Global Solidarities
Editorial Letter
The continued unprecedented onslaught on Gaza can crush any language. Writing an editorial one year into this abyssal experience, we could offer a lamentation, a wordless howl, or turn silent. Yet in the face of death, Refaat Alaraeer offered the spirit of collective creativity as resistance: “‘If I must die, let it be a tale”. Asked how to bear witness and give testimony of other, silenced wars against people across the globe—the DRC, Sudan, Yemen, and many more—Gabeba Baderoon reminds us about the task of the poet:
What can poems do?
They can remake the world, this history asserts.
Issue #2 of Love In Action emerged from meetings and trans-regional conversations between people in Johannesburg, Kampala, and New York City beginning in November 2023. What started with small groups gathering for workshops, teach-ins, poetry sessions, and collective actions grew into a dialogue across continents and time. We amplified each other’s solidarity through our eyes, voices, hands, minds, and spirits.
While zine workshops might seem like ephemeral events that won’t change anything, we believe in the power of small communities coming together to create narratives of resistance—not unlike the annual commemorations of Buddhist monks to mourn the echoes of nuclear explosions through time. This zine is a physical expression of our work to witness, hold space, grieve, and testify that genocide is a transgression against humanity. It is a living document of trust in the power of spiritual practices to transcend borders and boundaries.
We hope that this zine will resonate with people around the world and nourish the practices of collaborative study, deep listening, radical creating, collective mourning, and steadfast resistance. Yearning to create new visions of possible humanities, our work is inspired by the possibility of being together in solidarity with those who face industrialised killing, bombing, dispossession, organised famine, malnourishment, and the deprivation of the most essential elements of survival. The editors would like to thank all the individuals and activists who contributed to this zine by writing, drawing, printing, collaging, organising zine-making events, and more. We invite you to share this zine far and wide (please find links to a printer-friendly PDF and a digital version on the back cover).
Creative & Editorial Collective Teesa, Nandita, Jungwon, Gloria, Fouad, Andrew
Contact & queries: solidaritypod@proton.me
Fn1. Palestinian writer, poet, scholar, and activist Refaat Alaraeer was born on 23 September 1979 in Shuja’iyya in Gaza, and killed in a targeted Israeli airstrike on 6 December 2023
Fn2. In the introduction “What Can Poetry Do?” to the book Our Words, Our Worlds: Writing on Black South African Women Poets, 2000-2018, edited by Makhosazana Xaba, UKZN Press, 2019, p. 1-10.
by Nadine Ghammache
These days Dumped
In a shiny Lego box
All the same Gray pieces, thousands No figurines, none needed Dead, dead, dead
Thousand gray pieces
No booklet needed
None needed
These days are Palestine, my homeland, My mother, my uncles My aunts, my grandmother, Jeddo, my olives, my sea, My wind, my swallows, My beautiful children, My beautiful Palestinian accent, My dabke, my keffiyeh, My land I’ve never been allowed to be
These days speak They plead Why me?
I’m only a child Why me? Why me? What have I done?
I’m only a child
These days
I’m no longer an only child But all my people
12/3/2023
Lots
By Twahira Abdallah
She stood there, accepting her well-won prize and said - tears in her eyeshow she doesn’t know how come in this reality she is the one who gets to win the prize while in another part of the world another woman just like her: a daughter, a mother, a career woman beautiful and intelligent and kind sits in a refugee camp mourning the loss of her land, her people her children as around her, her world crashes down. She doesn’t know -I don’t know-
how come we are not the woman in the refugee camp and she is not us. What luck or providence has cast our lot for peace and hers for war and pain? None of us know.
And I sit in my house, safe. My family, safe. My land, safe. Drinking tea and writing about Her and on the stage, the Oscar winner stands - with tears in her eyespaying tribute to her
because not one of us knows why it is Her and not us.
A forest of beautiful towers gracing the skies is now reduced to rubble, decades of sweat lost to the drains.
Happy families broken, robbed and wiped off the face of the earth, it’s sad. Sounds of killing machines roam the airs, they are horrors of the skies. They bring misery, not flowers! They end lives, pure evil, how else can I define them? They come with fire balls, loud bangs and earthquake like vibrations that leave no building standing.
Amidst cries of horror and scenes of death, determined men and women of honor give love in it’s purest form to those in critical need. They won’t wait for machinery, with their hands, many are saved from collapsed buildings. Their efforts are non discriminative, they swing into action with no other motive except to save a life.
Putting their very own lives on the line of fire, they have demonstrated to the world what humanity should be about, love!
We love Palestinians, the wider world loves Palestinians, the means justify people’s actions. Peaceful demonstrations have rocked the wider world, to remind Governments to intervene and stop the genocide in Gaza! Petitioning the international court of justice to act, to stop the blood shed in Gaza.
Use of the wider media to condemn the ethnic cleansing in Gaza. To condemn the use of hunger as a weapon of warfare. To remind those responsible that hospitals are non functional, incapacitated and deprived of medical supplies to serve their purpose! We continue to use the wider media to remind Palestinians that we love them and that we shall continue to remind those responsible to intervene in Gaza for peace.
Kabuye John Bosco
Canister
With these hands I hold something That killed an olive tree.
One old enough to recount the generations of my understanding, ten fold.
With these hands Ancestors cry foul. The fruit has turned red watermelons, for a time, will exchange the bitter beauty of the ancient oil. Who kills olive trees?
Such an assassin aims to end scent of the earth and siphon the residues that kept Eve’s love for Adam despite the wilderness around them.
Such a sniper cuts at the jugular the river that connects us.
Such a settler places a bullet as God in an erstwhile haven of Bedouin milk.
In these hands, this wounding canister cripples the oldest trees on earth, and the youngest children whose poems and dance speak in the language of Olive trees. My dead father weeps from his grave in Observatory My late brother, whose last memory is with his fishing rod in my mothers living room in Goodwood weeps from his grave in Observatory. I buried them with these hands. These hands are stained in olive. Put on your battle ink, with me, my friend and prepare to fight.
Prepare to win.
Occupied Territory
I.
We were forged in Occupied Territory
This fragile thing called Us
Birthed as the bloodied shards of Love Pierced our collective unconsciousness. Debris from the dying juggernaut scattered all round Apartheid fell And We emerged Phoenix Rising Scarred, yet triumphant.
II.
This ‘We’ is tempered in Occupied Territory
The song of Us falls silent
As it flies from the throat of the nightingale
Shot down over Gaza.
But melody, once heard, Is imprinted in memory
It becomes the freedom chant of the occupied mind. The song of longing Of survival
Of belonging
We Dance
We are renewed.
III.
In the crucible of Occupied Territory
We slit our wrists, Slip on pieces of soap, Fly out of fifteenth floor windows
The hara-kiri of Greed Self-immolation by Apathy Is a tortuous Occupation we choose
Eyes wide shut
We choose
IV. Insidious
The Occupation persists
Resists all efforts to shake it off Lingers in the territory of ‘We’
Pernicious
Waiting to strike
At the core of our collective conscience. If conscience is suffocated
Subsumed by conformity
If conscience is suffocated
Is this the end of ‘We’, Habibi?
Poem for Ramallah
Madiba stands tall but alone in a place
Too far from the entrance of where he is needed
He stands tallest here, in the world, But the world cannot see him. His words are of Palestine, his blood is as red as the keffiyeh that greeted him as a warm hug from the neck of Arafat. Yet, alone, his words stand with Ramallah.
They say for all time “The people of South Africa are not free until the people of Palestine are free.”
Today, I walk to the statue and with my full heart say, you live now with the people of Ramallah. And we, of my country, the world, of every ghetto and every shack, of every house and every castle will live with you and the people of Ramallah.
From this epicentre, we will greet the Gaza, and place you Rolihlalhla at the entrance.
We will place you across the West Bank and place you at the entrance of every camp,
and every checkpoint, of every liberation and resistance site.
My ancestors are here now. Mayibuye! They have been here before.
Let us stay a while longer and make poems of resistance together that will give flow back to the River Jordan, give release to the water underground — back to her people.
Let our tears greet the aquifers beneath us, let our laughter play subterfuge against gas canisters, barbed wire, tanks, and let this creative and undeniable love mesmerise the snipers’ scope whose trigger hands will gently place down the weapon to join us in dance to the Derwish trance, where we all shall become humble again.
And with the prophets that run deep within our mutual veins let’s walk barefoot across the landmines to the Red Sea, turning them, each one, into roses.
Our ancestors are here now With you, our most beloved Palestine.
Their hearts are your stone, they will throw with you.
As we did in Soweto,
as they did in Langa, as we did on the Cape Flats, as they did in Salt River.
We will throw with you. We are in Apartheid, we are against Apartheid, only we can end it. Together.
I will throw with you. With all my heart and soul, I will throw with you.
Until we are both free.
Until we are free.
Until we are free.
What the Sun Gave Us
(for Rwakaroto and all the lost children of Gaza)
After trauma, we look for the sun for the grass for the gentle and still beings that surround us.
You were five when you were whisked away to another plane by the metal carriage and centripetal force of a wayward car.
I don’t think of the driver but of the pavement that rose up to meet you. Of the breath pushed from your lungs. Of the grave dug in the morning and the soil that enveloped you before the sun could even set. I think of the fire that burned through the night and the embers that ushered you home.
It is hard to look into the passing faces of Palestinian children decimated by bombs. They blow away like ash on the wind.
It is hard to understand destruction, until it crash-lands at your feet. Like how we don’t know blood until it has left our bodies. Now every border overflows with people feeling from their homes with the aftermath of their loss in hot pursuit.
On the way back from the burial we pass a nursery along Masaka Road. A collection of budding plants, each cradled in a blanket of wet soil. Their baby leaves reach out for the warm embrace of the ever-loving sunlight.
No farmer would pluck the budding plants or watch the sap pour from the fracture without freeing their own tears.
Tell me, Rwakaroto, up there, are all the children dancing? Have heaven’s hands cupped your broken bird bodies and set you to flight as doves from a cage?
Do you know what delight you brought us while you were here?
Do you know that we still smell the sweet sap of all the broken saplings?
InFebruaryof2024,mynephewdiedinacaraccident.Onthewaybackfromtheburial,Isawaposton IGofvariousphotosofchildrenwhohavebeenkilledinGaza.Inreflectingonmyfamily’sloss,Ibegan tounderstandthegriefthatcountlessPalestinianfamiliesareexperiencing.Onlytheirlossisnot accidentalandit’shappeningonanunimaginablescale.
It cuts through the burnt musk of these living nightmares.
It is all we have left of what the sun gave us.
Words to Stop a Genocide Thandi
Gamedze
I wish poetry could end the pain. I’m trying to come up with the exact configuration of words able to terminate a genocide
Like in the movies when everything hangs on figuring out the correct combination to open up the safe I am listening intently for the clicks that would indicate progress
The state of Israel is not the Israel of which the bible speaks
Click
Just because something is in the bible doesn’t make it right
Click
The Israelites in the Old Testament moved from being enslaved to practicing genocidal settler colonialism
Click
That was not, is not, and never will be okay
Click
Breathe
Re-strategise
The state of Israel is built on violent settler colonialism
Click
It was created in 1948, orchestrated by Western powers who thought they could kill many birds with one stone
Click
Those Western powers have never stopped pulling strings or killing birds but they have increased their stones and their targets
Click They continue to benefit through their devoted ally in the Middle East
Click
Breathe
Re-strategise
This is not a religious conflict
Click
Before Israel was created, Arab Jews, Christians, and Muslims were indigenous to the land
Click
Jesus himself was a Palestinian
Click
He is an ancestor of those currently being bombed
Click
Breathe
Re-strategise
Violence meted out by settler colonial powers is not self-defence
Click
The United Nations says so
Click
It also says that Israel is an apartheid state
Click
Surely we can at least agree that genocide is never okay?
Click Breathe Re-strategise
Think about the children
Click
Children everywhere belong to all of us
Click
We all belong to each other
Click
Think about our shared humanity
Click
I’m grasping at straws here I had thought the lock would be open by now
But we have to keep trying
Because everything hangs on us figuring out the correct combination
Because a threat to injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere
Because we are at risk of losing our humanity
Yet it doesn’t seem like there is an end to the numbers in the password to this particular safe
I’m starting to lose faith that all the words in the world could make even a dent in the Iron Dome of global evil
I wish I knew the combination of words that could stop a genocide
But I don’t
HEARTS
No words can capture your pain your courage your struggle
We watch powerless, furious, amazed at the cruelty
Spilt blood is the same the land is the same the god is the same
It’s the minds that create images of difference
Minds caught in their own careless creations
Eyes blind to the horror they unleash
Hands detached from the fires they light
Hearts covered with layers of distortions
Closed to compassion
Which can see the other
There is rage on both sides
Centuries of it
Yet each moment offers the opportunity for peace
What can stem this tide of anger fueled by fear?
Only voices of wisdom and listeners who have open hearts
Where are they?
Please stand up and be counted
Speak up speak loud and unrelentingly
Over and over again
And those behind the guns
Close your eyes and open your hearts to the children yours and theirs
Listen to the wise and the children
And you will know what needs to be done
-Sunita Kapila
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