UKS FORUM
No 6, November 2024

No. 6, November 2024
RANA ISSA: LETTER TO PALESTINIAN ACTIVISTS WITH CHILDREN

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Our sixth edition of UKS’ soft, digital revival of the old UKS Forum comes to you as the days darken and the weather grows cold. Small whirlwinds of yellow brittle leaves tag along on our way to kindergarten, work, beyond and home. We try to care for the world around us: wrap up plants, lather our dry skin with lotion, and put out food for the small birds. Here, writer, translator and curator Rana Issa takes the ancient form of the letter to address the paradoxes of life in the present of genocide in Palestine. Entangled in an everyday elsewhere yet connected with generational responsibilities and chores. If a child is hope and the future is the child of hope, how do we move, I wonder? Issa’s letter is accompanied by the poem ‘Salam to Gaza’ (1987) by Hussein Barghouthi, and by images from artist Jannik Abel, who has been documenting actions in solidarity with Palestine, the largest popular movement in recent Norwegian history.

Let the freshness of autumn blow brainfog away, and we leave you with a final wish: read. Can we move within our small, local actions of care, so evident in facing the colder weather, to think about how the Norwegian government could end its financial support for the genocide in Palestine?

Ragnhild Aamås,
Artist, writer and Chair of the UKS Board

 

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Letter to Palestinian Activists with Children

by Rana Issa

For Hakim

Lately I have been thinking a lot about hope. I have also been asked twice to write about hope. Many of us have thoughts of hope as we keep trying to make sense of how to live in this world that is being destroyed. I am a mother, and the future of my children is bound up with my hopes for them in a fast-decaying world. Like many, I watch my kids grow up in a world rapidly losing its grip on hope. Children, like hope, belong to the future. The problem for us mothers watching the genocide unfold in Palestine is that we know that nothing good can come out of all this killing; nothing good that can secure a dignified future for the generations to come. A probable future in times of genocide is more genocide and more death, more poisoning of all of life’s resources, and more injustice.

I watch my son grow during this genocide. He is the future, and I inhabit a present without a future for my kind. I tell him about my cousin’s son, two years older than him. Both are football players, and both are Real Madrid fans. One lived inside a death machine, until I managed to evacuate them from Gaza to Cairo, and my son roaming the streets of Oslo. I let my son be. I envy him his oblivion to the evils of the world, his innocence. I think of him constantly. I think of our children that we are caring for and bringing into this world. Was it hope that made me want to birth my son in such a broken world? This war taught me that the reason I became a mother was not hope but an insistence on fighting alongside you all for a better world. I think of the political prisoner Walid Daqqa, who recently died in an Israeli prison. He smuggled his sperm to his wife who got pregnant and gave birth to Milad, a healthy little girl, who has only seen her father once or twice before he died from torture and medical neglect. It was not hope that spurred them to give this world Milad, but a refusal to accept a life behind bars and the struggle for basic human ambition.

My children, I have learned, are the future I birth in the present, a future as sweet as the smell of newborn skin and your child becoming fluent in a language you do not speak. My son is the future in as much as he is the present, and in the present, I must learn to mother him as I tend to a broken world together with other activists, who also leave their families and children, only because to salvage the future means that together, we must tend to the present. Do I really want my son to witness a genocide? How can I teach him the value of the present, of the need to think of what he fills his time with in the present while I control as best I can how much of the genocide is unfolding in our lives? How can I tell a young boy whose sense of time is steered by his hormones that those who don’t tend to the present have no future?

In conversations with my Palestinian friends, it has become apparent that the genocide still going on in Gaza has become part of our present. It is no longer a state of exception that has disrupted our routines and our sleep cycles, but our new present. The UN said sometime in April that it will take 80 years to rebuild Gaza, which means that many of our children will never see Gaza rebuilt even if we liberate Palestine tomorrow. There are no conclusions that make sense for this narrative, so I will leave you with a prayer, written by the poet Hussein Barghouthi, who wrote it at the beginning of the first intifada.

 

 

Salam to gaza

(translated by Suneela Mubayi)

My sister will live without me
My family will live without me
My part will live without me
My whole will live without me.
Salam to those that hold out in jail
My heart goes out to those who died inside
A birds kiss to those who remain,
Peace be upon a stone, blue like the sea waves
Like the sky, like mountain goats’ eyes, like flights of pigeons
Peace be upon that stone
peace be upon it
upon it
Upon it are
the dreams of a land, the hopes of a nation
Peace be upon a stone encircled by a bunch of flowers
That the eyes of maidens are eager to grab

Salam to Gaza
The refugee camp lacks bread
But is now enriched with blood
The camp lacks land and bread
But ascends now skywards
Salam to all Gaza’s doves
Wherever they flutter they flick at my heart
And sip of my water
Silence mean more than speech
To honor those who remain

Salam to a pair of Rafahi eyelashes
On a boy’s face
Eyelashes wet with tears and roses
Salam to those who offered up their bodies to pallbearers
And a bird’s kiss to those who remain
What can I offer to the cemetery
The road into it
Is one we take to depart it like gods
The massacring hand that is not more powerful than the life gushing
The streets, like the birds, rise
They drink now from rain
Rain whose drops are free
Drops which come from free clouds
Clouds floating in a free sky
Salam to these trees
For they stand taller than my song.

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RANA ISSA is a writer, translator and curator. She is Cofounder and Artistic Director of Masahat for Arab Arts and Culture in Exile, an institution that programmes and produces cultural expression by Arab and Global South artists and writers in Norway. Her text Khatim Izdihar (Al-Jumhuriya, December 2021) is part of Hartaqat, a theatrical performance by Rabih Mroue and Lina Majdalani (premiered in Lausanne in January 2023). She debuts in Norwegian with Tung tids mor, a queer memoir that explores the limits of agency in wartime, which will be published by Press Forlag in February 2025. A graduate of the American University of Beirut and the University of Oslo where she taught until she left academia in 2022, Issa dreams of a liberated Palestine.

JANNIK ABEL is a Norwegian artist who lives in a wild forest outside Oslo. Abel works with distinctly mixed media, large installations, performances, film and photography. They have exhibited extensively in Norway and internationally in museums, galleries, nature and the public realm. Abel’s artistic practice is as much about the way they have chosen to live as it is about making. After their artwork has been exhibited almost all of it goes back to the nature.

 

* Top and bottom image by Jannik Abel.