Rifqa

by Mohammed El-Kurd

Overview

Each day after school, Mohammed El-Kurd’s grandmother welcomed him at the door of his home with a bouquet of jasmine. Her name was Rifqa—she was older than Israel itself and an icon of Palestinian resilience.

With razor-sharp wit and glistening moral clarity, El-Kurd lays bare the brutality of Israeli settler colonialism. His poems trace Rifqa’s exile from Haifa to his family’s current dispossession in Sheikh Jarrah, Jerusalem, exposing the cyclical and relentless horror of the Nakba.

El-Kurd’s debut collection definitively shows that the Palestinian struggle is a revolution, until victory.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781642595864
Publisher:	Haymarket Books
Publication date:	10/12/2021
Pages:	100
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 8.70(h) x 0.40(d)

About the Author

Mohammed El-Kurd is a writer, poet, journalist, and organizer from Jerusalem, occupied Palestine. He is the Nation’s first-ever Palestine Correspondent and editor-at-large at Mondoweiss, the recipient of numerous honors and awards, and the author of the highly-acclaimed poetry collection Rifqa, which has been translated into several languages.

Table of Contents

Foreword: Love Is Older Than "Israel" Aja Monet ix

1

In Jerusalem 2

Who Lives in Sheikh Jarrah? 3

Born on Nakba Day 4

This Is Why We Dance 6

Girls in the Refugee Camp 8

Bulldozers Undoing God 11

Smuggling Bethlehem 13

A Song of Home 15

Portrait of My Nose 16

Rifqa 17

2

Wednesday 26

1948/1998 27

Fifteen-Year-Old Girl Killed for Attempting to Kill a Soldier (with a Nail File), or Context 29

No Moses in Siege 31

Things I Cannot Say 32

Boy Sells Gum at Qalandiyah 34

Math 36

War Machines Dress Up as Drag Queens 37

Elderly Woman Falls Asleep on My Shoulder 38

Three Women 41

3

Laugh 46

Kroger 47

Autobiography 50

The Day Is Like Butter 51

Small Talk 53

Park Benches with Teeth 55

No Poetry in This 58

And They Leave and Never Leave 59

Amal Hayati 60

4

Anti-Biography 66

Why Do You Speak of the Nakba at the Party? 69

Martyrs 71

Crows 73

Lice 74

Where Am I From Jerusalem? 76

Bush 82

The Biggest Punch Line of All Time 84

Sheikh Jarrah Is Burning 87

Farewell, Palestine's Jasmine 89

Afterword: Lest There Be Unclarity 92

Acknowledgments 96

Gratitude 97

Editorial Reviews

Witnessing Mohammed El-Kurd cut down dragons with the mere shift in his gaze has been a gift to our generation. Reading him is a journey into our collective pit of pain, of unreasonable loss, of screams unheard and unabating, of anger that he tells us - even anger - is a luxury. Mohammed El Kurd’s debut book of poetry is a self-portrait of a Palestinian child who has grown up besieged by nuclear-backed settlers in his own home protected, still, by his beloved grandmama Rifqa’s indomitable belief that her family and her people would prevail. Rifqa is an admixture of the most intimate violence - wounds that are as difficult to reveal as they are to heal- together with song and dance that beseech the sun to sustain this life and these lands that ensure it. Rifqa El-Kurd lives in Mohammed and Mohammed breathes life into us - scented with fire and jasmine flowers - so that we may know her, and the victory she embodied, too.”
—Noura Erekat, author of Justice for Some: Law and the Question of Palestine

“Rooted in Palestine and ranging across the world, 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

“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.”
—Aja Monet, from the foreword

“Rifqa is an absolute marvel and El-Kurd is precisely the kind of poet—Palestinian or otherwise—we need right now: unafraid of the truth. The legacy of his grandmother, the eponymous Rifqa, flits across these poems and with it comes wisdom, hope and, most crucially of all, memory. ‘She left Haifa to go to Haifa/to go to Haifa,’ he writes of his grandmother. This is a collection of remembering, not just the past but the unfolding present, one that is constantly facing erasure; of his own place in this lineage, he writes, ‘What I write is an almost./I write an attempt.’ El-Kurd doesn’t flinch from the violence and death that comes with dispossession. But make no mistake. These are the poems of the defiantly, unapologetically, wholly alive.”
—Hala Alyan, author of The Arsonists' City

“Rifqa is the collision of strength and vulnerability. Earnest in its exploration of the grave realities in one corner of the globe, it is a banging on the doors of the world. It illustrates the wit which is necessary to weave together the tragic with the hopeful, and the painful with the joyful. RIFQA, is a testament to overcoming fear in expression. A book that will resonate with you. One which you hold and return to over and over again.”
—Mariam Barghouti

“Palestinians have long fought with poetry. Napoleon's army in Palestine was defeated by warrior poets. El-Kurd's words are part of this long and dazzling lineage. An elegy to our ancestors, maternal, whose resistance we hope to honor, each poem a rock hurled at the occupier and the oppressor. A beautiful and important book.”
—Randa Jarrar, Love Is An Ex-Country

“At its heart, Rifqa is a call to build a better elsewhere for Palestinians, in & beyond language: an ars poetica beyonded into unity intifada, where Palestinians are loved into present tense. Beyond a failed imagination of poetry that’s more “theatre over thunder,” beyond a poetics where elegy is merely a symptom of border, Mohammed El-Kurd weaves the ancestors and Land into every breath of these poems. “Every grandmother is a Jerusalem,” El-Kurd reminds us, in jasmine-scented memory, in liminal space and punchline, in auto- and anti-biography. Here is poetry the whole of us can turn and return to - even in grief, even in contradiction. Liberating itself from respectability & other colonialist gazes weaponized against Palestinians, here is poetry insistent on truths we’ve carried for generations. JERUSALEM IS OURS. El-Kurd writes this with its whole chest, knowing our lives - the whole & future of us—depend on it.”
—George Abraham, author of Birthright

From the Publisher