Warning: this article mentions colonial violence and death.
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Rifqa, An Ode To “Palestine’s Jasmine Tree”
Mohammed El-Kurd is a SCAD writing alum, award-winning author and staunch advocate for Palestinian justice. At eleven years old, he witnessed Israeli settlers occupy his home in Sheikh Jarrah, East Jerusalem. His neighbors were thrown from their houses to camps on the streets. This crisis was the first of several he wrote about through his essays and poetry.
El-Kurd’s lyric fascination began with a police-dissing poem, and his pen hasn’t stopped moving since. Though he’s been featured in The Nation, The Guardian and TIME magazine, the best way to learn the author is through his most recent, most notorious poetry collection, Rifqa.
Like jasmine grows through cracks of concrete, his grandmother was an indomitable spirit and a beloved presence in her community. Having lived through the horrors of colonial violence, Rifqa resisted until her last breath at age one-hundred-three.
El-Kurd keeps her spirit alive through his poetry collection of the same name. He writes, “and much like the trees, my grandmother died standing.”
This breakout book is a must-read for aspiring writers and activists — a collection transcending poetry, eulogy and a cry for justice. Aja Monet’s foreword illustrates the impact of this book best:
“May these poems challenge and awaken you. May they shake you into action. May they help you find the words for what you already know to be true … These words remind me that home is a series of shared memories, not brick and mortar. Home is where we go to remember and revisit who we’ve always been. Mohammed El-Kurd’s poetry is a home returned to us.”
Rifqa, The Beautiful and Enraged
Rifqa’s poetry is activism in motion, turning painful history into intimate art. It’s the shoulder to cry on and the call to action. It’s the caged bird singing because words are weapons for the silenced — the pen and the sword.
“This Is Why We Dance” is one of the first poems in the collection, and it shows that victims of colonization are left to choose between combating violence or recovering from it. El-Kurd’s father says that anger is a luxury they can’t afford. El-Kurd questions why anger — even anger — is a luxury.
And while the emotion may be associated with violence, the author’s anger is a protest against it. Some of his darkest works illustrate how conflict harms children. He cites displacement, necroviolence and the Mohammed Abu-Khdeir case.
“No Moses in Siege” is a haunting tribute to four boys playing soccer on a Gaza beach where Israeli forces shot and killed them. The poem is written from the boys’ perspective, and it lingers on its final line:
“What do you say to children for whom the Red Sea doesn’t part?”
Like any sweet grandmother, Rifqa refuges people in need. Memorial and love letter, its pages celebrate Palestinian lives. Its ink commands their respect. And though this book is small, meticulous readers will enjoy sifting through each element at play. In his free-form poetry, El-Kurd masters simile and metaphor, displaying radical craftsmanship in line structure and formatting. Each poem is a unique visual experience that captivates the readers’ attention — it doesn’t take a poet to understand a battle cry.
“These are poems that hurl themselves at the boundaries of what poems can do; lyrics that put a premium on anger, that reflect the serrated edges of living in the world today, that gift new and powerful phrases to the lexicon of liberation.”
—Ahdaf Soueif, author of Cairo: My City, Our Revolution
