"Cultural, Artistic Intifada"

If I decorate this euology with the kind of shiny adjectives we only gift our friends after they have died, I would be doing us all a disservice. After all, this was a man who loved to cuss and joke. Even when the bombs dropped he gave us laughter, and perhaps—indulge me—especially when the bombs dropped, he gave us laughter. So I’m not going to indulge in meaningless good taste because he gave us laughter, thunderous laughter, when the world ordered us to shrink and whisper.

But even though we still, in the Freedom Theatre, is a cultural, artistic place, where we have children, young people, girls, boys, women to come here to practice, to find a place where they can express themselves, where they can imagine there is a better life, a better place in this world, where they can decide their future in different ways, to choose to be different from the reality that we’re living.

And still the Israelis come, and they’re telling us, “No, you cannot dream. You cannot think that you can be something different from the reality around you. You are under occupation, and that’s your destiny as a Palestinian, to grow up, to be born, to grow up and die under brutal, crazy, violent occupation,” that they don’t believe in anything, not in art. They arrest us as artists, as the people who do theater. They arrest — they destroy everything that shows there is culture, there is art, that we Palestinians, we are a normal people.

Of course, we always fall into this trap of saying, “She [Fadwa Tuqan] was arrested for just writing poetry!” We do this a lot, even us believers in literature … [we say], “Why would Israel arrest somebody or put someone under house arrest, she only wrote a poem?” So, we contradict ourselves sometimes; we believe in the power of literature changing lives as a means of resistance, as a means of fighting back, and then at the end of the day, we say, “She just wrote a poem!” We shouldn’t be saying that.

Moshe Dayan, an Israeli general, said that “the poems of Fadwa Tuqan were like facing 20 enemy fighters.” … And the same thing happened to Palestinian poet Dareen Tatour. She wrote poetry celebrating Palestinian struggle, encouraging Palestinians to resist, not to give up, to fight back. She was put under house arrest, she was sent to prison for years.

And therefore, I end here, with a very significant point: Don’t forget that Palestine was first and foremost occupied in Zionist literature and Zionist poetry … It took them years, over 50 years of thinking, of planning, all the politics, money and everything else. But literature played one of the most crucial roles here … Palestine in Zionist Jewish literature was presented to the Jewish people around the world … [as] a land without a people to a people without a land. Palestine flows with milk and honey. There’s no one there, so let’s go. … And there were people — there have always been people in Palestine. These are examples of how poetry can be a very significant part of life.

In movements, creative spirits can make artists of us all as we use our hands, our bodies, and our voices to tell the stories of loss, love, and solidarity that unite us. Whether by tying our words together into kite tails or speaking in unison, movement art is not an individualist display, but an invitation into art, into the act of storytelling, and into the creation of a different world. In moments of direct action, we have the potential to embody art and story – like children, full of persistence and hope, running with kites on a still, foggy day, with their minds full of poetry.