The Light Through the Shards

<p>“To all those we are indebted to” brings together poetry, critical writing, image-making, drawing, and song in a multidisciplinary series that examines the politics of refusal in Palestine. Composed of four contributions assembled through paired collaboration, the contributors explore and develop novel ways of producing knowledge.</p> <p>This text is a conversation replete with broken edges and fragmentations, jagged in its attempt to grapple with insurmountable grief and loss. In it is a summoning of our legacies of struggle, as we search for guiding certainties such as that of the sun.
Embodied in this rehearsal is a sensorial envisioning of an orbit of return, entangled with refusal, memory, and grief, and ruptured by the inconceivable violence of annihilation of our people in Gaza.</p> <p>Alia Al-Sabi and Amany Khalifa take apart Palestinian ‘return’ through a conversation that unfolds across literary, temporal, and spacial registers. Amr Amer and Laura al-Tibi weave together song and critical analysis, unsettling colonial conceptions of Palestinians’ relation to their land economically and existentially. Basel Abbas and Ruanne Abou-Rahme offer a comprehensive hypothesis of the “negative,” unfolding across poetry, images, and illustration. Adam HajYahia and Haitham Haddad formulate an aesthetic theory of revolt, examined through text, images, and illustration. By focusing on the interplay between text and artistic form, “To all those we are indebted to” proposes new methods of thinking and creating, aesthetically and politically.</p> <p><strong>Alia Al-Sabi</strong> is a writer and researcher based in Brooklyn, New York. She is currently a PhD Candidate in the Performance Studies department at NYU, where she is researching prison literatures in various archives in Palestine. Her research focus considers theories of movement and subversion within logics of surveillance and confinement by examining the textual practices produced within carceral structures.</p> <p><strong>Amany Khalifa</strong> is a doctoral student in the Department of Anthropology at Columbia University. Amany is interested in studying social movements as sites of Refusal in Occupied Palestine. Her research explores how political collectivity reconfigures the present and aspires to reshape the future.</p>