It is through writing that times and spaces are made, ones that stand tall in the face of this world's incessant catastrophes. In this issue's Creative Encounters section, “The Radiator” by Ngoi Hui Chien tenderly questions both difference around us and us as difference, and how subjectivities that are arguably concerned with the homely can also be entry points to strangerhood in new settings. In the following collaborative work, Hanno Brankamp and Kodi Arnu Ngutulu view poetry from the optics of knowledge production whereby writing transcends writing-as-an- expression-of-suffering, instead offering the reader varied poetic voices from Kakuma refugee camp in Kenya, including Joh Magok Kuerang (“Unrelenting Pursuit”), Chol Reech (“Planted Thorns”), Atem D. Alaak (“Away from Home”), Mary Aluel (“Empty Pockets”), and Mamer Amou (“Escaping My Identity”). Articulating a diversity of human conditions, spanning containment, fleeing, belonging, and strandedness, the poems’ intricate imaginings not only express such conditions but also reinscribe them as individual journeys that are worthy of narration.
These are different times. What is particularly different is the extent to which the world, in its official capacity, has decided to remain silent and/or turn the other way as tens of thousands of Palestinians in Gaza are being maimed, buried alive, and/or starved to death. Disturbingly, we live in a world of hierarchies where human worth varies according to the victim's religion, ethnicity, and language. To extend the spirit of the Editorial for the entire issue (Fiddian-Qasmiyeh et al., this issue), I would posit that now is the time (yes, a different time) when persistence on living is akin to resistance for life's sake. In poetry, as in other arts and media, beauty is seen as evanescent and as such, as urgently in need of being sustained through the simple and specific in life. When my mother used to bake us bread in the refugee camp, what we referred to as “homely bread” contra the shop-bought bread, she would always remind us that bread, be it fresh or slightly stale, should always be shared equally between us and other living creatures, so much so that birds and insects are always thought of in such equations. When our bread is too dry to be swallowed, it is never binned; instead, it is broken into smaller scraps to be left by the wall awaiting its future eater. In this case, a lost bird or a feeble insect. This is the ultimate sharing. Or sharing as beauty, recalling that in forced displacement, it is the memories of people and things that remain. What they make and create for their own sustenance and survival. What they celebratorily consume in order to assert their persistence (and insistence) on life and living.
Yousif M. Qasmiyeh