writing and to art.
These poems, both titled “Otherwise,” are from a work in progress that follows the fugitive god in a Palestine, in a world, being altered by a genocide whose victims are expected to curate their own demise. The poems trace artistic traditions that inform our understanding and sensibilities in the West, that account for our manners and our savagery. They are shaped by the loss of the writer I was before this time.
