Adi Magazine

It has been our privilege as the editorial team at Adi Magazine to curate this issue dedicated to Palestinian perspectives in affirmation of Palestinian life and in solidarity with the ongoing struggle for Palestinian freedom. 

We are grateful to everyone who shared their work with us in response to our call for submissions. This issue gathers more than thirty writers and artists across genres, styles, and mediums all speaking to and through the historic and ongoing Palestinian experience of Zionist colonial aggression, occupation, apartheid, and ethnic cleansing. May it serve as one of many sanctuaries for remembrance and resistance. 

Cento for Falasteen

from works by Hasheemah Afaneh, laila r. makled, Yousef Abu-Salah, Rashid Hussain (translated by Salma Harland), Bassam Jamil (translated by Nicole Mankinen), Rania Lardjane, Hani Albayarie, Summer Awad, Veera Sulaiman, Suzana Sallak, Nama’a Qudah, Michael Jabareen, Alia Yunis, Yara Ghabayen, Aiya Sakr, Edward Salem, Ahmad Mallah, Kat Abdallah, Liane Al Ghusain, Priscilla Wathington, Lisa Suhair Majaj, Farah Alhaddad, Mikhail de Parlaine, Bader Alzaharna, and Fady Joudah. 

The air around me is clogged with dust, my lungs 
feed on cement; my mouth, on rocks.

Black curls melt onto fracturing cheeks. People are 
running out on the streets and they are 
still bombing the buildings there. 

They called us:
          Human-animals 
          Collateral damage
          Casualties 
          Uncivilized
          Third world people
          Terrorists

~

God said (and already you can tell
I’m making this up),
If you lift a rock, I am there.

At first, some screams echoed from within 
the rubble, and then everything went

           silent. 

Mustafa said he couldn’t recognize his own 
brother; the faces he had looked at 
his whole life were wiped of all features. 

We love our Lebanese mountains and Palestinian hills so deeply
that they mistook us for stones. We were so identified
with the olive and cedar trees, they thought us 
inanimate. Unalive. A land 

without a people. Never

           allowed to return, I fumble
           to find holes for the past to not be

a bleeding visitor who asks why the ambulance never arrives. 


~

I write in English, feeling a rising tension between 
myself and the language. The words feel strange, empty, 

                                 unable. 

(Is this a disappearing game 
                      or stretching membrane?)

I’m against my child
becoming a hero at ten
against the tree flowering
           explosives
against the branches
           becoming gallows
against the flowerbeds
           becoming trenches
against it all
but

           which fire will keep me from what is mine?

Sage in the fall, grape leaves in the spring,
and rooted year-round in our family trees –pomegranate, fig,
apricot, almond, orange. Before planting each
of those trees, Sedo would kiss the seed,
imbuing it with a piece of his soul. 

Your names are the only language
that holds any meaning.


~

There’s no point in turning the page on the calendar. The ninety-year old as registered in the documents of the colonizer’s archive is still fifteen, and the one who is seventy-five years old in the colonizer’s documents was actually born today, yesterday, tomorrow. They were all born and are all being born here. 

The almost dead wakes up, dies, dreams and breaks 

                                 smiling.

You learn to sing in a secret language
for the prisoner’s ear only - 

We, those of us not from Gaza, never meet Gaza as she’s rebuilding herself. 
We, those of us not from Gaza, have yet to meet Gaza not under siege. 

~

I see how he holds a maimed toddler in his left arm while 
driving an ambulance with his right, how he 
sits on the sidewalk, head against the remaining 
wall of a store, gazing blankly toward the fiery sky.

When the empires come for you you learn to hide it all. 

Ash.
Spells. 
Funeral bells. 
Candles on our mantlepieces and in 
our hearts: Please, 

           do not leave us. Stay with us. 

Hell is reading their messages and not being 
able to do a thing.

~

It’s not as easy as it used to be
to be alone with the earth. 

Children don't play outside anymore. 
They play in hospitals and shelters, dark circles 
around their precious little eyes. God is 
Palestinian, and we have all killed him,
snuffed him out, missile by missile.

           But which fire 

           will keep me 

           from what is mine?

Hope was the last breath of the traveler,
hope was his land. That cramped room 

in Ummi’s house in Gaza was my cathedral. 
The symphony of creaking floorboards, downstairs
arguments, and wobbling window sills its choir. 

I tell them Ramallah is the most beautiful,  
and that beauty compels you to forget 
their ugliness and that of your own. We keep 

           waiting for justice, the light of recognition 

           that makes the world whole: we see you and love 

                                 you as you are. 

           I am 

spent yet full of readiness. The fire 
drinks from my eyes. The roots of my land

absorb me 

Adi Magazine’s Editorial Team

Cover art by Fadia Jawdat