_

_

There are two ways to lose oneself: walled segregation in the particular or dilution in the universal. Aimé Césaire

Every attempt at reiterating the magnitude of the loss, degradation, and genocidal violence endured by Palestinians comes with the repressed hope that those perverted by imperialist propaganda will finally come to their senses and reckon with the truth, acknowledge that victims can in turn become perpetrators, or that the weaponization of a collective identity, once marginalized and abused, is now the perverse vehicle of Imperial violence. Some will argue that if all this destruction hasn’t yet pierced through the buffer zone shielding their sense of normalcy from the ongoing catastrophe, then nothing, no language, no matter how often repeated, will. While we understand that repetition can risk exiling language to the world of surplus, we also believe that it can serve a different purpose. Language and its performative powers are inherently unpredictable.

Much has been written about the power, or inversely, the powerlessness of language when measured against the killing of a people, against repetitive, structural violence. Adding language to a field of ongoing massacres (“there are no words”) or adding it to a field of surplus (“all has been said”) devolves discourse into a state of stasis. It turns anger into mute spectatorship and solidarity into apocalyptic antipolitics. Even when uncompromising political pessimism can seem justified, we must insist on the distinction between the importance of creating a language that can grasp the repeated horror “Israel” subjects Palestinians to and the transhistorical claim that everything is the same, all has been said, that language is now dead. We must reiterate the truth beyond binaries of success and defeat; repeat it until abstract universals turn concrete.

The deluge of articles, essays, and political analyses written and published (when not censored) since the beginning of the genocide are indispensable to fighting the war and propaganda machine set forth in full force to defend settler colonial and imperial interests. This 4th issue of Makhzin reflects on both the ludicrous yet necessary tool that is language, its role in making the real more real, in sharpening our politics via a syntax that is lived, enacted, defiantly voiced, and decisively mobilizing.

Author Rana Issa translates an interview with Syrian political dissident Yassin Al-Haj Saleh in which he describes the Palestinianization of the ruled and the Israelization of the rulers. Arab regimes, to him, have reproduced the Israeli condition locally and rendered Palestinianess a universal condition shared by the oppressed. In an in-depth conversation with Alberto Toscano, Edwin Nasr and Lama El Khatib explore the philosophical and historical stakes in the concept of evil. “Progressive” liberalism, Toscano tells us, advertises itself as the “guarantor of a virtuous historical arc ‘bending toward justice’ and away from past evils,” when, in fact, it is inseparable from the defense of capitalistic systems which were supported by past evils. Hilal Chouman writes of the political reality that Yassin al-Haj Saleh speaks of and which has led to the persistence of the Palestinian catastrophe. Writing to and from the point of view of the Arab youth who revolted more than a decade ago, he recoups Emile Habibi’s untranslatable invocation of the khurāfiyya as a mode of storytelling that turns the power of mourning into a revolutionary and historical force.

In All That’s Left of Me (written in 2013 and recently translated for this issue by Suneela Mubayi), Palestinian author Raji Bathish writes with suspicion about grand narratives and seeks to make sense of the schizophrenic nature of living as a 1948 Palestinian within “Israel.” In the wake of Oct. 7, the author revisits his previous yearning for transgression and asks, in the midst of a genocide, what is left to write about? Poet Jan Clausen writes of her ancestry, an acreage acquired at the cost of Indigenous land and life. She examines the way Indigenous languages linger in English, which, upon closer scrutiny, reveals the traces of the people it decimates. Also reflecting on the history of the Americas, Nora Treatbaby addresses the beauty and violence of the mundane. Driving up the Taconic highway, she reflects on the shared violence that connects histories of dispossession.

Nicholas Glastonburry writes of the “case of Palestine,” its grammatical declension. To free Palestine is to free it from its dependency on other clauses, from the slash that robs it of autonomy. Abou Farman unpacks, in critical fashion, the legal history informing the Western understandings of the “civilian” category, the way it congeals the divide between those who are “worthy” of the term, and those who fall through the cracks of its definition. Wrestling with precedents, Ash Moniz looks at the Asya, a settler ship directed to Palestine pre-48, which was turned away for lack of national belonging–the Zionist flag being denied legitimacy. Asya sets a case of Israel’s non-existence, the legal colonial order undone, in this brief instance, by its own absurdity.

From the diaspora, Andrew Riad yearns to build a poetics of distance within a world eroded both by war and termites. Ariel Yelen decries in a quasi-naive fashion the treason of the lyric; she was told that this was a beautiful world. Wendy Lotterman’s work proceeds from love amid revolution and lingering impasses. Christopher Rey Pérez logs language in the present tense, tracing disjointed geographies, with moments of lyricism emerging within the chaos. Morgan Võ writes of losers and winners, how history is made regardless of who is on the right side of it. Maryam Monalisa Gharavi offers poetic interventions into the archival imagination as it meets the violence of the present. Mireia Molina Casta speaks of the power of words on tongues to connect and untether our disjointed conditions. Andrea Abi-Karam reflects on the metaphor of flesh and time– a meditation on suturing that emerges as the infinite task of poetry itself. Finally, The Arachnospindicalist Palestinian Collective presents a documentation of a trolling campaign directed against liberal Zionism, infiltrating its support letters with phonetic transliteration of Arabic insults.

While outlining different styles and poetics, the contributions gathered here all gesture towards an imaginary afflicted by violence that refuses to submit to the conditions of our current world order. The authors publish in this issue imagine, revoke, suture, satirize, document, and dream of return, revolution, and acts of language that forge a poetics of liberation alongside other forms of material struggle.