Pleasure Lost Under the Rubble

Abstract

At the time of writing this, it is day 131 of Israel's genocidal campaign of collective punishment in Gaza, and it is almost 76 years since the beginning of Israel’s settler colonial project and ethnic cleansing of the native Palestinians. When I started writing this piece, I found myself staring at an empty document and asking myself: “How do I write about pleasure when it has become a distant memory?”. How does anyone write about pleasure while watching a settler colonial apartheid regime commit a genocide? How does the world continue to find pleasure while supporting this grave violation of human rights? How do I write about pleasure when all I can hear is the sound of my people screaming from underneath the rubble? Instead of silencing these questions, I decided to allow them to guide & shape this poem.