FUSION Essay
The theme of this FUSION issue, curated in collaboration with Lena Khalaf Tuffaha, is that of the Archive. While an archive generally suggests a physical repository, collected and preserved by institutions, it can also take the form of lived cultural practices, oral histories and literatures, and other artifacts cared for by communities. Archives and archiving can offer poetic material and process for articulating presences and histories and trajectories tethered to truth. For instance, a poet may deconstruct a colonial archive, extracting from its folds what they need to bring to the fore moments of witness, intervention, or resistance. Such is a necessary extraction against colonial erasure and distortion. Alternatively, a poet may contribute their own family’s story or seed other knowledge into a people’s archive. And so they introduce a thread to a larger weave, grappling with continuum and rupture. Observing repetition in an archive, be it a shared experience or departures from it, may reveal how oppression is stitched into social life and is reproduced in systematic patterns. What appears repetitively too is how a people resist what shackles them into misrecognition and dispossession. Archiving and conversing with an archive may serve as reminders that resistant lineages and precedents fortify, that there is a futurity to a decolonial repository’s purpose of being and an urgent necessity to protect and nourish and guard it.
The destruction of archives and their keepers is not a metaphorical issue. For more than seven months now, the settler colonial state of Israel has been attacking—systematically and with clearly expressed genocidal intent—the entire infrastructure of Gaza to render it unlivable. In addition to targeting hospitals, schools, and refugees sheltered or traveling on foot, Israeli Occupation Forces have bombed every university in Gaza, and directly targeted poets and university instructors in their homes and places of refuge. The genocide, consistent with decades of settler colonial brutality, is unprecedented in its scale and rapidity of destruction. The poets in this FUSION issue speak against the logic of such annihilation.
In curating this issue, Tuffaha solicited and selected poems by Palestinian writers, whereas I selected poems published by Prairie Schooner. With the assistance of graduate researchers and undergraduate interns, I searched JSTOR, where the journal’s repository of work published since 1926 resides, using the following keywords: archive, archiving, repository, chronicle, record, catalogue, ancestor, history, keeper, and Palestine. The archive yielded dozens of poems published over the past century. What interested me as a curator were poems that emphasized a decolonial aesthetic and subject matter. Decoloniality appears here as poetic engagement that demystifies, disrupts, or challenges colonial paradigms, a rather broad conception of the term. While wading through three hundred or so pieces, I encountered poems that were engaging yet irrelevant, and few poems that echoed some of the work I had already decided to include. Occasionally, I would come across a poem that reverberated strongly against the grain of the cultural establishment. One such poem is Wopashitwe Mondo Eyen we Langa’s “White Sea,” published in Summer 1970 when Bernice Slote served as Editor in Chief of the Schooner. Mondo, formerly known David L. Rice, was a member of the Black Panther Party. Accused of killing a police officer in Omaha, sources in the Lincoln Journal Star and other online publications indicate that there is much controversy surrounding his conviction. Mondo was incarcerated from 1971 till his death in 2016, and Amnesty International had taken up his case as a political prisoner. The figurative language of “White Sea” precisely articulates the grotesqueness of racism, as Mondo’s skillful repetition of the color “white” culminates in a courtroom scene where “a jury outside deciding a verdict / to bring us all to guilt.” The phrasing, and subsequent painful lines that follow, invite us to consider colonial law as a system weaponized against Black (and Brown) people.
The selection of poems here offer a prismatic treatment of the theme of archives in literal and conceptual ways. Read in concert, these poems suggest the presence of a transnational, resistant collection within the Schooner’s de facto archive. In Anne Champion’s “The Book of Sumud” we encounter the speaker’s refusal of books “written by victorious men behind desks.” Eschewing the injunctions of death and disappearance, Champion turns instead to “Sumud,” to Palestinian steadfastness in the face of decades of dispossession. I have always been struck by the kinship that “Sumud” shares with what Anishinaabe writer and theorist Gerald Vizenor coins as “survivance,” a Native presence marked by survival and resistance, a sovereign praxis outside and against the confines of settler paradigms—liberal and conservative alike. Shawnee poet Laura Da’ seizes the colonial archive in her poem “Hived Bees in Winter,” quoting the journal of a superintendent of Indian removal from 1832 to depict the Shawnee’s forced displacement from their lands in Ohio Country. The poem, rich in sensory language, juxtaposes the colonizer’s records with an Indigenous telling, and Da’ showcases a poetic attuned to movement and gesture in narrating place and weather and labors of care. She thus offers a poetic story of Shawnee survivance. Speaking against erasure also materializes brilliantly and painfully in “Blood” by Haitian American author Patrick Sylvain. Writing against “white/pages trying to bleach history,” Sylvain’s speaker makes a mockery of colonial civility and tone-policing: “Forgive this impolite language!” Tracing genocide and survival against the colonialization of the Caribbean, Sylvain’s refrain of ‘blood’ reflects the intimacy of colonial violence with respect to the body, disclosing how land grab and enslavement meet in the imperial greed for commodities.
At a later moment of North American history, the archive is conjured in the evidence of racist policing and the poet’s position of witness in Cornelius Eady’s “Anger.” In a poem written in response to the ‘LA riots’ and the acquittal of the officers who brutalized Rodney King, Eady’s speaker wrestles with expression against self-censorship. He writes:
I have an anger that could, as they say, lay waste to planets.
I have an anger that could converse only with volcanoes. It is surly
and diffident and doesn’t care to talk about it.
Some of the poems included here create new archives. Margaret Chula’s poem “What Remains,” takes on a familial artifact, a quilt. Its creation by archiving pieces of cherished belongings is an act of preservation in response to Japanese American internment. Mojave poet Natalie Diaz’s list poem “Métis” is an archive of sorts as well: between their legs the poem’s speaker has ‘car wrecks’ and ‘martyrs’ and ‘broken baskets’ and many other events and things that oscillate in scale and intimacy. And Chickasaw author Linda Hogan’s speaker in “Get Up, Go AWOL!” invites a break from colonial repetition and the weaponization of religion.
Record keeping is yet another thread that arises in relation to the theme. We can glimpse it in Nigerian ‘Gbenga Adesina’s poem “Resurrection,” an elegy for refugees and migrants drowned in the Mediterranean; in Belarusian Valzhyna Mort’s “Cenotaph,” where the image of a book carried by a starving child is written and rewritten against forgetting; and in Australian John Kinsella’s ““The Killing State” / The Murdering State,” an epic documentary poem.
It is heartening to witness, at this moment, a wide-scale student uprising for justice in Palestine at American universities. The students are calling for transparency in university finances, for divestment from genocide and apartheid. The students’ uprising is being met with disciplinary evictions and militarized police violence. Despite politicians’ and university administrators’ quest to malign and punish protestors, students clearly challenge the misrepresentation of their struggle. Jewish students, for instance, have joined the protests, refusing the genocide of Palestinians and the illogical conflation of anti-Zionism with antisemitism. Marilyn Hacker’s poem “For Despina” is for them.
Lena Khalaf Tuffaha’s beautiful curation is indeed a testament to the long-standing vitality of Palestinian poetry in English, as evident in the work of well-established and emerging authors here. I find it notable that in Tuffaha’s selection both A.D. Lauren Abou-Nassar and George Abraham draw on late author Etel Adnan, whose oeuvre is part of an Arab American poetic repository nourishing authors of multiple generations. Adnan’s work has long recognized the struggle for Palestinian freedom in conjunction with struggles against colonialism and imperialism in North America and globally.
My hope is that the poems in this FUSION issue become kin in their gathering, in their speaking against injustice for four centuries and seventy-six years.
Siwar Masannat
May 2024
