[An early version of these remarks was delivered as part of the
“Palestine as a Craft Question” panel at the Radius of Arab
American Writers (RAWI) Fest in Minneapolis, on October 27th, 2023.]
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NOTES ON CRAFT: WRITING IN THE HOUR OF GENOCIDE  
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Fargo Nissim Tbakhi
December 8, 2023
Protean Magazine
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_ An early version of these remarks was delivered as part of the
“Palestine as a Craft Question” panel at the Radius of Arab
American Writers (RAWI) Fest in Minneapolis, on October 27th, 2023. _

, Protean magazine

 

What does Palestine require of us, as writers writing in English from
within the imperial core, in this moment of genocide? I want to offer
here some notes and some directions towards beginning to answer this
question.

I.

_Craft is a machine built to produce and reproduce ethical failures;
it is a counterrevolutionary machine_.

I use “Craft” here to describe the network of sanitizing
influences exerted on writing in the English language: the influences
of neoliberalism, of complicit institutions, and of the linguistic
priorities of the state and of empire. Anticolonial writers in the
U.S. and across the globe have long modeled alternative crafts which
reject these priorities, and continue to do so in this present moment.
Yet Craft still haunts our writing; these notes aim to clarify it, so
we can rid ourselves of its influence.  

Above all, Craft is the result of market forces; it is therefore the
result of imperial forces, as the two are so inextricably bound up
together as to be one and the same. The Craft which is taught in
Western institutions, taken up and reproduced by Western publishers,
literary institutions, and awards bodies, is a set of regulatory ideas
which curtail forms of speech that might enact real danger to the
constellation of economic and social values which are, as I write
this, facilitating genocide in Palestine and elsewhere across the
globe. If, as Audre Lorde taught us, the master’s tools cannot
dismantle the master’s house, then Craft is the process by which our
own real liberatory tools are dulled, confiscated, and replaced. We
believe our words sharper than they turn out to be. We play with toy
hammers and think we can break down concrete. We think a spoon is a
saw.

In the title poem of Solmaz Sharif’s collection _Look_, she writes:

Whereas 
_         Well, if I were from your culture, living in this
country_,
         said the man outside the 2004 Republican National
         Convention, _I would put up with that for this
country_;
Whereas I felt the need to clarify: You would put up with
_         TORTURE, you mean_ and he proclaimed: _Yes_;

In a lecture
[[link removed]], Sharif
describes the erasure and reduction the poem demanded of this moment,
which we might also understand to be the demands of Craft. What the
poem simplified into that brief section existed in real life as a
prolonged encounter of violent rhetoric, and what the demands of the
poem erased was the violence of a liberal protestor who stood by,
ignored this encounter, and said to the Republican that while he
didn’t agree with what he said, he knew he was a good person. Sharif
calls this “the most violent betrayal and politically destructive
decision this poem made me make, making me question whether a good
poem is forever in fact irreconcilable with the nuanced reckoning our
lives actually depend on.” All the qualities of Craft, the qualities
which make a “good” poem, pressured this violence—the violence
of the liberal American unwilling to put their body and their peace of
mind on the line, a violence which might exist fundamentally outside
the boundaries the lyric can address—into disappearing. Craft
success is contingent upon ethical and political failure.

This is what Craft does to our writing: pressures and pressures until
what matters, what we need to say, gets pushed to the margins or
disappeared entirely. It is a Craft decision to describe Palestinians
as human animals. It is a Craft decision to pressure U.S. officials
not to use the word “ceasefire” or “de-escalation.” It is a
Craft decision to describe Israelis as “children of light” and
Palestinians as “children of darkness.” It is a Craft decision to
begin interviews demanding Palestinians condemn violent resistance, a
Craft decision to erase the perpetrators of bombings from headlines
describing the bombings, a Craft decision to question the reliability
of Palestinian death counts. These are Craft decisions because they
are decisions which occur in language, and that language feeds and is
in turn fed by policy. Somebody, with a name and an address, wrote,
vetted, revised, and spoke aloud these words. The tools they used to
do it, the ideologies which filled their vocabulary—these are Craft.

Craft is a machine for regulation, estrangement, sanitization.
Palestine and all the struggles with which it is bound up require of
us, in any and all forms of speech going forward, a commitment to
constant and escalating betrayals of this machine. It requires that we
poison and betray Craft at all turns.
 

II.

_To write in solidarity with Palestine is to write amidst the long
middle of revolution._

Between 1936 and 1939, Palestinian fellahin revolted against the
economic deprivations imposed by the British Mandate and a growing
Zionist movement in Palestine. Their revolt involved coordinated
general strikes and violent resistance to the beginnings of ethnic
cleansing and forced displacement. In response, the British instituted
a set of policies which would become the 1945 “Defence (Emergency)
Regulations”
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which allowed British officers to bring about the full repressive
strength of empire to bear on Palestinian peasantry to brutally
destroy the revolt. After the Nakba, these regulations served as the
basis for much of the state of Israel’s legal governmental
structure.

For seventy-five years, then, Palestinians have existed—violent or
not, political or not, active or not—in a state of revolt. We are
legally defined as such; the law and its human enforcers across the
globe act accordingly. This means that as long as Palestinians have
lived under the colonization of the Zionist state, and until
Palestinians are no longer subject to a state whose definitional
contours are premised on their existence as essentially threatening
others, the revolt has been, and is, _in progress_. It is a daily
lived thing, and Palestinians have always labored to define its shape
for themselves: the Great Revolt, the First Intifada, the Second
Intifada, the March of Return, the Unity Intifada, the myriad forms of
resistance both minute and maximal, spontaneous and organized, armed
and unarmed—these are part of the long and ongoing essential
Intifada, a long and ongoing revolution that has taken many forms and
will continue to evolve, and whose endpoint is liberation.

The Freedom Theater in Jenin refugee camp was founded by Juliano Mer
Khamis and Zakaria Zubeidi in 2006, out of the rubble of the Stone
Theater, which had been founded by Juliano’s mother Arna and was
destroyed by Israel. The Freedom Theater’s work is premised in part
on the notion that “the third Intifada will be a cultural one.”
Yet crucially, Juliano stressed: “What we are doing in the theatre
is not trying to be a replacement or an alternative to the resistance
of the Palestinians in the struggle for liberation, just the opposite.
This must be clear.” Palestine demands that all of us, as writers
and artists, consider ourselves in principled solidarity with the long
cultural Intifada that is built alongside and in collaboration with
the material Intifada. We are writing amidst its long middle; the page
is a weapon.
 

III.

_The long middle is the state of the dailiness, oppression so
pervasive as to form an atmosphere we move through._

The long middle is not a condition of time; we might be nearer to the
end of revolution than the beginning, we might be nearer liberation
than defeat, but our experience and our actions exist within the frame
we can see, the frame of the long middle. Liberation is the end, but
it is a geographical end rather than a temporal one, a soil and not an
hour. We move _towards_ it— sometimes slowly, sometimes quickly,
but always. It is the location by which we orient our movement. We
know it because it gets closer, not necessarily because it comes
sooner.

(And liberation moves too, it has its own sort of agency, it can dance
a little, as you stare through the hole in the fence you’ve just cut
you might feel a hand on your shoulder, someone standing by your side
like a friend, liberation letting you know what it feels like, that
you’re going the right way.)

The long middle, then, is the affective experience of moving inside
the dailiness, inside the structural and therefore constant violence
that forms the machinery of genocide and greases its wheels. Yet this
affective experience also is, or might be, one of a counter and
opposing dailiness: the dailiness of resistance and unrelenting
struggle. This counter-dailiness is modeled by Palestinians, whose
struggle within the long middle takes an astonishing diversity of
forms—forms of care, of tenderness, of violence, of ingenuity,
resource, and survival.   

This constant Intifada is the path through the long middle. Intifada
is a shaking off of oppression, shaking it off like a layer of dust.
This is a bodily action, to shake, to convulse oneself in a constant
motion of refusal, to be clean in the face of the world. We will get
tired. Our muscles will tear, and then get stronger. Someone falls, we
pick them up. We fall, we are lifted by others. We must continue.  

IV.

_We must ask: what does this require of us, then—to write amidst the
long middle of Intifada? What might it mean for how we approach the
page as a front of the long war?_

The Brazilian antifascist theatermaker Augusto Boal wrote,
in _Theater of the Oppressed,_ that traditional Aristotelian
narrative structures are coercive tools of the bourgeoisie, serving to
purge an audience’s revolutionary emotion and with it the obligation
to intervene in an unfolding narrative as an active participant. This
coercion is intended to make us feel as though world-historical events
are beyond our grasp, that we have no agency within them and should
remain within the status quo, which is only the dailiness. As Boal
argues:

“The poetics of Aristotle is the poetics of oppression: the world is
known, perfect or about to be perfected, and all its values are
imposed on the spectators, who passively delegate power to the
characters to act and think in their place. In so doing the spectators
purge themselves of their tragic flaw—that is, of something capable
of changing society. A catharsis of the revolutionary impetus is
produced!”

This catharsis makes witnesses of us, and nothing else.

(We should be suspicious of “witness,” too. In the West, in
English, a witness is only ever in service of the law, their testimony
only meant to convince a judge. The words and the positions they
require of us are already tainted; the law won’t save us, the law is
the one that kills us.)

Palestine requires that we abandon this catharsis. Nobody should get
out of our work feeling purged, clean. Nobody should live happily
during the war. Our readers can feel that way when liberation is the
precondition for our work, and not the dream. When it is the place we
stand, and not the place we shake ourselves towards.  

In this way, what the long middle of revolution requires, what
Palestine requires, is an approach to writing whose primary purpose is
to _gather others up with us_, to generate within them an energy
which their bodies cannot translate into anything but revolutionary
movement. This is what Boal modeled for us in his theatrical
experiments, which were dedicated to empowering audiences to _act_,
to participate in a creative struggle to envision and embody
alternatives. For Boal, theater was not revolution, but it was a
rehearsal for the revolution, meant to gather communities together in
that rehearsal. Creative work readies us for material work, by
offering a space to try out strategies, think through contradictions,
remind us of our own agency.  

We must be engaged in this kind of writing, which calls others into
mobilization, generating feelings within our audiences that cannot be
dispersed through the act of reading, but must be carried out into
collective action. You sit, you read something, you feel grief or
anger or joy, you get it all out, you put it down, you go about
business as usual—this is the coercive affective system that Craft
insists upon. We must write in such a way that there is no business,
there is no usual. We must write so that, as Boal says, “the action
ceases to be presented in a deterministic manner, as something
inevitable, as Fate… Everything is subject to criticism, to
rectification. All can be changed, and at a moment’s notice.”

V.

_The facilitation of this genocide is contingent upon the great
discursive and material weapon of the West: the ontological categories
of “terrorist” and “terrorism.”_

We must remember that terrorism does not describe an objective
reality; it is, like other pieces of language weaponized to murder, an
ideological word used by ideological powers, with specific legislative
and carceral bodies attached to its use.

C. Heike Schotten, in _Queer Terror: Life, Death, and Desire in the
Settler-Colony_
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us the only definition of terrorism that matters. She writes that the
figure of the terrorist:

“…can be understood as the contemporary settler state’s
moralized imperial name for the unthinkable indigenous remainder that,
in the insistence on remaining, challenges the settler state’s claim
to sovereignty, security, and civilizational value. Indeed, indigenous
peoples’ continued existence not only challenges settler
sovereignty’s claim to legitimacy and ‘first’-ness, but is the
harbinger of that sovereignty’s death insofar as they become legible
to it as existing.”

Terrorism is the great weapon of the West. It is used only against
those who can fit inside its scope, and that is not everyone. It is
the indigenous remainder, and those in solidarity with them, in the
scope; no one else appears. Land defenders blocking Cop City appear in
the scope, protestors fighting police brutality appear in the scope.
Terrorism does only what it was designed to do only to those it was
designed to target. Terrorism cannot be recuperated. We cannot use or
weaponize it for our own purposes. It means nothing to call Israeli or
American violence terrorist violence, because terrorism is a one-sided
weapon and its bullets belong to the state. The state cannot appear in
the scope. In trying to prove that we are _not _terrorists, or prove
that someone else _is _a terrorist, we reify that the weapon of
terrorism ought to exist at all, and that the problem is simply giving
it the right target. We reload the weapon ourselves when we do this.
Instead, as Schotten argues:

“If the only options are… to side with a futurist, settler, and
imperial ‘us’ (whether as avowed advocates of empire or its
collaborationist liberal compromisers) or with a queered,
‘savage,’ and ‘terrorist’ other, the choice, I think, is
clear: we must choose to stand with the ‘terrorists.'”

This choice must shape our writing. No more conversation between the
sword and the neck. No more attempting to prove that the oppressed are
the neck and not the sword, to point the sword in a direction that
will satisfy its blade. It doesn’t matter. This applies to a
multitude of other words whose meanings are situated outside of our
control. The language is poisoned already. There is no cure.  

What does that choice make possible? In her short film “In the
Future We Ate From the Finest Porcelain,” Larissa Sansour has a
character use the phrase “narrative terrorism.” This can be our
approach: to engage in a guerilla war on the page, to consider it an
additional front in our solidarity with those who will always and
forever be the targets of the state’s weapons. One way to think of
this is to consider what narrative means when it is firmly on the side
of those rendered terrorists, on the side of the colonized and the
oppressed, on the side of those in the scope. What tactics, shapes,
strategies and necessities do their struggles demand of our
narratives? How might our narratives serve the haunting of the
indigenous remainder, eating away at the foundations of empire like
termites? How might our writing, in the words of Palestinian
intellectual and martyr Bassel Al-Araj, “live like a porcupine,
fight like a flea”? And, perhaps most importantly, how can we refuse
the integration of these choices and this language into a new
neoliberal set of constraints that pay lip service to the struggle but
work to neutralize it nonetheless? That is, how can we continue to
globalize the Intifada without allowing it to be merely subsumed into
the project of globalization?

We might escalate this narrative terrorism towards a constant
aesthetic terrorism; we might pursue infrastructural damage to the
arts and to the structures of publishing. This might mean, among other
things, clogging submission portals, hijacking the space of the bio,
as Rasha Abdulhadi has modeled
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the podcast and the craft talk and the classroom and the call for
submissions and the $75 payment via Venmo for the poem. It might mean
writing things that are unpublishable and forcing publishers into
doing it anyway; it might mean circumventing or ignoring the
structures of publishing in favor of means of circulation outside the
bounds of capital and therefore free from the grasp of the invisible
hand. It might mean boycott, pressure, and refusing to allow the
return of the oppressive dailiness in any space we inhabit. It might
mean being loud, annoying, and resolutely steadfast in our refusals
and our insistences. It might mean joining with writers who are
extending solidarity beyond the page and into direct actions against
the complicity of our institutions, literary or otherwise. It might
mean, too, building alternative and sustained networks of support for
our fellow writers who lose jobs, opportunities, or face harassment.
Like a net, we tie ourselves to one another to stop the dailiness from
getting through; we tie ourselves tight enough so none of us get lost
along the way. Maximal commitment, minimal loneliness, to paraphrase a
comrade.

VI.

_We should betray Craft by replacing it with political thought._

The PFLP’s 1969 document, “Strategy for the Liberation of
Palestine”
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in part, by the Palestinian writer, revolutionary, and martyr Ghassan
Kanafani
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notes:

One of the basic conditions of success is a clear perspective of
things: a clear perspective of the enemy and a clear perspective of
the revolutionary forces. It is in this light that the strategy of the
struggle is determined, and without this perspective, national action
becomes an impetuous gamble which soon ends in failure. Revolutionary
political thought is not an abstract idea hanging in a vacuum, or a
mental luxury, or an intellectual hobby for the educated, which we
can, if we wish, lay aside as an unnecessary luxury. Scientific
revolutionary thought is clear thought whereby the masses are able to
understand their enemy, his points of weakness or strength and the
forces which support and ally themselves to the enemy.

If we are to consider our writing a space in which to fight, we’d
better know who we’re fighting, who we’re fighting _with_, and
why. Political thought and political education are the vital building
blocks of that knowledge. Craft asks us to consider the language first
and the politics second, tells us that a political education is not
central but peripheral to being a writer. We must reject this. As
Amiri Baraka argued in a 2004 lecture
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art and politics:

“You must raise the level of our understanding of the world… so
that we understand the causal connections in the world, why it acts
the way it does. So that we don’t believe everybody who smiles at us
and gives us a broom is our friend. So that we know who are our
friends and who are our enemies, and right now so that we can build
that united front. What is the artist’s job? To make war. The
artist’s job is unrelenting war on evil.”

Baraka tells us we are making war, and war requires strategy.
Political thought is what provides the strategy for an artistic war.
Political thought is the enemy of Craft; Craft is a machine to elide
and foreclose political thought. This must be our constant betrayal,
to know now that the lyric is not as valuable as the polemic. That the
sonnet must give way to the photocopied and wheat pasted list of
companies and individuals with financial ties to the genocide. That
political thought is not only an option for artists but a duty, an
obligation and a fundamental necessity. That it supersedes the line
break, the marginalia, the invocation of the muse. Better to know what
we’re saying and why, and to say it with force, like a stone hurled
from the river that reaches the sea.
 

VII.

_The craft for the long Intifada is made and remade each day by
resistance._

I wrote all this because I needed it, or something like it. I have
felt unable to write and needed a way back in. I was suspicious of
writing, of what its powers really are in a moment of crisis, and I
was equally suspicious of the more common ways we have to answer that
question. I needed more than healing, witness, catharsis, community,
imagining otherwise. I needed something that Craft does not contain,
is in fact devoted to purging from “writing” in its
professionalization and enforced respectability.

In September 2021, six Palestinian prisoners escaped from Gilboa
prison by tunneling out with a spoon. Among them was Zakaria Zubeidi
of the Freedom Theater, further reminding us that the cultural revolt
is inseparable from the material one. One of the other escapees,
Mohammed al-Ardah, said they did it to show “the occupation is a
mere illusion made of dust.” This illusion of dust coating our
bodies, drowning us in cruelty. We move with Intifada to shatter the
illusion.

This is what I need. Not Craft, but the immeasurable creative force
that breaks a prison using only the artifacts of bare survival which
have been allotted to us, and the clarity of knowing why we did it.
This is what life looks like. This is something we can do with spoons.

Above all, Craft is what keeps us polite while the boot is on our neck
or on somebody else’s. And we cannot afford that, not now and not
going forward. As June Jordan wrote, in _Civil Wars_:

“If you make and keep my life horrible then, when I can tell the
truth, it will be a horrible truth; it will not sound good or look
good or, God willing, feel good to you, either. There is nothing good
about the evils of a life forced into useless and impotent drift and
privation. There is very little that is attractive or soothing about
being strangled to death, whether it is the literal death of the body
or the actual death of the soul that lying, that the humiliation and
the evil of self-denial, guarantees. Extremity demands, and justifies,
extreme response. Violation invites, and teaches, violence. Less than
that, less than a scream or a fist, less than the absolute cessation
of normal events in the lock of abnormal duress is a lie and, worse
than that, it is blasphemous ridicule of the self.”

Craft is that lie. This Craft of the state, the Craft of the weapons
manufacturing board members, the silent, silencing universities, the
financially imbricated publishers, and the complicit awards bodies. We
have to abandon it and write with sharper teeth, without politeness,
without compromise. We have to learn, or build, or steal, or steal
back, the craft we need for the long Intifada, which we carry with us
to liberation and beyond. ♦

_FARGO NISSIM TBAKHI is calling on you to join with the revolutionary
masses across the globe in fighting for the survival and liberation
of Palestinians and all oppressed people. We are bound up with one
another. Anywhere and everywhere you are, you can get in the way of
the death machine; hold somebody’s hand tight and get in the way
together. Revolution until victory for all of us.  _

_PROTEAN publishes incisive and affecting criticism, journalism,
poetry, and art for the discerning leftist, sans advertisements._

_Protean Magazine is a non-profit leftist publication that produces an
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with vivid illustrations and writing that address the most pressing
issues of our time._

_Our site showcases new pieces of freely available work—essays,
fiction, and poetry—on a weekly basis. Protean’s mission is to
promote high-quality criticism, journalism, literature, and art for
the political left._

_Protean Magazine is a production of the Protean Collective._

_The Protean Collective is a distributed group of leftist writers,
journalists, academics, and artists who operate democratically._

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